A Bone From a Dry Sea

by Peter Dickinson

  She twisted out of bed, tapped out her slippers, and still in her pyjamas pushed out through the netting. The dawn air smelt as it had yesterday only more so, with fewer human smells to muddle it. In front of her, shadow-streaked in the sunrise, rose the outcrop. Dad was already up there, digging. She could see his yellow shirt bent beside the big rock.

  He’d left a note for her on the folding table. ‘Breakfast at site, please. Banana, coffee, muesli, two slices bread and Marmite.’ She put the kettle on to the propane burner, dressed, got two breakfasts ready, put everything carefully back into its containers the way he’d shown her and carried the food-bag up the slope.

  By the time she reached him, Dad had taken his shirt off and was streaming with sweat, so that all his tanned skin glistened and the muscles showed clear. Vinny had seen him half-stripped yesterday, but hadn’t realized then how fit and strong he must be, certainly compared with Colin who had a bit of a beer-belly and regarded watching American football on TV as good exercise.

  ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘Oh yes. I found your note. I think I’ve got it right. How much hotter is it going to get?’

  ‘Same as yesterday, give or take the odd degree. There comes a point where you don’t notice the variations. Beats me why our ancestors chose to evolve in a moderate oven.’

  ‘It was the other way round. They found themselves in the oven so they went into the sea to get out of it and then they evolved.’

  He was unstoppering the Thermos as she spoke and didn’t pause. In spite of May Anna’s encouragement Vinny hadn’t meant to barge straight in like that, but she’d been thinking about the coming heat, and how lovely it would be to have sea to swim in, while she’d been bringing the food-bag up the hill.

  ‘I don’t follow the logic of it,’ he said mildly.

  ‘They’d need to stand up to keep their heads out of the water,’ said Vinny. ‘And the water would help, too. I mean if chimps started wanting to hunt or something on their hind legs they’d have a terrible time. They’d actually be slower than they are now. And all their bits would be in the wrong place. And they’d get frightful back-aches – we still do. And – you know – sinuses – they don’t drain right because of the way we’ve got to hold our heads now . . .’

  ‘That argument would apply however our ancestors learnt to walk upright. So would many of the others.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Dad. The point is there’d have to have been something which made it worthwhile – I mean which actually made it easy, like having water to hold you up while you were learning to stand. And of course they wouldn’t need fur . . .’

  ‘Otters have fur. So do some seals.’

  ‘But most of them don’t, and whales and dolphins don’t. But they have fat under their skins like us . . .’

  ‘Elephants are pretty well hairless. Are you going to tell me . . . ?’

  ‘Elaine Morgan says elephants have webbed feet. She thinks they might have been water-animals once. Their trunks are sort-of snorkels. I can’t remember about the fat.’

  ‘You expect me to take this seriously?’

  ‘I just want to know. I mean, the idea about elephants seems weird, OK. But a lot of animals are weird, Dad. We’re weird. We just think we’re normal. If you could get the other animals to tell us what they thought, I bet they’d say we’re weirder than any of them.’

  He gave her an unreadable look and fell into one of his silences. She watched him cut his Marmite sandwich into exact triangles, just the way she herself would have done. I’m his daughter too, she thought. I may look like Mum. Some of those old photos of Mum Granny’s got, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t me, but if Dad wants to be silent, I can show him I’m happy with that too. That’s not pretending.

  So she ate, and watched the shadows change across the puckered badlands and thought about when it had been marsh, drying out, and the sea had been right over there, beyond those hills, until he stretched and put his mug down and looked at her and nodded.

  ‘Better get on,’ he said.

  ‘Can I see what you’ve been doing?’

  ‘Just shifting dirt so far. I’ll do a bit more and then we’ll rig the awning and we’ll get down to something more interesting.’

  He’d done a lot since Vinny had last seen the site. The mini-quarry she and Dr Hamiska had made had become a trench wide enough to work in, running several feet into the hill. Its floor sloped upwards, though far less steeply than the hill. That must be how the underlying strata lay. All that was left of the quarry was an eight inch step at the entrance to the trench, because so far Dad had been cutting in just above the layers with the fossils in them. She could see the darker line of tuff at the bottom of the step. The floor of the quarry had changed.

