The Find (17 page)

‘Guess I'll see how things turn out.'

‘Once you know, I'd like to help.'

People were beginning to leave the river parking lot, packing their chairs and banners away, eating at the picnic tables, making use of the pit toilets behind the trees. Barry Sutherland roamed from group to group, pointing out that any vehicles left overnight would be towed away.

‘Scott!' Thompson yelled as they climbed out of the van. ‘What're you doing on the wrong side?' Scott raised his hand in greeting and yelled: ‘Working!' before following Anna through the gap in the trees, down the boardwalk and on to the riverbed.

If he had not met her that day on the top of the cliff he might well be on the other side now, even just for something to do. As it stood, he felt that he was on both sides, and yet whatever he thought about what should happen, this way and that, it was in the end, he realised with a shock, how the
outcome affected the woman with the incomprehensible
vocabulary walking beside him that mattered to him most of all. But her mouth was tight, her eyes intense; she was not thinking of him at all.

Why not, Scott suggested when they returned, offer food to the half-dozen protesters who had stayed to bed down on the rock? It meant using both sets of cooking equipment, and had an unexpected benefit: Mike Swenson and the twins stayed away. After the plates of beans and rice had been handed round there was silence for a moment or two while people stirred the two foods together, investigated how spicy the meal was.

‘Look,' Anna said quietly to Coxtis, ‘I've been through so much to get to this point. You can't imagine.'

‘It's not personal,' he replied, setting his plate aside, ‘simply a matter of justice. And in any case, I
can
imagine. My people have been trying to negotiate an agreement with yours for ninety-six years.

‘So,' he explained, ‘we know this may take time. Everyone would be back in the morning. If they block the access from the parking lot, there are other ways in.'

A long silence followed this: there was nothing to do but eat. Eventually Spruce, the Forest Nation spokesperson, asked Anna whether or not she had looked into CanCo's environmental record before she approached them for sponsorship?

‘They're a logging company. Supporting us is actually one of the better things they do. Without them, their permission and their help, we can't get the specimen out.'

‘We don't like that word,
specimen
,' Coxtis said. ‘For us, that is not what it is. It is either Big Crow, or Raven.'

‘It's very hard for me to call it Crow or Raven,' Anna told him, ‘since it's not a bird of any kind. Fossil?'

‘Creature,' Greta suggested. Jason, welded to her side, arm around her waist, nodded his approval; his hand, Scott noticed (and so, he thought, must everyone else) had pushed its way deep under the waistband of her low-rise pants.

‘Are you saying,' Anna asked, swallowing her etymological objection to
creature
— a thing created — ‘that you want the… fossilised creatures…to be left where they are? That to your mind, they can't be touched
at all
?'

‘If that
was
the case, what do you think would be the right thing to do?' Coxtis, Scott knew, was talking around things the way the Big Crow people always did; even his mother used to do it, answer a question with a question — it used to drive Mac mad.

‘That's really hard for me to say. I think I'd want a third party to make a judgment.'

‘But was it a fair question, Alan?' Scott asked, and everyone turned to look at him. He tried to clear his throat: ‘Like: there probably isn't a right thing. This side or that side, someone's always pissed. There's only whatever you agree to.' Finally, throat welded together, he looked down at his hands, wishing he could vanish, had never come here at all — and at the same time not caring who Coxtis was, or who they all were, or how many degrees they all had and wanting to cut through the crap, all of it, and wishing he could stop thinking about what was happening opposite between Jason and Greta, what they'd be doing later, what Mike Swenson thought Anna and he might be doing too. The easy way to be rid of all this would have been to get up and do some hard, useful work, but it was dark. He wanted to explode — shoot up like a firework, up above the circle around the fire, the camp and the riverbed and the forest above all their heads and then burst into a million shining pieces.

‘We hope you will refrain from digging,' Coxtis said.

‘I think,' Anna said, ‘that we may have to continue, but I promise to take nothing away.'

‘Can you promise not to touch the cliff?'

‘That's a very reasonable request, but it's not for me to say. I'll pass it on to Dr Swenson.'

Maiko leaned forwards, smiling gently at the circle of faces:

‘This kind of problem,' she said, ‘does not arise in Japan.'

—
♦ —

THE FIRST OF THE PROTESTERS REAPPEARED
at dawn, and more arrived steadily as the morning grew bright and hot. By noon, the shale was baking; the work, already painstaking, witnessed by so many people, seemed to go even more slowly than it always did. Yet, because it was such a large task with its own logic and continuous demands, the work had a kind of insulating quality, like ritual, which made it possible to continue while watched.

