He shook his head and studied the half-finished picture.
‘No use for them. They take photographs, casts, you know. This is for me. My way of seeing a thing. Learning it, you know. Fred Wessler, he can tell you all about this fossil ‘cause he’s seen don’t know how many hundred fossil, all the same sort, looked at them, felt them in his hands. That’s his way. This is my way. When I draw something I look at it like it was the only damn thing in the world, only thing I’m ever going to be let see again. Know what I mean?’
‘I’d love to be able to draw like that.’
‘You just got to learn to see, Vinny. Then you’ll be drawing like I do. Good morning, Dr Sam.’
‘Morning, Nikki,’ said Dad, coming up. ‘Breakfast, Vinny?’
‘I’m starving. But don’t you think that’s beautiful?’
Dad looked briefly at the drawing, not very interested.
‘Pretty good,’ he said. ‘Come along, before the eggs are all gone.’
As they were walking up towards the eating area, she asked about Nikki.
‘He said he was just here by accident, because he drew a dinosaur.’
‘I told you, there’s only one palaeontologist in the country. Watson Azikwe. You met him last night.’
‘The one with the gold chains?’
‘That’s him. But for reasons of national pride this has got to be a joint expedition, so we get landed with people like Nikki. It’s not such a bad idea, to my mind. I’d much rather have someone we can teach, like Nikki, than some half-taught chap who wants to prove he’s better than the rest of us. Nikki’s being useful.’
‘Because he can draw?’
‘Because he can see. Not much point in knowing a lot about fossils unless you can spot them in the first place. Locals are often superb at that – you know, herdsmen who think we’re quite mad with our passion for old bones, but show them what you want and tell them there’s money in it, and they’ll spot things professionals might have missed.’
‘I’d really love to find a fossil.’
They’d reached the eating area. Dr Hamiska was sitting with his wife and Dr Wessler, reading a document, but he must have heard what she said. He looked up at once.
‘You shall, Vinny, you shall,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to it personally.’
Dad was pretending not to have heard. He was still walking towards the table with the food laid out on it.
‘In fact,’ said Dr Hamiska a little more loudly, ‘you shall do that this morning. There’s a site I want to have another look at. We’ll leave immediately you’ve finished your breakfast, before it gets too hot.’
‘Oh . . . I really want to watch Dad taphonoming. Nobody else has got a father who’s a taphonomist.’
‘And you actually know what a taphonomist does?’
‘Yes, of course. I looked it up in the library. He uncovers fossils very carefully and then he tries to work out exactly how the animal died and what happened to the bones after that. Is that right?’
‘Pretty good, Vinny. It’s what I’ve been doing all my life only now they have a fancy name for it. Well, you can watch your father working as soon as there’s that kind of work to be done. Is that all right with you, Sam? Jane and I will take Vinny off your hands while you’re finishing that report.’
Dad had come back with a bowl of muesli and a mug of coffee.
‘Where are you proposing to take her?’ he asked flatly.
‘I want to have another look at that outcrop beyond H8.’
‘You’ll be wasting your time. Michael and I went over it a month ago. There may have been something there once, but it’s all been eroded down the hill.’
‘I know, I know. I just have a feeling about it.’
‘You’ll still be wasting your time. If you don’t trust me, you might at least trust Michael.’
‘And I also want to take some samples of those tuffs. They’re the clearest sequence we’ve got. All right?’
‘It’s your time, and it’ll mean Vinny sees something of the country, I suppose. Don’t forget she’s not acclimatized.’
‘Jane will lend her a parasol.’
Dad grunted and moved off to another table. Vinny fetched herself cornflakes, a banana and orange juice and joined him.
‘I don’t have to go with him if you don’t want me to,’ she muttered.
‘You might as well now.’
‘It’s all right. I’m not going to let him take me over.’
‘It isn’t just that – it’s all sorts of things. I bet you for instance he will find something. Or if he doesn’t Jane will – she’s got a fantastic eye. And then he’ll come back and laugh at me for having missed it. Oh, never mind. The important thing is for you to keep out of the sun as much as you can, wear sun-glasses, slap on gallons of lotion, and don’t be ashamed of telling people if you’re finding it too much.’
‘I’ve got a big floppy hat, too. I’ll be all right. And we’ll go taphonoming this evening, right?’
‘If you like.’
THEN
NEXT MORNING LI hunted early for food, and was lucky. With Iggi she levered a flat rock aside on the floor of the bay and found a large crab which they cracked open and shared before any of the adult males were around to come and take their prey off them. Then she went out again to the spit, to wait for the dolphin. She was sure it would come, and it did.
They played and danced as they’d done the day before. Since the dolphin was so much the better swimmer, so made for the single element of water, it played with her as an older child might play with a younger one, teaching it an easy game, patient with its mistakes and clumsiness. Li’s wonder and joy were no less than before. Laughter burst from her mouth whenever she surfaced, while underwater she became aware that the sea was not silent, but full of whistlings and clicks, which seemed to come from the dolphin itself.
Then it swam suddenly away, and she realized that there were other whistlings coming from far off, which it seemed to have gone to answer. She waited in the water unalarmed, sure that it would not have left her in danger. She heard the noises returning, watched underwater, saw shadows move and all at once found herself in the middle of a large shoal racing in panic past her. She missed two strikes but grabbed a fish at her third try and surfaced. A big dolphin arched past, ignoring her, and then three more close behind her. The water foamed round her with the rush of their passing, and then a final dolphin rose and tried to take the still struggling fish from her hand. She let go and sank beside the dolphin as it sank, hearing the whistles of the hunt recede.
The dolphin waited, impatient. Why didn’t she join the hunt? it seemed to be saying. She slid her arm around it and gestured underwater towards the shore. Again it understood and let her lie beside it, streamlining her body along its flank, as it leaped through the waves. Half the tribe were out on the spit, watching and pointing. Presh dived and swam to meet her, but as he approached, the dolphin bucked itself loose from her grasp and swam off.
This was bad for Presh. To maintain his dominance he couldn’t let anyone else achieve triumphs which he couldn’t either out-do or somehow counter. If Li had been an adult male Presh would at once have displayed at him and faced him down, and if necessary fought him. But Li was a child, and children didn’t have that kind of triumph. There was no ritual, no mechanism, for dealing with what she had done.
Presh solved the problem first by patrolling the shark-watch line and sending the watchers ashore. Then, watched by the tribe, he turned towards the open sea, sank below the surface and shot his body back up until he was visible to the waist. As he reached the top he let out a yell of challenge, and as he came down he slapped his palms against the surface to force two arching sprays of foam away from him. At once the tribe understood what he was doing. This was the first stage of a contest for dominance between a leader and a challenger, but they had never seen it used as Presh was using it now.