“This is Adam,” Jamie announced. “He’s an old friend of mine and a terrific artist. He draws dinosaurs like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Hi,” Adam said.
The others looked up, called greetings, waved.
A young woman was seated at a table. “This is Bonnie,” Jamie said. “Bonnie, meet Adam.”
“Hi, sweetie. Welcome to Digsville.” Bonnie waved two fingers, sized Adam up, probably decided he was too young, or too short, or too something, and called to Jamie’s father. “Al, while you’re up, would you bring me a little drink of something. Maybe orange juice? There’s a pet.”
Bonnie was a paleontology student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She wore cowboy boots and a knee-length smock over cotton leggings. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail with a bright pink silk scarf.
“This is Kanga and Baby Roo,” she said as she picked up a large stuffed kangaroo with a baby in its pouch and hugged it to her chest. “Aren’t they adorable? My sweetie-pie uncle brought them back from Australia. He always brings me nice things. Doesn’t he, Kanga?” She kissed the top of the furry head.
“Here’s your drink, Bonnie girl.” Mr. Jamieson set a glass in front of her.
This was a pretty democratic group, Adam thought. Al was the only paid person here. As well as supervising the field work, the preparator had to put it all together after the digging was done — make skeletons out of bits and pieces of bones. And he seemed perfectly willing to get Bonnie drinks.
A man who was sitting on the end of a table started to strum a ukulele and sing a song about a woman named Bobby McGee. A cowboy at a dinosaur dig? He certainly looked and acted like a cowboy. Talked like one, too. Even had a cowboy name.
“That’s Slim Hardisty,” Jamie said.
Small wrinkles fanned out around Slim’s eyes, giving him a squinty look. He seemed about fifty years old. His horses were called Old Spike and Giddyup. Slim talked about his horses and his wife. Giddyup’s name was really Napoleon, but he wasn’t the fastest thing on four legs and it was a lot easier to say “Giddyup” and be done with it than yell “Giddyup, Napoleon.”
Slim’s wife got three and a half a day. “Three meals and half a bed,” he explained, and everybody laughed.
His wife looked like a cowgirl — fringed shirt, white straw Stetson hat, cowboy boots — but she didn’t speak like one. She talked like a paleontologist — about the Judith River Formation and fossil fauna and habitat influenced by rising western mountains. Her name was Denise. “Have you known our Jamie long?” she asked.
Adam’s palms began to sweat, and he felt a tightening of his jaw. “Um, not too —”
“We were at the Banff School together last spring,” Jamie interjected quickly. “Come and meet Sy.” She pulled Adam away.
Sy was older. A lot older — seventy-five at least. Both his first and last names began with an S and had a lot of consonants and not many vowels. He was tall and thin-faced and wore a green cotton work shirt and a Panama hat. Adam expected him to say, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” as he reached out to shake hands. What he did say was: “Just call me Sy.”
Sy crossed his legs, clasped his hands around one knee, and commenced to tell the story of his life, or so it seemed to Adam. He was a retired geologist and had done a lot of exploring in “the oil patch” for one of the big companies. That was how he’d become interested in fossils and artifacts.
“Sy has enough old bones to start his own museum,” Jamie said.
“Have a care now,” Sy said with a grin. “Just be careful what you say about my bones.”
Slim sang a song about staying around and playing some old town too long, and Adam wasn’t sorry when Mr. Jamieson said, “I think I’ve stayed around and played around this campfire long enough. Good-night, all.” He left, and the others followed.
Adam decided it was worth the trouble of lowering the camper table level with the two side benches to form a bed, rather than sleeping in the low space over where the truck cab should be. What luxury! He could see a few stars through the open overhead vent and part of the Big Dipper through the side window.
He was here. On the inside of the fence. And he could stay ... for a while, anyway. The people seemed nice enough, so why wasn’t he feeling exultant, elated, thrilled? Was it because all his planning, hoping, and working toward the moment had been so intense that a letdown was inevitable? Was it because he was worried about his artwork measuring up, or doing or saying something stupid in his role as an “old friend” of Jamie’s? Was it because he didn’t know how to avoid being stodgy? How could he possibly hope to turn into Mr. Personality all of a sudden?
Things looked brighter in the light of early dawn.
“Digsville,” as Bonnie had called it, boasted tents, trailers, campers, a couple of trucks, a Jeep, an old Volkswagen Beetle, and several bicycles.
An Atco trailer served as a cookhouse/dining room, and that was where Adam was heading when he heard running footsteps behind him and felt a slap on the back.
“Hi, guy! Put her there, man! Mike’s the name, micropaleo’s the game.” An exuberant young man with longish dark hair tied back with an elastic band clasped Adam’s hand and shook it vigorously.
“Micropaleontology?” Adam said. “So you study the —”
“Yeah. The micro sites, the little guys — frogs, bugs.”
“Uh ... nice to meet you.”
“Ditto.” Mike scrutinized Adam with a puzzled frown. “So you’re the famous artist. I thought you’d be older. Anyway, catch you later.” He headed in the direction of the toilets on the run.
The activity in the cookhouse reminded Adam of a large family of kids getting ready for school. People were eating, slapping lunches together, grabbing fruit and juice boxes from the fridge, sorting through water canteens in the freezer, and looking for misplaced backpacks.
A young man who reminded Adam of Mike, except he was blond with short hair, paused with a cup of coffee in one hand and a slice of toast in the other. “Hi, I’m Hans. You must be ...?”
“Adam. Nice to meet you.”
Hans balanced the toast on his coffee cup and offered his left hand for a shake.
“You from around here?” Adam asked. He had decided to try to keep all conversation focused on other people.
“No. University of British Columbia. Excuse for a second. I better grab something for lunch.”
“Hans is a sedimentologist,” Jamie said. She was kneeling on the floor, fitting food and drink around various tools in her pack. “He’s working on a thesis with a long name — about rocks.”
Adam didn’t have much difficulty fitting lunch around his supplies — two sketchbooks, twelve pencils in a case, and a small pencil sharpener. He was just closing the door of the camper, ready to leave with the others, when Bonnie came running across the road with a camera.
“Hold it, sweetie. I need a picture for my album. Smile! Say ‘sex’! Gotcha!”
At 6:30 a.m. a party of ten set out for the dig. Cowboy Slim didn’t go. His role, as far as Adam could see, was to provide support for his wife, amuse and entertain with stories and song, and be the gofer — take the water barrels to Warner and fill them up every second day, run into Raymond for groceries, make an overnight trip into Calgary for glyptal, a preservative, and plaster of Paris.
In addition to the people Adam had already met — Mr. Jamieson, Jamie, Bonnie, Denise, Sy, Mike, and Hans — there were two new faces.
“You must