A Bone From a Dry Sea (16 page)

‘He’ll tell everyone what we’ve found.’

‘No way I could stop him, Sam, seeing whose nephew he is. I don’t want Wishart turned back at the airport. And it’s not that much of a risk – if Watson’s the only palaeontologist in the country, who’s going to listen or understand? And in any case, anyone who knows him will reckon he’s shooting a line.’

‘Well, it’s done now. OK, Vinny, I’ll be wanting the A-layer bag.’

The morning wore quietly on. It was at least as hot as yesterday, and Vinny found it even more shattering. She’d been hoping to get used to it fairly quickly, but now she realized she’d be lucky if she did before she left. Dr Wessler was in the second trench beginning to work his way into the fossil-layer the way Dad had done, and Vinny looked after both lots of bags and labels. Michael and another African called Ali started to clear the topsoil for another trench, further along, while Dr Hamiska and Nikki made a systematic series of shallow excavations all along the sloping line of tuff, trying to chart how far the fossil-layer extended. Mrs Hamiska drifted over the plain below, just looking.

Dr Wessler was held up by a crocodile-jaw jutting sideways into his trench. It was large but fragile, so that he had to scrape round it and burrow into the side wall, hardening it section by section with resin as he went. Dad found pig-teeth, the leg-bone of a small deer, and in the second section of H-layer some fragments of
another
clam, and then more in the third section. There were no hammer-marks on them, but when Vinny did a jigsaw with them she found that though there was still a lot missing the chips near the centre were the smallest and seemed to make a sort of star-pattern with a crack curving round it, just what you might get, she thought, if the shell had been broken first go, with one good bash. The actual point of impact was missing, but those chips would be tiny, so perhaps Dad had missed them. He was tipping the loose soil from the fossil-layers separately on a plastic sheet, to be sieved through later.

‘Can I have a look in your bucket, Dad, if you’re not using it?’

‘Hold it.’

The words were little more than a murmur, but she could hear something in them – total absorption, interest, excitement. Ducking under the awning and peering into the trench she saw Dad crouched below, picking the clay away, crumb by crumb, from around a little cylinder of fossil.

‘Is it a toe-bone?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Don’t forget about the webbing.’

Grunt.

‘Shall I get Joe?’

‘Five minutes.’

But Dr Hamiska was already there. Usually he made a point of crunching round in his heavy boots as if he wanted to tell the world that the great Dr Hamiska was coming, but this time, he must almost have tiptoed down. He leaped off the boulder beside the trench and squatted by the awning.

‘Got it sorted out now, Sam,’ he said. ‘What
we’ve
got must be something like a stream-bed running into the lake. That’s just this nine-metre stretch. You’re near the top of it – there’s nothing beyond the boulder here – and it peters out just beyond the new trench. That’s all. Just this one needle in the haystack, and we’ve found it! How are you doing?’

‘Come and look.’

Dad hardly had time to stand aside before Dr Hamiska was in the trench, gazing at the new fossil, touching it with his forefinger, peering through his magnifying glass.

‘Terrific!’ he said. ‘I knew it was there! I knew it! This’ll show ’em. Fred! Fred! Come over here! Someone tell Jane!’

He climbed out and waved his cap and hallooed to Mrs Hamiska, who heard him, waved back and started to come. By the time she arrived everyone else had had their turn to crouch and gaze and revere the tiny object, and now they were standing round, oblivious of the battering sun, talking like kids after a concert. In the middle of it all, Dr Hamiska laughed as if he’d thought of a new joke. They looked at him.

‘And Sam didn’t want to tell me!’ he crowed.

‘What do you mean?’ said Dad.

‘I heard Vinny ask if she should fetch me and you said no.’

‘Oh, rubbish,’ said Dad.

‘I’m not deaf, Sam.’

Dad gave an exasperated sigh but said nothing.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ muttered Vinny.

‘Of course it wasn’t,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘But I must insist that the moment any object of significance comes to light I am immediately
informed
, and that no further excavation takes place till I have seen it.’

‘Are you suggesting that I was in some way trying to keep this to myself?’ said Dad.

