The Bone Hunter’s Odyssey

Moving across the vast arid expanse,
the fossil-hunter walks where
wind sculpts the sandstone cliffs.
She moves, a dark silhouette
against the open sky, her gaze
probing the land for ancient whispers.
 
Each step brings her closer to
forgotten worlds, a boot print left
where titans once roamed.
In her hands, the map is a mere outline,
but her heart knows the language
of the earth.
 
The first find is modest: a piece of a tooth,
jagged, yellowed, kissed by time’s
slow grind. She kneels, brushing away eons of dust
with reverence— as though waking a sleeping king.
 
The storms come fast in the badlands,
thunder growling like the ghosts of giants,
and still she presses on, for somewhere
beneath the layers of sandstone,
a story waits, curled in the rock’s embrace.
 
One evening, the setting sun paints the cliffs in fire,
and there it is: a curve of rib, a fragment of a skull,
a whisper of something vast, something
that once thundered across the land now hushed
beneath the layers of hard sediment.
 
She digs until the moon rises, chipping away millennia
with steady hands, the fossil emerging like a secret
told too long ago to matter anymore.
  
What was it, she wonders, this beast whose bones
she cradles? A scavenger, a predator, a titan
of green forests? She dreams of it moving—
great muscles rippling under plated skin,
a roar that could split the silence of time.
 
When the season ends, she packs her finds,
loading crates with the weight of history.
The land watches her go, its treasures
uncovered its riddles offered but never
fully solved.
 
And as she drives away, dust rising in the wake
of her truck, she glances in the rearview
mirror, knowing she'll return. For the earth whispers
to her an endless call to adventure.
 
By Steven Wade Veatch