The Bone Hunter

by Tom Holland

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

An heir of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, Holland is a storyteller, dealing in mysteries and marvels ... he holds the reader's attention in an iron grip' DAILY TELEGRAPH

1878. The golden days of dinosaur discoveries. In the still-Wild West, fossils of a monstrous size are being uncovered by America's two greatest bone-hunters, Professors Marsh and Cope. Caught in the bitterest of feuds, their rival gangs steal or smash up each other's collections of bones, and clash murderously in the badlands of the West.

Back in New York, the two professors are sniffing out tantalising rumours of the ultimate find. Also lured by these hints are enigmatic English scientist Captain Dawkins and Miss Lilian Prescott, a naïve but wilful heiress. Drawn into a web of corruption and murder, they are forced on a desperate hunt for a box of mysterious fossils - a quest filled with danger, adventure and extraordinary discoveries.

Release date: May 19, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 528

Sample

 

In the early spring of 1878, on the southern plains of the territory of Wyoming, a storm blew up from a frozen sky, which
but a half-hour before had been a blinding, cloudless blue. There were two men caught out in the blizzard. They were mounted
on large Kentucky horses and dressed in long and battered leathern coats, their slouch hats pulled low against the violence
of the winds, so that there was no seeing their faces, not until they reached the side of a lake, where one of them paused
and his fellow looked up. Both were weather-worn, skin stretched tight across their bones, whiskers grizzled to the colour
of old gun-metal. Neither spoke, as though there weren’t the need, one the shadow of the other. But then the first man spat.
He fell to complaining. How they never should have left that afternoon. Hadn’t he said he’d smelt it, the snow blowing in?
What had he been doing, trusting to a Texan?


His companion, the Texan, said not a word in answer. Just eased the carbine slung across his back, then shook out his reins
and spurred on his horse. He rode down the bank of the lake. Thin ice was forming about the reeds and stones. The Texan began
to canter through the shallows, shattering the ice, leaving bright shards behind to mark his horse’s trail. His companion
followed. He didn’t bother grumbling any more. The wind too bitter to have it felt against the throat. The water as it splashed up freezing on
his boots. And still the snow falling and the flakes thick like goosedown.


By the time they reached the far bank the night was falling too. The first man reined in his horse. His eyes were narrow and
they darted to and fro.


‘Almighty God,’ he muttered, ‘this weather, we could be anywhere.’

The Texan angled his hat to scratch the back of his head. His long, dirty hair was frozen into plaits. He squeezed a couple
of them absently, thawing them in his grip, and then all at once he tensed and his look turned puzzled.


‘What is it?’

The Texan leaned forward, his head cocked, as though staring with his ears.

‘You didn’t see no light.’

‘I saw it, Benton.’ Without waiting the Texan urged his horse forward, though by now the snow reached up to the girth of his
saddle. His companion, the man addressed as Benton, shook his head, but he followed in the trail left by the Texan’s horse
all the same. They began to climb a slope. When Benton peered into the snow-blotted gloom he could just make out the ridge
of a bluff, stretching across the horizon. He shielded his eyes with the palm of his hand and scanned the bluff for anything
that might offer shelter. Suddenly he rocked back in his saddle. He rubbed his eyes, but when he looked again the light was
still flickering, and Benton was about to call out and wave his hat when he saw his companion draw his revolver.


‘Put that up, there’s no one here going to worry who we are.’

The Texan dismounted from his horse. He began to slither and stumble up a sharp incline, feeling his way across the snow-smothered
rocks. Though the way was treacherous he still gripped his revolver. After a second’s thought, Benton slipped down from his
saddle and drew out his own.


He followed the path which had been breasted by the Texan, taking care where the snow had been crushed into ice. All the way
up he stared at his boots. He wanted to mark his path, but also to avoid the burning of the snowfall in his face. The flakes
were finer now, but the wind was so cutting that they stung like grains of sand. Benton only looked up again once he’d reached
the crest of the bluff. The rocks levelled out to form an angled plateau. A wide trench had been dug across it, so deep that
it appeared to vanish into darkness, and leading from there were several sets of footprints, still clear enough despite the
blurring of their edges. Benton followed them with his eyes from the trench’s edge. They led to a large pile of crates, which
loomed from the gloom of shadow and snow. Benton crossed to them. He saw they had been boarded up with roughly nailed planks.
Some of them were almost twice the size of a man. The sight seemed the cause of a gleam in Benton’s eye. He ran his hand down
the side of one of them, then walked back to the side of the trench. ‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘Hey!’


