Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall



  EARTHFALL

  By Thomas P. Hopp

  Book One of the Dinosaur Wars Series

  First Edition Copyright 2000 Thomas P. Hopp

  Second Edition Copyright 2004 Thomas P. Hopp

  Third Edition Copyright 2013 Thomas P. Hopp

  For my mother Edee, who taught me a hero had better be good.

  “That was my biggest blunder.” —Albert Einstein

  Praise for Dinosaur Wars:

  “Solid science and pacing that never quits.”

  —Kay Kenyon, Philip K. Dick Award nominated author of Maximum Ice

  “Fills the void since Jurassic Park. And Hopp’s book may be better.”

  —Steve Brusatte, DinoLand Review

  “The moon will never look the same.”

  —Bob Gue

  PART ONE: Moonstrike

  Chapter 1

  Chase Armstrong paused on a game trail high on a Montana mountainside. He had spotted what he was looking for. Two wolves sprinted across the sloping grasslands, weaving among the sagebrush and lodgepole pines dotting the landscape. Chase pulled the bill of his green National Park Service cap down to shield his eyes from the morning sun and looked hard at their coat markings. Yes, they were the wolves he was after—288F and 293M, two breakaway yearlings from the Geyser Basin pack over in Yellowstone Park. The young female was out front, sprinting at flank speed. Every time the male got near her tail she wheeled and snapped at him and then tore off in a new direction. Someone might think this was war, but Chase smiled. It was puppy love.

  It would be the real thing soon. And Chase hoped these two runaways would establish a new pack here. That kind of excitement—the renewal of life—was what caused Chase, fresh out of college and only an assistant park ranger, to love the wolf reintroduction program. He surely didn’t love the tedious days radio-tracking wandering Canis lupus, or weary evenings at his rented cabin, writing fatality reports when a wolf was hit by a truck or by a rancher’s bullet. Nothing was particularly appealing about the tiny town of Silver Gate where he lived on the northeast corner of Yellowstone Park, compared to the urban pleasures of his hometown, Seattle.

  But a day like this made it all worthwhile—a day when the June sun blazed but cool gusts of air came down into the foothills from snowfields lingering in the 12,000-foot Beartooth Mountains. Above him, the rangeland climbed unevenly into the granite crags. A mass of white clouds boiled up from the highest pinnacles, bringing the last of the season’s rain. Today Chase had risen before dawn—on the longest day of the year that meant 4 am—to drive 90 miles northeast from Silver Gate. He had gotten the local cattle rancher’s permission to cross his land and then driven and hiked seven miles to this spot.

  These breakaway pups would mean more controversy sometime soon when they took down a young steer or a lamb, but right now Chase soaked up the beauty of their dance of love. They moved across the rolling rangeland, weaving in and out of sagebrush thickets, whirling around the base of a stunted ponderosa pine. Maybe they sensed a day like this under the big sky—a vast cool blue infinity with splashes of white clouds—was a rare event not to be wasted. Summer heat, dust, and flies would be on them soon enough. Right now all that mattered was their courtship.

  “I hate to interrupt,” Chase whispered. Raising his 30-06 rifle he lined up the female in his sights. He inhaled a deep breath of sage-scented air. Letting it out slowly, he squeezed the trigger. The bang of the cartridge sent the dart arcing smoothly to her rump. Minutes later she was down and Chase was kneeling over her, fastening a radio collar around her neck.

  Once it was secure he tested its signal with the receiver he carried in his backpack. He injected a dose of antidote and stood back to keep watch as the anesthetic wore off. He knew a darted wolf was vulnerable until fully recovered. The high country held plenty of danger—mountain lions, bears, or wolves from a strange pack.

  Chase glanced around as he waited on the wolf’s recovery but saw no signs of danger. Not even the male wolf was around. It had disappeared at the sound of the rifle.

  The view outward from the Beartooths was as spectacular as the peaks themselves. Chase could see the craggy Crazy Mountain Range fifty miles away across the dusty plains to the northwest. Nearer, the triangular peak of Sandstone Mountain jutted above the other foothills, a towering reddish-tan rock pyramid and the centerpiece of Twin Creeks Ranch.

  In a valley several miles below lay the ranch compound itself, half hidden among tree-studded hills. From Chase’s high vantage point, it looked like a little fortress of clustered buildings in the middle of a green pasture. When he had stopped there this morning to get permission to enter the property, rancher Will Daniels had been out by the barn loading his jeep. His daughter had been saddling her horse.

