Early June, Calgary, Alberta, under a blistering urban sun. A young reporter looks dramatically into a television camera. Behind her, a notorious criminal, convicted of gruesome crimes, emerges from the dark interior of a police cruiser and comes into view. He is led towards a courthouse, handcuffed, his ankles chained.
“He stands seven feet tall,” intones the reporter, “and is as thin as a ranch-rail, with a shaved head, pockmarked skin, and piercing eyes. Hear his sensational story at eleven.”
The convict shuffles out of the shadows and into the bright glare, his dark eyes becoming slits. The reporter and her cameraman turn and rush towards him. But they and others are pushed back by a quartet of policemen and burly jail guards. The criminal glances at the gathering media and then focuses his gaze and an unnerving smile on the young woman. She returns his look for a moment but then moves away, her face becoming white.
Fifteen minutes later she gets a call on her cellphone.
It’s him!
“It was nice to meet you,” he says in a sickly sweet voice. “I’ll look you up some time. Oh, and tell Alberta to have a nice week. Tell them…I’m coming. I’m free!”
Then there was a beep.
It had been his sentencing day and the guards had been rushing him into the courthouse. In the hallway, he had asked to use a washroom. They had taken him to a stark, concrete room with two toilets and a very small window. When they broke down the door five minutes later, they found the guard who had accompanied him lying on the floor, unconscious. Otherwise the room was empty.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police go on full-scale alert, nationwide bulletins are issued, and Albertans everywhere imagine finding this desperado on their doorsteps.
“The Reptile,” the one and only, is loose.
We were sky-high, literally. Man, was I having fun. Ten kilometres above Manitoba, all my buds in tow, and the parental units back home in Toronto. It doesn’t get much better than that. And to top it all off, we were about to go on a dinosaur hunt.
I’m still not sure how we pulled it off, but me and Bomb Connors, Rhett Norton, and Terry Singh had hit the jackpot—the scientific, paleontological jackpot, that is. We had built a Tyrannosaurus rex about half the size of this big baby we were flying to Calgary, and made it actually move and roar and take swipes at people. Then we’d entered it into some science fairs, and before you could say “edmontosaurus,” we were national champions and on our way to dinosaur country in the badlands of Alberta.
If the truth were known, our dads almost built the thing for us. At first they said they just wanted to watch, but almost right away they started drawing up all sorts of plans. We could barely even get at our own project! But boy, by the time they were finished with it, it almost seemed like it was alive, and a couple of moms were ready to kill them, T. rex style, because they practically lived in the basement for about two straight months.
First we entered it into the Moore Park Junior High Science Fair, and it just cleaned up there. A little on the spectacular side, one might say, the biggest meat-eating monster the world has ever known, nearly twice the height of your average school principal, coming right into your kitchen. It scared the bejeebers out of most of the girls we knew. For some reason it would give a huge roar and swipe every time they got near it (our sweaty little paws on the on/off switch, of course).
Next was the National Science Fair in Nepean, and it ate up the competition there, too. Not bad for a bunch of grade eights who hate science class. Anyway, they gave us a choice of a trip anywhere in Canada for a week or so as a prize, providing it had some scientific significance to it. We figured we’d built a T. rex, right? Let’s go dino hunting!
So, southern Alberta it was. Not exactly the world’s most exciting place, I know. Calgary isn’t Toronto, and Drumheller, the little town we were headed to, wasn’t exactly Vegas, but we knew that scientists had been digging dinosaurs out of the ground in those parts for over a century. It couldn’t be totally bad. And besides, all four of us got to go. That was dynamite!
“Sit down, boys, and behave yourselves!” said a whiny voice from across the aisle.
Well, it wasn’t all dynamite. That was Newcombe. Norris Newcombe, our science teacher. He and his wife, Ophelia, were our chaperones. And they were a royal pain in the butt! But we had plans for them. We were going to give them the slip as soon as we got to Dinosaur Valley, at least for a while.
When you fly into Calgary you get quite a view. There’s the city, appearing out of what looks like about a million kilometres of fields and more fields: skyscrapers and subdivisions popping right up out of cattle country. You start seeing some hills, foothills they call them, that look as if they’re just bubbling up from all that flatness, and then in the distance you see the Rocky Mountains. Pretty cool, really. I had to admit that there was nothing like that at home.
