The Find (15 page)

—
♦ —

ANNA MUST HAVE LEFT THE HOTEL
well before dawn.

‘Totally out of order, Jason!' Scott heard her shout. ‘Not you. Him. I don't want messages! He must talk to me direct. Will someone tell him that? Scott? Where is Scott?' He struggled into his jeans, shoved feet into boots. Swenson's music was playing already, subdued, yet hard to ignore.

‘Hey, what's going on?' She was huge-eyed, her fists clenched, beyond herself, not caring who saw it.

‘Just tell him, Scott. Please. Tell him he has to talk to me direct!'

Of course he couldn't say that, it would make her look foolish. He crossed to the other camp and crouched down next to Mike.

‘Come and talk to Anna about the cliff, Mike.'

‘I'm busy.'

‘I'll wait,' Scott said. ‘Can I help?' There was no response, so he sat on the rock and watched them work. The Swenson team had most of their vertebrae out in large sections and were jacketing them, their hands and forearms gloved in white. Gus and Garth were setting up to film the process.

In the strengthening light everything grew visibly sharper as he watched, as if the world was focusing itself. Scott waited almost half an hour until Swenson got to his feet, wiped his hands and said they could go.

‘Not much fun,' Swenson said, ‘being the messenger boy?' He pitched the question halfway between taunt and sympathy — and it was very simple, Scott thought: in any particular situation, Swenson did as much as he judged he could get away with.

Anna and Swenson lowered themselves into director's chairs, and she indicated that Scott should draw up a third, which Swenson made a point of noticing, though he said nothing.

‘You must be aware that I'm aiming to go in under the cliff by the end of July at the latest?'

‘You haven't kept me informed, and so naturally I have no idea of your plans. Surely that's a very questionable thing to do, to
remove the bottom section of a cliff
?'

‘That may be your opinion. The fact is for health and safety reasons you'll need to be finished over here before work starts.' He made as if to get out of his chair.

‘Wait, Mike. You intend to
blast
it away?'

‘I always have done,' he said, smiling now, and words deserted her. She noticed how the plaster on his arms and hands had dried to a cracked crust. The silence gathered force and then pushed her out of the chair and onto her feet; she could almost have struck out at him again and instead she strode away in the direction of her tent, her face fighting itself.

‘So— we're going at the necessary speed,' Scott filled in. ‘We'll keep you posted.'

‘Who the hell are you!' Swenson barked. ‘The cook? Who exactly is in charge here?' Everyone heard it, and as Swenson made his exit, Felix, running his fingers through a pile of shale chips to check for any kind of pattern or change in texture, for tiny signs of life pressed into being stone, was the only one still at work.

How was he, Scott Macleod, supposed to make this good? Anna was not helping. She was acting oddly. She was
not
sick, but she was acting that way and if he let himself, he'd be thinking that she might be and what he might have to do. The whole thing was insane, and it was none of his business. But it was his job.

‘I better go check on Anna,' he told Jason.

‘No,' Jason said. ‘Help Felix go through that waste pile, and get it offsite.' That meant that he had to make things between them worse still by ignoring him.

Anna's face, framed by the door of her tent, was colourless and sharp. He knelt on the rock.

‘You have to get back out there. You've just got to calm down, back off a bit,' he told her. She clenched her fists, opened her hands. He grabbed them, tried to keep them still, she pulled free, buried her face in them. He was not helping and had absolutely no idea what to say or do next. Finally, she let her hands fall.

‘I can't,' she said, letting her hands fall and looking up at him. ‘Too angry. I've got to write to the funders, telling them what is going on here and making my position absolutely clear, surely you can see that?' He didn't see and stared back at her, helpless. ‘You're meeting the Yamaguchis from the afternoon floatplane,' she said: it was the first he had heard of it. ‘So you can go early, print out my letter, send it by fax and email,
both
, do you understand? Will you do that for me?

‘Maiko and Akira are lovely people,' she added, before she sealed the tent door. ‘Thank you.'

♦ ♦ ♦

Maiko and Akira wore identical glasses with delicate wire frames and rimless lenses. He, Akira, was very slim; she, Maiko, was small but plump, with short, slightly greying hair, expensively styled. Scott introduced himself as a volunteer, picked up their bags.

‘My colleague, and also my wife, Maiko.' Akira's smile carved up his face. The lightweight, high-tech clothes they wore rustled all the way back to the van.

‘So very exciting!' Maiko said as she climbed in. ‘Is it going well? Do we drive far?'

