Saber Tooth (Dawn of Mammals Book 1) Read online

  SABER TOOTH

  Book 1 - Dawn of Mammals

  Lou Cadle

  Copyright © 2016 by Cadle-Sparks Books

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Hannah Kates, seasonal park ranger, was not looking forward to today’s outing. It wasn’t that the paleontologist was running late; that was typical of him. It wasn’t that it was already 90 degrees F outside at 8:52 in the morning. It wasn’t that she had caved when her fellow ranger, Sam, had pleaded a headache and asked her to take his place while he took hers in the pleasant air-conditioned museum all day.

  “It’s teenagers.” She said this to the plaster cast of a saber-toothed nimravid skull, a catlike creature extinct for millions of years. The empty eye sockets looked back at her blankly.

  The group set to arrive in eight minutes was twelve teenage advanced science students, their teacher, and a parent. Teenagers on field trips had given her more trouble than screaming toddlers with sticky fingers, tired parents, drunken hikers, and the inevitable crazy bosses of five summers working in the National Park Service.

  She heard the back door bang open.

  “Somebody give me a hand,” shouted M.J., the chief paleontologist. “Please.”

  Hannah turned from her view of the museum and went to the staff entrance to find M.J. hip-checking the door, holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee, carrying a duffle bag and briefcase, and trying to push a case of Gatorade over the lip of the threshold with his well-scuffed hiking boot.

  “Which do you want me to get?” Hannah asked.

  “The drinks.”

  She pulled in the case of plastic bottles and he let the heavy door shut behind him. He was a lean forty-five, with thick honey-blond hair and a tanned face, but this morning he looked a bit worse for wear. He hadn’t shaved and when she looked more closely, she could see his eyes were bloodshot. “Late night?” she said.

  “Old friend came into town for drinks,” he said. “Ready to go? We’re going to find us a bat fossil today. I can just feel it.”

  “With a dozen inexperienced fossil hunters? Those tiny bones?”

  “Bob O’Brien has experience. And kids have sharp eyes. Besides, there’s one natural in every group. You’ll see.”

  “Okay.” She had learned a lot about finding fossils in her months here. First lesson: it’s not all that easy. Second lesson: some people are naturals at it. Third lesson: she was not a natural.

  Sam’s voice came over the intercom. “They’re here!” He sounded awfully chipper for a man with a terrible headache.

  M.J. dumped his gear on his messy desk, towering with publications and bureaucratic paperwork and printouts of articles he was submitting to a dozen science journals. He took a swig of coffee and said, “Don’t look so glum. It’ll be far more fun than you imagine. Let’s get to it. The day’s a-wasting.”

  She snatched her ranger’s hat off a table and followed him out and into the public space of the museum. It held three rooms—a meeting room, a large exhibit hall where nearly all the fossils were behind locked glass cabinets, and the main room, with a reception desk and various interpretive displays.

  Sam was settled behind the main desk, and between him and the door milled a dozen teenagers, most of them talking loudly, and two adults, a man and a woman. The man came forward to shake M.J.’s hand, then he turned to the teenagers and clapped his hands. “Okay everybody,” he said. Obviously, the teacher. Slowly, the discussions tapered off.

  The kids shifted themselves around, and that’s when Hannah saw the tall girl’s clothes. Shorts, a tank top, and some idiotic platform espadrilles. The girl next to her, a shorter Asian kid, wasn’t dressed quite as badly. Capris, running shoes, and a short-sleeved cotton blouse. But neither of those outfits were the right ones for a day of fossil hunting.

  M.J. caught sight of the tall girl at the same time. “You, in the shorts,” he said. “Did you not get the handout about dressing for today?”

  “Me?” she said.

  The teacher, O’Brien, said, “They all got the handout, and I reminded them yesterday. Dixie knew what to wear.” He frowned at her.

  “It’s hot out there,” the girl whined.

  “And it’ll be hotter in the canyon,” said M.J. “Look at the ranger, there. She’s Hannah, by the way. Long-sleeved cotton shirt, long pants, hiking boots, hat. Smart lady. And here.” He took two steps over and snatched the hat from O’Brien’s hand. “And Bob—Mr. O’Brien, here—has done this many times and knows the perfect hat. Wide brim. Lots of little holes for air circulation.” He pointed to a boy in the front row. “That baseball hat isn’t going to protect you from a nasty sunburn, so I hope you remembered your sunscreen. Put some on your face and neck every hour.” He handed back the straw hat to O’Brien and said to them all. “We’ll be sweating, and sweating off the sunscreen, so make sure you all reapply it often.”

