As his father grabbed the long table and flung it over, ammonites, trilobites and fossils Henry Marchant didn’t recognise flew into the air, raining down on to the sand around him. He ducked and dodged, while his father continued to bellow at the woman in the long grey dress.
The moment he had heard that the fossil lady had set up a makeshift stall on the beach, his father had stormed out of his church, bible in hand, and marched to the seafront to confront her. Charles Darwin and his new ideas about evolution, he had told Henry in no uncertain terms, were like an infection, a plague on mankind. Such Godless ideas were to be fought, wherever they took hold.
Henry had heard this same sermon hundreds of times. Whether muttered over the dinner table, droned to a pious audience in church or screamed over the seagulls, it was the same message: God created the world in seven days. Only God can create life, and only God can take it away. Fossils are nothing. Darwin is wrong.
His father was right, of course. Fossils couldn’t be anything more than random marks in the rock. A couple of weeks ago a lecturer had visited Henry’s school. He had brought a model with him, a replica of a creature that had been built in the gardens of the Crystal Palace in London. The man had sounded more like a circus ringmaster than an academic, and his model looked fanciful. The creature appeared to be a cross between a dragon and a cow, the kind of thing you might invent to entertain children. Yet the boys at school all talked about ancient monsters lying buried in the rocks, and now here was this lady in her long grey dress. She looked earnest, with an honest face.
While his father was distracted, Henry picked up one of the small round stones and slipped it quietly into his pocket. He ran a finger around the spiralling, ridged impression inside the rock. It felt regular and measured. Not at all random.
Without warning, his father turned on his heel and stormed off along the beach, cassock flapping behind him. Henry turned to follow. A hand caught his; it was the woman with the long grey dress. She smiled at him and pressed a printed pamphlet into his hands. At the top, it read, ‘The Dinosaurs of England’. Henry paused for a moment, then pushed the papers deep into his pocket and hurried off to catch up with his father.
The leather-bound books lining the dining room walls rarely left their shelves, but they sucked in light and sound. Dinner was dark and quiet, and Henry winced at the sound of his cutlery scraping against the china plate. His mother sat like a mouse at one side of the table, while his father, locked impenetrably in his own thoughts, sat at the other. Henry thought his father was capable of making silence the way other people made noise.
‘I would like you to stay away from the beach,’ Father said eventually.
Henry hated that thought. The beach was the one place he could go to escape the suffocating quiet of the house and the dead echoes of the church. At home, if you made the tiniest noise it would hang in the air forever. You couldn’t tread on a stair or open a book without being heard and judged.
But the beach was a different place. At the beach, there was always sound. On a stormy day, the waves crashed against the rocks and the wind hammered the cliff and you could shout anything you wanted into it. On a calm day, the waves rattled back and forth over the pebbles, and it was as if the whole world was breathing, each exhalation carrying your secrets further out towards the horizon.
But there was no arguing with Father. You did what he told you to do, and you thought what he told you to think.
‘Yes, Father,’ Henry replied, staring at his plate.
‘The world is changing, boy,’ his father went on, sadly. ‘Our nation is too rich and too much driven by engines. Today, it seems the best way to better your position is by publishing scientific papers. A man has to decide whether to look for his answers in the Bible, or to dig for them with his hands in the mud.’ He paused, then said almost to himself, ‘Only one thing lies down there, mark me.’
Henry didn’t answer. He didn’t really know what to say. He felt the round stone and the pamphlet still in his pocket and he couldn’t look his father in the eye.
‘Finish up,’ said his mother after a long pause. ‘It’s time for bed.’
It was summer, and Henry’s bedroom faced west, so even with the curtains closed there was plenty of light to read. He took out the stone and the papers from his pocket and quietly unfolded the pamphlet.
The type was small, crowding the page in solid blocks. It began by describing the differences between types of stone. It explained how one type of rock could only be laid down by layer upon layer of sand, and how another was made up entirely of crushed and rotted plant material. It detailed how a solid object – like a bone – might become a kind of mould in the forming stone so that when it finally did decay, it would be replaced by a completely different kind of rock to that which surrounded it.