  ‘Where’s my bone?’ she said.

  ‘Your bone?’

  ‘It was there. I was digging it out and Joe came to see and dug some more and that’s when he found the toe-bone. I wanted to try and draw it. It was a bit of shoulder-blade, he said.’

  ‘Oh, that. It was in the way so I took it out. It’ll be in one of the bags . . . Here . . . don’t lose the label.’

  It took Vinny a while to find a way of propping her parasol to give her enough shade to work in. By then Dad was slogging away at the back of the trench, hacking the earth out with a pick, shovelling it into two buckets and carrying it to his spoil-heap down the hill. The further he went in, of course, the more earth he had to move to get down to the fossil-layers.

  The label had figures on it which meant nothing to Vinny. The fossil, now that she could see the whole thing, turned out smaller than she’d expected – a thin flat triangle, broken along two sides and with a hole near one corner. Another corner was cracked off, but the pieces fitted neatly together. The longest side was a bit over three inches. She turned the larger piece over and over in her hands, trying to look at it the way Nikki said you had to, as though it was the only thing in the world. Then she settled down to try and draw it.

  Mrs Clulow, who taught art at St Brigid’s, used to tell Vinny to try and ‘free up’, whatever that meant, but in the end she’d given in and let her draw and paint her own way, with every line as exact as she could make it. Vinny thought Dürer’s engraving of a hare – she kept a Christmas card of it pinned over her bed – was the most beautiful picture she knew. Dürer would have been good at fossils. She worked steadily, locked in a cell which contained only her and the bone and her pad and pencil. She used a 4H to make faint lines, which she rubbed out again and again until she was satisfied. She realized how time had passed only when the shadow of her parasol left the edge of her pad.

  Dad was straightening from his trench and must have seen her shift position.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘OK. It’s easier being flat. Round would be much more difficult.’

  ‘Mind if I look?’

  Vinny passed the pad across. She didn’t want to feel he was judging her.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ she said. ‘A pig or something?’

  ‘Very difficult with something so broken. I’d have said it was too big for a pig. Or a hominid, of course.’

  ‘A hippo?’

  ‘Um. I don’t think so. I haven’t seen that many hippo scapulae. It’s the sort of thing you’d need a specialist to identify, and even then . . . What are these lines here? Shading?’

  ‘No. At least, well, I think they’re there, only sometimes I can’t see them. Like the man in the moon, sort of.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at the bone.’

  Surprised, she passed it across. He peered, wiped sweat from his eyes, peered again and fetched a magnifying glass from his satchel and studied the bone through it, turning it to vary the angle of light. The lines he’d asked about were faint curves, like parts of several exact circles, close together round the hole.

  ‘Yes, they’re there all right,’ he said.

  ‘Do they mean something?’

  ‘
Hard to say. If we’d found them somewhere else, say on a known neolithic site with stone tools around, or animal bones with butchery incisions, the natural interpretation would be that the hole had been deliberately bored with a pointed stone-flake. That doesn’t make sense here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because whatever the date of this site is, however you interpret Fred’s pig-data and the geological sequences, we’re still at least a couple of million years too early. Right, are you ready to give me a hand?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please.’

  By now it was starting to get really hot, so they rigged the awning to shade the trench and Vinny lashed her parasol to one of the poles to make an extra patch of shade. Then Dad started to work his way along the floor of the trench, down into the fossil-layers. He’d removed the precious toe-bone last night and May Anna had taken it back to the camp. Now he probed delicately with his trowel-tip into the soil, loosened a morsel, and crumbled it between his fingers into a bucket. When he’d cleared a patch about half an inch deep and a few inches square he brushed the loose bits into the bucket and moved on until he’d worked about a foot along the trench and all the way across. Vinny took the bucket down the hill and tipped it on to a plastic sheet, separate from the main spoil-heap. Later someone would sieve it through in case Dad had missed a tiny chip. Meanwhile Dad started to go down another half inch.

