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18 BARNUM BROWN led a strange procession , so strange, so special, I wanted the worst way to have it preserved for posterity on film. Unfortunately, there was no camera loaded, and I couldn't lay hands on a film. Brown walking out the long ridge of Number Five Hill, a little distance from our recent and disappointing excavation . Gil Stucker and Bob Chaffee in his wake. Big Don Guadagni, our Patagonian giant, coming behind . Then the shovel, its great boom swaying, more like a lumbering dinosaur, a lost and disappointed iron creature in search of its ancient meaty kin. One by one they all topped the small rise and disappeared over the brow, all but the shovers steel boom. Hurrying to overtake them, I reached the top in time to see Brown and the boys bending over what appeared from a distance to be fragmented bones scattered about the surface. There was no indication they might have leached out from the hillside . Brown suggested, however, that the shovel might cut into what we hoped might be the bone layer. The operator dug into the hill with a repeated monotony of movement. Bob and Gil watched the dump carefully. Don and I stayed as near the grinding blade as we dared. Suddenly Gil cried out, and Brown signalled the operator to halt. The rumble of the shovel died, and we all hurried to the dump to see for ourselves what Gil had noted. Gil was prodding into the back of a ten-foot pile with the point of his prospecting pick. A bone fragment fell out with a lump of clay, followed by a shower of tiny bits of bone. What the shovel had ripped into was broken a million ways. We tried to ascertain what the bone had been, but it was too badly fragmented . Brown stepped into the pit, examining the spot where the shovel had taken out its last load. Nothing to be seen. 100 "Well, anyway," Brown said, "we know there's been a bone here ... that's something." He turned to the shovel operator. "Now, then, if you'll move just a little farther over, we'll see what we find." While the shovel trundled to a point where it could bite into a new area, we all crowded into the hole the bone had come from, each eager to explore the matrix. In a few minutes, Don's awl struck bone, and he and Chaffee soon exposed it to view, a big flat bone, much bigger than my stolen rare rib. It was fairly complete and seemed a part of a skull of sorts. Brown pronounced it a part of a ceratopsian skull. There weren't enough pieces to say accurately which one; it was a large and varied family. We could each of us visualize anyone of these lumbering four-footed herbivores waddling through an ancient mixed forest in company with our mystery dinosaur. Each of us was free to fit out our visualization with horn nose-pieces and any of a variety of neck-and-shoulder guards to suit each fancy. We were without enough clear evidence to challenge anyone's vision. While we were variously thus engaged, a chill wind whipped a few flakes of snow about. "Just think, it was tropical here once," Don commented. "We should have come earlier." At the end ofa week that largely resembled our opening day, we had thoroughly prospected the three-mile length of Number Five Hill with unmitigated lack of success. We gave the shovel back to the railroad and would have given away our meager supply of bone scraps, if there had been enough to go around. Recalling that first rib-still one of our best finds-we were confident of only the slowly flagging interest ofour still persistent guests. We moved camp seven miles to a spot Lauzer and Brown had scouted out before, on the west side of Eden Valley on the flank ofWhite Mountain. There were a few cedars and other desert growth about, not enough for much protection from the wind, but a place where we felt less naked to the elements . And we installed Maw Denniger, of Howe Quarry fame, who had been waiting in Rock Springs for us to settle down. With her great camp cuisine, we ate better. We didn't do better, but doing isn't everything; eating is important too. Despite our failure to turn up giants and solve mysteries, the shovel experience was...

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