Every Hidden Thing (28 page)
Read Every Hidden Thing Online
Authors: Kenneth Oppel
WHAT'S LEFT BEHIND
W
HEN I WOKE AND HE WASN'T THERE,
I knew something terrible had happened. He'd died in the night, and they'd taken his body out of the tent to spare me. Or he'd skulked off to die like a wounded animal. That wasn't like himâmore like something I'd do. But the tent flaps were unbuttoned, showing the colorless sky of dawn. I had no idea how long he'd been gone, how long I'd slept. I burst out of the tent to see Withrow setting the fire going, calm and unhurried.
“Where's Samuel?” I demanded.
Alarmed, he said, “What do you mean?”
I started shouting his name then, looking all about.
“He wandered off?” Withrow said, standing. “Jesus.”
He went to wake the other men, shouting at Hobart. “You didn't see him? You were on duty. He didn't disappear into thin air!”
In the pitch-darkness anything could have happened to him. The land was pockmarked with sinkholes that would break your ankle at best. There were drop-offs of thirty feet.
“Sam! Sam!”
I picked a direction and ran, his name echoing between the buttes and ricocheting through the defiles. And then I saw him, limping toward me from the west. I called out to him, and he shaded his eyes, for the sun had just cleared the horizon. He raised his hand high.
In it was the blackest, biggest tooth I'd ever seen.
I wasn't much use digging; my wrist was swollen, and pain still jolted my arm. But it didn't seem like my hand was at risk of falling off; it hadn't turned blue or black, and I could feel my fingers and move them all right. I felt weak from the fever. There'd be no shoveling for me for a little bit anyway.
Restlessly I watched as Rachel and the others opened up the sinkhole so we'd be able to get at least two bodies down there to dig. Tricky because there were several rattlesnakes coiled up on shady ledges inside, and it took some very careful spadework to scoop them up and fling them far away. It was a miracle I hadn't been bitten as I slid down in the dark.
At the end of the afternoon Withrow helped lower me down into the pit beside Rachel. For the first time in millions of years, the sun hit the jaws of the Black Beauty.
“What a brute,” she said.
Protruding from the sandstone was a good portion of the upper
jaw, bristling with teeth. Some of them were still deeply buried, others weathered out almost completely. There were two noticeable gaps where the teeth had been wrenched from the rockâone by the Sioux man decades earlier, and one by me in the early hours of daybreak. I put my good hand on the charcoal-colored bone, ran my fingertips over its smooth surface. I peered hard at the rock, imagining the shape of the entire skull, the orbit, the naris and nasal bones, imagined the window of the antorbital fenestra, and the orbit where its huge eye would have socketed. I could almost imagine its nostrils flinching to take in my scent.
“As big as we thought,” I said to Rachel. “The skull must be almost five feet long.”
“We're going to need a bigger wagon,” Withrow called down to me with a happy grin.
“Mr. Barnum's going to have his American dragon,” I said.
“How big?” Withrow wanted to know.
“A monster. Twenty feet high at least.”
“But how long to dig it all out?” Thomas asked.
“If it's big as I think,” said Rachel, “we could spend most of an entire season.”
“You really think so, Sam?” Withrow asked.
“My partner's right,” I said, and saw her smile.
“That's time we don't have,” Hobart said sourly.
I thought for a moment. “We just take the skull now,” I said. “We can come back in the spring for the rest. I think Mr. Barnum will be pretty pleased to see it, don't you?”
The second day digging, Thomas went scouting and said
he saw some campfire smoke rising to the south. Every day we stayed, it was a risk. We needed to beat it back to Crowe.
But the skull took several more days. It was beautifully preserved, and Rachel did a fantastic job, cutting around it on all sides, so we had a chance at taking it out as a single big chunk. I didn't like just watching, and several times Rachel asked me to shush because I was giving instructions too much from the edge of the quarry. It was the most magnificent piece of bone I'd ever set eyes on.
Rachel came up with the idea of making a kind of plaster cast from flour and water and scraps of cloth and jacketing the entire block for extra strength before we hoisted it up and out. While it dried, Withrow and his men built a wooden tripod over the sinkhole.
On the last day, my hand was healed enough so that I could finally help. We got rope around the huge block, ran it through a pulley, and let the team lift it. Getting it onto the back of the wagon took some doing.
Last thing, we filled in the sinkhole. Rachel even planted some brush on top, and we rolled some rocks over for good measure. Right afterward it looked about as secret as a fresh grave, but I knew within a couple days the sun would have baked all the moisture out of the soil. And in a couple more it would settle and crack like any other stretch of parched badlands.
I hoped the camouflage wasn't even necessary. I didn't think there'd be any prospecting parties working through the winter. Especially now that the Indians were on the move and everyone festering for a big battle.
Rachel made several drawings so we'd have no trouble
finding the spot in spring when we came back.