‘My dear Sam! Don’t be so touchy. Everyone can keep in mind what I’ve said and we’ll say no more about it. Now, let’s imagine a stream running out of the hills, from roughly that direction. There has recently been a volcanic eruption which has altered the course of the stream into a new channel. It deposits its silt here for a number of years and then alters its course again, but in the meanwhile a number of creatures have died, leaving their bones to be preserved in the silt-layers. One of them is our friend here. She dies. Her body lies in the water. The flesh decays. The skeleton falls apart. The flow of the stream gently sifts the bones, scattering them in a regular pattern before the silt-layers harden and hold them. We come along and find three points in that pattern. Can we from those three points deduce the rest of it?’

For a moment he made it sound actually possible. Dad shook his head unbelieving. Dr Wessler giggled.

‘It’s a lovely line, Joe,’ he said. ‘I hope John Wishart buys it.’

Dr Hamiska ignored him, entranced by his vision.

‘Sam?’ he said. ‘You’re the taphonomist.’

‘Not a hope,’ said Dad. ‘For a start, it needn’t have been a stream, and if it was how can we yet tell which direction it came from? I’d need to get the whole area cleared and mapped and do a series of computer-simulations, and even then the best I’d be able to show you would
be
some probability-curves. But if you want to tell Wishart that there was a stream and that the creature was female and died of hiccups on a Thursday afternoon, I’ll keep my mouth shut.’

Everyone laughed. The row seemed over as soon as it had started, and the others went back to their work. Vinny looked at her shell-fragments, but felt too worn-out with heat even for something as simple as that, so she sat in the shade of the awning, looking out over the shimmering grey plain and trying to imagine it with water, and reeds, and pigs, and crocodiles, and something (someone?) sitting where she was sitting, looking out over it then. Dad seemed not to have noticed she was there, but he must have, because he spoke without looking round.

‘It’s all so unnecessary,’ he sighed.

‘I suppose he wants to find everything himself. He’s got to make it his, somehow.’

‘What have you done with that shoulder-blade?’

‘It’s in the tent, with my drawing things.’

‘We’d better get it back into its bag. I don’t want any more fuss. This evening, after he’s gone.’

‘All right. I’m going to go and lie down, Dad. It’s too hot for me. Listen, I’ve made another sort of shell-shape. It’s out here.’

‘Let’s have a look.’

He climbed out, studied the pattern with his head on one side and grunted.

‘OK, I’ll show Joe,’ he said.

‘I thought there might be some of those little middle bits still in the bucket.’

‘OK, we’ll put it through a sieve. Well done. I suppose.’

Wearily, Vinny went down the hill.

THEN

THE TRIBE WERE
still straggling out of the water in answer to Presh’s bellows of
Come
when he limped along the beach to confront the strangers. There was a code for such a meeting. Although nothing like this had happened before in their memory, deep in their instincts, inherited through tens of thousands of generations, was a knowledge of what happened when ape-group met ape-group at the edges of adjoining territories.

The grown males went forward, their leader at the centre. The females and young watched from behind, screaming defiance. The males displayed at each other, fangs bared, manes bushed, bellowing not their ritual challenge-calls, but older ones, a hoarse repetitive bark which till now they had not known they knew. All this happened, much as it once had happened in the forest.

Li had come down with Presh from the rock from which they’d first seen the strangers and had joined the females as they’d gathered behind the line of males. Then, because it was difficult in the crush to see what was happening, she had gone aside and, much as she had done at the shark-hunt, had climbed a little way up a gully behind the bay till she reached a point from which she could watch everything. The two groups of
males
were confronting each other, Presh with a whole line of them supporting him, but the other leader with only three and those barely fully adult. The leader, though, looked bigger and stronger than any male Li had ever seen.

What would have happened in the forest was that the smaller group, seeing they were outnumbered, would have been cowed and so retreated, and the larger would, if they’d wanted, have followed them until they began to feel they were getting uncomfortably far from their known territory, and stopped. A new frontier would have been established.

