Peter Dickinson - A Bone From a Dry Sea

‘Do you see what I see?’ he said. ‘Sam! Can you spare us a moment?’

Wearily Dad climbed out, ducking under the awning, and came over. Watson whistled astonishment. Dad took the shell and looked at it for a while through his own glass.

‘There could be a number of explanations,’ he said slowly.

‘Oh, Sam! Sam! You’re impossible! If the skies opened and the host of heaven appeared announcing the end of the world, you’d say there could be a number of explanations.’

‘Such as me having gone off my rocker. And I understood the end of the world was scheduled for Thursday.’

‘What is it?’ said Vinny. ‘Please can I look? Don’t tell me.’

‘Why not?’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘If an unschooled eye can see it, perhaps even Doubting Sam will begin to believe.’

Vinny focused the magnifying glass on the outside of the fragment, near one edge, where she’d seen the others looking so intently. There were two sorts of markings on the shell, a series of waves or rumples running from the middle of what had been the hinge side across to the outer lip, and then a lot of finer bands running parallel to the lip, like tree-rings, laid down as the shell had grown and grown. With the glass she now saw that these bands were interrupted by three small pits near the corner closest to the hinge, while on the very edge was a place like a chip on the edge of a china plate, when it’s been knocked against something.

‘Something hit it,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t just squashed.’

‘Or someone,’ said Dr Hamiska.

‘You can’t say that yet,’ said Dad.

‘I say someone,’ said Watson. ‘Yeah, I’m with Joe. Look, just these three strike-marks, all close, and the one on the break . . . Let’s see.’

He knelt to inspect the rest of the shell, looking slowly at each piece in turn and putting it back in its place before picking up the next. By the time he’d finished some of the others had arrived, and were passing the first shell-fragment round. The air was full of tension.

‘What about the piece the other side of the break?’ said someone.

‘I haven’t found it yet,’ said Vinny.

‘No more strike-marks on any of these,’ said Watson. ‘Looks like it must’ve been, you know, deliberate, uh?’

Chatter broke out, excited, wondering. Vinny stared at the broken shell, working out what Watson had meant. Yes. If whatever had caused the marks had been accidental – stones rolling down in a landslip, say – then you’d have expected them to be scattered all over the shell. If just one stone had hit it there’d be only one mark. But if someone had been deliberately trying to break it they’d have hit it several times, near the same spot, weakening it till it gave. Of course it could still be just coincidence, but . . .

‘Quiet, everyone, quiet!’ shouted Dr Hamiska. ‘You know who we have to thank for this?’

Without warning he bent and picked Vinny up and set her on his shoulder like a three-year-old. The others cheered.

‘That’s twice now Vinny has brought us the sort of luck palaeontologists dream of. Two miracles. One more, and the Pope will make her a saint. Till then the best we can do is call this site officially Vinny’s site, and I shall see it goes into the reports as that.’

Vinny managed to smile, but it was at this point that she definitely made up her mind she didn’t like Dr Hamiska. He’d been kind to her, and friendly, but that certainly didn’t give him any right to treat her as if she belonged to him. And when he put her down he patted her on the head as if she’d been a spaniel or something. No.

* * *

Vinny cooked supper out of cans and Dad at least pretended to think it was delicious. They ate in the tent by the light of an oil-lamp, with the netting down over each end, because without that all the insects in Africa would have been swarming round the light. As it was, Vinny could hear the continuous faint flutter of tiny bodies batting against the net and the sides of the tent. It was wonderfully peaceful, and cool enough for a sweater. Dad was transferring the rough notes he’d made on the site into his main notebook, and Vinny was having another go at drawing her fossil, though her eyes were tired and the light was too poor for her to see the fine detail. Neither of them had spoken for half an hour. Dad closed his notebooks and looked up.

‘Early bed for me,’ he said. ‘I’m knackered.’

‘Me too. And I can’t see to draw.’

‘I think I’ll have to tell Joe about those scratch-marks you spotted.’

‘Oh. I suppose you’ve got to.’

‘What’s troubling you?’

‘Well, you see, I found it in the first place. I’m afraid he’ll say it’s the third miracle. I hate it when he makes a fuss about me like that.’

‘I thought you were relishing it.’

‘Well, I’m not. And I’m not his lucky mascot either.’

‘Um. I’ll sit on it till you’ve gone. I can pretend to notice the marks then. I can certainly do without another bout of wild speculation.’

‘Thanks. I warn you, Dad, you’d better tell him as soon as I’ve gone. Otherwise I shall use it to blackmail you.’

‘Oh huh? What will be your price of silence?’

‘I’m going to buy the sea-ape book and send it to you, and you’re going to have to read it and tell me what you think.’

His mood changed. He had been stretching and half-yawning, relaxed, happy with her companionship, with being her father, but as she spoke she saw him shrink into himself and go cold.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I shouldn’t have talked about it to Watson. It was stupid of me.’

‘It’s done now.’

‘May Anna says . . .’

She stopped, knowing she’d put her foot in it again. She’d been going to tell him what May Anna had said about the sea-ape theory being wrong, but not crazy wrong. That would be a disaster now.

‘Well?’

‘May Anna says it’s no use trying to pretend with you. I must just be what I am, and hope. So must you.’

He looked at her and nodded.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope.’

THEN

FOR THE FIRST time, ever, in countless generations, the pattern of the tribe’s existence changed. Accidents might have varied their journeys before – a storm, or a stranded fish large enough to feed them all for an extra day or so, keeping them longer in one place – but they had always tended to make the time up, reaching the river in the north around the new moon, and returning to the shrimping beaches at the full. Now they didn’t go north at all. The first haul of fish lasted them three days, and then the dolphins came again.

This time the shoal was smaller, but the people knew what to do, so the catch was almost as great. Li hadn’t called to the dolphins in her mind, but Presh assumed she had and took her out to dance with them when the hunt was over. Four days later the people were hungry again, but by then he felt that his leg was strong enough for normal swimming and he took them south.

To Li’s surprise, though the rest of the tribe took it that she’d sent for them, the dolphins brought a shoal to a bay like the one where Greb had danced after his fight with Presh. There was no bar to trap the fish here, so the people lined up in the water in an open-ended ring, into which the dolphins herded the fish to be scooped out on to the shingle. Already these hunts were becoming part of the tribe’s life-pattern, something which happened because it happened, no cause for wonder at all.

Li did wonder. At times she was almost paralysed by the wonder of things – her own shadow, for instance, moving below her as she swam above sunlit sands, or the intricacy of a jellyfish, or why gulls could fly and she couldn’t. She wondered often about the dolphins, though she knew they were so wonderful that she would never understand them, unless, perhaps, when she died and they took her to the place the sun came from.