Mastodon Puzzle

     It felt like a test, a rite of passage.  

     Fossil Steve (this nomenclature to distinguish him from another friend named Steve) handed me an old shoebox filled with fragments of mastodon tooth and 2 tubes of Super Glue (I added the beer later).

     Steve is 70 years old and still digging in the river every other day during the season.  He stands up on his canoe while he paddles and I cannot keep up with him in my kayak unless I'm using the trolling motor.  He is a country boy and a character and the real deal and he has a way of turning a phrase.  He once told me about a young woman who was digging downstream from him and screamed so loudly when she found a huge meg that he "run down there coz I thought she was gator bit."

     I know Steve likes me but I also know I irritate him.  It's that usual issue of men liking an independent woman...until they realize she's independent and won't do what they tell her.  We go round and round about the size of hardware mesh on my screens.  He insists that I use 1/4" so that I get all the tiny fossils.  I prefer 1/2" so that I don't get frustrated sifting through all that little gravel.  Right or wrong, I am comfortable leaving the bird claws and baby snake vertebra for someone else to find but I also realized that he was on the verge of getting truly upset about it.  So I use 1/4" when I'm digging with Fossil Steve.

     Anyway, I took the shoe box and worked myself crosseyed over that mastodon puzzle for an entire weekend. I made excruciatingly slow progress but ultimately, even that came to a grinding halt.

     I posted a photo of my project on FaceBook and a club member pointed out that there was definitely pieces of more than one tooth in the collection.  

     I had done all that I could do.  I carefully wrapped the reconstructed sections and placed them with the remaining fragments back in the shoe box.  When I handed it all to Steve, he initially looked disappointed with a tinge of "that's what I expected" until he opened the box and saw that I had been able to put together the framework of one entire tooth and parts of at least a couple others.  His whole demeanor changed and he got that excited glint in his eye.  "I gotta get back there and keep digging!"  Of course he won't tell me where "there" is but that's ok.  I can use a break from the mastodon puzzle.