I FOUND THE CRATE THE NEXT MORNING.
It was unopened under Father’s desk. The muddy boot prints on its lid told me he’d been using it as a footrest for a good while. Exactly the kind of thing my father would do absentmindedly. I dragged it out and cleared a space on one of the worktables.
A small crate, not much bigger than a shoe box, stenciled all over with the faded insignia of the Kickapoo Medicine Company. It was addressed to the “Most Esteemed Professor Michael Bolt” in a spidery hand. Clearly the sender was hoping flattery would get Father’s attention. Which was normally an excellent plan. But in this case it still hadn’t saved him from being used as a boot rest.
Tons of things got sent to my father by amateur naturalists. Ancient leaf impressions in sandstone, the giant toe bone of some extinct mammal, the skins of two warblers with unusual wing markings. And lizards. Plenty of lizards. Sometimes they were sent to him care of the academy; other times they came direct to our house. Our doorframe was splintered by the number of crates wrestled through. They stacked up in the hallway, in the long, narrow rooms of our ground floor.
The floors crunched with dried clay trimmed from fossils. You stepped around rickety towers of dusty books and papers, trays of things yet to be labeled—and tried not to tread on Horatio, our tortoise, who made his slow creaking perambulations around the house and somehow managed to turn up underfoot when you were lugging something tricky.
There was no parlor or living room or library. No comfortable room with great leather armchairs for guests to sit and stretch their legs. Our decorations were the skins of a vole, a snake slowly uncoiling in a jar of spirits, an antelope femur.
Mrs. Saunders, our cook and housekeeper, was forbidden from cleaning these front rooms—Father didn’t trust her not to whisk up some treasured body part or scrap of paper with a brilliant note. Not that she’d ever set foot in here, even if ordered. She hated the chaos, our salamanders, and the sight and smell of our Gila monster, who had a habit of regurgitating her meals.
Often there were students over, or colleagues, helping father with something or other. Some days it was like being in a telegraph office. News and chatter flashing between tables. It was a museum upended, everything dragged out of its cases and cupboards. It was a zoo. It was a morgue. More dead things here than the local slaughterhouse. More pickling alcohol than the tavern down the street.
I loved it. But I was also glad that, upstairs, I had a bedroom with a door I could close. And there were times I needed to shut it tight and keep it shut. Against the dust and the roving salamanders. Against my father’s cries of fury or joy.
Two weeks ago I’d been sent home from school. For the rest of the year. I’d been suspended, mainly because of the incident with Harold Thom. He’d asked me what my father had done during the war. It was a sneaky question, since most Quakers hadn’t fought as a matter of conscience. But some had, including Thom’s own father. When I told Thom my father had worked in field hospitals since he was a pacifist, Thom had snorted, said that was a joke since everyone knew my father was quick enough to use his fists when it suited him. And it was only for the war he decided to be a coward.
I kept hitting him until his nose and teeth bled. Which was not a good thing to do in a Quaker school. I got yanked off by several of his friends and marched to the headmaster’s office. He lambasted me for my “deplorable violence.” Also, I’d played billiards in the town, gambled, and scandalized several girls at the school with my “saucy poetry.” “Moreover,” the headmaster added, “your penmanship is atrocious.” I think he found this the most despicable thing of all. I would not graduate this year, he said, and would need to reapply to return in the fall, if there was any hope of me being accepted into college. I didn’t care about returning, and I didn’t care about college. But I knew my father did. My first few days home had been explosive with his angry talk.
But that was past now. I think he was secretly glad to have me home. Since he wasn’t an organized man, he quickly enlisted me to help sort and identify his specimens.
So all this morning I’d been dutifully opening boxes and letters and taking notes. Trying to stay focused.
But I kept seeing those eyes of hers. Rachel. I’d only learned her name from my father on our way home from the academy. She’d filled my head as I slept. In my dreams I was trying to schedule a train trip to see her. The Pennsylvanian from Philadelphia to New York, arriving at Penn Station, and then a quick change to the New England line that would bring me to New Haven in another two hours. She would see me, wouldn’t she, if I showed up at her doorstep? But the train schedules didn’t make any sense. Columns of jumbled numbers and letters, and anyway I was always running late and never getting to where I was supposed to be, and I woke up with my heart pounding.
