The Fossil Hunter of Sydney Mines
The
Fossil
Hunter
of
Sydney
Mines
Jo Ann Yhard
Copyright © Jo Ann Yhard 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.
Nimbus Publishing Limited
PO Box 9166
Halifax, NS B3K 5M8
(902) 455-4286
www.nimbus.ca
Printed and bound in Canada
Design: Jennifer Embree
Front cover illustration: Gerry Cleary
Author photo: Rhonda Basden
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Yhard, Jo Ann
The fossil hunter of Sydney Mines / Jo Ann Yhard.
ISBN 978-1-55109-760-2
EPUB ISBN 978-1-55109-851-7
I. Title. Â Â Â Â Â PS8647.H37F67 2010 Â Â Â Â Â jC813'.6 Â Â Â Â Â C2009-907321-8
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.
For James, my best friend and sounding board. For Mom,
who gave me the nudge and helped me find my path. And
for Mary, my buddy and fellow explorer.
Table of Contents
GRACE DOUBLE-CHECKED HER GEAR: FLASHLIGHT, MATCHES,
pocket knife, caving rope, rock hammer, and glovesâall there. She grabbed her trusty Dalhousie University baseball cap. Her thoughts flipped back to the day her dad had given it to her. She squeezed her eyes tight and tried to stop the memory from coming. The strategy usually worked, but not this time. It had been three months ago, on her birthdayâthe worst day of her life.
That morning he'd made her favourite breakfast, blueberry pancakes.
“Here's part one of your present,” he'd said after she'd blown out the candles on her pancakes and they'd eaten so much they could hardly move. He'd pulled out a baseball cap that was embroidered with the letters
DAL
, short for Dalhousie. It was identical to the one he'd worn every day. He had earned his doctorate in geology at Dalhousie and she was going to do the same.
“I love it,” she'd said.
Then he'd left for work with his trusty fossil bag over his shoulder, just like every other day. It had seemed so normal, but it was the last time she'd ever seen him.
She had anxiously waited for him to come home that night. There had been a knock on the door and she'd run to open it. Her smile had quickly faded as she stared in shock at two police officers.
Her mother had sent her upstairs.
Shore Road. Car crash. Ocean. No body
. The words had drifted up to her as she huddled in her room.
Now, as she packed her fossil-hunting gear in her bag, she felt the sting of tears, just as she had that fateful evening. Shaking her head, Grace tried again to rattle the memory to the back of her brainâinto that dark corner where she locked away all those memories. This time it obediently returned to its hiding place and she sighed with relief.
KCHHHHH!
Grace's walkie-talkie squawked loudly. It must be Fred, finally. She'd told him to radio her as soon as he got home.
“Fred, come in,” Grace said into the walkie-talkie. Within seconds, there was an answering crackle.
“Roger, Grace. Fred here.”
“Radio Jeeter and Mai. Tell them to meet us at Black Hole in thirty minutes.” Grace paused, trying to calm her stuttering heartbeat. “It's an emergency!”
“What's going on?”
“I'll fill you in later. Get moving, okay?”
“Sure thing, Grace. Over.”
Grace flung her battered backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her hat, and raced out the door. “Darn,” she muttered, making a U-turn back into the house. She ran to the kitchen counter and scribbled a note for her mother:
Gone to Jessica's to study. Math test. Back by nine. Yes, I ate already. Love, G
.
This should cover my tracks for a few hours
, Grace thought. A shiver of guilt rippled through her as she re-read the note. Well, it wasn't a total lie. She
had
eaten already. She slapped the note on the fridge and headed out the side door. Of course Mr. Stuckless was watching from his window.
“Hi, Mr. Stuckless!” Grace waved and gritted a smile at their next-door neighbour as she passed by his window.
Nosy old goat
, she thought, backing her bike out of the garage.
He must be stuck to that window. He probably
has a portable toilet under him so he never has to
move!
She hopped on her bike and coasted slowly down her driveway.
She picked up speed and was soon flying down Queen Street. Without a thought, she took her hands off the handlebars to put on her hat and reached up to tug her long blonde ponytail through the back of it. Hands dangling at her sides, she thought about what had happened that day. Her head was spinning. Who could have done it?
Playing the day back in her mind, she tried to remember the last time she'd been at her locker. Had there been anyone hanging around? She couldn't say for sure, but she didn't think so.
Grace was so lost in thought as she zipped down Pitt Street that she nearly missed the turnoff. Checking behind her to make sure no one was watching, she veered past a pair of rusted gates with a faded danger sign and onto a forgotten path that ran through an overgrown field called the heaps. Gangly alders and tall elephant ear plants immediately hid the streets from view.
She cycled slowly and scanned the ground with her eyes, always on the lookout for sinkholes. They could appear anywhere, even here in the fields where the old coal wash plant used to be.
Perched above a spiderweb of coal seams at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Cape Breton, the town of Sydney Mines had a labyrinth of coal mining tunnelsâboth commercial and illegal bootleg tunnelsârunning beneath its surface. The commercial mines were hundreds of metres deep and stretched for kilometres out under the ocean, but they had been shut down for many years. They had been flooded with sea water long ago. The bootleg tunnels were usually shallower, and often ran directly from miners' backyards into the coal seams. As the years went by, the miners had kept digging under their homes, making longer and wider tunnels to extract more coal. For many of the poverty-stricken residents of Sydney Mines, illegal mining had been the only way they could heat their homes and survive. The tunnels were long since abandoned, their coal extracted. Some of them had collapsed.
Coal also meant fossils and there were plenty of those in Sydney Mines too, if you knew where to look. Grace had been a fossil hunter practically since she could walk. Back then her dad used to call it hunting for dinosaur bones. He would take her to Lachman's Beach, where it was flat and sandy. She'd found her first fern fossil there. Her dad had chipped it out of a large piece of broken slate with his rock hammer. Grace had proudly donated it to the fossil museum when it first opened.
Several years ago, Grace had taken Mai and Fred to the museum to show them all the fossils she'd donated. As soon as Fred had seen her name on the “Donated by” plaque, he'd decided he wanted to have his name on a plaque too. They'd been fossil-hunting together ever since.
Grace, Mai, and Fred had found this perfect clubhouse last year. They'd been cutting across the heaps one day, when Fred had almost fallen in a sinkhole. The hole had been created by the earth collapsing over an abandoned bootleg mine. When they'd climbed down to investigate, they'd been amazed to discover tunnels at the bottom they could walk through.
Before they found Black Hole, Grace and her friends' fossil hunts had been above ground at places like Lachman's Beach, Florence Beach, Sutherland's Corner, and the old strip mine at Halfway Road. Exploring the bootleg mining tunnels that were connected to Black Hole was way more exciting than hunting for fossils along the beaches. Many of the bootleg mines stretched all the way under the town. But rooting around in illegal caves was much more dangerous than fossil-hunting on the beaches. Grace knew it; they all did.