  Hannah could see the tall girl bending to whisper to the one in Capris who nodded to her friend but kept her eyes fixed on M.J.

  He said, “Why no shorts? Because there are rocks, that’s why. Not just the sunburn, but it’s the Badlands, people, and they are bad to people who don’t respect them. If you fall in those shorts,” and he pointed to the girl Dixie, “you will know how bad they can be. And while I’m in warning mode, let’s talk about rattlesnakes.”

  Hannah tuned out the familiar information and studied the group. Twelve children, about half boys, half girls. The tallest was over six feet, the shortest not quite five feet. A couple were chunky, as was the mother, a fortyish woman in a light pink cotton shirt, khaki pants, and a straw gardening hat. All of the kids had sunglasses visible on their persons, and one had a pair of normal glasses on his face and sunglasses perched on the top of his head. Most were Anglo, except the Asian girl in Capris, a girl who looked Hispanic, and a skinny boy, light-skinned black, who moved gawkily like he had just gained six inches this year and hadn’t quite figured out what to do with his new long arms yet.

  They
looked healthy. It could have been a worse collection of hikers.

  These were supposed to be science honors students, so they couldn’t be stupid. That meant they would understand what they were told, but doing it? Dixie in the shorts and tank top was evidence of how hard it was to make that happen.

  Teenagers. Bah. She glanced at Sam, who was watching with a bit of a smirk, and she narrowed her eyes at him. It would be the last time she traded assignments with him. She had to quit being such a pushover.

  “But how do you dig fossils?” one of the girls asked.

  “We don’t dig. We collect. Weathering processes—rain, snow, wind—reveal new fossils every year. So we collect what has been revealed. What’s safely still in the rock, we leave there for another generation, people who will have more knowledge and better equipment.”

  A hand shot up, the boy with the glasses. “Do you have jackhammers to get the fossils out? I saw that in a movie.”

  M.J. shook his head. “Don’t believe everything you see in the movies. I’d never endanger a fossil that way. Sometimes I use a little paintbrush, though.” He mimed a careful brushing of a fossil and grinned. “Not as manly as a jackhammer, is it? But we’re not into macho here. We’re into protecting the fossil. Protect the data at all costs.”

  Dixie whispered something to her friend again.

  “But that’s enough lecture,” said M.J. “Hannah has gear set up for all of you. You all have backpacks, I hope? Great. Then four at a time, let her take you back and we’ll get you geared up.”

  The teacher said, “And if any of you brought a phone, in spite of the rules, hand it over so she can lock it up.”

  Hannah spent the next half hour loading kids up with the gear she’d prepared yesterday afternoon. That began with a wide canvas belt stuffed with rock hammer, dental picks, collection bags, and two-ounce bottles of polyvinyl butyral dissolved in acetone for stabilizing fossils. She made sure they all had pens and paper to label what they collected, which would likely be meaningless rocks and fossilized dung beetle casings, so plentiful in this formation that you could build a castle with them.

  She’d been on one of these amateur collecting trips so far this summer, and had watched M.J. go through the bags of new collectors, dumping 90% of the stuff in the trash bucket of rocks, looking unimpressed with most, and only once smiling as he held up the little plastic bag. “Beaver tooth,” he had said, making a little beaver face—in case, she had supposed, she hadn’t understood what a beaver was. Oh well, you got used to the science staff condescending to you in this job. At least M.J. had better humor than most when he did it.

  As she handed over the heavy belt to each student and helped them strap it on, ten out of twelve of them complained. Dixie balked at wearing it at all. “I’ll look awful.”

  “You’ll look the same as everyone else.”

  She looked insulted at that idea and reluctantly took the belt. “Can I put it in my backpack?”

  Hannah kept herself from telling the girl exactly where she should put it and nodded. The fashionable backpack rode too high, and the belt was over twenty pounds. Dixie would no doubt regret her decision tomorrow when her back started to ache. The thought made Hannah give the girl a real smile as she departed. It was no joke to dress wrong for a day in the canyons, and if it were up to Hannah, she’d make the girl stay in the museum all day.

  Other gear, including a bottle of the sports drink, went into their backpacks. They all had water, too, and most had brought the half gallon that had been on their list. Two did hand over cell phones, which she put in her own locker.

  The two kids who did not complain about the weight of the gear—and it was serious weight and would feel bad within a few minutes of hiking—she took note of. They were Zach, a soft-spoken boy with vivid green eyes, and Laina, the girl she’d pegged as Hispanic, but who had not a trace of Spanish accent. “I like your name,” she said.

  “Thank you,” the girl said. “It’s Alaina, really,” and she spelled it. “A family name, my great-grandmother’s.”

