Argentavis Magnificens

Morgan and I first met Howie at a dig. Or, I suppose, Howie met us — we didn’t realize it was him at the time. Our roped excavation site sat two-thirds the way up a slope of the Milk River canyon, and the river, light brown with silt, sauntered below. Morgan and I had been at the site a number of days, and had the majority of the bones of a small false-saber Dinictis felina jacketed in parts and stored at the base of the canyon under the shade of a tarp-canopy, next to our tent and equipment — extra trowels, picks, and such. The last few pieces of the false-saber (head, front legs that bent back on themselves) were still in the dirt, balanced on pedestals of grey-brown consolidated ash and sediment. Morgan lay on his back in the sand beside the pedestals, chipping away at their undersides and holding plastered strips of burlap to the small cat’s skull. I stirred a pail of water and plaster so it wouldn’t set in the heat. Neither of us could see much above the striped lip of the canyon, but we noticed the trail of dust against the blue sky, and the intrusion of country radio and diesel rising from a one-ton. Then the slam of the truck door, a man backlit by the afternoon sun, and a minor rock slide where a black spaniel skidded down the cliff toward us.

“Must be lost,” I said. The site was way off the highway at the Alberta−Montana border, surrounded only by the hoodoos that dotted the badlands.

Feet planted on the canyon’s crest, the silhouette set his hands to his hips while the dog rattled stones ahead of itself, looking like it would run us over. Morgan sat up the best he could with one hand cementing the strip of burlap on the skull.

I left the stick in the plaster bucket and yelled, “Heel the dog, jackass.”

The man’s shape lifted a straw Galveston. I thought he’d yell back, but he whistled sharply and the dog stopped.

Morgan squinted, half-sitting in the ditch. “Who brings a dog to a dig?”

“An asshole.”

“Some people, I tell you.”

A second whistle and the spaniel backtracked — struggled its way up the loose side of the canyon and sat next to the man. The two of them, man and dog, watched us for a full hour. During that time Morgan and I sank plaster strips into the pail, removed excess paste between two squeezed fingers, and held each bandage while it dried around the fossilized cat. When the sun lowered we rinsed plaster and sand from our hands and faces, prepped dinner at a camp stove, and yelled again — this time about the man’s radio. I wonder what he thought of us. Me, a tired, sweaty woman in a bandana shouting profanities from the base of the canyon. Morgan short and stocky, long dusty hair, and a face that he joked was a throwback to the Neanderthal. I don’t know, maybe we were more amusing than I give us credit for. Still, Howie never descended the canyon to our level, or called to tell us who he was or what he wanted. After that hour of boring voyeurism he whistled the dog into the cab of the truck and drove elsewhere.

The second time we ran into Howie was weeks later at our university, when the Department of Geoscience where Morgan and I lectured hosted a memorial gala for a deceased donor. We were obligated to attend, but networking and small talk — that wasn’t for me. I planned to catch the eye of the geoscience chair, down a free drink, and then sneak back to the lab where the false-saber sat on the table. (I had the hard plaster and burlap waiting under a wet cloth, and as soon as it softened would cut the jacket open with a utility knife and roll it back in sections.) Morgan intended to wave a picture of an in situ teratorn in front of the donors and see if he couldn’t change the department’s mind about sending us to the Andes. (The specimen, in the Bolivian altiplano, was our latest pipe-dream — the university had already told us no.)

We arrived late. Morgan and I edged around the auditorium to the bar at the side. While speeches droned on, I scanned the crowd. The department had paid a fortune — spared no cost in attracting wealth — and carted in temporary displays from the museum. Several ostrich-like ornithomimid fossils the university was famous for sat against a wall of windows overlooking the courtyard, and a replica of an Apatosaurus femur — a six-foot thigh bone from one of the largest-known sauropods — had a line of donors waiting for a photo op. Tablecloths, wine, gowns. Most people had pushed their seats back (dinner was long over) and were watching the stage, or chit-chatting amongst themselves. I spotted the geoscience chair talking to a group of black-clad mourners who crowded the exit. The mourners breathed together, and synchronously raised their cigarettes to their lips under the green light of the hall’s exit sign — grief, I supposed, kept their motions in unison. I finished my drink and plotted a path through the tables, and then I saw a black spaniel curled at the feet of one of the attendees, a straw Galveston hung daintily on the corner of the chair back, and the man in the chair who, logic said, must own both the hat and the dog. The man was Howie Bring. Bring Petroleum, Bring Oil, Bring everything — he was the only donor with enough wealth to walk a dog into a reception. Even seated Howie was tall and lean, although I’d put him in his late sixties. He saw me and lifted his hand, gesturing Morgan and I toward his table.

