Tides of the Heart (Crestwood Chronicles #1)

Chapter 7

By the end of the first week, life in camp becomes routine.

We rise at dawn (those on kitchen duty a half hour earlier) and attend to our personal needs. Then we convene for a simple breakfast. Every morning there's an array of choices including scrambled eggs (reconstituted from a powder, but not bad), oatmeal, polenta or another grain, fruit, granola, and yogurt. On Saturday there are pancakes (the just add water variety) and a passable re-hydrated sausage and potato scramble. Beverages include coffee, tea, and juice.

After breakfast we consult the roster and perform our daily chores, which besides kitchen duty include dishwashing, camp clean-up, and (everyone's least favorite) wiping down and restocking the camp's two portable restrooms.

Once the chores are done, we gather again for a brief lecture from either Professor MacDowell or Professor Yuan, and then the real fun begins.

At the dig site, tools range from picks and shovels to toothbrushes. Sometimes we chip away at rock or shovel debris; other times we painstakingly brush grit from exposed fossil bone.

These physical tasks are simple and straightforward compared to what MacDowell calls 'the real work' of documentation.

We take pictures of everything and use photographic scales and various common objects to show the subject's size; coins reveal the minuteness of tiny fossils, and our own bodies demonstrate the scale of larger things, like the rock face itself.

Besides pictures, we note how far various specimens were found from one another, their exact position, and any other features of note that could help future researchers glean valuable information from our finds. Without these details, Professor MacDowell explains, a fossil's scientific value is greatly diminished.

At midday, we pause for lunch—typically something easy and quick, like peanut butter sandwiches, jerky, trail mix, fruit, and protein bars—and a short rest before returning to the site until late afternoon. There's a period of free time before dinner, and then another round of camp chores.

Dinner itself is hot and filling, and sometimes fun. One night we bake potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil in the coals of a fire; another we roast hotdogs over the open flames. There's always a vegetarian option, and if it's impossible to ensure a meal meets certain dietary restrictions (kosher for George and halal for Kaja and Abdul) an alternative is provided.

After the meal, the professors or one of the grad students gives a lecture with the aid of a battery powered slide projector, and then the rest of the evening is ours to do with as we please.

Left to myself, I'd probably wash my face, brush my teeth, and go to bed. Hazel and Riley like to stay up and play cards, though, especially poker, and to avoid being labeled a poor sport I join in, despite not being very good. George joins us as well, having failed to develop much rapport with his own tent-mates, and the four of us often end up playing past midnight.

Instead of money, we wager things like interesting pebbles or the next day's assigned chores (which is how George got stuck with bathroom duty three days in a row).

Lacking much skill at the game, I run out of things to bet fairly early on, and end up watching as Hazel faces off with Riley, but on the fifth night in camp, I get lucky. I've learned enough to know I have a decent hand: three jacks and two sevens, for a full house. Hazel tends to bluff hard, which is how he beat George's flush with a single pair after George folded, and I think I've learned his tell: he smiles a lot when he's bluffing.

Usually, no one is very attached to the valueless things we wager, but tonight he has something I want, and he knows it.

Theropod dinosaurs—the bipedal carnivores like T-Rex, Velociraptor, and Allosaurus—shed teeth like crazy. Their teeth continued to replace themselves every few months throughout their entire lives, and they lost them often. Theropod teeth are therefore abundant and of little scientific value if not found in context with other fossils, so if we find one, we're allowed to keep it.