This was not how it went on the shingle beach. The three younger strangers indeed looked uncertain, and their manes began to flatten, but their leader gave a louder bellow and took a pace towards Presh with his left arm raised into the fighting-grip but his right swinging loose and low, as if he couldn’t use it. The movement and pose made Li recognize him. He was Greb.

Instantly she was sure he had come for her. Terrified, she turned and scrambled further up the gully, which was still streaming with water after the downpour. The yells from below changed note. She stopped and looked over her shoulder.

Presh had limped forward to face Greb, also in the fighting-pose, both hands raised. They were barely a pace apart. Greb moved a half-step to the left and struck with his raised hand. Presh seized him by the wrist and struck with his other hand to grasp Greb’s neck. Greb swayed away, but as he did so his dangling arm swung back and round. He had kept it till now with its back facing his opponent, concealing the rock he was holding. The blow caught Presh full force on the
side
of the skull. His head jerked violently away. He staggered half a pace back and toppled over. He didn’t rise.

A moment’s silence. Out of it Greb’s bellow of triumph rose echoing round the bay. He stood punching the air, his right hand still grasping the rock. His three followers moved forwards, their manes fully bushed out once more, and now Li saw that they too each held a rock. This was something that didn’t happen. The whole ritual of challenge and contest was deep in the instincts of the males, preventing the kind of fighting to the death which might leave even the winner too badly hurt to survive, or at least to become a useful leader. But Presh was dead.

The sheer shock overwhelmed the tribe. Even unarmed there were more than enough males to overcome Greb and his small group, but when Greb, still in his triumph-posture, stepped forward to face Kerif, Kerif’s mane at once went flat and he backed away. Greb paraded along the line facing them down in turn, daring them with threatening little movements of his rock to show the least sign of challenge. His followers copied him but stayed close behind him, not risking confrontation with the larger males of the tribe alone. Still further back, the small group of females who had come with him watched apathetically. They looked cowed and miserable. They had no small young with them. Memories of ancient instinct told Li that Greb, somehow taking over the leadership of such a group, would have seen to it that any babies they carried died. This was how it happened in the forest long ago, though it didn’t in the tribe.

As their males retreated in front of them the
females
of the tribe began to scatter in alarm. Some hurried for the water, others into the caves, others along the shore. Li saw Ma-ma below, with the baby clasped protectively against her and Hooa beside her. She called, and again, and again. Ma-ma heard her, stared around bewildered and at last looked up and saw her. Li beckoned, saw Ma-ma begin to climb, and immediately turned to scramble further up the gully. The nightmare certainty that Greb had deliberately come for her, to take her over and own and control and mate with her as soon as she was ready, filled her mind. She had no idea where she was going, or of what lay above the cliffs. No-one had ever been up there before.

It wasn’t at first a difficult climb, but so steep that soon she was gasping and despite her terror was forced to stop and rest. Ma-ma and Hooa weren’t far below, with others behind. Pursuers? Greb? No, he was still on the beach. He had begun to organize a kind of triumph-ceremony, with his own followers and as many of the tribe as he had managed to round up lined along the shallows and himself getting ready to parade in front of them. Presh’s body lay where it had fallen.

Seeing Greb thus occupied, Li was able to climb on more calmly until she reached a place where the gully ended in a cliff face down which the rain-fed stream fell in a veil of spray. Beside the waterfall hung a mat of gourd-vine. Li climbed the side of the gully with difficulty and found that the cliff face extended either way, almost sheer, without handhold or foothold. By now Ma-ma and Hooa had reached the foot of the waterfall and were looking around, still bewildered with shock. Li joined them and saw Goor coming
up
the gully behind. She looked at the mat of vine.

Sometimes young members of the tribe would play swinging-games at the bottom of vines, though their mothers discouraged them because it was impossible to be sure how strong the strands were, and there were many falls. Occasionally adults would use the vines as a means of reaching birds’-nests, but always tested them carefully before they did so. It didn’t happen often, as birds along that coast had mostly learnt not to nest in such places. The vine by the waterfall looked skimpy. Li tested it and it stayed firm. Gingerly she climbed. There were occasional jerks when a strand gave under her weight, but the mat as a whole held and she reached the top, panting.