Chapter 3

The next morning, Jackie called in a part-time woman named Francis to help her with breakfast and lunch. That eased my guilt about abandoning her to go off fossil hunting with her daughter.

Cheyenne set a metal toolbox and a backpack in the rear of an old Toyota Land Cruiser that looked like it had been on the losing side of a war. The sun had just peeked over the distant mountains, sending long shadows slanting away from anything tall enough to catch its rays.

I sipped on a travel cup of hot coffee as we turned onto the dirt road and headed west. “How far are we going?”

“It’s about fifteen miles on this road, then maybe another mile and a half overland. There’s a place where I’ve been digging for about six weeks now. I haven’t found anything big, but I’ve turned up enough bits and pieces that my gut tells me there’s something there.”

“I hope you’re right. It’d be really cool to find a dinosaur.”

She gave me an indulgent smile and said, “Don’t get your hopes up, newbie. Finding whole fossil skeletons is an extremely rare event. We’ll be lucky to find a few more small pieces. By the way, I’d advise you to buckle up, because the ride’s going to get rough when we leave the road.”

I took her advice.

“Well, I’m still excited, even if we don’t make a major find.”

There was nothing but prairie as far as the eye could see, except for the pale blue shadow of the Rockies, probably forty miles further west. Like most dirt roads, there were areas of washboard bumps that sent the rear of the Land Cruiser shuddering sideways when we flew over them at fifty-plus miles per hour. I was feeling a bit anxious, but the fishtailing didn’t seem to faze Cheyenne one little bit. As far as she was concerned, her boxy little vehicle only had two speeds: fast and stop. At the bottom of a long hill, and without any warning at all, she just drove off the right side of the road, and we began bouncing over dust dunes and sagebrush. The seatbelt probably saved me from grievous injury.

We topped a hill and surprised a small herd of antelope lying in the grass, sending them zig-zagging off at an incredible speed. By the time we came around the foot of a hill and skidded to a stop, it was pretty obvious to me why the Land Cruiser looked so beat up. To Cheyenne’s way of thinking, it was simply a tool, and meant to be used hard.

She handed me the toolbox and pointed up the hill to a sandstone outcropping. “It’s right up there. Be careful where you step, and keep an eye out for irregularly shaped white, gray or brown things. They could be fossils.”

I looked around me and observed, “Um, Everything is white, gray or brown!”

After some lessons on how to remove layers of hard dirt with a trowel and a stiff-bristled brush, we each chose a patch and got to work. We chatted idly about anything and everything as we crawled around looking for something unusual. Sometime around mid-morning, she called a recess and opened her backpack to produce some ham and egg sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. She must have got up early to cook our breakfast. My back was starting to get achy from being hunched over, so I was more than ready for a break.

Cheyenne handed me one of the sandwiches and asked, “So how long are you planning to live the life of a wandering minstrel?”

I shrugged, “Don’t know. I guess until I find a reason to stop. I’d like to go to school someday, but I still haven’t decided for sure what I want to be when I grow up... if I grow up.”

She chuckled at that. “You probably shouldn’t wait too much longer. Before you know it, you’ll have gray hair and a crabby disposition. Don’t you have any idea at all what you want to study?”

“Well, sort of. I’ve always been interested in people. I don’t mean individuals, necessarily; more like the human species. I think I’d like to do something like cultural anthropology, maybe specialize in Native American cultures.”

“Really? Then I know just the person you should be talking to. Her name is Kasuma Spotted Elk, and she has a master’s degree in Native American History. She’s even written a book about the Arapaho people. Oh wait, that’s redundant isn’t it? I think Arapaho means The People, but I could be wrong about that.”

“I’d love to meet her. Does she live around here?”

“No more than ten miles away. If we’d kept going on the dirt road, we’d have run right into her house.”

“Maybe you could introduce me sometime.”

“Maybe I could.” She swallowed the last of her sandwich and picked up her trowel. “Let’s get back to work.”

When the sun was directly overhead, she decided to call it a day. She’d gathered up her tools and walked over to get the metal box, when she saw me scraping away at something in the ground. Suddenly, she dropped to her knees and grabbed my hand. “Whoa, cowboy, easy with that!”