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29 SNOW SWIRLED down the empty street ahead of me, swirled around me like windblown thistledown. The Hill place was a barn-like structure between two nondescript buildings, halfhidden by them, half-hidden by the snow. On each side of the door were small showcase windows. I peered in. The window was bare but for an antiquated sewing machine and two blocks of stone. Each block, about eighteen inches long, bore a man-like footprint of giant size. The impressions were completely natural in the way the toes were splayed, in the human shape of the heel, in the clearness of the outline apparently once made in soft mud. A shift in the wind brought a curtain of snow between me and Jack Hill's window. I didn't walk in the door; I walked on down the street. I wanted a minute to think it over. Could the great five-toed prints be those of a Pleistocene bear? Some fine fossil mammal tracks were known in this part ofthe United States, but so far as I knew, no fossil bear tracks had been found. There had been Tertiary camel tracks, deer tracks, tracks ofa big cat like a puma. Perhaps ... perhaps ... the pair in the window belonged to a great Ice Age bear. I retraced my steps. Snow beat upon the glass, half hiding the blocks from view. I turned the knob on the door and went in. The store was full of Indians . Several fat squaws sat about on the floor, wrapped in their blankets. At the back, around a pot-bellied stove, stood a dozen or so blanketed braves, while others lounged around the counter. The group had apparently drifted in to escape the vile weather. I picked my way toward the open bay of the window. The blocks beside the aged sewing machine were easy to pull to the back of the bay. The odd impressions looked as astoundingly real as they had from outside. The matrix in which the tracks were cast was a light grey calcareous sandy limestone. I realized that whoever had quarried the rock had, at the same time, destroyed proof of the length of stride. How much better it would have been to quarry them in one piece. A stirring beside me turned out to be a big Hopi Indian. He too had stepped through the seated squaws to look at the objects that held my attention . He hunched his blanket about his shoulders, and his eyes twinkled. "Zuni tracks," he grunted. Evidently the big Hopi looked on the Zuni with ridicule. I ran my fmger around the fifteen-inch track on one block with, first, disappointment. No claws, therefore no bear prints. Only a man could have made these prints. Only, there were no men with feet like this. A clerk behind the counter, noticing me, came to the front of the store. "Ever see anything like that before?" he asked with a grin. I shook my head. "Who's been carving those things out of stone to fool people?" I asked. "I don't know much about 'em. All I know: they come from Glen Rose, Texas. Mr. Hill brought them west a couple weeks ago, with some dinosaur footprints. " Dinosaur footprints? "Where are the dinosaur footprints?" I asked the clerk. I learned they were in nearby Lupten. I looked again at the specimens before me, looking for signs of sculpturing in the long footmark. The rough surface seemed old and weathered, as though the artist might have etched away any marks with acid. Or perhaps the limestone had been green, freshly uncovered from a well-buried and still soft stratum. Definitely, they were not footprints made in mud and turned to stone; they were clearly sculptured copies of the bottom of an imaginary human foot. A real foot could not make a foot of such clarity in real mud. Were the dinosaur footprints fake, too? In all my fossil-hunting I had never found a fake dinosaur track. I was curious to see what I'd fmd inJack Hill's other store. It was dark and still snowing when I drove into Lupten. Jack Hill was behind his counter. Four dinosaur tracks layover in a corner of the store, on separate blocks. By the uncertain light of a lantern held by the owner, they appeared to be prints of a medium-sized carnivore, but there was something too suspiciously perfect about the three-toed outlines . The matrix was...

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