Time. Roger Reid

built like a linebacker. He carries a gun. And his name is Shirley. In all my fourteen years, I’d never met a man named Shirley until Deputy Shirley Pickens.

      “If I were you,” said my dad, “I would get that chuckling out of my system before I got to Alabama.”

      “Good idea,” I agreed.

      “Like I was trying to say,” Dad said, “when I was talking with the deputy, I discovered that your host in Alabama is a friend of mine. He’s an astronomer. His name is Curtis Carroll. We always call him C. C., but you should probably call him Dr. Carroll.”

      “An astronomer?” I said. “Why are we staying with an astronomer?”

      “You’ve got something against astronomers?” said my dad the astronomer. I think he was joking.

      “No,” I said. “I’m used to astronomers. I just thought we would be staying with a paleontologist or geologist.”

      “C. C., uh, Dr. Carroll is a professional astronomer and an amateur paleontologist,” said Dad. “Tell him I said hello.”

      I nodded.

      “And,” Dad continued, “ask him to give you and Leah a little bit of his presentation on time.”

      My pocket buzzed again.

      “You should probably answer that before she gets the idea that you’re not going,” said Dad. “And Jason?”

      “Yes?”

      “You do want to go?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      5

       Friends

      ???

      Talking with my parents

      U still going?

      Yes

      C u in bhm

      I’ll text you from the pane

      Pane?

      Plane

      K

      Leah was pretty good at text-talk. Me? Not so much. Most of the time I had rather just make a phone call. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had the phone all that long. Leah hasn’t had her phone all that long either, though. Her dad got it for her after Carl Morris and his brothers chased us through that longleaf forest less than four months ago. Less than four months . . . seems like a lot longer than that.

      I finished packing and set my duffel bag beside the bed. For a moment I stood there not knowing what to do with myself. I had just passed up the perfect opportunity not to make the trip. The truth is I didn’t think Carl Morris was as stupid as everyone thought he was, so I didn’t think he would come looking for me even if I had punched him in the face with an axe.

      And then there’s “the greater truth,” as an old friend of mine would say. The greater truth is that I wanted to see Leah.

      Much as I hate to admit it, my sister was sort-of right: I don’t have a lot of friends around here. It’s not my fault. All of my friends are like a year older than me. That was fine until I got to the eighth grade. Then they all went to high school, and I got left behind.

      There’s something else, too. When I try to tell them around here about being shot at in a longleaf forest and then again on a mountaintop, they look at me like I’m crazy. Can’t blame them. I still have a hard time believing it myself. Anyway, I’ll be in high school this coming year, so, who knows, maybe we’ll be friends again.

      6

       Evidence of Living

      On the flight to Birmingham, I reread some of the first article Leah sent me about the fossil site. The article described the discovery of fossil footprints at a coal mine by a man who was, at the time, a middle school science teacher in Oneonta, Alabama. His name was Ashley Allen.

      Here is an excerpt from the article.

      . . . That fall, early in the school year, Ashley Allen was orienting his Oneonta, Alabama class to the year ahead when one of his students did something unusual for a seventh grader: he volunteered. Mr. Allen mentioned that he hoped to take a fossil hunting field trip during the year and that coalfields were often good spots for finding fossils. Student Jessie Burton volunteered that his grandmother owned a coal mine.

      “It was significant that Jessie’s grandmother owned the mine and the mining company,” says Ashley Allen. “She was able to give me permission to scout the property—no bureaucracy, no red tape, no lawyers limiting liability.”

      Delores Reid, Jessie Burton’s grandmother and owner of the New Acton Coal Mining Company, made the arrangements for Allen to visit the Union Chapel Mine a few miles south of Jasper, Alabama. Billy Orick, Permits Manager for the mining company, met Allen on the fringes of the site and drove him to the top of a ridge that overlooked what was then a working strip mine.

      Allen was a bit overwhelmed as he stepped from Orick’s truck. He thought he had come prepared in his fossil hunting regalia: wide brim hat, safari vest, trekking boots. In one hand he held a hammer, in the other, a chisel. He stood alone at the top of the ridge, surveyed the site and wondered. To the south and east the ground fell away from him at a steep angle for more than a hundred yards. Then it plunged into a gully for another thirty or so feet. From the bottom of the gully, a sheer rock wall shot straight up more than one hundred feet. Orick had told him the mining crew had seen more fossils at Union Chapel than at any other of their mining sites, but Allen wondered if this site might be too treacherous for his students. Piles of jagged rocks—the spoils of strip mining—littered the landscape that dropped away before him.

      Allen drew a deep breath and took his first tenuous steps down into rocks that had not seen the light of day for more than 300 million years. Beneath his feet the rocks wobbled and slipped with every move. He could not lift his eyes from the ground beyond each step he would take. But it was enough. There in the bright, autumn sun he saw it. His fossil hunter’s dream: evidence of living.

      As a kid growing up in Florida, Allen made his first fossil find in high school. It was a shark’s tooth. Shark teeth are not uncommon, as fossils go in the southeastern U.S., but this one was Allen’s treasure—there’s something about holding a relic in your hand that is millions of years old. When he entered Livingston University (now the University of West Alabama), he took his treasure with him. At Livingston, he took his prized possession and showed it to geology professor Richard Thurn. It would have been easy for Professor Thurn to dismiss so common a find as a shark’s tooth. Perhaps it was Allen’s enthusiasm, perhaps Professor Thurn is a great teacher, probably both, but the professor seized the opportunity. He encouraged the young student to keep looking. Alabama is one of the most fossil-rich areas of North America, he told Allen. And then he threw out a challenge.

      “Fossil footprints,” said Thurn. “Fossil footprints are among the great quests of geologists and paleontologists across the globe. In the footprints of ancient creatures you find more than evidence of their having lived; you find evidence of living.”

      The professor’s words inspired Allen to change his minor from chemistry to geology. He continued his major in biology and became a high school science teacher. Teaching in Oneonta, north of Birmingham, put him in the heart of Alabama coal mining country. And it put him within an easy drive of the Birmingham Paleontological Society (BPS). As a regular member of the BPS, Allen continued in the love of fossil hunting inspired by Richard Thurn.

      Professor Thurn’s words resonated in his mind as Allen gazed down upon his first discovery at the Union Chapel Mine, “Evidence of living.” There they were: tracks. Tracks from millions and millions and millions of years ago. Ashley Allen shouted