“Constance,” I introduced myself.

“Think we saw you at Milk River.” Morgan sat beside him. I cringed, remembering the curses I’d shouted.

“That’s right.” Howie reached down and twisted his fingers in the black spaniel’s curls. “I heard you got a chance for something big in the altiplano. Does it have hope?”

“It used to,” I said. “The department vetoed it due to cost.”

Morgan slipped the Polaroid from his pocket, straightened a bent corner, and set the photo on the table. “But if you’re scouting —”

The photo, normally tacked to the corkboard in the lab, pictured a leather glove lying on a patch of dirt with the general location and year of the find pencilled underneath: Bolivian altiplano, 22/01/83. Red-and-grey rock surrounded a line of lighter, pinkish-tan vertebrae embedded in the tuff. The scale the glove provided, and the way the skeleton seemed situated, spoke of something huge and avian. Argentavis magnificens was our best estimate. A bird that pre-dated the mountain it fossilized in, and one of only two known specimens.

Howie turned the photo and leaned back in his chair, looking first at the line for the Apatosaurus femur, and then at us. He was either remembering, like I was, all the profanity we’d thrown at him from the hot canyon, or sizing us up — the over-bleached grin Morgan was proud of, and my denim and shitty blazer — versus the donor currently beside the femur: a woman, at most five feet tall; even standing on a chair her up-do didn’t reach the top of the mounted thigh bone. She looked at the brown, polished head of the femur arcing above her and laughed, and then hiked her gown (black, beaded, vintage) above her ankles so that the camera captured her heels.

Howie touched the photo again, and with his other hand still resting on the spaniel, told us he’d made a fortune in oil and retired. He had an interest in the “black stuff’s origins” and “just what the heck he’d cashed in for this life,” did we understand that? He’d already explored subterranean bitumen leaks, those asphalt pools that “made up tar pits and whatnot.” We’d dug on his land before, Howie claimed, though he didn’t think we’d realized. That slip of dry mud he’d spotted us on, it’d been him who signed the permissions.

“My wife wants me to pour more money into her clinic.” He nodded toward the woman in the black dress dismounting the chair beside the Apatosaurus. “She does plastic.”

Of course she does, I thought, look at her — she was at least a decade and a half younger than Howie. Although, now that I did look, she didn’t seem Botoxed. And if she’d had other work done, it must have been a reduction.

“But it occurs to me,” Howie continued, “if you’re confident in the reward, I’ve never toured the Andes.”

“You’re offering?” Morgan poured wine from a bottle that sat in the centre of the table.

“I’m offering.” Howie raised his glass.

“Then we’re confident.” Morgan turned to me.

Before I could respond, applause broke from the tables closer to the stage and the tux-clad “mourners,” returning from their smoke with the geoscience chair, picked up their cello and violins and filled the hall with fussy chamber music.

“Right, Constance?” Morgan pressed.

Having the photo come to life — to stand on the same patch of earth as Argentavis magnificens — would be prize enough for us. I wasn’t sure that was what Howie meant by “reward,” but the offer was too good to question. I raised my glass alongside theirs.

The third time we met Howie we had him tour the lab. We treated him to a dust mask and goggles, and for an hour or so he scraped calcite from the smooth, almost vitreous surface of the false-saber’s ribs. That visit cascaded into a fourth, and so on — it seemed Howie had taken our invitation as a universal one. Or, I don’t know, the six a.m. phone calls and unannounced drop-ins both at the university and my rental, all that could be commonplace for an oil baron.

Same time, Morgan left his boyfriend, and since it was July and we were set to leave for Bolivia early September, I let him sleep on my couch. For the next four weeks the three of us spent most evenings at my place, a one-bedroom bungalow on retired ranchland that edged the Kneehill badlands. The house had a veranda wrapped around three sides, an unkempt lawn, and a couple Saskatoon berry bushes the prairie dogs routinely stripped. The view, though, was what I paid for: farmland to the west and badlands parks to the east.

“The whole wide, flat world,” Howie would say, and then lean his chair back, set his boots on the veranda railing, and raise his drink to the horizon. I bit my tongue when he pointed out which portion of the land was his, and as he waxed on about life “pressed book-like” while his spaniel dug apart gopher holes. It was hard not to mock him. Maybe because I’d been wrong about the musicians back at the gala, or maybe because Howie’d brought his dog uninvited to both a dig and a memorial party, but I felt we couldn’t get on the same track. Like although we’d met and travelled next to each other, I was tensed for him to pull away. Pull his funding away — he’d never toured the Andes, he’d said.

