Isadore Durant - Death among the fossils

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title	:	Death Among the Fossils
author	:	Durant, Isadore.
publisher	:	University of New Mexico
isbn10 | asin	:	0826319505
print isbn13	:	9780826319500
ebook isbn13	:	9780585188478
language	:	English
subject	Anthropologists--Fiction, Africa, East--Fiction, Detective and mystery stories.
publication date	:	1999
lcc	:	PS3554.U667D4 1999eb
ddc	:	813/.54
subject	:	Anthropologists--Fiction, Africa, East--Fiction, Detective and mystery stories.

Page iii Death Among the Fossils Isadore Durant University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque

Page iv Copyright 1999 by the University of New Mexico Press. All rights reserved. First edition Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Durant, Isadore, 1945 Death among the fossils/Isadore Durant.1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-8263-1950-5.ISBN 0-8263-1951-3 (pbk.) I. Title. PS3554.U665D4 1999 813'.54dc21 98-40790 CIP

Page v To A.

Page 1 Barbore 1985: The Find The wind whipped up the gully in a hard gust, slashing him in the face with grit lifted from the alkaline exposures, driving sharp particles up under his wraparound sunglasses. He turned his back to the wind, blinked, wiped his eyes to clear them, and reached again for his canteen. Glancing at his watch, he forestalled the motion. Only ten-thirty... this water's got to last till noon. He pulled a blue American handkerchief from his shorts pocket and wiped his face, set his hat at a steep angle down over his brow, and turned again into the wind. Walking down the rocky floor of the gully, he swept his eyes over both sides of the slopes. His pace was slow, attuned to the rhythm of his eyes as they searched through the scatter of lava cobbles, fragments of eroded calcrete, broken crusts of the recent land surface, looking for the telltale blue-black sheen of fossil bone. It had been nearly four hours since Balebe had started walking alone down from the head of this winding gash in the ancient Batchilok Formation. The wind had then been a light breeze, cool and pleasant on his skin. The sun had just been rising, deceptively distant and gentle, over the eastern mountains. Now its radiation actually stung his skin, and as on other such mornings he was beginning to pant lightly under the pressure of its heat. First time in my life I've sunburned... and I used to make fun of wazungu with their sunscreen lotions... here I am borrowing Bob's. He's really

Page 2 had his fun out of that one, talking about making me an honorary white man! A rock outcrop along a southerly twist of the gully offered a slim shadow, and he stopped there to check his bearings on the aerial photograph of the region. Crouching in the scanty shade, he removed the clipboard with the photo from his small backpack, found the curve of the gully in the picture, verified its orientation with his compass. Should be two kilometers more down to the Bir Kalichi drainage, hope to God Bob isn't late again. The wind died in the little curve of the gully, and immediately he felt the sweat plastering his shirt to his back, under his watchband, trickling down the backs of his legs. He rose from his crouch and moved the band up his arm, noting an even greater contrast between the skin under the band and the deep reddish-brown of the rest of his arm. "Damn! If Mum could see me now! She always said I was too much of an Irish redhead for this equatorial sun," he muttered. He moved out of the shade and sighed as the sun hit him. "How the hell Shafer expects anyone to actually find anything after ten a.m. is beyond me. I wonder how many hominids have been missed by men walking by in a stupor." He began to scan again, tracing the light tan streak of a volcanic ash bed across gaps caused by erosion. The cemented layer of ash formed the highly visible upper boundary of the Batchilok Formation. Potassium-argon dates on samples collected by the Belgians last year indicated that hundreds of square kilometers had been blanketed by a violent eruption of poison gas and incandescent ash nearly three million years ago. The gas was long gone, but the ash remained, now as a narrow band of easily crumbled rock, cropping out over the badlands of southwest Barbore. The fossil-rich deposits lying under the ash were even older, perhaps as much as another half million years. Chances of finding new hominid fossils of such great age had brought Dr. Bob Shafer to prospect these badlands, and had led Balebe to work with him. A cluster of bone high on the southern slope of the wash caught his eye. He moved closer. Limb fragments, looks pretty good sized,

Page 3 bovid or primate? Balancing precariously on a ledge, he reached up to the scatter of mineralized fragments, pushing the top few away, revealing an articular end a bit down slope. Bovid, large gazelle size, shit... oh Lord, I really am starting to speak American! I'd best mind my tongue around the Guvnor when I get home. Oh, please let me find something this last day! A few meters ahead some stones slid down the wall of the gully, followed by finer sediments. He walked on, past a huge hippopotamus jaw lying exposed in the floor of the wash. All its teeth were perfectly preserved. The back ones were opalescent black, the tusks gray-streaked. The teeth were beginning to weather, breaking into splinters. How scandalized I was at first that they weren't collecting things like this, even when Laporteau explained that they'd fill the Barbore Museum's storage facilities in one season. It's we collectors who are swimming against the tide of time, pulling fossils out of their rightful course of self-destruc Then he saw it. There was no mistaking the arch of teeth exposed midway up the gentle slope on his right. "Hominid! Beautiful! It's not a robust Australopithecus,

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