Into the Badlands. Caron Todd

damaging specimens or falling down sinkholes. Time enough for that later. “Okay. Up the hill and then?”

      “Then I slid down it.” Matt darted an exploratory glance in Susannah’s direction. When she didn’t comment, he continued more confidently. “Then I followed the riverbed, and I saw the backbone just lying there on the ground.”

      “Where those new hoodoos are forming?”

      He nodded.

      “Okay. Ask one of the counselors to help you map it, and add it to the collection.”

      Matt didn’t move. “Dr. Robb? How did you find the bonebed?”

      “I just went for a walk, and there it was.”

      “Really?”

      “Almost. Really, I went for lots of long walks, looking at the ground, and looking at the ground—like you did this morning when you found the vertebra—and then one day, I saw part of a skull, just barely nudging up out of the rock.”

      “And that’s how you find dinosaur bones?”

      “Absolutely.”

      “Like me this morning,” he repeated. Matt’s eyes wandered past Susannah, to the badlands stretching beyond the quarry. He had the bug: he was clearly imagining the dinosaur he would find one day. The biggest, the best, the first of its kind.

      “What are you going to do now, Matt?” Susannah prompted.

      His eyes met hers, questioning. “Oh! Map the vertebra.”

      “Good. And, Matt, don’t wander away from the group again. You have to stay with the other kids. It’s important.” She watched him hurry off without giving any sign that he’d listened to her warning.

      A young woman stepped carefully around a chiseling camper to join Susannah. With sun-streaked blond hair scraped back into a ponytail, and a bright yellow T-shirt and denim shorts that revealed long, tanned arms and legs, Amy looked more like a teenage baby-sitter than a fourth-year geology student. “I didn’t expect to see you here today, Susannah.”

      “It was a sudden decision. How are the kids doing?”

      “Settling in. They’re already finding out how boring paleontology can be.” Amy gestured toward a small girl with short, curly hair and pink-framed glasses. Her head was bent low, her chin tucked into her chest. “Julia had a tough night. Homesick. Think you can do anything to help?”

      “I can try. I’ll put these water bottles in a cooler first.”

      “I’ll do that for you.” A little more insistently than Susannah liked, Amy put a hand out for her backpack. “Julia’s going to burst into tears any minute. She’ll get all the younger ones started.”

      Susannah quickly relinquished her pack. She’d been at the campsite on Saturday afternoon to welcome the children, and had spent that evening getting to know them. Julia had seemed upset right from the start, as if she really didn’t want to be there. She looked and acted younger than ten—she probably wasn’t ready to spend two weeks away from home.

      Hoping she wouldn’t say or do anything to release pent-up tears, Susannah knelt on the ground near Julia. “Finding anything?”

      The small, curly head shook from side to side.

      “I get days like that, too. I had about five years like that when I was just a bit older than you. I grew up on a farm in Manitoba. Not prime dinosaur country.”

      “Wheat,” Julia muttered, still looking at the ground.

      “Lots of wheat,” Susannah agreed. “But I was interested in paleontology, so I’d go out into a pasture, rope off an area and start digging.”

      Julia glanced up. “But you didn’t find anything?”

      “Not much. Rusted metal that broke off a plough about a hundred years ago. Bone from a bison. One summer I lucked out—found a pioneer garbage dump.”

      Julia had stopped her halfhearted digging and was giving Susannah her full attention. She wrinkled her nose. “Yuck.”

      “It wasn’t yucky. There were old medicine bottles and broken dishes and a pretty chamber pot with hand-painted flowers on it. Do you know what a chamber pot is?”

      Julia shook her head.

      “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you.”

      The girl’s gaze intensified. “You can tell me.”

      Susannah whispered in her ear. Julia drew back, her face twisted in pleased disgust. “Eew! With flowers on it?”

      Susannah nodded. “Those pioneers must have had a sense of humor. The thing is, where I turned up bottles and dishes and chamber pots, you’ll turn up a hadrosaur bone.”

      Using her geologist’s hammer and a chisel, she began to chip at the ground. Julia watched Susannah’s even motion and began to copy it. It wasn’t long before they uncovered the tip of a bone.

      “Finally. A rib. We found this animal’s skull, its spinal column, and its tibia, but we couldn’t find its ribs. Good for you!”

      Julia smiled up at Susannah, her glasses glinting in the sun. Smiling back, Susannah realized she had passed thirty minutes without a single thought about Alexander Blake.

      THE SUN, STILL HOT, was in the west. A few plaster-coated specimens lay drying on the ground. Some of the children worked slowly, obviously tired; others sat together, resting and talking.

      “James?” Susannah said. “I don’t see Matt.”

      “Again? He’ll be around somewhere.”

      “I told him not to go too far.”

      “Your definition of too far and Matt’s are probably very different.” James raised his voice. “Matt!” He listened for an answer, then called again. “Matt, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get back here pronto!” But no apologetic Matt, full of explanations, trotted back to the bonebed.

      “I saw him near the dining shelter,” one boy said. “Maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

      “He was just here, wasn’t he?” asked another camper. “Wasn’t he talking to Julia?”

      Julia, her eyes huge, shook her head. She looked from James to Susannah, ready to panic.

      One of the older girls said, “I was digging with him about an hour ago. He left to get some preservative, but he didn’t come back, so I just got it myself and kept working.” Uncertainly she added, “I guess I should have looked for him.”

      “He’ll be somewhere nearby, Melissa.” Susannah spoke quietly to James. “Let’s take a quick look around. He could be behind any of these hills or walking along the riverbed—he found a vertebra there this morning. Maybe he went bone hunting again.”

      When they didn’t find Matt near the quarry, in the dining shelter, supply tent, or back at the school bus, Susannah and James organized a more thorough search. Four pairs of one counselor and one camper fanned out from the quarry, carrying whistles as a simple form of communication. Hoping useful action would help ease the girl’s worry, Susannah asked Melissa to be her partner.

      As she walked, Susannah thought about how often Matt had been told not to wander off. She hadn’t paid close enough attention to him. For most of the day, she’d been preoccupied with work and angry feelings about Alexander Blake, sometimes almost forgetting the children were there. In all the years the museum had run a science camp, no one had ever got lost.

      Self-recrimination at this point was counterproductive. Nothing bad would happen to Matt. He was lost. They would find him. Later—alone and awake at night, or assessing the summer camp at the end-of-season board meeting—there would be lots of time for guilt.

      They were nearly a mile from the quarry when Susannah