Bone Beds of the Badlands, page 9
We had a little tour of the field station and then went outdoors to hang out while we waited for the three o’clock bus. Slowly other tourists started gathering. For something to do, Bomb climbed up on the triceratops. Ophelia was on his case like an albertosaurus, and he had to get down. She seemed to have reverted to her old, charming self.
Dorothy hadn’t said anything about the Reptile since we’d left Dinosaur Valley; she seemed to have almost forgotten him. We were now far away from any evidence of his presence, real or imagined. Dorothy had been to the park only one other time, and she was obviously looking forward to her first trip into the Restricted Area.
We all loved the sound of the “Restricted Area.” It was as though we were going somewhere forbidden—we ignored the fact that we would be on a guided tour with a whole bunch of other tourists.
Soon the bus pulled up. Actually, it was a sort of minibus with an all-terrain look to it, for getting around on the rough ground of the badlands, I suppose. When the bus driver got out, Bomber started making eyes at the rest of us. We knew what he was thinking: she was, in his words, “a babe.” This woman was probably twice his age and likely could have taken him on a hike that would have just about killed him, or arm-wrestled him into the ground, but that didn’t matter to Bomb, she was still “a babe” to him—though I don’t think he really knows what a babe is, anyway.
She was a young woman with medium-length blond hair, blue eyes, and skin tanned brown from the sun. She was wearing the dark-green sweater—with a badge on the shoulder—and the lighter green shorts of a park ranger, and a park cap. She seemed very knowledgeable and capable, the sort of person who made you feel relaxed about everything. Ophelia liked her right from the start. And Newcombe, well, he just loved her. I’ve never seen him ask so many questions or listen with such fascination.
Her name was Katie Currie, but she said that everyone called her KD and we should, too. She started out by asking us a lot of questions. She stood at the front of the bus with a microphone and asked where everyone was from. There were people from Japan, England, the US, and, of course, us. Terry spoke up and very carefully explained why we were there. He was good at stuff like that.
KD then told us that Dinosaur Provincial Park was a World Heritage Site because of its unbelievable number of dinosaur fossils, its stunning badlands, and also its large collection of rare cottonwood trees. To be frank, we could have cared less about the trees—the other two attractions were what we had come for.
She explained to us that long ago the area had been a “lush, warm, coastal lowland.” There had been a huge body of water in Alberta called the Bearpaw Sea, and the humid environment had been perfect for many animals, among them the dinosaurs. She said that almost every known species of dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period had been found here. She mentioned the T. rex, the albertosaurus, and the maiasaura, or “good mother lizard,” a favourite of hers, and the only dinosaur with a feminine name.
Once we got into the Restricted Area, we would be welcome to pick up dinosaur fossils. She made it sound easy. Apparently, they were all over the place. All you had to do was know how to pick them out among the other rocks.
“First of all, they have a kind of pink colour. Wet the end of one of your fingers and press it against a rock that you think might be a fossil. If the rock falls off, you have nothing…if it sticks, you have a dinosaur fossil.”
This was going to be amazing.
KD hung up the microphone and got behind the wheel. Off we went, down through the public area where there were picnic tables and campsites. The road we were on was specially marked for tourists to follow—it was paved with brick and painted yellow. But suddenly it ended. Ahead of us, behind a very high fence, was an area that looked deserted. A big sign read, “RESTRICTED AREA. NATURAL PRESERVE. NO ADMITTANCE TO GENERAL PUBLIC. STAY OUT. DANGER!”
Inside the bus we looked at each other and smiled.
“Anyone want to open the gate?” asked KD.
Bomber jumped up and ran to the front of the bus. In seconds he was outside handling the gate. We drove through and he closed it. But as he was about to get back on board, KD suddenly gunned the motor and sped off. The look on the Bomb’s face was priceless. It just sort of fell all over. Then KD slammed on the brakes and backed up. Bomb smiled and looked a little embarrassed as he climbed up the steps and found his way back to us.
“Sorry,” said our ranger, turning around to us and switching on her mike, “just a little trick. But actually I did it for a reason. You saw the look on this young man’s face when I pretended to leave him behind? Well, he was right to be afraid. That was the correct response. I want all of you to stay close to the bus at all times. We will be getting out for a few strolls but I don’t want anyone to ever be anywhere where they can’t see me. Believe me, inside the closed gates of the Restricted Area of Dinosaur Provincial Park without a ranger or transportation is not a place anyone wants to find himself or herself. Let me tell you why.”
She explained that we could get lost, very quickly. Though all the hills in these badlands are different, they have a tendency to start looking the same, especially if you are a little frightened and start wandering off in the wrong direction. Before you know it you’re either going in the opposite way you think you are, or just moving around in big circles. And though it wasn’t the hottest time of the year, it was hot enough. Temperatures could reach 48 degrees Celsius in the park. And there was no water, anywhere.
“We don’t go onto this preserve to protect people from getting lost. So you have to take some responsibility yourselves. We don’t want you to turn into a fossil.” KD liked to joke. But the facts she kept laying on us were no joke at all.
