Page 101 of Down the Track

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‘Dinosaur news?’

‘Sort of. Prehistoric news, put it that way.’

‘I can’t wait to hear it. Why don’t I rustle you up a sandwich and a few drinks to put in your cooler bag while you put your bags upstairs?’

The roads were (mostly) open. A tributary of the Diamantina was over the road just off the Matilda Way when she made the turn north to head for the main gates of Corley Station, flushing a slow-moving stream of muddy water across a causeway bearing the name of Mulga Crossing. It must have rained somewhere, but you wouldn’t have known it from the blue, cloudless sky. The black and white floodwater markers showed water less than two hundred millimetres high, so she trundled on through in the four-wheel drive, picking up speed again when she was clear.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, save the umbrage of a flock of cockatoos roosting on the Cracknells’ old water tank by the homestead.

‘Settle down,’ she told them, as she drove past.

A mud-spattered ute approached when she was still within cooee of the homestead and it pulled over to the side of the rough track she was on. A man wearing a singlet, his hat pulled low, gave her a slow nod as she came to a stop beside him and put her window down. The kelpie on his lap stuck its head out the ute’s window, pink tongue lolling down almost as far as his pointy ears pricked up.

‘Hello,’ Jo said.

‘You’ll be the dinosaur lady then,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘Sure am. You’ll be the nephew?’

‘Yep. Robbie Allan. You headed down by the jump-up?’

‘Yes. I left some gear there because I was hoping to get back here sooner, but it’s a little hot now for living rough out here under a tarp, so I thought I’d come and get it. I’m hoping to organise a more formal dig on the same site in the next month or so.’

He looked sceptical. No doubt this was what Jedda had said when she left, too, only Jo had actually found something. A lot of things, actually. One of them being the value of a promise made and honoured.

‘I couldn’t stay away from this site if you paid me, Robbie.’

‘Yeah? You reckon you really might have a find, hey? Wouldn’t that be something. Wipe the smirk off those roosters at Winton and Muttaburra, hey?’

She chuckled. Rivalry was clearly alive and well out here when it came to sheep farmers’ bragging rights about the fossils they’d found in their paddocks.

She was tempted to give him the heads up that Corley Station could be on the brink of becoming as world renowned as the properties of those other ‘roosters’, but she wanted Ethel and Dot to be the first to know.

‘I reckon. Don’t go running a bulldozer through there or anything, will you?’

He nodded. ‘That patch of ground gets a visit from me about once a decade. I check the fencing, and that’s where it ends. It’s too far from the irrigation for the sheep to bother wandering down there unless there’s floodwater for them to drink, and I’ve got enough on my plate already without piling on more.’

‘I bet you do. I’ll tell the Dirt Girls I saw you. I’m hoping to see them this evening or tomorrow, depending on when I get finished here.’

‘All righty then,’ said Robbie, and he gave a little whistle, which the ancient kelpie apparently understood meant to get his front paws off the windowsill and sit down, then drove off in a plume of red dust.

Packing up her gear didn’t take long. The tarp was in situ, the trestle table still wedged where she’d left it. The crate of hand tools was dusty but its lid was still firmly clasped down. As tempted as she was to get some tools out and start work, she was on her own. Levering delicate articles out of bedrock took balance and teamwork, and she needed to put the preservation of whatever fossils might still be in the black soil ahead of her impatience.

She slid a second set of marker pegs into the ground to demarcate the spot where she and Luke had extracted their find, and pulled a few rocks off the cairn to make an X. Not quite pirate treasure, perhaps, but whatever might lurk there was of a lot more value than gold coins and pilfered pearls.

When the site had been photographed from every angle and when everything was packed except for one camp chair and the cooler bag Maggie had filled for her, Jo sat in the shade of the four-wheel drive and contemplated … life.

So much to think about. She was tempted to pull her notebook out of her backpack and start crosschecking the many lists she had written in there. But lists weren’t everything.

Science wasn’t the whole story. The palaeontology process in which she excelled—the study of geology, of sediment, of the controlled dig, the judicious swish of the brush to dislodge the crud of millennia from the fossilised bone within—could only ever reveal a part of the story. The bony parts, in fact, that did not need interpretation so much as they needed cataloguing. A femur either belonged to a theropod or it did not. The three-toed pattern preserved in a long-ago riverbank recently revealed afresh by landslide or flood damage was either a sauropod or it was not.

But the other part of the story … the fleshing out of the story with the fears, the joys, thelife…

Her relationship with Luke was on the mend. She’d even come around to the idea that spending term-time with Dad and holidays with Mum didn’t have to mean she wasn’t being a good parent. Only, instead of him spending his holidays with her in Brisbane, he might—if her plans came to fruition—be spending them with her somewhere out here.

Jo took a sip of the coffee Maggie had poured into her thermos and grimaced. Ugh. It had come from the staff pot, for sure, because it was bloody awful, but … it did also seem a little like Maggie was welcoming her as one of Yindi Creek’s own.

It was time she started fleshing out her own story with some fears and joy and life. Be vulnerable, take risks, open her emotions wide without stopping to calculate all the statistical likelihoods of whatever outcomes might come her way.