‘Jane’s found something.’
He swung to look. Mrs Hamiska was kneeling now, and prodding carefully at the earth with a narrow trowel.
‘You want to go and see?’ he said. ‘Come and fetch me if it’s anything worthwhile.’
Vinny found Mrs Hamiska using a painter’s brush to clear the earth she’d loosened round a shapeless small lump. She glanced up at Vinny’s approach.
‘Yes, he’d better come,’ she said.
Dr Hamiska was still watching, so Vinny simply waved and he came loping down like a schoolboy. He rushed past Vinny, knelt and took the trowel from Mrs Hamiska and prodded it vigorously into the earth around the lump, not bothering to use the brush, hoicking chunks of clay out. In a few minutes he had the thing free and was nudging the last bits of clay off with his thumbs.
‘There!’ he said, holding it triumphantly up. To Vinny it looked like a bit of twisted dead branch.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘A lower mandible. Some kind of small deer, perhaps. Look, that’s where one of the molars fitted, and another here. Not in itself very exciting, but the point is that it was buried in the original matrix, so there’s every chance we’ve now got the level from which the tooth Jane found was eroded down. Have you brought a cord, darling? Excellent. And a peg and a hammer. Good. Now, Vinny, go back up – oh, to about where I was working, and we’ll see if we can use the angle of strata in the cliff to get a line on how they might run down here . . .’
Vinny toiled back up the hill, trailing the line, too excited to notice the heat. Dr Hamiska strode up and down lifting the line clear of obstacles, then moved to a point where he could compare its angle to that of the rock-strata. From there he shouted instructions. When he was satisfied, Vinny hammered her peg in and tied the line taut. Using it as a guide the Hamiskas worked along inch by inch, studying every bump or nubble in the earth. Mrs Hamiska found two splinters of bone, leg probably, and Dr Hamiska found the tooth of a pigmy hippo. All three were below the cord, so Vinny had to climb and adjust the top peg. She came back to find him burrowing at the hillside like a dog, showering loose earth down the slope.
‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Here’s our tuff! It’s the same one, I’ll bet my life on it. And the finds are right on top of it. Now . . . !’
Mrs Hamiska was watching him, amused. Her way of smiling was to try not to, which made her purse her lips as if she were trying to spit out a grape-pip. He jumped to his feet, flung his arms round her and kissed her on both cheeks, lifting her clean off the ground.
‘Put me down, please, Joe,’ she said. ‘We’re not twenty any more.’
She didn’t sound disapproving. As often before, with other married people who seemed totally different from each other, Vinny wondered how they’d managed to stay together when Mum and Dad hadn’t. At the back of the hole Dr Hamiska had dug she saw a faint band of grey crossing the yellowish earth. Then, because her eyes knew what they were looking for, she realized she could see the same band right out on the surface, slanting down nearly parallel to the cord. It was so faint that she had to be standing directly on its line to see it, and looking back up the slope to where it should have run on till it reached a large flat-topped rock, she couldn’t see it at all. When she climbed and looked down from the rock it was there, all the way to her feet. It was something to do with the angle of the light, probably.
‘I can see your tuff, Joe,’ she called. ‘If you stand here . . .’
He rushed to join her and stare, rushed back for more pegs, marked the new line and prowled along it, snorting with excitement and effort, as if he could bully the hidden fossils out into the open, by pure will-power. Mrs Hamiska was already digging at something else. Vinny stared at the earth beside the rock but could see nothing. She knelt and moved her fingertips across the ground, closing her eyes, concentrating on the task of feeling. Ah. No, it was only a pebble. So was that. A faint ridge, like the cut end of a Sellotape reel which you can feel but not see. She picked at it with a fingernail. It was harder than clay.
‘Please, is this something?’ she called, keeping her finger on the spot, fearful of losing it.
Mrs Hamiska stopped working to come and look and feel.
‘Yes, that’s probably a fossil,’ she said. ‘Broken, I think.’
‘What is it?’
‘Oh, I can’t tell you yet. Do you want to dig it out yourself?’
‘Is that all right? I’d love to.’
‘I brought a trowel and brush for you. Be patient. Don’t lever against the fossil – they can be very fragile.’
‘Oh, thank you! Isn’t this exciting!’
Mrs Hamiska smiled her mysterious smile. Her eyes were invisible behind her sun-glasses, so Vinny couldn’t tell if she was smiling at her or with her. She helped Vinny prop her parasol on the rock to cast a useful patch of shade and returned to her own work.
Gently, Vinny eased the trowel-tip into the soil and levered the first crumb of clay free. There’d been no need to tell her to be patient. This was the sort of job she did best, with its bit-at-a-time delicacy, and the way her hands learnt the nature of what they were working with, so that they seemed to know almost at once how far to push the trowel in, and how to twist and lever so that another fragment came cleanly away from the ancient bone. Her world narrowed to a square foot of hillside. She forgot heat and thirst and the ache of crouching. Her whole being became the slave of the bone.
It seemed to be thin and flat and to lie almost level in the hill so that its left edge actually broke through the sloping line of tuff. The outer edge had been snapped off where it reached the surface, and the right corner, about half a square inch, was cracked and loose from the main bit. She was working not down but sideways into the hill, digging out a hollow like a miniature quarry with the bone as its floor. Dr Hamiska’s boots crunched on the rock above her. She rose to let him see what she’d been doing.
‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to employ you full time.’
‘What is it? Do you know?’
‘A fragment of scapula, I think. Shoulder-blade to you, Vinny. Some fair-sized beast. Don’t try and lever it out or you’ll break it – you’ll have to undercut it first. Look how the sequence runs at the back there – that’s beautiful.’
‘Do you think it was killed in the eruption?’
‘Could be, could be. Your father’s here to answer questions like that. The ash would have been soft, mind you, so the creature could have died after the eruption and then the bones partly embedded themselves. Lend me your trowel, will you? I could get a column of the sequence out there – something to show them on Thursday. Blind them with science, eh?’
Still chuckling he forced the blade vertically down at the back of Vinny’s quarry, as if he was cutting the first slice out of a birthday-cake. The slice broke in two when he eased it out but he fitted the pieces together and laid them carefully out on the slope.
‘Now if you’ll ask Jane for a bag and a label,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll . . . hold it! Hold everything!’
He pushed his sun-glasses on to his forehead and stared into the slice-shaped cut he had made. His breath hissed between closed teeth. With Vinny’s brush he swept the loose bits from a pale lump which had been exposed on one side of the cut, just above the tuff. He took a magnifying glass from his shirt pocket and gazed intently through it.
‘Jane,’ he called. ‘Come here a moment.’
He’d changed. A moment before he’d been the friendly old professor showing off to the visitor. Now he’d forgotten she was there. Mrs Hamiska came and crouched beside him. Every line of their bodies expressed enthralled excitement. Two terriers at the same rabbit-hole.