We entertained him. We walked the badlands and tested the backpack core-drill we had him purchase. Morgan listened to Howie recount his fights with his wife about her clinic, and I excused myself to analyze maps and core samples, and photographs of the dig site. We were set to leave in a month, and we knew nothing about where we were going besides the date of the flight. Thank god our guide-to-be, Julia, was on top of things at her end — she’d sent the samples, booked us a place in La Paz and a jeep and driver for the road from the city to the foot trail where she planned to meet us. She promised enough pack animals for our gear, which, with Howie’s unchecked generosity, was growing. Besides the new drill we bought a portable computer (small as a briefcase), and a brand new ’83 Magellan NAV that could pinpoint our latitude and longitude give or take a couple hundred metres. All stuff we truly didn’t need, and had never used in the past.

Maybe the overspending added to our impatience. Summer felt both slower and more irritating than usual: Morgan’s evolving collection of coffee cups sidelined the fossilized corals and crinoids I had displayed on the windowsill, Howie blasted a thumbhole single-shot at the prairie dogs, and me — I couldn’t help but mention future digs. Places I wanted to go that would need Howie-level funding. We provoked each other and annoyed ourselves.

The night before we were scheduled to fly to La Paz — the only night Howie was actually supposed to join us for dinner and a chat — he was late. Morgan and I ate and turned off the grill. The evening cooled. We sat on the veranda and watched clouds — purple-blue, heavy — spit on the south. Our shadows stretched and then vanished with the sun, leaving the glow from the house behind us and a pair of headlights on the highway: Howie’s maroon one-ton. The truck swerved, and then — about a hundred metres from my house — caught the soft shoulder and jerked from the road to the ditch where it smashed the wood and barbed-wire fence (a remnant from a time when the property had cattle). Howie opened the door and fell into the grass. The spaniel bolted over the road and ran between canola swaths in the neighbouring field.

“Jesus, Howie.” I ran to the truck and pulled the keys from the ignition. “You hurt?”

“Violet.” He stumbled up the ditch. Morgan slipped under his arm, steadying him. I picked up the straw Galveston and slapped the dirt from it.

“Let’s get you inside,” I said.

“Violet, heel,” Howie yelled.

“Come on, Howie,” I said. The dog, scared and running, wasn’t going to stop. Or if she did, it would be so far into the field we wouldn’t be able to see her.

He tripped on the porch steps and I ducked under his other arm, helping Morgan.

“My wife won’t let me in my own house,” Howie said.

“Don’t worry about that now.” To be honest — I didn’t want to let him in either, but I did. I put fresh sheets on my bed for him since Morgan had the couch. When he passed out I staked a pup tent at the edge of the property for myself. It was too early to sleep. I sat on the front steps, worried and angry about the trip.

“So his wife cut him loose.” Morgan handed me a pilsner and sat next to me. “I don’t know what took her so long.”

“What do you mean?”

“He pulled funding from her clinic.”

“She does plastic,” I said. “Who cares if someone doesn’t get their lift and tuck?”

Morgan turned to me.

“Facial reconstruction, Constance,” he said. “She does that sort of plastic. She’s a surgeon.”

I couldn’t think of what to say, so I drank. We sat on the steps listening to the rock wrens and watched the storm flicker and boom miles south over the fields.

“Does that —” I began.

“Doesn’t change anything.”

Kneehill when it’s wet — the long grass around the river turns green, and the plains, dead for most of the year, creep with small blue flowers. We stayed on the veranda well past dark. The spaniel running somewhere, Morgan beside me. In the black I couldn’t see his face, and I assumed he couldn’t see mine.

Howie pushed the flight back to find the spaniel. I thought the dog was dead and told him as much, coyotes would have made a quick meal of her, but it was his call — if he wanted to re-book there wasn’t anything Morgan or I could do. We watched him stride through the ranchland grasses toward the canyon, groaned, and packed a lunch to follow.

The path jackknifed to the base of the ravine, where it travelled alongside ribbons of brown water — what was left of a river that had worn the sandstone, exposing grey and tan stripes of consolidated sediment that dated to the late Cretaceous. I wondered what Howie saw when he looked at it (three hundred metres below us sat the coal zone, and a constant fight between preservationists and big oil), but I suppose he only had his eye out for the spaniel. He wasted three days trekking.

