Page 25 of The Rancher’s One and Only

“I do. Though I’m not sure that any woman wants a man to look at her and see a gopher.”

“Granted,” he said.

“Anyway, apology accepted and no harm done. I have actually reached some fossils today.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. You want to come around to the other side and see them?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Come on,” she said, climbing up the lower rock level, and looking at him expectantly.

He pressed his foot down on an outcropping of the rock and stepped up onto the top.

He had much longer legs than she did, so the movements were a lot less dramatic.

Around the other side, he could see just how much she accomplished. She had dug through several layers of the rock, and there were chisels, hammers, brushes and other implements nearby. Along with a sophisticated-looking piece of computer equipment, which he had a feeling was the scanner she’d been referencing the first day they met.

“What did you find?”

“I have a feeling these are tracks from Nimravids.”

“What?”

“An ancient cat that shares common ancestry with saber-tooth tigers. They were pretty prevalent in this part of the world back during that era.”

“And are these more common footprints and fossils for you to find?”

“Really well-preserved footprints aren’t all that common. So, no. But, it’s not quite what I’m after. I feel certain that the giant sloth and the mastodon did migrate here but the evidence of that is vanishingly small.”

“But these are…these are good?”

“Yes. Because it means I was right about the migration pattern. I think that the migratory animals of that period moved through here in large groups during the changing of seasons. And I think there was an even larger migration prior to a catastrophic weather event. There were no land-going dinosaurs left during the Cenozoic. Dinosaurs in Oregon really aren’t a thing.”

“And are you going to take all of this to the museum?”

“Oh no. Not all of it. Some rock I might displace and bring for a display. But I think it would be better to leave as many of the footprints behind as possible.”

“And would that be…a tourist attraction?”

She frowned. “Well. Yes. People would want to come see it. There are some great footprint tours around the world. When I was digging in Australia I got to go to Broome, and there are some incredible footprints preserved in this very orange-pink rock. They’re beautiful. And incredibly fascinating. People travel all over to see those, and to go on that tour.”

He wasn’t one to ponder the past all that much—not his own past or back into history. But right then, it struck him as something that mattered. “It’s funny, don’t you think? That human beings migrated across the plains, on the Oregon Trail, and millions of years before that all these animals were migrating through here. Everything always shifts, I guess.”

“Exactly,” she said excitedly. “This is what I was saying about science. It’s a story. And using the pieces of that story, we can put together the reality of what was happening in the world at the time.”

“So, do you think that little scanner tool is helping you out?” This was a whole world he knew nothing about, and hell, when you had a great resource of information right there, why not use it?

She frowned. “It’s interesting. I can see how it would. But then, I’ve spent years figuring out how to position myself and find things based on what we know about migration patterns, based on the kind of rock where we normally find things, what kinds of environments are going to be ideal for the preservation of fossils and other evidence of animals existing. So I would say that for me it hasn’t been groundbreaking. Though I think it’s an interesting tool. Nothing wrong with it, basically. And I can see how some people would find it helpful.”

“Do you think it’s cheating?”

She laughed, and he found the sound as fascinating as the rest of her. It was loud and unrestrained, and he wouldn’t say that she was either of those things on the surface. Except she was very much who she was, and so it actually did fit her.

He was sure that she hadn’t been the kind of person who was popular in school. He hadn’t been either, not really. He’d carried the stigma of poverty and foster care on his shoulders like a cross to bear.

But he’d been dangerous.