The Find (12 page)

Anna smiled, sat there at the wobbly plastic table, combing her hair with her fingers. Everyone was pale and rumpled from sleep; the men whiskery, the women soft-faced. They waited in near silence for the helicopter, first a mere vibration in the frames of their chairs, concentric rings in the cups, then the throb of it hammering across the gorge, shaking their bones; the machine itself was suddenly there, hanging above the gorge, churning leaves and grit from the ground and whipping it into their eyes. Amid a skittering of shale chips, the load inched down, touched, and then collapsed onto the ground. Felix and Scott in hard hats and ear protectors ran out to undo the hitch and then the machine lifted away, leaving a shocked silence behind it. Bodies and minds slowly returned to each other, somehow new.

‘Ours!' Anna yelled across to Swenson. They set to breaking open the crate. An audience had arrived: Gus and Garth, Camera and Sound, ready to document the unpacking of two-by-fours, a generator, an air compressor, drills, jackhammer, angle grinder, box on box of smaller tools and fixings. Hammers. Goggles. Gloves. Masks. Sacks of plaster, rolls of sacking.

‘Dr Swenson is over there,' Anna said, to get Gus and Garth out of the way, but soon they were back, instructing everyone to forget they were there.

‘That burlap should be under cover,' Jason told Scott, ‘along with the plaster.'
Burlap?
he had to ask, and soon Felix, his long face calm and attentive, like that of a nun or a monk, was explaining how the technology hadn't changed much since the nineteenth century: it was a kind of sacking and each piece of the fossil would be wrapped in lengths that had been soaked in plaster and then later reinforced with two-by-fours and more plaster-soaked burlap to make a jacket that would protect it from shocks on the way to the museum.

‘I have a colleague,' Jason interrupted, ‘who wanted in on this dig so bad, but didn't get picked.'

‘I guess you'll have to tell him all about it,' Scott said, turning away as the helicopter returned with Swenson's gear. The third time it came it brought more jacketing supplies for each team and two blue portable toilets that dangled above their heads like a pair of outsize castanets.

A central axis, and then a grid of metre squares had to be set up over the entire site, covering both specimens, and numbered at each corner for easy reference. Each metre could be divided further when detail was required. Both teams stood amid a jungle of equipment and waited while Swenson and Anna discussed the placing of the axis and then numbering systems each preferred to use: letters and numbers, just letters, lower, upper? Swenson let out a hiss of breath to show when he tired of the discussion. Scott noted that Swenson didn't look Anna in the eye, but sent his pale blue gaze out and away, at the other people, at the specimen. When she let him have his choice, Swenson relaxed and grinned; she came back tight-faced.

‘Hey, who cares,' Scott said.

She bent down to pick up two small hammers, handed him one of them.

‘Please. Here. Greta will show you what to do.'

They drilled and then drove in slender pins to mark the main axis, which ran between the two specimens on their side of the river, stretched a line across and then another north to south. From there, they measured parallel, marking each intersection with a dot of white paint, and writing the co-ordinates on the rock. He had to check and double-check that the lines were parallel, call out to Greta, mark the spot.

‘Don't trip over it when you stand up!'

Anna photographed each square. Greta's skin burned pink even though she wore sunblock and a hat. All of them were sweating hard and their smells emerged: nothing too bad, Scott thought, just individual variants of smoky and pepperish, blended with a variety of disintegrating perfumes, and in the case of Anna, cut grass, blood, rain after a dry spell; it was like the trace of some unseen animal passing in the woods. Maybe he was hallucinating from lack of drugs and the heat.

He and Felix taped off the area surrounding Specimen A, and after that, Swenson's team had to walk around it to get to ‘their' Specimen B (‘None of these specimens are
anyone's
,' Anna said), though at least twice already Mike ducked under the tape — its existence, it being put up by someone else's hand, let alone hers, too much to bear.

