Eggers squatted beside me, crossing his legs. His face was exuberant, glowing with firelight. “I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said.
“If you ever held any esteem for my opinion,” I said, “you will quit this farce of science.”
“This is serious,” he said. “Wait till you hear this.”
I asked him, “You didn’t go see your parents, did you? You didn’t listen to me.”
Eggers endured my entreaty, smiling. “Ready?” he asked.
He gestured a large headline in the air above us. “Pleistocene World,” he said.
Trudy said, “You’re going to love this one, Dr. Hannah. Talk about half baked.”
I reclined across the fur, tuning the boy out. Part of me was still on that galactic ice sheet, and I let my eyes go heavy with it. With focus, I might return.
“Get this,” Eggers said. “We reintroduce tigers, elephants, sloths, and so on, maybe in some kind of park, or maybe just wild. Tourists go crazy for this stuff — lions chasing camels, here in South Dakota. Can you believe it? We’d get a tram, maybe.”
“How about a gondola?” Trudy said.
“There’d be giant bears everywhere, and maybe, in ten thousand years, things will have taken their course, things will be back the way they were before.”
“Before what?” I asked, pulling an animal skin over me.
“You know, before,” he said. “What do you think, Dr. Hannah?”
“Sounds like you’re talking about a zoo.”
“A zoo is where you store animals that are going extinct. Sticking an animal in a zoo means you’ve given up on it. My idea is the opposite of depletion. I’m talking about repletion.” His face shifted gears. “No, no, wait. How about Pleistocene Times? That has a ring, no?”
Eggers went on and on, describing Pleistocene Whatever in great detail, with Trudy plugging in her two cents, both of them slumber-party punchy. I pulled the skin close around my face — it smelled of both the human and animal worlds. From this window of fur, the casino was reduced to a hypnotic plane of light, high-strung and out of focus. In the Cretaceous period, a meteor traveling twenty-one kilometers per second eradicated 93 percent of life on earth. Mammals at that time were nocturnal, burrowing rodents, so when the sky turned blue-white with fire they were safely underground, happy to snooze through the resulting nuclear winter.
When I was at the edge of sleep, cocooned in dark fur, my eyes opened and closed, focusing on a bleary mobile of flame, stars, and casino lights. How alluring the night sky must have been to our tunneling ancestors, to whom the only glimmer on earth was a snatch of starscape, glimpsed on a nightly foray. Their fossilized nests exist today still packed with ancient shiny things — teeth, micalike flakes of petrified scales, and hardened, amberized corneas, all scavenged from billions of newly dead dinosaurs — proof we have always been attracted to flashy things, that we were born to dig graves and line them with souvenirs of the dead.
Chapter Four
In the dream, I am walking through valleys replete with white, save for a few lichen-covered boulders and an occasional island of frozen grass whose brown tufts poke from the snow. Iced-over saplings lean one way, then another, in the meter of the wind, and I watch as a shaggy ground sloth, big as a backhoe, lumbers up to an extinct Uinta tree. Using its stumpy tail, it rears up to strip the top branches, and when its black claws get behind the bark and tear, it sounds like husking corn.
I traverse ice hummocks and pressure ridges. Though I am in an unknown land, I move under the illusion that below the fresh powder are unseen sets of old footprints, showing me the way. The sun is strong, though diffused through clouds, and I don’t feel the cold. Ahead, on a leveling plain, I spot a team of humans, a black huddle against the horizon. It takes forever to near them. Are they grouped around a kill? Lighting a fire?
Nearing, I see they’ve cut a hole in the ice, and they are cradling, like a baby, a fish whose yellow scales are graying with each moment it is out of the water. Recumbent on their mittens, the fish knits its brow and speaks — it sweeps a fin past their fur-shrouded faces and tells a story in a tongue I do not know. What I feel in the dream is an amazing sense of continuity. I suddenly know that the story Farley’s mother told him is true, that it was faithfully handed down through six hundred generations, and I feel connected, almost electrically, to twelve thousand years of oral history, to every elder who repeated it on a winter night.
The fish, as if tired, pauses to fan its gills for air.
Then it points its fin at me. “Now you,” it says.
I jolted awake. Opening my eyes, I found myself in the warm belly of a mastodon. Great ribs met above me in a line, and a yellowed membrane stretched between them, which must have been its stomach lining. I sat up, shaking off an animal skin. A crack of light met my eyes, and I pulled a flap and stepped outside. Only in the blinding light did it come clear that those ribs were really tusks, that Eggers had erected his lodge around me during the night.
The day was both occluded and bright, a sign of snow to come, and not a stone’s throw from the lodge were the mounds of discolored snow that marked Eggers’ latrine. Along the ditch where Keno rested, I noticed a grid system had been erected: at intervals, sticks protruded from the sooty mud; these were laced together with strips of knotted leather. Amid this tangle, Eggers and Trudy lay on their sides, meticulously excavating something from the mud.
“Water,” was all I could say.
“I bought coffee up at the casino,” Trudy said. “But yours is probably cold by now.”
My eyes hurt. My mouth tasted like oily hair, and I was itchy all over. I had to have fluids and aspirin, and the need to urinate was approaching desperate.
But as I stood, I glanced over at Keno, and for a moment I forgot the madness of Eggers’ project, Trudy’s foolishness in joining it, and I could only think that I was in proximity to the oldest skull in North America. I took a couple quick steps through the wet remnants of last night’s fires, then leapt across the stream, where I dropped in the mud beside Eggers and Trudy, the three of us face to face.
“Morning, Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said.
When Eggers spoke, the poo of his breath nearly finished me — his puffy gums and furry teeth fumigated me with a writhing, larval cloud of vinegary yeast. Hadn’t he just brushed his teeth?
It instantly ignited my hangover.
Still wincing, I turned to Trudy. “What have you found?”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “Wait till he farts.”
She whispered, “I think he’s been eating trash.”
This I pretended not to hear. “Find any hematite?” I asked. Hematite is the source of red ochre, which is commonly found sprinkled over gravesites.
“Not yet,” Trudy said. “There’s no sign of whether Keno was buried or if she died alone.”
For some reason, I winced at the pronoun.
With what looked like a sharpened antler, Trudy pointed to a section of exposed earth. There, embedded in a plane of thawing mud, was a saucer of bone that, even half sunk, glowed with the vellum of prehistory. I couldn’t look directly at it. I’d hoped all my life to find the remains of a Clovis, the most elusive Paleo-Indian on earth, and now, when I was so near, I froze up. My mind got distracted, and all I could think about was the slipshod nature of the excavation. I suddenly hated Trudy’s antler. Anger welled over Eggers’ stupid dissertation stunt and all his ridiculous theme-park plans. I should have recognized fear when I felt it, known that I was somehow afraid of Keno, but all I could muster was disdain for my students.