‘Remind me.’
‘It was the first real site I worked on. Pakistan. Harry Blakey ran it. It was amazing, a sort of cetacean graveyard. There must have been one almighty stranding incident. When I was still a student I’d handled more cetacean fossils than most guys see in a lifetime. That’s whales and dolphins, Vinny.’
‘I know. It would be neat if it was a dolphin.’
‘What on earth do you mean – “neat”?’ said Dad. ‘I can’t think of anything more untidy than an early hominid drilling a hole in a dolphin scapula.’
‘We came from the sea, Dad. Like I keep telling you.’
He laughed cheerfully and hardly at all with scorn, and May Anna joined in.
‘You haven’t cured her of that bug yet, Sam?’ she said.
‘It isn’t a bug,’ said Vinny. ‘You said you didn’t think it was complete nonsense. I bet you really think there might be something in it!’
‘Me? A poor girl with a career to make? I can’t afford to . . . What do you want me to do, Sam?’
‘Do you think you could find this tree again?’
May Anna looked around, checking landmarks.
‘Sure,’ she said.
‘Then I think we’ll bury it here for the moment. When you get back – if you get back – you can check out how things are. Maybe you’ll simply be able to tell Watson what happened. Maybe you’ll be able to sneak it into the H-bag somehow. Maybe things won’t work out and it’ll have to stay here. If necessary I can send you a note about it once I’m out of the country. All right?’
So they measured a distance from the trunk and hacked a good deep hole and wrapped the fossil in plastic and laid it in the bottom and stamped the earth back firm above it. Vinny rose, dizzy from bending, and stood and swayed with the world dark and her ears drumming. It was strange knowing where the fossil was hidden, and knowing that she and Dad and May Anna were the only ones in all the world who had that knowledge. It gave her a sudden sense of her own uniqueness, her singleness, as if she was a particular point where various lines, drawn right across the universe, came together, focusing here, now.
The drumming left her and her vision cleared. Around her the plain which had once been sea stretched into its unknowable wavering distances, like time.
THE END
NOTE
There were apes, walking on four legs, and millions of years later there were our human ancestors, walking on two. What happened in those millions of years to bring that about is still largely guess-work.
The Sea-ape theory is one of those guesses. Professional palaeontologists have tended to call it crack-pot, but some of them are beginning to agree that it at least needs a serious answer. Vinny mentions some of the arguments for it (our hairlessness, the fat beneath our skins, our hearts slowing when we dive, and so on). The chief arguments against it are that there aren’t any fossils, and there doesn’t seem to be enough time to fit that amount of evolution in. I would like to have written more about it, but I found it held the story up too much. Readers who are interested should look for Elaine Morgan’s books (The Descent of Woman; The Aquatic Ape; The Scars of Evolution). There is a discussion of it in The Aquatic Ape: Fact or Fiction? edited by Machteld Roede and others.
I have of course made up everything that Li and her people do in this story. There’s no evidence for that at all.
P.D.
About the Author
Peter Dickinson was born in Africa, but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for adults and children.
Amongst many other awards, Peter Dickinson has been nine times short-listed for the prestigious Carnegie medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice. His books for children have also been published in many languages throughout the world. His latest collection of short stories, Earth and Air, was published by Small Beer Press.
Peter Dickinson was the first author to win the Crime-Writers Golden Dagger for two books running: Skin Deep (1968), and A Pride of Heroes (1969). He has written twenty-one crime and mystery novels, which have been published in several languages.
He has been chairman of the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009.
Also by Peter Dickinson
Eva
Tulku
Shadow Of A Hero
Chuck and Danielle
A BONE FROM A DRY SEA
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17261 0
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
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This ebook edition published 2012
Copyright © Peter Dickinson, 1994
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Corgi Childrens 1994
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