Through the Hidden Door Read Online Free PDF

in tidal waves and volcanoes had flagged to the point of no work at all. Instead I began going through the fat volumes of Snowy’s Latin encyclopedia of natural history. Nowhere in any part of any skeleton did I find a bone even close to Snowy’s.
    I next saw Snowy just before an English class. I asked him where he’d been. “Mr. Finney took the bone,” he said, “and sent it off to a friend of his at the University of Massachusetts. They have something called a carbon dating department there.”
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    He scrunched his nose under the bridge of his glasses. “It’s a way of finding out how old something that was once alive is. U. Mass. sent it back. They did the test as a special favor for Mr. Finney. According to the guy at U. Mass. they get a thousand and one bones sent in from all over the world every month. People find things in their backyards that they think are prehistoric saber-toothed-tiger skulls and they turn out to be groundhog’s jaws.”
    “Well, go on,” I said impatiently, but I was beginning to learn that Snowy could not be rushed.
    “It’s old, all right,” said Snowy. “Maybe even a hundred thousand years. They don’t really know. Their test goes back only fifty thousand years. The test could have been wrecked by the dog’s blood and saliva that soaked into the bone.”
    “A hundred thousand years! Wow! What kind of bone is it?”
    “Well, that’s the thing of it. The guy said it looked like a primate. Since there were no monkeys or anything ever found here in Massachusetts, it must have come from somewhere else. Been dropped, like Mr. Finney said.”
    “But an organ-grinder’s monkey doesn’t have hundred-thousand-year-old leg bones,” I argued.
    “Doesn’t matter,” said Snowy. “Somewhere out in California they found eighty-thousand-year-old bone knives and arrowheads. The bones are Stone Age all right, but they were only carved up by Indians many, many centuries later. The Indians just found some ancient bones lying around and whittled them. The guy at U. Mass. looked at the marks on my bone and said it had pretty likely been carved. Maybe a hundred years ago by Massachusetts Indians here, copying a human skeleton. Mr. Finney says probably some early Indian tribe used to carve human skeletons as part of a religious burial ceremony. Or maybe a sailor traded for it in China in 1850. Massachusetts had a lot of ships coming in from all over the world. Or maybe South Yemenis carved it after a monkey skeleton and a traveler brought it to Greenfield five years ago. Maybe someone else did.
    “Anyway, all the stuff they’ve dug up in Africa looking for the missing link and all that junk? Well, it was discovered pretty recently, but it was there in the earth forever. This could have been buried in Australia or Lapland or Japan, then carved to look like a leg bone and brought here.”
    “So we’ll never know,” I said sadly.
    Snowy didn’t answer this. He held the bone up between his thumb and index finger. “It could have been carved,” he said. “But then, it got some rough sawing inside the collie’s mouth, and that could have made the scratches.”
    “U. Mass. doesn’t sound very interested,” I grumbled.
    Snowy dropped the bone in his shirt pocket. “Since they figured it was brought here from somewhere else and the dog could have picked it up anywhere, they said there was no sense in going around looking for the whole skeleton. Mr. Finney talked to them on the phone. They don’t have the money to study every single bone. I’m late for class,” he added, and dashed away down the hall.
    For the next week and a half, until it was nearly Thanksgiving, Snowy disappeared again, but wherever he was, I guessed it had something to do with the bone. The funny little bone had me by the short hairs too, and I knew if I were to have any time at all to spend on it, I had better finish up my disaster paper. I did. I made it one hundred and nineteen pages.