  “Wolves?” The old man had growled. “You’re bringin’ back them varmints my daddy worked all his life to get rid of? No thanks.” Chase got that kind of reception from ranchers a lot. Step out of the green pickup truck with a National Park Service emblem on the door wearing the tan shirt with National Park Service arrowhead arm patch, green shorts and ball cap, and it was a dead giveaway at a hundred paces you would be on the environmental side of any issue that came up. Just looking at you raised most ranchers’ hackles. Cattlemen like Will Daniels, who ran 600 head of Black Angus beef on his property, had not one spit of respect for wolves.

  “I suppose I can’t stop you,” Daniels had grumbled, but in the end he wasn’t too hardheaded. He had even given some directions to a little back road that led halfway up to this high ground. Then again, old Daniels had had that I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile ranchers sometimes wore. It usually meant one of two things, either “I’ll see you in court, first time I lose a calf,” or “No problem, I’ll shoot your wolves later.” Normally Chase could figure which of the two it was but Daniels was a hard one to read, polite but closed-mouthed.

  Not so Daniels’ daughter, Kit. Smallish, sandy-haired, and strikingly pretty, she had flashed him a big smile when he introduced himself, like maybe she didn’t share her father’s prejudices. When the old man went to hitch a livestock trailer to his jeep, she had been quite friendly, telling Chase how the ranch got its name from two streams that drained opposite sides of Sandstone Mountain and joined near the house, introducing her old mare whose name was Lucky, and asking him a dozen questions about wildlife biology.

  “We’re schoolmates!” she had exclaimed when he mentioned he was in the Masters Program at Montana State University in Bozeman. “I’ll be a junior there this fall. I wonder why I haven’t seen you around?”

  “I spend most of my time in the mountains doing field research,” he had said. Seeing a hint of disappointment cross her face, he had added, “But, sure, maybe I’ll see you around.” He had suddenly noticed how her bright blue eyes peeked at him from under her cowboy hat brim. They held the spark of intelligence mingled with a touch of tomboy charm. As she had cinched her horse’s saddle strap, he had answered her questions about how hard it was to get a master’s degree and who his thesis advisor was, but inwardly he had begun searching for a way to suggest something more than chitchat. Her father had come back and interrupted.

  “You got any other questions I can answer, mister wolf man?” He’d drawled the last two words derogatorily. The old man had looked from one of them to the other until Chase tired of his stare and went to his pickup without another word.

  Now, knowing the wolves were definitely on the Danielses’ property, it occurred to him he would get a chance to see Kit again. Maybe he would invite her to picnic up here and watch the wolves.

  A flicker of blue drew his attention to the sky, where the daytime moon caught his eye. It was a thing of remarkable beauty, a
bright white crescent blotched with pastel blue floating in the deeper blue sky not far from the morning sun. There was nothing unusual about it. It was the same moon that always rose in the daytime at this phase. But what had flickered?

  A flash of brighter blue appeared again and this time Chase saw it clearly. It was a thin shaft of light coming from the bottom tip of the moon’s crescent, the south pole. The beam was narrow and laser-like, streaking away toward the western horizon. It glinted for just a second and then vanished.

  A moment later, another stronger flash appeared from the same point on the moon, this time aimed off to the east. It reminded Chase of a laser light display, the beam darting one way or another but originating from the same point. And the light wasn’t like the red or green lasers he had seen at shows. It had more of a bluish white-hot look to it. What didn’t make sense was its origin on the moon. How could that be? A government experiment? A freak of nature? He scanned the sky but nothing else was happening. He shrugged, passing it off as something he would read about online or see on TV.

  A noise in a nearby willow thicket reminded Chase of more immediate matters. Something was moving there. Something big. Whatever it was, it was coming his way.

  Chase froze when the animal stood and raised its head out of the willows. It was a grizzly bear, not forty feet away from him. True to its name, it was a grizzly sight. A shock of coarse blond-brown hackles jutted out from its head and shoulders. The animal’s beady black eyes fixed tight on Chase. Like hungry grizzlies tended to do, it came straight at him as soon as it saw him.

  Chase glanced at the wolf. Her feet were twitching but she was still out cold. Unwilling to retreat and give her to the bear and with no time to hesitate, Chase reached into his breast pocket and took out one of the live bullets he had brought along. He threw open the single-shot breach of his rifle, quickly fitted the bullet and snapped the breach handle shut. The bear was already halfway to him. There would be no time for a second bullet.

