The Find (2 page)

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THE THREE OF THEM SET OUT
at first light carrying daypacks, binoculars and cameras. It was a thirty-minute drive to the site. Once there, they kept their eyes to the rock, inched up the gorge, saying little. Occasionally they were startled by the staccato riff of a click bug, or the drumming of a woodpecker's beak on a rotting trunk in the forest above, but mostly they heard only small sounds: their own footsteps, the chirrup of invisible birds. The river huddled in its course, a barely audible trickle, leaving most of the bed exposed.

Anna had a good feeling, a kind of lightness inside.

Prospecting, she explained to Scott later, is not looking in any ordinary sense of the word, but a special kind of seeing. What she did was to read the rock: interpret its patterns and irregularities. She knew how brittle and how dense it was, when and how it was formed and later deformed, where the planes might break apart, what it might contain, how, if need be, it could be removed. At the same time, she pictured what might have lived in the environment the rock implied. She knew from experience the architecture of fossilised bones and their texture, compared to that of this particular rock. She could hold the knowledge of a vanished world in one part of her mind, and at the same time open her eyes to what was there now, in front of her. The two coalesced and she was able to see both what was there and how it had been brought into being.

Listening to her, Scott felt as if he were stone, waiting to be read.

But that day in early September they had not yet met. Anna's gaze passed steadily over the rock. The shale in the Big Crow valley was dark grey, very fissile. It broke in some places into tiny flakes, elsewhere split into broad layers several centimetres thick. On the seams between the layers of rock, the shells of Sphenoceramus and
Mytiloides
were everywhere, too common to be worth collecting — and yet the preservation was exquisite and the sheer quantity exciting, suggestive of larger possibilities.

Colin Gordon had recently returned from the Arctic. Mike Swenson, a specialist in the bird–dinosaur link who had taken over Anna's job when she left the university, had just spent three months in the Gobi Desert. Anna was returning from her annual visit to the museum in Tokyo. They were all back from fieldwork at around the same time, and Colin had come up with the idea of a day's prospecting: since Anna had to stop in Vancouver on her way home, he'd pointed out, why not catch a floatplane to the island and join them in a visit to Big Crow?

Why not, indeed. Soon Anna would have to sit on committees and lobby for her slice of budget and technician time: her least favourite part of the job. But now, she could simply observe the profusion of fauna — flesh and fossil, terrestrial and marine; she could stop to examine a scattering of shiny, blue-black fish scales in a fragment of rock and notice, as she stood, a sunbathing garter snake slithering for cover, a cloud of mosquitoes slow-dancing in a patch of shade. The relics of the past and the creatures of the baking hot now co-existed under the same fierce sun.

An egg-shaped concretion broke open as she touched it to reveal the shiny tooth of a lamnoid shark: perfect, the serrations on its edge crisp, the surface as smooth as the original enamel.

‘Anna, over here!' Mike called, and she slipped the tooth unprofessionally into her pocket, smiling at herself for doing so, and picked her way across the riverbed.

‘Those plesiosaur fragments turned up here—' Mike showed the other two the spot marked on his map. ‘Local amateurs. Ken Rivers is describing it. A flipper almost a metre long. No sign of the rest — could even have been disturbed in that massive flood they had in March. Since then—'

‘Enormous ammonites. Crustaceans.' Colin mopped his brow.

The lower part of the cliff had been slightly undercut. Someone had put a marker — a blob of yellow paint — on the cliff above the excavated section, a rather futile gesture, Anna thought, given the rate at which this kind of shale eroded.

‘An incredibly rich environment,' Mike said, smiling as he looked back down the rocky valley, as if, Anna couldn't help thinking, he had made it himself. The old awkwardness between them was long gone, and he seemed very easy with himself. Was he fifty-six, now? Despite family life and middle age he'd stayed lean. His once-blond hair was grey, but there was still, when he pushed back his sunglasses, the shock of his eyes, the blue irises sailing in the clearest of white.
See?
Anna thought.
It did work out for the best. And you are a lucky man.
There was a sliver of envy, too — why pretend? But she took a great deal of pleasure in other people's situations, their families and relationships, as well as in her own friendships:
not everyone
, she often had to remind her brother, Vik,
needs
to love in exactly the same way.

In the early afternoon they stopped to rest, sitting on the hot rock to make the most of the treacly September sun. Anna dug in her pack for a bag of nuts, offered them around. Occasionally a fragment of the driest, most fragile shale on the cliffside worked loose, hurled itself down onto the riverbed to land with faint cracking sound as it broke, on impact, into a scattering of tiny flakes. The world is falling to bits, Anna thought, as it is and does, while we, part of it, sit and eat.

‘Fantastic paper of yours I read in
Nature
,' she told Colin, who grinned back at her, said nothing. He drank deeply from his water bottle and leaned back into the rock, closing his eyes against the sun. Since she'd seen him last year he had become thin, to the point of haggard; he looked greyer and craggier, as if he were at least part mineral. Clearly, he was not well, but she did not feel she could ask about it, not there and then.

When Mike brushed crumbs from his t-shirt he did it, as he did everything, vigorously, larger than life.

‘Three hours back to the car. We two have to get the floater out of here at four-thirty. Guess we'll turn back now, return another time?'

The other two had a meeting the next day, but Anna was free and she had a feeling that she should stay a little longer.

‘Your cell won't work here,' Colin said. ‘Suppose you break your ankle, meet a bear?'

‘I probably won't,' she told him, grinning. ‘I'll very likely be okay.'

‘Bear or no bear, you have to let Anna do what she wants,' Mike said. ‘We've all learned that.'

