by Ken Springer
The Fossil Hunter’s Daughter
The conclusion
When Cristina and Luca returned from a climb on Monte Rosa, where they found a fully intact stegosaurus fossil in a sedimentary rock layer, each headed home, planning to climb to Mount Rosa’s summit at a later date.
On her way to the B&B where she and her father were staying, Cristina regretted not telling Luca to avoid mentioning the fossil discovery to anyone. It would be almost 24 hours later when she called Luca and left a voicemail to that effect.
What Cristina didn’t know was that when Luca got back to his hometown near the Italian border, he went straightaway to a pub frequented by climbers to meet up with his mates for a few pints.
In the course of their conversation, Luca mentioned his exhilarating climb with Cristina and mentioned their discovery of the stegosaurus fossil. Sitting at a table next to Luca and his friends were three Italian men, one of whom bore a tattoo of an orchid on his right forearm. They stopped talking among themselves and listened intently as Luca described the details of the find.
When Luca left his friends, saying he was dead tired and needed some sleep, the Italian with the orchid tattoo followed him outside the pub, saying that he couldn’t help but overhear Luca’s conversation with his mates about his mountain climbing adventure.
Feigning interest in Luca’s adventure, the Italian said he admired people brave enough to climb a mountain and expressed his own desire to do so. He had shaken Luca’s hand and started walking back to the pub, when he suddenly stopped and turned back to Luca, as if an afterthought, asked which part of Monte Rosa they had climbed, the Swiss or Italian? Luca replied, “The Swiss side.”
A week later, Cristina called Luca and asked him if he could help her get her father up to see the fossil on the same route they had climbed the previous week. Luca was eager to climb again with Cristina and said, “I thought you would never ask.”
On the same call, she asked Luca if he had mentioned the stegosaurus fossil to anyone. He said that he had mentioned their climb and the fossil to his climbing gym mates at a pub on the evening of his return from their climb of Monte Rosa, but had forgotten about the brief discussion with the gentleman sitting at the next table.
Unbeknownst to Luca, the three Italians were connected to a criminal syndicate involved in drugs, prostitution, human trafficking, harvesting human organs, and art theft. This particular trio was the bottom feeders of the organization, stealing and selling rare orchids, crimes of opportunity, and occasionally plundering archaeological and paleontological dig sites. They were sloppy and incompetent, but deadly: imagine a sinister version of The Three Stooges.
Cristina and her father arranged to meet Luca at the trailhead, and the three hiked up to the climber’s hut. Thomas left some tools and brushes for extracting fossils in the hut, planning to come back the next day to continue shuttling tools up to the site.
Cristina had business in Zurich the following day, so Luca volunteered to lead her father up to the fossil site. Cristina knew he was capable but hoped they could find an easier way to reach the site, since it would take weeks to properly extract the large fossil.
Having recently climbed the route, the climbers reached the site in half the time it had taken on the previous climb. Thomas talked all day about how much fun the pendulum traverse was.
He also immediately took to Luca, telling Cristina, “Luca is a fine young man. I asked him if he would like to work with me on extracting the fossil, and he jumped at the opportunity.” Cristina smiled, happy that her father had someone to help him on the project, while she explored other mountains to climb in the breathtaking Alps.
While Luca and Thomas were busy measuring the stegosaurus, Cristina followed the ridge down and came upon a gully that ended at the base of the face, less than a 1/4 mile from the usual start. She easily downclimbed the gully to the bottom to make sure it was safe.
When she climbed back up the gully to rejoin them, they were finishing up their measurements and photographs of the stegosaurus. She gave them the good news about the gully, which would eliminate the chimney and the pendulum traverse, making the access much easier.
“Darn, I really enjoy the pendulum traverse,” Thomas said.
Choosing to retreat down the gully brought them to the goat trail at the base of the cliff in less than half the time of the initial route. Once the fossil was slowly and methodically removed from its rock entombment, getting it off the mountain would require a helicopter, but that was weeks or months away.
While Cristina was climbing everything in the Alps she could get her hands on, Luca and Thomas went to the site daily, hauling equipment up the gully like sherpas. Once the equipment was in place, the hard work began, so Thomas asked Luca if he could hire him to work the site with him, promising to teach him on the job the various methods used to separate the fossil from the ambient rock. Luca jumped at the opportunity to work with Cristina’s father.
Cristina rented another car so that her father could drive to the site each morning. He usually came home before dark, dusty, tired, and hungry. One day, a couple of weeks into the project, Thomas failed to show up at home, and Cristina became concerned that they may have had an accident. There was no cell signal near Monte Rosa, and her efforts to call Luca late at night, when he should have been home, went straight to voicemail.
The next morning, she left before daylight for Monte Rosa. When she arrived at the climber’s access parking area, she noticed a windowless van parked there alongside Thomas and Luca’s vehicles. “It must be a group of climbers,” she thought.
She slung her pack over her shoulders and headed up the trail to the stone climber’s hut. Approaching the hut, she noticed that no one was around, so she assumed her father and Luca had gotten an early start to the project site that morning.