There was no answer. But even as he peered down, he caught the movement of two dark shapes. The snow was so fine now that
it was barely more than a haze of shivered ice, and Benton could see as he inspected the opposite wall of the trench how the
rock lay banded in stripes of grey and purple. He called out again, and this time he was met by an answering cry. He could
make out the dark shapes more clearly now. There were two men, and they appeared to be struggling with a mighty lump of rock.


‘What you got there?’

One of the men glanced up and shouted something, but Benton couldn’t hear it above the screaming of the wind. After a moment’s
considering, he holstered his revolver.


‘You keep a good watch on me now,’ he told the Texan, then lowered himself carefully into the trench. He approached the two
men guardedly. They both wore hoods pulled tight across their faces, but Benton could just make out their moustaches, which
were long and straggly and dripping with sweat.


‘What you got there?’ Benton pointed to the rock.

‘Nothing you’d think was any use.’

‘Why?’ Benton stared at it some more, then asked in a cunning tone, ‘What would anyone want it for if it’s just a lump of
rock?’


‘You care to help us?’ Both the men seemed close to dropping their burden. After a moment’s hesitation, Benton stepped forward
to share the weight. ‘God’s name,’ he whispered, ‘something this heavy, it’s got to be precious to be carrying it in this
cold.’ But he had no breath to speak any more, and even when the job was done and the lump of rock delivered to a pallet by the crates, all the
men kept their silence, just sucking as best they could on the painful air, Benton wiping the sweat from his grizzled moustache.


‘So,’ he said at length, his voice raw and thin, ‘you got some shelter, because it sure is bitter cold like Hell out here.’

The taller of the two men, a swarthy-complexioned, handsome-looking fellow, blew into his hands, then gestured with his arm.
‘There’s a railroad station a mile or so back.’


‘Railroad?’ Benton frowned. ‘Where is this?’

‘This here? Why, this is named Como Bluff.’

Benton frowned. Rolled the syllables over his tongue. ‘Co-mo Bluff.’ He peered sharp-eyed at the two men. ‘And you two work
at this station then?’


‘Section foreman,’ said the tall man. ‘Reed, Bill Reed. And this here’s Vincent, who’s hired to help me out.’ He paused. ‘You?’

‘Me?’ answered Benton at length. ‘Oh, me, me and him’ – he gestured to the Texan – ‘we’re just looking for somewhere to bed
down for the night.’


Reed glanced at the Texan, who stood motionless, his Frontier still in his hand, leaning against the crates. ‘What’s the matter
with him?’ Reed asked. ‘He thinks it’s clever to go waving that thing round?’


Benton turned to meet the Texan’s eye. The Texan stood motionless a moment more, still leaning against the crates, then wiped
his nose and slipped the pistol into his belt. ‘You got any food?’ As the Texan asked this he looked all of a sudden heartsunk and famished, and he no longer
fixed to keep himself from shivering at the cold.


‘Got to safe this up first.’ Reed tapped the rock with the tip of his boot. ‘Then tomorrow, if you’re willing, maybe you can
help us move these crates down to the station.’ He gestured towards the boxes, dim and mournful in the twilight.


Benton stared at them with a rapacious curiosity. ‘What you got in them then,’ he tried again, ‘if not just lumps of old rock?’

Reed suddenly smiled. ‘You really want to know?’

‘I surely would.’

Reed nodded. ‘Then you’d best both come with me.’ He reached over to Vincent for the light and led the way back to the trench.
As he turned to scramble down into the darkness, his face, which before had seemed so guarded, now wore the aspect of a showman
at a fair. He waited for Benton and the Texan to follow, then started picking his way along the trench, slithering on the
frozen snow as he went. From above there came the heavy flapping of a tarpaulin stretched out across the rock. Reed stood
waiting on the margin of its shadow, then angled his torch to illumine the cliff face. ‘There. In the rock. That’s what we’re
hunting.’