‘We're working on the tail.' Greta handed Scott a slender chisel, a dusty pair of safety glasses and some brand-new gloves, and then crouched down next to him. One section has already been removed: the bit Anna had dropped and broken: she had still not told anyone about that.

‘Like so.' Scott copied her movements, splintering off tiny flakes of rock. She ran her fingers through the debris.

‘Look at every piece. There might be something—'

‘Like what?' Moisture condensed inside his goggles and mingled with the dust there to make mud; he pushed the goggles back on his forehead.

‘Fragments of our specimen. Or of something else — a tooth, or fish scale, an arthropod...we're trying to go underneath, see? Better safe than sorry,' Greta said. ‘They can take excess matrix off in the lab.' Her buglike safety glasses were jammed under the hat which shaded her face and neck; her breasts, encased in a pale blue stretchy sports top were in full sun — and then, looking up again, Scott realised that this time they were on camera: who could resist such a shot? Garth, hunched over his camera, zoomed right in.

Periodically, Scott visited the different points of the excavation and filled the wheelbarrow by the dustpanful, watching all over again for any kind of irregularity, while the others covertly watched to see that he was taking the right amount of trouble.

It was on the way back from the dumpsite that Swenson fell into step with Scott, bringing with him a new variant of the human smell, a blend of hot skin, DEET and fabric conditioner.

‘Where are you from, then? Local? You got the short straw there,' he said, turning his face to look into Scott's, but not taking off his Ray-Bans. ‘Fantastic experience though. Camp cook too?'

‘Kinda.' The barrow bounced along.

‘Might make sense to pool our resources in that department.'

‘You'd have to ask Anna.'

‘I won't be doing that,' Swenson said with a twitch of a grin, a sideways nod towards the site, where Anna crouched with Felix, Lin and Jason in the skull area, her finger brushing the rock as if she were reading Braille. ‘She chewed you over yet? Be warned, that one bites. Come take a look at what we're doing. We're going to have to cut right in under the cliff…exciting stuff... So what's in it for you?' he asked.

‘What?'

Mike grinned. ‘As for me—' he said as they splashed through what was left of the river, ‘I think this part of the world is really going to start to open up. If there are two of these, then there will be others, that's how it goes. Some kind of nesting site, an offshore island. I think the only viable explanation for this kind of preservation, is some kind of toxicity during a period of volcanism and seismic activity. There's a life's work here, and a chance to get a few things settled: I don't think that in ten years' time anyone will still be thinking that these larger species actually
flew
— not actively. That whole line of thought has been a diversion: how does an animal this size
take off
? I've never been persuaded. At this scale,
gliding
is far more plausible. A completely different thing, and of course it has implications for every aspect of their behaviour and ecology.'

Swenson grinned, rubbed his hands together. They had reached the cliff, the shale layer at the base of it a fissured background that seemed almost ready to burst apart. The camera was on him now:

‘We'll take what's out here, and then go in for the rest. This is the jaw—' he crouched beside it, looked up into the lens ‘The head in its entirety would be almost as long as I'm tall.' He stood. ‘And there's a lot of information inside that skull about the brain, of course, and the diet. We'll take the cliff back just here—'

‘How will you do that?'

‘A little bit of drilling and a lot of elbow grease,' Swenson smiled, folded his arms across his chest. ‘Watch this space.'

Scott found Anna in the office area outside her tent: two folding chairs, a white plastic table with a sun umbrella, which cast the table in shade. The laptop was plugged into a solar panel that she had propped up in front of the table, and she was entering the grid data, a long job. Her hands already felt stiff, she said.

‘What did Dr Swenson have to say?' she asked. ‘No, don't tell me...' Though at the same time, she needed to know and wanted to know, and also, what had Scott made of the man? But she could not ask that.

