Authors: Dana Stabenow
He was a fussy little man, and in spite of pink cheeks with nary a wrinkle and wide brown eyes and quantities of light brown hair contrived to seem as dry and desiccated as one of his fossils. He looked at the world over the tops of a pair of spectacles perched low on his nose, reserving the more exclusive view through the lens for his precious specimens, although Jack was sure they were just for show, like the affected shoulder stoop and the calipers protruding from one breast pocket. He couldn't have been more than thirty years old, and he was annoyed at having his work interrupted and he told them so. Kate apologized, several times, but he remained annoyed. "Mr. Campbell--" she began, only to be immediately interrupted.
"Dr. Campbell, if you please."
The shine on his doctorate must not have worn off yet. "I beg your pardon, Dr. Campbell." She made her glance admiring. A doctor. And are you faster than a speeding bullet, too? "Doctor, do you happen to remember talking to a Daniel Seabolt?" "Seabolt?" he said brusquely.
"Seabolt? Certainly not. Now if you'll excuse me--"
"He was a teacher," she said quickly. "No, not here, at the public school in Chistona. He contacted you last year for help in conducting a course study in dinosaurs."
"Seabolt," Dr. Campbell said.
"Daniel," Kate said.
"Daniel Seabolt. Of course I remember. A teacher at Chistona Public School. He contacted me last year for help in conducting a course study in dinosaurs."
"Yes, sir," Kate said. Jack's face was carefully blank, and she turned slightly so she wouldn't have to look at it.
"I was unable to help him, of course," Dr. Campbell sniffed.
"Why?"
He sniffed again, more reflectively than offensively this time.
"Really, we have no adequate specimens of dinosaurs in the collection.
We have as yet no adequate specimens of dinosaurs in the state of Alaska."
Jack hooked a thumb over his shoulder. "What about the woolly mammoth?"
He was promptly withered by a look of intense scorn. "That is not a dinosaur, that is a Pleistocene mammal. A warm-blooded, milk-producing vegetarian." "Oh," Jack said weakly, and subsided into the background.
Campbell lifted one weary eyebrow in Kate's direction, as if to mutually deplore these amateurs who plague us from time to time. Kate did not know what had elevated her from their ranks but she took the promotion and the accompanying rise in patronizing respect with appropriate gratitude.
Which is to say she hung on Campbell's every word with wide-eyed, enraptured attention.
Campbell preened himself beneath that regard and proceeded to tell them everything he knew about the Pleistocene Era, which was considerable, and all of it in words of not less than four syllables. He began two million years in the past and in forty five minutes had worked himself all the way up to the last Neanderthals and early Paleolithic art when Kate managed to insert a breathless comment. "Then there were Homo sapiens on earth when the woolly mammoth was alive?"
"My dear girl!" Though he could never get her to admit it later, Jack distinctly saw her flutter her eyelashes at Campbell. "My dear girl,"
Campbell repeated, placing a less than professorial hand in the small of her back and urging her toward the mammoth exhibit. Jack trailed along behind, a forgotten third, keeping an eye on Campbell's hand. He understood perfectly Kate's promotion from the rank of novice to that of confidante. Dry and desiccated as he might affect to be, Campbell wasn't dead.
The two hunched over the display case in front of the tusks, Jack peering over their shoulders. " These tusks of an infant mammoth,"
Kate read aloud, " ' found with this stone projectile point near Ester.
This discovery suggests that people occupied the Fairbanks area during the Pleistocene period and hunted mammoths."
Campbell beamed at her. "You see?" He dropped his voice and said in a deferential tone, "I hope you don't mind my asking, but would you be an Alaska Native?" "I would," she said, dropping her own voice an octave, a difficult feat since the scarring on her larynx brought her voice out in a throaty rasp perilously close to a bass anyway.
"I thought so," he said smugly, and flung out one hand. "Then you should take considerable pride in the strength and the skill and the sheer daring of your ancestors. They faced down one of the largest mammals in their co evolutionary time frame and served him up for Sunday dinner."
She frowned up at the skull and tusks displayed above the case. "Why does the display say mastodon on one side and mammoth on the other?"
