‘I expect I would have, but it’s so much nicer to have someone to enjoy it with.’
Not just someone:Giselle. He couldn’t think of anyone else he’d want to be here with. To be truthful, he was beginning to think he wouldn’t want to beanywherewith anyone other than her.
It was a sobering thought.
‘Real live dinosaur footprints?’ Rocco asked, incredulously.
‘Not live, no. I believe dinosaurs have been dead a wee while.’
‘I meant, in situ – not in a museum.’
‘On An Corran beach, actually. I’ve never heard of “situ”. Where’s that? Down south?’
Rocco pulled a face, and wondered whether to tell Giselle that in situ didn’t mean an actual place, when he caught the twinkle in her eye and realised she was winding him up.
‘Why don’t you stop making fun of me and tell me where we’re supposed to be going,’ he said.
‘I told you, An Corran beach.’
‘Who’s Anne Corran and where is her beach?’ he shot back.
Giselle rolled her eyes. ‘Just drive. I’ll let you know where to go when we get to the main road.’
‘Please tell me it won’t involve any more walking,’ he begged.
He’d more than achieved his step count for today. In fact, he’d happily find a nice pub to sit in for a couple of hours, but he’d asked her to show him Skye, and he could hardly complain that she was doing as he’d asked. He was also worried that if he did, she might suggest they return to Duncoorie, and he wasn’t ready to go back yet. Not unless he was able to spend the rest of the day with her, but he had no idea how he’d wangle that.
Great, yet more single-track lanes, Rocco grumbled to himself when Giselle instructed him to turn off the main road and head for a village called Staffin. At least they were at sea level now, so hopefully their destination wasn’t far.
‘There it is,’ she said, pointing to a small expanse of sandy beach flanked by rocks.
He parked the car and they picked their way down onto the beach. As they did so, he glanced back the way they’d come, to see cliffs rearing above them, and to the west he could make out the Quiraing.
Rocco was now standing on a shelf of flat rock, and he wondered where to start looking. The rock was criss-crossed with cracks and furrows, and speckled with green algae and seaweed.
Heads down, they spread out and began their quest.
‘What are we looking for, exactly?’ he called, after a few minutes of not seeing anything obvious. He wondered whether they’d be similar to the massive, cratered footprints depicted in theJurassic Parkfilms.
Giselle was a few feet away. She was crouching down, tracing the outline of something with a finger. ‘This,’ she said.
Rocco hurried to her side and peered down. He still didn’t see anything.
And then he did! It wasn’t as big as he’d anticipated, about forty centimetres long, and neither was it as distinct an outline as he’d expected. But now that she’d pointed it out, he could see a three-toed depression. Although, if it hadn’t been for Giselle, he would have walked straight past it. Now that he’d seen one, he spotted another, and another. Three in all, although he subsequently found out that there were eighteen in total.
‘This island is full of surprises,’ he said. ‘I knew it had lots of history, but I didn’t realise it went so far back.’
‘Want to see some more?’
‘Footprints?’
Giselle nodded. ‘And other things. Staffin Fossil Museum is just down the way.’
The museum was an old stone single-storey building, a mile or so along the main road leading towards Portree.
‘It’s quite a small museum,’ Giselle said, ‘run by a guy by the name of Dugald. He’s collected many of the exhibits himself, and some have been donated by local schoolchildren.’
She was right. It was small, but it had some interesting stuff. Rocco gravitated towards a display of footprints made by a creature called a Coelophysis, and a slab of rock containing fossilised shells. There was also a thigh bone as tall as a small child. The Neolithic arrowheads and pottery fragments were fascinating, and he spent a few minutes studying them before joining Giselle, who was at the far end of the room, examining something called a mangle.
