A Bone From a Dry Sea (11 page)

It was in Li’s mind too, but how could Presh make that journey? Between feeding-places the tribe moved steadily, close inshore where possible, wary of sharks. Towing Presh would slow them and make them more vulnerable, and would need a calm sea, which they were soon not going to have. How would his leg mend, constantly in movement in the water? Where would he sleep? There were only two sets of caves on the coast, and elsewhere the tribe used ledges with a difficult climb to them, which no predator would make.

No, he must lie on land, in shade, with drinking-water easy. There was only one place, the bay with the water-caves. He must go back.

Li swam off to look for Tong who was family-close and had been her main helper the night before, but found him in confrontation with Kerif. With Presh unable to patrol the tribe and remind everyone of his authority it was natural for the other males to start jostling for status, so Tong and Kerif were face to face beyond the headland, rising and falling, yelling their challenges and sluicing their arches of water. It was still more like a game than a serious contest for leadership, but their minds were filled with it. Nor could Li have brought herself to interrupt. Though she was aware of her own new status in the tribe she knew that it only worked some of the time. Now, with two adult males engaged in something that took all their energies and attention, she was an unnoticed child. Li watched for a while but the contest showed no sign of ending so she swam back to Presh.

He too was anxious, but only about his need to move on from this exposed headland. ‘On’ for him meant south, past more headlands with shingle beaches between, plagued by the savage crabs, and eventually to the coral beaches and the fresh-water pool. He had not considered how long it would take to get him there, where he would sleep, how great his need to drink would become. Normally before a move he’d have gone round the scattered families expressing his restlessness in sounds and signals, making them feel restless also, so that when he at last swam off they’d all have been ready to go. But it was different here. There was still plenty of food and it was important to eat all they could before the sea rose. No-one expected to move or wanted to. Even Ma-ma and Hooa, who’d been attending to Presh’s needs
and
could sense his anxiety, could only mutter soothingly to him and coax him to stay where he was.

He was relieved to see Li, but astonished and angry when she grunted a
Come-help
to Hooa, put an arm under his arm and started to tow him north. Her idea was to take him to Tong and Kerif and use his authority to stop their contest. Then, somehow, she would have to get him to detach Tong and a few of the others to help tow him back to the water-caves while the rest of the tribe continued their usual journey south. They couldn’t all go back. They’d just stripped that section almost bare of food. So it would have to be like that.

At one level Li was aware that she was asking something almost impossible. You simply didn’t leave the tribe. To do so was a kind of dying. The tribe was where you belonged. But the need was now so obvious to her that at her surface level she couldn’t see that the others would be unable to grasp it.

So Presh resisted and Ma-ma and Hooa didn’t know what to do but at length gave in to Li’s insistence. They found Tong and Kerif, their contest over, feeding together, touching each other often and sharing any prey they caught. They peered briefly at Presh, grunted commiseration and returned to the vital business of re-making their friendship.

It was the same with all the others. They were hungry, and occupied with settling into themselves after yesterday’s upheaval. They didn’t want to move. Only two attached themselves to Li’s group – a young male, Goor, who was in the stage of splitting himself off from his immediate
family
, and the stranger whose baby had died, Rawi – Presh had always been kind to her and she would have liked to mate with him.

Presh was too tired, too shaken by his loss of command to resist any more. Ma-ma and Hooa were deeply worried about leaving the tribe and at first gave signs of wanting to break off and return, but then became afraid to leave the little group. Rawi and Goor were readier for the idea and did most of the work, towing Presh through the rising swell, lying on their backs and kicking with their webbed feet, the tribe’s usual stroke for longer journeys.

Normally it would have taken them less than half a day to reach the caves from that headland, but it was almost dark when they came to the bay, hungry and exhausted, and working together lifted the unconscious Presh across the rocky foreshore and into the smaller cave.

NOW: TUESDAY MORNING

VINNY WOKE WITH
the sun shining into her eyes and remembered where she was. They’d finished putting the tent up in the dark, but now when she looked around she saw that it was as large as a small room, with her cot one side and Dad’s the other and plenty of space between. There were mosquito nets at each end to let the wind blow through. Dad’s cot was empty.

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.