The Tooth

by Des Hunt

  ‘As long as it does the job,’ I replied, before plunging into the bushes and pushing my way through to the cliff face. I got a few stings, but they were nothing compared to the excitement I felt about beginning the final stage of our search.

  A moment later Mits joined me. We stared at the rock face in disappointment. I suppose we both half-expected to find The Tooth on the first go. It was not to be. We stood staring at a moss-covered cliff face that showed no sign of a tooth or any other fossil. It was a great anti-climax.

  It would have been an easy search if we could have just walked along the base of the cliff. But that was not possible. In most places we could go no further than a few metres before a rock fall or exceptionally thick bushes forced us to retreat to the pasture and try another spot. It was time-consuming and frustrating.

  We stopped for lunch when we were about halfway. It was almost two hours since we’d started searching. However, we weren’t unhappy with our progress. The remaining half was big enough to keep our hopes up, and Nanna’s bacon-and-egg pie was delicious.

  The afternoon was a repeat of the morning, except that the happy feeling faded as we approached the end of the ongaonga. It was also extremely hot dressed in clothes more suitable for a snow storm than a mild autumn day. By the time we’d finished we were both feeling depressed.

  ‘So, what next?’ I asked after we had stripped off our extra clothes.

  ‘Maybe there’s another place further downstream,’ suggested Mits without enthusiasm.

  I looked around the canyon and shook my head. ‘No, this is the place. I know I’ve been here before.’

  ‘Then why haven’t we found it?’ whined Mits. ‘You sure it was behind the ongaonga?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied without hesitation.

  ‘Then what’s happened to it?’ Again the whine. Soon he would be yelling at me, unless I directed his anger at someone else.

  ‘Maybe somebody else has found it. It’s been eight years since I saw it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘Probably that thug Sam Mason. Why does he have to be here, wrecking it all for us?’ He looked up at the white container sitting above the pathway. ‘I bet he’s got the fossils stacked up there.’

  ‘I doubt it. We would have seen where they’ve been working.’

  After that we sat in silence for a few minutes, dejected, but too tired to think of anything else to do.

  Mits broke the silence with, ‘So, what do we do now? Give up?’

  ‘We could have another look tomorrow?’ I suggested with little enthusiasm. ‘Maybe we should find out what glow-worms look like in the daytime and search for them.’

  Mits sat up sharply. ‘The glow-worms,’ he said excitedly. ‘I’d forgotten all about them. That’s how we’ll find it.’

  ‘What? Come back tomorrow and look for them?’

  ‘No! Not tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tonight! Instead of us doing all the work, let them do it. Didn’t you say you were attracted to the glowing lights when you first found it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then, we come back tonight and let the glowing lights do it all over again.’

  ‘Yessss!’ I hissed. ‘You’re right. Why didn’t I think of that?’

  ‘Because you’ve got no imagination. Only a fantasy nut would think of something like that.’ Then he hit me playfully on the arm. ‘Hey! If it’s a full moon we might even see some of those things that I’m not allowed to mention. Wouldn’t that be something?’

  I laughed. At that moment I would have quite happily confronted a werewolf, or anything else that could help us find The Tooth—even a dragon.

  Chapter 11

  Nanna and Grandad were bitterly disappointed, although they tried not to show it. We had difficulty matching their feelings, as we were excited about our secret plans for that night.

  We told them about the people living in the house, but not that we knew one of them. That evening Grandad rang Fred Hyde at the retirement village to see if he knew anything about the Basinhead Gang. It was a long conversation that seemed more about old times than the present. When Grandad hung up, he said, ‘Silly old coot. He seems to be worse every time I speak to him. Anyway,’ he added, slumping into his favourite chair, ‘one of the residents in the village asked if their sons could use the house for a while. They offered to clear some of the scrub in return.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he sell the place?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s too small to make a living on nowadays. It needs to be added to one of the existing places. Jim was thinking of adding it to Pounamu. Even made Fred an offer, but the silly old coot turned him down. Now nobody will buy it because it needs too much work.’

