The Find (5 page)

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GLASS AND TINTED CONCRETE:
part warehouse, part church, the museum was a place like nowhere else on earth. Its staggered shape and ochre walls deliberately echoed the landforms surrounding it, but, as Mama had once pointed out, you could also think of it as a ship voyaging on the vanished Cretaceous seas, a kind of modern-day ark, huge and well-equipped, its storerooms filled with plaster-wrapped life forms awaiting preparation and, eventually, resurrection.

The public carparks were empty; even the staff parking, tucked away behind the landscaping to either side of the main entrance contained only a dozen vehicles this early in the day. Anna slipped her pass into the reader and, inside, felt herself relax into the particular hum — almost, but not quite, silence — that was the sound of the working part of the museum.

Anna wedged her office door open. Light filtered through the Venetian blinds in the farthest of the two rooms, illuminating, just, the closer, larger room where she kept equipment and specimens in use. Waiting on the workbench was the long skull of the mosasaur,
Clidastes liodontus
, right there where she had left it six weeks ago.

The electric lights threw everything into sharp relief and showed up the dust. She dug into her daypack and unwrapped the fossils. The air seemed to stiffen as she set the exposed phalanx under the binocular microscope, steadied it with miniature sandbags, adjusted the focus and, there — suddenly clear — was the porous pattern of the ultrathin bone, a bubbled effect almost, like batter made with self-raising flour. The texture was exquisitely detailed at the joint end, where the top layer had adhered to the other side of the concretion and partially detached when the nodule split. And there, where the border between fossil and rock had been disrupted, she caught the faintest hint of something gold: pyrites, which must have been formed right at the beginning of the fossilisation process.

‘What have you there, then?' Peter Grace, aka Wings, stood in the doorway waiting to be invited in. After months of fieldwork, his iron grey hair was especially shaggy.

‘Vancouver Island?' he asked, as she stood to let him look. A thin man, he bent awkwardly at the knees before giving in and using the chair.

‘It's quite something. The scale—'

‘Yes. Two of them. Maybe more.' Later, when Brian Hogarth took his turn at the microscope, she and Peter watched him, knowing what he would see, waiting for him to see it. When he looked up, grinning, you could see the boy in him, Anna thought, despite his baldness and weathered skin.

By ten o'clock, everyone was in the staff lounge. Brian and Pete, Dave, Jan, Ken and Ray: Dinosaurs, Birds, Fish, Mammals, Arthropods, Pollen. Squat, bushy-haired, lanky, unshaven, pop-eyed, dusty-looking, as various as the creatures they studied and all gathered together in an odd, coffee-smelling, windowless, leftover box of a room. This was her other family, her kinship group. It was good to share her luck.

‘So, next year?' Pete was applying for co-funding for a trip to the Arctic and so now they would be looking to the same sources, but then, she reasoned, so would several hundred others. It was a matter of the project itself; the various committees would decide.

‘Yes,' she told him. ‘It's very fragile. I'm aiming for next year.'

‘Pressure's on, then,' he said. ‘Better get started. Let me know if I can help.' She wanted to hug him, but he'd turned away to fill his cup.

In the preparation lab, a crane lifted a two-metre hadrosaur femur onto a bench; the sound of the machinery, the bench tools and the ventilation system merged into a rhythmic blur of grey noise. Huge metal tubes from the extraction system snaked up from each bench and reached towards the ceiling that towered above them. None of the half-dozen masked and goggled technicians bent over their benches had noticed her enter and Anna waited at Ai Lin's bench until the other woman became aware of her and removed her safety glasses and dust mask.

‘You can have him very soon!' she said, gesturing at the row of vertebrae on her bench. How to say she had something better now? And the fact was, she had barely three weeks to prepare a sixty-page application: permissions, outline, significance, context, budget, benefits to local community, referees, maps, pictures, timeline.

She leaned in and unwrapped the fist-sized nodule that Mike had dug out.

‘Just look at this, Lin. Very fragile bone in rather tough but also terribly brittle shale—' She watched Lin turn the nodule over in her gloved hands. ‘Hopefully, we'll extract it next summer — and hopefully you'll get out of here and join us? Anyway, it's urgent. Funding application. I can't wait until the next committee.'

‘No paperwork?' Lin's face with its dark eyes, its stillness, was hard for Anna to read, but she leaned closer as she spoke. ‘Not even a
number
?'

‘Not yet. But I need fantastic pictures by the end of the month.'

‘Two weeks, maybe,' Ai Lin said, and reached for her eye protection. Eighty million years it had lain in the ground: it was, Anna knew, absurd to have these deadlines and agendas, this huge impatience inside her. Later, separating the new specimen from its matrix and reassembling it would proceed micron by micron and take three technicians at least four years.

Physically large, technically challenging, and of the utmost scientific importance
, she wrote to Andrew Bellavance at CanCo, the logging company which owned not just the adjacent land but also that section of the riverbed itself. The Ministry of the Environment had said that designation as a Special Heritage Site would take at least three months: there had to be a way around that.

. . . Although it is too early to know the exact timing of any possible excavation, we are hoping for the summer of next year, and I am writing at this stage to obtain in a general sense the permission of CanCo to extract these fossils (which would of course take place with full consultation and in co-operation with yourselves) and indeed to invite you to enter into partnership with us and our possibly other sponsors in what will be a hugely exciting enterprise
attracting international attention...

