“Hi, there! Welcome aboard. I’m Herbie.” A small dark young man fell into step beside Adam.
“Thanks. I’m Adam. Are you from around here?”
“Yes, from the University of Alberta.”
“Paleontologist?” Adam asked.
“Uh-huh. I’m working on the digestive systems.” He had a slight lisp and pronounced the words digethtive thythtems. “I classify coprolites.”
Adam looked puzzled.
“Droppings,” Herbie said.
“Oh ...”
“I understand you’re going to be our resident artist for a few days.” Herbie bent down, picked up a stone, and turned it over. “Do you do book illustrations or gallery work or what?”
Adam tried to make his face appear normal, but his lips felt tight as he shook his head. “Not really. Mostly just private stuff.”
Jamie, the rescuer, had apparently overheard, because she immediately joined them. “Watch your step as we climb the hill,” she warned. “The caliche can be tricky if you step on it the wrong way.”
“Caliche?” Adam asked.
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “The little white stones. They can send you skidding along the sandstone on your butt quicker than you can say calcium carbonate.”
“Or into a cactus,” Herbie added. “And that’s not an adventure without peril.”
Adam grimaced. “I guess.”
The countryside was stark and inhospitable. Great expanses of prairie grasses — spear grass and wheat grass — were interrupted by eroded patches of rock and dirt. A few oil well pumps bobbed their grasshopper heads up and down, up and down. The morning sky was clear, and the wind hadn’t started to prowl yet. On the dry southern slope of Devil’s Coulee grew prickly pear, cushion cactus, sagebrush, yellow violets, and prairie onion.
“John Palliser sure got it right two hundred years ago when he said this country wasn’t fit for human habitation,” Adam said.
“Oh, like really? Did he say that?” Jamie gazed around. “I guess it does seem kind of barren, but I like it.” She put her hands behind her back and shoved her pack higher.
“Oh, yeah, it’s nice in a way,” Adam said quickly. Actually, the ambience was improving. There were surprises in the sear landscape — patches of bright yellow buffalo beans, golden asters, bluebells. Ground squirrels popped beady-eyed heads out of dens, peered around with quick movements, then crept cautiously out to sit up straight and swivel their necks to search for danger.
“Isn’t it just the most perfect thing?” Jamie shaded her eyes with a hand and gazed up at the coulee. “Only a tiny fraction of dinosaur remains are ever fossilized and here we have whole nests right in our own backyard.”
Adam tried to think of something un-stodgy to say. “Yeah, funny, isn’t it? All this time they’ve been finding fossils of adults but no kids. They just weren’t looking in the right place. I mean — right church, wrong pew.”
“You got it,” Jamie said. “The duckbills laid their eggs in upper coastal plains where there was good mud-pie stuff for 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