He talked allthe way to the bones.
It was, in some ways, amazing and in other ways utterly infuriating.
How the shit did a man have that much to talk about with a complete stranger? It was probably a good thing that the sun hadn’t risen fully yet, this way he couldn’t see me rolling my eyes as we bounded along on my Polaris, the headlight bouncing. He had wanted to bring his Subaru so I had had to explain that Wyoming pastures weren’t the same as sandy dunes. The exhaust system of his car would have been torn off in no time. So, he was behind me, arms tightly around my waist, thighs clamped to my hips, mouth going steadily.
“There are bugs,” I warned him numerous times hoping that would shut him up, but he would just chuckle and continue along with whatever story he was telling. I’d never been so happy to find that old dry creek bed in my life. Bishop Haney agitated me. The press of his body into mine was too much, too tight, too firm, too sharply painful in so many ways. When he did lapse into quiet, to breathe, his chin rested on my shoulder. That was also too painful. I’d not been held by a man in far too long. I couldn’t recall the last trip I’d made to Jackson Hole to find some quick relief.
“Holy hell,” he said at one point. I slowed down, certain he had seen a predator in the shifting shadows of dawn. We did have wolves, coyotes, grizzlies, and mountain lions roaming the Prairie Smoke Ranch on occasion. Which was why there was a rifle strapped to the rear of my four-wheeler. My gaze flitted across the rolling pastureland. “Look at that sunrise.”
Ah. We were close to the dig, but I shifted down and let the machine under us idle. There was no denying it. Nothing came close to a Wyoming dawn. The clouds were stacked thinly in a scarlet sky. Ribbons of purple and blue had been airbrushed along the bottom of the wispy cirrus clouds. The Tetons rose up to kiss the reds, purples, and blues. The snow still clinging to the peaks was pink and reminded me of cotton candy. It was a glorious sight.
His tight hold slackened, and his chin came to rest on my shoulder again. I turned my head, just an inch, and watched the wonderment dancing in his gaze. He was a handsome man, in a fashion. Minus the bun. The morning light did wondrous things for him though. His eyes darted to me, a smile pulling up the corners of his lips. Another flicker of awareness sparked inside me. Flustered, I shifted into drive, and we bounced and jounced along until the flapping strips of yellow tapes could be seen.
He was off the four-wheeler before it stopped.
With the rising sun behind him, he cut a masculine silhouette. Minus the bun. What the hell ever possessed a man to wear a bun? It was dumb and needed to be taken out immediately.
“Okay, so this is promising. I’ll be able to get a better read once the sun is up, but the layering of sediment looks pretty consistent with what we’d see in the mid to late Cretaceous period.” He crept up on the cordoned off area as if trying to sneak up on a rattlesnake. I cut the engine and watched the show from the comfort of the four-wheeler. “We’d be seeing a great deal of angiosperms. Ginkgoes, conifers, ferns, plants of that nature. Of course, the sedimentary layering will also tell us a great deal and—oh my God! What the hell happened to that fossil?!?”
He threw a long leg over the electric tape then stood looking down at the big chunk of calcified bone that we’d broken in half.
“Excavator,” I tossed out. He turned and threw a glower at me that should have knocked me off the Polaris. Then he dropped to his bare knees.
“Oh, the humanity!” he shouted as he shrugged off his rucksack and shoved a hand into it. He pulled out a pair of dark-rimmed glasses as he muttered along to himself. I couldn’t catch most of what he said, but I had to reckon the tirade was aimed at ranchers with heavy equipment. He did glance back at me once. The glasses looked good on his angular face. And ramped up his science nerd levels greatly. So now he was an odd combination of bun wearing surfer guy and dinosaur geek. My brain was having trouble getting him plugged neatly into a niche.
“Okay, it’s okay.” He sat back on his heels as he extracted a rolled up kit of some sort. “I know you didn’t know she was here.”
“You can tell it’s a she from a fractured leg bone?” If so, he was damn good.
I could hear his eyes rolling and battled down a smile. “No of course not, but the site has a feminine feel to it.”
“Uh-huh.” I pushed the brim of my hat back just a bit.
“I have a knack for these things.” He gently unrolled his kit. The slow reveal seemed almost religious. I leaned forward a bit to spy on what he had brought. Looked to me to be a well thought out assortment of tools such as a rock hammer, a walkie talkie or two, a GPS, chisels, probes, brushes, a bottle of some sort of liquid, a tape measure, and a Swiss army knife.
“Feminine things?”
He glanced up over the top of his glasses. The sun was slightly higher now, giving his bare arms a rosy glow.
“Yep,” he replied as he extracted the GPS device and started feeding in information.
“Explains the bun,” I mumbled.
That made him chuckle. “Don’t diss the bun, dude.” After a moment or two, he slid the GPS back into his kit. “I have the site fed into my field notebook. Next time I won’t need an escort.” He flashed me a quirky smile. “I will need a lift back to those cabins you talked about.”
“I can send one of the hands out to get you around lunch.”
He blinked at me. “Lunch?”
“It’s the meal we eat at midday.”
His plump lips flattened. “I have my own food.” He waved at his rucksack. “Come get me in a few days.”
That one set me back a bit. “The cabins are over by the lake which is about forty miles from here.”
“That’s fine. It will take me a few days to gather enough information to determine what kind of dig we’re looking at.” He pushed to his feet, hands on his hips, lips pursed. “This could just be a wash pit, where an animal died upriver and some of the bones washed down here. Or it could be a cache of bones all caught in a sharp turn of the river. We’ll have to get into the earth better of course, but I’m going to need some time to make that determination.”
“Uhm not to be a killjoy, but it’s May.”