Postcards by Annie Proulx

Author:Annie Proulx [Proulx, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-738555-3
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1992-04-04T11:00:00+00:00

He dug with Wulff off and on for three summers. Wulff showed him what he claimed were the tricks of the trade.

‘Two rules, Blood. Get the fossil out of the ground and back home in the best shape you can. And write every fuckin’ piece of information about its location and bed and position that you can think of and include that information with the specimen. That’s about all there is to it.’

With Bullet he learned a kind of patience, the slow search by eye and feel through obelisks of cream and oxblood mudstone, the crumbling peach bluffs, the white ravines, the eroding streams of milky water, violet mounds and domes in a burning heat that left him choked for something to drink besides the rubbery water in the canteen.

‘Goddamn it. Blood, if you can’t see a rabbit jaw from fifteen feet you are in the wrong business.’

The lime dust, the fine sand scoured their skin, inflamed their sore eyes. The heat sprang up from the white earth like an electric charge. Often they would go out after a rain hoping the freshets dashing down the coulees and draws would have torn away fresh layers of sandstone, exposing new fossils. He learned to walk bent toward the ground, casting his eyes for ridges and bumps of bone working up to the surface. He winnowed anthills for tiny rodent teeth and bones, screened small seashells out of sand, shellacked shells of crumbly bone protruding from weathered slopes, and later, at camp, sat with Bullet picking at encrusted bones, cleaning surfaces with a dentist’s scratch brush, or packing the plastered specimens for shipping back east.

The front of the truck was a mare’s nest of bundles of geological maps printed in turquoise and salmon. Beer bottles rolled on the floor. His hats were stuffed behind the seat, under the sun visor. Broken sunglasses all over the dash, pretzel bags. The back of the truck filled up as well with the fossil-hunter’s gear, plaster, burlap sacks, chisels, rolls of toilet paper, newspaper, gallon cans of glue, shellac and alcohol, whisk brooms and paintbrushes, tape, picks and dental tools and a box of notebooks. The Indian’s book, a cheap spiral notebook, lined pages stained with grease, lay buried in the pile. He wrote in it once in a while.

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