  The Basinhead Gang might not be squatting illegally, but they could still be doing illegal things with the scrub-clearing as a cover. Although the refrigeration container might simply be a store for their scrub-cutting gear. Maybe I was only thinking of criminal things because I didn’t like Sam Mason.

  There was no moon when we crawled out of our beds just after midnight. However, the sky was full of other objects: galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets—all the heavenly bodies. There was hardly a spot where something didn’t glimmer. Only away from the city lights can you ever see the night sky like this.

  I had decided that taking Phoebe at night would be too dangerous, so we removed the carrier box from the quad and I squeezed onto the seat behind Mits. The motor groaned a bit when we took off or went uphill, otherwise it coped OK.

  We followed the tracks we’d left in the afternoon when we’d headed cross country to avoid the house. It wasn’t easy, yet we eventually made it onto the gravel track. I looked in the direction of the house, but all was dark. If they were still there, then, hopefully, they were asleep.

  We parked alongside the white container and set off on foot, lit by the light of a torch. It was all a bit scary. Our visible world was little more than a circle of light. Yet we knew that on one side the cliff towered above us, and on the other it fell many metres down to the prickly bush below.

  It was even worse when we got to the bottom, as the torchlight was beginning to fade. I cursed myself for not having checked the batteries before we left. Now, if we didn’t conserve them, we’d have to go back up the path in the dark.

  I turned off the torch and we waited for our eyes to adjust to the blackness. The stars provided a surprising amount of light. Enough to see the outlines of the canyon and the black shapes of the ongaonga bushes. We set off, skirting the edges of the bush. Sometimes we got too close and got a prickly reminder to move back a bit.

  There was no missing the glow-worms when we reached the right spot. They appeared through the bushes as glowing dots, brighter than the stars overhead. Without speaking, we pulled the balaclavas and gloves from our pockets, dressed up and plunged into the ongaonga. As soon as we got through, I experienced a strange feeling of déjà vu, knowing I had done this before.

  After the nettles we had to clamber over boulders that had fallen from the cliff, and then scramble up what seemed like a dry stream bed. At a couple of places I had to use some of the precious life of the torch batteries. Each time I turned the torch on, the glow-worms seemed to dim as our eyes adjusted to the brighter light.

  Finally we were below an overhang where the glow-worms lived. They were surprisingly bright, with enough light to see their webs and the long sticky threads they used to catch their prey.

  ‘Where’s The Tooth?’ asked Mits.

  ‘It’s there,’ I said quietly. ‘I think.’ If it was, it was nowhere near as obvious as I’d remembered.

  ‘Where?’ Mits demanded impatiently.

  I stretched my hand up and touched the dirt-covered rock in the middle of the glow-worms. ‘It should be there,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s not. Is it?’

  I moved my fingers around until I felt a slight bulge. Then I smiled. ‘There,’ I said. ‘That’s The Tooth.’

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ grumbled Mits.

  I ran
my fingers over the surface wiping away the grime. ‘OK! Is that any better?’

  Mits moved forward to get a better look. ‘That’s it?’ he cried. ‘That’s what we’ve spent weeks searching for?’ Maybe he had imagined a glowing white fang sticking out of the rock. I don’t know. What we saw was a brown-stained, pointed shape half-exposed in the surface of the rock. Yet, there was no mistaking that it was a tooth.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ I replied with a feeling of great satisfaction. I wiped it again with my glove, and it changed to more of a yellow colour. ‘It was whiter than that when I first saw it. And I thought it was more curved. But, yes, that’s The Tooth.’

  ‘It doesn’t look very special,’ moaned Mits.

  I turned to him. ‘If I told you that it was a dragon’s tooth—the only dragon fossil ever found—what would you think about it then?’

  His face brightened. ‘I’d think it was the most wonderful thing ever.’

