psamphire (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} psamphire) wrote,@ 2007-04-23 14:29:00 |
|
When the Dragon Falls
This story was first published in Realms of Fantasy in August of 2005. Enjoy.
When the Dragon Falls
By Patrick Samphire
1.
Tam found the fossil jutting from the crumbling slope above the lake.
The day was hot, the air thick with humidity and gnats. Chasing along the trails had left Tam red faced and sweaty. So he thrust through the tangle of hawthorn and started down the slope towards the glass-flat lake.
The fossil was in full view. The slate had slipped away, and the long, fossilised bone stared up at him.
The others gathered around quickly.
"A dragon," gasped seven-year-old Rosie, wide-eyed. She was the youngest of them, and she had tagged along all morning like a burr in a dog's tail.
"A dinosaur," Josh said. At thirteen, a full year older than Tam, Josh knew everything.
Tam wasn't so sure. He didn't know what it was, but he did know one thing. He had found it. It was his.
Lisa rolled her eyes and stepped over the fossil. "Are we going swimming or not?" Her long hair was stuck to her sweaty neck.
"Not yet," Tam said, dropping to his knees. The fossilised bone ridged from a bed of dark grey slate. The same bed disappeared beneath the loose scree a couple of yards further up the slope. Tam brushed the fragments away with his hand. "There could be more of it."
"God, who cares?" Lisa said. "It's just a bone."
2.
There were sounds in the night, and shapes that flitted across Tam's peripheral vision, and lights that blinked and were gone before he could focus on them. Bats chasing fireflies across the lake, he told himself. But he got up from his sweat-damp sheets and crossed the room to the window, and watched the flickering lights and flitting shapes and listened to the sounds, because they might not be. They still might not be.
3.
"Who's for swimming?" Tam's dad said.
Rosie jumped up from the breakfast table, sending eggshell scattering across the wood. "Me. Me. I'm going to wear my mermaid costume and swim underwater for a mile."
Tam's dad laughed.
"Anyone else? How about you, Tam? Lisa? Josh?"
They all nodded.
"Good," Tam's dad said, rubbing his hands. "It's going to be a scorcher. We'll swim and play football and see who can build the biggest sandcastle."
Tam's mom eased herself from the table. "Not me and Dan," she said. "We're going for a hike."
"Again, Maria?" Tam's dad said.
Tam's mom tightened her lips. "Yes, again. We like hiking. At least Dan doesn't just sit around all day letting himself get fat."
"Maria..."
Rosie pushed in between them. "Can I come hiking too, Mom? Oh, please."
"No, petal," Tam's mom said. "You go to the beach with your father."
Rosie's face fell, her round cheeks pouted out. Tam knew what would happen next. Tears and a tantrum and a day of sulks. "Why not?" Rosie said.
"You couldn't keep up. Not where we're going."
"Yes, I could, I--"
Tam's dad scooped Rosie up. "The lake'll be more fun, rosebud." He rubbed his greying beard against her neck until she giggled. The he looked across at Josh and Lisa's mom. "Just you, me, and the kids, Annie. Again."
4.
"Why does Mommy keep going for hikes with your daddy?" Rosie said.
Josh splashed water at her. "You're too young to understand. You're just a kid."
"I am not!" Rosie shrieked, her face turning red. "You don't know either."
Tam glanced up the beach to where his dad was sitting a couple of feet from Josh and Lisa's mom. They were talking quietly, staring out over the silver-rippled lake, arms wrapped around their own knees, not touching, not looking at each other.
"Tam knows," Josh said. "He's not a sprat anymore. Don't you, Tam?"
Tam felt his cheeks redden. "Of course," he said, furious that he didn’t. "I’m not a kid." He splashed towards the shore. "It's too hot down here. I'm going to ask if I can go and look at my fossil."
5.
The fossil was dark grey on dark grey rock, but Tam could see it clearly, nonetheless. When he ran his fingers over it, he could feel the grain in the ancient bone-impression. A bit at a time, he cleared away loose stone and dirt with his fingers.
The bone was thicker than his arm, and the exposed section was as long as Tam if he lay down and stretched his arms over his head. It must have been an enormous beast, whatever it had been. And still the bone sank into the slope.
He stuck his fingers into a crack in the slate and tried to lever it up and snap it off.