The airport was just like the whole city. Everything seemed new. In the lobby there were these employees dressed in white shirts, red vests, and big white cowboy hats called Stetsons. And downstairs in the main hall, they had lots of stuffed animals on display, big ones, all from the west. The buffalo kind of caught my eye at first, but then we saw a whole platform filled with dinosaurs. We dropped our bags and sped over. A T. rex, an albertosaurus (just about as vicious but a little smaller and wickedly fast), and a triceratops loomed out over the crowds. On the plaque nearby was information about the Royal Tyrrell Museum, in Drumheller. It said they had discovered thirty-five species of dinosaurs in Alberta, more than they’d found anywhere else in the world.
“Who do you think would win if Alberto-VO5 there faced off against the T-man?” snapped the Bomb.
“T. rex, dude,” said Terry. “No contest. Tear his head off at the stem.”
“Yeah, but Albert’s got the speed, man,” cracked Rhett. “He’s got the wheels.”
“I’ll take size and brute strength over speed any day,” said Bomber.
“These guys don’t often fight each other, you twits,” I reminded them, “they’re meat-eaters. They’re looking for easier kills, veggie munchers, like Tri-boy here, or some big juicy brontosaurus on his last legs.”
We hadn’t seen Norris easing up behind us. When we did, we could tell by the frown on his face that he had heard us. Uh-oh.
“We aren’t here to dredge up the most vicious scenarios we can about these magnificent beasts. All I’ve heard from you gentlemen since we left is how violent this meat-eater is or how aggressive that one is. Let’s try to be a bit more scientific, shall we? By the way, it’s apatosaurus, not brontosaurus, and they’re Late Jurassic, not Cretaceous—there is no evidence that they ever lived in Alberta. And another thing.” He turned and looked over at our bags, sitting alone not far off. “What did I tell you about leaving your bags lying around? And what do they say about every five minutes over the public-address system?”
“Do not leave your bags unattended,” I said, trying not to sound as excruciatingly bored as I was. It was the five millionth time he’d made his point.
“Right. Pick them up, boys, and let’s find our van.”
“Rats,” whispered Rhett. “Mad bombers foiled again.” Norris had rented a van for us: a big one, almost like a minibus, our touring-mobile. We were itching to come up with a nickname for it. A gross one would have been nice.
We walked by a little magazine store and saw some of the local newspapers sitting out on a rack. It was just a few weeks before school ended back home, so the Calgary Flames had been on vacation for a while—wrong time for hockey news. But the front-page headlines jumped out at me. They were thick and black. “REPTILE ON THE LOOSE!” read one. “DANGER TO US ALL, SAY MOUNTIES!” shouted another. Under each was a picture of this creepy-looking guy with bad skin, dressed in black, a big black Stetson on his head, a snarl on his lips.
Norris picked up a paper and paid for it. I heard him speaking with his wife.
“They say he’s heading northeast from Calgary,” he almost whispered to her. Then he skimmed the article. “Oh dear. This guy is a real piece of work. Apparently, he has a thing for bones. Human bones.”
As we got closer, he folded the paper under his arm.
“Nothing to see here, boys. I believe our van is at gate seven.” He and Ophelia steered us away.
It turned out that the van was green. We wanted to call it the Snotmobile, but Norris got wind of that almost right away, and after he was finished with us we didn’t dare use that word again, even in private. He steered it through the busy streets and pointed out things like the “famous” Glenbow Museum and “historic” Fort Calgary.
They wanted us to see a little of the downtown area before we headed out into the Wild West. My friends got bored with that sort of thing pretty quickly, but I must admit I would have liked to have gone inside all of those buildings. I just love history. It always seems so neat to me that there used to be different people wearing different clothes and thinking in totally different ways, right where we are now. To me, it’s like something from a dream. Or from another planet. But I tried not to seem too interested.