Anna made lists, proceeded with what she needed to do and tried very hard to ignore completely what had happened with Mike that night in Big Crow — but it came down to this: the museum was not a teaching institution and in terms of grants, it could not go it alone. Nothing would progress without collaboration with a university. It was best to use a tried-and-tested partnership, and that meant dealing with Mike Swenson, who was already involved. Surely, he wasn't prepared to jeopardize the entire excavation out of a mixture of anger and pride? She certainly was not.

All her instincts told her not to make a fuss. To move on, not dwell, to bury rather than confront. She hadn't told Vik about what had happened, and she hadn't told her mother. She hadn't told Janice (had she told anyone at that point, it would probably have been her), and she certainly had no intention of telling anyone at the museum. She would make the incident go away, and take with it, too, the fears, memories and anxieties it had provoked. This was not the time for them. She would ignore the man, and make contact with the scientist inside. And if what was needed was for her to swallow the very last shreds of her pride and offer him a way back that involved absolutely no loss of face, not even a mutual apology, well, yes, she could do that, too.

She looked at what she had written to Mike and deleted
my part
, replaced
incident
with
misunderstanding
.

I'm deeply sorry about the misunderstanding last week. Let's put it behind us, and begin a new collaboration between our two institutions...
She explained that she aimed to commence in June and would like them to put in joint applications to National Geographic, NFS and CFS as a matter of urgency; she was preparing the application and would be able to send him a draft for his input very soon.
Please, Mike,
she concluded,
contact me at your very earliest convenience so that we can agree upon the details of the approach.

As she left her office, Greta, one of the year's volunteers, emerged from the library. Dressed in sun-bleached clothes and scuffed field boots she looked like the spirit of the place, but, she said, it was her last day.

‘Come back next year,' Anna told her as they shook hands, and she added that it would be a very good one: though this was not the way, later, that she would think of it. Neither good nor bad could encompass the experience: it was like one of the vanished creatures she studied come to life, an amalgam of teeth, wings, scales, claws, a huge beast that materialised suddenly ahead of her in a woodland clearing, both magnificent and terrifying. But at this point, life was still more or less normal, and that evening she drove her mother up and out of the canyon to one of their favourite viewing spots. They sat in the last of the sun's brightness and ate still-warm deli chicken, while with each mouthful the earth tones in the valley below grew deeper. A breath of air caught the wisps of hair around her mother's face.

‘Gorgeous, darling,' Grace said, waving at the view. The way things looked — that they should be interesting, if not beautiful, mattered very much to Grace. Because of her hands, she could no longer paint the way she wanted to and her career, just as it had taken off, was at an end, even though paintings themselves changed hands at ever-increasing prices. She still thought in pictures; she exclaimed over colours, pointed out contrasts, drew her daughter's attention to the exact way light changed. Recently, she had taken up photography. When Anna talked to her mother about the find, she took pains to give the right kind of visual detail.

‘Covered in gold! How wonderful.'

‘Pyrites. But you know, we'll have to remove it during preparation, so we can see the structure of the bone. That's beautiful too. More so, even. Like bubbles, or honeycomb. And, of course, that's where the information lies. The thing is, once it's exposed to the air, pyrites can cause the specimen to degenerate. And, you see, it tells us nothing about the—'

‘The trouble with science is that so much destruction seems to be involved, and all in the name of
information
.' Familiar territory, this:
Why not leave things as they are? Does one need to know about something's insides in order to love it for what it is or does?

Smiling, Anna took her mother's hand.

‘You'll love it when it is articulated.'

‘I expect so,' she said, ‘but, darling, imagine it
gold as well
. Gold leaf. Even spray paint. Why not?'

They heard the yowl of coyotes somewhere in the distance and when the sun finally disappeared, the whole town, the entire valley, was for a moment or two, empty of human noise.

Please
, Anna had written in her email. But Mike did not reply.

Andrew Bellavance, on the other hand, was very forthcoming. His company was always happy, he said, to be associated with projects that brought positive benefits to the local community and showcased the company as a responsible part of it. They could grant outline permission, had no objection to Special Heritage status for the riverbed area, and were keen to consider to help further. He could put her in touch with a contractor they used for airlifting who might also like to be involved. What kind of payload would they need? He would see what he could do.

Perhaps Mike had some family or personal problems: it would explain everything. Why hadn't she thought of that before? Cursing herself for being so self-centred, she called him again to express her concern, but stopped short of leaving a message on the voicemail. Instead, she called Colin, and asked
his
voicemail if he knew what was going on, if there was something the matter?

Neither of them replied.

How many helicopter trips? Andrew Bellavance asked.

Eight, she said, though she thought they'd get by with four.

I'll approach them for you on the basis of the higher number, he said.

The budget: staff, insurance, vehicles, travel, accommodation, helicopter, materials, equipment, return transportation of the specimens, contribution, donations, shortfall. Supplements: maps, drawings, topographic and stratigraphical analyses. Permissions and consultation: a search turned up several quotes from Alan Coxtis, the leader of the First Nation band that held the lands adjacent to CanCo's property: the Stallquakseen, or, as they wrote it themselves, St'alkwextsihn. Most of these articles concerned their ongoing treaty negotiations and their objections to pollution of the lower reaches of the Big Crow River caused by the now defunct mill; she added to her list the need to contact Alan Coxtis, explain how the specimen was close to, but not on, the reserve, and that the site would be treated sensitively, and ask for input from the band.

Regarding Mike Swenson, she abandoned the personal crisis theory, and could feel her heartbeat gear up when she thought of him.
If you don't answer by tomorrow morning,
she wrote,
I shall be forced to seek another partner for this project.
It would not be hard to find one, given the nature of the find, and it was a relief to declare something and be prepared to stick to it, move on.