Benton squinted. The trench had been braced with heavy timbers, and the torchlight was irregular and faint, so that at first
he could barely credit his eyes. He rubbed them. But when he opened them again there it still was, a dark shape formed by the contours of the rock. A dark shape that seemed to be a vast and monstrous bone.


‘You see it?’ Reed asked.

Benton stepped forward over the icy rubble. He reached out with a shaking hand to touch the spectral form. Wider, taller than
himself, a giant bone. He ran his fingers down the curve of its length, and as he did so he saw other bones embedded in the
rock – rib bones, hip bones, all of titanic size.


Reed smiled as he watched Benton’s face. ‘Uh-huh, you can see them all right.’

Benton guessed he was expected to answer. But he didn’t want to, still less to think. There were thoughts crowding him like
scavengers and he’d been fleeing them for many days now. Where they’d come from he couldn’t be sure, saving that they rose
from some place beyond the limits of what he’d ever thought to know. They wore a terrible aspect and they were nothing he
cared to be reminded of at all.


His eyes still not straying from the bone, Benton beckoned to the Texan. ‘Hey,’ he called out hoarsely, ‘you got to see this.
Get over, take a look at this.’


The Texan sauntered blank-faced into the flapping shadows. But when he saw the bone he started violently, and then he whistled
and scratched his head and stepped back out from underneath the canvas. He looked up at the sky. The snow had stopped falling
and the darkness was still with the iciness of night. The Texan began to moan to himself, then he reached for his revolver,
but Benton had already scrabbled over to him and was pulling on his arm. Benton clapped him round his shoulder and patted him soothingly, for all the world as though the Texan were a
startled horse.


‘Hey,’ Benton whispered, ‘hey, it’s all right.’ He turned back to Reed, who was looking somewhat nervous. ‘These bones,’ he
demanded, pointing to the rock, ‘where did they come from?’


‘Not from anything you’d find living today,’ Reed answered, glancing uneasily at the Texan, ‘if that’s your friend’s fear.
Why, this thing …’ – he began to walk further down the trench, swaying his light across the rock – ‘this lived millions of
years ago, when all about here was warm with jungles.’ He half-slipped again on the ice and hugged himself and shivered. ‘Strange
as that may seem.’


Benton followed him, still inspecting the rock. He could trace a pattern to the ribs now, and to the dispersal of the back
bones, see how they formed the contours of a skeleton. Like Reed he shuddered, though not with the cold. ‘Must have been a
monstrous thing.’


‘Giant lizards, that’s what they were, long as a train.’

‘And that’s a fact?’

‘It is indeed a fact and can be read here in this stone.’

‘And who is it wants them? You want them for yourself?’

‘Not me. There’s a professor back out East, Professor Othniel Marsh.’

‘Professor Othniel Marsh. Professor Othniel Marsh.’ Benton stretched out the syllables, as though with the pleasure of the
sound. He stood with his lips pursed a moment, then narrowed his eyes. ‘And this same professor – he’s the one been getting you to slave out in this cold?’


‘He wants all the bones from hereabouts as fast as he can get them.’

‘Hell, what’s the hurry?’ Benton began to laugh. ‘These monsters been buried for millions of years, what’s another month or
two?’


Reed smiled faintly from beneath his icy moustache. ‘Our professor, he’s not alone in wanting these dead bones.’

‘A rival?’

‘That’s how it appears.’

‘And this rival know about this place?’

‘Nope.’

‘And your professor’s eager it stays that way, I guess?’

Reed smiled again so that the ice on his moustache began to crack. ‘You could say that.’

Benton reached out to touch the black forms of a bone. ‘Who’d have guessed something quite so dead would ever bring so much.’
He glanced round at the Texan, then back at Reed. ‘I guess, one of these things was still alive, it’d be worth even more?’


‘I guess so,’ shrugged Reed, ‘but since there’s no chance of that, I just worry about getting the bones all safely packed
away.’ He raised an inquiring eyebrow, then pointed down the trench. ‘Back there,’ he said, ‘underneath the canvas, that’s
where all the hammers and the planks are kept.’