It was their sheer strangeness that made Scott stop and pick up two hitchhikers who were waiting just past the turnoff: a tall man and a woman with a shaved head, the dark stubble just growing through. Heavily pregnant, she had rich blue Celtic tattoos on her chest, arms, and ankles — everywhere that was exposed. The man's green eyes glittered out of the deepest tan Scott had ever seen on a white man. They wanted to use the Internet, he explained, in the library or a cafÈ, and then they climbed into the far back of the van and sat silently looking at the road unfold; and until Scott let them out no one else felt that they could speak.

‘How is Anna?' Maiko asked, as soon as they were gone.

‘Great,' Scott told her.

At nightfall there were two fires and people called across and passed from site to site. A stranger, Scott thought, would not have known that anything but good science and a major flirtation between Greta and Jason was happening. There were jokes, laughter, even cross-teamwork: team Swenson boiled the pasta. Scott, assisted by Lin, made the sauce. They estimated their progress, congratulated themselves on the weather, stoked the flames of the campfires.

Orange light played over faces and hands. There were tales of other discoveries: how, after a week of fruitless prospecting, Felix's supervisor tripped over the edge of the shell of the turtle they were looking for on their way back to the jeep. How hadrosaur trackways had been spotted by a seven-year-old having a birthday flight with his dad in a six-seater; how someone in North Carolina had CT-scanned a dinosaur specimen and was able to see the heart inside; it had four chambers and a single aorta, warm-blooded, just. There was talk of a half-hatched maiasaur with bits of eggshell sticking to its scales. Live young inside an ichthyosaur. And another scientist, a woman from Texas whom Jason had met, had recently discovered fossilised soft tissue attached to the femur of a T. Rex.

‘Meat, basically!' he said. ‘It's getting very close to actual DNA. We're
almost
in Jurassic Park.'

‘That frog in amber, where was that?' asked Gunnar. ‘They could surely get DNA there.'

‘Private collection, Mexico,' Kevin told him. ‘Probably end up as a necklace.'

No one had said not to ask about the discovery of the specimens they were working on, but absolutely everyone knew not to.

‘A colleague of ours,' Akira said, ‘just found a hadrosaur near Mifune: the first to be found in Asia. Perhaps we too will have our own pterosaur soon.'

All the time, Anna said, they were finding more, and seeing what they found better. Jason and Greta slipped away. Swenson, seated opposite Maiko and Akira, smiled and nodded when they spoke; he held out his hand to each of them when he got up to leave.

‘Scott—' Anna held out her hand to him. A shake? A high-five? Something between a grasp and a squeeze.

He sat in his tent, legs akimbo, wrist on knee, book on the floor, read how less than a decade ago, in 1993, they'd found their golden needle. The normal gene: cytosine, adenine, guanine; the abnormal,
just the same
but with extra repeats of the sequence that doubled its size. It was a good place to stop. He closed his eyes; he saw two immensely long tangled strings of beads, a jumble of red, yellow, white, red, yellow, white.

—
♦ —

GUS MOPPED HIS REDDENED NECK
with a scrap of burlap.

‘We'll aim to give a sense of time passing,' he said, ‘not to make the viewer actually experience it.' They only needed to film when there was some kind of change or result; there would be other footage, a voice-over, interviews with Anna and Dr Swenson, opinions from experts, and so on. He and Garth, he admitted, had had no idea when they first came how very slowly it would go.

‘Slower, even, than
psychoanalysis
!' Garth rolled his eyes. Until now, that had been his last assignment: a man lying on a couch! Sighing and rambling to himself while another man sat very still and listened… Every hour had been a month... ‘It'll never air, I'm sure of that.'

‘We're with Swenson, I must admit: get to the big stuff as soon as possible. Should be exciting when that cliff comes down!' Meanwhile, they said, why not let them help? They could take photographs, push the wheelbarrow, sweep, sift through the waste pile, whatever: ‘Just say where you want us.'

One wing-finger concretion broke lengthways into three pieces and one of the pieces had cracked down the length. Jason, who'd been working on it with Felix, was furious with himself, but Anna remained calm and pointed out it was surprising that they had it in just three pieces.

The pieces were laid out on strips of precut three-quarter-inch marine ply and Felix and Scott donned orange latex gloves, slapped on the soaked burlap, then the lumber, then more dripping burlap; tomorrow, when it was cured, they'd fill it in and protect the other side and strap the whole thing together.

Felix, squatting easily, worked fast, pushing the wet cloth in tight, smoothing it with his long strokes, his face perfectly relaxed. He'd never wanted to do anything but this. From boyhood, he told Scott, he had devoured anything about fossils; his dad had encouraged him. He was drawn to the Cretaceous era because of the extinction at the end of it:

‘An era of climate change not unlike our own,' he pointed out, ‘although arising from natural rather than human activities. Though I guess people are part of nature... Some of them, anyhow.' He had mixed feelings about people: the things they did, especially to children and animals. He liked all animals without reserve and was particularly drawn to the larger marine and airborne creatures in the fossil record.