She said that the cactus quills in this area were like needles—they could pierce the soles of even the best hiking boots. The sun could damage your skin in no time. And there were caves all around. She didn’t explain what she meant by that, but it sounded a little scary. What was in those caves?
Then it got even scarier.
“We have all kinds of animals on the preserve. There are coyotes, bobcats, mule deer, cottontail rabbits, and porcupines. But we also have snakes. There are lots of harmless ones—garters and hognoses—but there are others that you don’t want to mess with. We have bull snakes here, constrictors that squeeze the life out of animals. They are at least two metres long.”
“Whoa!” said Bomber.
“And we have rattlesnakes.”
“Rattlers,” said Rhett under his breath.
“The prairie rattlesnake is venomous. It is a pit viper. If it bites you, you will die within twenty-four hours. The poison does evil things to your digestive tract. But it isn’t the only thing with venom around here. We also have northern scorpions. If they sting you, report it immediately. And then there are the lovely ladies of our park, the black widow spiders. If they inject their venom into you, you will get the chills, nausea, and paralyzing stomach cramps…it’s all downhill from there.”
She paused and smiled. “So…we have deadly rattlesnakes, constrictors longer than you are, black widow spiders, scorpions, bobcats, and coyotes. We have caves, blistering heat, cacti like knives, no water, and a labyrinth of hills that stretches as far as the eye can see. Even searching for lost people with airplanes or helicopters is almost useless. It takes special pilots who sometimes aren’t available for days and people are very difficult to spot from the air here anyway. Understand why you should stay close to the bus?”
We understood.
“And another thing. If, God forbid, you ever do get lost out here, look for the flag. There is a red flag on a hill right next to the field station, the highest hill in the park. It can be seen from everywhere in the Restricted Area. If you follow it, you can find your way out. But you won’t be needing that…will you?” She smiled.
“No, we won’t,” snapped Bomb. What a card.
KD placed the mike back on its hook, got behind the wheel, and we rumbled and banged forward on a rough gravel road. Occasionally she would rev the motor and start going pretty fast. It was a bit like a carnival ride when she did that. The tourists loved it. She started pointing out all sorts of things. She said there were three levels of soil in these badlands—sandstone, mudstone, and ironstone—though there were many more layers of history. She said the rate of erosion on this land was the fastest in the world. And she used some big words (which Terry wrote down in the little notebook he always carries) when she was talking about the glaciers. And she called the badlands “time-independent landscapes.” I only partly knew what that meant, but I loved it, very cool…“time-independent landscapes.”
There were funny things, too. Some of the land formations out there actually looked like animals. There was something the rangers called “the turtle,” another one that looked like an “elephant head,” and best of all, “Fred the Camel,” who came complete with a nearby pyramid. The hoodoos were incredible—they made the ones at Drumheller look like they were minor league. We saw millions of them, huge ones and small ones, new ones and old ones. There was the “lonesome hoodoo” sitting off by itself, the “hairdoos” that actually looked like they had Beatle haircuts, and ones that KD called “nudoos,” which were naked hoodoos—ones whose caps had fallen off. But it wasn’t until we were well into the Restricted Area that we came to my favourite formation. It freaked me right out.
It was really a whole area, like a mini-canyon in the preserve. On all sides of us, hills started rising up and we seemed to be sinking. The hills looked like buildings from some sort of magical kingdom. And when KD told us what the area was called, it made perfect sense. “This,” she said quietly, looking up as if still amazed, “is the Valley of the Castles.”
“Awesome,” said Dorothy quietly. I knew why she liked it. It looked like some sort of world far away, like something you might see in a movie. And it was kind of spooky, too.
At one point I asked KD about the legend of the living dinosaurs.
“I’ve heard that, too, but you’ll never see them.” She laughed. “It’s said that they’ll only show themselves to bad people. The story goes that they hate the fact that their ancestors are remembered as monsters, so they hide themselves. Dinosaurs only killed to survive, not to be evil, but we seem to really like the flesh-ripping side of them. I suppose that says something about us.”
That made me feel a little guilty, and when I glanced at the guys, they were all kind of looking away.
“So,” KD continued, “they won’t show themselves to everyday folks.” She laughed again. “At least, that’s what they say!”
She let us out of the bus a couple of times at designated spots along the way. She showed us a bone bed that had been preserved and covered by a glassed-in case, another in a small building, and we had a great time finding fossils. What she had told us was absolutely right; they were everywhere, and if you licked your finger you could pick them up. They just stuck to you like glue. Me and the guys found tonnes.
We could see the places where the snakes gathered to lie in the sun, and when we climbed up several of the little hills and looked off into the distance, we could see badlands that just went on forever. It was getting very hot. A couple of times I asked Dorothy for a drink from her canteen. She let me, but she was very careful about it. I would barely get my lips to it and she’d pull it back.
Every time we stopped we stuck close to the bus. Once I looked up to see that red flag, high on the hill near the field station.
Little did I know that very soon I would search the skies for it…in absolute desperation.
10
Lost
Our ranger had told us that there would be just one more stop, and it would be at the farthest point the bus would go into the badlands. When we got out we were in a little opening among a series of steep hills that encircled us—supposedly a very good place for fossils.