Back home in Toronto, they’ve been putting all sorts of plastic moose on the streets. Our mayor and the other deep-thinking adults who run the place believe Americans think that’s kind of cute and very Canadian. It supposedly makes them want to visit the city and spend their money. Well, Calgarians (as they’re called) are into that too. Except with them it’s cows. We couldn’t go more than a few blocks without seeing a plastic moo machine. Whoopee. I don’t know if it was the Americans they were trying to impress or not, but they sure went at it. Canadians: we always seem to be trying to impress someone.
There were some pretty cool things about Calgary, too. One of them was the glass walkways between the big buildings downtown. You can stroll a storey or so above the streets just about anywhere. Probably makes sense for a place where the temperature gets down to about five thousand below zero in the winter.
And I just couldn’t get over how new everything seemed in Calgary. There wasn’t a concrete building in sight. Everything was glass and very tall. We were all craning our necks looking up—not an easy thing to make Toronto kids do. Norris was nice enough to whip by some of the sports places, too…after we pleaded with him. The Saddledome, where the Flames play, was amazing, built like something a giant cowboy would set his butt onto. Actually, it isn’t called that now: some company gave the owners big bucks to add their name to it, a name that has nothing to do with hockey. One of these days there’ll be a rink called the Ever Ready Underwear Arena or something like that, just so everybody involved can make a few more dollars.
We saw the stadium where the Stampeders play football, and Norris even took us over to the west end of the city to see Olympic Park, where the 1988 Winter Games were. The ski-jump ramps looked pretty awesome—we could just imagine flying through the air off one of those babies.
Before long, Norris was heading the Unmentionable mobile north. We crossed over a few bridges and then got onto Highway 2 in the direction of Edmonton, once home to the mighty Gretzky, and now the Kingdom of Connor McDavid. It didn’t take long to get out of Calgary: there were just a few wheat fields and then some suburban towns. Not long after we passed Airdrie, we turned straight east and pointed towards Drumheller. And I mean straight. The road looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. We were out of the foothills now, and the land was like a pancake. Old Norris was just bombing along the road—they say these flat stretches will make an easterner lose track of speed. We started putting bets on when the RCMP would nail him. We were hoping, anyway. There was a no-cellphones rule, so we had to find other things to do.
There were wheat fields and canola fields stretching out for many kilometres, houses and round metal barns and silos way off the road with clusters of trees around them. The crops were just getting going, sprouting up in different colours as far as your eyes could see. And then we would come upon endless open spaces just filled with sagebrush, like the setting for a Wild West movie. I almost expected to see the Blackfoot Nation appear on horseback on the horizon, or cowboys riding towards us. We even saw a coyote run across the highway in front of the van, as if he were on a mission or something, hunting his prey. It was the real Canadian west. Everything just seemed so big. Even the sky looked bigger out there.
After a while, it began to seem as though the wide-open spaces would never end. Norris was blathering on about how some of these farms had more than five hundred hectares of land and hundreds and hundreds of cattle. He pointed out tractors and farm equipment the size of Mississauga working the fields. All right, all right. Stunning. But let me see a tree or two near the road every now and then, or let the road maybe curve a centimetre, or maybe have a hill in it bigger than a molehill! Let’s have some imagination!
Then, without warning, we came upon a part of Canada that looked like Mars. Man, was it wicked! That was the perfect way to describe it. Absolutely wicked. About twenty kilometres out of Drumheller, coming around the first corner we’d taken since we’d left Calgary, we saw what looked like some sort of canyon.
“Whoa!” said Terry.
The rest of us just gawked. The canyon was beginning to open up for us, and we realized we were seeing the legendary badlands. Norris turned onto a smaller road and drove past a sign that read Horseshoe Canyon. He headed towards a lookout.
We piled out of the van like zombies, just staring at the scenery in front of us. We walked up to the edge and looked down into the abyss. Before us was something alien on earth. The canyon was brown and grey and purple and had all sorts of layers in it, and it was filled with sandy hills that looked like giant beehives or something. And each beehive was carved like a sculpture, a sculpture maybe the Big Friendly Giant would have made. There were deep lines and waves and curves in them. Far off in the canyon you could see patches of green grass, pathways, and caves, places you just knew you had to explore. Some of the hills looked as though they had faces, monster faces, and at their bottoms there seemed to be giant dinosaur feet. The parental units have some paintings by this guy named Salvador Dalí. He painted stuff that looks like it comes out of your dreams. This canyon, here in what we had thought was a boring stretch of Canada, seemed as though it had been put together by Salvador Dalí, except it was even weirder. I remembered standing right at the edge of Niagara Falls and having this sensation that I’d like to just jump in. It felt the same way here. I wanted to dive into this wide-open canyon in the badlands of Alberta.