‘Utterly different,' he said, pausing for a moment, lost in his thoughts. ‘Hey!' he flung out a skinny arm, pointing: ‘Who's that up there? What are
they
doing?' There were people on top of the cliff, standing right where Anna and Scott had stood the day they first met, looking down at the site with what looked like binoculars.

‘Hikers,' Scott said. There was a sign at the entrance to the trail telling people to seek permission from the band, but it rarely happened. And with all the media attention people would naturally be curious. Half an hour later, when he returned from emptying a barrow load of waste, they were still there, still looking. He waved; someone pointed at him, but no one waved back.

‘
They
are filming
us
,' Gus said, sounding both shocked and pleased. He studied them through his own lens, watched the figures move back from the edge. ‘Voyeurs,' he added, with a nod at Jason and Greta who were no longer crouched side by side at work, but standing, her face lifted towards his, her breasts grazing his chest. A pair of safety goggles dangled from her wrist.

Scott was mixing plaster when he first thought he heard something: a soft wave of sound, like the sea, but not. Singing, perhaps. ‘You have media deprivation syndrome!' Lin suggested when he asked her if she could hear it too. ‘Since you so kindly lent Anna your CD player.' When Lin smiled, it looked as if she was sealing her lips together to stop something shocking or even terrible from coming out, but at the same time, her eyes sent out sparks.

The music grew clearer: singing. Drums.

‘You must be able to hear it!'

‘Maybe there is something, yes,' she agreed with a little nod, just as, behind them, Jason yelled to everyone to come see: the third cervical vertebra had split and the half of the concretion could be lifted off, like a lid! They could actually see the fossilised bone, new-looking except for the slightly brownish grey colour. Flecks of something that glittered stuck to it here and there, and Anna was just explaining what it was, when she too heard the music, which grew louder by the second. Swenson and his team strode up. For a couple of beats everyone waited as if themselves fossilised — even Felix, once he had finished the plaster that had been made up, wiped his hands and fell still.

They saw: the beginning of a line of assorted people bearing placards, chanting in a language Scott recognised but could not understand. A few kids, a woman with a baby in a sling, a hundred or more adults and teenagers, some carrying drums or rattles, others just bringing themselves. A huge assortment of hats, a few sun umbrellas.
This Land Is Not Your Land
, one placard read,
Leave our ancestors alone
. Several said
‘CanCo, Can GO!'
There were people from the reserve, and people Scott knew from town, including Andrea Price's special needs brother and one of her grown-up sons, and several old men who'd once worked with his father at the mill, as well as strangers — young people in loose clothes who looked like peasant extras in a dragon-slaying fantasy movie, their hair dyed and shaved, tousled and teased and braided — almost hip, yet not quite.

Rentamob
, CanCo would call them.

‘Oh my God,' Anna said. She realised, then, what she had done.
Not
done.

The singing, strong and deep, filled the space completely, like a thick liquid. For a moment, Scott wanted to join in. Mike Swenson broke out and strode towards the oncoming crowd.

‘Stop right there!' he called out as he reached the leaders — elders from the reserve, and one tall, pregnant woman: one of the hitchhikers Scott had picked up, now wearing a bandanna over her shaved head. ‘This is a site of special scientific interest,' Swenson continued. ‘Only authorised people are allowed onsite during the excavation.' He spread his arms wide, but the crowd parted and continued past him; he had to catch up and then fall in beside the leaders as they walked right on past the tents, stepping carefully over the rocks that kept them in place, still singing, and finally arrived at Anna's part of the excavation, where the column came to a halt, and suddenly there was complete silence. They stood with their heads bowed, looking at the earth.

‘Scott,' she said in a low voice, ‘are these the St'alkwextsihn?' She stood just in front of the tape, between him and Mike Swenson and the twins; Greta and Jason and Lin, Akira and Maiko and the rest were inside the work area.

There was a great aunt of his. And Thompson, a little older than him, very tall, with the main part of his hair gown long and worn in a ponytail, the sides shaved close. He was some distant kind of cousin; he had been at Scott's uncle's funeral, which was the last time he'd visited the reserve, perhaps five years ago. Back then, Thompson's hair was long all over and he'd clearly been wrecked, but now he stood tall. Leading the crowd was Alan Coxtis, the new band leader, a stocky man in jeans and a white t-shirt, neat hair, wire glasses and big watch: there was nothing obviously traditional about him except the shape of his face and the silver pendant he wore on his chest.

Coxtis pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket, glanced at it and then shoved it back where it had come from.