  There was nothing in the first two layers, but on the next Dad said, ‘Let’s have the steel rule. Thanks. Got a label? 13.5; 26.1; 11.8. Now the dental pick. Thanks.’

  He pecked delicately at what looked like a scrap of seashell, got it loose and handed it out. Vinny put it into a bag and attached the label. Deliberately she didn’t ask what it was – he’d tell her if he wanted to. There were more bits of shell in the next layer, which he photographed in place and told her to put into a single bag, and more still in the next, with what looked like the tail of a lizard projecting from the wall of the trench. Dad painted it with hardening fluid and was cutting round it when Vinny heard the growl of an engine as the driver changed gear to cross the dry river-bed.

  ‘Someone’s coming,’ she said.

  ‘Joe,’ said Dad. ‘We’re lucky to have had this long.’

  He went on working. A few minutes later the truck appeared, nosing its way through the hummocks and scrub below the outcrop. It stopped and several people climbed out. Dr Hamiska pointed and gave instructions and then the others started to unload while he came striding up the slope with Dr Wessler trailing behind him.

  Dad had stopped work to watch him come.

  ‘By the way,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t show anyone your sketch for the moment, and don’t say anything about those marks on the scapula. I’m not trying to hide anything, but I can do without a lot of crazy unsubstantiated theorizing till we’ve got a bit more to go on.’

  As soon as he was in earshot Dr Hamiska stopped and flung up an arm as if he was posing for a war memorial.

  ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ he cried.

  ‘I’ll settle for a cold lager,’ said Dad.

  Dr Hamiska loosed his great laugh, strode on and peered in under the awning.

  ‘Terrific, Sam,’ he said. ‘You must have been sweating your guts out. Found anything new?’

  ‘Nothing much. Some shell-fragments. That lizard there. I’m getting on fairly fast now I’ve got the spoil cleared. The layer above the tuff seems to be only about twenty centimetres deep.’

  ‘The land was rising. The lake would have dried out.’

  ‘Possibly. What was that about spirits?’

  ‘I put a call through to Craig. I wanted Amanda to know her trip out here wouldn’t be wasted.’

  Dr Hamiska glanced at Dad to see how he’d take it. Dad stiffened.

  ‘You told Amanda what we’d found,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Naturally. She has a right to know.’

  ‘You want the world’s press flooding out here?’

  ‘Who said anything about the world’s press?’

  ‘Amanda will have been on to the agencies within ten minutes of getting your call.’

  ‘Oh, Sam, Sam. You suppose I didn’t tell her not to spoil Craig’s big day with a premature announcement? I’m not telling the media anything till I’ve got a whole skeleton to show them.’

  ‘Supposing it’s there.’

  ‘Of course it’s there. But meanwhile I’ve got to strengthen Amanda’s hand so that she’s in a position to fight her corner for funds inside Craig. And that’s just what I’ve done. She called me back. She’s still coming Thursday, of course, but now she’s bringing John Wishart with her!’

  Dad looked at him and sighed, as if it was the worst news he’d heard for months. Dr Hamiska responded with another bellow of laughter. Baffled, Vinny looked at Dr Wessler, who was standing beside her, smiling thin-lipped, like a spectator enjoying a sour sort of comedy.

  ‘Dynamic Dr Amanda Hutt,’ he said, ‘is the recently appointed head of the palaeontology department at Craig Museum. John Jedediah Wishart Junior is the Museum Director, the big cheese.’

  ‘The absolute Gorgonzola,’ cried Dr Hamiska. ‘So you see, Vinny, it’s up to you now. You must work your magic for us again.’

  Not wanting to make things worse for Dad, Vinny managed to smile.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you will. I’m relying on you. What shall we have? A tibia, do you think, Fred?’

  ‘How about an artefact?’ said Dr Wessler, joining in the tease of Dad.

  ‘Oh, yes! Vinny, would you please see that in addition to a further selection of hominid bones your father unearths a primitive but unarguable example of a stone tool.’