The fourth day I refused to search. Morgan and I let Howie comb the hoodoos alone and drove the highway with the windows down. We didn’t have a set destination — anywhere to get away from the piercing whistles and the voice crying Violet. We ended up at the lab. It was a Sunday, and there was only one other person — a technician at the microfossil table, intent on his microscope. Morgan and I wheeled the sandbox containing the semi-jacketed false-saber (a wide, shallow Tupperware bin on a rollable island) to the centre of the room under the main fume hood and opened the lid. In planning the teratorn dig over the summer we’d lost interest in revealing the cat, and the jackets were only half-peeled from each section. I worked with an air scribe, much like a miniature jackhammer, and chipped away at the sandstone. Morgan started at the other end with brushes and a grinder. Because of our dust masks and the sound of the fume hood and the tools, I didn’t notice that a guest had entered the lab until I set down the scribe and took up a syringe of epoxy.

“A moment.” I finished with the consolidant (injected into a weak spot to help stabilize the fossil) and snapped a picture of the process, making a note of the action and time in the logbook. In the doorway — a black spaniel on a leash, the leash held by a short, well-dressed woman with thick brows and a wide mouth. The woman from the gala, Howie’s wife.

I took off my safety glasses and cotton gloves, and squatted to greet the spaniel. The dog smelled of lavender soap and her soft coat had been clipped.

“Howie will be glad.” Morgan shook the woman’s hand.

“Constance,” I greeted her, and added: “He’s not here. He’s searching the canyon. Where did you find the dog?”

“Near to our ranch.” The woman unbuttoned her blazer and sat on a stool next to the false-saber’s sandbox. “She was a black speck running the highway’s shoulder. She wouldn’t stop for me. I had to park up the road and grab her as she went by.”

She twisted the spaniel’s leash around her left hand and leaned for a better look at the false-saber. Three main jackets, and a couple buckets of smaller fragments where we might find missing pieces. In the first jacket, the pelvis and the right hind limb — thigh, shin bones, and foot — stretched half-uncovered in the matrix next to the part of the tail that had been preserved. The second contained the false-saber’s ribcage, front limbs and neck; the third held the long-toothed skull. An array of brushes, air scribes, epoxy, syringes, safety glasses, and gloves lay beside the cat.

“He could fund us both if he wanted to,” she said.

I straightened the row of scribes, and Morgan picked up his gloves.

“Thanks for dropping off the dog,” he said.

“I also brought —” She passed me an envelope. Howie’s name was written in silver sharpie on the front.

“We’ll give it to him,” Morgan said. I agreed — I knew we wouldn’t.

She looked at us like she knew it too, and unwound the spaniel’s leash from her wrist. “You do that, then.”

Morgan took the dog from her.

“It’s a mistake,” I said when she left. “Digging with him.”

Morgan stepped back from the false-saber and spread his arms. Are you sure of that, his reach said. A bird with six-foot flight feathers. It tripped me up imagining it, and it was my living to un-puzzle the bits and pieces we found buried in the coulees. That giddiness behind the jigsaw — that was why I did it, I suppose. I tested the weight of the envelope Howie’s wife had given me — photos, it seemed like — and I thought of her at the gala with her head tossed back, delighted at the absurdity of the huge femur. I opened it. It wasn’t pictures of her, although it was photographs. Each image showed a face (I won’t describe them) and underneath listed a procedure with a cash amount. I re-sealed it quickly. Morgan thrust his arms out a second time. The bright, overhead spotlight of the lab was unforgiving, and he looked old. Greying jaw-length hair, barrel chest, and thick brow. His boyfriend was gone, I remembered, and our lecture contracts were cancelled for the next year. We had the dog.

I trashed the envelope and began to pack the false-saber. We were stuck in this, whether we liked it or not.

Howie had meat on the grill when we brought the dog back and lied about her — we told him it was us who found her.

“She burned the pads of her feet on the highway,” Morgan told him. “The only time I felt sorry for a dog.”

“So you took her to a spa.” Howie closed the barbecue and eased himself into a deck chair. We’d forgotten the dog was groomed, scented, and leashed.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well, we washed her at the lab.” Morgan unclipped the dog and looped the leash around the railing. The steak spit in the grill. The dog finished scouting the yard and clambered onto the veranda.

“It’s pricy to buy last minute.” Howie pinched the crown of his hat and set it on his lap. He was talking about our flights — we knew it, and backtracked. If we left tomorrow, Morgan reasoned, it would only cut short acclimatizing in La Paz and we could still make the other connections — the driver and such. I went so far as to tell Howie that if he wanted to trade the computer and NAV to make up the flight expense, that was all right with us. He took it quietly. Fanned himself with his Galveston, and agreed.

