nests.”
“And I think the most amazing thing of all is that they cared for their young.” Mr. Jamieson had joined them. “Evidence from the Montana site indicates the little guys were fed by one or both parents for several months.”
“So they weren’t the big clumsy lummoxes we’ve been led to believe,” Adam said. “I always suspected as much.”
“Right, Mr. Einstein,” Jamie said with a teasing smile.
On the northern slope of the coulee there were larger shrubs and a few trees. Saskatoon bushes hung with purple berries, wild roses stored the sun in rosy hips, buckbrush and kinnikinnick spread thick branches over the ground.
“Listen ...” Jamie said. “That’s why radios are banned. So we can hear the birds.”
Mourning doves cooed, and horned larks added clear, high-pitched voices from overhead.
As they climbed the bare sandstone bluff, Mr. Jamieson stopped to point out bones and parts of eggs eroding out of the hillside.
“Wow! That’s incredible!” Adam said, crouching beside Jamie’s father. “They’re sure hard to see.”
This fossil-hunting business wasn’t as easy as it sounded. There were no signs saying BABY BONES HERE, and no pointing arrows stating FOSSILS THIS WAY.
“Here’s the femur from a baby dinosaur,” Jamie said, pointing at a tiny stick protruding from the rock. It was less than two centimetres long. “The same leg bone in an adult would be over a metre long. Pretty small babies for such big animals, eh?”
Adam whistled. “Yeah, really.”
The wind had started to blow again, and his hair was the wrong length. He hated to admit it, but Jamie was right. Everybody, men and women, wore their hair very short or tied back in a braid or ponytail.
He must look like one of those plastic troll dolls his little sister collected. He wore shorts, gym shoes, and a T-shirt. His orangey freckled face, legs, and arms were slathered with sunscreen; his reddish hair spiked around his head like cushion cactus; and he peered through his double layer of eyeglasses like a squinty-eyed mole.
Adam forgot whipping hair, whirling dust, and squinty eyes in the excitement of actually seeing the nests and the eggs, flattened like fat pancakes from millions of years under pressure. They were the size of pie plates and were arranged in a herringbone pattern in circles in their rock beds. His skin crawled, and he felt a deep yearning to know and understand the creature that had built this nest. He touched one of the eggs, running his fingers over the pebbly surface.
Mr. Jamieson was watching. “Pretty thrilling stuff, isn’t it?”
Adam nodded.
Devil’s Coulee rose in bumps and ridges at a steep incline, and two flat ledges had been cut into the side hill, providing platforms for the workers. Around the platforms two-sided screens made of metal posts and fine black nylon webbing protected them from the wind and dust coming from the south and west. They also helped keep the nests free of soil buildup.
Jamie, along with Bonnie, Herbie, and Denise, gathered around one of the sites and began to unpack tools: geology hammers, knives, chisels, paintbrushes, whisk brooms, medicine droppers, small dental picks, ice picks, toothbrushes, even a mascara brush. They also each produced a field notebook, a bottle of glyptal, and empty medicine vials for bits of egg shell and other small finds. Then they began to work, two people on one egg, chipping and brushing with meticulous care.
The other group — Lois, Sy, and Hans — had moved to a different site about eight metres away.
“The animals were seven to ten metres long, and that was sort of the pecking distance,” Jamie said. “They had togetherness and still had room to move around. You don’t need other people looking over your shoulder when you’re trying to get your nest just right, now do you?”
“I guess not,” Adam said.
Mike was huddled over his micro site farther up the hill where two wind-eroded hoodoos punctured the skyline. Mr. Jamieson, with his map on a metal clipboard, was as excited as an expectant father, moving from one group to the other, giving instructions and encouragement.
Denise was the fossil illustrator. The site had been marked out with string and stakes into a grid. She carried a large pad, already mapped, with one page representing a square on the grid, and her job, as well as to participate in the digging, was to sketch the fossils as they were unearthed.
“Al uses a camera, too” she explained to Adam. “But it can’t show exact distances, levels, and positions the way my illustrations can.”
Adam’s plan was to sketch several stages of the digging, as well, but he wanted to capture not the scientific data but the feel of it — the coulee, the sun, the distant mountains, and the people. Conversation drifted around him as he sat with his back against a boulder, his sketchbook on his bent knees, and got lost in the scene.
His first sketch showed kneeling, sitting, reclining, and stooping figures, some partially hidden by screens, most wearing gloves, some wearing knee pads, some with hat brims pulled down tightly to shade faces from thirty-five-degree temperatures, one Panama hat. Adam included the paraphernalia that was on hand — toilet paper, bags of plaster of Paris, two small barrels of water, and strips of burlap. Not to mentions bigger tools — shovels, picks, and grub hoes.
He wanted a “before” and “after” series entitled “Now and Then: What a Difference Seventy-Five Million Years Can Make.” But the “before” and “after,” he feared, would more likely apply before and after people found out he was a fake. He was a far cry from the “professional” Jamie had made him out to be.
“Hmm. You have quite a knack for that, son.” Mr. Jamieson was looking down at Adam’s work.
“Thanks. I’d like to do another one. Same place, but with the dinosaurs here building the nests.”
“Sure. Interesting approach. You’ve got a pretty decent talent. It’s funny Jamie’s never mentioned you.”
Adam felt the skin at the back of his neck begin to prickle. Here it comes, he thought. He’s going to ask questions I won’t know how to answer.
But Mr. Jamieson didn’t. He tilted his head back and swept his arms around as though pulling Devil’s Coulee into his chest. “This whole expanse of country was once a rich, lush garden. Just think of it. All those different breeds, each with its own specially adapted teeth, chomping and chomping away.” He made chomping noises with his mouth.
Adam turned the page of his sketchbook and began a “before” drawing. For starters, he had decided to do a distant scene so that the dinosaurs were shrouded in mist and the details wouldn’t have to be perfect.
CHAPTER 4
Insects, lizards, fish, frogs, crocodiles, turtles, and small mammals find their place, along with the dinosaurs, in the warm, moist habitat — feeding, breeding, sleeping, hunting and being hunted.
The monsoons have ended. It is wintertime, and the temperature is twenty-seven degrees Celsius. Creatures of every imaginable size, shape, and colour browse, hunt, and rest. Big animals,
