Salley laughed and, after an instant’s hesitation, so did Monk.
“Well, exactly. An eleven-meter-long carnivore trying to look inconspicuous is one funny sight. But also an interesting one. Just what was she up to? Why was she sniffing and searching around like that?
“It turned out she was looking for the fisher’s nest. When she found it, I thought she would eat the eggs—which would’ve been intriguing in itself—but instead, she squatted down over them and with surprising delicacy deposited one egg of her own. And then she left.”
“Nest parasitism?” Monk asked.
“Yes. Just like a cuckoo. I picked out a good site, built this blind, and hunkered down to observe.”
“Show him the nest,” Salley suggested.
Obligingly, Lydia Pell handed Monk her binoculars. “Straight out,” she said, “where the land begins to rise. You see that little stand of cycads? Good. Right in the middle of it, there’s a darker green spot, and that’s the widow. Can you make her out?”
“No.”
“Be patient. Keep looking.”
“I don’t… whoah! She just sat up.” A bright streak of blue rose up from the cycads—the silvery underbelly of the fisher. She craned her neck to its utmost, peering anxiously into the woods. Then, with a clumsy surge, she stood. Her narrow snout turned one way and then the other. “What’s she doing?”
“She’s looking around for her mate. A fisher is not a brilliant animal, I’m afraid. Just look at those big-mama hips! All butt and no brain.”
“Her back blends in with the shrubs perfectly.” He returned the glasses. “But why is her belly that color?”
“A fisher spends a lot of its time crouching over the water,” Salley said promptly. “The light belly makes it less noticeable to the fish.” To Lydia Pell, she said, “Tell him the rest of your story.”
“Oh, yes. Well, eventually her eggs hatched. The poor widow had to go fishing to feed her hatchlings, and that meant leaving them alone several times a day. Life is not easy for a single mom. Still, it was convenient for me. I was able to monitor the nest on a daily basis.
“The allosaur hatched a good two days later than the others. It was a little bigger than its siblings, and it seemed to me—though I wasn’t close enough to be sure—that it got more than its share of fish.
“The next day, there was one fewer hatchling in the nest.”
Monk whistled.
“Cain-and-Abel syndrome, exactly right! Every day since, there’s been one fewer fisher hatchling. Like clockwork, one fewer every day. Now there’s only the one overfed allosaur chick and still the poor misguided widow fisher keeps bringing it fish. How long will the hatchling keep working this scam? Will the widow ever wise up? It’s quite a soap opera, you’ve got to admit.”
“How much longer does it have to run?”
“Well, fisher chicks normally leave the nest three weeks after they hatch, so not very long I expect. Unfortunately, I’m expected to be back at Columbia tomorrow, prepping for this year’s classes. Which is why I asked Salley to take over here for me.”
Monk looked sharply at Salley. She said, “You’d think it would be just as easy to return you to the opening of the school year two weeks from now as it is today.”
“That’s exactly what I said. But would they do it for me? No. Bureaucrats! ‘One day home time for every day deep time. No exceptions.’ ”
“I hate that kind of thinking. I hate dishonesty. I hate deception. Most of all, I hate secrecy. If I were in your position, I’d hunker down and make them drag me away.”
“Well, that’s you, isn’t it, Salley? Not all of us are such terrible rebels. My things are packed and waiting by the time funnel. This time tomorrow I’ll be facing a campus full of freshly-scrubbed, vacuous young faces. I—well! No use dragging things out. It’s time I left.” She slapped her knees and stood.
They followed her outside.
“Have I left anything? Hat, water bottle… You can have the camp chairs. I see you’re collecting archies again. Jorgenson doesn’t appreciate you, Salley.”
“Is there anything I need to know?”
“The widow leaves her nest three or four times a day. Wait until she’s out of sight—you’ll have at least twenty minutes before she returns. You only need to check on the nest once a day, I expect. When the allosaur leaves, write up your notes and ship them forward. I’ll see you get second credit on the paper.”
“I look forward to it,” Salley said.
Lydia Pell gave Salley a quick hug. “I’m so grateful,” she said. “This work means so much to me, and I wouldn’t trust it to anyone else.”
At last, she left.
“Okay,” Salley sighed. “Now we wait. Switch on your machine. We might as well make the most of it.”
Hours passed. The interview droned on.
“Where did you find the fossil in the first place?”
“I acquired it at a mineral and fossil shop. On the drive home from a summer dig. I stopped off in—well, never mind where—and struck up a conversation with the proprietor. Naomi was an amateur fossil hunter, and she asked me to identify a batch of specimens she’d picked up, and this was among them. I asked where she’d acquired it, and she got out the maps, and promised to lead me to the spot in the spring.”
“You told her how valuable it was, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But she just gave it to you, anyway.”
“Yes.”
“You must’ve hit it off pretty well.”
They’d set up business at a table in the enclosed porch in back of the shop—Naomi lived in back and upstairs of the store—going through shoe boxes and coffee-cans of fossils, and slabs of rock wrapped in newspaper. After two hours, with almost everything classified, Salley leaned back in her chair and, staring through the screens, saw a few cottonwoods, a car up on cinder blocks, and the empty gravel parking lot behind a shabby roadhouse some distance down the highway.
Naomi returned from the kitchen with a teapot, and saw her glance. “Not much to look at, I’m afraid,” she said. “It gets pretty lonely out here sometimes.”
“I’ll bet.” Salley held a rock up to the light and put it down with the other miscellaneous crocodilian scutes. “How’d you get stuck here?”
“Oh, well, you know.” Naomi wore a sleeveless top and a loose skirt that brushed against her ankles. She was a lean woman with sharp features, angular and nervous, with large brown eyes. “See, I bought this place with a friend, but she…”
Salley unwrapped one final slab. She took one look, drew in her breath, and stopped listening.
The bones had fossilized in a disarticulated jumble, and then been further damaged by Naomi’s clumsy extraction. But they were still readable. One fragmentary ulna was broken open, revealing a hollow interior. The skull had held together better than might be expected, and showed avian hallmarks in lateral aspect, including what might be a modified diapsid condition. There was a fragment of jaw nearby with distinctly unavian teeth.
And winding through the matrix, like a halo around the mangled remains, was a dark feather trace.
“Where did this come from?” she asked, hiding her excitement.
“Up Copperhead Creek, there’s a Triassic outcropping. It’s one of my favorite fossiling sites. I could take you there, if you like.”
Salley, bent low over the fossil, said, “Yes, I’d like that very much.”
“You would? You can? Really?” Naomi set down her cup so rapidly that Salley jumped at the sound. She looked up, expecting to see it shatter.
Their eyes met.
Naomi blushed, and turned away in confusion.
My God, Salley thought. She’s flirting. With me. Well, that explained those big, googly eyes. That explained her nervousness. That explained any number of odd things she’d said.
In a sudden flash of insight, then, she saw exactly how it must be for Naomi. This poor, lonely woman. Still carrying a torch for the friend who’d saddled her with this business, and then left. And now a hotshot young vertebrate paleontologist comes breezing through her life, bronze-skinned and windblown from a summer spent digging up Elasmosaurus skeletons, with a rusted-out old Ford Windstar crammed with fossils and a head full of sacred lore. Small wonder she’d be infatuated.