Victor Bassington, blissfully unaware that he had been the topic of discussion, waddled up to Jake and Elizabeth for no apparent reason other than the possibility of hijacking a conversation. His round face had the look of damp cheese, and his squinting in the sunlight made him look even more piggy than usual. “Jake, is it your turn to cook tonight? I wanted to remind you that I’m allergic to onions.”
“I’m not likely to forget,” sighed Jake.
“I may also be coming down with sun poisoning,” Victor announced with mournful satisfaction. “Since Dr. Lerche has pitched a tent up here to store the finds in, and since he isn’t around to use it himself, maybe he’d let me work in it.”
“I wouldn’t ask if I were you,” Jake advised him. “Mary Clare’s the site manager, and you know how she feels about delicate fieldworkers.”
“She really is most unsympathetic. In England, when I worked with Heinrich Schliemann-”
“Ah-ha!” yelled Jake, pointing his finger disconcertingly close to Victor’s nose. “Heinrich Schliemann died in 1890. I’ve got you!”
Victor blinked innocently at the finger. “Of course he did, Jake. I was going to say Heinrich Schliemann III, who is with the Royal Archaeological Society. Very nice fellow. But you may be right about Miss Gitlin. I suppose I’ll have to brave it out until I drop.” Mopping his forehead with a rumpled white handkerchief, he ambled off in the direction of the water jug.
Jake was grinding his teeth. “Now, I know there is no Heinrich Schliemann III in the Royal Archaeological Society, but in order to prove it, I’d have to find a Dictionary of National Biography or a membership list, and by the time I’m in a position to do that, I’ll have forgotten the whole argument, or else he’ll swear he didn’t say it.”
“I thought it didn’t bother you any more,” said Elizabeth in a carefully neutral tone.
“I was plainly mistaken,” snapped Jake. “Someday, somehow, Victor Bassington is going to play Mr. Know-It-All to the wrong person, and he’s going to get nailed to the wall with the facts. I just hope I’m there to lead the cheers.”
“Good luck,” smiled Elizabeth. “By the way, I may be late for supper tonight. I’m going to see Amelanchier after work. What are you cooking anyway?”
“I don’t know, but there’ll be onions in it; I promise you that.” Jake picked up his trowel and headed back to the trenches.
Despite the painstaking precautions taken to filter the soil and check for unexpected finds, the work at the gravesite had gone unusually well. The four daytime volunteers were diligent workers who made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in experience. By the beginning of the third day, the site tent contained several boxes to be analyzed by Dr. Lerche, and Elizabeth had been able to practice her measuring techniques on eight new skulls. She was not convinced that her results were accurate, but her skill in using the instruments increased as she became accustomed to working with the grisly objects.
Elizabeth examined the latest acquisition-missing quite a few teeth for one as young as the cranial lines indicated-and decided that it was too late in the day to begin another measurement. This one could wait until morning. Perhaps by then Dr. Lerche would have finished his computer work and could double-check her original findings. If she hurried, she would have time to find Amelanchier and get acquainted before supper, leaving the rest of the evening free to spend with Milo.
Elizabeth stowed the crate in a corner of the site tent. “I just put my folks to bed,” she told Mary Clare. “Do you need me for anything else?”
Mary Clare shook her head. “I’m about ready to pack it in myself. Maybe the guys will be back from town by now.”
“Well, if they are, tell Milo I’ll see him later. I’m going to find the Wise Woman of the Woods.”
“More power to you,” laughed Mary Clare. “I’ve got all the wise guys I can stand right here.”
Although she had acquired a certain regional reputation, Amelanchier Stecoah was by no means easy to find. Outlanders seeking her advice had to park their cars at the church and follow a footpath through the woods, which, after a twenty-minute walk, mostly uphill, stopped in a clearing sheltered by a wooded ridge. At the end of the path, a crudely hand-lettered sign, the twin of the one on the highway, proclaimed: WISE WOMAN OF THE WOODS LIVES HERE. Smaller printing below advised: “If Door Locked, Ring Yard Bell or Rad a Note.” A large brass bell was mounted on a post in front of an unpainted wooden shack. Elizabeth decided to try the porch door before ringing the bell.
“Hello?” she called out. “Anybody home?”
“Just got back!” answered a cheerful voice from within. “Come on in.”
Elizabeth edged her way past an old wooden icebox and a cardboard box full of letters. The room was small and crowded, but the sprightly old lady in jeans and a denim workshirt was no martyr to poverty. Her eyes sparkled behind gold-rimmed glasses, and she jumped up to greet Elizabeth.
“And who might you be?” she asked in a tone suggesting that she’d be pleased to meet you whatever the answer.
Elizabeth introduced herself and explained that she was with the dig arranged by Amelanchier’s son.
The old lady nodded at the mention of Comfrey’s name. “He’s the ambitious one of the bunch. Allus was.”
“He said that it would be all right for me to visit with you. I’m very interested in herbs.”
“I reckon you came to the right place then. Will you be wanting to go out gathering? I was just fixing to go get me some ginseng.”
Elizabeth’s eyes widened. Ginseng had been discussed in reverent tones in her folk medicine class. Hailed as a cure for everything from the common cold to cancer, it sold for $140 a pound for export from the Orient. “Do you think you’ll find any?”
Amelanchier snorted at such a tomfool question. “We got a woods full of poplar trees. That’s where it grows. ’Course we’ll find some. Pick up that basket and follow along.”
She led the way past a small shed beside her house, picking her way up the ridge through underbrush and around fallen logs. “Now you only want to pick the old plants,” she told Elizabeth, lecturing as she walked. “Them young ones won’t bring much nohow. Their roots are no bigger’n a peanut. And another thing: when you pick sang-ginseng, you folks call it-you always want to pick off that red berry that grows between the twigs, and you want to plant it. If you do that, why, there’ll be a plant growing there the next time you go a-hunting it.”
Elizabeth nodded, wishing she’d had the sense to bring a notepad with her. “How did you learn so much about wild plants?”
“Handed down in my family,” said the old woman. She stooped to examine a small three-branched plant near the base of a tree. “My grandfather did the root medicine when I was a girl, and he taught me. Indians allus been close to the land. You know how there come to be healing plants in the first place?”
Elizabeth shook her head. She knelt beside Amelanchier and watched her uproot the small plant and carefully rebury the strawberrylike fruit.
“You want to watch how you kneel down out here in the woods,” Amelanchier warned her. “Those copperheads blend right in with the underbrush. And you oughtn’t to jump up quick like that, neither. Slow, steady movements is the best. Got to look out for snakes this time of year; bears mostly minds their own business. Animals aren’t our friends, though, the way the plants are. That’s how the healing plants come about. Back in olden times, when people could still talk to other living things and be talked back to, there was peace among us. But by and by, man began to get above hisself, wanting bearskins to keep him warm, and deer meat for supper, fish for fertilizer. Man became a danger to his fellow creatures. So all the animal folk of the world had a meeting and decided that something would have to be done about it.”