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June 5:
Eighty-Four Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
The most important thing Ripley Adams learned during her useless four-fifths of a paleobiology PhD was that time really is everything.
If the history of planet Earth were a three-hundred-page book,Tyrannosaurus rexwould appear three pages before the end. Humans, two pages after that. Modern civilization would arise at the very last word.
And yet a single second has the power to rearrange a whole life.
Nobody outwits time—not tyrannosaurs, not Ripley herself. But right now, working on the most important fossil she’s ever touched, she feels like she’s set one foot outside of its flow.
She focuses only on the claw-tipped wing bone under her hands, the rest of her fossil dig site fading to a soft blur. The ring of chisels and probes, the whisking of brushes, and the metallic scrape of teaspoons against sandy, crumbly rock recede into a subliminal soundtrack. Loose shale crunches underneath work boots as one of her crew members stalks around the site asking, “Has anyone seen my fucking tape measure?” The steady flow of chatter is punctuated by the occasional wave of laughter, probably at the senseless Mosasaurus pun (“Mo’s ass?Yo’ass!”) that’s already become this summer’s indispensable in-joke.
This moment is so incredibly, unbelievably unlikely. To fossilize, these bones needed circumstances so specific they’re all but unimaginable. The right climate, the perfect mineralized water, the wash of silt that laid down the beginnings of rock. And then, on the other end of history, another thousand coincidences all lining up. Impossible odds.
For a beautiful, floating moment, there’s just Ripley, the bones, and the wide Montana sky. She can almost forget how quickly the excavation season passes when she’s—
A large boot stomps directly in her field of vision, dangerously close to the fragile bones. “Need you at my site, boss.”
Ripley’s hammer makes the bright, dangeroustink!sound that means she’s hit fossilized bone.
“Shit! Matteo!”
“Oops.” Matteo, the least capable of her summer interns, doesn’t sound particularly remorseful.
Ripley whisks through debris, her heart in her throat. The delicate wing-tip bone looks okay, but it’s not until she’s run a whisper-light finger across its unchipped surface that she lets her body sag with relief. If the phalanx had been damaged, she might not have been able to stomach Matteo’s studied indifference for the rest of the day, let alone until September.
For the past three weeks, she’s struggled to find what drives him. Unlike the rest of her crew, he’s not a paleontology geek by nature. His father—the owner of the Italian restaurant that does their catering—offered Ripley a substantial discount on the summer’s food bill to take Matteo on and “shape him up.” Perhaps unwisely, she made that decision with her wallet instead of her brain.
Cara Yellowtail, Ripley’s protégée and second-in-command, scrambles into view from around a curve in the shallow canyon, black-brown ponytail flying. Her khaki pants and goldenrodClever Girl FossilsT-shirt are generously decorated with dirt. “Matteo! We don’t bother Rip while she’s working on this one.”
His mouth turns mulish. “The boss said she’d check my specimen before we cap and turn.”
“That was this morning,” Ripley says, dismayed. She assigned him a disconnected triceratops thigh—worth maybe a few hundred bucks in the local fossil shops—that should’ve taken him weeks to excavate. No way it’s ready to be covered in a plaster cast and lifted from the crumbly stone matrix.
He shrugs. “I work fast.”
Cara rolls her eyes majestically. “I’ll check it, then I’m going to kick your ass for rushing. Kick it twice if you’ve made a mess of the bone. Paleontology takespatience,Matteo.”
It does. But that doesn’t mean a patient person never feels the hand of time shoving between her shoulder blades.
Ripley resumes hammering, theclink-clink-clinksounding like the seconds of summer ticking away as she works around the partially exposed wing of a dinosaur she’s certain has never been found in North America. Maybe not anywhere.
And on the last day of last season, she almost walked right past it. One second sooner or later, one step left or right, and she’d have missed it. She wasn’t even looking for new bones, just double-checking the fossils they’d capped in plaster for the winter, distracted by thoughts of her dad.
Her dad, who might never again be well enough to take her fossil hunting.
Relax your eyes, Pip,Steve Adams once said to a small Ripley who was crying after failing to spot any fossils the first time she’d gone on a weekend hunt with him.Don’t hurry. Don’t try to look everywhere at once. Let your eyes catch the things that look different.
But I’ll m-miss some,she’d hiccupped, scrubbing at her eyes and trying to be a big girl.
Yup. And you’llseesome. Feel the joy of it, Pip. Feel the fossils you’re going to find, not the ones you won’t.
Last year, at the bottom of a canyon that was once a primordial forest stream, grown-up Ripley had had to stop walking and breathe through the pain of all the fossils her dad wouldn’t find, plus the absence of the crucial specimen she’d failed to uncover in the past two years. She’d been sosureshe’d find bird fossils here.
Hands on hips, she’d turned her face to the deep blue September sky.
