Chapter Sixteen: I Start My New Job

The rest of the journey went off without a hitch and I hardly even noticed the heat. Okay, I noticed the heat, but I was so pumped up about the new direction my life had taken that I didn’t let it bother me.

The dig site was easy to find. I could see it half a mile away: six or seven pickups and cars parked in a row beside a collection of tents that looked like flowers in the distance, red and blue and green against a background of drab yellow grass.

I rolled into camp around three o’clock and . . . you know, I had sort of expected a welcoming committee—not anything fancy, but maybe two or three of their top people who would drop their digging tools and rush out to welcome me. I mean, how often does a Head of Ranch Security show up at these deals?

Nobody even noticed I was there! Oh well. I tried not to get my feelings hurt. I knew they were busy, and to be fair about it, a lot of those folks didn’t realize who I was.

Do we need to do a quick review of what’s involved in an arkinsawlogy dig? Maybe so, and we can start with the correct pronunciation of the word. It’s archeology, not arkinsawlogy. I don’t know who started calling it arkinsawlogy . . . well, yes I do.

Drover, and that should come as no great surprise. The runt has trouble remembering his own name, much less big scientific words like arkinsawlogy.

Archeology.

Archeologists dig around in the dirt and look for old things, but they don’t do it with backhoes or even with shovels. No sir, when I got there, I saw seven grown men on their knees, humped over like snails and dragging trowels across patches of dirt that were as square and flat as wooden boxes.

This was the “site.” That’s what they called it, the site, and they had it laid out in several squares that were marked by string lines. The digging took place in the shade provided by a big blue awning, a kind of tent, open at the sides and held up by poles that were anchored in the ground by ropes and stakes.

They would trowel for a while, then scoop up the dirt and toss it into a white plastic bucket. When a bucket got full, a tall fellow named Mike picked it up and carried it to a screen. He wore a cowboy straw hat and had a silver mustache, and he would dump the bucket of dirt into the screen and shake it back and forth until all the loose dirt had fallen through.

Then he would bend over the screen and pick out certain objects that he called “cultural material”: pieces of bone, charcoal, pottery, and flint, which he dropped into a small paper sack with writing on it.

At the same time, Dave Wilkens was walking around, looking down into all the holes. He would pull on his chin and say, “Hmmmm,” and write something on his clipboard. No kidding, that was it. I have no idea what he was writing down, but maybe it was just “hmmmm.”

Well! After sitting quietly and observing it all for fifteen minutes, and listening to ten thousand wasps buzzing overhead, I began to realize that this was REALLY BORING. So, to liven things up a bit, I took in a big gulp of air and delivered a loud bark that said, “Hey fellas, great news. I’m here!”

Yipes. It didn’t exactly liven things up. It stopped everything dead in its tracks. I mean, every head came up and every eye swung around to me, and, fellers, the silence that fell over the place was almost scary. Then Mr. Wilkens said, “Hey, Slim, some of your kinfolks just showed up.”

Up till then, I hadn’t seen Slim or Alfred, but now their heads popped out of one of the holes. When Slim saw me, he chuckled. “Kinfolks. Wilkie, you have a sick mind.”

Alfred’s eyes grew wide and he gasped, “Hankie! What are you doing here?”

Well, I . . . I glanced around at all the frozen faces and all the narrowed eyes, and all at once I felt that we should discuss this in private. I mean, I didn’t know these people and they didn’t seem quite as thrilled about my presence as they should have been. So I trotted over to the hole where he . . .

“Watch the string line!”

Oops. Okay, they had yellow string lines all over the place, and maybe I tripped over one of them. What was the deal with all the string? I mean, it was like some kind of giant booby trap. If they didn’t want dogs tripping over their string lines, they should have . . . I don’t know, put them somewhere else.

Anyway, I trotted over to the hole where Slim and the boy were . . . well, doing whatever they were doing.

Alfred didn’t look happy. “Hankie, Mom said she was going to lock you up in the barn.”

My eyes drifted up to the clouds. Yes, well, his mom and I discussed that and we decided that on a normal day, I’d rather not be locked in a barn . . . and she wasn’t fast enough to catch me.

The boy shook his finger in my face. “Hankie, you’re a naughty dog.” He glared at me for a moment. I began sending up Looks of Remorse and it wasn’t long until he grinned. “But I’m kind of glad you came, ’cause now we can sleep together in the tent.”

Hey, that sounded like good wholesome entertainment, a boy and his dog sharing the great outdoors.

I dived into the hole and said hello to Slim. I figured he would be happy to see me. I mean, who wouldn’t be thrilled to see an old friend? (We weren’t actually kinfolks. I think that was some kind of joke.)

But he didn’t act so thrilled. “Hank, get out of my unit!”

What unit? I turned to see what he was yelling about and somehow my tail knocked over his bucket.

“Dog, for all I know, you might be standing on top of King Tut. Scram!”

Me? Standing on top of . . . gee, I couldn’t see anything but dirt. Maybe he was talking to someone else, but his face sure was turning red and I could see the blood vessels standing out on his forehead when he brought his angry face right up to mine and hissed, “Will you please get out of my unit?”