He guided her around to the front of the exhibit, the better to stare head-on into the mammoth skull's empty eyes. "They were both proboscideans, my dear. The American mastodon, or Mammut american us and the woolly mammoth, or Mammuthus primi genius
"Proboscideans?" Jack said involuntarily. "What the hell is a proboscidean when it's at home?"
Campbell disdained even a single glance over his shoulder at the amateur. "The first elephants, Mr., en-"
"Morgan," Jack supplied.
"Yes, of course, Mr. Gorman."
Kate ignored them both and ran her fingers over the samples of teeth displayed at the front of the exhibit below a sign saying, PLEASE TOUCH.
She closed her eyes and ran her tongue over her own teeth. She had molars that felt like the mastodon's teeth, canines that felt like the mammoth's. She opened her eyes and gave Campbell one of her best smiles.
Before it wore off, she tucked one hand in his arm and said confidingly,
"So when Daniel Sea bolt asked for help with a class on dinosaurs, of course you couldn't help him."
"Certainly not," Campbell said, mesmerized, reminding Jack irresistibly of Mowgli falling deeper under Kaa's spell.
She fussed a little with the front of his shirt, straightening a collar, smoothing a lapel. "What subject did you suggest he cover instead? The woolly mammoth?"
"It was what he was interested in, at first, after I told him I couldn't help with the dinosaur project."
"No," she murmured encouragingly.
"And of course I have made a special study of taphonomy."
"Of course." Again with the admiring glance. And do you leap tall buildings with a single bound?
Jack wondered what taphonomy was but he wasn't fool enough to ask.
"So I suggested he have his class conduct a study of mammals of the Pleistocene instead. These would include the woolly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger and the steppe bison, of which we have a very fine specimen." He guided her carefully around the mammoth exhibit to the mounted figure of Blue Babe, a steppe bison discovered on a mining claim near Fairbanks. They regarded the figure. The museum was between busloads for the moment, and silent. Babe was prone, legs folded beneath him, and he looked a little annoyed, in Jack's opinion, as if he hadn't taken kindly to having his eternal rest disturbed for the satisfaction of a lot of gawking tourists. "I pointed out that some of the mammals that existed during the Pleistocene still exist today-the caribou, the musk ox, the wolf--and that these were creatures with whom his students were undoubtedly familiar, and so would present a link, past to present." "Very neat," Kate said approvingly. Campbell beamed. "What happened?"
The beam dimmed. "I'm sure I don't know. We had it all arranged, including a field trip over which I myself would have presided, not that I really have the time for such extraneous nonsense. He didn't contact me again, of course." His superior smile was world-weary.
"They never do, these dilettantes. No scholarship, no perseverance, no intellectual curiosity whatever. Simply any little thing to keep the kiddies amused and off the streets, and then not even that." "Dreadful,"
Kate said sympathetically.
Enough was enough. Jack excused himself and went to wait outside in the smoke-filtered sun with one of the survivors of the Pleistocene era.
Kate found him a few moments later, playing tag on the brown lawn with Mutt. "So," Jack said, panting to a halt in front of her, "you make a date for later, or what?"
"No, I've already got a date for later, with someone else." Mutt bounced over and demanded attention, and it was a while before Kate slid to a halt next to Jack and added blandly, "One of my old teachers." "Good," he said, recovering his composure, "there's a guy I want to drop in on at the Center for Justice. Meet you in an hour in front of the fountain?"
"Make it an hour and a half."
"Okay."
They parted and Kate cut through Wood Center, the student union building. The stairway that went nowhere was still there, as was the sunken lounge, although with a lot less chairs in it than she remembered. The pizza parlor on the second floor was new and smelled of garlic even though it was closed, promising well of the cuisine.
She remembered the building as full of students, all in a hurry, all with the same look of urgency on their faces. Today it was deserted.
She saw one person wiping tables in the second-floor cafeteria, another behind the information counter downstairs. A strip bulletin board ran around the wall and Kate paused to read a few of the notices.
NEED TO RENT HOUSE
3 PEOPLE: MOM & 2 DAUGHTERS
(AGES 9 & 12)
PLUS: CAT; SMALL, WELL-BEHAVED HOUSE DOG, & 7 SLED DOGS
(PREFER RUNNING H20) Kate liked the placement of the seven sled dogs.