  “It’s lovely.” She helped the girl with her canvas tool belt.

  While the kids were milling in the museum, M.J. pointing out exhibits to them, she got the mother and teacher geared up quickly, and soon they were out the door.

  “To adventure!” said M.J., leading them across the parking lot.

  Chapter 2

  The kids’ bus was a van, but painted that awful yellow that school buses always are. She and M.J., toting the bag of heavy equipment (pickaxe, extra water, sack of dry plaster) to be left in the van in case it was needed, made it a full load, and the van labored up the hill to the dirt road. Halfway up the dirt road, there was a wide space in the road for parking and a picnic table with a roof, and the bus driver settled herself in there for the duration with a stack of paperback romances and a cooler of pop. It was ten in the morning and the day was getting much hotter.

  M.J. unlocked the gate at the end of the road, and waved Hannah ahead to lead. She began the hike up the trail, going at two-thirds the pace she would if she were alone. A great thing about being a seasonal ranger was how fit she could stay with no effort outside her paid job. Winters, she joined a gym. Summers, she just showed up for work.

  Subtle streaks of colors painted the landscape. She loved the Badlands, felt a spiritual connection to it even stronger than that she felt elsewhere in nature. It was a special place.

  Behind her, M.J. was lecturing as he hiked, pointing out features, and the age of the rocks. “These we’re standing on?” he said. “They’re about twenty-five million years old.”

  “How do you know?” asked a girl’s voice.

  “Radiometric dating.”

  A boy said, “Carbon-14, right?”

  “Carbon is for shorter term dating. It won’t take you back forty million years. We use potassium-argon and argon-argon dating. Have you guys studied isotopes yet?”

  Some yeses.

  The teacher spoke up. “What sort of element is argon?”

  “Noble gas,” said two voices at once.

  “We’ll do a class next week on why that ends up being important to dating the rocks.”

  M.J. took over again. “Just around this bend, I want you to look across that canyon at a rock face.”

  Hannah held up just beyond the best viewing area, and the other fifteen stacked up behind her.

  “Watch your step,” said the mother. Hannah had forgotten her name already. She seemed to be the mother of the girl with lanky hair that had already escaped her scrunchie.

  M.J. said. “There are nice exposed layers there, across the way. From the top, there’s beige, and then pink, and then a pretty bright white. A grayish layer, another beige, and another white, not quite as bright. You see it?”

  Some sounds of agreement, one boy who said, “No. It all looks like just rock to me.”

  M.J. ignored the comment and said, “The duller white I’m talking about is called tuff. You know what that is?”

  A girl ventured. “It’s hard? Like on the hardness scale for rocks?”

  “Good guess, but no. T-u-f-f. It’s volcanic ash, compressed into rock.”

  The African-American boy said, “Are some of those sandstone?”

  “They are! A plus for the day. What’s your name?”

  “Rex.”

  “Rex, there is sandstone. Siltstone, sandstone, mudstone. And all erode differently, which is why you can see some of the layers are indented, eroding faster.”

  “I can see that,” said the boy who couldn’t see the colors.

  “Which rocks are the fossils in?” asked the girl who kept close to Dixie. Nari was her name.

  “Ahh, we’ll find that out in a little while here.” He signaled to Hannah. “Onward and upward, team! And then onward and downward.”

  They climbed to the crest of the trail, Hannah hearing a good deal of panting behind her. Then the land fell away. She turned and called out to the group, “Be careful, everyone. There
’s loose rock on this slope.”

  She took it slowly, but there were still two falls on the way down. One boy near her blushed crimson as he dusted himself off. “I’m usually not a klutz. Not this much of one, anyway.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s the weight of the backpack. It’s hard to find your new balance with that. What’s your name?”

  “Garreth.” He gave her a smile and stuck out his hand.

  She shook it briefly—still gritty—and they continued down the hill.

  “We’re here,” she finally said, checking her watch. It had taken them forty minutes to hike here. Later, exhausted, it’d take an hour to hike back to the bus, so they needed to leave by three. M.J. could stay out until twilight and hike the trail in fifteen minutes, she knew from experience.

  As they gathered in a circle, the kids started to complain about the hike and the hot sun as they stripped off their backpacks. When one girl took a step to set hers on a ledge, M.J. called, “Wait! Don’t set that down yet. Any of you.”

  “Why not?” asked the girl.

  “There could be fossils there. We don’t want to smash them. Everybody, from now on, any direction you go, go slow. Look ahead of your feet for at least a minute before you put the next foot down. Right now, before you set down your backpack, right next to you, look at the ground where you plan to put it. Make sure there’s not a rhinoceros right there.”