Page 19 of Down the Track

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For starters, having Hux beside her in the closed confines of the helicopter cabin was unnerving, She’d tried tuning him out by reading articles she’d downloaded last night, but she hadn’t cared for the tone of the last blog. Really, did these uni students not understand how privileged they were, having access to science degrees and laboratories and expert knowledge? Ethel and Dot may not even have had the chance to finish school, let alone go to university.

Let it go, Jo, she told herself, taking a breath in and in and in until her rib cage felt like it couldn’t expand any more, then slowly letting it out. The Dirt Girls had been looking forward to today like kids looked forward to their birthday and she didn’t want to ruin it.

But no, damn it, shecouldn’tlet it go. She frowned as bits from the blog circled in her mind. It had been written in 2014. What had she been doing then? Breastfeeding, that’s what. Spending a year of her life on maternity leave with mushed banana in her hair and too tired to write the wordnappy, let alone anything work related likeshallow intercondylar groove. No wonder she hadn’t known about the dig; even if Jedda had tried to call her, she probably wouldn’t have been able to find her phone under the piles of laundry and building blocks and cloth A-is-for-Apple books that had taken over the house after Luke had arrived, squalling and unplanned, into their lives.

That smug blogger. So young and ignorant. Life got in theway, all right? Life and kids and sheep stations got in the way of pure science, and it was about time smart alec bloggers figured that out.

She sighed. It was about time Jo figured that out, too.

She looked over her shoulder. Ethel and Dot were relaxed and chattering like they were on a tourist trip and had all the time in the world to point down at rocky outcrops and cattle grids and reminisce about where Roger the kelpie might have been buried, and was that the old paddock where Ethel had bogged the tractor and their dad had taken off his belt and threatened to whoop her from there to next Sunday if she didn’t get it unbogged before he got back from the feed store. They didn’t look like they gave a snap of the finger about having missed out on a career opportunity that involved writing snooty blogs for a dinosaur forum.

No, Jo was the only one in the helicopter worried about their career. But was it even worth worrying about if everything about it was making her so damn unhappy?

She wanted to be like Dot and Ethel. She wanted to behappyabout being here.

And she would be happy, if she could just please,please, have one little tiny thing in life go her way. Let her find something. It didn’t need to be a tangible thing like a fossil or a rusted digging peg handily marked DIGHERE. But … something. A glimmer of something would do. Enough to retain some hope that this trip out west was a good decision, not one more in the long list of bad decisions she seemed to have made lately.

Hux was flying low over the arid terrain, low enough to bewilder small flocks of sheep into scattering below them, low enough for her to see the rise of the ancient geological formation that was coming up ahead. From their vantage point, it was easy to see that the jump-up was a long, thin, reddish ribbon of land, a couple of hundred feet higher than the ground below. Its size hadn’t been obvious from those old photos. Its surface was so barren it could have featured as a backdrop for a movie set on Mars, and its steep, near-vertical sides showed signs of erosion. Wind and seasonal rain were doing their best to erode this relic of the long-distant past, leaving pillars of sandstone to hold up the hardened silica caprock above. She wondered what would be left if Luke were ever to come here. If he were ever to follow in her footsteps and make the study of the past his vocation, like she had. Or at least show some interest in her career and agree to come with her to a dig site just once.

Nothing seemed less likely.

At the moment, Luke’s interests revolved around water polo and graphic novels that she wasn’t sure he should be reading at the age of ten, communicating entirely in monosyllables, and an eleven-year-old girl from his class at school named Sophie, who Jo had not been invited to meet.

‘Ethel,’ she said, determined now to put bloggers and breastfeeding and monosyllables out of her mind. ‘Dot. We’re approaching the area where the photos might have been taken. Can you see anything that looks familiar?’

The lower eastern ridge of the jump-up was not as desolate as its upper surface, but barely half-a-dozen trees were visible from their search height, and no stock.

‘Definitely that one,’ said Ethel, her finger pointing through the window on her side of the helicopter. ‘The far tree. See how its limbs are akimbo? Like arms trying to flag us down?’

‘No way,’ said Dot. ‘I say we check out that whitish clump. I reckon that’s a tree blown over. And see how close it runs to the fence line? That’s the one.’

Two definite but opposing opinions. Very helpful indeed.

Okay, Jo had nominated herself leader of this unsanctioned expedition, so it was time to make some leadership decisions. ‘Can we land somewhere here, Hux? Midway between the log and the tree with arms akimbo, so we can get out and have a walk about the place?’

‘No problem.’

Jo opened her phone’s mapping app, happy to see she was in range of some sort of service, and found the location settings. She could drop a pin as they landed, accurate to a four-metre radius under a clear sky. With the site pinned, she could visit by road, bring the items she’d so carefully written on her list over the last few months while she’d prepped, and then begged or borrowed or not-quite-stolen to bring along: her swag; a slab of bottled water; a mini-stove and cookpot. A snake kit in case of a close encounter with a king brown. She’d visit again by road with no six-foot, blue-eyed reminder of younger days sitting a hair’s breadth away from her to mess with her concentration.

Visiting alone sounded idyllic.

Apart from the snake, obviously. A ‘nope rope’ as Luke liked to call them. They were reptiles, true, so taxonomically speaking they were distant cousins to the dinosaurs she loved, but still. A snake was a snake.

The helicopter came to rest some fifty yards from the first area of interest. The three of them set off, hats and sunglasses on to counter the scorch and glare of the sun, leaving Hux behind. It became apparent within a few yards of the helicopter, however, that despite their assertions that they were right as rain and totally up for anything, Ethel and Dot were less than nimble. The loose soil shifted underfoot and the ground was covered in small, skittering rocks and sheep tracks that had dried into ridges and furrows, all of which proved hard for them to navigate. No way could she let them clamber about an excavation site if a miracle happened and they decided to commence a dig.

Jo took Ethel’s arm and was reaching out to tuck a hand under Dot’s, too, when Hux set aside the laptop he’d dragged out of a backpack and walked over to lend his assistance. His smile was as warm as she remembered. Only this time around, it wasn’t directed at her.

Kissing a dinosaur hunter has always been on my bucket list.Now, where had that memory come from? He’d said something like that to her once, long ago, on the Harper property dig site back in 2009. He’d been joking, of course, and smiling like he only had eyes for her. She’d been totally ambushed by all that charm and the clear blue sky above them, and the fossil fragment they’d just found in the soil beneath their boots. He’d stayed to have dinner at the camp and she’d dished something up on an enamel plate and given it to him—sausage curry with lumpy rice, perhaps, or the chilli con carne that seemed to be on the menu every time it was Jedda’s turn to cook—and she’d not been able to take her eyes off him.

A spark had been lit, but what the spark was, and what it might turn into, were questions she’d been too afraid to ask, because while she might have had four years of tertiary study under her belt by then, none of that study had covered psychology. Or taught her anything at all about human interactions.

The opposite, in fact: Zoology had taught her that her skills were best suited to working in a lab or on a dig site, on her own or with colleagues who were as focused as she was on the science. She was not a people person; not then and not now.

‘You’re very quiet, Jo. Everything all right?’ said Ethel.

‘Sorry. I was just thinking. Is this pace okay or do you want to slow down a little?’

‘I’m good, pet. You want to tell me how it is you and our Gavin know each other? And why you said you didn’t?’