His nail bent back, and Tam let out a pained gasp. A drop of blood welled from beneath the nail. Tam watched, fascinated, as it fell from his finger onto the fossil and spread along the grain.
The fierce sun beat on his bare neck and thin T-shirt. Sweat dripped over his nose and into his mouth.
"It could be a dragon," Rosie said.
Tam looked up. His little sister came slipping and sliding down the scree slope, still in her swimsuit with the little mermaid waving from it.
"Maybe," Tam said. "Does Dad know you're here?"
"They're all coming," Rosie said. "Dad says you've been here for too long, and it's time for lunch. You've been hours."
Tam took one last look at the fossil. Where it entered the rock, it seemed to widen slightly, as though the bone was coming to an end.
6.
"I dreamed about the dragon," Rosie said. She was tucked up in her bed, her sheet pulled up tight beneath her chin.
"When?" Tam said.
"Last night," Rosie said. "And when I woke up, there were dragons flying over the lake."
Tam ruffled her hair. "You were still dreaming."
"No I wasn't. If you'd been awake you would have seen them too, but you weren't. You were probably snoring with your mouth open wide to catch the moths."
"Go to sleep," Tam said.
"I will," Rosie said. "And I'll dream of the dragon again. It was defending its eggs against the fairies. That's how it got caught and died. The fairies have got teeth like pins, and there's thousands of them, and they like to bite. But the eggs hatched and the babies swam away while the mommy dragon stopped the fairies from catching them."
7.
Tam dreamed, but in his dream there was no dragon. The dinosaur was vast, longer than a bus, heavier than a whale. Its long neck arced over the swamp, dipped down to strip the leaves from a low fern. Its eyes, small and half blind, did not see the quick movements among the deep vegetation beside the swamp, but Tam did. He wanted to shout out. He wanted to tell it to fly and to breathe fire, but it could not. It was only a dinosaur, a slow, dull dinosaur.
"You're a dragon," Tam yelled, while his sleeping body dripped sweat. "You're a dragon."
Something came rushing from the vegetation, something smaller, with tearing teeth and long jaws. Its teeth sliced into the dinosaur's leg, ripped. The dinosaur let out a moan like a slow foghorn and took a plodding step forward. Its massive tail lashed around, but by then there were a dozen more predators upon it, shredding, slicing, biting. Blood slipped into the stagnant Precambrian water.
8.
"Do you remember how we caught a fairy last year?" Rosie said.
Tam wiped his sleeve across his forehead. The heat was near unbearable, the humidity total. When he tugged at the splintering rock, his fingers slipped.
"No, we didn't," Tam said. "There's no such thing as fairies."
"We did," Rosie insisted. "You're just saying that so Josh and Lisa won't laugh at you. It was floating through the woods near the stream. You caught it by the back of its neck so it couldn't bite you, and you made it give you a wish. You wished you could be all grown up like Josh and Lisa. That was silly. Why would anyone want to be grown up and boring?"
Now Tam remembered. It had twisted and turned and darted, even though there had been no breeze. He had chased it and leapt and laughed and then trapped it between his fingers. He had breathed upon it, kissed it, wished...
"It was just thistledown. It's a seed. I learned that in school. We pretended it was a fairy. It was a kids' game."
9.
He cracked away the layers of slate with a knife he had snuck from the kitchen. The large bone ended, but there were other fossils in the same bed of slate. There was something that could have been a claw, and some thinner bones that stretched back further again, into the slope.
"That's its wing," Rosie said confidently from where she lounged higher on the slope.
"Go and swim," Tam said.
Rosie made a face. "Dad made Mom go to the beach with him today, and she's being all grumpy. It's no fun. Anyway, I want to see the dragon."
10.
He had never noticed how they looked at each other before, but he noticed at dinner that night. His mom kept sneaking glances at Josh and Lisa's dad. Tam's dad was growing steadily more pale. His knife and fork clattered and clashed on the willow-pattern china.
Rosie didn't notice any of it. She just kept chattering on about her dragon.
Tam's dad slammed down his cutlery. "For Heaven's sake, Rosie, shut up."
"Don't take it out on her," Tam's mom flared up.
Rosie burst into tears.
"Rosie!" both parents snapped.
11.
Tam tucked Rosie into bed.
"Why are Mommy and Daddy being so mean?" she said.