Then we were there: La Paz, Bolivia, where I tried to sleep. Morgan drank at the hotel bar, and Howie — Howie took us up on our offer and traded the tech for eighteen bottles of pisco. We barely had time to register the slap-down before all of us (spaniel included) were in the jeep headed to the high plateau and then dumped at the trailhead where our guide, Julia, met us with a string of alpacas.

Morgan dropped his bag. The landscape on the drive had been humid and flora-laden, but here at the higher elevation the plateau was characterized by aeolian erosion, and large rocks were worn away at the base by dirt and wind. The only plants were hardy grasses and mat-like cushion plants. We’d intended to camp, but Julia asked us to push on — she had an uncle on his deathbed. Or, she said, we could stay by ourselves and she would return in a few days. We were tired. Already the sky leached colour, darkening to the east. Howie, we saw when we turned to consult with him, looked like he’d taken a punch in the face, with dark brown bruises under his eyes.

“He should stay,” Julia suggested. “Maybe even turn around.”

“We’re on Diamox, and we’re doing this.” Howie straightened his Galveston and whistled the spaniel to the foot trail.

“Or go on,” she said. “Whatever.” She wore her hair braided on one side of her face, and combed it back with her fingers in frustration — I was startled to see a raised, crimson birthmark that began behind her left ear, held her eye slightly closed, and came to an abrupt stop in the centre of her cheek. She saw me looking, said something to herself in a language close to Spanish, and then turned to Morgan and me. “I thought you were professional.”

“We are professional,” I said. “And he is on Diamox. Four a day and fluids. But we haven’t done altitude — I should have told you.”

“Do you have headlamps?” she asked, and began to sort our equipment and ready the alpacas’ panniers.

We hiked switchbacks in the dark. The gain in elevation didn’t affect Morgan or the dog, but had me lightheaded and focused on breathing. Although when we reached the hamlet and I turned to Howie, I lost concern for myself. He’d drooled a sticky bib of saliva over his shirt, and his nailbeds (when he raised his hand to wipe his mouth) were purple.

“How long were you in La Paz?” Julia swore under her breath. “Never mind. He needs oxygen.”

She went to get a tank. A couple kids unloaded the panniers from the alpacas in the dark, and Morgan and I assembled our wall tent. Both of us hurried the job, and with the spaniel underfoot it took twice as long as usual to get the fittings and rafters aligned and pitched. By the time we’d stashed the gear and set up our cots, Julia’d helped Howie strap an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. We stripped him of the wet shirt and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders.

“You should sleep.” Julia balled Howie’s shirt and tossed it to Morgan. She was right. But the tent canvas pulled and sagged in the wind like a lung, and Howie, who’d stopped wheezing and drifted off, woke choking on himself.

“We’re not going to sleep.” Morgan found the pisco bottles.

“No? Fine. Of course not. Then you can help.” She zipped the tent screen behind us and we followed her to a fire pit, where the kids who’d unloaded our gear from the alpacas strummed a charango. Firelight flickered over pale-yellow and mint houses with aluminum or thatch roofs, and gardens. Only a single house had lights on, and Julia walked us toward the two open doors — a double-wide entryway and a kitchen where a number of women lifted five- and ten-gallon pots to the stove. Inside, a swept, packed dirt floor, a painting of Jesus on the wall, and colourful woven curtains. A wooden shelf held an open bottle and a line of shot glasses. Every bit of furniture — benches, two leather recliners, wooden stools, a couch — had been pushed against the exterior walls, and in the centre of the room a man in a faded green top and canvas shorts lay on a table under a bare lightbulb.

Behind the table another man (in a suit, his unbuttoned shirt loose around his huge gut) sat in the corner braiding palm fronds into a rope. A broad-chested senior chewed a cigar in one of the leather recliners, and on the couch a young man of about twenty leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. The door to the adjoining kitchen was open, and two or three women fanned the steaming copper pots. One of the women saw us and spoke to Julia, who in turn spoke to Morgan and me.

“This is a funeral,” she said.

The man on the table — I hadn’t realized. By “deathbed” she’d meant dead.

The youngest man rose from the couch behind the dead man and downed three shots from the glasses that lined the shelf. He raised his hands and spoke to the room in a dialect I again didn’t catch, not exactly Spanish — I kicked myself for only researching the geology, not the language.

