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, small animals, clumsy animals, graceful animals, horned, crested, crawling, burrowing, flying, and swimming animals.
Giant ostrich-like dinosaurs forage in large gaggles, running swiftly over the meadows, clawing small prey out of burrows and holes with their fore claws and then snatching them with quick strikes of their heads.
Flying Pterosaurs, with ten-metre wingspans, swoop out of the sky to feed on small animals and decaying carcasses. Crocodilians crawl out of the swamps to bask in the sun. Small rat-like mammals scurry about in the undergrowth.
The placid duckbills live together at the edge of swamps in extended family groups of a dozen or so, warning one another with trumpet-like calls when danger is near.
Hypacrosaurs are one of these duckbills. They have large, flat snouts for cropping, and batteries of small grinding teeth cemented together allow them to eat needles and twigs of coniferous trees — forage other animals cannot digest. Their flashy facial crests culminate in bony ridges along their backs. The crests are not only useful echo chambers for their trombone-like courtship calls, but they are also exceptionally attractive to the opposite sex
Adam put down his pad and pencil, stood, stretched, and blinked.
“Listen, everybody!” Herbie was speaking loudly so the other group could hear. “If you come across anything that looks like elephant droppings, or doggy-doo, you know what to do. Call me.”
“For sure, Herbie,” Hans said. “We’ll remember you’re the manure man.”
The plan was to remove individual eggs from some nests, but others they hoped to lift out whole. At each step of the way, as they exposed more and more of the eggs’ surfaces by loosening the rock and dirt around them with hammers, picks, and a descending order of smaller and smaller tools and brushes, they painted them with glyptal, a polyvinyl acetate, to hold them together. They used long medicine droppers to drip the preservative into cracks and crevices. Eventually, when the fossil was almost free, they wrapped it in wet toilet paper and then put on a cast made of burlap strips soaked in plaster of Paris. They had to work fast once the plaster was mixed — it dried quickly in the sun. As they loosened the material around the eggs, they sifted the debris through a metal screen and picked out fragments of bone, shell, and other unidentifiable — to Adam at least — bits and pieces.
“It’s ready. Come on, everybody. This is a moment to remember.” Mr. Jamieson had set a camera on a tripod and was adjusting the focus. “Just hold everything for a couple of seconds while I get this thing set on time sequence.”
Adam, along with the others, hurried to the nest and watched as careful hands cut through the pedestal supporting the egg.
“Beautiful piece of work,” Mr. Jamieson said as he gingerly placed the fossil on a tripod made of pieces of sandstone. And it was — glistening white in the sunshine.
All was silent. The faint click of the camera shutter automatically opening and closing every few seconds seemed to be counting down through eons of time. This chunk of stone, which had last been exposed to the light of day too long ago for the human brain to comprehend, held an almost-hatched dinosaur baby. Adam shivered at the intensity of his own emotion.
He went back to his sketchpad. People found their voices and knelt beside the egg as if it were some kind of miracle, cheering, clapping, and watching as Mr. Jamieson labelled it.
Adam’s pencil had taken on a life of its own, and he was simply the spectator, observing as simple strokes on paper became faces, bodies, shadows. He positioned the egg toward the lower left of the scene so that the slope of the hillside and the standing, kneeling, and squatting figures led the eye toward that focal point. Jamie’s sturdy form seemed to anchor the group as she knelt with her hands on either side of her face, hiding her profile. Her braid swayed forward over one shoulder to hang like a dark tassel beside the dazzling egg. Adam was mesmerized by the images that were emerging on the page — the stark countryside, the people in prayer-like stances.
Suddenly, his pencil stopped moving and his attention jerked away from the paper. One figure stood apart, solemn and still. Bonnie seemed frozen, as if hypnotized. The experience must have been so overwhelming for her that she couldn’t move or speak. Adam knew how she felt.
Hans glanced at his colleagues. “Yeah, you got the first one out, but ours will be better, won’t it, guys?”
“Sure will,” Lois said with a nod, reaching for her notebook. She had to be the biggest taker of notes Adam had ever seen.
“You bet,” Sy said.
Mr. Jamieson moved to the other excavation site, squatted, and ran his hand around the contours of rock. “Looking good, but don’t hurry it. It’s doing fine right there in the matrix.”
Adam kept his distance from the others as he walked back to camp. He needed to think. He had never before been with people like this. They were so focused, so involved in what they were doing, so connected. He wanted to be part of that connection, but he felt like an imposter. He wasn’t a professional artist, he might not be able to draw a Hypacrosaurus to their satisfaction, and he and Jamie weren’t old friends.
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