A Bone from a Dry Sea by Peter Dickinson

Author:Peter Dickinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504002974
Publisher: Open Road Media Teen & Tween

Now: Tuesday Afternoon

By lunchtime there was a large awning erected at the bottom of the hill, and a little one a few yards along from where Dad was working, to shade a second trench. By now it was too hot for work out in the open, so after lunch everyone rested. Dad made Vinny go and lie down while he wrote up his notes. She’d never have believed she could sleep in that heat, but she did, for nearly two hours. When she woke it was still roastingly hot, but she looked out of the tent and saw that the others were up on the hill again, so she climbed slowly up to see if she could still help. The moment she arrived she realized that Dad was in a bad mood, deep in one of his silences. It didn’t take her long to find out why.

Dr. Wessler had (typically, Vinny guessed) got out of doing the heavy preliminary work of opening up the second trench, and he and the Hamiskas and anyone else who could be spared were spread out surveying the rest of the outcrop for possible further sites. Meanwhile Watson Azikwe and Michael Haddu were hacking out the soil above the fossil layer and carting it down to the tip. They were both Africans. Michael was a grizzled, roly-poly man who (Dad had told her) had left school when he was twelve. He’d been on a lot of expeditions like this in other countries, starting as a laborer but becoming interested, so that by now he knew more about fieldwork than a lot of highly qualified experts.

Watson was Dr. Azikwe, but Vinny couldn’t think of him like that. He was quite young, for one thing, only twenty-something. He wore three gold chains under a gaudy open shirt. Vinny thought he was fun. She enjoyed his style, and the way he assumed that all the world was going to like him as much as he liked himself. The trouble was, Dad didn’t.

It was Watson’s fault. While Michael was hacking out a fresh barrow load of spoil, Watson squatted by Dad’s trench, chattering away about his time in Europe and America, and the well-known paleontologists he’d met. Dad was crouched out of sight. Vinny heard one or two grunts—snorts, more like, to Vinny’s ears—but Watson treated them as encouragement to keep the conversation going. It wasn’t that Watson was shirking. As soon as Michael called to him he gangled himself up and wheeled the full barrow down the slope. Dad straightened in the trench, wiped his face with his shirt, and took a swig of water from his bottle.

“I’ve had about as much of that chap as I can stand,” he muttered.

“Poor Dad. Do you want me to try and distract him?”

“It would be like trying to distract the Victoria Falls.”

“I’ll ask him to explain about something.”

“Why not? Try him on these—he says he’s done some work on mollusks, and he seems to know his stuff, in spite of everything.

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