Lin and Scott finished wrapping the bones of the left arm and hand, began the excavation of the pelvis: a confused lump of hardened rock that likely contained the fused bones of the ilium, sacrum and pubis, along with another bone unique to the species, the prepubis: a kind of sitting-bone, Lin said, as well as a support for the fossilised creature's intestines. From the direction and structure of the hip socket, Lin explained, they might be able to learn something about how it walked and, if there were significant differences in the proportions of the pelvic bones in each specimen, they might be able to
assign gender
.

The preparation department in the museum was hoping, Lin said, to acquire a CT scanner to help with this specimen, but if it didn't materialise, then it will be down to her and whoever else to find the bones inside the stone, removing the shale a micron at a time with an air scribe. Maybe Scott should visit the museum sometime, see how it was done, what was there, she said as one gloved hand scooped away a handful of broken rock and the other reached for the brush.

Swenson refused to discuss anything unless he and Anna were on their own,
without Scott
, he specified; she agreed to walk a little way upstream with him, making it clear first to the others what she was doing.

‘I told Alan Coxtis we'd try to find a solution,' she told him, ‘and that I won't remove anything from the site until there's agreement. They want an assurance that you will not take the cliff down without their consent. Would you be prepared to meet with the chairs of our departments and come up with something clear that we can offer?'

‘Do you think I'm not aware of what is really going on here! It won't work,' he said. The discussion was already over: he turned his back on her and set off back to the dig.

‘He thinks,' Scott explained, ‘that
you
have set up this protest to stop him from digging under the cliff, and that I've helped you. I think that's it.'

‘What!'

‘Maybe it's the kind of thing he might do.'

What might thinking that way lead Mike to do or say next? Things were worse than she had imagined they could be, and yet, immersed in the continuous emergency that the dig had become, she had no time to worry about anything else, certainly not about her life after the dig. She clung to the fact that there would be a meeting at the museum, from which surely, a tangible offer would emerge. She felt, in the midst of it all, a peculiar kind of calm.

‘Meanwhile,' she announced, ‘back to work.' Scott struck his chisel and the rock split cleanly along the bedding plane, freeing a small concretion.

‘Split it,' she told him. Inside was a thumbnail-sized beetle that could almost be alive: they could see some kind of joints in its long antennae, and the fine ridges on its wing cases — the
elytra
, she called them.

‘Our first insect!' she said. Watched impassively by the protestors, they took it over to the plank bench, gave it a number and recorded it in the log:
Coleoptera?

The flight of insects, she said, was another matter entirely to that of pterosaurs, birds or bats, and very imperfectly understood.

That night he sat up after the others had gone. Not so long ago he had spent his nights in the trailer with Mac, arguing about how much was a reasonable amount to spend on alcohol per week, why he never washed dishes, and who the hell was it who left open the door and let in all those damn flies, and how that had felt like the entire possible world. Now, just a few weeks later he was here and Mac was, so far as he knew, still at Phoenix House. Instead of Mac there was Anna: her passion for the deep past, her fear and courage and secrets and silences, all the parts of her that almost no one knew anything about. There was this new world where people spoke in Latin and Greek, read the rock for signs of other, ancient worlds, feuded, made grant applications, dug up monsters, or, as he had read in
Reading Fate
, they spent their days in laboratories measuring things they could not directly see. All this now stood side by side with the other world of the St'alkwextsihn with its atmosphere of pride and hurt, where stories were as real as science, and maybe more use.

He slept at last, right there on the rock by the fire.

♦ ♦ ♦

At dawn, Anna went to collect tools and noticed immediately that parts of the specimen had been moved. She knelt among the jackets, a jumble of hard, white parcels, checking and double-checking numbers against the log. The bones of the right hand and one of the caudal vertebrae were missing.

‘Oh, hell, hell, hell!'

‘Someone must have gone right past me!' Scott, hollow-eyed, wanted to check again, but she was already sure, and threaded her way around the excavation and over to where Alan Coxtis sat, his back against the rock, the Cretaceaus-Tertiary boundary passing a metre or so above his head.

‘Do you have them?' she asked, her body waist up reflected in his sunshades. ‘The missing pieces, do you have them?'

‘Missing pieces?' He looked around him, as if searching. ‘I have nothing,' he said. ‘You say these creatures belong to no one,' he continued, removing the shades, making her image vanish, ‘yet you want them so very badly. I hope that you can find a way for each of us to get what we badly want.'

‘I am going to have to report the missing pieces to the police.'

Coxtis shrugged, looked through her as if she did not exist.

—
♦ —

ALL WORK ON THE DIG WAS SUSPENDED
. Fifteen officers were drafted to the site, and the two crews sat waiting on the rock in the midday heat, much like the protestors themselves. Downriver, the entrance to the parking lot had been cordoned off. Police conducted a search of the parking lot, campsites and the riverbed: no one could leave without their bags and vehicle being checked, even though it seemed very likely that whoever had taken the pieces would have hidden them during the night. Vehicles, once searched, were allowed out of the carpark, but not in again. Camera crews and journalists arriving there were turned away and had to make do with interviewing those leaving the site.