  He took a step forward, straddled the wolf and raised the rifle. The bear was a big one, maybe seven hundred fifty pounds. It halted only a dozen feet away, lowered its nose and sniffed the air, eyeing the wolf. Chase knew this bear habit. If you can run another hunter off of his prize, you get a free meal. But Chase had no intention of moving. The she-wolf was about half consciousness. She would be on her feet in a minute or two.

  “Back off!” Chase shouted at the bear, sighting between its eyes with the rifle. “You can’t have her.”

  The grizzly didn’t take kindly to being threatened. It rose on its hind legs and roared back at him. Chase felt sweat break out on his brow. He knew the grizzly was measuring itself against him, height for height, and he was on the short end of the measurement. He aimed at its heart and touched his finger to the trigger, but hesitated. Saving wildlife was his job, not killing it, and the grizzly was as endangered here as the wolf. Right now Chase realized he was as endangered as the bear.

  Suddenly the grizzly dropped to all fours and bolted into the brush as if it had seen the bear equivalent of a ghost. Just as it disappeared, the terrific blast of a sonic boom—only ten times louder—hit Chase with jawbone-jarring impact. He looked up to see a huge aircraft passing overhead so near it seemed he could touch it.

  It was a silver delta-winged glider like a space shuttle but with double tail fins and ten times the size. Hugging the ground, it raced downslope, hurtled along the brush-choked ravine Chase had climbed to get where he was, and veered to the left, disappearing behind the pyramid-shaped peak of Sandstone Mountain. A moment later a distant rumble echoed up the canyon as if the flying machine had crash-landed on the other side of the mountain.

  A rustling in the brush behind Chase made him wheel around, ready to face the bear again. Instead, he saw the she-wolf’s tail vanish among the bushes. She had recovered while he was distracted and taken the opportunity to flee.

  Good. His task here was done. He would be back to follow her sometime soon but right now he wanted to know what had happened to the bizarre aircraft.

  It took fifteen minutes to hike down to his pickup, parked in a graveled turnaround where the Danielses’ fence road ended against the cliff base of Sandstone Mountain. He hung his rifle on the gun rack in the rear window, dropped his backpack on the floor, put the bullets in their case in the glove box, and turned on the CB radio. He wanted to ask around about the flying machine but got nothing but static on every channel he tried. That was odd. No matter though, he would find out more in Red Lodge on his way home. But before he drove off, he thought it might be worthwhile chatting with the other denizen of the turnaround. Maybe Professor Ogilvey could explain the aircraft, the lights from the moon, or both.

  Dr. David Ogilvey was an elderly semi-retired paleontologist from the Museum of the Rockies at Bozeman, here for a summer digging season. Chase had met him this morning in his camp on the grassy flat beside the road end. Ogilvey’s rusty and dented beige Land Rover was still parked beside the turnaround so Chase assumed the fossil hunter was near.

  “Dr. Ogilvey?”

  No answer.

  Chase poked around the campsite. The big, square, old-fashioned white canvas tent was empty. In the morning Ogilvey had been eating breakfast at the camp table, now deserted except for a propane stove and boxes of goods cluttering its surface. The old scientist wasn’t puttering among the dozen wooden crates of fossils scattered around the camp. Chase had nearly decided to head for home when he spotted something that quickly changed his mind. Kit Daniels’ old brown mare, Lucky, was tied to a hitching rail in the shade of a ponderosa pine. Listening carefully, he heard faint voices. He scrambled down the bank of a little muddy creek and followed the sound for twenty yards downstream. He spotted Kit and the professor on the creek bank at the base of Sandstone Mountain’s cliff, standing on rubble thrown out from a new dig and discussing something the professor held in his hand.

  Chase watched them for a moment unobserved. Dr. Ogilvey was a comical old cuss, short and stout, dressed in a khaki safari shirt and shorts with scrawny arms and knobby knees thrust out of the appropriate openings. All that, and a pair of outsized hiking boots and a gray beard combined to give him an owl-like appearance, but with little of an owl’s grace or dignity. He wore a dusty canvas hat and his eyes peered through thick glasses in an owlish way while he ogled the object in his hand. He gabbed excitedly about it while Kit asked questions with obvious interest.

  Chase took a good look at Kit as well. She was cowboyed up in a red-and-white checked western shirt, blue jeans, and brown cowboy boots and hat, with a long mare’s tail of sandy hair gathered and hanging down her back. There was nothing shy about her and she seemed to hold her own in conversation with the professor. Despite her masculine clothing, Chase couldn’t help noticing the way her trim feminine curves filled out those blue jeans.

