“Don’t worry. You can fake it.”
“Fake it? I know nothing about you. Zilch. Zero. I’ll make a fool of myself.”
“Listen.” She stopped and turned toward him. “I thought it was worth going to bat for you because it was something you seemed to want so badly. The odds were a thousand to one against you, so I stuck my neck out. Would you rather take a chance of making a fool of yourself or leave right now?”
Adam was contrite. She had stuck her neck out for him. “Sorry. You vouched for me and that’s the only reason I’m here and I do appreciate it. What can I say?” He put his hand on her arm.
“It’s okay. Actually, I do have an ulterior motive. I thought it would be fun to have somebody my own age around. The people are great, don’t get me wrong, but they’re older and a bit, um, stodgy. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah, stodgy,” Adam said. So he better be the opposite of stodgy, he thought. What would that be? Interesting, exciting, stimulating? Good luck!
Jamie changed the subject. “I’m on my way for a shower. Guess you’d like one, too?”
“A shower? Yeah. A shower would be great.”
“Norm’s Place” looked like heaven. It was a rusty old camper meant to be sitting on the back of a pickup truck, but here it sat on the ground at the edge of the camp. Its licence plate said: ALBERTA. WILD ROSE COUNTRY. 1988.
“Thanks, Norm, wherever you are,” Adam said as Jamie opened the door.
“It’s not Norm’s really. It’s my dad’s, but now he uses the Prowler and lets the graduate students use this.”
“Thanks, then, to your dad. It looks great to me after two days on that bike.” Adam dumped his pack onto the fold-down table.
“Come on,” Jamie said, “I’ll show you where the shower is and then I’ll go see if the cook has any leftovers.”
The “shower” was in a little grove of trees about a hundred metres along a winding path past Norm’s place. It consisted of a truck inner tube filled with water set on a wooden framework. There were pieces of an old tarpaulin on three sides for semi-privacy and several chunks of flat shale for a floor.
At the end of the path four outdoor toilet stalls under one roof were separated by two-metre-high partitions.
“You can use half of what’s left,” Jamie said, pointing at the shower. “They’ll fill it up again in the morning.”
Half of what was left was about one-twentieth of the water Adam used at home at least once a day, but it was warm and it was wet.
He sat outside his new home in the only movable piece of furniture he could find — a slightly twisted aluminum folding chair. Adam was more or less clean. His glasses were off, his contact lenses were in, his stomach was full — Jamie had handed him a plateful of roast beef sandwiches before she’d gone for her own shower — and he had his sketchbook on his knee and a pencil behind his ear. And as an added bonus, the wind had subsided.
He stretched and laced his fingers behind his neck. The prairie scene at twilight was truly something. Mountains purpled the horizon, with the fainter outline of Devil’s Coulee close by. That was where the nests were, and tomorrow he would actually see a dinosaur egg!
Yeah, dinosaur egg. And he was the professional artist. They would be expecting big things of him. He was setting himself up for a major embarrassment.
Exactly what did a Hypacrosaurus look like? Sure, he could draw his impression of one, but would it satisfy the experts around here? They knew. He would probably get some detail horribly wrong, and they’d all laugh at him.
Adam decided he had to forget about dinosaurs and draw what he saw, so he began to sketch. The colours were so soft and spellbinding that he was glad he hadn’t brought his pastels — he would never be able to capture those subtle hues on paper. A pink-and-golden haze transformed everything with a delicate glow. Tents, water barrels, bicycles, a dusty Jeep, makeshift clotheslines — all seemed ethereal, impossible to capture. He turned the page and started to draw the landscape the way it had appeared when the dinosaurs were here.
Intermittently, over vast periods of time, mountains heave and grow, spewing enormous quantities of dust and rubble into the air. The debris settles, and streams and rivers overflow as they carry it toward the sea, depositing sand and mud on the flat flood plains. The sea grows and shrinks over the millennia. Streams widen, join other streams, form meandering rivers bordered by swamps.
The land becomes dotted with ponds and green with vegetation. Dense forests of giant conifers — swamp cypress, redwood, sequoia, and china fir — block out the sun. Lush mosses and ferns are everywhere. Palm-like plants and katsura trees grow on the higher ground, some covered with vines — wild grape, monseed, and green briar. Myrtle, sweetleaf, box prothea, and poison ivy also find a niche.
These 932,000 hectares of rich river delta between the Rocky Mountains and the Bear Paw Sea are a haven for dinosaurs. Hundreds of thousands of duckbills feed on evergreens, dogwoods, and berry bushes. Other vegetarians — the armour-plated Ankylosaurs the three-horned, six-tonne Triceratops, the thick-headed Pachycephalosaurs — graze, along with the duckbills, at different levels in the rich greenery, providing a takeout diner for the carnivores. Some of the herbivores are a lot easier to take out than others, though.
The Ankylosaurus can crouch under thick, spiky armour plating, or deliver fatal blows with its clubbed tail; the Triceratops can set even the largest predator reeling with its 1.2-metre-long horns; and the swift-running Hypsilophodon can outrace any pursuer. But the duckbills are not fast runners. Many of the old, the unwary, the young, and the sick die violently, prey to hungry raptors.
Adam drew water lilies with kidney-shaped leaves floating on still water. On the shoreline he added thick rushes, tall horsetail, swamp grass, and moss. Behind this he outlined trees — vine-entwined sycamores, redwood, poplar, dogwood — then started on flowers and hesitated. What kind of flowers? There was no grass then, but he was sure there should be flowers on some of the trees. He leaned back and imagined insects darting around — a kind of giant dragonfly would be right at home, and probably some kind of bees.
“Hi! How you doing?” It was Jamie. A very different Jamie. Her damp hair, out of its braid, hung down her back in kinky waves, and her face was so scrubbed and rosy that it looked polished. She wore clean shorts, white running shoes with no laces, and an only slightly wrinkled navy blue T-shirt.
“Oh, hi, uh, ah ...” Adam was momentarily unable to collect his thoughts, let alone form words.
“Wow, that’s neat.” Jamie glanced at his drawing. “It probably did look like that way back when. You look different.” She tilted her head and studied him. “I’ve got contacts, too, but I don’t use them out here. Too much hassle trying to keep the dust out of my eyes.”
Her eyes were startlingly bright in her tanned face. Green or blue? he wondered. Or a mixture of both? “Really?” he finally said, swallowing. “I guess I won’t wear mine, either, when we go up to the dig.”
“There’s no alcohol allowed and no radios. And your hair’s the wrong length.” She nodded knowingly. “It’ll be in your eyes all day and will drive you crazy.”
“It is? Well, pardon me!” He felt like a disobedient child, sitting here with this bespectacled young person giving him a lecture about what he should and shouldn’t do. Even how to wear his hair! But he’d better watch his step. He was the stranger in a new situation, and she was his only ally. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “So what if people start asking questions about this ‘old friend’ business?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be there to coach you.” She smiled and winked, and if Adam hadn’t been so nervous, he would have winked back.
Not