Here is the opening chapter for my novella The Gatherers.
Discovery
The rocks beneath Kate’s feet were among the oldest on earth, over three billion years. PreCambrian. Any geologist would know that. More than two billion years older than the earliest known life on the planet. And that was why the footprint preserved in the rock when it was still mud, before it solidified to stone, was so startling.
“No one will believe me, Strata. I need to get this piece of rock back to the lab.”
Strata wasn’t listening. On a hiking trail in Montana’s Tobacco Root Mountains, surrounded by fir and spruce and even an occasional majestic whitebark pine, Strata focused only on chasing rodents and being with Kate. Her exuberance wiped out any camouflage advantage from her red merle coat. Rocks had no place in this border collie’s world.
Kate pulled an ever-present geologist’s pick from her pack and began cutting a moat around the fossil, isolating a foot-wide piece of rock. By the time she had dug deep enough to undercut the column of sedimentary rock holding the footprint, she ended up with a chunk big enough to fill her backpack and heavy enough to make her worry about the long carry back to her truck at the trailhead.
As a new faculty member in the Earth Sciences Department at Montana State University in Bozeman, Kate had a good working knowledge of the state’s geology. She hiked to explore the wilderness, for exercise, and to be alone with her thoughts, but also to study the land and structures she taught in her classroom. The Tobacco Root Mountains were old, but determining the exact age of this fossil would need radiometric dating. She had no doubt it was eons before when scientists currently believed was the start of intelligent life. This was a major find that would change how the world thought about evolution, and along the way, make her career. But first she had to get the rock back to Bozeman.
When her moat was six inches deep and showing three layers of sediment, she began undercutting to free the column. The number in her head was seventy-five pounds, the most she thought she could haul. She knew that a cubic foot of sedimentary rock weighed about 150 pounds. She estimated the surface area of her sample at approximately one square foot, and she wanted at least three layers to make the dating reliable. With the third layer at the five-inch mark, six inches down would yield a half cubic foot chunk that should weigh in around her magic seventy-five-pound goal. Deep enough, she figured.
The moat needed to be widened outward to make room for her pick to work underneath the column. It was slow going. Her back ached, hunched over the site, sweating heavily despite the cool, crisp day. Strata kept running over to her, rubbing her nose on Kate’s face and putting her front paws on Kate’s back as she kneeled next to the moat. Twice, Kate stood up to stretch her back and throw a stick for Strata to fetch. Finally, by early afternoon, the fossil column was detached and lying tilted in its hole. Now the job was to get the rock into her backpack.
First Kate totally emptied her pack. She stuffed the small items like the compass and first aid kit into the pockets of the pack Strata wore to carry her mostly-gone food. They were on the wet side of the mountain, so Strata could forage for water in the many creeks. Kate’s canteen would clip to her waist, and her parka could be tied on top of the pack. She hoped the pack’s fabric and straps were strong enough for this load, more than three times the weight of what she usually carried.
Opening the daypack’s main zipper, she slid the bag over the fossil and its rocky housing. She wanted the fossil itself to face out, not lying against her back where friction might damage the footprint. After several minutes of careful jiggling and sliding, using a large stick as a roller to move the rock horizontally, she had the chunk inside her pack and the zippers closed, barely.
She twisted the pack upright, still in the hole, and ran her belt through the rings on top Once more Kate stood up, stretching to her full height of 5’11”. For most of her life Kate alternated between glorying in her tallness (on the volleyball court in high school and college) and lamenting it (when some good-looking guy didn’t want to be a looking-up guy). She always figured that if her smarts and her good looks were not enough, she didn’t want him anyway. This was a glorying day; she realized her athletic frame gave her a better chance of reaching the trailhead with her extra-heavy load than a smaller woman would have. Chalk up one for the tall girls!
Carrying the heavy pack was the second obstacle; the first was just hoisting it onto her back. First she retied her bandana to keep her frizzy, curly hair away from the shell parka strapped on top of the pack. Next she used her legs and core muscles to squat over the rock and lift it out of the hole with both arms, grabbing the pack by the belt. Those sessions in the gym were finally paying off. Almost staggering, she walked over to a nearby downed tree and set the pack on the highest part that could support it. Then she twisted around, slipped her arms through the straps, and again used her lower body muscles to stand. Fully upright, she gasped at the weight on her back.
“Strata, we have a tough five miles back to our truck. Let’s get started.”
Most people look ahead when they hike, or sometimes up when climbing a mountain. Not Kate. She stared at her feet. That was the geologist in her, and that’s how she had spotted the fossil. Now, fighting the momentum that gravity gave to downhill hiking, and needing to balance her heavy load, every step was a challenge. She was more careful than usual about where she placed her feet. This was a mountain path, not the old logging road closer to the trailhead that teased hikers into thinking this route would be an easy excursion.
A backbreaking two hours later, she reached the logging road. One hour more brought her to the tailgate of her truck. The whole way down, Strata foraged ahead and then ran impatiently back to urge Kate on. Her playful nagging kept Kate moving. At the truck, Kate lowered the tailgate, slipped out of her pack while it rested on the truck, spun it so the fossil was facing her, and then laid it down gently and pushed it safely into the truck bed. Hauling herself into the cab, she didn’t sit, she collapsed.
Exulting over her triumph and flooded with relief from the weight off her back, she drove slowly and carefully back to Bozeman, avoiding bumps that might jostle her treasure. It was well after dark when she pulled into the garage at her condominium complex. Examining the fossil would have to wait until morning, but talking to her mentor could not.
“Sorry to bother you so late, Wilson. Is Barbara adjusting any better?”
“No, Barbara is still agitated. I spent the day with her, but she doesn’t know me. She thinks I’m one of the staff.”
Barbara had been a second mother to Kate all through graduate school. After she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Wilson had taken a position at Montana State so that his wife could be near her family. When his wife’s mental state deteriorated further, he was forced to put her in a facility that cared for patients with dementia. The move left Barbara even more discombobulated. Kate was checking on her regularly.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Wilson,” said Kate, “but I brought back some rock from my hike today that I thought you should see.”
“Where were you hiking?”
“The Tobacco Roots.”
“That’s all PreCambrian, Kate. You know that’s way too old for me. I only study rocks where there is some evidence of life.”
“I found a vertebrate fossil footprint.”
There was dead silence on the line. For a moment Kate thought they had been disconnected.
“In PreCambrian? Impossible.”
“That’s what I thought at first, so I brought back a sizeable chunk of the column beneath it. I’m pretty sure it’s PreCambrian. I need you to confirm it. You’re the specialist in sediment geology and I’ve got a big rock in my truck.”
“Okay, a vertebrate fossil in PreCambrian, this I gotta see. Bring it around to my lab in the morning. Not too early. I’m going to visit Barbara first.”
Kate hung up, satisfied. As soon as she had finished her doctoral degree, Wilson had persuaded her to join him on the Bozeman faculty. Even though she was confident in her field analysis, when it came to dating sedimentary rock, Wilson and his mass spectrometer were the gold standard for Kate. If she was going to turn evolutionary biology on its ear, she wanted that validation in her argument. Pretty sure was not good enough. She needed to be damned sure.