‘We, the St'alkwextsihn,' he said, making the sounds not as they had become,
Stallquakseen
, but as they were supposed to be — the explosive
t
, the rough
x
, the abrupt but breathy
h
, the stress on the
i
at the end — and then waiting for the applause from behind him to subside. ‘We, the St'alkwextsihn Nation, do not recognise the lines drawn on your maps. We are the Big Crow River People, and this valley, and all the creatures living in and buried in it, are part of our lands and our culture. We do not want them disturbed, not by logging, and not by scientists. We do not want our dead, human or animal, dug up. Negotiation with the provincial government is ongoing.'

There was more applause, whoops and catcalls.

‘I know who he is—' Anna said.

‘Very tough. A good man, they say,' Scott told her.

Garth and Gus roved around the edges of the crowd. The protesters' own crew, up on the cliff, did the same, and members of the crowd, too, were recording things as they took place.

‘We and our supporters…' Coxtis coughed, ‘…the Forest Nation and the people from the town of Big Crow call upon you to stop what you are doing here and leave the land intact until the treaty negotiations are complete. We call on you to show your support for us by severing your relationship with CanCo, whose planted forests occupy many acres of our traditional lands to either side of the river and whose planting practices have severely affected the biodiversity of the area and our traditional way of life.' More applause. ‘Thank you,' he concluded.

‘Mr Coxtis,' Anna said, holding out her hand, which he did not take, ‘Anna Silowski. Please accept my apologies. I believe this is my mistake: I intended to write to you about the excavation, but during a time of great personal difficulty it somehow got missed. I'm very sorry. I hope we can talk.'

Coxtis lowered his head a little. ‘We can talk,' he said.

‘There's not much to say.' Swenson stepped forwards and stood between them, too close to both. ‘We're scientists, doing our job, preserving an amazing find — and on a shoestring, I might add. We have permission from the current landowners and are having an absolutely minimal impact on the site. I don't see what argument there can be and I can't believe what I'm hearing here. If you want to protest, why not pick something worthwhile. Fish farming. Nuclear Energy… This is just bloody
politics
. We're asking you to leave, and if you don't, then we're going to have to call in the RCMP.'

‘Who is the leader here?' Coxtis asked, looking between Swenson and Anna.

‘Both of us,' Anna told him.

‘You must speak with one voice,' Coxtis replied, ‘or what is the point?' He took a folding stool handed to him by another of the protestors, opened it and sat down; in semi-unison the rest of the crowd followed suit, some on stools, some on blankets, some right on the rock.
Leave Our Ancestors Alone
, another of the signs read,
Let the Big Bird Sleep
.
Go Away, Scientists
, a third declared.

Mike Swenson dug his cell phone out of his shorts pocket, handed it to Gunnar: ‘Run to the carpark and go call the RCMP, get them to send someone up here immediately. These people are trespassing on a site of special scientific interest. And it's a dangerous workplace.'

‘Wait.' Anna reached towards Swenson, and then froze. ‘Let's try and sort this out.' But Gunnar was already striding off, picking his way through the seated crowd, who neither helped nor hindered him, but acted as if he simply did not exist.

‘No filming!' Swenson yelled at Gus, who ignored him. ‘I suggest everyone get back to work!'

Anna turned to Mike again, and this time without realising it, briefly grasped his arm. ‘We must talk this through. Maiko, Akira, Scott. Please excuse us, Mr Coxtis.'

They sat under the kitchen awning. There was a tremor in her hands and arms again, but Scott was there and Maiko and Akira; she was determined not to think of it, and to treat Mike as if he were any other colleague.

‘I had it on my list to contact Mr Coxtis, but I forgot to do it. That was a mistake. The application happened in such a rush. We absolutely should have gotten their blessing.' She looked across at Swenson, who did not offer to share the responsibility.

‘Well, perhaps,' Swenson said. ‘Would they ever give it? And it's really not the point!'

‘Yes,' Scott found himself saying, ‘You should have asked, both of you. And now—' Swenson turned, glaring.

‘Whose side are you on?'

‘My mother was from the St'alkwextsihn.'

‘So do you have something to do with this?'

‘Don't be ridiculous!' Anna said. ‘Scott is offering to help us understand the situation. Why did you bring along all this media in the first place is a better question! There'll be more tomorrow. And Mike, suppose the RCMP come; they're not going to drag all these people away, are they? I think we have to talk with them. Apologise properly. Somehow show them what we're doing.'

‘They don't care what we're doing. It's a means to an end. Isn't it?' Mike turned to Scott, who felt his face burn.

‘We have to respond,' Anna said. ‘We are going to have to take the time to sort this out.' Her hands were vibrating inside, but she kept them pressed to the table. You couldn't see it. She checked, looked back up again.