End of an Era

Paleontology has a long history of famous meals. On New Year’s Eve, 1853, Sir Richard Owen hosted a dinner for twenty fossil experts inside a life-size reconstruction of Iguanodon made under his direction by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.

Almost a century later, Russian paleontologists enjoyed a meal of mammoth steaks and the finest vodka after one of the hairy elephants was found frozen in Siberia.

Klicks and I weren’t to be outdone. Late that afternoon we built a fire near the base of the crater upon which the Sternberger was perched and set two choice pachycephalosaurus steaks to cooking.

While the meat was grilling, I went over to check on our Martian hitchhiker. I found some shady ground and set the stasis box down on its side, and, in case the Het wanted something to drink, I placed a bowl of water next to it. Evidently it wasn’t thirsty, since after pulsing its way over to the bowl to see what it contained, it ignored it.

I normally like my meat medium-rare, but we grilled the steaks for a long time, flipping them repeatedly. We wanted to be sure that any parasites and germs had been killed. When it finally came time to eat the meat, I felt a certain reluctance. For one thing, although all modern bird, reptile, and mammal meat is edible by humans, there was always the small chance that dinosaur flesh would prove poisonous. For another, well, it somehow seemed wrong.

As usual, Klicks had no such misgivings. He immediately sliced a piece off and brought it to his mouth.

"How is it?" I asked.

"Different."

This from the gourmet of Drumheller. Oh, well. Making sure my cup of water was handy, in case I had to wash down some foul taste, I took a tenuous nibble. I’d never eaten reptile before, but I expected it to resemble chicken. It tasted more like roasted almonds. I don’t think I’d ever want to have it again, but it wasn’t bad — just a bit too stringy to be a comfortable chew.

I didn’t know if the Het needed to eat — really, we didn’t know much about them at all — but I took a plate over to it with both some cooked and uncooked pachycephalosaur and a mound of fronds. It ignored these, too, and seemed content just to throb quietly. I couldn’t understand a lifeform that neither drank water nor ate. Although I wasn’t looking forward to seeing other Hets again, I hoped some would come soon and take our reluctant guest off our hands.

It was getting too dark to do any serious exploring, so we just sat around on some bald cypress trunks, letting the meal digest.

"Hey, Brandy," Klicks said at last.

"Yeah?"

"How do you define gross ignorance?"

"Beats me."

"One hundred and forty-four Brits." He flashed a grin.

"Oh, yeah?" I said, rising to the challenge. "What do sugarcane and unwanted pregnancies have in common?"

"Dunno."

"They both pop up all over Jamaica."

He laughed out loud. "Good one. Why does King Charles want to abdicate?"

"Too easy. So he can go on welfare like everybody else in England. What has six legs and goes ‘ho-de-do, ho-de-do, ho-de-do’?"

"What?"

"Three Jamaicans running for the elevator."

Klicks roared. "Well, fuck me," he said.

I sipped my coffee. "Not while there are still dogs in the street."

I sighed contentedly. It was like old times. We’d whiled away many an evening in the twenty-odd years we’d known each other telling jokes, slagging each other’s ancestors, and just shooting the bull. We’d shared a lot in that time, and I’d always enjoyed his company. We’d even said, back in the simpler days at university, that we’d never let marriages destroy our friendship. We’d seen too many people drop off the face of the Earth once they’d gotten hitched. No way we were going to let that happen to us. We’d keep in touch, do things together, stay a team. But then reality got in the way. There were precisely three really good jobs for dinosaur specialists in Canada: Chief of the Paleobiology Division at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Curator of Paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta. I ended up at the ROM; Klicks at the Tyrrell — with 2,500 kilometers between us. And we each did get married, although Klicks’s union with Carla had lasted less than a year.

Still, we did a better job than most of keeping in touch, of remaining friends. We got together at the annual meetings of the SVP and Klicks always came back to Toronto for his vacations. We were the best of friends until … until … until…

I threw my plate down onto the mud plain, the uneaten portion of my pachycephalosaur steak bouncing onto the dirt.

Klicks looked up. "Brandy?"