Into the Badlands

There was an elevator, but Alex took the stairs two at a time and arrived at the top breathing easily. The nameplate on the first door to his right caught his eye—S. Robb. Hadrosaur nesting habits, he remembered. She’d been short-listed for the job he was about to start.

An auburn-haired woman was in the room, reading at the desk…the World’s Greatest something or other, according to her mug. Her desk was free of clutter, free, even, of dust. Neat rows of journals, textbooks and color-coded file folders lined a ceiling-to-floor bookcase along one wall. On another, six identically framed photos of quarries formed a perfect rectangle. A collection of rocks stood in orderly rows on shelves under the window, as straight as soldiers on parade. World’s Greatest Organizer?

The woman noticed him and said warmly, “You must be Dr. Blake.”

“That’s right. Dr. Robb?”

She looked surprised. “Oh! I forgot where I was. No. Diane McKay.” She went around the desk to meet him, hand outstretched. “My perfectly usable office is across the hall. I just couldn’t overcome my inertia once I’d sat in Susannah’s chair.”

“McKay,” he repeated. “Burgess Shale?”

Diane nodded. “My team has been up there for most of the summer, but I’ve been going back and forth. I want to spend as much of August as I can with my son.”

“You must have a reliable team.”

“Don’t tell my boss, but they hardly need me. The same group has been with me for years.”

Alex could hear morning clatter coming from the other offices. “I’d like to hear more about your quarry, but I don’t want to be late for my own meeting.”

“You’ll have to come up to Mount Field with me. There’s no place like it anywhere in the world.” The soft-bodied creatures from the Burgess Shale site often seemed like reckless experiments of nature. One, the Opabinia, had five eyes and claws on its nose.

The suggestion fell in nicely with Alex’s plans. “Are you going back soon?”

“In a couple of weeks, just for a few days.”

“Sounds perfect. I’ll be able to take some time away from the museum by then.”

Diane walked with Alex to the conference room. He sat at the head of the long table and waited for the staff to get settled. He didn’t recognize most of them. Field and lab technicians, probably, or the teachers and artists who helped prepare exhibits. A few paleontologists working at faraway quarries, like those in South America or on Ellesmere Island, near the Arctic Circle, hadn’t made it back to the museum to meet him.

He could only identify four people at the table. George Connery, a rumpled, dark-haired man fidgeting with his pen and looking as if ten weeks of sleep would do him good. He headed the Bearpaw Formation quarry, studying marine reptiles. Diane McKay, still grasping the mug he now saw praised her parenting skills. Lynn Seton, a dignified older woman…where had he met her? A conference at UBC, he thought. She’d lectured on fossil pollens. She leaned away from a young man sitting beside her…Jeff Somebody, studying links between dinosaurs and modern birds. Had a few too many last night, from the look of it. Alex wondered if it was habitual. Guilty conscience? Stress? Maybe just a special occasion, somebody’s birthday. Across the table was a man of medium height and early middle-age, white coated and frowning, with faint chemical smells clinging to him—probably Charlie Morgan, the head conservator. Susannah Robb seemed to be absent. That was odd. Her quarry was just half an hour away.

Alex sat forward, a small movement that signaled the meeting was about to start. Shuffling and talking stopped. Twenty faces looked back at him. A lot of people to get to know before he could prove that at least one of them was a thief.

AT FIRST NO ONE NOTICED Susannah had arrived. She stood on the periphery of the site, watching James work with the new group of children from the science camp, the last group of the summer. Some of the campers used chisels and toothbrushes to chip and brush soft rock away from the specimens. Others painted exposed fossils with preservative, or wrapped them in plaster, to protect them during their trip to the museum.

“Dr. Robb!”

Susannah was already familiar with that excited voice. Matt was the busiest, most talkative ten-year-old she’d ever met. He ran toward her, clutching something to his chest. Sand sprayed against her leg when he skidded to a halt at her side.

“Look what I found!” He was so bursting with eagerness he seemed to take up several feet of space in every direction. He handed her a saucer-size fossil. “It’s a backbone, right?”

Susannah used her cuff to rub dirt from the specimen. “It’s part of a backbone,” she agreed. “How did you know?”

Crowding next to her, he traced the fossil’s shape with his finger. “It’s like the backbones on my models at home. It’s a circle, and it’s got these two points.”

“Those are the pedicles. They formed part of the neural arch, where the spinal cord went through. Any idea how old it is?”

Matt hesitated. “Seventy-five million years?” James and Susannah had explained how old the site was, and had tried to help the kids make sense of that amount of time. He added, “Before pyramids. Even before people.”

“That’s right. It’s from the Late Cretaceous period. Where did you find it?”

“Over there.” He pointed vaguely along the dry riverbed.

“Exactly where over there? We need to know, because we might find more vertebrae in the same place.”

Matt’s small body expressed the beginnings of agitation. “Um…”

“Retrace your steps in your mind,” she suggested quietly. “You left the site and walked…where?”

“Up the hill.”

“Up the hill!” Susannah reminded herself the problem at the moment was the exact location of the fossil, not the fact that Matt had ignored warnings about disturbing delicate ecosystems, damaging specimens or falling down sinkholes. Time enough for that later. “Okay. Up the hill and then?”

“Then I slid down it.” Matt darted an exploratory glance in Susannah’s direction. When she didn’t comment, he continued more confidently. “Then I followed the riverbed, and I saw the backbone just lying there on the ground.”

“Where those new hoodoos are forming?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Ask one of the counselors to help you map it, and add it to the collection.”

Matt didn’t move. “Dr. Robb? How did you find the bonebed?”

“I just went for a walk, and there it was.”

“Really?”

“Almost. Really, I went for lots of long walks, looking at the ground, and looking at the ground—like you did this morning when you found the vertebra—and then one day, I saw part of a skull, just barely nudging up out of the rock.”

“And that’s how you find dinosaur bones?”

“Absolutely.”

“Like me this morning,” he repeated. Matt’s eyes wandered past Susannah, to the badlands stretching beyond the quarry. He had the bug: he was clearly imagining the dinosaur he would find one day. The biggest, the best, the first of its kind.

“What are you going to do now, Matt?” Susannah prompted.

His eyes met hers, questioning. “Oh! Map the vertebra.”

“Good. And, Matt, don’t wander away from the group again. You have to stay with the other kids. It’s important.” She watched him hurry off without giving any sign that he’d listened to her warning.

A young woman stepped carefully around a chiseling camper to join Susannah. With sun-streaked blond hair scraped back into a ponytail, and a bright yellow T-shirt and denim shorts that revealed long, tanned arms and legs, Amy looked more like a teenage baby-sitter than a fourth-year geology student. “I didn’t expect to see you here today, Susannah.”

“It was a sudden decision. How are the kids doing?”

“Settling in. They’re already finding out how boring paleontology can be.” Amy gestured toward a small girl with short, curly hair and pink-framed glasses. Her head was bent low, her chin tucked into her chest. “Julia had a tough night. Homesick. Think you can do anything to help?”

“I can try. I’ll put these water bottles in a cooler first.”