Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

turned out, on climbing, to be five or six hundred feet high. Scrambling up these sheer crumbling
faces, working halfway up the hill, maintaining balance on the incline, was fatiguing in the extreme. It
was a strange world: often, working on these huge rocky faces, they were so far apart they could
hardly see each other, but because the land was so quiet and the curving cliffs acted like giant funnels,
they could hold clear conversations no louder than a whisper, even within the constant sound of the
reverberating pings and soft clicks of hammers striking chisel and chisel striking stone.
At other times, the broader silence and desolation became oppressive. Especially after the Crow
moved on, they were uncomfortably aware of the silence.
And Sternberg had been right: in the end, the worst thing about the badlands was the dust. Harshly
alkaline, it billowed up with every stab of pick and shovel; it burned the eyes, stung the nose, caked
the mouth, caused coughing spasms; it burned in open cuts; it covered clothes and chafed at elbows
and armpits and backs of knees; it gritted in sleeping bags; it dusted food, sour and bitter, and
flavored coffee; stirred by the wind, it became a constant force, a signature of this harsh and
forbidding place.
Their hands, which they needed in order to do everything, especially dig fossils, were soon
scraped and calloused, the dust burning in any cracks. Cope insisted they thoroughly wash their hands
at the end of the day and dispensed a small dollop of yellowish emollient to rub into their palms and
fingers.
“Smells bad,” Johnson said. “What is it?”
“Clarified bear fat.”
But the dust was everywhere. Nothing they tried worked. Bandanas and facecloths did not help,
since they could not protect the eyes. Cookie built a tent to try to keep the dust off the food he was
preparing, but it burned down on the second day. They complained to each other for a while, and then
after the second week, they no longer mentioned it. It was like a conspiracy of silence. They would no
longer talk about the dust.
Once dug out, the fragile bones had to be lowered down with ropes in a difficult, painstaking
process. One slip, and the fossils would break free of the ropes and tumble down the hillside,
crashing to the ground, smashed beyond value.
At such times, Cope turned waspish, reminding them that the fossils had “lain for millions of years
in perfect peace and remarkable preservation, waiting for you to drop them like idiots! Idiots!”
These hot speeches led them to anxiously await some slip by Cope himself, but it never happened.
Sternberg finally said that “except for his temper, the professor is perfect, and it seems best to
recognize it.”
But the rock was fragile, and breaks in the fossils did occur, even with the most careful handling.
Most frustrating of all was a break days or weeks after the fossil was lowered to the ground.
It was Sternberg who first proposed a solution.
When they set out from Fort Benton, they had brought with them several hundred pounds of rice. As
the days went on, it became clear that they would never eat all the rice (“at least not the way Stinky