He reached out; a few more feet to the rip in the rock wall, and then he had its edge. He rested, waiting for his heart rate to come down as he felt the jagged stone under his palm. The cliff side was primarily diorite batholith – hard, damned hard. As a geologist, he knew that any rock, no matter how dense, under the right pressures became as elastic as rubber or could fracture like glass. One huge tectonic shift could rip open a section of the earth, and then the next shift could close it off, land-locking all manner of life forms in either a safe-harbor, or their grave. And that was exactly what he hoped for.

Granger was buoyant, and also confident that today he would find something really memorable. Not far away from where he stood, there were rich Miocene shale layers, where abundant fossils had been found. At one time, this area was underwater, as another amateur, just like himself, had uncovered fossilized clam beds and evidence of early cetaceans that placed the site as being an ancient sea floor around the Miocene period. Jim had a theory – as the water-covered landscape began to shrink when more and more ice formed during another glacial epoch, the last giants of the waterways needed to retreat to warmer currents, or risk being stranded. And if they had become stranded, then their bones awaited him, somewhere beneath his feet.

Granger thought of the elder’s story of catching some huge living creature. He didn’t think the Nantouk elder had purposely misled him, but that maybe time and imagination had meant things weren’t exactly as the man remembered them. At the least, Granger expected to find some sort of prehistoric bone yard, protected from the elements with high quality specimens prized by museums, universities and private collectors from Boston to Berlin.

He ducked inside – there was blackness, and depth. Excellent, just what he hoped for. He knelt to check his equipment in his pack: rope, water, brandy flask, miner’s chalk, a carbide miner’s lamp, a new type of incandescent flashlight, candles as back up and most importantly, waxed matches. There was also a single picture of Violet – Vie – his wife. Jim stared at the pretty young woman, the pretty young patient woman, who waited at home with their baby daughter. Vie was his strength, and his biggest fan. She’d sit for hours, listening to him as he told her of his latest finding or exploration. There was real interest in her eyes. Sometimes he wondered whether he was here because of his own hobby-interest, or simply to bring back fantastic stories to amuse that beautiful woman.