Free The Dragon in the Cliff by Sheila Cole Page A

it. They’re the ones who want the verteberries. Squire Henley made me promise that if I ever found it I would save it for him. He will pay me handsomely for it.”
    Mama furrowed her brow. “Are you certain that this is the creature he was talking about?”
    â€œNo, but he said the crocodile, or whatever creature it was that the verteberries belong to. I think this must be it.”
    She shook her head. “Well, if you say Henley told you he wanted it, I guess he does, though whatever for, I will never understand.”
    She stood in front of the cliff staring at the fossil for some time. Then she sighed, turned away, and started back for town. I caught up with her. “Well, what do you think?” I asked eagerly.
    â€œYou may as well not have found it for all the good it will do us. We’ll never get it out of the cliff. It is too big for us, Mary. We would have to hire some workmen to help us break it out, and we do not have the money to hire them.”
    â€œI can do it, Mama. I know I can.”
    She shook her head. “I do not mean to be discouraging, child, but it would be a waste of your time even trying. Besides, we do not have the tools for such a job.”
    â€œBut Mama,” I pleaded, “it will fetch a lot of money. We cannot just let it remain in the cliff.”
    Mama nodded wearily at my arguments, but did not reply.
    I was not to be discouraged. I believed with all my being that if I tried hard enough and did not give up, I would have that fossil. Looking back now, I can see that it was unreasonable for a twelve-year-old girl with only a hammer and one not very heavy chisel to expect to cut a fossil almost as big as she was out of the cliff. But then I am not only Papa’s child, I am also Mama’s. When one cannot accept what is reasonable, one must have faith and hope to fly in face of what reason denies.
    However, I do admit that faith and hope are only a beginning. Despite hours and hours of work chipping away at the rock, I made little progress until spring when Mr. Hale was ill and Joseph had the free time to help me. It was he who thought of borrowing a pick, crowbars, proper square-headed hammers, a mallet, heavier chisels, and wedges from the stonemason.
    At first Mr. Littlejohn was reluctant to let us use his tools for such a “foolish project.” Finally he relented, saying that it was only because we were Richard Anning’s children that he was letting us use them. But he still could not understand what we wanted with a stone monster. He became more enthusiastic when he came down to the beach to see for himself. Standing before it, he shook his head and laughed, saying that he was glad it was stone and not wandering around Lyme today.
    Once we had the proper tools, extracting the fossil began in earnest. The rhythmic clink of our hammers hitting our chisels filled the air as we chipped away at the cliff. The creature was embedded in limestone surrounded by shale beds that splintered under our blows and fell to the ground at our feet where it lay in mounds. But still the fossil remained in place. The more rock we broke, the more there seemed to be to break. My back ached and my arms hurt from pounding at the rock so much that I cried with fatigue, but still I continued and so did Joseph. Then, at last, after hours and days of slow difficult work, we had a deep enough channel around the skull so that we could start to break it out using metal wedges.
    When we had gotten this far Joseph’s friends, Robert Whitesides and John Whittle, came to help. They had never collected curiosities and knew nothing about getting them out of the cliff. “Don’t get too close to the curiosity,” I cautioned them, remembering Papa’s advice to me. “Angle your tools well away from it. Be certain to get all of it.”
    All of it, as it turned out after we had pried the fossil out of the rock with crowbars, was only the head of the