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10 CARL PICKED UP a bundle of empty burlap bags, handed them to me at the entrance to his tent, and went inside, to reappear in a moment with a ream of rice paper, a pair ofsheep shears, and three pairs of rubber gloves. "When we get these sacks cut into bandages," he said, "and when Thrapp gets back from the spring with a couple of pails of water, we can start plastering bones." We climbed up to the quarry. Brown had flown back from Montana and gone on again, leaving Lewis to assist in the job ahead. However, our personnel had been cut by the departure of Rainsford, his son Laurence, and Green, whose summer vacations had come to an end. The fmal excavation into the sandstone had been made, revealing the last of the big tail and many other bones but showing no end to the bone layer and turning up no new skulls. The skeletons had been photographed from all angles and from the top ofMilo Howe's hay derrick set up to give us an "aerial" view. Except for Ted Lewis, the rest ofthe crew were at work cutting a drainage ditch in back of the quarry to take care of possible heavy fall rains. The bones lay gleaming in their final coat of shellac. It was going to be ajob to remove and package this tremendous mass of rocks for shipment. "Where do we start?" I asked. "Next question: 'When'll we be done?'" Carl said. "Makes little difference where we start, so long's we move in from the edge. You get this cervical vertebra, over here by itself, down on your chart?" "I sho' have." "Well, then, let's start right here. But fust we'll have to cut bandages." Carl sat down on a folded tarp, picked up one of the empty sacks, and began to unravel the seam 66 along the edge. I followed his example. When we had opened several, he stacked them neatly on the ground, picked up the sheep shears, and cut them into strips four or five inches wide. These, in turn, were cut into twelve to fourteen inch lengths. Thrapp appeared with his pails ofwater and opened a sack of plaster of Paris that stood in the back of the quarry. Nearby was a pile of short cedar sticks, gathered from the growth in a draw back of the ranch house. Lewis was starting to wrap the many small bones in newspapers ... claws and toe bones and the like that would not require a plaster jacket. Carl and I moved over to the cervical vertebra. The complex mass of spines and processes with a rib prominent was about twenty-eight inches long, looking as ifit might weigh thirty or forty pounds. It was endlessly fractured, but had been soaked and soaked again with thin shellac and was quite hard and fum. Carl cleared away the loose shale around it with his pick, undercutting it until it stood on a pillar of matrix several inches high. Then he brought over one of the buckets of water with the ream of rice paper and a whisk broom. He passed me the paper. "Now if you'll just hand me sheets of this as I ask for them. . ." Carl dipped his whisk broom into the water bucket and with quick flicks of his wrist sprinkled the surface of the vertebra. He reached for the first sheet of paper and laid it across the end of the bone, wetting it further with additional flicks of the broom. The water drops beat the fragile paper to the bone surface, where it adhered evenly. Carl patted it down and said, "This paper keeps the plaster from sticking to the bone." It took two more sheets to cover the exposed surface. Meanwhile, Thrapp had finished cutting bandages and was mixing plaster. Dan appeared at my side with a pail of the white mixture. Carl put on a pair ofrubber gloves-working barehand in plaster of Paris is worse on hand texture than protracted dishwashing. He reached for one of the bandages and dipped it into the milky mixture. "One thing you must watch out for in plastering bones: don't get your plaster too thick. Dan's got it just about right. " Though the mixture seemed to me as thin as water, there was plenty of white color on the saturated burlap; it looked as if it had been dipped in buttermilk. Carl...

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