  He swallowed hard and shook himself, reigning in his animal instincts. “Hey you two,” he called. “How’s it coming with the Pter— Ptera-whatchamacallit?” He didn’t quite remember Ogilvey’s name for the creature being unearthed here.

  “Pteronychus,” Kit replied, batting her blue eyes at him cordially as he came up the path. “You don’t pronounce the P in Pteronychus. It’s Terr-ON-ickus.”

  “Got it,” he said, feeling a little outgunned where dinosaur names were concerned.

  Dr. Ogilvey squinted through his thick glasses at Chase’s nametag. “Hello again Mr. uhh, Armstrong.” He touched the tattered brim of his hat and nodded, simultaneously hiding the object in his other hand behind his back. Chase instinctively leaned to follow the hand behind the paleontologist’s plump midsection. The old man laughed a geezing “Hee-hee!” and brought back out an oddly shaped lump of rock.

  “I guess you’re wondering what we’ve got here.” He smiled sheepishly and held the stone out for Chase to see. It looked like nothing more than a yellowish-white fragment of rock. “I suppose there’s no need for me to hide it. You don’t look like a commercial fossil hunt
er. Are you one?”

  Chase shook his head. “I’m not particularly interested in fossils.”

  “Good,” said Ogilvey. “I forget that you biologists like your predators alive and your bones with meat on them. I suppose it would be okay to let you in on our little secret.” He turned to Kit. “What do you think?” She looked unsure, but Ogilvey had made up his mind.

  “Do you recognize this?” He hefted the chunk of stone up under Chase’s nose for a close look. It seemed like nothing special so Chase made a guess based on the name of the mountain. “Sandstone?”

  “Hardly, my boy,” Ogilvey scoffed. “It’s a type of limestone. Alabaster to be exact.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Heeh!” The old man’s woolly face gaped in a long-toothed grin. “It’s a key piece of a great mystery I’ve been unraveling. Come have a look.” Without waiting for a response, Ogilvey turned and descended into his excavation. It was a huge trench, stretching for about thirty feet along the cliff and extending twenty feet wide, right up to the rock face.

  Chase hesitated. “Did you see that airplane—?”

  “Kit discovered the first few bones along the banks of Eggshell Creek here several years ago,” Ogilvey lectured, ignoring Chase’s half-spoken concern. “Since then, there’s been much digging and one discovery after another. The latest is the most startling of all. Come on!”

  Kit scrambled down the crumbling bank of the trench and Chase shrugged, and then followed, taking a good look at Ogilvey’s prodigious earth-moving efforts. Stretched out on the flat bottom of the excavation, three dinosaur skeletons lay exposed but still half-buried in the trench floor. The bones were amber-brown, contrasting with gray dust surrounding them. Lines of vertebrae and ribs traced the forms of one larger skeleton, about human sized, and two smaller ones. Something about the way the skeletons were grouped seemed peculiar.

  “Pteronychus family,” Ogilvey proclaimed with a note of pride. “That’s what we have here.” He pointed his piece of stone at them. “Mother and two babies.”

  The body of the larger animal was about human-sized, but not human-shaped. About ten feet from the tip of its toothy snout to the end of its long tail, it was a two-legged carnivorous dinosaur, stretched out on its side with its head thrown back in a death agony. Chase saw nothing unusual about it, but the positions of the smaller creatures surprised him. They lay within the arms of the adult, clutched to its chest, one on each side. Furthermore, they were curled with their arms and legs drawn in, their heads turned to burrow against the adult’s breast. It was a poignant scene, one he might have expected from a human family caught in a disaster of some kind. The tiny bones of the babies seemed impossibly delicate, cradled in their mother’s arms.

  “Isn’t it sad?” asked Kit, a little choked up. “Look at how gently she’s holding them.” Though the mother’s three-fingered hands were tipped with deadly talons, they seemed to touch the infants tenderly, comforting them even at the instant of death.

  “Death is always sad,” Ogilvey said pedantically. “You don’t dig fossils without getting used to that.”

  “But this—” Chase stammered. “This tenderness isn’t something I’d expect from a reptile.”

  Ogilvey chuckled. “Underestimating dinosaurs has been standard procedure for everyone including paleontologists—until now.”

  “Until now?”

  “Yes, yes. I was just showing Kit my latest discovery when you arrived. I dare say no one will underestimate dinosaurs again.”

  Kit remained conspiratorially silent, giving Chase an inscrutable smile. There was some secret between these two that he suspected was about to be revealed.

