‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Hamiska. ‘I think so. I really do think so.’
‘Whoopee!’ bellowed Dr Hamiska, standing and flinging his cap into the air. It landed half-way down the hillside.
‘Let me have a go,’ said Mrs Hamiska. ‘You’re a bit too excited.’
Without waiting for an answer she started to chip the clay away from the other side of the cut. Vinny fetched Dr Hamiska’s cap, and then helped him measure and peg out an area round the find. Standing on the rock he began to draw a sketch-map. By now Mrs Hamiska had opened the cut enough for Vinny to see that the fossil was a stubby cylindrical bone with a bulge at each end.
‘Is it part of someone’s hand?’ she said.
‘Their foot, Vinny, their foot!’ crowed Dr Hamiska. ‘It’s a distal phalanx – a toe-bone to you, Vinny. You are looking at the left big toe of a creature that walked on its hind legs five million years ago! It’s going to be datable by the tuff! And either my name’s not Joseph Seton Hamiska or the rest of the skeleton is all there, right under our feet! The oldest fossil hominid yet found! I knew it! I knew it! I knew the moment I woke up that this was my day, and this was going to be the place! Whoopee!’
You could have heard his shouts a mile across the plain. Mrs Hamiska straightened and watched him, like Mum watching Colin and the boys let the sea run into the moat of their sandcastle, yelling with triumph as it swirled around their ramparts.
‘I think you’d better get Sam out here, darling,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes, of course. And Fred and the others – as many witnesses as we can. We don’t want any nonsense this time. I’ll call them up.’
He charged down the hill towards the jeep, where he’d left the two-way radio, but half-way down he stopped and turned.
‘Vinny!’ he shouted. ‘Didn’t I tell you, the moment I set eyes on you, you were going to bring us luck!’
THEN
NOBODY LIKED GREB. He was a big, surly young male who didn’t keep to the rules. A while ago he’d broken Nuhu’s arm. She and some other children had been playing a splashing-game round a rock-pool when Greb had settled near them with a clam he’d found and a rock to hammer it open. Nuhu had wheedled for a bit of clam. A normal male would have barked a Go away, but Greb had shoved her hard enough to knock her flat, so that she’d banged her head on a rock and started to howl. Greb in sheer bad temper had brought his hammer-stone down on her outstretched arm, snapping the bone above the wrist.
Mirn had tried to give Greb a hiding, but Greb had refused to be cowed. That was when Mirn had started to lose his leadership, giving Presh the chance to take over. Nuhu’s arm had mended, crooked and short, so that later, when she’d begun to wonder about things, Li had become interested in it and, when Nuhu would let her, had touched and felt and stroked it, comparing it with the feel of the bone in her own arm, wondering how a bone could mend itself, and whether, if it happened again to someone, she could help the bone to mend straight . . . you’d have to hold it straight with something, for a long time . . . difficult . . .
Now the children gave Greb a wide berth, and the adults had as little to do with him as they could. He paid no attention, and foraged wherever anyone else was finding food, often snatching their catch from them. Males sometimes did this, but Greb seemed to prefer to steal food, rather than find it for himself. And when the tribe settled down for the night he made a point of choosing a place where the bodies lay thickest and forcing himself down among them. He refused to do shark-watch.
Though still young, Greb was as strong as any male in the tribe, and if he’d known how to make allies everyone would have realized that one day he’d become leader. Presh was quite different, friendly and easy-going. He liked to visit the families every day, and not just because they would offer him any food they’d found, out of deference. Usually he’d take a mouthful and give the rest back. If children disturbed him while he was snoozing in the shallows his Go away was more laughter than anger, and they weren’t afraid of him. Only when his dominance was threatened did he make the hair on his head and nape stand out, and snarl and bare his teeth, and hunch his shoulders, big-muscled from swimming. Then he could look really dangerous.
When Greb had made trouble before, Presh had taken Tong and Kerif to help give him a thrashing, reinforcing their authority over their own groups of families, so though one of them would have been the natural challenger they remained content as things were. In fact a challenge from any male in the tribe would have been a surprise, so complete was his acceptance. That it should be Greb – young, disliked, without any authority beyond his own strength – broke all the rules.
A challenge should have been built up to in a series of confrontations, testing the leader’s self-confidence and his support from the rest of the tribe. It should come like the start of the rains, slowly, with tension in the air and days of waiting and far-off thunder, until everyone was ready for the outburst, longing for it, to get it over.
No-one realized at first that anything was happening. Greb chose a place where a headland ended in a series of shelving rocks, with deep fissures between them. A seaweed grew here whose young fruiting-fronds were good to eat. Juicy sea-snails fed on the weed, and crayfish could be poked out of crannies, so the tribe was spread along the headland, mostly out of sight of each other, foraging between the rocks. Many of them missed the challenge ritual and only arrived to watch when the actual fighting had begun.
This may have been clever of Greb. A popular leader drew confidence from the support of the tribe, and at first Presh was partly deprived of that. But some, including Li, saw everything that happened. Ma-ma was still carrying her baby and so had a right to the best feeding places, and Li foraged alongside her. She had eaten as much as she wanted, and was now floating in the gentle swell, eyes closed, looking as if she were asleep but in fact wondering about the dolphins. They hadn’t returned, but they still haunted her thoughts. Last night, waking on a roosting-ledge and seeing the moonlit sky, she’d found herself wondering why the sun was hot and the moon cold, why the moon changed its shape and the sun didn’t, and then she’d slept and dreamed of dolphins playing with the moon and sun. Now, remembering that dream, she told herself that they all came out of the sea, the dolphins as well as the sun and the moon and the stars. Perhaps they all come from the same place. Perhaps one day a dolphin would take her there. It couldn’t be far, at the speed a dolphin swam.
A hoot of challenge broke into her musings and she rolled over to look. A few yards away Greb shot vertically out of the water, visible almost to his knees, bellowing as he reached the top of his leap and flailing his spread arms down as he sank back to arch two huge jets of spray at his opponent. It was a terrific display. Li paddled swiftly clear – fighting males had no time to watch out for children.
Her move brought Presh into view, rising, bellowing, flailing in rhythmic answer. His voice was far more commanding than Greb’s but his leaps not quite so high. It didn’t cross Li’s mind that he wouldn’t punish Greb easily enough. He was in his prime and had the whole tribe behind him.
The challenge ritual was exhausting. (It was meant to be, so that if it came to a full-blooded fight both combatants would already be very tired and the weaker would quickly give in. That way neither of them would get seriously hurt.) Gradually the tribe gathered to watch. Li moved to be close to Ma-ma among the rows of bobbing heads. The baby floated asleep by Ma-ma’s shoulder with his hands twined fast in her hair, and occasionally she’d scoop up a little water and wet the smooth round face. She looked worried. Presh was her brother and they had always been close.