The Day Before · Sprout · ages 6-8
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Read by an AI-generated voice. The words on this page are the transcript.
The Notched Bone
The hammer rang once. A spark jumped off the anvil and did not go out. It waited. They followed.
Warm wind blew the Green away, and the ground under their feet was somewhere else, the day before.
A big lake. Reeds. A girl had set fish traps all along the shore.
"Every trap must come in tonight," she said. "Tomorrow we move."
"I noticed it! That's a..." said Inkling. Bzzz.
You can't bring the answer. You can only bring the question.
The girl counted on her fingers. Too many traps! She lost count.
Her grandmother gave her pebbles. One pebble for each trap.
Then she slipped. Splash! The pebbles were gone.
"What was each pebble?" said Inkling. "One trap. One thing for each one works. It just has to stay."
"Could the marks be cut in?" said Lan. "So they can't fall out?"
Grandmother gave her an old bone and a sharp stone. One notch for each trap. Twelve!
"Cut them in groups," said Lan. "Three for the reeds. Four for the rock. Five for the fig tree."
Each trap that came in got a line across its notch.
At dusk one fig-tree notch had no line. They waded back. There was the last trap, full of fish!
Warm wind blew the day before away, and the grass under their feet was the Green.
Under DOOR was a new letter. O.
The spark dimmed to a warm dot and settled back on the anvil. The Green was just the Green again.
Back on the Green
Lan drew a mark on the fridge list for every sock she found. Seven!
Tell the story back to someone. Why did the notches work when the pebbles did not?
Who you met
-
Inkling a child of the Green Names what she notices -
Lan a child of the Green Goes first; makes a friend in a minute
Every recurring character has a short tune, so you can tell who is on stage before a word is said. The tunes play only when you tap, and the Reading Access sound switch turns them off.
The Honest Page
Which parts are true, stretched or made up — and what does nobody know?
True
- The Ishango bone was found at an old fishing settlement where Lake Edward runs into the Semliki River, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is about twenty thousand years old, and it has groups of notches cut along it in three rows. Source
- An even older notched bone, the Lebombo bone, comes from a cave in the Lebombo Mountains between South Africa and Eswatini. It is about forty-two thousand years old. Source
- A tally keeps a count by making one mark for each thing, and the marks are often put in groups so they are easier to read. Source
Stretched
- In the story the girl's fish traps are woven baskets, and the notched bone is made in one afternoon to count them. What we simplified: The people at Ishango fished and gathered food, but nobody knows whether they used basket traps. Twenty thousand years is a long time, and how dates this old are worked out is still argued about.
Made up
- Lan and Inkling, the spark, the buzzing word, the girl, her grandmother and the twelve traps are made up.
Nobody knows
- Nobody knows what the notches on the Ishango bone were for. Some people think they were a count, some think a calendar of the moon, and some think they were cut to make the bone easier to hold. Source