  THEN

  IT WAS LIKE living in a dream, alone at the water-caves, just the six of them and the baby, no clamour, no quarrels, no scurry, no press of bodies to lie down among at night, no song to wake to in the morning. The rhythms of their normal life were so strong in them that as the moon reached full they woke at midnight and all except Presh went down into the high tide to hunt for shrimps, though there were none here. They returned and huddled in the cave, mourning their loneliness and the emptiness of stomachs used to being crammed at this hour.

  They’d piled a bed of seaweed for Presh near the mouth of the cave, where the rising sun struck in to warm him as the day began but climbed out of sight before its heat grew too much to bear. Most days Li would untie the bundle round his leg and she and the other females would inspect the swollen limb, and stroke it for a while, and then Li would fasten the bundle again. As she became more skilled she was able to reduce the padding. The swelling subsided, and soon Presh could hunker himself about without much pain, and lie in the water during the heat of the day. Till then the females brought water in their cupped webbed hands to wet him, as they’d have done with a sick baby.

  It was always poor foraging in the bay, and worse so soon after the tribe had passed through, so they foraged in turn along the outer shore. Hooa, bewildered by the change, was inseparable from Ma-ma, and Rawi usually went with them, so Li foraged with Goor. At first Goor had been almost as bewildered as Hooa, but realizing that he was the only healthy male in the party had given him confidence, especially when he was away from Presh’s commanding presence. Unlike some males he was generous in sharing the food he found, and not too old, after feeding, for catch-as-catch-can and diving games along the rocks.

  Li was poised twenty feet above clear water when she saw the dolphins. She hadn’t expected them here. In her mind they belonged with the other bay, but now five of them were coming towards her in formation, surging out of the water with arched backs and then plunging under. She dived, crying Follow to Goor as she fell, and raced to meet them.

  Before she’d dived she had seen the spattered surface in front of them, where the shoal they were hunting broke through in panic flight. By the time she was nearing them Goor had caught her up, and the shoal must have seen the two bodies in the water as two m
ore hunters ahead. It swung aside, now heading directly for the bay. Where the rock spit loomed it might have turned again, but the leading fish saw the single channel of clear water ahead and took it, and the rest of the shoal, bound into formation by instinct, swirled through behind them.

  The dolphins were unable to follow, but Li and Goor, racing along behind them and now wild with the thrill of the hunt, splashed across the bar and harried the shoal around the bay, yelling Come-help to the others. Goor actually managed to grab a fish and fling it out on to the rocks, and Rawi caught another, but the rest of them had no luck and simply rushed and yelled and splashed, keeping the fish in a state of panic until the leaders found the entrance of the bay and headed through.

  The dolphins were waiting for them. Deliberately, as if they were used to this way of hunting, they raced past the shoal, turned it and headed it back towards the bay. Li and the others, gasping at the entrance, saw the catspaw ruffle in the water racing towards them and waited ready. As the shoal rushed through, packed by the narrows into an almost solid mass, they were able to snatch fish after fish and fling them over their shoulders to flounder on the rocks. Then they plunged into the bay, and knowing now what they were doing harried their prey around along the shore and out again into the open sea where the dolphins waited.

  Twice more the cycle was repeated before the remains of the shoal escaped, scurrying along below the southern crags. As Li stood panting on the rock spit, two of the dolphins came cruising through the clear water beside her. All around her lay dead and dying fish. She picked a couple up and flung them out, and the dolphins rose and took them just as they hit the surface. Almost at once the other dolphins arrived and hung below her, waiting expectantly. Ma-ma, Hooa and Rawi were already harvesting the fish on the other side of the entrance. Goor was carrying one up for Presh. The ones this side, Li felt, were rightly the dolphins’ share.

  When she had all but cleared the rocks around her she picked up the last two, slid down into the water and kicked gently towards the dolphins. They backed away so she waited, treading water, with a fish held in each hand until they became inquisitive and drifted in. Two of them took the fish, but suddenly they backed away again.