‘Important questions,' she said of Swenson's gliding theory. ‘But on the other hand, flight is certainly
possible
. Absolutely. Because we mustn't be dazzled by scale: it doesn't matter nearly so much as the wing area to weight ratio, the flexibility of the wing, and the ways in which it can be moved, angled and adjusted. The wing-loading and aspect ratio would be very similar to that of some of today's large sea birds, like the albatross. I think we could imagine short bursts of active flight, interspersed with long periods of gliding and soaring on thermals. Manoeuvrability would be excellent and stalling speed low...

‘We have to keep our minds open. There might be some answers, on flight, say if there was some soft-tissue preservation — attachments to the bone which allowed us to have a better picture of the actual musculature. Then again, there might not. And there might be some other information entirely that we're not even thinking to actively look for, so the more possibilities we can entertain the better. From now on, it's a process,' she told him, sitting there in the canvas chair, straight-backed, hair loose and wild. ‘Not a moment of illumination. Areas of relative clarity, a few pieces of hard evidence. If we find a fish inside its stomach, then we know what it ate. But mostly, it's not like that. The scale of an eye socket suggests either the importance of vision, or the darkness of the environment, or something you haven't thought of yet; the flexibility of an assemblage of neck vertebrae implies an ability to scan behind itself and to preen. But it is,' she smiled, ‘a kind of supereducated guess. We can't do experiments, the way they can in physics or even psychology. I hope I haven't bored you? You can use this if you want,' she waved at the laptop. ‘No Net, of course, but there are some useful programs and a couple of games, if you'd like.'

He remembered her calling flight
swimming in air
. He'd never knowingly seen an albatross, but he could imagine a huge heron flapping lazily above them. Branches would sway, leaves flutter on the ground as it passed.

His eyes were the colour of the forest, she thought; it was not a terribly useful thought and she turned quickly back to the screen.

♦ ♦ ♦

He made chilli with rice and afterwards walked upriver thinking how his father would be in the worst of it now, and how good it was to be away; when he returned, scruffy Kevin and the twins from Swenson's team had joined the others around the fire, and everyone was lying on their backs so they could stargaze without hurting their necks.

‘Ursa Major and Minor, the two bears,' Felix said, quietly, as if the stars might overhear them, ‘and over there, the swan, the eagle.' No one could see the swan or the eagle, and they argued over what they did see. Scott, silent, peered into the swirling mass of stars above him: it was like a thick liquid boiling, and eventually, by hanging on to what Felix said, he thought he could make out Draco, the dragon, towards the north.

‘Thousands of years ago, it
was
the north,' Felix said. ‘One of its stars was the polestar, and the dragon used to spin over our heads. Since then, the world has shifted on its axis.'

‘What do you mean,
shifted
?' Scott asked, sitting up. Everyone laughed, but it still felt more or less okay.

‘Bit by bit, Scott,' Greta said, ‘not so you'd notice.'

‘Actually,' Felix corrected her, ‘some people think the axis has shifted very dramatically in the past and will do so again. The magnetic pole, on the other hand, is wandering all the time, and there's clear evidence of big shifts back in the Cambrian.'

The world was full of boiling iron, Felix told him, which surged and sloshed around inside and responded to external forces too.

‘Of course, it could be tied in to climate change, or vice versa. Don't get me started on that one...my family's in Alaska. Enjoy the stars.'

Scott's smoke tin was digging into his thigh, but he ignored it. If you looked at the stars long enough, it made you feel as if you were vanishing, becoming smaller than one of those pricks of light, at the same time as your mind spread open, taking them all in. Did what Felix said about the magnetic north mean that all the measuring they did would be different another day, or next year? He wanted to know, but didn't want to ask, and he wished, suddenly, that he'd not given up school. At the time it had been the obvious and only thing to do, after months of taunts:
half 'n' half, loser
, to which he could not back then reply as he later wished he had: Okay, so there's no mum driving me to soccer and Dad is not showing me how to fish or use the workshop tools, and I'd be scared to let him if he tried — yes, I'm not like you. What the hell?