"They're having a few problems," Tam said. He brushed a hand over her light hair. "Nothing to worry a sprat like you. It'll all be all right." It had to be. Tam curled himself up beside Rosie on the bed and closed his eyes.
"If I was a dragon," Rosie said, "I wouldn't let anyone be mean to anyone, and if they were I'd gobble them up."
12.
A warm breath woke Tam. At first he thought it was just the stifling night air, but then it seemed more than that. It felt like heat from rock in the midday sun. The lake would have cooled quicker than the surrounding earth. The breeze should have been cool.
Strange light strobed the cabin, cold sounds shivered into his bones.
He pulled up his sheet. He didn't want to know, wanted to know.
The angry heat was like a fever.
That was all it was. A fever. No more.
13.
"I saw your mom with my dad last night," Lisa said. "Outside."
They were standing in the shallows of the lake, up to their waists in the warm, still water. The hard sun beat upon Tam's bare back.
"Do you want to know what they were doing?" Lisa said.
"What?" Tam said, not wanting to know.
Lisa's tight arms wrapped around him. "This." She kissed him.
14.
He worked like fire in dry grass, fast, angry, violent. Chips of slate flew from the screwdriver he had taken from the cabin. Din-o-saur, dra-gon, din-o-saur, dra-gon. His blows hammered down to the beat of the syllables.
The slate was hard but brittle, cracking along its faults, coming away with every blow.
A larger bone was emerging. His screwdriver should have shattered and scarred it, turned the fossil into unrecognisable fragments. But fate and need and fury guided his hand. Inch by inch, the giant fossil emerged. Inch by too-slow inch.
15.
A small hand tugged Tam awake. Night was thick upon the cabin. The shy moon flirted behind slipping clouds.
"I want to show you something," Rosie whispered.
"Go back to bed," Tam muttered, turning over.
Rosie persisted. "You need to see it. You need to believe." Then, "I can stay here all night."
Tam sighed. He swung himself out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.
Rosie was still dressed in her nightshirt. A dry leaf was caught on it. Her bare feet were dirty.
"Where are we going?"
Rosie held up a finger to her lips. "Shh. Outside." She turned and padded from the room. Tam followed her.
She was quick in the night, like a will-o-the-wisp, as she threaded her way up the slope behind the cabin.
Eventually, they reached the ridge. Rosie motioned him down. He dropped into a crouch.
"There." Rosie pointed.
Through the dark trees, sharp lights slipped and rose.
"And there." She directed his gaze up.
Black shapes moved across the face of the moon, like the flap of giant wings.
"The fairies are hunting the dragons again," Rosie whispered. "They want to steal the gold in their eyes and the gems in their scales."
Still the lights flowed, hurrying through the trees, rising towards the sky, red and white slivers in the night. Tam heard a breath like wind in the trees. The treetops shook and bent. For a second, the moon was obscured. Sharp teeth and scales glittered in the sky. Tam dared not breathe. His heart thundered like the hooves of fairy steeds, like--
Raised, angry, adult voices came from the cabin behind them, then footsteps on floorboards. The cabin door slammed. Car doors opened, thumped shut. The engine, starting loud, headlights springing on, the engine fading into the distance.
Tam stood there, staring down at the cabin, his eyes wide and spilling tears. "Mom?" he said.
Rosie tugged at his T-shirt. "You have to see. You have to believe."
Tam turned. He took Rosie's hand. "I'm not a child anymore, Rosie," he said. "I'm sorry." He squeezed her pudgy hand. "Look."
The lights through the trees were car lights on a nearby road, climbing up the valley side. The wings in front of the moon were simply gathering clouds. "I'm sorry," Tam said again.
16.
The weather broke that night. The heat shattered before the pounding rain.
In Tam's dream, the dragon fell, like a dark sheet from the sky, tumbling, twisting, bunching. And then it was gone.
17.
In the sad, unbending humidity of the day, Tam walked from the cabin, where his father and Josh and Lisa's mother sat, unspeaking and hollow. He followed the trail that led up through the trees, around the lake. He pushed through the hawthorn thicket and came out onto the cracked slate slope. Beyond, the lake lay flat and glassy.
He started down the slope.
The bed of slate that had held his fossil had broken off in the night and fallen into the deep lake. The fossil of the dinosaur was gone.