Almost an afterthought. Made the cat, the well behaved house dog and the two daughters seem insignificant by comparison.
Written in Marksalot on a sheet of typing paper, another notice read:
AIRPLANE TICKET ONE WAY UNITED AIRLINES ANCHORAGE-CHICAGO-WASHINGTON, D.C.
AUGUST 20
$450
Transportation to Anchorage was evidently your option. Well, there was always the train. She wondered if college students still hitched.
Probably. They all thought they were immortal. So had she, once.
SEMINAR THE INTER HEMISPHERIC BERING STRAIT TUNNEL AND RAILROAD Now, there was a seminar Kate would like to attend. Nonstop, Nome to Anadyr, Anchorage to Vladivostok, Washington, D. C." to Moscow without ever leaving the wheel of your car. She wondered how one bought gas in Russia. She wondered if Russian teachers were allowed to teach their students that gas was refined from petroleum, which was a fossil fuel formed over millions of years from decayed plant and animal remains, such as dinosaurs. She wondered how long it would be before the same people who protested Daniel Seabolt's teachings in Chistona stormed the ivied halls of the University of Alaska.
The prospect depressed her, and she left Wood Center through the front door, crossed between Gruening and Rasmuson, circled the fountain and found the engineers' stone right where she'd left it the day she graduated. The pyramidal shape was painted a color something between nauseous lavender and bilious pink but no one had stolen it lately and the bronze plaque affixed to the front was still firmly affixed.
"Fundatori Mundi," Kate said in greeting, and read the inscription through from beginning to end, and laughed like she always did. Her first year up, it was about the only laugh she got.
She walked back to Gruening and her feet took her the rest of the way on their own, up to the third floor and down the hall. The door opened inward, she saw Tom Winklebleck look up from behind his desk and smile, and the memories rolled back as if it were yesterday, as if it were 1981 again and Kate that silent, miserable eighteen-year-old in the back row of the classroom.
Short of height, spare of frame, dressed in worn twill trousers and plaid shirt and shoepaks, long hair combed back from his face in soft gray waves, gray beard and mustache neatly trimmed to chin length, at first sight Tom Winklebleck had given the impression of barely contained energy perilously close to achieving critical mass. Her first day in his class, he had swept the room with one piercing, all encompassing glance that had left Kate feeling a little singed around the edges. He had perched one hip on the corner of the desk at the front of the room, and produced three books. One was a thin, tattered paperback; the other two were thick and hardbound and equally old.
The class, most of them freshmen and sophomores whose natural youthful optimism had been burned out after four years of Sophocles, Dante and Shakespeare droned at them with as much indifference as ineptitude, eyed him with wariness and in some cases downright hostility. He waited out wariness and hostility with equal calm, without speaking, and something in the intensity of his dark eyes and the patient quality of his silence got to them. The whispers and the rustling died away, the signal for him to open the larger of the three books and begin to read aloud.
He had the most beautiful reading voice Kate had ever heard in her life and ever would hear again. A flowing, mellow tenor without stammer, stutter or mispronunciation, sensitive to feeling, rich with power, it rolled out full-throated and deep, deep as the sound of the biggest bell on the steeple. It fever berated throughout the room, and it reverberated through each and every instant convert sitting before him.
Our legions are brimful, our cause is ripe:
The enemy increase every day; We, at the height, are ready to decline.
With that reading of those three lines he brought them up, erect in their chairs, tense and expectant. If the cause was ripe and the enemy increasing every day, then the time to strike was obvious; it was now, this very moment. They waited but for him to tell them how and when before arming themselves and setting out forthwith.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
He looked at the class over the top of the page, accenting the last syllables with a drawling scorn that expected little more of them. It stung their pride, as he had meant it to, and they stared back at him almost angrily.
On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.
He closed the book. "This is poetry," he said.
They stared at him, dazed and dumb, more than one with their hearts thudding in their breasts as they traveled back two thousand years from the plains of Philippi to arrive with a thump in the drab, humdrum twentieth-century classroom.