Benton met Reed’s stare, then shrugged and muttered, ‘Sure.’ He followed Reed and helped him and his hired man muster the tools. They all of them scrambled back out of the trench, and then Benton watched Reed set to fussing with
the timbers. At last, grown impatient by the sight, he pushed Reed aside and finished up the crate himself. The task didn’t
take him long. Only when the time came to nail down the final board did he pause a moment and gaze through the gap in the
crate – at the rock, and the strange dark shadow of the bone which it contained.


‘You’re willing,’ Reed said slowly, watching him, ‘there’s work enough here and more.’

‘The professor? Professor Othniel Marsh?’

Reed nodded. ‘Yessir. Professor Marsh.’

‘Well.’ Benton nodded. ‘Well, well,’ he said.

There was a silence. Then Reed tapped the crate with the tip of his boot. ‘Best stack this with the others. If the weather’s
good in the morning, we can take them down the station.’


Benton nodded faintly. He helped Reed and Vincent with the shifting of the crate, then he glanced towards the Texan, who was
still gazing up into the sky, his face pale, his eyes staring wide. Benton crossed to him and the Texan slowly lowered his
gaze to meet his companion’s eye. ‘You see that bone?’ he whispered. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, would you? Not if you didn’t
see it with your own eyes?’


‘No,’ answered Benton softly. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, no.’

The Texan twisted his mouth into a grin, but it was a fearful thing to see, for mirth was the last thing it appeared to signify. All the same he suddenly began to laugh, shaking his head, and then seeing Reed and Vincent heading off he wandered
after them, his shoulders still twitching. But Benton scanned the boarded crates again, and then scarcely without meaning
to he gazed into the sky. Snow was starting to fall again, falling from the blackness, swept in ragged blots upon the ever-shifting
storm, so that Benton, following their passage, could imagine that he was watching the movement of phantom wings, beating
once, twice, then forever dissolving.


Miss Lilian Prescott clutched at her hat, breathed in deeply of the Atlantic gales, and wished that she were dead. Indeed,
she had been longing for extinction for almost two days now, ever since watching the coast of Ireland melt away, for it was
then that she had first grown conscious of the rolling of the deck beneath her feet, and discovered, to her surprise, that
her constitution was not altogether the servant of her will. Even now, upon the violent heaving of the gale, the thought still
faintly affronted her, for Lily was a young lady accustomed to having her own way, and she could not help but regard her frailty
as a form of impertinence. And although it was perfectly true that she had suffered similarly on the outward voyage to Europe,
nevertheless it had been her vague assumption, now that she was engaged to marry Lord Bemerton, that she would never again
have to endure anything so undignified as common mal de mer. She clutched at her hat again. A surge of dizziness rolled across her thoughts. Really, she wondered faintly, if one still
had to suffer so, then what was the point in marrying a peer at all?


‘Your hat’s gone all crooked.’

Lily clenched both the railing and her teeth at the same time.

‘Lily, you do look funny, your face has gone all green like your eyes. Are you going to puke?’


‘Don’t say puke,’ snapped Lily, her teeth still clenched, ‘it’s vulgar. Say vomit.’ She turned very slowly, as though she
were balancing a pile of books upon her head, and inspected her brother through narrowed eyes. He appeared horribly full of
health, as only a six-year-old boy can be when the ocean spreads wild and unbounded all about him, and the whipping of the
wind makes his cheeks glow shiny pink. ‘Go away,’ Lily groaned.


Robbie began to run up and down the deck, his arms outstretched, whistling shrilly.

Lily barely had the strength to order him to stop, but somehow she mustered it.

Robbie slowed to a reluctant halt. ‘I’m only doing what the man I met does, only he does it much better.’ He flapped his arms
again once or twice erratically, then reached into his pocket and drew out a bottle. ‘Are you really very sick?’


Lily, cheek pressed hard against the iron of the railing, sought to give her brother her most withering look.

‘He said, if you were, to give you this.’

‘Who did?’

‘The man I met.’ Robbie paused. ‘I think he’s a lord, like Lord Bemerton is.’