“Julia —” I said. Our intrusion felt tasteless at best. Moths battered the bare lightbulb above the body, their dusty wings casting flickered shadows in the haze of cigar smoke. She waved me quiet. The young man moved to the table, cupped the dead man’s head, and slipped the braided palm fronds around the corpse’s neck. Then he twisted the rope around his hand, braced against the dead man’s throat, and began to strangle the body.

“His grandson,” Julia said. “The cord seals the airways. For gases.”

The grandson pulled tighter, so that the woven fronds dug into the dead man’s neck, and then tied the rope off and turned to us. I put my hand to my face; Morgan lifted the pisco bottle. The men in the chairs nodded in unison — Graçias. Morgan carried it to the shelf and filled the row of shot glasses. The grandson downed three more shots (“For any smell,” Julia explained) and he fell onto one of the chairs along the wall. The man with the prominent gut stood and cast a set of sheep knuckles to the dirt floor like dice. Morgan refilled their shots.

I stepped backwards into the night and closed my eyes. Maybe I could sleep — I should at the very least check on Howie. When I opened them there was no need. Howie stood at the edge of the fire, his oxygen tank hugging his bare chest and the spaniel close to his side. The green-and-blue blanket draped his shoulders and his straw Galveston sat on his head like it anointed him.

“Howie,” I said. He passed me, stepping cautiously around the firepit and into the house as Julia carried a copper pot full of boiling water from the kitchen.

“It’s a funeral,” I called after him. “You sure you want to go in?” He groped his oxygen mask with one hand and lowered the other to the spaniel and her pink tongue.

Julia set the pot on the ground beside a box of cuy, and an older woman with a waist-length braid joined her. The woman lifted a jumpy cuy from the box and yanked its feet and head and it died. She handed it to Julia and took another. She handed the second dead cuy to me, and Julia and I dipped the animals into the boiling pot and then cold water, and we ripped the fur out with our fingers.

“You found the fossil?” I asked.

“I did.” Julia rubbed a knife over the skin of the plucked cuy. She passed me the knife, picked up a razor, and ran the blade over any last fur. I used the knife, then took the razor from her and shaved the rodent.

“Is it close?” I asked.

“Very close.” She passed me a bone fragment from her pocket.

“Shin,” I said. Thin-walled and hollow. A bird, then. We were right.

She sliced the corners of her cuy’s mouth and cut the testicles off, then she pricked the belly skin and pulled it open with two fingers and shook the guts into a bowl. She rinsed the carcass in a bucket. After all the cuy were prepared, we stuffed them with a mix of apple, cumin, and marigold, and set them on the stove with rocks on their backs to flatten the ribcages while they fried.

We rinsed our hands. Julia stood and stretched her legs. The entryway to the house was wide and the interior lit. Inside, men blew smoke around the corpse. The grandson poured alcohol on the door frame and spoke aloud to the house and the dirt. I saw Howie with a shot glass, watching Julia from one of the leather recliners — in the angled light of the doorway her birthmark was slightly shaded, and not as unattractive as unusual. Morgan left and returned with more pisco.

The night smelled of cigars, steeped coca leaves, and fried cuy, and wouldn’t end. The body was stripped, washed with tea, and wrapped in white muslin. It looked — for all my unfamiliarity with everything else — like the bones we plastered and jacketed in the field. The dead man’s grandson poured alcohol in the doorway and again said what sounded like a prayer to the house and dirt. Men blew more smoke on the door frame and windows and over the corpse. In the kitchen women lifted the rocks from the backs of the fried cuy and served bowls of meat and diced yams.

Julia poured Howie a mug of warm goat’s milk and took away his shot glass. “Make sure your friend doesn’t smoke,” she told me.

We sat on the furniture pushed against the walls. I turned my dish, trying to find an approach to the cuy. Howie, the oxygen mask pressed to his face, pulled the spaniel off piles of food scraps and settled her beside his chair. Julia poured Morgan and me glasses of clear pomace brandy — her sleeve unrolled as she did, and she stopped to correct it. The bones of her wrist were wider than the forearm, and her hands, stained brown from peeling yams, were also wide-boned and thin.

Howie coughed into his mask and waved her toward him. She leaned close. When she was near enough that he could whisper, he reached out and set his fingers on her birthmark.

“If you came back with us,” he said, “my wife could fix that.”

“Jesus Christ.” Morgan said.

I set aside my plate — the cuy were crunchy and fatty with not much meat.

Julia held Howie’s gaze, then pulled her braid aside and showed him the mark went well behind the ear. “Too much scarring. Too painful.”