Henry held up his tiny fossil in the dying sunlight streaming through the window. The stone itself was dark slate, but the perfectly coiled shell embedded in it was, indeed, entirely different. A smooth, shiny rock almost like crystal.
Henry turned it over and over in his fingers. The light seemed to glow through it. The pamphlet’s explanation could not possibly be right, yet it seemed so obvious.
He read on. Now, the text described a few of the most sensational recent finds. A diagram of a bone caught his eye. Clearly it was a bone from an animal’s lower leg – he was learning anatomy at school and the shape was unmistakable. Beside the diagram, an arrow indicated dimensions. The bone was huge. An animal with a leg that long could easily peer into his bedroom window.
‘Megalosaurus: a giant predator’, read the caption. Further down the page a curved, serrated tooth was pictured, as large, the text said, as a dagger.
The pamphlet described a ferocious monster stalking a distant jungle world, but the finds were well documented and their locations were listed. He recognised the names of villages and towns, all within a few miles of his home. One tail-bone had even turned up on his local beach. This distant jungle was his country. His village! Henry folded the leaflet and put it under his pillow along with the so-called fossil. He laid his head down, watching as the sun vanished and the shadows grew across his window, and fell slowly asleep.
Henry walked close behind his mother through the woods. She was usually so quiet and small, but now she seemed huge, purposeful. It was all Henry could do to keep up as he dodged through the ferns, stepping in the deep footprints she left in the mud.
She stopped suddenly, frozen, facing straight ahead. Henry looked up at her, wondering what she was looking at. He could see nothing in the trees ahead. She seemed to be listening, then she sniffed the air, turned and strode away into the forest. Henry followed, running after her. He felt the mud oozing between his toes, and the ferns scratching at his legs. It didn’t feel cold.
It was a dark night but he could see well enough, and the trees were alive with noise. He caught up with his mother again as she stopped at the edge of a clearing. He ducked under her huge tail and stepped up beside her.
Breathing as quietly as he could, he looked out between the tree trunks. On the other side of the clearing, four camptosaurs were feeding. The two smallest were hunched over on all fours, grazing on ferns. The other two, the adults, were leaning back and stretching up to grab the tips of branches in their beaklike mouths, grinding them slowly from side to side.
The male stopped feeding and turned. He swung his elegant head from left to right, searching the edge of the clearing as if he knew he was being watched. His forelimbs rose in a defensive pose, hanging forward like a boxer’s, but in place of gloves, he had long, spiked thumbs ready to stab any attacker. The creature sniffed, listened for a moment, then turned back to grab another mouthful of leaves.
Henry looked at his mother, but she did not move. She simply turned her heavy, scaly head towards him, and then back to the clearing. The moonlight glinted on her teeth. This was to be his first hunt.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and jerked his head back to focus on the camptosaur group. The adults were too large, and he could not hope to bring them down, but the youngsters were about his size, and with their heads deep in the ferns at ground level they were less alert to danger.
He took a cautious step forward, poking his head into the clearing. Instantly, the big male swung around to face him. Both adults began to bay wildly and swing their thumb spikes threateningly, and the two youngsters ran and cowered behind them.
With the element of surprise gone, a more experienced hunter would have known to give up any hope of a kill. But Henry was not an experienced hunter. He launched himself into the clearing, snapping his jaws, then ducked as a thumb spike hooked over his head and had to leap to the side to avoid the male’s massive tail.
Realising the danger he was in, Henry tried to turn and run back to the safety of the woods. But the two giants stepped forward to block his way, cornering him in an area of the clearing where the thick tree trunks made escape impossible. He backed up and opened his mouth as threateningly as he could, but on their back legs, the adults were twice his height and five times his weight. The male reared up and twisted his body, ready to bring down his spiked thumbs in a crushing blow.
There was a deafening bellow as his mother broke cover behind the two camptosaurs. Immediately, they lumbered around to face the new attacker standing between them and their young. On the other side of the clearing, the two youngsters leapt back in surprise and fled into the woods.
The camptosaur adults squared up to Henry’s mother. Although she could easily bring down either of them alone, together they formed a fearsome wall of muscle and bone, four spiked thumbs swinging dangerously and unpredictably in front of them.