  ‘Well,’ I said softly, ‘that’s how I feel. It might not look great but it is something special—real special.’

  Mits nodded slowly. ‘OK, so we’ve found it. What do we do now?’

  ‘Go home and come back tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you sure we’ll find it again in the daylight?’

  ‘Yeah, if we leave our gloves and balaclavas out on the grass as a marker.’

  Which we did, before heading in the direction of the path. To find it I had to turn on the torch, and straight away I saw our tracks in the dew on the grass. For a moment my heart did a skip. If anyone else came, they would easily be able to follow our tracks, which would lead to our marker, and then on to…I put it out of my mind. Nobody was going to be coming here in the middle of the night.

  The torch failed about halfway up. From there on we crept forward with one hand on the rock wall. At the top we found the bike by creeping around until we fell over it, always aware that we could just as easily fall over the cliff. It was a welcome relief to be able to start the bike and have some light again.

  We’d just passed the clay pit on our return journey when I saw the glow of lights in the mist hanging over the scrub. A vehicle was coming. ‘Look!’ I yelled into Mits’s ear. ‘Quick! Get off the track.’

  Without replying, he killed the headlamp and turned the handle-bars into the scrub. There was no knowing what was in front of us: there could have been pits or boulders or stumps, anything. Mits must have been thinking the same thing, for he pulled up after about ten metres and turned off the motor. We dismounted and squatted beside the bike, staring in the direction of the glow.

  Now we could hear the growl of a truck engine in first gear. It seemed to be struggling under a load. As it got closer, we could see the headlights lurching from side to side as it lumbered along the primitive track.

  Soon it was alongside and I could see it was the horse float I’d seen at the house. There was more than one person in the cab, but it was impossible to see if it was the Basinhead Gang or not.

  Then, to my horror, it stopped. The driver’s door opened and a large shape got out. Next, the headlights went off. We stopped breathing.

  After a while a gruff voice said, ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘But there was. I tell you I saw a light.’ There was no mistaking Sam Mason’s voice.

  ‘Nah, you’re imagining things, kid. Nobody’d be out here at this time.’

  Mason began to argue, but his voice was cut off by the door slamming. A moment later the headlights came back on, and the truck ground on its way. We both exhaled with relief, thankful that the Basinhead boss had not believed his younger cousin.

  Mits waited until the truck could hardly be heard and the lights were a dim glow, before firing up the motor, turning on the light and finding a way out of the scrub.

  We drove home in silence. I don’t know what Mits was thinking, but I couldn’t think of anything except the tracks we’d left in the dew of the canyon. If the Basinhead Gang went down there, they’d be sure to see them, and Mason might just have enough brains to work out what they meant.

  Chapter 12

  It was late when we got up on Friday morning. Once again my grandparents had most things organized. They plainly felt that we should have got up hours before, yet said nothing. Our body language must have been confusing to them, for, while we talked about hoping to find The Tooth that day, our bodies must have said that we already had.

  I added a small digital camera, a sketch pad, and my cast-making gear to the carrier box, so I could record our find. I also grabbed a stone chisel and hammer from the tool shed, in case it looked as if The Tooth could easily be removed.

  Even before we got to the canyon, I knew that something had changed. Phoebe became jittery and difficult to control. As we approached the edge, she snorted a couple of times, before letting out a loud whinny. Immediately there was a return call from down in the canyon. I moved to the edge and saw two horses in the sunshine near the opposite side.

  I pointed them out to Mits.

  ‘That must be what they were doing last night,’ he said. ‘Bringing in horses.’

  ‘And they must’ve taken them down that path in the dark,’ I added angrily. ‘They could easily have injured them.’

  ‘But why bring them here?’ asked Mits. ‘Why not have them around the house?’

  ‘To hide them,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you think they’re stolen?’

  I didn’t reply straight away. To me the horses looked like Kaimanawas. But I doubted they were wild ones. I couldn’t imagine anybody taking a wild horse down that path, whether it was night or bright daylight.