I wanted to talk to her, tell her I wasn’t a rash, cocky fool. Wanted to tell her I wasn’t a mad brawler like my father. Quite a speech I had planned. I kept hearing her voice, catching her scent, seeing her looking up at me gravely. Just one meeting. No beauty, and an ass of a father. But she’d snagged at something in my heart.
I dropped a fossil shell to the floor and went scrabbling for it—and that’s when I found the Kickapoo Medicine Company crate under my father’s desk.
On the worktable I used a chisel to prize up the lid. Inside was a nest of prairie grass for padding and three separate burlap bundles. I’d only just started to unwrap the largest when I heard the front door burst open and slam shut. Father exploded into the room with a mighty sigh.
“It’s too late, they say.”
All through the night, holding a handkerchief bulging with ice chips against his bruised cheekbone, he’d furiously rewritten his elasmosaurus paper. It had already been slated for publication in the next issue of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. He’d even paid (too much, I thought) for a set of lithographic plates illustrating the glory of his find.
“It’s already gone to the printer’s.” He plummeted into his cane-backed swivel chair—the only chair without a stack of paper on it—and slouched, his long legs shooting out.
“You’re sure Cartland was right?” I asked pointlessly.
“I knew the instant he said it. I blame that numbskull dentist Hawthorn for leading me astray. He assured me the skull rested near those vertebrae . . . but that was my mistake: relying on others. If I’d been there, if I’d dug it out myself, there’d be no confusion.”
“What’ll you do?”
“Buy up all the copies of the journal as quickly as possible.”
He didn’t need to say what a huge embarrassment this was. He had no degree. No professorship at an esteemed university. All he had was his work and what he published.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” I said, hoping to cheer him. “Remember Agassiz, the Harvard man who fell for the Cardiff Giant?”
My father smiled only briefly. “Yes. It was Cartland who exposed that as well, of course.”
“Well, you still brought the elasmosaurus to life, just a little . . .”
“Backward,” my father said, and we laughed together.
Absently he touched his bruised face, winced. “That was a fair thrashing I gave him, eh?”
“You thrashed each other.”
“I got in more blows, I think. The parasitic carbuncle. Did you know how he got his position at Yale?”
“Yes, you’ve—”
“He cajoled a wealthy relation into creating a department of paleontology, building it, endowing it. And now he is the chair of that very department!”
A series of rasping pants came from the Gila monster’s vivarium.
“Have you fed her?” my father asked.
“Just an hour ago.”
“That’s her hungry sound.”
“She’s getting fat.”
My father went to her, stooped, and scratched her head. “Old girl,” he said fondly.
I felt sorry for her, pacing her small home with her splay-legged gait. Sometimes Father let her have the run of the workroom, but once she disappeared for several days, and Mrs. Saunders refused to come downstairs and cook until we’d found her and gotten her back into her vivarium. Father let her out less now, since neither of us enjoyed going hungry.
Father’s distracted eyes turned to the crate I’d just opened. “Anything good?”
“Did you know you were using this as a footrest?”
He made no reaction. Not sure he even heard me. He already had one of the burlap bundles open in his hands and was staring. His face very still.
Slowly he laid it out on the table. It was a seven-inch span of bone, some stone still clinging stubbornly to it. Tapered at one end, much thicker at the other, like hardwood polished to a high sheen. I was trying to place it. Tibia? Part of an ulna? But the shape wasn’t right. Both ends were jaggedly broken. I tore away the burlap from the second bundle as my father unwrapped the third. His piece was the thickest yet, with a broad oval base. He placed it near the thick end of the first piece. They clearly belonged to each other. And my piece . . .
My piece tapered to a very sharp point. The surface was smooth to the touch, but the pad of my thumb felt telltale serrations along the edges. I placed it in front of the other two pieces.
I felt a bit breathless. “This is the biggest tooth I have ever seen.”
“Who sent this?” my father demanded.
I foraged inside the crate. “There’s a letter!”