Behind them, Henry kept his distance from the swinging tails, watching his mother between the giants’ flanks. He saw her snap her jaws at one, then the other, then draw back, studying their movements for a sign of weakness, or a gap between the flailing limbs.
He watched her rear up and take a step forwards, jabbing with her own front claw. As the male swung his body to fend off the blow she flung out the razor-sharp talons of her other arm, carving a deep gash into his shoulder. The male recoiled, while the female camptosaur brought her own claw up, slicing through the air a whisker away from his mother’s soft throat.
Henry scanned the perimeter of the clearing for a spot where the trees were thinner, and edged sideways. The camptosaurs didn’t seem to notice. The male was fighting one-handed now, but had turned slightly, so that his great tail was ready to swing. Henry’s mother eyed it warily. One blow could knock her over or break her leg. She followed its movement, waiting for the right moment to attack, mouth wide open, ready to strike.
Henry saw his chance and broke for the edge of the clearing. The whip-like end of the female’s tail caught him across the side of the head as he ducked underneath it, but he kept running and she didn’t seem to notice. He heard a loud roar and a crash from behind him, but he didn’t stop or turn. He simply dodged between the trees and kept running until the sounds of the fight disappeared into the background noise of buzzing and chirping insects.
Finally, he stopped. The trees were dark, but the smells were heavy and deep. Instinctively, his mind began to untangle them, separating one from another, sorting plant from animal, water from rock, building himself a picture of the jungle he could not see. He stood motionless, his tail rigid, balancing his body, his head low but alert. His claws clenched and unclenched slowly. Underneath the forest’s smell was another scent. It drifted through the trees towards him.
It was the smell of prey.
He listened, trying to isolate his target among the forest’s sounds and smells, tuning out the insects and rotting plants and the rustling of the leaves in the high branches. Suddenly, there it was – a low baleful moan, the unmistakable sound of distress. A young camptosaur. It must be one of the youngsters that had fled into the forest. And now it was alone, lost and vulnerable. It was calling for its mother, but its mother would not be coming.
He ran silently towards the sound, his feet deftly picking their way between fallen branches. Soon he saw it through the trees. The young camptosaur was tired and slowing down, wailing out its long, low cries. He knew he would have to act fast or he would not be the only predator determined to make this kill. His heart surged and he felt his body fill with a strange fury.
Without pausing, he ran straight at the camptosaur and leapt. The claws of both arms sunk deep into its back and he brought down his open mouth hard on the back of the creature’s fleshy neck. It was over in seconds. The camptosaur gave a strangled cry and dropped to the ground as though its legs had suddenly lost all their strength. He held on tightly until there was no movement left and his prey’s heavy chest sank for the last time as its final breath rattled from its lungs.
He fed quickly and greedily, swallowing chunks of raw meat. The smell of the kill would soon attract scavengers and many would be larger than him. After every mouthful, he raised his head to listen and sniff the air before sinking his head back into the carcass to tear off another chunk of flesh.
By the time the first light of the sun began to show through the trees, dappling the ground with orange streaks of light, he had eaten his fill. He left the dead camptosaur to be picked clean by ants, flying scavengers and the tiny feathered dinosaurs that roamed the forest floor. He crept into a thicket to rest, but his ears remained sharply tuned to the sounds of the jungle. Slowly, he became aware that below the humming and squawking of the Jurassic dawn chorus, something else was coming his way. Heavy feet were being placed one in front of the other with the practised care of a predator.
He shifted his position slightly and raised his head so that he could look out over the tops of the ferns without being seen. Between the trees he could see a large, dark shape: a great head, sharp claws and a long, solid tail. It moved slowly closer, the head swinging slowly left and right.
It was his mother. She was searching for him.
His first thought was to run to her side. He took a step, then paused. From deep within him, another instinct was rising. He had watched her hunt, and shared her kills, but now that time had passed. Today he had killed. Now he was a predator too.
He watched from the ferns as her huge bulk moved past, her teeth still glistening with blood. Her sharp eyes scanned the forest but did not see him. Her tail swung slowly from side to side as she passed on into the darkness.