  ‘Maybe,’ I conceded. ‘We’ll have a closer look at them later.’

  Right then I was more interested in the tracks left in the dew. A pair of horse tracks led out into the middle, but there were no new human tracks—only ours.

  We found our gloves and balaclavas wet with dew, yet we still put them on before going into the bush. It’s strange how your senses at night magnify things. I had thought it was a long way from the edge of the bush to the overhang, but it was barely twenty metres. And the boulders we’d struggled over were little more than large stones.

  The overhang was as we’d left it, except that the glow-worms no longer glowed. The Tooth was clearly visible against the dirty, grey background. The rock to the right was polished from the flow of water. Even now, after a very dry summer, there was water trickling from above. When it rained, the trickle would become a waterfall.

  Water was the key to how The Tooth had been brought to the surface. For thousands of winters the waterfall had slowly eaten into the cliff, cutting into rock that at other places was still hidden from the surface. Probably there were still other fossils to be revealed in another ten thousand years or so. I was content with the one we had. Now it was time to record the evidence, so we could convince others of its existence.

  Mits took control of the digital camera so we could get a continuous record of what I was doing. First I tried to shift the glow-worms out of the way. I felt an attachment to these particular ones. If they, or their ancestors, hadn’t been glowing then nobody would ever have found that a tooth was embedded in the rock. However, they were awkward things to shift as they were attached with web-like nets. Getting them to stick in another place was difficult, and some were lost.

  Next, I brushed away the loose dirt. That was when we had a bit of a disappointment. We were both hoping to find something alongside: a piece of jaw or another tooth—there was nothing. It looked like The Tooth was just like all the other New Zealand dinosaur fossils—a single piece unconnected to anything else.

  Yet, we were not despondent. We might have only a single tooth, but it was still an extremely rare find.

  We sat down for our morning tea and planned our next move.

  ‘Are you going to try and take it out?’ asked Mits.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think we should. It’s all we’ve got. Imagine if it broke.’

  Mits shudd
ered. ‘No, that would be horrible. So what do we do?’

  ‘We make a cast and show it to Ms Marshall at the museum. Let her work out what should happen.’

  Mits nodded. ‘They’re going to have to do it quick, but. Or the dam will flood it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. I’d almost forgotten about that. Winter was approaching and it was sure to start raining soon. ‘We’ll try and get Ms Marshall to come out next week. It shouldn’t take much to get the thing out.’

  We then set about making a cast of a tooth, with Mits recording everything with the camera. The first step was to smear The Tooth with Vaseline. Then we broke open an epoxy resin stick. These have two parts to them. When the two are mixed, they form a soft material that can be moulded onto a surface. Then a chemical reaction starts which causes it to harden, and thus form the shape of the object it is sitting on. We spent the hour that it takes for the mixture to fully set sitting in the sun, eating and fantasizing about the importance of our find and how famous we would be.

  After removing the mould, we stood back and looked at the rock. Anybody who came through the bushes would soon see the thing—The Tooth now seemed to stand out like a beacon. We couldn’t leave it like that with Sam Mason around. It would have to be disguised.

  Mits was the one who came up with the way of doing it. We covered the exposed part with Vaseline and then smeared it with dirt. After a few minutes of work we had it more camouflaged than when we had first found it. Unless someone had been watching us from above the cliffs, it would be almost impossible for them to find it.

  Before we left, I took out the hammer and stone chisel and bashed away at a couple of boulders trying to get some idea of their hardness. The rock was hard enough to form sparks, yet soft enough for chips to fly off. I felt that with the right tools there shouldn’t be any problem getting the thing out of the rock.

  We then took a trip to where the horses were grazing. I approached the horses in such a way that if they bolted they would head away from the ongaonga. I didn’t want them to get caught up in that stuff. That was another thing that made me angry about the Basinhead Gang: no-one who loved horses would ever put them near something that could kill them.