Bestiary

CHAPTER THREE

There were about twenty-five kids in the group, all sixth graders from a local school, and the docent was having a bad first day. She’d been carefully trained by the museum, given a lengthy test to make sure she knew her stuff, but she’d never actually been in charge of a group, all by herself, and peppered with quite so many questions.

“Where are the dinosaurs?”

That was an easy one. “There aren’t any. The fossils from the tar pits date from the Ice Age, when the dinosaurs were already extinct.”

“What about saber-toothed tigers?”

“Actually, they’re not tigers at all; we call them saber-toothed cats, and yes, we’ve found many of those.”

“How big were they? Were they as big as dinosaurs?”

“No, they were about the same size as a modern-day lion.” She knew she had to move the group along, but there were always stragglers who didn’t want to leave the life-sized re-creation of the giant sloth, or the glass dome covering the plungers immersed in tar. “If you’ll just come this way,” she said, looking in vain for their teacher — wasn’t she supposed to be there, too, for the entire tour? — “we’re coming to an exhibit of one of the most—”

“Could you talk louder? I can’t hear you.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, raising her voice and detecting a surprising quaver. “We’ll see an exhibit of one of the most successful predators in this region.”

“A predator like in the movie?’”

For a second, she didn’t even know what that meant. Then she remembered her boyfriend talking about a movie called Predator versus something else bad. Alien?

“Probably not. By predator, I simply mean a creature that hunted and killed other animals, for its own survival. A carnivore.”

“A what?”

“A meat-eater. Like all of you.”

“Not me; my mom’s a vegetarian, and so am I.”

“That’s very laudable,” she said, still trying to shepherd them to one of the Page Museum’s most startling displays — a wall where 404 skulls of a creature called the dire wolf were mounted and displayed against a glowing golden light. As the kids approached, some fell silent, and some muttered things that sounded like approval. The questions were just starting to come—“Are those from a dog?” “Why are there so many?” “Did you dig those up around here?”—when she spotted her salvation walking by, in a hurry, toward the main exit.

“Dr. Cox?” she called out, and then, when he didn’t seem to hear her, “Dr. Cox? Over here.” She actually waved one arm feebly over the heads of the kids. “Would you like to tell these students something about the dire wolf?” To the students, she confided, “Dr. Cox has dug up several of these himself. He’s a very famous paleontologist.”

Carter had been on his way out to Pit 91—his crew would be assembling there in a few minutes — but he could never resist a chance to talk to students, especially when it looked like a new docent was drowning.

“Sure, the dire wolf is a good friend of mine,” he said, striding to the front of the group, “and at one time he roamed in packs all around here. Up and down Wilshire Boulevard, all over the Farmers’ Market, in Hancock Park and Koreatown and Century City.” He knew from experience that it always helped to place these extinct creatures in the modern context at first — not only to get your listeners’ attention, but to bring the experience closer, to make it clear that the animals didn’t live somewhere else, as if on a movie set, but on the very spot where, today, everyone was walking and talking and, like the kids all the way in back, goofing around. His comments already seemed to be having the desired effect.

“Why’s he called a dryer wolf?”

Carter wanted to laugh, but he didn’t want to risk embarrassing the questioner. “Actually,” he said, keeping a straight face, “he’s called a dire wolf; the word ‘dire’ means dreaded, frightening. And these wolves were.”

Carter stood in front of the prehistoric skulls — starkly black against the yellow light, displayed in four massive panels sixteen shelves high — and explained how these wolves differed from the wolf we know today. More heavily built, with a deeper chest, wider hips, shorter legs. Originally from South America, but scattered all over Central and North America by 130,000 years ago. The dominant carnivore in the New World by the Late Pleistocene.

“The late what?” one of the kids asked, and Carter had to remind himself that he wasn’t talking to NYU students anymore.

“The Pleistocene is what we call the period of time from about two million years ago to ten thousand years ago.” And then to make sure he had their attention again, “The dire wolf may have had a smaller brain than any wolf today, but he also had much bigger and more deadly teeth. The jaws of the dire wolf were so powerful he could jump on and bring down a much bigger animal than he was — a bison, say, or a camel — and crush its bones with his teeth.”

There was a moment of silence.

