The Tooth (3 page)

I set off to school on Monday morning with little enthusiasm. Usually I enjoyed the last week of term, but our discovery of the dam had dampened my interest. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to go to the museum any more.

School is only a five-minute walk from our house. That year was my last at primary school, and I enjoyed being one of the senior students. A group of us were in charge of the sports cupboard—Monday was my duty morning. It was my job to be there at 8.15 to issue balls and other gear. Most of the time I enjoyed the job. However, there were always a few kids who treated us badly, who would refuse to write their name in the book or would leave stuff out on the fields.

The worst of these was Sam Mason. He’s a big, round boy with a crazy haircut that looks like it gets trimmed by putting a basin on his head and cutting around that. Sam picked on most kids, even those he called his friends, yet I’d always been his favourite target. At some stage someone had read him the Walt Disney version of
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens. The book has a boy with a deformed leg called Tiny Tim. Somehow this had stuck in Sam’s mind and he always called me Tiny Tim, in a nasty, sneering way. That Monday he began as usual.

‘Well, if it isn’t Tiny Tim again. God bless us every one!’ He looked around at his henchmen to check that they were sneering at me as well.

The ‘God bless us every one!’ was one of Tiny Tim’s sayings in the book. I hated it.

‘What do you want, Sam?’

‘A rugby ball of course, you little creep.’ I grabbed a ball and thrust it into his hands. He turned to his mates. ‘Hey! Did you fellas hear that our Tiny Tim has been trying to be a hero?’ He turned back to me. ‘Isn’t that right, Tiny Tim?’

I said nothing.

‘Oh, yes,’ he went on, ‘Tiny Tim saved a boy from being killed by a horse. God bless you, Tiny Tim! What would we do without you?’

I’d had enough. ‘Why don’t you get your facts right, Mason? I didn’t save the boy, I just happened to be there. Can’t you get anything right?’

The sneer went from his face. I knew how he hated to be told he was wrong. ‘That’s not what I heard.’

‘Well, you heard wrong. Now write your name in the book, and make sure you bring the ball back.’ It was a faint hope, but I felt better for saying it. By then he’d recovered. ‘Write it yourself, creep. And you can collect the ball from the other side of the field. It’ll be as far away as I can put it.’

Morning class was much as usual. It wasn’t until after interval that we got around to the earthquake. Each group made their presentation. Ours was by far the best, thanks to Grams.

The study of the earthquake carried over into science. This was Klink’s specialty, and he always made it interesting. That day he was determined to teach us why the earthquake had happened using a PowerPoint animation.

He started with a model of a supermarket checkout where groceries were being put on the conveyor belt. Every time an item was taken off, the belt would move a little, putting another object near the scanner. ‘That’s how the thing should work,’ he said. ‘But imagine that the thing is faulty and it doesn’t stop when one reaches the scanner.’ He clicked to the next animation. This time the groceries piled up and up until he had a mountain of them on top of the scanner.

‘So what has all this got to do with earthquakes?’ Everyone except Sam Mason knew that Klink didn’t want an answer. Sam threw his hand into the air. Klink smiled, ‘Yes, Sam?’

‘We should stock up on groceries in case there’s an earthquake.’

The class roared with laughter. For a moment anger flashed over Mason’s face, before he put on a tough smile, as if he’d intended it as a joke all along.

‘Very true, Sam. But that’s not what I had in mind.’ He clicked the mouse and a more complicated image appeared. ‘You’ll remember that the earth’s crust is made of moving plates that slide into each other. Well, this is a cut through the earth at Napier and shows the Pacific Plate sliding into the Australian Plate. The Pacific Plate is the supermarket conveyor belt and the Australian Plate is the scanner. See how the stuff on the Pacific Plate piles up and forms hills? That’s how Hawke’s Bay was formed, and is still forming. It’s happening all the time at about fifty millimetres a year. Except sometimes it goes in a rush and we get an earthquake like the one in February 1931.’

I liked his model. It explained the things that I saw in the hills on the way to Pounamu. Lots of them had steep edges as if they’d broken when they’d been pushed up.

He then went on to describe how the collision also pushed older rocks up into mountains. ‘All of the coastal hills are from the Pacific Plate,’ he explained. ‘The higher ones in the middle of the North Island are from the Australian Plate. They have layers of rock that go down a couple of hundred million years. As they get lifted the tops wear away, exposing the older bits. In some places they’ve worn down to rocks formed in dinosaur times.’ He pointed to the hills north of Napier. ‘Like up here. That’s where Dr Joan Wiffen found the dinosaur bones you’ll see at the museum tomorrow.’