Well, he’d said “please,” so we seemed to be making progress. I figured this might be a good time to extend the hand of friendship, so I offered him a paw to shake. Maybe that was a bad idea. He jacked himself up to a standing position (and did a lot of groaning in the process) and pitched—I mean, physically threw me—out of his hole . . . unit . . . whatever you call it.

Gee whiz, he didn’t need to yell and screech, and what was the big deal anyway? As far as I could tell, he was raving about DIRT. How much dirt did he need? If he didn’t want to share that patch of dirt, why couldn’t he go somewhere else? I mean, there’s a whole lot of dirt in this world, and it’s a sad day when a grown man gets so fussy that he can’t share a little piece of it with a loyal dog.

Oh well. I had already begun to suspect that people who spend entire days scratching around in the dirt are . . . how can I say this? They’re just a little bit strange, and for his information, I had no wish to spend another second in his so-called “unit” (it was nothing but dirt, honest).

Mr. Wilkens drifted over and gave Slim a looking-over. “You look kind of stiff.”

“Yeah, my body wasn’t meant to be folded up in a hole. My knees hurt, my back hurts, everything hurts.”

There was no sympathy in Wilkens’ face. “I guess you’ve been living a pampered life. You’ll get used to the pain.” Wilkens knelt down, looked into Slim’s unit, and pointed toward some kind of lump in the middle. “What is that?”

“Well, it looks like the top of a rock to me.”

“What’s your elevation?” When Slim didn’t answer, Wilkie looked up at him. “What’s your elevation?”

“Well, I was six foot tall till that horse throwed me through the west wall of the saddle shed, and I s’pect I’m some shorter now.”

Wilkie’s eyes grew distant. “Slim, what is the elevation in your unit? How deep are you?”

“Oh.” Slim frowned and looked into the hole. “Well, that’s hard to say. You want me to guess?”

“Slim, this is science. We don’t guess. We measure.” Wilkie pitched him a measuring tape. “Use the string level, and measure down from there.”

Slim pulled out the tape and squinted at it. “Good honk, did you notice all these weird little lines?”

“Yes. They’re centimeters. We use metric units.”

“You know, I got stung by a centimeter one time and it hurt for three days.”

Wilkie laughed and shook his head. “Slim, step down into the unit and measure your elevation.”

“Do I have to use all them little marks on the tape measure?”

“Yes.”

Slim heaved a sigh. “This is worse than brain surgery.” He got down in the hole and told Alfred to pull the string level—a string with a level hanging from it—tight. When the bubble meddled in the lid of the settle . . . settled in the middle of the level, Slim pulled out a strip of tape, set the end of it on the floor of the unit, and squinted at the marks on the tape.

“Well, it says . . . it says either fifty or fifty thousand or five hundred million, I can’t tell which.”

Wilkie rubbed his chin. “Fifty centimeters. You ought to be pretty close to the floor of the house, but the north wall is over there.” He pointed to another unit. “That’s where you’d expect to find a big rock. What’s it doing in the middle of the house?”

Little Alfred said, “Maybe it’s a dinosaur bone.”

Wilkens smiled. “Believe me, it’s not a dinosaur bone. Not in these parts.” He turned back to Slim. “Well, take your unit on down and leave the rock in place. When you get down to sixty centimeters, we’ll take another look at it.”

“Can I use a shovel?”

“A shovel? Ha ha.”

“Will I have to measure again?”

“Yes.”

“When’s quitting time?”

Wilkens strolled away. “Midnight.”

“Wilkens, you’re even crueler and more heartless than High Loper, and that’s nothing to be proud of.” To no one in particular, Slim muttered, “This archeology reminds me of a cold. Just when you think it can’t get worse, it gets worse.”

Nobody was listening to his complaints, so he went down on his knees again, folded up his legs, and started scraping dirt with a trowel. Little Alfred did the same, but with less grumbling.

Scrape, scrape. Pick, pick. Brush, brush. Ho hum. Time sure did crawl. I sat for a while, laid down for a while, yawned three times, scratched two fleas, and took another yawn. Ho hum. But at last, some excitement appeared on the scenery.

A grasshopper landed right in front of me. You know, on an ordinary day, I don’t get excited about grasshoppers. Drover does but I don’t. But this was turning out to be a pretty slow day, so I flipped the switch for Slow Hydraulic Lift, rose to my feet, and began inching my nose toward the hateful grasshopper. When he flew . . . well, maybe I tried to, fly too, only . . .

“Hank, for crying out loud!”

Okay, maybe I’d gotten absorbed in the grasshopper and had forgotten about . . . well, Slim and the hole and so forth, and I flew right on top of his back. Anyway, I got his attention. “Alfred, call your dog and get ’im out of here.”

Alfred climbed out of the hole and called me. I leaped out of the hole and followed him away from Slim’s crummy little playpen. By George, if he didn’t want my help, that was fine. I had better things to do, and he could just . . . I don’t know, suffer through life without me.

What a grouch.