When she opened the door to the hut, she saw three strangers. One grabbed her and forced her to sit in a corner of the small enclosure. Luca was tied up and gagged in another corner, one eye swollen shut from a beating, while Thomas was restrained in a chair. To her utter horror, she saw that her father was missing the index finger on his right hand, a dirty, blood-soaked rag wrapped around the wound.
Cristina said, “What’s going on, Dad? What happened to your finger?”
The man with the orchid tattoo held up a pair of tin shears and told her to shut up, or they would remove another finger from her father’s hand, adding, “If your father doesn’t tell us where the fossil is soon, we’ll begin removing more than just fingers.”
Cristina had many skills, not the least of which was the ability to read people at first meeting. She inherited this trait from her mother, a walking, talking polygraph machine. Although she could fool her father, she never got away with lying to her mother.
“You could cut off all his fingers, and it wouldn’t get you a step closer to the fossil,” Cristina said. Now, she had the Orchid’s full attention, realizing he was the head of this motley crew.
“And, why is that?” Orchid replied sarcastically.
“Well, for one thing, the fossil is some distance up the mountain, and neither my father nor my friend is capable of climbing up there without me, so if you want the fossil, you will have to go up there with me. That fossil is not going to get up and walk down here,” Cristina replied.
It occurred to Cristina that the thugs didn’t know the fossil was embedded in rock, and thought they could just pick it up and carry it away. She also sensed Orchid’s hypermasculinity, and she knew she could play on his machismo to the hilt.
“Well, if you have the guts to get what you came for, you’ll have to follow my lead. You aren’t afraid of heights, are you?” Cristina said.
Orchid gave her an angry look and said, “If a woman can climb this mountain, we can run up it. She smiled, knowing that she had the three at her mercy and that only one person would return from their climb.
While the three men looked on, she stuffed several harnesses in her already full pack and headed for the door, opening it for the goons. Looking back over her shoulder as she exited the hut, Cristina saw her father wink at her. She smiled to herself; her father knew her plans.
When they arrived at the original route, Cristina explained how they would climb the chimney. She didn’t trust any of them to belay, so she free-climbed to the ledge above and tied a bowline in the rope, lowering it to the men, telling Orchid to hook the carabiner into the rope. Once he was hooked in, she instructed him to climb the chimney exactly as she had, adding that the rope was above him and he wouldn’t fall far if he slipped.
Orchid stepped up to the crack, already sweating before he made his first move. The other two just stared at her, mouths open, and fear in their eyes.
After considerable huffing and puffing, Orchid arrived at the ledge and was told to sit down until Cristina could coax the other two up. It took all of an hour to get the three men onto the ledge, and she noticed that one had wet his pants in the effort.
She led the trio down the narrowing ledge until they arrived at the fixed rope, still there where she had left it from the first climb.
“Now, here’s where you might have a little fun if you’re brave enough,” Cristina said.
“To get to the fossil, we merely have to cross this blank wall to the other side,” she said, pointing to the ridge.
After explaining how the pendulum traverse works, Cristina said, “Which one of you brave men wants to go first, and remember, this is the fun part, you get to swing like Tarzan. In her fertile imagination, she saw chimpanzees swinging on a vine rather than men on a rope.
Orchid told one of his men, whom he called Leonardo, to go first. How ironic, Cristina thought: Leonardo, in Italian, means brave lion, and he was shaking like a leaf before he even started.
Cristina could feel the temperature dropping and the wind picking up. There may be a storm brewing, and she intended to get them all across to the ridge before it struck.
When the second fellow was making the traverse, he seemed to be having fun, even shouting the Italian version of “Yahoo.” Once he was across, she turned to Orchid and instructed him to tie into the rope.
“I know what you’re up to, bitch.” and he pulled out a knife. He was still tied into a piton for safety, and Cristina instinctively backed away from him. While he was unhooking himself from the carabiner, he dropped the knife, which bounced off the ledge, clanking down the mountainside.
Cristina hurriedly unhooked the ice axe from her pack. As she turned to approach Orchid, he grabbed the ice axe with such force that, when she suddenly released it, he stumbled back to the brink of the ledge, teetering momentarily before falling out of her sight without a sound.
Looking across the blank wall, Leonardo and his cohort stared in abject horror when they realized she was leaving. Cristina carefully looked down over the precipice where Orchid was lying face down, impaled on her ice axe.
Cristina waved goodbye to the two stranded men and started back down to the hut to free her father and Luca. Glancing up at Monte Rosa, she saw dark clouds moving in, and shortly thereafter, the snow started. It would be a cold night on the mountain, a very cold night indeed.
Ken Springer
ken1949bongo@gmail.com
A special thanks to Eddie Fletcher, an inveterate fossil hunter and the inspiration for this short story.
And, of course, hats off to the real Cristina Mace, a proficient climber and an extraordinary young woman whom I am proud to know.