Mits’s hand shot into the air. ‘Are there old rocks like that anywhere else?’ I felt like adding ‘Such as around Waitea River’, except I knew the classroom was no place to reveal secrets—especially with people like Mason around.

‘Yes,’ replied Klink. ‘There are Cretaceous Age rocks all along here.’

‘So they could have dinosaur bones, too?’ Mits asked.

Klink thought for a while. ‘Probably not. Most of the rocks along there were formed in the sea. You need rocks that were formed on land or near land to get dinosaur fossils.’

‘But it
is
possible?’ Mits persisted.

‘Yes, I suppose so. There’s a lot of country up there, and I’m sure it hasn’t all been explored by geologists.’

Mits turned to me and winked. It was good to hear that The Tooth could be from a dinosaur, even if it was now at the bottom of a lake. It meant we might find fossils in some other place around Pounamu.

Meanwhile Mason was talking, ‘I’ve got cousins living up in those hills. I’m going to stay with them during the holidays. Maybe I’ll find some dinosaurs.’ My ears pricked up. This was not good news.

‘Oh, yes?’ said Klink. ‘Do you know exactly where?’

‘Up near where they’re building a dam.’

Klink went to the map. ‘That’s about here. Certainly, the rocks around there are the right age, but it’s unlikely you’ll find dinosaur fossils just lying around, Sam.’

‘But I might, eh? I might even find an apeman.’ A good part of the class giggled.

Mits turned to me and said—quietly enough that only those around could hear—‘Just look in a mirror, Mason.’ The burst of laughter made Mason suspicious, but there was nothing he could do except glare at us. It was a victory of sorts, yet the news that Sam Mason was going to be around Waitea River during the holidays was frightening. To me, Pounamu was something special—Sam Mason would destroy the magic.

After school, we headed straight to Mits’s place. Mrs Smithson was sitting at the kitchen table, enjoying a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper. As soon as I saw her face, I knew there was something to do with me in it.

‘Hello, Tim,’ she beamed. ‘You’ve been getting yourself in the news.’ She folded the paper back to the front and there I was, covering a good quarter of the page.

The heading read
Whispering Hero Saves Boy
. A photo showed me in profile raising my hand to the horse’s head. The boy was plainly visible under the animal, his face distorted with fear. It was a great photo, one I would’ve admired—if it had been somebody else who was in it.

‘You didn’t tell me about this!’ cried Mits, crowding in by his mother to read the story.

For a while we read in silence. It was accurate enough, yet my comment had been changed. I know I never said ‘I knew I had to do something to save the boy’, because I never really thought about the boy—it was the horse I’d been worried about.

After the factual report came the whispering stuff. An expert with horses was reported as saying I had used some horse-whispering techniques, which under the circumstances was probably the only thing that would have worked. He finished by saying that I had a talent that should be developed.

I finished reading the article before Mits, and then braced myself for the teasing that I knew would come. Yet, when he finished, he turned to me, not with the evil smile but with one of pride. ‘That’s cool, Tiny. That’s really cool.’ From Mits that was the greatest of praise.

‘I’m proud of you, too,’ said Mrs Smithson. ‘Come here and give me a hug.’ So I did and that felt good, too.

When we released, she asked, ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘Pretty good, I guess. I’m pleased that I did it. But this,’ I pointed to the paper, ‘will cause problems at school.’

‘Will that be the Mason boy?’ she asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you want me to contact the school about him?’

‘No!’ I said quickly. ‘I can deal with him. I’ll just keep away from him for a while.’

‘Hey, Tiny,’ interrupted Mits, ‘look at this!’ He was pointing to an article further down the front page of the paper.

Dam Nears Completion

More than a month after the scheduled completion date, the Waitea Hydroelectric Dam is nearly finished.

‘We had a few problems with the earthquake proofing that set us back,’ said Dave Kitchener, the site manager. ‘But, we’ve overcome those and expect to begin filling the lake as soon as the autumn rains come.’

The Waitea dam has been built using revolutionary technology that will allow it to withstand a magnitude-nine earthquake. That is almost fifty times stronger than the 1931 Napier earthquake.

Dave Kitchener said that the delay will not affect power generation for this winter as they had always planned for a few months’ leeway.