“She could do it,” Howie said. “But she’s leaving —” He stopped abruptly, bent double, and puked a great fan of goat’s milk onto the floor. Morgan and I stared at the mess. The spaniel lapped the vomit. Julia lit a cigar and took her turn with the sheep’s knuckles.

“Thinking the dog will make it rich?” Howie wiped his mouth. And when we looked confused he reminded us of how we thought anything he touched turned to cash.

“I’m done for the night,” I said.

“Take him with you when you go.” Morgan pointed his fork at Howie. “Make him lie down.”

Cigars, smoke. More wood on the bonfire. The sheep knuckles clattered on the packed dirt in a sort of game that, I suppose, wasn’t a game.

In our tent I lit a lantern. Moths buffeted the screen door — there were so many, they must have bred in the loose shale of the mountains. Howie crawled into bed and touched the tubes at his chest. He reached for the water I offered him but closed his fist too early. I held the canteen and he drank. The pisco bottles shone in the corner with the knee pads, gloves, a sharpening stone — all the gear we’d hauled in.

“The NAV and the comp — why didn’t you trade for something better than pisco?” I asked.

He sputtered, but managed some cynicism: “You think there’s something better than toys and alcohol? You two, you and Morgan, you want what my wife wants — only money.”

“It’s not true,” I said, although it felt like a half-truth.

“What’s money anyway?” he asked.

I took the shin fragment from my pocket. Howie pinched the shard and turned it in the lamplight. The majority of the fragment was dark grey, with one end worn pink where — before Julia found it — it must have protruded from the rock and been exposed to rain and sun.

He seemed to drift, and I took the bone back thinking he would sleep, but he pushed his mask up and continued.

“Prospected and found,” he said. “Oil. Years ago.” His eyelid drooped and twitched. He raised his hand, palm forward. A surrender, I thought, but he held up three fingers. “My second wife,” he said. “Third, with the common law. But I’ve the likes of you two pulling at me now.”

“You really think that?” I remembered the envelope of photos, our lie about the dog, and I crossed the tent and uncorked a pisco. He waved the drink aside and twisted the tubes at his face.

He was afraid, I realized. The petroleum guru, Howie with the straw Galveston who’d rambled on under the hoodoos about how he built his fortune between layers of silt. He was terrified. And I thought of the spaniel, running the pads off her feet beside the highway before Howie’s wife found her — the ridiculous stream of dust the lonely thing must have trailed in the heat. Howie brushed his nose and held his knuckles to the light. I could have laughed I was so surprised, only looking at his blue fingers clinging to the oxygen tubes, I was afraid too.

I started to stand and he grabbed my arm. His grip shocked me — the nails in my wrist. He didn’t want me to leave. Or, rather, he didn’t want to be left alone. Who I was had little to do with it. I set the pisco aside, wet a piece of burlap, and tried to clean the vomit from the stubble on his chin. He relaxed his hand a little, and I pried his fingers from my arm and moved them to the spaniel.

“We’ll stay,” I said, and he closed his eyes.

The moths buffeted their soft, meaty bodies against the screen. I lowered the gas on the lantern and crawled into my cot.

I woke to Julia standing over me in the tent — her brown hair, the red stain on her cheek.

“Do you want to see this fossil?” she said. “Or do you want to take your friend back to La Paz?”

“How long will his oxygen last?” I asked. Howie’s colour had improved — the mask covered his lower face, but the bags around his eyes had lost their swelling and the brown tint from last night. At least he slept.

“The tank is empty now,” she said. “If you don’t tell him, he could be all right.”

She and I loaded a single alpaca with a pannier of the basics — backpack core-drill, marsh pick, trowels, plaster, burlap, gloves, water, etc. — and took a path between the houses. The hamlet looked different by day — more kids. Gardens. A single, visible power line. When we reached the edge of the houses we found the grandson, the man with his unbuttoned shirt, Morgan — his Neolithic profile, his arm around the man with the hairy gut — and a few others digging a grave on an open plot of land. Morgan peeled away from the gathering and joined me and Julia.

The trail led us up a slope, where we had a view of the hamlet’s corral — alpacas and goats, tufts of wild millet. Beyond the corral, all those switchbacks we’d hiked in the dark. We stopped when we found loose float where Julia had found the shin bone, and she pointed to the source: a series of ledges a couple hundred metres above. I pinned a flag into the area. Morgan and I hiked, and she headed back to the hamlet. We were damp and breathing heavily when we reached the shelf. A curl of pinkish-tan vertebrae, lightened by the sun, stood out against the grey dirt and rock. Morgan ran his thumb over one, then tapped the surrounding ground with the marsh pick.