-End-
Copyright Patrick Samphire
This story was first published in Realms of Fantasy in August of 2005. Enjoy.
When the Dragon Falls
By Patrick Samphire
1.
Tam found the fossil jutting from the crumbling slope above the lake.
The day was hot, the air thick with humidity and gnats. Chasing along the trails had left Tam red faced and sweaty. So he thrust through the tangle of hawthorn and started down the slope towards the glass-flat lake.
The fossil was in full view. The slate had slipped away, and the long, fossilised bone stared up at him.
The others gathered around quickly.
"A dragon," gasped seven-year-old Rosie, wide-eyed. She was the youngest of them, and she had tagged along all morning like a burr in a dog's tail.
"A dinosaur," Josh said. At thirteen, a full year older than Tam, Josh knew everything.
Tam wasn't so sure. He didn't know what it was, but he did know one thing. He had found it. It was his.
Lisa rolled her eyes and stepped over the fossil. "Are we going swimming or not?" Her long hair was stuck to her sweaty neck.
"Not yet," Tam said, dropping to his knees. The fossilised bone ridged from a bed of dark grey slate. The same bed disappeared beneath the loose scree a couple of yards further up the slope. Tam brushed the fragments away with his hand. "There could be more of it."
"God, who cares?" Lisa said. "It's just a bone."
2.
There were sounds in the night, and shapes that flitted across Tam's peripheral vision, and lights that blinked and were gone before he could focus on them. Bats chasing fireflies across the lake, he told himself. But he got up from his sweat-damp sheets and crossed the room to the window, and watched the flickering lights and flitting shapes and listened to the sounds, because they might not be. They still might not be.
3.
"Who's for swimming?" Tam's dad said.
Rosie jumped up from the breakfast table, sending eggshell scattering across the wood. "Me. Me. I'm going to wear my mermaid costume and swim underwater for a mile."
Tam's dad laughed.
"Anyone else? How about you, Tam? Lisa? Josh?"
They all nodded.
"Good," Tam's dad said, rubbing his hands. "It's going to be a scorcher. We'll swim and play football and see who can build the biggest sandcastle."
Tam's mom eased herself from the table. "Not me and Dan," she said. "We're going for a hike."
"Again, Maria?" Tam's dad said.
Tam's mom tightened her lips. "Yes, again. We like hiking. At least Dan doesn't just sit around all day letting himself get fat."
"Maria..."
Rosie pushed in between them. "Can I come hiking too, Mom? Oh, please."
"No, petal," Tam's mom said. "You go to the beach with your father."
Rosie's face fell, her round cheeks pouted out. Tam knew what would happen next. Tears and a tantrum and a day of sulks. "Why not?" Rosie said.
"You couldn't keep up. Not where we're going."
"Yes, I could, I--"
Tam's dad scooped Rosie up. "The lake'll be more fun, rosebud." He rubbed his greying beard against her neck until she giggled. The he looked across at Josh and Lisa's mom. "Just you, me, and the kids, Annie. Again."
4.
"Why does Mommy keep going for hikes with your daddy?" Rosie said.
Josh splashed water at her. "You're too young to understand. You're just a kid."
"I am not!" Rosie shrieked, her face turning red. "You don't know either."
Tam glanced up the beach to where his dad was sitting a couple of feet from Josh and Lisa's mom. They were talking quietly, staring out over the silver-rippled lake, arms wrapped around their own knees, not touching, not looking at each other.
"Tam knows," Josh said. "He's not a sprat anymore. Don't you, Tam?"
Tam felt his cheeks redden. "Of course," he said, furious that he didn’t. "I’m not a kid." He splashed towards the shore. "It's too hot down here. I'm going to ask if I can go and look at my fossil."
5.
The fossil was dark grey on dark grey rock, but Tam could see it clearly, nonetheless. When he ran his fingers over it, he could feel the grain in the ancient bone-impression. A bit at a time, he cleared away loose stone and dirt with his fingers.
The bone was thicker than his arm, and the exposed section was as long as Tam if he lay down and stretched his arms over his head. It must have been an enormous beast, whatever it had been. And still the bone sank into the slope.
He stuck his fingers into a crack in the slate and tried to lever it up and snap it off.