The Waitea scheme is the first of a number of dams to be built around the country. It will produce enough electricity to supply about twenty per cent of Hawke’s Bay’s winter demand. It has taken four years to build.

We looked at each other and smiled: we were back in business. I felt a surge of excitement tingle through my body. From the look of Mits, he was feeling the same way too. Maybe we would find The Tooth after all.

That afternoon we started working seriously on The Tooth. Both of us were now convinced that it was from a dinosaur.
We searched the Internet and discovered that only one or two dinosaur teeth had ever been discovered in New Zealand, so if we found one it would be really big news. Of course we also did some dreaming: if there was a tooth, then why not several, then why not a jaw, or a skull, or a whole skeleton?

However, we also learned that The Tooth was probably
not
from a dinosaur. Most rocks in the area had been formed under the sea and would contain only marine fossils, like shells or fish bones. While Dr Joan Wiffen’s dinosaur fossils were from sandstone formed under the water, it was thought that the bones had been washed there in a flood. Only single bones had ever been found.

Whether it was a dinosaur tooth or not, it would still be an important find, and we were determined to get it. Our first task was to track where I’d been on that day eight years before.

We figured that I must have got out of the water onto a small beach, like the one where I’d gone in. If we found that beach, we could then explore the surrounding area looking for clues. So we needed to identify beaches from maps.

We found the maps we wanted on the Internet. Unfortunately they didn’t really show us enough detail, but some aerial photos on the same site did. We downloaded one and magnified it to maximum scale, which clearly showed places where the river broadened and formed beaches. There were twelve of these little beaches between the park and where I had been discovered. This was too many, so we looked for two other things as well: it had to be reasonably easy to get up from the river onto the surrounding land, and there had to be at least some bush nearby. That narrowed it down to five, which was still too many, but with the clues
we had to work with there was no way we could reduce the number further.

That night I started a book to record everything about our search. I named it
The Quest
. I filled the first few pages with drawings of the things I could remember, and was surprised at how strong the images became when I started drawing them.

Yet when I eventually went to bed there was still something nagging at the back of my mind—another clue, and it felt like an important one. This wasn’t one from when I was young; it was more like something I had seen recently. However, no matter what I tried, I just couldn’t bring it into my mind.

Tuesday morning, I went straight to the school library to do some research. I also wanted to keep away from Sam Mason, who was sure to pick on me because of the newspaper article. There would be nobody to support me for most of the day, as Mits had a dental appointment.

I was interested in stinging plants, and soon came up with poison ivy and stinging nettle. Poison ivy doesn’t occur naturally in New Zealand, but stinging nettle does—it’s called ongaonga or
Urtica ferox
. I learned that it can grow to the size of a small tree and is quite common in parts of the North Island.

Another book gave me much more detail. It said that people had died from ongaonga poison and it recommended avoiding the plants. Cattle and sheep seemed immune to the sting, but horses and dogs were not. There were a number of cases where horses had died after being ridden through groves of the plant.

The most interesting fact, however, was that stinging nettle is the main food for the Red Admiral butterfly. With growing excitement I searched for a book on butterflies. Scrambling through the index I found the Red Admiral, and a few seconds later I was staring at my butterfly. It was almost exactly as I had remembered it: black wings with red and white spots and a body that looked like it had been dusted with golden glitter.

I carried the books to the photocopier and made copies of the relevant pages and stuck them into
The Quest
. I also photocopied parts from Grams’s lost scrapbook and added those. By the time the bell went, my book was bulging with information.

Unfortunately, Klink was late to class that day. I’d barely got in the room before Mason yelled out, ‘God bless us every one—our hero Tiny Tim is here!’ He waved his arms up and down in a rude takeoff of Muslim prayer. His mates joined in, forming a circle around me.

‘Give us a whisper, Tiny Tim. Calm us all down.’

‘No!’ I said. ‘I can only do it with horses. It doesn’t work with apes.’ The rest of the class found that hilarious. For a moment Sam Mason didn’t know what to say. While he was off-guard, I went to push through to get to my desk. One of his henchmen gave me a shove and I sprawled into a chair. My bag tipped over and Grams’s scrapbook spilled onto the floor.

Mason was on it in a flash. ‘What have we here? A book of special whispers?’ He started thumbing through the book.

‘Give it back!’ I screamed, charging at him. He sidestepped and I crashed into a desk. In the time it took me to recover, he was sitting at his desk, making out he was reading the book in earnest. I lunged at him again.

‘Stop that!’ yelled Klink, striding into the room. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘He’s got my book,’ I said, pointing at Mason.

