‘That argument would apply however our ancestors learnt to walk upright. So would many of the others.’
‘That’s not the point, Dad. The point is there’d have to have been something which made it worthwhile – I mean which actually made it easy, like having water to hold you up while you were learning to stand. And of course they wouldn’t need fur . . .’
‘Otters have fur. So do some seals.’
‘But most of them don’t, and whales and dolphins don’t. But they have fat under their skins like us . . .’
‘Elephants are pretty well hairless. Are you going to tell me . . . ?’
‘Elaine Morgan says elephants have webbed feet. She thinks they might have been water-animals once. Their trunks are sort-of snorkels. I can’t remember about the fat.’
‘You expect me to take this seriously?’
‘I just want to know. I mean, the idea about elephants seems weird, OK. But a lot of animals are weird, Dad. We’re weird. We just think we’re normal. If you could get the other animals to tell us what they thought, I bet they’d say we’re weirder than any of them.’
He gave her an unreadable look and fell into one of his silences. She watched him cut his Marmite sandwich into exact triangles, just the way she herself would have done. I’m his daughter too, she thought. I may look like Mum. Some of those old photos of Mum Granny’s got, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t me, but if Dad wants to be silent, I can show him I’m happy with that too. That’s not pretending.
So she ate, and watched the shadows change across the puckered badlands and thought about when it had been marsh, drying out, and the sea had been right over there, beyond those hills, until he stretched and put his mug down and looked at her and nodded.
‘Better get on,’ he said.
‘Can I see what you’ve been doing?’
‘Just shifting dirt so far. I’ll do a bit more and then we’ll rig the awning and we’ll get down to something more interesting.’
He’d done a lot since Vinny had last seen the site. The mini-quarry she and Dr Hamiska had made had become a trench wide enough to work in, running several feet into the hill. Its floor sloped upwards, though far less steeply than the hill. That must be how the underlying strata lay. All that was left of the quarry was an eight inch step at the entrance to the trench, because so far Dad had been cutting in just above the layers with the fossils in them. She could see the darker line of tuff at the bottom of the step. The floor of the quarry had changed.
‘Where’s my bone?’ she said.
‘Your bone?’
‘It was there. I was digging it out and Joe came to see and dug some more and that’s when he found the toe-bone. I wanted to try and draw it. It was a bit of shoulder-blade, he said.’
‘Oh, that. It was in the way so I took it out. It’ll be in one of the bags . . . Here . . . don’t lose the label.’
It took Vinny a while to find a way of propping her parasol to give her enough shade to work in. By then Dad was slogging away at the back of the trench, hacking the earth out with a pick, shovelling it into two buckets and carrying it to his spoil-heap down the hill. The further he went in, of course, the more earth he had to move to get down to the fossil-layers.
The label had figures on it which meant nothing to Vinny. The fossil, now that she could see the whole thing, turned out smaller than she’d expected – a thin flat triangle, broken along two sides and with a hole near one corner. Another corner was cracked off, but the pieces fitted neatly together. The longest side was a bit over three inches. She turned the larger piece over and over in her hands, trying to look at it the way Nikki said you had to, as though it was the only thing in the world. Then she settled down to try and draw it.
Mrs Clulow, who taught art at St Brigid’s, used to tell Vinny to try and ‘free up’, whatever that meant, but in the end she’d given in and let her draw and paint her own way, with every line as exact as she could make it. Vinny thought Dürer’s engraving of a hare – she kept a Christmas card of it pinned over her bed – was the most beautiful picture she knew. Dürer would have been good at fossils. She worked steadily, locked in a cell which contained only her and the bone and her pad and pencil. She used a 4H to make faint lines, which she rubbed out again and again until she was satisfied. She realized how time had passed only when the shadow of her parasol left the edge of her pad.
Dad was straightening from his trench and must have seen her shift position.
‘How are you doing?’ he said.
‘OK. It’s easier being flat. Round would be much more difficult.’
‘Mind if I look?’
Vinny passed the pad across. She didn’t want to feel he was judging her.
‘Do you know what it is?’ she said. ‘A pig or something?’
‘Very difficult with something so broken. I’d have said it was too big for a pig. Or a hominid, of course.’
‘A hippo?’
‘Um. I don’t think so. I haven’t seen that many hippo scapulae. It’s the sort of thing you’d need a specialist to identify, and even then . . . What are these lines here? Shading?’
‘No. At least, well, I think they’re there, only sometimes I can’t see them. Like the man in the moon, sort of.’
‘Let’s have a look at the bone.’
Surprised, she passed it across. He peered, wiped sweat from his eyes, peered again and fetched a magnifying glass from his satchel and studied the bone through it, turning it to vary the angle of light. The lines he’d asked about were faint curves, like parts of several exact circles, close together round the hole.
‘Yes, they’re there all right,’ he said.
‘Do they mean something?’
‘Hard to say. If we’d found them somewhere else, say on a known neolithic site with stone tools around, or animal bones with butchery incisions, the natural interpretation would be that the hole had been deliberately bored with a pointed stone-flake. That doesn’t make sense here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because whatever the date of this site is, however you interpret Fred’s pig-data and the geological sequences, we’re still at least a couple of million years too early. Right, are you ready to give me a hand?’
‘Oh, yes, please.’
By now it was starting to get really hot, so they rigged the awning to shade the trench and Vinny lashed her parasol to one of the poles to make an extra patch of shade. Then Dad started to work his way along the floor of the trench, down into the fossil-layers. He’d removed the precious toe-bone last night and May Anna had taken it back to the camp. Now he probed delicately with his trowel-tip into the soil, loosened a morsel, and crumbled it between his fingers into a bucket. When he’d cleared a patch about half an inch deep and a few inches square he brushed the loose bits into the bucket and moved on until he’d worked about a foot along the trench and all the way across. Vinny took the bucket down the hill and tipped it on to a plastic sheet, separate from the main spoil-heap. Later someone would sieve it through in case Dad had missed a tiny chip. Meanwhile Dad started to go down another half inch.
There was nothing in the first two layers, but on the next Dad said, ‘Let’s have the steel rule. Thanks. Got a label? 13.5; 26.1; 11.8. Now the dental pick. Thanks.’
He pecked delicately at what looked like a scrap of seashell, got it loose and handed it out. Vinny put it into a bag and attached the label. Deliberately she didn’t ask what it was – he’d tell her if he wanted to. There were more bits of shell in the next layer, which he photographed in place and told her to put into a single bag, and more still in the next, with what looked like the tail of a lizard projecting from the wall of the trench. Dad painted it with hardening fluid and was cutting round it when Vinny heard the growl of an engine as the driver changed gear to cross the dry river-bed.