“When the Blackfoot Nation ruled here, long ago,” said Norris, “they believed this place was haunted.”
That made perfect sense. Haunted. But still, I wanted to climb down in there and walk around until I dropped, edge down some of these sheer cliffs into dreamland. And I knew the other guys did, too. I could tell by the looks on their faces. The sun was beginning to set, and there was a sort of orange glow over everything.
“We have to go,” said Ophelia. “We’re due at the museum in less than an hour.”
“Can we go down in there for a minute?” asked the Bomb.
“Down in there?!” snapped Ophelia.
“Uh, not now,” replied Norris. “We may do some camping later on, somewhere in the badlands. Not here. We have to get going.”
Back in the van, on the move again, we were all quiet, but I noticed that a couple of the guys were kind of rocking back and forth a little, like the way you get before a big game.
Soon the land flattened out and got boring again. Then we approached the outskirts of Drumheller.
Now, I’ve been to a few places in this country—the parental units are always travelling around and they’ve taken me with them a few times. I’ve been to Newfoundland, for example, and even spent some time in a little ghost-town island off the coast. I’ve been up to the snowy north of Ontario, and I’ve checked out just about everything Toronto has to offer. But I’ve never seen anything like Drumheller. It is just a little town, about eight thousand folks, and they are folks, just down-home types, pretty easygoing. However, they all live in the Land of Oz.
The first thing I noticed was that we were descending, going down on a suddenly twisting road with hills rising all around us. Big bad badlands. Then everything opened up and we realized that we were actually in one of those huge canyons, like the one at Horseshoe. We saw the sign for Drumheller with a dinosaur on it, a T. rex, and then gas stations, hotels, and that sort of thing—all sitting on land from outer space. Those beehives were all around us, towering over the van, looking even more spectacular because we were among them. We rolled on past their feet, their big dinosaur feet. We had been told that quite a few science fiction movies had been filmed around here. Perfect.
Norris turned on the radio. Country music came blaring out, music we normally would have groaned about. But somehow it sounded different as we stared out at the badlands. It was a fitting soundtrack. There were no words, no twang or complaining voice, just the sound of guitars and fiddles playing fast over a thumping bass. It sounded like the devil’s music to me as we went down, down into “Drum.”
It faded out and a deep voice, like a salesman’s, filled the van.
“Welcome to Drumheller. You are listening to tourism radio for our beautiful region, and you are now in the land of the dinosaurs. Seventy-five million years ago, just outside your windows, creatures as big as houses thundered about on this land, huge, reptile-like beings who engaged in desperate battles to survive, not only against the elements, but also against the sharp teeth, powerful jaws, and rapacious appetites of one another. Drumheller: where history becomes reality, where giants once roamed the earth. In a moment, we’ll begin our tour.”
The devil music began again.
“Can we, uh, listen to something else?” I asked. “Just until that music stops.”
Norris turned the dial.
“This is CBC Calgary,” said a smooth voice. “One of the nation’s most vicious criminals is still on the loose in southern Alberta.”
I noticed Norris glancing at Ophelia.
“The Reptile,” continued the announcer. “Seven feet tall, capable of murder at any moment, able to withstand almost any hardship. He was once described by a prison guard as a human being who preys on others. Reports indicate that he might be headed northeast towards the badlands. In fact, he might already—”
Snap.
Norris turned off the radio. Just cracked it off.
“Why did you shut it down, sir?” I asked.
There was no answer at first.
“Who’s this Reptile dude?” asked Rhett.
We all looked at each other.
“Not our concern,” said Norris. “Not yet, anyway. We are going to the museum, indoors. To sleep with the dinosaurs.”
I looked up to the hills of the badlands. They just about touched the big blue sky. I scanned the horizon. There was something about that distant line that gave me an eerie feeling. No matter where I looked, it seemed to be flickering, as if there were something moving around on the edge, as if someone were up there…watching.