Bestiary by Robert Masello Read Free Book Online Page B

herbivores, such as horses and camels. People were always surprised, when Carter happened to mention it in a lecture, that most of the evolution of camels had taken place in North America.
     
     
    “Am I right?” Rosalie asked. “Can you feel it?”
     
     
    “Yes, good job,” Carter said. “It could be from a bear.” Rosalie beamed, like a kid who’d just been told she was head of the class.
     
     
    “But we won’t know for sure, of course, until we’ve glopped the rest of this out, and actually removed the fossil.” Even then it often wasn’t easy. Carter had an uncanny knack for guessing where a fossil might be located, and what it might turn out to be—that knack had served him well when excavating the Well of the Bones in Sicily, where he had first made his reputation—but he also knew that lab work was a painstaking business, where your initial assumptions could all be turned upside down with the discovery of one molar, an unexpected alveolus, or, as had happened to him on one occasion, fossilized blowfly larvae lodged in an ulna. Larvae could tell you a lot, if you were paying attention.
     
     
    He pulled his arm back out of the pit, and held it up to let some of the goo dangle and then plop back down. By now it was clear that they had definitely hit a very fertile layer of the pit—a big cat and a monstrous bear, a dozen other sharp anomalies perceptibly (at least to Carter’s trained eye) disturbing the surface of the presently un-worked quadrants. Carter felt a prickle of excitement, the feeling he’d had on so many other digs, in places far more exotic than this, where discoveries far more significant than this was likely to be were begging to be made. But it was the same old feeling, nonetheless, and he suddenly realized how much he’d missed it. The post at the Page Museum was a great one—most paleontologists would salivate at the chance to fill it—but office work wasn’t what appealed to Carter. Even writing up his monographs and reports and arguments was less interesting to him than the sheer pleasure of being outdoors, in fields and mountains and long-lost riverbeds, surveying a strange landscape and making his best guess as to where its secrets lay hidden. The world, to Carter, had always been a kind of treasure chest, filled with odd things—stones and bones, shells and shards and petrified bugs—that most people didn’t even notice, much less want.
     
     
    But that he did.
     
     
    Miranda, who’d been patiently waiting, said, “I wonder what that leaves me with.”
     
     
    “Pardon?” Carter said, who’d been lost for a moment in his own thoughts.
     
     
    “If Claude has a saber-tooth, and Rosalie has a bear, I wonder if I’ve got something different over here.” She gave Carter her most dazzling smile—he knew she had a crush on him, and wondered what he could do to discourage it—and looped a finger under her silver necklace, unwittingly leaving a smear of tar on her neck. “Maybe a lion?”
     
     
    Carter smiled and, stepping over Rosalie’s buckets, made his way to Miranda’s work spot. By now, his forearm was so crusted with muck it felt three times its normal weight.
     
     
    “You’ve got to wear more sunscreen,” he told her, gesturing at the pinkish skin of her neck and shoulders. She blushed even redder, and he said to himself he should have kept quiet. Anytime he noticed something about her, particularly something so intimate as her skin tone, it only gave her hope. “And get yourself some cheap T-shirts like mine,” he said, showing off today’s Old Navy logo. “The paleontologist’s best friend.”
     
     
    Miranda mumbled that she would, but hardly budged when Carter knelt down next to her. He’d expected her to make a little room, then kicked himself for thinking that. “So where’s your find exactly?” he asked.
     
     
    “In the center of the square,” she said, “kind of deep.”
     
     
    “If you glop from the side,” he