Page 92 of Down the Track

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‘Don’t know. Could be total rubbish.’

‘But it could be a worldfirst, Mum.’

She grinned. ‘Now you’re talking like a palaeontologist.’

He jumped in beside her. ‘Where do you want me?’

‘You think you can shimmy in next to the wall and get your hands in on that side? I’m going to dry dig from this side with a chisel and see if there’s softer soil underneath. Try to get a sense of how deep in it goes. You can give it a little pressure every now and then and see if it’ll wiggle.’

She tipped a little more water over the hard shape that was beginning to emerge, consoling herself with the thought they’d be able to refresh their water supply later that day, then began prying in the chisel and moving it in a slicing motion as though she were cutting a sponge cake in order to fill it with jam and cream.

‘I think it just moved.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ she said, chucking the chisel to the side and replacing it with her fingers. She was holding the object now from underneath, and it was about the size of a man’s shoe, only it was not—her breath caught because she was beginning to feel really, really excited—a man’s shoe.

‘Gently,’ she breathed. ‘We stand together on three, okay?’

‘Is it a fossil? Am I holding something that’s ninety-five million years old, Mum?’

‘I think so.’ She grinned at him. Even if this thing they were holding turned out to be nothing more exciting than a bit of tree stump clumped up with clay, she was going to remember this moment. Her and Luke, a team, and both of them having a genuinely fantastic time. Not all of the sting in her eyes was coming from sweat.

‘One, two, three,’ she said, and then they were walking sideways, like crabs, to the edge of the pit. ‘If I hold it, can you jump up and put one of those plastic trays on the ground here? Then we can lift it onto the table without risk of dropping it.’

‘Sure.’

A few moments later, the darkish muddy clump was on the folding trestle table under the shade tent and Jo was rolling her shoulders, ready to get stuck into the important task of clearing away some of the matrix (or dirt, as Luke would have called it) that clung to it. She opened the tool kit where she kept the stuff she used for finer work: paint brushes, toothbrushes, bristled brushes that plumbers used to clear out narrow pipes, chisels and scalpels.

‘Mum,’ said Luke. ‘You haven’t forgotten we’re leaving soon, have you?’

‘Um,’ she said. The damp surface matrix was peeling off like onion skin, but the grit below felt like cement. She’d scrape first, but in a small area, and try to establish the basics of what she had before her. Was it rock? Was it sheep or kangaroo remains? Or was it something else entirely?

‘Mum.’

Here she was on the cusp of (maybe) an awesome find and she’d promised to drive two hours to attend a library talk where Maggie would no doubt strongarm her into passing around tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches. She very much wanted to not go.

Shit. This was one of those put-your-child-first moments, wasn’t it?

She breathed in, held it, then breathed out. Luke was right. This fossil had been waiting for a very long time; it could wait a little longer.

‘I will get you to that library on time. I promise,’ she said. She was about to start barking out instructions but stopped herself in time. ‘Can you help me workshop this? Because we both know I get tunnel vision when I’m working on long-ago dead stuff. I need you to keep an eye on the time so we’re not late, and do you think you can take over getting the camp pulled down and packed up while I work?’

‘Pack up everything? On my own? Mum, that’s a lot.’

She looked up and considered. ‘Food and museum gear has to come with us, same with the swags, but we could stow the other stuff in the pit down that end,’ she said, pointing to quadrants one and two. ‘Last minute we can pull down this shade tent and trestle and leave them in the pit too. We can weigh the tarp down with some of our rock spoils.’

‘What about our chunk?’

She smiled at the ‘our’. Perhaps her son had a way with pronouns, too, only his was a nice way that made her feel like laughing suddenly.

‘Our chunk comes with us. In a padded box. With a seatbelt. And with me driving with an eagle eye for potholes.’

‘I’ll get started,’ he said.

‘Thanks. Let me know when your watch says three thirty, and no matter what, I’ll be in the driver’s seat driving you to the library. Deal?’

He grinned. Being at the receiving end felt better than discovering the chunk. ‘Deal.’

She turned her attention to the wedge of caked dirt that had begun to shift and sluiced a little more water in to the narrow channel she’d made with her small chisel. The crack widened and she dug her fingers in and levered gently … gently … And with a faint wet sucking sound, the wedge popped free and under it—