Hunting With The Troll

[John K]

With two hands firmly gripping the brown trout he had just extracted from the bottom of the deep mountain river, my friend "the Montana Troll" quickly dispatched the fish by whacking it's head onto a rock. He held up the fine specimen for me to admire, then quickly and expertly eviscerated the fish and slipped it into a cooler of ice. We would eat it later, under dill sauce, along with grilled Elk steaks, new potatoes, and a fine wine…

The fish slowly finned through the flats, its scaly body visible as a darker shade of murk in the shallow, muddy water. Minnows, crustaceans and other smaller creatures scurried for cover as the large predator's presence was felt. Unable to breathe in the muddy, stagnant water, the large fish from time to time pushed its snout to the surface to take in essential oxygen with its primitive lungs. It was on one such trip to the surface that the water suddenly erupted into frothy brown foam: tooth lined jaws of reptilian flesh and scales snatched the fish from below and dragged it into oblivion. Quickly rolling with its catch, the 10-foot crocodile-like animal sank back into the darker depths to digest the large gar it had just ambushed…

"That's a Champ vert," the Troll said, peering over my shoulder at the buff-colored pebble I had just picked up.

Mixed in with a litter of other buff-colored pebbles that made up the hillside we were standing on, the lightweight piece of fossilized bone's oddly regular shape had caught my eye.

"Here's another one - hey! Another one!" my friend exclaimed, quickly dusting the area free of debris with a small paintbrush.

Peering closer, we uncovered another half dozen or so "verts", or vertebrae. Laid end-to-end, the bones made up a foot long fossilized partial section of spinal column that at one time supported a ten-foot long ancient crocodile-like animal known as Champsosaurus gigas. Scattered in among the bones were the shiny, teardrop shaped dark brown scales of the Champs probable last meal, the freshwater gar known as Lepisosteus.

Midway through the first of two weeks of a vacation I've dreamed of since childhood, I was looking forward to fly fishing the famous western Montana waters my friend had promised we'd visit later that week. But first was a visit to the famous eastern Montana fossil beds, and with it a chance to uncover the remains of actual dinosaurs. For three days, the Troll, my wife, my two-year-old daughter and I walked across the 40,000-acre private ranch we had been given access to. Eyes glued to the ground, we picked up bits and chunks of bone, armor and teeth that when put together, tell the tale of an immense ancient system of forests, estuaries and backwater channels known today as the Hell Creek formation.

We found literally thousands of gar scales, along with the animal's fishy-looking teeth. Scattered among the pebbles and sand were hundreds of turtle shell fragments, at first mistaken for pottery shards. We found a couple partial skeletons of Champsosaurus gigas: the spinal column I mentioned earlier, and another one that included several pieces of rib cage. But what I came for, indeed, what I had dreamt and schemed from childhood to find someday, were dinosaur bones.

And we did indeed find dinosaur bones. Larger and more fragile than the smaller turtle and crocodile bones, the dinosaur bones were in mostly poor shape when we found them. In their remote setting, the already ancient remains had been exposed and weathered by eastern Montana's harsh climate for many, many years. We found a few specimens we could pick up, so for the most part we left them lay. We did, however, find a few “note worthy” specimens.

Walking along, eye’s on the ground, I saw the fist-sized triangular piece of off white material from several feet away. Something about the pieces uniformity caught my eye, and as I got closer, that little buzzer in the back of our minds that tells us something extraordinary is about to happen started going off...

Back when he lived in Wisconsin, the Troll had become infamous among his fishing partners for his mastery of the practice of “hole jumping.” Upon seeing a partner catch a fish, the Troll would work his way quickly downstream of the person, then slowly wade out into the river and began casting upstream towards the spot his partner had caught the fish. His irritating habit was to try to get either above or below the person catching fish so he could cast into the exact spot the fish was caught out of, cutting the other person off from any hope of catching another fish, and I had witnessed him practice this dark art time and again.

What I didn’t realize, of course, was that after moving out west, the Troll had expanded his palette, so to speak, to paleontology. As I walked up to, started to recognize, and actually extend my arm to pick up the piece I had spied, a short, dark, hairy arm shot out of the sage brush in front of me, snatched the bone out of the dirt, and exclaimed

“Hey, look at what I found! I saw you headed over this way looking at something, so I followed... Hey! This looks just like the nose bone core from a Triceratops! Here, you can have it...”

The pieces we managed to collect, besides the nose-horn core of a juvenile Triceratops, include several teeth from a Hadrosaur, a very badly preserved Tricertops tooth (I have a small bottle of pieces that need to be glued together some day) and several un-identifiable chunks of bone from large, un-identifiable dinosaurs.

It was an extremely hot October, and by the third day of fossil hunting, the dry dusty Montana badlands were starting to take on the appearance of an asteroid. The ranch house, in which we were staying, provided a primitive shelter at best. Deceivingly charming from the outside, my wife was less than thrilled to find out that the owner's wife had intentionally not visited the place in years: the alkaloid well water being unfit for drinking, the ranch hands who occasionally stayed at the place also apparently found it unfit for general house cleaning. We were awaken the second night by the screaming of my daughter when she discovered a large spider in her bed, and she and my wife spent the rest of the long night crammed into my bunk. After another sleepless night of listening to the prairie wind flap a loose piece of the ranch house's metal roof back and forth, we had had enough of paleontology, and made our way west for fishing, which is another story.

I don't know what it is that keeps my friendship with the Troll intact. Certainly, my friend has provided me with hours of priceless entertainment over the years But beyond that, our friendship has more to do with a mutual respect of each other, and an intense interest in the outdoors. My friend has a good natured and practical approach to life, which manifests itself in his approach to nearly everything. We've spent countless hours together, slowly picking our way across dusty gravel pits, hunched uncomfortably in listing canoes, sharing a beer and a good joke. A day afield with the Troll is a day spent learning the behavior of the ancient crocodile Leidyosuchus, discussing which tomatoes are best for homemade salsa, or arguing the best way to site in a deer rifle.

My friend has re-affirmed to me that the beauty of the world can be found everywhere: inside a stone picked up from the stream bed, in the white curved grace of a mouse's skull, and in the cold morning's stillness of a northern Wisconsin winter's day.

And so while I still hold out hope that he'll catch a trout someday on a dry fly, I have every intention of enjoying the next freshly caught shore lunch the Troll whacks on the head.

[sparkchaser]

Wow! Nice find! And a great story, too.

[Seldom]

Great story and cool finds Thanks

[Auspex]

You have quite a gift for storytelling; thank you for this one