Dinosaur Wars

Chapter one - The Mexican Connection, 1876

The bullets thumped the ground, sending up spurts of sand. Adam crouched for cover, along with his uncle, James Addison. The fossil they'd just been excavating caught a bullet, sending splinters of prehistoric teeth flying over their heads.  

The rest of the work party found cover where they could - behind rocks, equipment, or sprawled out, face to the ground.  

A bullet ricocheted, whined, piercing their ears like a searing pain.  

Adam looked over to his uncle, wondering if all his expeditions and years of adventure would end here. Violently, while digging up a violent past. Addison had only one thought: 'What of Adam? If he survives the attack and I die, how would he go on? It would be another tragedy loaded onto his young shoulders. Another grief burned into his life.' Addison felt a stab of guilt, that his potential, sudden end was somehow selfish. They exchanged a look: desperation, fear, love.

*****

They were in this high-altitude desert with its surrounding ranges and high, flat-topped mountains due to an extraordinary purchase. A Mexican trader, a seller of curiosities and rare antiquities, was peddling his wares in New York. He had heard of James Addison's passion for ancient animals and presented him with the toe of what was umistakably a dinosaur. But its preservation was so good it looked like it had died only the day before.  

The trader gave a vague indication of where it was found. And even this information was delivered in a offhand way that deflected accuracy.  

"Perhaps it was the Chihuahuan Desert, perhaps not. The supplier lives in a dark pool of his own imaginings." Then he had pointed to his head: "Too much sun." 

So, instead of trekking inland to the rich fossil fields in Montana or crossing into Canada, Addison provisioned his clipper, Pelorus, and sailed from New York to the Gulf of Mexico.  

Adam couldn't be happier than holding the wheel of Pelorus, judging the wind, devising the tack he needed to follow. After his parents had died, his uncle had adopted him. And this is where he'd found some freedom, some sense of release from his terrible loss. Out on the ocean, far from the familiar land and it's memory of war and death. His uncle had instructed him in the art and science of sailing and that is where he began to understand the older man. That is where they had connected.  

Once they had reached the Gulf of Mexico, they had toiled away in the Chihuahuan Desert with a couple of dozen workers. But the relic he and Adam were unearthing didn't come close to the one he'd bought from the trader. 

They had arrived at the site mid-morning, and the sun already made the ground shimmer. Usually, due to its high altitude, it was a desert with a mild climate. But it was in the grip of drought - a land with a fever, whose temperature soared. 

"Could it get any hotter?" 

"There won't be any let up, Adam. Not till evening." 

Adam wiped the sweat from his broad forehead with his sleave yet again.  

"I don't know how anything could survive long in this heat. Surely, it would be rotted to bone like this thing."  

He gestured to the petrified skull. 

Addison's brow furrowed. Not for the first time he wondered if he'd been duped. He took the toe from his pocket and looked at it. Curved like a bird claw, it was five inches long. A green leathery skin stretched nearly its entire length. It had become Addison's talisman, the article of faith in his quest.  

"The preservation is amazing," he mumbled. 

Adam eyed him with concern. His uncle looked as though he had aged beyond his sixty years. In the last week, his beard had become grayer, his skin more wrinkled, redness had crept into his eyes and deep black marks has spread under his eye sockets.