His nail bent back, and Tam let out a pained gasp. A drop of blood welled from beneath the nail. Tam watched, fascinated, as it fell from his finger onto the fossil and spread along the grain.
The fierce sun beat on his bare neck and thin T-shirt. Sweat dripped over his nose and into his mouth.
"It could be a dragon," Rosie said.
Tam looked up. His little sister came slipping and sliding down the scree slope, still in her swimsuit with the little mermaid waving from it.
"Maybe," Tam said. "Does Dad know you're here?"
"They're all coming," Rosie said. "Dad says you've been here for too long, and it's time for lunch. You've been hours."
Tam took one last look at the fossil. Where it entered the rock, it seemed to widen slightly, as though the bone was coming to an end.
6.
"I dreamed about the dragon," Rosie said. She was tucked up in her bed, her sheet pulled up tight beneath her chin.
"When?" Tam said.
"Last night," Rosie said. "And when I woke up, there were dragons flying over the lake."
Tam ruffled her hair. "You were still dreaming."
"No I wasn't. If you'd been awake you would have seen them too, but you weren't. You were probably snoring with your mouth open wide to catch the moths."
"Go to sleep," Tam said.
"I will," Rosie said. "And I'll dream of the dragon again. It was defending its eggs against the fairies. That's how it got caught and died. The fairies have got teeth like pins, and there's thousands of them, and they like to bite. But the eggs hatched and the babies swam away while the mommy dragon stopped the fairies from catching them."
7.
Tam dreamed, but in his dream there was no dragon. The dinosaur was vast, longer than a bus, heavier than a whale. Its long neck arced over the swamp, dipped down to strip the leaves from a low fern. Its eyes, small and half blind, did not see the quick movements among the deep vegetation beside the swamp, but Tam did. He wanted to shout out. He wanted to tell it to fly and to breathe fire, but it could not. It was only a dinosaur, a slow, dull dinosaur.
"You're a dragon," Tam yelled, while his sleeping body dripped sweat. "You're a dragon."
Something came rushing from the vegetation, something smaller, with tearing teeth and long jaws. Its teeth sliced into the dinosaur's leg, ripped. The dinosaur let out a moan like a slow foghorn and took a plodding step forward. Its massive tail lashed around, but by then there were a dozen more predators upon it, shredding, slicing, biting. Blood slipped into the stagnant Precambrian water.
8.
"Do you remember how we caught a fairy last year?" Rosie said.
Tam wiped his sleeve across his forehead. The heat was near unbearable, the humidity total. When he tugged at the splintering rock, his fingers slipped.
"No, we didn't," Tam said. "There's no such thing as fairies."
"We did," Rosie insisted. "You're just saying that so Josh and Lisa won't laugh at you. It was floating through the woods near the stream. You caught it by the back of its neck so it couldn't bite you, and you made it give you a wish. You wished you could be all grown up like Josh and Lisa. That was silly. Why would anyone want to be grown up and boring?"
Now Tam remembered. It had twisted and turned and darted, even though there had been no breeze. He had chased it and leapt and laughed and then trapped it between his fingers. He had breathed upon it, kissed it, wished...
"It was just thistledown. It's a seed. I learned that in school. We pretended it was a fairy. It was a kids' game."
9.
He cracked away the layers of slate with a knife he had snuck from the kitchen. The large bone ended, but there were other fossils in the same bed of slate. There was something that could have been a claw, and some thinner bones that stretched back further again, into the slope.
"That's its wing," Rosie said confidently from where she lounged higher on the slope.
"Go and swim," Tam said.
Rosie made a face. "Dad made Mom go to the beach with him today, and she's being all grumpy. It's no fun. Anyway, I want to see the dragon."
10.
He had never noticed how they looked at each other before, but he noticed at dinner that night. His mom kept sneaking glances at Josh and Lisa's dad. Tam's dad was growing steadily more pale. His knife and fork clattered and clashed on the willow-pattern china.
Rosie didn't notice any of it. She just kept chattering on about her dragon.
Tam's dad slammed down his cutlery. "For Heaven's sake, Rosie, shut up."
"Don't take it out on her," Tam's mom flared up.
Rosie burst into tears.
"Rosie!" both parents snapped.
11.
Tam tucked Rosie into bed.
"Why are Mommy and Daddy being so mean?" she said.