‘I'd like to conduct a more detailed interview with Scott Macleod,' Constable Sutherland announced towards the end of the day.

‘Why?' Scott asked.

‘There have been some accusations and so I'd like to be absolutely clear about your movements last night.'

‘This is ridiculous!' Scott heard Anna say as he and Barry walked downriver. Once out of earshot, they sat facing each other on a couple of rocks, the constable sweating in his uniform, Scott in his shorts and cap.

‘How's your father doing?' he began.

‘Suffering. But I think he's still there.'

‘Any idea where these bones might be?'

‘No,' Scott told him. Though really, he had too many ideas: they could be under a piece of sacking in somebody's garage; buried in the forest, or planted beneath a bush in someone's backyard. They could be wrapped in pieces of tie dye and batik in the back of one of the Forest Nation campers, or packed into someone's deep freeze alongside cuts of meat and frozen blackberry pies. Smashed to pieces and scattered. They could be in a locked drawer in the filing cabinet in Alan Coxtis' office, or carefully packed in a carved cedar chest in the newly built longhouse; they could simply be farther down- or upriver, concealed under a pile of branches and shale. They could even still be onsite, buried, perhaps by one of Swenson's team, in the refuse pile.

‘I'd like to know,' Sutherland said, ‘about your connections on the reserve these days. Do you see much of the younger people up there, like, say, Thompson Brown?'

No. Nothing at all, really. Did he leave the site during the night on which the fossils were stolen? No. Did he have any way of proving that? Jason and Greta, Scott pointed out, were the only two who could possibly prove anything of that kind, and Constable Sutherland flashed a smile, continued his writing. It was as if he had forgotten the past, but it was surely impossible?

‘Some people felt I should check things out with you,' he said, ‘but frankly, I see nothing pointing in your direction. I'm not thinking of bringing you in at this point.'

‘Good to know that, Baz,' Scott said, getting to his feet. He did not like the way the rest of the team studied him when he returned.

‘Swenson,' he told Anna, ‘obviously! Thinks it's me in cahoots with the protest. Could just as well be him, wanting to bring things to the boil, get the protesters moved away, or to undermine you by making it look like I'm involved, or any twisted thing, for fuck's sake—'

‘Okay, Scott.'

It was, they both realised and saw the other realising, the wrong way around, her calming him down.

‘Okay.'

It would be impossible, she thought, not to like his smile.

That night, four officers remained onsite and both teams were to help them keep watch. There was a sliver of crescent moon in the sky, and a light breeze. Even the ravens seemed to be on guard, calling occasionally to each other in the night with a staccato sound halfway between a croak and a bark, and then before dawn beginning a complicated and noisy conversation.

At about ten, the media were allowed to return. Alan Coxtis read a press release announcing that the protest would migrate to the clifftop area, on reserve land, and plant its banners there. Johnny Fleet, the taller of the two elders accompanying him, was asked for his view:

‘This is very serious,' he said. ‘Very serious. It is dangerous to disturb the spirits of the ancestors. I see only bad things coming from it.'

‘We still want to reach a compromise,' Anna said. ‘I will be returning to the museum very soon to discuss the possibilities.' Mike Swenson was not available for comment.

Around lunchtime, two Forest Nation people were badly injured trying to abseil down a crumbling cliff just upriver from the carpark, and CanCo sent Andrew Bellavance to explain that the company would have to withdraw their funding if negative publicity continued.

‘I think it will turn around very soon,' Anna told him.

Was there a curse? journalists asked.

No, Anna said. There had been a
misunderstanding
and now there was a
disagreement
, which she hoped would be resolved by means of negotiations. The museum would respond shortly to the demands the Big Crow River People had made.

I feel strong
, she had written the night before.
I want to deal with this: I'm prepared to do whatever is necessary.

So now the dig stumbled along: gloved and padded, watched from above, Anna and her team knelt in the trench that had been dug around the head and began tunnelling well beneath where she had calculated the bottom plane of the head to be. Once through, she explained, they would reinforce and jacket the top in situ, and then cut through the plinth and lever the specimen over onto plywood boards, before manoeuvring it up onto level ground.

‘Then we'll jacket the underside.'

‘Anna!' Swenson, shaved and cleaned up, stood at the edge of their circle. His cheeks were flat and hard.

He had his specimen's jaw out and jacketed, he said, and was ready to get to work on the cliff, but could not. First, Anna had not finished, and in any case, he could not cut into a cliff with a crowd of people hostile to the entire enterprise and especially his part of it standing close by on what was apparently their land.