‘Then politely ask him for it back.’

‘Give me back my book, Mason.’ He looked up at me with a sneer.

‘That’s hardly a polite request,’ said Klink.

‘Please!’

‘Give him the book, Sam.’

He lifted it and held it so I had to come close to get it. ‘You need to watch yourself, Tiny Tim,’ he whispered as I took the book. ‘Things could get ugly if you’re not careful.’

I slowly calmed as lessons got underway. I didn’t know how much of the scrapbook Mason had seen. If he’d seen enough to know what it was all about, then he was sure to let me know over the coming days. I should never have brought it to school. A thing like that was a weapon in the hands of a bully like Sam Mason.

Our bus arrived at the museum soon after morning interval, and we formed an orderly file at the entrance, waiting for our guide. A few minutes later she arrived, looking flustered.

‘Sorry,’ she panted. ‘I was caught up.’

Klink stepped forward and shook her hand. ‘Ms Marshall, this is Room Twelve. Room Twelve, this is Ms Marshall, Assistant Curator of the museum. She will be our guide for the day.’

Ms Marshall smiled at us. ‘Hi,’ she began. ‘We’ll take a shortcut through to the earthquake display so we don’t disturb the other visitors.’ Her voice was confident and pleasant.

We followed her through a fire exit, down a concrete flight of stairs, into the bright lights of the display halls. She led us straight for the earthquake area, which was a lot smaller than I’d expected. I soon discovered that, despite its size, the place was packed with information. Ms Marshall gave us a short tour and then left us to fill in the worksheets Klink had prepared.

The short tour and worksheet completion was repeated in the Art Deco display, and later in the dinosaur area. This last area was by far the most interesting. It was based around a re-creation of the shed Dr Joan Wiffen had used for many of her dinosaur discoveries. On the benches were skulls and backbones of various marine reptiles. For the first time I realized how big these things were. The blocks of rock that they sat in were massive, much heavier than anything Mits and I would be able to lift. If we found more than a tooth, then we would need help—lots of it.

The other thing was the hardness of the rocks. Dr Wiffen and her team had used rock-cutting machines to extract the fossils. I’d thought we could do it with a hammer and a screwdriver but, if we were going to get The Tooth, we’d need a lot more than that. I smiled to myself: first find your fossil, Timothy Thomas, then you can worry about how you’ll get it home.

Once we had handed our completed worksheets to Klink we were allowed free time. Most of the class just milled around without any purpose, but I knew exactly what I was looking for. It took a few minutes before I found it in a room of artwork—a polished brass plaque mounted on the wall.

I
N MEMORY OF
R
EBECCA
T
HOMAS
A
SSISTANT
C
URATOR
1996–2000

Above the plaque was a painting of the hills around Pounamu. I could even recognize the spot where it had been painted. At the bottom was the signature:
RJT
.

Fortunately I had the room to myself, for I experienced a surge of strong emotions. The thought that I could go to
Pounamu and stand on the same spot and have the same view that she had seen was overpowering. It gave me a sense of being with her that I had never felt before. I stood there with my eyes closed, imagining her with her paint brush and easel, her head turned to one side as she tried to capture what she saw.

I don’t know how long passed before a voice broke in. ‘Hi, you’re Timothy, aren’t you?’ I turned and saw Ms Marshall.

I simply nodded.

‘I recognized you earlier from the photo in the paper.’ She paused for a moment. ‘We were talking about you and your mother at our tea break this morning. There are still some here who remember her.’

Again I nodded.

‘I never met her, but I have seen her work. She was very good, you know. One of the best. We’ve still got some of her backdrops down in storage. When we get the right opportunity I hope to bring one or two up and use them in a display.’

I gave another nod.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘This is not a good time, but if you come back another day, I’ll take you down there. There’re lots of things in storage that I’m sure you’ll find interesting.’ She fished into her trouser pocket and removed a card. ‘Show this to the people at the desk and they’ll guide you to my office. Come and see me anytime.’ She touched my shoulder for a moment before turning and moving out of the room as quietly as she had come.

I fingered the card in my hand, thinking about the encounter. She had spoken in a sympathetic way, but without using meaningless, sympathy words. She had offered to
show me Mum’s work; not out of pity, but because she thought I might like to see it. I liked her. She’d made me feel good. I would definitely come back and see her. In fact, if we ever found The Tooth, I hoped we’d see lot of her—she would be just the sort of contact we’d need.