And we would come back. Withrow promised. As a sign of good faith, he handed over a portion of the fee we'd agreed on in cash. Rachel and I would get the rest when we reached New York City. He said it was likely Mr. Barnum would put the two of us on retainer, to quarry out the Black Beauty in the spring, and after that who knew?
The next morning we rode for Crowe to catch the next train east.
That first night on the train, after the porters had closed all the curtains, and the lamps burned low, I slipped down from my berth into Sam's. His arms were waiting to guide me to him in the dark. His body was luxuriantly warm, and we spooned together.
“I'm looking forward to seeing New York,” I whispered.
“We have enough money to rent a cozy apartment through the winter.”
“And enough time to prepare the skull for Mr. Barnum.”
“We're fossil hunters, you and me,” he whispered back. “We can work for whoever we want. We can sell to museums, paleontologists, our own fathers.”
We both giggled at this.
“I think we'll have a very eventful life together,” I said.
He flexed his fingers. “I'm a bit worried about my hand. That I won't get all my feeling back.”
I took his hand and placed it against me.
“I feel that,” he said.
“You'll be fine, then.”
We kissed each other for a long time, and as the train shuddered and pulled and rocked through the darkness, our hands moved over each other, exploratory, gentle at first. We were patient with each other, and then neither of us could be patient anymore. Your right hand still hurt, but we figured it outâwe were very clever, both of us, with our handsâand the only difficult part for me was not crying out.
You were the first to fall asleep.
I nestled with my back against your chest and stomach, your legs folded with mine, your arm across my breast, enclosed on all sides by you, and your unique marinade of desert and sweat and rarely laundered clothes, and yet you still managed to smell good.
As the train moved us east across the prairie, across that ancient inland sea, I thought how little of us got left behind after death. How none of the most important parts survived. It all decomposed: kisses, caresses, tongues, mouths. Passion spent itself in our animal heat, dissipated as vapor, left no permanent record. No echoes of spoken words, moans, gasps, endearments would be stored in the earth's layers.
You said I wasn't one bit romantic, and you were right mostly. But I knew that bones remained, like the terrible lizards who left their teeth and vast femurs for the jigsaw-puzzle pleasure of us paleontologists.
I hoped that when they found us, me and you, we'd be entwined together just like this, among the dinosaurs, in the ruins of the world.
E
VERY HIDDEN THING
WAS INSPIRED, IN PART,
by two pioneering American paleontologists, Edward Drinkwater Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Their rivalry in the late nineteenth century was famous, and has been referred to as the “Bone Wars,” during which each scientist tried to outdo, undermine, and even destroy the reputation of the other. Nonetheless, between them they found and named over a hundred new species of dinosaursâthough today, a much smaller number of them are considered valid.
Researching this book was fascinating, and I'm very grateful to Donald Henderson, Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum; Donald Brinkman, Director of Preservation and Research; and Dennis Braman, a Research Scientist in Palynology, for allowing me to tag along with them during a dig at Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. They were generous with their time, and patient in answering my many questions.
Two books in particular were invaluable to me in researching Cope and Marsh, and the history of American paleontology. The first was
The Gilded Dinosaur
by Mark Jaffe, an enthralling history of the fossil war between Cope and Marsh, and a great primer in the evolution of American science. The second book was
The Life of a Fossil Hunter
by Charles H. Sternberg. Sternberg was largely self-taught, and became an indispensable fossil hunter for Cope, before striking out as an independent collector. In 1912 Sternberg moved to Canada with his three sons and they prospected for dinosaurs in Alberta for decades.
The period in which my book is set was incredibly eventful not just scientifically, but politically and socially as well. The Civil War had ended just years before; the Union Pacific Railway had just bound the nation coast to coast, and American expansion was pushing farther west, displacing the Plains Indians, breaking territorial treaties and promises, and pursuing a policy whose aim was to confine the Indians to ever smaller and poorly maintained Reserves, while deliberately exterminating their traditional food source, the bison.
Black Elk Speaks, as told through John G. Neihardt
, helped give me an insight into this period of American Indian history, and the culture of the Lakota Sioux. Thomas King's
The Inconvenient Indian
was an excellent overview of the collision between First Nations people and white European settlers. Since my story contains several Lakota and Pawnee characters, it was very important to me that my depictions of them be as accurate as possibleâso I am very grateful to Brandy Tuttle, a member of the Lakota people, for agreeing to read and comment on the manuscript before its publication.
Finally I'd like to thank my editors, Justin Chanda, Hadley Dyer, and Bella Pearson, who, as always, helped me to write a much better book.
KENNETH OPPEL
is the Governor General's Awardâwinning author of the Airborn Trilogy and the Silverwing Saga, which has sold over a million copies worldwide. His most recent novels are
The Nest
, winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award; and
The Boundless
, winner of the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children's Book Award. A two-time nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, he lives in Toronto with his wife and three children.
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EVERY HIDDEN THING
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Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
First Canadian edition
EPub Edition: August 2016 ISBN: 9781443410335
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