‘You should know,' he said, ‘that I have faxed the funder and made a formal complaint about your unprofessional conduct and mismanagement, and to express my concerns about the resulting delays which are preventing me from progressing.' He tried, then, to hand her a copy of his letter. She stood up without reaching out; let it drift to the ground.

‘Get out of this part of the excavation, Mike,' she told him, adding, ‘Please.' He didn't move.

‘I can't tolerate delays,' he said. ‘We have to be ready for when these dammed protesters are finally cleared. My team is free. I'll send them over to help you finish.'

‘No,' she said, ‘I don't want them here.' She felt it happen, fought it, lost: she knew she should have said
yes
, but it was too late. ‘What do you think is going to make the protesters move? Just you wanting it? Why does no one want to engage with the actual problem?'

‘Anna,' Scott began, and she caught his gaze for a moment and then pulled herself away. ‘In no circumstances,' she told the team, ‘are you to work with any of Dr Swenson's team on this part of the site. I hope that's understood?'

‘Now,' she said to Swenson, ‘leave.'

‘You shouldn't be in a position of responsibility,' he told her before he strode away and she thought she could feel them, some of them, silently agreeing.

‘Leave me alone!' she told Scott when he called to her from outside the tent she had sealed herself in, hiding from the atmosphere she'd helped to make.

‘You asked me to tell you. Everyone's exhausted and thinking why the hell have they come here. You need to come out and be nice to them. And you need to offer the St'alkwextsihn—'

‘I can't come out now, I'll make it worse. Go away, please.'

‘What a complete fucking mess!' Jason said, poking the fire and sending up a trail of sparks. It was his turn to keep watch for the first part of the night. ‘Has been from the start.' There was no beer left.

‘I don't get what's happening,' Greta said, ‘I've worked with her before and it was fine.'

‘The protest is about history,' Scott told them. ‘It's not her fault. Anna says she will come up with something. She's trying, for sure. There's this meeting, at the museum...' Felix sighed, slipped on his headphones. He listened, Scott had discovered recently, mainly to natural sounds: animal and bird calls, the jungle, the sea. People stared unspeaking into the flames. Akira and Maiko, who had gone to bed early, could be heard talking quietly to each other in Japanese. The winged lizards were becoming a distant memory; the mosquitoes seemed far more important.

‘Can I do anything?' he asked Anna's tent. There was no light within.

Was she even in there? He could hear nothing, not the slightest sound.

‘Anna?'

No reply. Total failure all round. A muggy, starless night, the tent stifling. He took his foam mattress and bag and went downstream to lie in the open air again, staring up at the darkness so dense that he could hardly see where it joined the top of the trees.

Maybe you couldn't help anyone by trying to? Maybe there was nothing you could do. Maybe the person you were trying to help was the one who made it work or not: they took what they needed, and it might not even be what you think you were offering: look at what had happened with Mac. He felt like crying.

Maybe, as Matt had said, he'd spent too much time on this?

♦ ♦ ♦

‘Scott?' A glimmer of light. She was dressed in clean clothes and wearing her backpack; she was
smiling
.

‘There you are. Please,' she said, ‘drive me to the floater dock. I'm going to the museum. You and Jason will hold the fort for two or three days. Hurry, please.'

She waited while he found his shoes and jacket: a different woman.
Not me
, he remembered her saying when he first met her.
That was not me.

‘I do know how it could work,' she told him as they set off, almost at a jog. The birds were well away by then: a huge noisy conversation between ravens, subtle tapestry of other songs. ‘It came to me last night that all we need ask for is to
borrow
what is here, and then return it. And we must pay for that loan with something magnificent.'

‘Depends on what that is,' Scott said. She did not tell him that, although she could actually see it in her mind's eye: a long building in the forest, built in cedar or rammed earth, beautiful, imposing.

‘We must learn from what has happened in archaeology. It's obvious, but I need to persuade the others,' she told him as they climbed into the van.

Could he help? He had, she said. It was because of him being there that she could think straight at all.

‘Hurry!' she told him as they climbed into the van.

The roadside burned green; they arrived at the dock with minutes to spare. Scott watched the Beaver taxi out, dragging a thick, silky wake behind it, race to take off, dwindle, and vanish into the now radiant sky.

In the emptiness that followed, Scott's phone rang:

‘Where have you been, son?' Mac's voice was unnaturally loud and clear, like that of a much younger man. ‘Did you get my message?'

‘Not yet. How are you?'

‘I'm through Stage One. I get to invite a guest to supper. I'm cooking. Six-thirty tonight, okay?'
Cooking?
The water ahead of Scott glistened and trembled, like some kind of hallucination. He was very thirsty.

‘Mac. Things are heavy here. I'll have to see what's going on. So I want to, but I can't promise.'

‘Please,' Mac said. ‘Scotty, I don't ask much of you.'