“Tight,” I said. “Probably whole. Guess on the age?”

“Young,” Morgan said. “Seven, eight million based on location.”

I measured. From the first bone to the last visible — over three metres.

“Core sample,” I suggested.

Morgan blew dust from the drive pins and aligned the extensions and secured the bit in place. We checked the water circulation and I placed my foot on the bit, notched the rock sideways, then eased the angle and drilled downward. The soft, layered sediment took barely fifteen minutes to breach. Morgan smoothed a square of burlap and I knocked the core sample loose, reaching the catcher in the hole to tong a couple snapped bits. We squatted and poked through the core. The consolidated ash was wiry — porous. A metre or so of light-grey, medium-grained tuff that was amply flecked with dark-brown and greenish-black mica. The base of the sample was full of shale and sandstone.

We pegged rope around the exposed bones, staked poles and cables into the rock, and secured a tarp to the poles for shade.

It took us a week to secure a dry stone wall above the specimen and clear the overburden. Soil samples had the tuff bed wavering around ten centimetres thick. Fine-grained. Grey to yellow, and sparkly with biotites where it was damp. The ash was interbedded with red sandstone and smaller maroon mudstones. Flakes of green-black mica stuck to our gloves and, working through the cotton, on our skin. Our clothes turned red with the dust, and then grey-black as we removed the sandstone and bared the tuff. Finally, we had more than a guess of what we were looking at.

We’d had to expand the dig marker to excavate the left wing, which had fossilized fully extended. The tissue and acetate glue painted on the weaker bones contrasted brightly against the soil, and gave us a visual hint at the full size — three point two one metres on the stretched wing. A jaw large enough to swallow a hare whole. Proportions said the primary feathers would have been as wide as a hand and as long as a man is tall.

We dug trenches into the tuff around the bones, and when enough of the skeleton was exposed Morgan used the humerus and tibiotarsus for calculation. The bird would have weighed eighty kilos and had a wingspan of six to eight metres. Morgan spread his arms — he was nowhere near the size. Wind flapped his shirt, torn and dusty, under the canopy.

Another few weeks and we’d finished trenching and started on the underburden, replacing supporting dirt with sandbags. Jacketing took longer than anticipated. We had to haul water in order to mix the plaster, and the cliffside wing required us to lie under the bones and hold the plastered burlap in place. Forty percent of the time the strips dried before we’d managed to get in position, and we ended up covered in plaster and dirt ourselves.

The afternoon humidity stayed consistent. Clouds rose, rain fell, and mist cleared as the sun set. Each night twilight gave the sky a yellow colour, like nothing I’d ever see again anywhere else, all of it pale and bright, then becoming translucent in a thin, breathless way.

No one told Howie about the oxygen tank, and since he wouldn’t brave exertion, for the most part we forgot about him. He walked below, poking the ground before him with a stick, not yet counting on himself to make the ascent of barely a hundred metres. Always the empty tank hugging his chest, the straw Galveston and the spaniel. Kids kept him company in the corral, running Polaroids we took of the dig down the cliff so he could see.

“Do you think he’ll fund us again?” I could hear Morgan from where I lay, half under the huge skull on its pedestal.

“No,” I said. There was no way. “Almost done,” I called. Still, thinking back to how long he’d watched us when we first met him on Milk River, that he’d passed over the clinic to bring us here, the way he searched for the dog — “Maybe,” I changed my mind. The real answer. Look at what we found.

“It’s ready,” I said. “I’ll push on this side. You got it?”

“On three,” Morgan said.

We lifted. Turned the half-finished jacket onto its back. Morgan packed sand and damp tissue on the underside and I laid strips of burlap over that. When we were done I spat in the dirt and sat with my hands on my jeans. Across the dip of the valley: mountaintops, glaciers, volcanoes, and distant ricochets of crumbling rock. The bright sun washed the peaks and there was a headiness to the elevation.

I set down my trowel. “Howie,” I called.

Morgan stood and yelled, “Howie — Argentavis magnificens!”

“Look here,” I called. “Howie.”

When Howie looked, I don’t know if he understood. I can’t describe how it felt. The kids in the field raised their arms, imitating us, caught in our excitement. We lifted the head of the huge teratorn, jacketed in white plaster and burlap, ready to be shipped home and uncovered. I threw my head back and laughed. “Howie,” we shouted, and went on shouting.