For a moment, just a moment, Lily considered demanding that her brother make some sense, but she found the very prospect of
further speech unendurably hideous. She allowed the bottle to be forced into her fingers, then watched as her brother soared
down the deck, arms outstretched, whistling as before. Then he was gone, and Lily remained alone upon the deck, not stirring, trying to concentrate
upon the coolness of the wind, attempting to banish from her thoughts all movement of the waves. Only when she imagined that
she would surely freeze to death did she twitch at last and inspect the bottle. She unfastened the stopper, sniffed at it
suspiciously, then screwed up one eye and peered down the neck. All she could make out was an unappetising sludge. She sniffed
at the rim. Her nostrils brought her the faintest whiff of something vegetable. Such an odour did nothing to allay her suspicions.


Yet Lily did not, as her first instinct had been, hurl the bottle and its contents into the sea, but continued to gaze at
it, her cheek as before pressed hard against the iron of the railing. Several minutes passed, and then, with a supreme effort,
she raised both her head and the bottle together. After all, she wondered, as she brought the rim up to her lips, what was
there to lose? She could scarcely feel worse than she already did.


A couple of gulps, however, were sufficient to persuade her that this had been an overly optimistic view. She groaned. The
ship bucked and fell, and Lily felt the contents of her stomach do the same. She draped her arms limply over the railing,
then dropped the bottle into the sea.


She watched it fall into the waves.

At the same moment she felt her sickness roll away.

She rose to her full height. Her nausea seemed quite gone.

Scarcely able to credit this, she took a couple of turns upon the deck. She discovered that she was indeed capable of movement
and thought both at once. Next, greatly daring, she left the deck behind. Previously, the very onsideration of her quarters,
with their red velvet carpets, their gold-braided curtains, their cherub-clasped gas-lamps muffling her breath, had been sufficient
to induce in her a further violent wave of nausea. Yet now, for all that the air remained as close as before, Lily found that
her mal de mer remained at bay. She wondered if perhaps the waves might have abated. She passed into her mother’s panelled chamber and there
her mother lay, still whimpering and moaning. Louise, Lily’s maid, and the other servants, were likewise prostrate, too green
to raise their heads. The spectacle only made Lily herself feel all the better still.


Her first thought upon realising this was to regret that she had thrown the medicine away, her second to wonder if there might
be any more. She paused a moment by the mirror, rearranging the dark coils of her hair and adjusting her hat – all things
considered, she felt, she looked very well. At the same moment the door slammed open, and Robbie came clattering into the
apartment. He had evidently been enjoying his relatives’ indisposition: his cheeks were quite rosy, and Lily was now recovered
enough to observe that his suit was streaked with grime. She found this highly aggravating, especially when she considered
her own pains to remain elegant, despite the inconveniences of sickness and sea, and for a moment she was tempted to scrub
and scold him roundly. But in the cause of securing her future good health she decided that this pleasure should be postponed, and so
she demanded instead that Robbie tell her about the mysterious lord.


He answered in a wild babble of enthusiasm. The lord lived in the middle of the ship. He’d travelled to Africa. He’d had his
own gun. He’d seen a lion. He’d found a hold which was filled up with rats.


None of these recommendations inspired Lily with very great enthusiasm, but she asked her brother to lead on all the same.
He ran ahead of her, and Lily, in her efforts to keep up despite the tightness of the drapery round her limbs, began almost
to worry that she might split her skirts apart. She pleaded with Robbie to slow, but still he darted about with seeming capriciousness,
down stairways, through doors, so that Lily feared that, if she grew lost, she would remain so for ever. There was no longer
any mahogany or velvet on the winding stairs, only unadorned metal, and the further Lily descended, the filthier it became.
The thundering of the sea was now remarkably loud, yet above the uproar she could hear a murmuring that seemed louder still,
composed of the wailing of children and the rattling of dishes, of strange languages and accents, and people being sick. Through
open doors Lily caught occasional glimpses of huddled forms, impossibly crowded, so that she could scarcely believe they might
be human at all; and indeed it seemed to her that she had descended into some primordial world, where humanity was nothing
but a thing of dirt and shadow. She began to wonder what a lord might be doing in such a place. Certainly, she could not imagine Lord Bemerton choosing to voyage in such quarters, however much he
liked to complain about his bills.


Having paused a moment upon these reflections, Lily realised with a start that she had quite mislaid Robbie. Just as she was
preparing to panic, however, she heard the echoes of his laughter coming from beyond a half-open door. ‘Do the terradicadal,’
he was shrieking, ‘the terradicadal, the terradicadal!’