  The old man swept an expository gesture across the skeletons. “You’re looking at the very last moment of the Cretaceous Era. This is the end of the age of dinosaurs, right here. These creatures were killed by the asteroid impact that devastated the earth, destroying them and their civilization at the same time.”

  “Civilization?” Chase asked. “That’s an odd choice of words. I’ve never heard it used in the context of dinosaurs.”

  “Nonetheless,” Ogilvey grinned. “Civilization.”

  Chase looked to Kit for confirmation and she nodded. The concept was going to take some time to sink in but Ogilvey went on with professorial flair.

  “Yes, my boy, it’s all here. You’re looking at the greatest discovery in the history of paleontology. See there, Chase?” He pointed across the excavation to a mound of stacked stones, cobble-sized chunks of alabaster like the piece in his hand. “Those were strewn right over the skeletons. I had to remove them to uncover the bones. Notice anything different about them?”

  Chase looked carefully at the pile. “They’re all about the same size.”

  “Good, Chase. Your observation skills are not bad, for a biologist. But look at the shapes.”

  “They’re all shaped the same,” said Chase. “Rectangular.”

  “They’re bricks,” Kit interjected as if waiting for Ogilvey to lead Chase to a conclusion was too slow a game for her.

  The thought boggled Chase’s mind. “Bricks buried with dinosaurs?”

  “Exactly.” Ogilvey placed his alabaster fragment on the pile and straightened his portly body, wiping the dust from his hands on the legs of his khaki shorts. “Alabaster bricks. Some are broken, but originally they were identical. You’re standing on the site of a Cretaceous city.”

  “City!” Chase struggled to accept what he was hearing.

  “Yes, yes,” said Ogilvey. “These bricks tumbled down from the city walls.”

  “But Professor,” Kit said, resuming the conversation Chase had interrupted when he arrived, “if the asteroid hit in the Gulf of Mexico, that’s a thousand miles away.”

  “Farther,” Ogilvey replied. “But the force of the impact sent out a massive shock wave.” He bent over the mother pteronychus and peered into an empty eye socket. “What must she have seen? A flash of light in the sky somewhere down south and then a blast of white-hot air ripped through the city, knocking her down and searing her and her babies to death. And then an earth tremor buried her under tumbling bricks. And as if that wasn’t enough, she and her babies would have been submerged by a giant tidal wave that arrived a few hours later.”

  He spread out his hands to encompass the whole dig, from the skeletons to the brick pile to the undermined cliff edge. “You’re looking at the end of the world here, quite literally.”

  “Stupendous.” Chase felt a chill just thinking of the calamity, until the thought of another flash in the sky came to mind. “Did you see—?” he began, but Ogilvey lectured on.

  “There’s more. This sandstone cliff towering above us is part of a huge tsunami deposit formed from sand washed up by the tidal wave. Montana was on the edge of an inland sea then, and the wave traveled unobstructed from the Gulf straight up here. I’ll wager it was the biggest tidal wave the world has ever seen. This whole mountain is made of sand carried by the flood, hardened into stone over the intervening 65 million years. And, unless I miss my guess, the remains of that ancient city lie right under there.” He pointed to the rear of the excavation, where he had started tunneling into the dusty clay underlying the sandstone of the cliff.

  “There’s a city buried under Sandstone Mountain?” Kit asked.

  “Yes, my dear. The clay on which we stand and these specimens of pteronychus mark the level where the city stood but the sandstone itself is an over-layer encasing the whole thing. I’ve dug back under the cliff a ways, following the base of a brick wall. And I keep finding tantalizing clues. There’s more back there, I am sure. Perhaps most of the ancient city. An entire Lost World waiting to be uncovered.”

  Chase’s mind reeled. Ogilvey was overturning everything he had ever learned about dinosaurs and their extinction. It was baffling, but it was not his only concern right now. He held up a hand to preempt Ogilvey’s lecture. “Now, wait a minute,” he insisted. “Before you go any further, I’ve go
t something to say. The moon—”

  “Yes, yes,” Ogilvey chafed at the interruption. “What of the moon? It’s still in the sky, I expect.”

  “Listen you old buzzard!” Chase shouted to make himself heard. “There’s something going on up there, flashes of light coming from the moon.”

  “Atmospheric phenomena,” Ogilvey snorted, adjusting his glasses and looking over the brick pile as if searching for miniscule clues.

  “Didn’t you see what flew past here about an hour ago? Didn’t you hear that sonic boom?”