Bursts of loud male laughter faded as they disappeared behind a bend in the river's course. She turned and walked slowly on and up. The landscape was discernibly wilder, as if, within less than a kilometre, she had passed through some invisible boundary. It was fascinating to be somewhere where trees, the enemies of palaeontology, grew with almost insane vigour, where most of what existed, in fossil terms, was concealed. The gradient rose more steeply and the cliffs to either side were increasingly rugged. She examined them through her binoculars: banded with dark grey shales and fawn-coloured sandstone, they reached up perhaps fifteen metres high. At the top, rising out of a thin layer of dry, yellowish soil, the conifers grew denser and older than those in the planted forest closer to town. Two ravens launched themselves noisily from a tree limb far above her, creaked across the valley and then soared into the sky, leaving a third perched on the branch, head cocked, apparently observing their flight.

And then, as she emerged from a slow rightwards bend in the river's course, she saw, as if laid out as a gift, her find: a long line of protruding nodules in the riverbed shale. It could only be the spinal column of some enormous creature long-dead, buried, slowly exposed again, and now ready to be seen.

At first it made no sense: the row of grapefruit-sized nodules veered to the right and then shot back at ninety degrees or so, culminating in a narrow, barely exposed shape pointing back to the left. Perhaps a third of the way down was a confused-looking area, from each side of which a narrow length plunged straight down at an angle of about forty degrees. These two lengths were immense — three or four metres long. They disappeared, reappeared, and then disappeared again, like crude basting stitches in the stone.

It looked, if anything, like a gigantic broken umbrella — and it was only after she had entertained that thought that she realised what she had found. It was not the marine reptile she'd been half hoping for. What she was looking at did not swim, but
flew
: the long bones must be the huge wing fingers of an enormous flying reptile. Not seriously expecting them to hear her, she cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled back downriver:

‘Mike! Colin!' She'd already slipped her pack off and was feeling inside it for the camera when the reply came, very faint:

‘An-na!'

She stood again, yelled:

‘Come— here—!'

Because now, she could see it all quite clearly: an elongated, pelican-like skull turned to one side, a bend in the neck resulting from the shortening of tendons and ligaments during putrefaction... She could make out the position of some of the bones of the arms, and the extraordinary, extended fourth digit that would have supported the edge of the wing, half open, half folded. Lower down there was at least a suggestion of another pair of much smaller limbs... Whatever was in there was not only very large, but very nearly
complete
.

The concretions were the same dull grey as the rest of the shale, but denser and smoother, less fissile than the rock surrounding them. It was as if each element of the skeleton had been carefully dipped in a protective coating — though what had really happened was a chemical mystery, a serendipitous combination of organic and inorganic chemistry arising out of the process of putrefaction, an accumulation of changes which, for a while, had created atypical strength in the rock. If this protective covering had not formed, the delicate, hollow bones of a flying reptile would have been crushed flat as the mud piled up on top of them. But there it was, and her hands shook as she took the first photographs and then extracted her measuring tape from the pack. She willed herself to wait until it passed, and then set the tape along the spinal column — two metres — and took another photograph. She measured, tried to estimate the wingspan — could not believe the figure she came up with:
ten
metres. She'd forgotten the other two and was shocked to see them hurrying towards her, sweating, red-faced and anxious. She ran to meet them.

‘Look! Do you see?' There was silence, and then all three began to laugh and talk at once.

‘Lie down, Anna,' Colin said, taking out his camera. ‘Next to it, there. Arms out. That's it. Amazing!'

Then they set to work, outlining the nodules with chalk and taking more pictures, from different angles. They sketched a map, measured the distance of each protrusion perpendicular to the cliff. It could be, they all agreed, something like
Pternadon longiceps
, or just as easily, given the scale, the new location and the marine nature of the site, it could be an entirely new species or genus.

It was worth trying to get something out. Anna selected one of the scattering of concretions that lay where the third and the fourth digit emerged, cigar shapes that might contain metacarpals or phalanges. She worked the chisel around the edge of one, teasing away the surrounding rock flake by flake and, when her hand suddenly slipped, cursed herself for being too lazy to put on gloves. Goggles were sensible, too, but she hated them. Blood spread out and dripped with annoying persistence from the wound on the ball of her thumb; she had to hunt in the pack for a bit of bandage. Finally, she chipped through the narrow pedestal remaining and with both hands picked up whatever it was she'd freed. As she grasped it, it broke horizontally in half.

‘Brittle!' she warned Mike and Colin who were working behind her, and then she found it had opened almost perfectly, one half containing the fossil, exquisitely preserved; the other its cast.

After that, they were silent, each sitting or squatting on the warm rock and hearing only the thud and ring of the hammer on the chisel. Then Colin cleared his throat and said, ‘Hurry up.'

‘Why?' Mike said. ‘We won't make it in time and obviously, now, we're going to stay the night—'

‘Upriver, right by the cliff,' Colin said, pointing. At first all Anna saw was shadow, but then, just emerging from the rock, she made out what could be another long, narrow bone. The three of them looked at each other as if they themselves were discoveries.

Mike eased his concretion out, handed it to Anna and hurried towards the new area. She wrapped all three pieces in the bubble wrap she carried in her pack, and then they set to work all over again, finishing just as the sun slipped behind the trees above them. Cast suddenly into deep shade, they put on sweatshirts and rubbed insect repellent on their hands and faces.

‘You've got blood on your chin now,' Mike told Anna. ‘Christ!' he said, ‘and we thought you'd turned your ankle. What luck! Bastard site though, miles from anywhere.'
Difficult
, Anna thought,
not impossible
. There was history of partnership between their university and the museum when it came to funding applications. And this was something people would want to support.