“It was going to be a gift, but it looks like shit,” he said.
He took the thing and tossed it off in a desolate cornfield.
“Hey, I wish you wouldn’t pull stunts like that,” I said. “A tractor will plow that under the soil, and it’ll really screw with the mind of whoever finds it. Without any context, they won’t know that carving isn’t ten thousand years old.”
“It’s a whale,” Eggers said. “We’re in South Dakota.”
“All the more reason.”
At some point, without my noticing it, the crunch of wheels on shoulder gravel had shifted to the shush of tires on snow that had given a new coating to everything. Ahead, in the flurries, appeared one of the new billboards the Tribe had put up, welcoming us to the Reservation, Home of Fun!
Neither one of us said anything as we slowly passed it.
“Eggers,” I said, “it was none of my business, what I said about the condoms. It’s just that there’s no way you can live a hundred percent Clovis, and I was concerned.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dr. Hannah. I didn’t take it personal.”
“I saw you taking a bath this morning, so I know your technology pact suffered a little. But I understand your reasons for cleaning up. I’ve been struggling with it myself.”
I was thinking about the pig, about the poor girl who’d lost her hog.
Eggers looked at me funny. “You’ve been struggling with Parents Weekend?”
“Parents Weekend?”
“Yeah, you know, banquets, speeches, the big game,” Eggers said. “You know, my parents have no idea. I started this whole thing right after they came out last year, so they don’t have a clue how I’ve been living.”
We drove for a while in silence, the heater blasting on high. The glorious Thunderbird Casino began to materialize, in all its flashiness, on the horizon.
A quarter-mile from the casino’s central parking lot, Eggers said, “We’re here.”
I killed the motor and set the brake. Though the heavy snow had mostly subsided, enough had fallen to coat the van. When I opened the door, a wedge of snow dropped into my hair, packing my glasses and ears, slushing down my neck.
Eggers tightened the strips of leather that held his poncho closed.
“Ready?” he asked.
Above us stood a vast billboard advertising Phase II, which boasted an architectural sketch for a second casino that looked exactly like the first one — hazy, then clear — in the distance. We walked under the sign’s great legs, and at the fence Eggers stomped down one strand of barbed wire while bowing up another so I could duck through.
We set off across a field, fallow under snow that shone in the afternoon light with the bluish, old-wool hue of manganese. A few rabbit trails crossed the powder, suggesting they’d bolted as we arrived, and ahead, a small creek babbled through the snow. The cold air made your nose whistle, your breath plume glinty before you, and the light was enough to narrow your eyes.
I turned to Eggers. “Okay,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”
“Shh,” he said. “Listen.”
In the distance, a couple of charter buses dieseled in the casino’s main lot. An occasional car chugged its way down the half-frozen road. Other than that, the only sound was the sleepy-talk of the little brook. I was about to ask What’s the big deal? again when it struck me how odd it was to hear running water in this intense cold.
I began walking toward the water, Eggers following, giving me the lie of the land. “This is runoff from the casino,” he said, and, sure enough, you could see how the creek wound all the way back to the parking lots, where a pair of corrugated culvert pipes dumped their meltwater.
We neared the little channel running through the snow. The water was only an inch or two deep as it tumbled lazy and black-hued over a bed of silica sand that had washed down the culverts. Sand gives cars traction in the winter, and they mix it with rock salt to fight the ice.
“So it’s salt water,” I said.
“Which is why it doesn’t freeze,” Eggers added, “and why it excavated this in the middle of winter.”
A stick had been pushed into the sand, and where it rose from the water, a ribbon of corn silk had been tied. “Is that some kind of marker?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Eggers said. “That’s where the Clovis point was.”
“Did you touch anything else?”
Eggers shook his head no.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what you were doing out here.”
Eggers shrugged. “Just walking.”
I sunk my hands into my parka and scanned the surrounding terrain.
There was a slight slope to the land. This suggested an alluvial plain, and a small ridge in the distance could have been a glacier’s terminal moraine — both ripe settings for fossils. There were no boulders in the field, which comes from glacial plucking, a likely clue that any artifacts were deposited from someplace else. The creek strata revealed a foot of topsoil, and below that, a layer of diatom, followed by a striation of shale. Again, ideal settings — alkaline and unmolested.
Eggers didn’t speak. He silently studied the terrain with me, and if I’d taught him well, he’d hear everything the land had to say.
I knelt at the edge of the creek. There was something in the sediment. I went to all fours, and then I lay down. Plainly visible at the bottom, downstream from the stick, was the ivory loop of a shaft straightener, a common Clovis tool. Time had eaten away the pockets of cellulose, leaving only the stronger honeycomb of bone. And half sunk in the sediment was what looked like the sacral bone.
The oldest human remains in North America that had been dated in situ, with strata and artifacts, were those of Kennewick Man, from Washington State, at ninety-six hundred years. If these bones were associated with these artifacts, in this soil, it could be two thousand years older, making it the definitive site on our continent.
I looked a few feet downstream. Rocking in the current were several tiny metacarpals, all trapped from washing farther by the protruding fin of a human scapula. I slid down into the ditch, so I was close to these minnowlike finger bones, schooling in the shadows.
How old are you? I asked them.
They wiggled quietly in the stream.
Who are your kin? I whispered. Are you all alone?
Eggers finally spoke. “What do you think, Dr. Hannah?”
I looked up from the water.
“What will you name him?” I asked.
“You think it’s for real?”
“He’s got to have a name,” I said.
“Tell me it’s for real,” Eggers said.
“I think it’s for real.”
Eggers’ gaze drifted to the casino. He studied its endlessly scrolling marquee: “Welcome Parents — Blackjack — Keno — No Hold ’Em-Slots.”
“Keno,” he said.
“Keno,” I repeated.
I sat up, dusted the snow off my overalls. My boots had soaked through, but I didn’t feel it. My eyes scanned the scene — blank snow, an ivory tool, and the bones of the hand that had made it. Keno’s hand. I listened again. The stream seemed to talk a little, nothing I could make out, though I could almost see a set of footprints, faint in the snow, the trail of Keno’s last steps before he lay down and sank into the soil. I wanted to look into Keno’s eyes, note their wetness and intention, maybe hear the clip of his speech, but I could only see his tracks, barely, and that was half-dream.
“I think you’ve really found something here,” I told Eggers. “Something amazing. It’ll be a battle, but don’t worry, we’ll get permission to dig.”
Eggers was still looking off to the casino.
“Permission?” he asked, turning to me. “We don’t need permission.”