Dorothy seemed to have totally forgotten about the Reptile by then and was getting more and more adventurous with each stop. She had barely been out of the bus for a minute when she ran up to the top of a hill and challenged the rest of us to try it, too. We did, of course. You can’t let a girl beat you doing something like that.
So we were standing near the top of this hill. When we looked in one direction we could see the tour group, and in the other direction was this almost sheer drop. A few steps farther would have put us onto a thin, narrow piece of rock that jutted way out over the canyon, a hanging ledge. It looked dangerous. But suddenly, Dorothy ran onto it and stood there glaring back at us.
“Queen of the castle!” she shouted.
We piled up after her.
And that’s when it happened. The whole thing just collapsed. Dorothy didn’t scream because she wasn’t the type to do that. And we didn’t, of course, because we just couldn’t. But we should have—maybe somebody would have heard us. Instead, we just fell. And fell. We rolled down the side of this mini-mountain in a five-kid avalanche, picking up speed as we went, like snowballs out of control. It seemed like an hour before we came to the bottom.
Bruised and battered, we got to our feet and looked up. We couldn’t believe it. We were at the bottom of a mountainous cliff and there was no one in sight. We couldn’t hear anything. Not even the wind.
“Uh-oh,” said Terry.
At first we tried to climb back up, but that was useless. Then we resorted to yelling, but no one came. So we made a decision, the dumbest of the whole trip. We decided to take a different route back to the top of the hill. It would be a long way, and we’d have to start out in a direction almost the opposite of the one we had come from. But if we went that way we could get to another hill that looked easy to climb, and from there we could double back towards our group. We started running. Before long we were sweating like pigs (and that includes Dorothy), and we were all out of breath.
When we got to the place we had seen from the bottom of the cliff, and looked back, we were surprised to discover that it was very hard to tell exactly where we were.
“This way,” gasped Bomber, pointing to his left.
“Not a chance,” said Rhett. “It’s this direction.” He pointed the opposite way.
I was confused, Dorothy was unsure, and Terry thought a third direction was right. We went with Rhett’s idea. He just has a way about him that makes you want to do what he thinks is best. It’s the way he is when he’s killing a penalty and everybody else is nervous and freaking out.
Half an hour passed and we still hadn’t found the hill. An hour later we were lost.
It’s hard to describe the emotions that were going through me. I guess, all together, they would make up what people call a “sinking feeling.” I was one part terrified, another part worried, and another part ready to cry.
You could see that Bomber and Terry were feeling the same way, but Dorothy and Rhett both had these calm, determined looks on their faces, as though they were going to solve this disaster. We kept walking, hoping something familiar would turn up. But finally we all stopped and sat down. At first no one said anything. We just kind of looked at each other. I glanced at my watch. We had been lost for three hours!
The ranger would have searched for us for a long time, but by now she would have taken the bus back to the field station. She would have alerted other rangers, and maybe even the RCMP, and a search party would be getting ready. Newcombe had to be just going nuts, and Ophelia…she would have fainted about a hundred more times. Thinking about her fainting didn’t seem funny any more.
I was starting to really panic. I was wondering what would happen to us, and what the parental units would do when they heard. My mother always kidded me about things, and lately she was pretending not to be such a typical mom around me, because I was getting older, I guess, but she still got in just as many hugs and kisses as before. My dad’s mind was always in the clouds, thinking about some case he was working on or some vacation adventure he was planning, but when he was doing something really exciting, he could hardly wait to tell me. They weren’t nearly as bad as I usually said they were. I missed home. This would kill them. I’m their only kid.
I glanced around at the other guys. Dorothy still seemed okay, but Rhett was beginning to look as depressed as the rest of us.
This was actually happening to us. We were lost in the middle of nowhere, it was blazing hot, we had no food, and our only water was what was left in Dorothy’s canteen. I felt a cry coming on again. So I stood up. I had to say something. First, because it would prevent me from blubbering, and second, because we needed a plan.
“So,” I said as calmly as I could, my voice holding on, “what are we going to do?”
Bomber rose to his feet. He started to pace. “I don’t know. I’m not the one with the brain. That’s your job, Terry. If I had your smarts, I’d have us out of here in no time.”
But Terry was silent. Our fearless goaltender was sitting with his head down and his hands were shaking. “I’m afraid,” he said quietly. “I don’t have the guts for this. I can face a million pucks coming at me but I don’t want to be lost in this place. I’m too scared to think.” I heard him sniffle. “Rhett?” Surely Rhett, Mr. Cool, would have an idea.
“We’ll be all right, Dylan,” he replied without even thinking. “No problem.”
“No problem!” I shouted. “What are you talking about, Norton?”
“I don’t know, Maples, I’m just not the emotional sort! I’m trying not to freak out here. Maybe if I was all emotional like you seem to be, I’d come up with something. But I can’t. Okay? Why don’t you ask Osborne…And I need a drink of that water…NOW!” Dorothy hadn’t been allowing anyone to drink from her canteen. She said we needed to preserve what we had for as long as we could. But Rhett wasn’t just mad about that. He had never forgiven her for the things she had said to him back at the museum. He was funny that way. He acted cool, but he held grudges, took things personally.
