“Sorry, just looking for you.”
“How the hell?” he asked
“Hey, this isn’t my first rodeo,” she said, substituting a western drawl for her British accent.
“Alright, but can you back out carefully now?”
“Why?”
“Because I need more than an iPhone picture or flashlight app.”
“It’s just a cave,” she said.
“Probably,” McCauley answered. “But you never know. It could be my vindication?”
“You wish,” she joked.
Once on solid ground she saw how disgusting they both looked. “This is why I got out of the field.”
“I’ll introduce you to the badland’s best friend.”
“What’s that?”
“The hose. It’s cold, but it’ll wash off most of the crap. Maybe now you’ll understand why I wanted a tub at the El Centro!”
“Trust me, that’s off the evaluation.”
McCauley was finally feeling a bit more comfortable with Dr. Alpert. “Come on, let’s clean up.”
Back with the others McCauley clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention.
“Gentlemen. Ladies,” he said. “A few things. Gather around.”
The team converged.
“Time to formally introduce you to Dr. Katrina Alpert. She’s sticking with us for…”
He wasn’t sure. “How long, doctor?”
“Maybe a week, give or take a few days. But please, treat me like one of the team. Nothing special.”
“Believe me, we have nothing special here,” Jaffe said for the group.
“No Marriott points,” added Chohany.
Alpert laughed. “So I heard.”
“Dr. Alpert is from the very prestigious Cambridge University. So show some respect.”
“Doc, she smells,” Jaffe joked.
“So will the rest of you. I found a cave down the line. We got a few feet in and this is what we look like coming out. But there was a Native American cave painting. There might be more. Who’s up for checking it out for a day or so? You never know.”
“Excuse me, Dr. McCauley, but didn’t Dr. Alpert come to check you out?” Jaffe asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes. But this way we’ll keep her busy and maybe she’ll forget.”
“No chance,” Alpert joked.
“Seriously, I’m beginning to think she’s a good egg. She traded in a summer vacation for a trip back in time with the likes of us. Consider her a friend…after she hoses down, of course. Then, who’s up for a ride into town?”
“Why?” Leslie Cohen asked.
“Shopping. We’re going to need a whole helluva lot of extra equipment, and”—looking at Alpert and himself—“a lot of tarp.”
McCauley spread more than $1,400 over his three credit cards. The cashier at Ranch and Farm Ace Hardware Store on Harmon Street in Glendive couldn’t have been happier.
The biggest expense was a National Parks approved DuroMaxXP4400E four gallon gas generator. The power source would feed portable lights and fans for hours. Also on the shopping list, four two-story First Alert metal folding ladders, hard hats for everyone, twenty high beam flashlights with extra batteries, ten twenty-five foot extension cords, five fuse protected power strips, fifteen electric lights with clips, and three hundred feet of rope.
“Okay, two more stops before we call it a day.” McCauley drove to a liquor store on South Merrill and Reynolds Market over on West Bell.
Finished with the errands, McCauley finally provided a hint of what was going on. “Okay, I think we’ve got enough to get a good way’s in.”
“Tell us more about this cave,” Chohany said showing increased interest.
“It’s actually not all that unusual. Over near Billings, Pictograph Cave State Park has more than one hundred rock paintings, the oldest dating back to two thousand years ago. Scientists have pulled out thirty thousand artifacts from stone tools and weapons, but the artwork holds the clue to understanding how natives lived, hunted and survived.”
“That’s all well and good, Dr. McCauley,” Rodriguez offered. “But I’ve seen far older pictographs in my country. I came here to find dinosaurs.”
“We all did. I’m hoping the cave will let us go further and maybe deeper into the past than we otherwise would.”
He recounted the Native American legends of the thunderbirds and dinosaur-like monsters, which, as incredible as they sounded, foretold actual discoveries that wouldn’t come for centuries. “You can read about it on other cave walls across the state. So, maybe we’ll find something that gets us closer to the dinosaurs we all seek through fossils embedded in the cave walls.”
McCauley had them fired up. The team was eager to start.
“We’ll begin with first light tomorrow. Tonight, a cookout and beer.”
Cheers broke out.
Facing an early morning, the students hunkered down by 10:00 P.M. They were all up seven hours later. Considering their SUV would not get them to the valley floor, they divvied up the equipment. What they couldn’t carry in their backpacks went into old fashioned wagons which McCauley had picked up at local thrift shops the first week.
By 6:45 A.M. they were below the site.
“The first thing we’ll have to do is get the turkey vultures out,” he said. “Who’s good at Angry Birds?”
It actually took a dozen rocks to get the entrance clear. The next problem was to make sure they didn’t return. That required some of the team’s clothes and straw and twine they’d gotten from the hardware store. The result was a very comical scarecrow to be sure, dressed in a red bra, black briefs, a cowboy hat, and high-heeled shoes Leslie had no idea why she brought. To a turkey vulture that lacked a sense of humor or fashion sense, it looked threatening enough.
McCauley was first up, scaling the rock with one of the folding ladders stuffed in his backpack. Once above, he carefully secured the ladder to a rock with grappling hooks and lowered the rungs to the team below. Then he tossed down a rope. Tamburro attached the scarecrow. McCauley hauled it up.
“Okay gang, now the rest of the gear.”
The generator and five gas cans remained on the ground under a large picnic table umbrella. They plugged in the extension cords and power strips and fed them up by rope. Lights, shovels, picks, hardhats, and tarp followed.
Then it was time for the first four students. They’d drawn straws. Chohany, Tamburro, Jaffe, and Trent comprised the lead team, along with McCauley and Alpert. The students kept their backpacks relatively light as they climbed the metal links. Each carried more bottled water, walkie-talkies, first aid kits, digital cameras, painter masks, and gloves.
“Ready to see what we’ve got?”
A resounding, “Yes!”
McCauley called to Lobel below. “Fire up!” The generator began to rumble. Rodriguez checked the power, flicked the circuit breaker, and the first light turned on. Chohany acted as photographer and quickly clicked off six pictures.
Tamburro automatically shouted the way McCauley had before. He chose echo instead of hello.
“Tom and Al, start laying down the tarp. Might not need it further in, but the bird shit is awful right here. Masks and gloves, everyone.”
The plastic helped. It took some of the grossness out of the initial ten feet. But not all of it.
“Disgusting,” Chohany complained.
Fifteen feet in, the cave floor was not as bad. They stopped and tapped a hook into the rock and hung a second light.
So far, the only good part was the cooler air that flowed from deeper within. Dr. Alpert wished she’d had a thermometer to see how quickly the temperature was going down while her blood pressure was going up. This clearly wasn’t her line of work.