‘Pterodactyl,’ said a voice in clipped English tones.

‘Terrad …’ tried Robbie, before dissolving into giggles.

The English voice sighed, and repeated the syllables with loving emphasis. ‘Ptero-dac-tyl.’ There was a moment’s pause, and
then instead of a voice Lily heard a sudden whistling, rising and falling and rising again. Robbie, just as suddenly, began
to scream with excitement, and when Lily pushed the door open she saw him being held beneath his armpits and flapping his
arms as though they were wings. The man holding him had the size and the evident strength of a bear: he swooped Robbie downwards
with ease, and Lily realised that he was whistling to provide the illusion of speed. He was standing with his broad, hunched
back to the door and so he remained oblivious to Lily’s entrance, but Robbie, as he was swung to and fro, caught sight of
his sister. ‘Look, Lily, look, I’m a terradicadal!’


The man immediately spun round. At the sight of Lily he pulled a face of mingled embarrassment and contrition, yet Lily could
only smile, for however regretful the man tried to look the marks of his good humour stubbornly remained. He was not, Lily thought, especially handsome,
since his nose was protruding and his skin somewhat sallow, his dark moustache a little ragged at the edges, although she
guessed that in his youth he might have been good-looking, albeit in a large-boned, shambolic way. She supposed that even
now he could not be much more than thirty, although the lines about his mouth and his eyes ran very deep. It was these, she
realised, that surely made him seem so cheerful, for they were the lines of a face much creased by smiles; and yet for all
that there seemed a reserve about him, both in his expression and in his bearing, which Lily found confusing, for it served
almost to contradict her first impression of the man.


She realised how closely she had been studying him. She did not care to think that it was in her nature to blush, but even
so she felt a faint tingling of embarrassment, and blurted out at once, ‘I came to thank you for your tonic.’


The man attempted to bow in reply, but discovering that he still held Robbie in his hands he had to abandon the attempt. At
the same moment Robbie wriggled free, and running to his sister he pulled upon her hand. ‘That’s the lord!’ he announced with
pride. ‘I found him myself!’


‘Of course,’ confessed the man promptly, ‘I am not really a lord.’

Lily glanced round his room. It was bleak and unadorned, save for a couple of trunks, a mattress and a rickety desk. ‘You
don’t say.’


The man smiled ruefully, then bowed again, successfully this time. ‘Dawkins. William Paley Dawkins. Honoured, I’m sure.’


‘So you don’t have a title at all?’

He considered this. ‘Captain?’ he asked at length, as though uncertain whether this would pass muster.

‘Captain? You’re a soldier?’

‘Recently retired.’

Lily studied him with renewed interest, even as she introduced herself in turn. She saw now that the stiffness in his demeanour
might indeed be explained as a military reserve. Even so, as she watched him fumbling with a pair of spectacles, then peering
at her distractedly, as though perfectly oblivious that he was staring at her at all, she was struck by a slowness about him,
so deliberate that it seemed almost to be gentle, and not at all a quality she would have thought to be a soldier’s. ‘But
if you are a captain,’ she asked him, ‘why did my brother think you were a lord?’


‘Oh, fault of the Steerage passengers,’ answered the Captain promptly, fumbling with his spectacles again as he slipped them
back into his pocket. ‘Insisted on giving me a title, you see. If you listen you can hear them, for they are huddled about
this cabin, but you will also notice’ – he pressed his ear against the wall – ‘they are not being sick.’


Lily pressed her ear to the wall.

‘This is because I have dosed them,’ the Captain explained in a tone halfway between irony and triumph, ‘on my wondrous and
unheard-of liquor. In return they teach me to play the fiddle, and have the pleasure of thinking me a most tremendous swell. But of course’ – he smiled with
sudden shyness – ‘I could never hope to fool you, for Robbie tells me you are engaged to a genuine lord.’


‘Yes,’ answered Lily. ‘To Lord Bemerton.’ She glanced down at her engagement ring, exquisite gem of the Rue de la Paix, and
wondered how much else Robbie might have told. ‘I am returning to New York to prepare for the wedding, and then shall return
to England to be married in the fall.’ She paused again. ‘I am greatly excited.’


‘Oh, quite,’ the Capta