“And now I have to leave you so I can go and try to dig up one more!” He turned to the grateful docent and said, “They’re all yours.”

The pit, located on the museum grounds, was a two-minute walk away, and by the time he got there the afternoon crew was already at work. Claude, the retired engineer, was toiling in one corner, Rosalie in another, and Miranda had her arms up to the wrist in the goo.

“You’re late,” she said, teasingly. “I’m telling.”

“Who are you going to tell?”

“Oh yeah, you’re the big cheese.”

“A quick lesson in life,” Carter said. “There is always a bigger cheese.”

Claude snorted as he slopped another handful of tar into his bucket. “You can say that again.”

Rosalie mopped her brow with the back of one chubby arm and said, “I think I can feel a lot of stuff over here.”

“Me, too,” Claude said.

“Me three,” Miranda chimed in. Today, she was wearing a pink tube top and a necklace of little silver beads. Not exactly what Carter would have recommended for fieldwork.

Carter glanced around; they were all working in different quadrants, carefully marked off pieces of the grid, and they were all at almost exactly the same depth.

“It’s like I told you last time,” Miranda said. “I can still feel something really strange down here.”

Carter began to suspect they’d hit a lateral “pipe”—a section of the pit where a particularly dense concentration of fossils had accumulated. Sometimes this could happen. A large beast, perhaps a giant ground sloth or a long-horned bison, had ventured too far into the tar — which might have been concealed beneath a layer of brush and leaves, deposited by a running stream — and become trapped; just a few inches of the tar could do the trick. The youngest and strongest animals might have been able to extricate themselves, but the older ones, or the infirm, or the ones that exhausted themselves bellowing in fear and frustration, would not. Their cries would hasten their doom, in fact, drawing predators from far and wide. Packs of wolves, or saber-toothed cats, or American lions — who, unlike their African counterparts, traveled in pairs not prides — would have leapt on the trapped beast and tried to kill and devour it.

And many of them would have been trapped in turn.

Carter had seen evidence of such mad scrambles before, piles of broken bones and fangs and claws, but glancing over the wide expanse of the pit, nothing quite so broad and focused as this. What was at the bottom of it? What had attracted so many creatures to the kill, and dragged so many to their own death?

“What have you got over there, do you think?” he called to Claude.

“Can’t say for sure,” Claude replied, “but it feels like a neck or collarbone. I can show you right where it is.”

The surface of the pit was crisscrossed with narrow wooden walkways, perched just inches above the tar; Carter walked carefully to Claude’s corner, then knelt down beside him. He was wearing shorts today, and the wooden boards were sharp and hard on his knees.

“It’s a few inches down,” Claude said, pointing to a spot right between them.

Carter leaned forward and put one hand into the glistening black muck. It was warm and viscous, as always, and gave him a slight shiver as he plunged his hand deeper into it. His fingertips grazed something hard and angular, exactly where Claude had indicated.

“You feel it?”

“I do.” But it was still so immersed in the tar, and out of sight, that he could only guess what it was. “Right now, I’d say it’s a machairodont of some kind.”

“A what?” Rosalie said.

“Miranda,” Carter threw out, “can you answer that?”

Miranda bit her lower lip. “I’m not sure they covered that at UCLA.”

“What if I said it was probably a Smilodon fatalis?” Carter prompted her.

“Oh, that I know!” she piped up. “It’s a saber-toothed cat.” Claude tried to applaud with hands coated with tar, and Miranda laughed. “I remember the name because it sounds like the cat is smiling.”

“But how can you tell it’s not some other cat, like a scimitar or a western dirktooth?” Claude asked. He’d been reading up on his paleontology, and Carter knew he liked to try it out.

“I can’t,” Carter admitted, “with any certainty.” He let his fingers probe a little deeper. “But something tells me I’m touching the hyoids, or throat bones. The fact that the saber-tooths had these is what tells us they could roar like a lion.” Along with the wolves, they were one of the most commonly excavated fossils at the site — a ruthless killer, with especially powerful forequarters for holding their prey while their massive fangs did the rest. While it had been commonly assumed that the cats attacked their prey by biting and breaking their necks, Carter believed they actually preferred to attack from below, ripping into the soft belly of their victims and then patiently waiting for the creature to expire from blood loss before devouring the remains. Over seven hundred saber-toothed skulls had been found at the La Brea site and only two of them had shown teeth broken with wear; if the cats had been lunging at other animals’ hard and strong-muscled necks, Carter reasoned, there’d be more missing and broken teeth.

