I shuddered, one of them shivers that come over you when you're not even cold but you can't stop yourself. I didn't know crocodile eyes could be so big. In the picture Miss Elizabeth showed me the croc had little piggy eyes, not huge owly ones. It made me feel odd looking at that eye, like there was a world of curiosities I didn't know about: crocodiles with huge eyes and snakes with no heads and thunderbolts God threw down that turned to stone. Sometimes I got that hollowed-out feeling too when looking at a sky full of stars or into the deep water the few times I went out in a boat, and I didn't like it: it was as if the world were too strange for me ever to understand it. Then I would have to go and sit in Chapel until I felt I could let God take care of all the mysteries and the worry went away.
'How long is it?' I said, trying to make sense of the monster by asking questions.
'Dunno--three or four feet, just the skull.' Joe ran his hand over the rock to the right of the jaw and eye. 'Don't see the body.'
Bits of loose shale tumbled down the cliff and fell near us. We looked up and stepped back, but nothing further come down.
I glanced at baby, wrapped up in his cocoon so he looked like a caterpillar. He'd stopped whimpering and was squinting into the grey sky. I couldn't tell if he were following the clouds that scudded across.
Far down the beach at Charmouth two men were pulling a row boat down to the shore, out to check lobster pots. Joe and I quick stepped back from the cliff, like children caught eyeing a plate of cakes. The men were too far away to see where we were or what we were doing, but we were still cautious. Though few hunted the way we did, people were sure to be interested in such a thing as the croc. And now I could see it, it was so obvious in the cliff, with its forest of teeth and saucer eye, that I was sure someone else would soon spot it.
'We got to dig out the croc,' I said.
'We never dug anything this big,' Joe said. 'Could we even lift four feet of rock?'
He was right. I had used my hammer to get ammos out of rocks on the beach, and out of the cliff, but most of the time we let the wind and the rain wear away the cliff and release the curies for us.
'We need help,' I said, though I did not like to admit it. We had already had so much help from the village since Pa's death, and it were hard to ask for more without paying, especially when it was to do with curies. Fanny Miller weren't the only one who hated fossils. 'Let's ask Miss Elizabeth what to do.'
Joe frowned. Like Mam and Pa, he had always been suspicious of Elizabeth Philpot. He couldn't understand what a lady like her would want with curies, nor why she was willing to have anything to do with me. Joe didn't get the same feeling when he found a cury as Miss Elizabeth and I did, like we were discovering a new world. Even now, with something as amazing as the crocodile, he was quick losing his excitement, and only seeing the problems. I wanted to go to Miss Elizabeth not only because she could help us, but because she would be as thrilled as I was.
We stayed a long time, chipping at the croc with my hammer and talking about what to do. We spent so long there that the tide cut us off and we had to climb over the cliffs back to Lyme--not easy with baby in my arms. Poor mite. He died the following summer. I always wondered if it weakened him, being taken upon beach in the cold. Of course, so many of Mam's babies died that it were no surprise he didn't last. But I could have stayed inside with him, and gone the next day to see the croc. That's how fossil hunting is: it takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.
I hadn't ever seen anything better than what Joe found that day, though. That brought the lightning straight through me, as if waking me from a long sleep. I was glad to see it. I just wished I had discovered it rather than Joe. It was a surprise to everyone that Joe found such an unusual specimen, for it weren't in his nature to look out for something new. That was what I was good at. I tried not to be jealous, but it was hard.
Soon enough, people forgot it was Joe who found the croc, and made it my croc. I didn't stop them, and Joe didn't seem to mind. He was happy to step back from it and just be plain Joe Anning rather than a hunter who could find a monster. It was hard for him, being part of a family so talked about and judged. If he could have stopped being an Anning, I think he would have. Since he couldn't, he kept his thoughts to himself.
Next morning we took Miss Elizabeth to see the skull. It were one of those clear cold days that makes all the rocks look crisp, though it didn't last long, the winter sun just skimming the horizon past Lyme Bay. Despite the cold, Miss Elizabeth needed no convincing, but come out straightaway, though their servant Bessy muttered and Miss Margaret twittered that they had guests coming soon. Now I was getting older I'd begun to find Miss Margaret a little silly, preferring the quietness of Miss Louise or the tartness of Miss Elizabeth. Miss Elizabeth didn't care about guests, but wanted to see the monster.
When we reached the end of Church Cliffs, I almost gasped at how clear its peculiar outline was in the cliff face. Miss Elizabeth was silent. She took off her nice gloves and put on the work gloves with the tips cut off so that she could run her fingers along its long, pointy snout and its great jumble of teeth. At the end where the jaws were hinged, she prised off a flake of stone. 'Look,' she said, 'there is a slight upturn of its mouth where it seems to be smiling. Do you recall that in the drawing I showed you of the crocodile in Cuvier's book?'
'Yes, ma'am. But look at its eye!' I used my hammer to tap carefully and reveal more of the ring of bones that overlapped like giant fish scales round an empty centre where the eyeball must have been once.
Miss Elizabeth stared. 'Are you sure that is the eye?' She seemed disturbed by it.