“Read it!”
So like him to command me to do something he could easily do on his own. So impatient he couldn’t bear the idea of doing only one thing at a time. He handled the portions of the tooth and peered close as I ripped open the envelope. Yanked out the letter and started reading aloud.
Dear Professor Bolt,
It is with great humility I write to you, as it’s my truest wish to become a fossil collector like yourself. I am a section boss on the Union Pacific near Edford station, and—
“What’s a section boss?” I asked.
“Takes care of a stretch of track. Go on!”
—I’ve been a dedicated collector for several years, and made a fair collection of leaves and flowers from the Cretaceous.
“Dear God,” said my father, “hurry this along!”
“If you’ll let me!”
While prospecting northeast of Fort Crowe, I came upon a portion of exposed femur and sacrum, which to my untrained eye, were so large that they could only belong to the Dinosauria. But what I think might be of greater interest to you, sir, is this tooth which I found. I have never seen a bigger one, and think this creature in the rock must be of enormous proportions. I did not have time to do much quarrying, but I think there is a great deal of bone here. I send you this tooth as a way of showing my interest and ability, in the hopes you might find a use for me. I would like to continue work at the site, but have no funds available to me. This work is God’s work for me, and my needs are few.
Awaiting your advice, I remain yours truly.
Edward G. Plaskett
This tooth was a meat eater’s. Those serrated edges helped sink the tooth deep into its prey and hold. Imagine it punching into you, gripping, bleeding you.
“What length would you say . . . ,” my father was murmuring.
I already had the tape measure in my hands. “Eleven and a quarter inches.”
With calipers my father measured its thickness and called out the girth at its widest and narrowest bits. I got out ink and a pen and noted the figures. He snatched the pen from my hand and began talking aloud to himself as he made his own calculations. “Our model will be Laelaps . . .”
Laelaps aquilunguis—practically a member of our family I’d seen it so many times. Sketched what it might look like with muscle and skin. But its longest teeth were not even a full inch.
Father inked more numbers. “Given the size of the tooth, we will assume the jaw . . .” He jotted again. . . . “Making the overall size of the skull five feet. Again, using Laelaps as our model . . .”
There was this French anatomist, Cuvier, who claimed you could build an entire animal from just a single tooth. I knew this was what my father was trying to do. He was calculating the extent of the backbone, then the hips, then the humeri.
“And we have,” he concluded, looking up at me triumphantly, “a bipedal creature of some fifty feet in length, whose height, measured from the ground, would be in the area of thirty feet.”
Never had I imagined anything so big. There was the megalosaurus, which Buckland had discovered over in England decades earlier. It was big. But if megalosaurus could peep into my second-floor window, this new creature could crash right through the roof before swallowing me whole.
“It’s like the king of dinosaurs,” I said.
“A rex,” Father said. “Ha! You’ve half named it already!”
For as long as I could remember, I’d been looking for things. As a boy it might be a warbler egg or the knuckle of an ox or the larva of a monarch butterfly. The thrill of the hunt, something lost now found. I’d kept shelves in my bedroom for my specimen boxes. They made me happy—but almost from the moment of the finding, that hunger rekindled and made me turn to something new, something more I needed to be discovering.
But anything, everything, I’d collected before now seemed like nothing.
Every other thought went out of my head. I knew instantly. I knew I wanted this creature, every bone of it. I wanted to chisel it out of the rock with my own hands and assemble it and see it mounted in the gallery of the academy.
“We will not speak of this to anyone,” my father was saying severely, like I might just telegraph his day’s work across Philadelphia.
“The letter is dated April second,” I told him.
“What of it—” he started to say, and then paused, his eyes wider. “What day is today?”
My father’s head was so full of genius he sometimes had to jettison little things—like the seasons or day of the week.
“June fourth.”
“Nine weeks ago!” He handled his beard a moment to soothe himself, then glared at me. “Why did it take you so long to open this?”
This was rich. “I told you! You were using it as a footrest.”
“That’s absurd!”
I lifted the crate lid, showed him his muddy boot prints. “Under your desk!”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Never mind that now. We’ve got to telegraph Mr. Plaskett immediately. Before he takes this to someone else.”
