Droving had been a lost American craft until the 'dines had resurged. Who cared if they were totally real or not, so long as a profit might be turned from herding them?
The big beasts had rescued Case from the fallout of his third firebombed marriage and a coke habit which, fiscally speaking, had begun to resemble the jackpot of the state lottery on one of those days when nobody had picked the right numbers for awhile. He had not known how appealing a cold-turkey switchoff could be until his droving contract had been bonded. He'd been required to pass urine and blood tests, and had skinned past. Only just.
He had replaced the whoopee dust with Camels and contemplation. The hole left in him by Pearl never closed.
The hornet buzz of Aguilar's trailbike came razzing across the flats. Like Moses, he had come on down. Probably with no news of spirits. And at dawn Shack would gravely inform all hands that they had to stay right where they were for one more thrilling day.
If your honor was intact, the waiting wasn't so bad.
Case waited to swap the usual words with Aguilar. In about an hour there would be microwave chili and seven card stud, and a fire around which the oldest stories and the rawest jokes would be repeated one more time.
With a wet water balloon squeegee noise, a Triceratops pressed through into the real world, its golden disc eyes glazed from the transfer. It pawed dust and wandered off, making the earth tremble. Case sniffed the languid air. Nothing like fresh dino waft to hand-cancel your appetite.
Below, in the bowl of the valley, a thousand or so dinosaurs milled around in varying states of corporeality. Excreting. Mating. Waiting, like Case.
What started out as a Time Magazine cover screamer had become a growth industry. Case's current profession was a byproduct of the Sherlockian equations that had come out of that fella Seward's mind. And the happenstance that first set Seward to his brainwork had occurred at a rundown Texaco station in the middle of Riverside, California.
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