  The paleontologist raised his arms to indicate their surroundings. The sky was hemmed in on one side by the towering cliff of Sandstone Mountain and on the other by the stream gully. Only a narrow swath of blue was visible. “Down in this dig,” he asserted, “I don’t see much of the sky.”

  “I heard the boom,” said Kit, “but I didn’t see anything. I thought it was some kind of military aircraft. There was a noise like that last night, too.”

  “The U.S. military?” Chase considered the idea. “I didn’t see an insignia.”

  Ogilvey scowled his annoyance at the abbreviation of his lecture. “Have you had your eyes checked lately, son?” He picked up his shovel and moved to the back of the dig. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lost civilization to uncover.”

  Chase was at a loss to provoke a reaction from the old man, so he left him digging under the cliff overhang and walked back out of the excavation. Kit followed, her face registering real concern when a bolt of whitish-blue light sliced across the sky visible between the cliff and the gully wall.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” said Chase.

  The flash was brighter than others he had seen and it was followed by a sound like thunder rumbling off the cliffs of Sandstone Mountain.

  “Do you think we’re in danger?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I suppose there’s some rational explanation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Beats me. But the lights are nothing compared to the aircraft, a spacecraft, maybe. I think it crashed on the other side of the mountain.”

  Kit’s expression darkened. “That’s where my father is, up on the high range with the herd.”

  “Well,” said Chase. “I’ll bet he knows what’s going on by now even if the rest of us don’t.”

  She frowned. “I think I’ll go home. Maybe he’s back already.”

  “I’d be glad to tag along,” Chase offered. “I’m curious about what he might have seen over there.”

  “No,” she said. “My father’s not too partial to strangers.”

  Disappointed, Chase nodded toward Dr. Ogilvey clanking away with his shovel. “If your father isn’t partial to people coming around, why does he tolerate that strange old bird?”

  “Because it’s important to me. I found the first dinosaur fossils here when I was a kid. The museum sent Dr. Ogilvey to study them and, well, I’ve been interested in dinosaurs ever since. I lend a hand here sometimes.”

  “Is that what you’re studying at the University? Paleontology?”

  “Yeah, as much as I can. But my father makes me take classes in animal husbandry. His heart’s set on me running this ranch someday.”

  The air shook with the whu-whump of another sonic boom.

  “There.” Kit pointed to the source, a vapor trail far up in the stratosphere. Whatever it was seemed to be moving incredibly fast but silently now that the boom had passed. They caught only a brief glimpse before it disappeared behind the cliff.

  “The one I heard last night must have been closer,” she said. “It was a lot louder, like that noise a while ago.”

  The whinny of a horse echoed along the canyon.

  “Oh-oh,” she said. “That sound spooked Lucky. I’d better go check on her.” She called a hasty goodbye to Dr. Ogilvey, who seemed not to hear, and started hiking back up the creek bed.

  Chase followed. “That’s about enough weirdness for me,” he said. “I’m heading back down to Red Lodge to find out what’s up. If you want, I’ll get on the CB radio and let you know. Or better yet, Kit, what’s your phone number?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “Daddy and I can tune in the TV news on the satellite dish tonight. If you learn anything really important, you can find us in the Red Lodge phone book.”

  “Sure. I guess you’re right.” Chase was embarrassed she had spotted his ploy and a little disappointed she hadn’t played along.

  A minute later they stood at the hitching rail and Kit stroked Lucky’s flank to calm her. She planned to ride back to her house on a game trail that followed the creek. Chase would be taking the fence road. He thought she looked a little short to easily make it into the saddle by herself.

  “Want help getting up?”

  She looked at him critically, then grabbed the saddle horn, put a boot-toe in the stirrup and swung herself up into the saddle. “I can manage just fine,” she smiled. “See ya.” She touched the rim of her hat and then snapped the reins lightly across Lucky’s neck. They cantered off down the little creekside path.

  “Bye,” he called after her, with an odd feeling in his chest. He’d only met Kit Daniels this morning but she had quickly gotten under his skin. Watching her move in unison with the canter of her horse, her trim shoulders square under her cowboy hat, her blue-jeaned hips rising and falling smoothly to the rhythm of the gait, he shook his head. Darned if she wasn’t a major distraction coming when he ought to keep his mind on other things. After she disappeared around a bend in the canyon, he got in his pickup and drove back down the fenceline road.

  On the way, he couldn’t help wishing she had wanted him to call. “To be continued?” he wondered aloud. When the fence road reached the asphalt county highway he turned right, heading for Red Lodge.