"They're having a few problems," Tam said. He brushed a hand over her light hair. "Nothing to worry a sprat like you. It'll all be all right." It had to be. Tam curled himself up beside Rosie on the bed and closed his eyes.
"If I was a dragon," Rosie said, "I wouldn't let anyone be mean to anyone, and if they were I'd gobble them up."
12.
A warm breath woke Tam. At first he thought it was just the stifling night air, but then it seemed more than that. It felt like heat from rock in the midday sun. The lake would have cooled quicker than the surrounding earth. The breeze should have been cool.
Strange light strobed the cabin, cold sounds shivered into his bones.
He pulled up his sheet. He didn't want to know, wanted to know.
The angry heat was like a fever.
That was all it was. A fever. No more.
13.
"I saw your mom with my dad last night," Lisa said. "Outside."
They were standing in the shallows of the lake, up to their waists in the warm, still water. The hard sun beat upon Tam's bare back.
"Do you want to know what they were doing?" Lisa said.
"What?" Tam said, not wanting to know.
Lisa's tight arms wrapped around him. "This." She kissed him.
14.
He worked like fire in dry grass, fast, angry, violent. Chips of slate flew from the screwdriver he had taken from the cabin. Din-o-saur, dra-gon, din-o-saur, dra-gon. His blows hammered down to the beat of the syllables.
The slate was hard but brittle, cracking along its faults, coming away with every blow.
A larger bone was emerging. His screwdriver should have shattered and scarred it, turned the fossil into unrecognisable fragments. But fate and need and fury guided his hand. Inch by inch, the giant fossil emerged. Inch by too-slow inch.
15.
A small hand tugged Tam awake. Night was thick upon the cabin. The shy moon flirted behind slipping clouds.
"I want to show you something," Rosie whispered.
"Go back to bed," Tam muttered, turning over.
Rosie persisted. "You need to see it. You need to believe." Then, "I can stay here all night."
Tam sighed. He swung himself out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.
Rosie was still dressed in her nightshirt. A dry leaf was caught on it. Her bare feet were dirty.
"Where are we going?"
Rosie held up a finger to her lips. "Shh. Outside." She turned and padded from the room. Tam followed her.
She was quick in the night, like a will-o-the-wisp, as she threaded her way up the slope behind the cabin.
Eventually, they reached the ridge. Rosie motioned him down. He dropped into a crouch.
"There." Rosie pointed.
Through the dark trees, sharp lights slipped and rose.
"And there." She directed his gaze up.
Black shapes moved across the face of the moon, like the flap of giant wings.
"The fairies are hunting the dragons again," Rosie whispered. "They want to steal the gold in their eyes and the gems in their scales."
Still the lights flowed, hurrying through the trees, rising towards the sky, red and white slivers in the night. Tam heard a breath like wind in the trees. The treetops shook and bent. For a second, the moon was obscured. Sharp teeth and scales glittered in the sky. Tam dared not breathe. His heart thundered like the hooves of fairy steeds, like--
Raised, angry, adult voices came from the cabin behind them, then footsteps on floorboards. The cabin door slammed. Car doors opened, thumped shut. The engine, starting loud, headlights springing on, the engine fading into the distance.
Tam stood there, staring down at the cabin, his eyes wide and spilling tears. "Mom?" he said.
Rosie tugged at his T-shirt. "You have to see. You have to believe."
Tam turned. He took Rosie's hand. "I'm not a child anymore, Rosie," he said. "I'm sorry." He squeezed her pudgy hand. "Look."
The lights through the trees were car lights on a nearby road, climbing up the valley side. The wings in front of the moon were simply gathering clouds. "I'm sorry," Tam said again.
16.
The weather broke that night. The heat shattered before the pounding rain.
In Tam's dream, the dragon fell, like a dark sheet from the sky, tumbling, twisting, bunching. And then it was gone.
17.
In the sad, unbending humidity of the day, Tam walked from the cabin, where his father and Josh and Lisa's mother sat, unspeaking and hollow. He followed the trail that led up through the trees, around the lake. He pushed through the hawthorn thicket and came out onto the cracked slate slope. Beyond, the lake lay flat and glassy.
He started down the slope.
The bed of slate that had held his fossil had broken off in the night and fallen into the deep lake. The fossil of the dinosaur was gone.
-End-
Copyright Patrick Samphire
