I may have lost Joe, but that didn’t mean I was alone upon beach One day as I went along the shore to Black Ven I saw two strangers hunting by the cliffs They barely looked up, they were so excited to be swinging their hammers and grubbing about in the mud The next day there were five men, and two days after that, ten None was known to me From overhearing their talk I learned they were looking for their own crocodiles It seemed my crocodile had brought them to Lyme beaches, attracted by the promise of treasure Over the next few years Lyme grew crowded with hunters I had been used to a deserted beach and my own company, or that of Miss Elizabeth or Joe, and being with them had often felt like being by myself, they were so solitary in their hunting Now there was the tinking of hammer against stone all along the shore between Lyme and Charmouth, as well as on Monmouth Beach, and men were measuring, peering through magnifying glasses, taking notes, and making sketches It was comical For all the fuss made, not one found a complete croc A cry would go up from someone, and the others would hurry over to look, and it would be nothing, or just a tooth or a bit of jaw or a verteberry—if they were lucky I was passing a man searching amongst the stones one day when he picked up a bit of round, dark rock “A vertebra, I think,” he called to his companion I couldn’t help it—I had to correct his mistake, even though he hadn’t asked me “That’ll be beef, sir,” I said “Beef?” The man frowned “What is ‘beef’?” “It’s what we call shale that’s been calcified Bits of it often look like verteberries, but it’s got vertical lines in the layers, a bit like rope fibres, that you don’t see in verteberries And verteberries are darker in colour All the bits of the croc are See?” I dug out a verteberry from my basket that I’d found earlier and showed him “Look, sir, verteberries have six sides, like this, though they’re not always clear till you clean them And they’re concave, like someone’s pinched them in the middle.” The man and his companion handled the verteberry as if it were a precious coin—which, in a way, it was “Where did you find this?” one asked “Over there I got others too.” I showed them what I’d found and they were astonished When they showed me theirs, most of it was beef we had to throw out All day they come up with would-be curies for me to judge Soon others caught on, and I was called here and there to tell the men what they had or hadn’t found Then they would ask me where they should look, and before long I was leading them on fossil hunts along the beach That was how I come to be in the company of the geologists and other interested gentlemen, looking over their mistakes and finding curies for them A