But his was the minority view so far, and he hoped soon to finish the paper that would lay out his case in full.

“What about mine?” Rosalie asked. “What have I got?”

There were moments, like right now, when Carter felt a bit like a grade school teacher, with a bunch of eager, brown-nosing students. But he also knew that this was part of the deal: In return for their volunteer service glopping out the pit, folks like Claude and Rosalie and Miranda were promised a sort of tutorial, with a real-live scientist.

“I think it’s a limb of some kind,” Rosalie ventured, and not to be outdone by Claude, “maybe a femur.”

Carter doubted she would be able to distinguish a femur from a tusk, but he would never say anything to deflate their enthusiasm. He got up and walked slowly over to her quadrant, studying the mottled, lumpy surface of the pit as he went. It did look unusually uneven and, though nothing was moving but the occasional bubble of methane gradually swelling up and then bursting, it looked somehow agitated. He wondered if his little crew had come to some signal event, something that had triggered a feeding frenzy of extraordinary dimensions.

“It’s about six inches over, and the same distance down,” Rosalie said. She leaned back on her haunches, in a dirty madras shirt and what looked like green slacks that had been cut off at midthigh. “You can’t miss it.”

Carter knelt down again — he was tall, with long arms, which gave him greater reach but sometimes left him precariously balanced, like a crane hovering over a construction site — and slipped his hand into the pit. The tar parted with an audible glug, and he slipped his hand farther down. He felt nothing so far.

“More to the left,” Rosalie said.

Turning his wrist to the left, he stretched his fingers out. Still nothing. A series of methane bubbles rose, iridescent in the sunlight, and broke with an especially gassy pungency. And then he felt it — and moved his fingers slowly, against the protesting sludge, along its length. Rosalie was right — it probably was a leg bone of some kind, and possibly from what was known as a short-faced bear, a precursor of the grizzly, who had entered the contiguous United States, and departed it forever, sometime toward the end of the last ice age. Though they stood even taller than grizzly bears — eleven feet when rearing up, and weighing up to eighteen hundred pounds — their legs were surprisingly long and slender, giving them the ability to break into a fast run for short distances and, presumably, catch inattentive 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 advised, “it’s easier, and just as effective.”

Then he leaned forward and reached down, one more time, into the pit. He could feel Miranda’s eyes on him, and when she volunteered to hold on to him — and grabbed the back of his belt — he had to tell her it was okay, he wasn’t in any danger of falling in. He could only imagine the look that Claude and Rosalie were exchanging from their respective corners.

His own eyes flicked self-consciously to the upper observation deck — a small enclosure behind a Plexiglas shield — that allowed the general public to see paleontology in action. Today, they had but one spectator, but he was a regular — a Native American man in a buckskin jacket that he wore no matter what the temperature was.

The tar at first seemed to be fighting him, even more than usual; it was especially thick and sludgy here. But then, as if he’d hit a pocket of gas and looser material, he felt his wrist descend into the mire. Still, he hadn’t encountered anything of any substance. He reached deeper; the farther down he went the warmer the tar became, and as the methane was released, mephitic bubbles speckled the surface and released little exhalations of gas. Miranda giggled and said, “What’d you have for lunch, Carter?”

“Very funny.”

And then he did feel it. Or, to be more accurate, it felt him. His breath caught in his throat, and his arm stopped moving. His own fingers were spread wide, and for all the world it felt as if another hand — someone else’s fingers — had just slipped into his own, the way a drowning man might grasp the hand of his savior. Carter could feel the individual bones, the metacarpus, the phalanges. And, though he could never have even imagined such a thing, it didn’t feel inert. It didn’t feel dead and lost, as if it were lying there, inanimate, and waiting to be lifted from oblivion. To Carter, it felt as if the hand — too large to be a woman’s — had found his own, had sought it out, in order to be raised, after a silent eternity in the earth, from the dead.