By “someone else” I knew he meant Cartland. There weren’t too many scientists who called themselves paleontologists. Even Leidy and Hayden thought of themselves more as geologists and biologists.
If—and it was a big if—we’d been the first people Plaskett told about this, we had to get in fast.
“Take this down,” my father said, rocking on the balls of his feet.
I found a clean scrap and dipped the pen in ink. It was just as well I was doing this. I’d seen his excited handwriting—a hideous jumble, even worse than mine. Which was no small feat.
My father looked through me, addressing our invisible fossil hunter in Wyoming Territory. “Mr. Plaskett. I like your style. You’re hired. Retainer to come. Share news with no one. Await further digging instructions by post.” His eyes refocused on me. “That’s all. I’ll need to send him some money to bind his services. . . .”
“You’re going to let him find it?” I blurted in dismay. “Just like that? We should be the ones! That way there won’t be any mix-ups—like elasmosaurus!”
I knew I’d plucked the right chord. Could see his restless eyes trawling the room, trying to find anchorage. He brought his hand down hard on the table. “Damn it, but you’re right. I want to go and dig it up myself! The teeth and everything attached to them!”
“Yes! Why don’t we?”
His gaze meandered, losing intensity. “I’d like nothing more . . . but I can’t afford to mount an expedition at the moment. Do you know how little I have in the bank?”
I nodded, because Father had also asked me to manage our bills. His genius did not extend to household finance. “Sixty-two dollars at present.”
My father folded his lips over his teeth. “So very little?”
He hadn’t had a paying job for years. For a while, when I was small and just after my mother had died, he’d taken a job at Daverford College, teaching zoology. But he’d lasted only five semesters before resigning in a fury, saying he couldn’t work with such pedants. At the time I’d had no idea what a pedant was—thought it must have been something really unpleasant like a goblin. Since then, of course, my father had made me familiar with its meaning—and all its lively synonyms.
Grandpa had wanted my father to farm, like all the other siblings, had even given him a large portion of land. Father had rented it out, land and house, and for a while we got by on that. When that became too little, he’d sold the house, then the land, and we’d been living off the capital, shrinking year by year, boosted by articles my father wrote for encyclopedias and magazines.
“What about the academy?” I asked. “Can’t they help?”
He scoffed. “The academy is a gentlemen’s club for amateurs playing at science. What money they have is used to maintain their collections and publish their Proceedings. They don’t pay for their fossils, and certainly not for expeditions.”
He frowned and paced the room. “It’s not like some,” he said, warming up to a rant, “who work for well-endowed institutions like Yale, who can raise funds. Cartland, for instance, I know has been planning something—”
“What about the money Grandpa’s set aside for me?” I interrupted. I knew this was a sticky matter, but it was all I could think of.
“That money is in trust,” he said, “to be released only for your university studies.” His gaze hardened. “Which you’ve imperiled by your recent delinquency.”
“Why do I need to go to college?” I said. “Isn’t this a much better education? Working the field alongside you? Laying claim to the undiscovered world of Dinosauria? That’s better than studying in any classroom.”
“Not anymore,” said my father. “It’s not enough to be self-taught. You need a degree from an accredited university.”
“You have no degrees.”
“That’s right!” he said. “And the world is changing. It demands degrees if you’re to be taken seriously!”
“You’re taken seriously!” I said.
His nostrils narrowed. “Not by Cartland and his cohort. I’ll never get a university appointment. No, that money is for college—which you will go to, after you finish school.”
“But the expedition,” I said, worried we’d veered too far from my goal. “If we could ask Grandfather to let us use the money temporarily—”
With force he said, “I will not ask my father and nor will you. And you will go to university—there is no question of that. Not this fall, clearly, but the next term.”
“What if we had money for an expedition, though?” I asked him.
“There’s no point entertaining such a question. Now take that note to the telegraph office. I’m off to the bank to get a check for Mr. Plaskett.”
I took my coat from the hook. I’d send his telegraph.
But I was already planning a way to dig up the rex myself.