I reached out and plucked one of the flimsy leather straps that served as a gridline. The stake it was tied to flopped in the mud.
“What kind of sorry grid system is this?” I asked.
Before they could answer, I said, “It’s worthless. I can’t even tell what scale you’re using.” I yanked another strap of leather. “The squares are smaller than a meter yet bigger than a foot. The whole point of the grid is to map the site. Haven’t you two learned anything?”
Eggers looked stunned. “You know I can’t use the metric system,” he said.
“Hey,” Trudy said. “He made his own. You have to give him credit for that.”
I looked at Eggers. “You made your own what?”
From the muddy snow, Eggers produced a stick.
“This is one eno,” he said, handing me a fresh switch of mulberry whose edges had more or less been rough-planed square. There were eight hash marks on it.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“It’s an eno. You know, as in ‘Keno.’ That’s where I got the name.”
I could tell Trudy’s heart wasn’t completely into defending Eggers. Still, she said, “We’re using our own measurement system. An eno is the length of a Clovis femur.”
My jaw dropped. “You found a femur?”
“Not exactly,” Eggers said. “I measured mine.”
“An eno’s about sixty-three centimeters,” Trudy said.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re going to document a ground-breaking discovery by dividing your leg into nine sixty-thirds?”
“It’s not how you’re making it sound, Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said. “The beauty of the eno is that you can divide it any way you want — tenths, sixteenths, whatever. The eno leaves all the old systems behind.”
“Give him a break, Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said. “Don’t you see what we’ve found?”
“Yeah,” Eggers said. “Check this out.”
With a twig, he indicated the piece of bone. “We defined the edges but decided to stop, choosing to get more data from the surrounding strata. Over here we found some soil calcification, and closer to the water, more finger bones. Trudy thinks the torso is oriented this way.”
With his hand, Eggers made a sawing motion that ran parallel to the ditch.
Trudy raised her eyebrows. “Don’t you see,” she said. “This is the birth of a whole new field. This is paleo-paleoanthropology. We’re not dragging bones into the cold light of the modern age. We’re going back to Keno’s time. We’re entering the context. We are in situ with the bones.”
I shook my head in disapproval, but still I leaned close to examine the bone.
Lightly, with the pads of my fingers, I gave it its first human touch in twelve thousand years, and that shiver of fright ran through me again. Cold and mud-slick, it was like making contact with your greatest fear: that humans could live, love, and die without a trace, vanishing as if they had just slipped the earth’s mind. But of course the opposite is true: the ground never forgets. Only humans punish each other with amnesia. Unremembering another’s name and story is strictly a human pastime, and only we have learned that, to truly get the last word, you must give silence.
So you had to get the ground to talk. I’d come to believe, after a career of study, that justice leaves no mark on history, let alone the soil, and the longer a story lies buried, the more unsavory you’ll find its moral. Go back far enough, and you’ll no longer know the heroes from the villains. All we had of Keno’s story was a dark conclusion, and only science could tell us its middle and beginning. Trudy and Eggers needed science. They needed to tease out the terrain of Keno’s final day with striation-and-sediment analysis. With chemical spectography, they could get the soil to whisper the menu of Keno’s final meal. They needed to run his remains under ultraviolet light, the best rumor mill for old injuries, illnesses, growth spurts, and malnutrition. Radiocarbon is solid scuttlebutt on clan and friends. Dental morphology would tattle on Keno’s age, diet, health, and kin. To get a story as old as Keno’s, my students needed to gossip with fluorine isotopes, pillow-talk with electron microscopy, then, finally, name names with DNA.
Invariably, however, you will be left with some degree of mystery. Beyond science is an area of not knowing, and to get past that, you must enter the story yourself, filling the blanks with your own past, splicing the helix of your own narrative into the gaps of another. You must enter the play before you, becoming a minor character, the ambassador or court jester who appears in the final scene to satisfy the audience’s need to know how everything worked out.
My students had always shown good digging instincts — at a Mandan site last year, Trudy had worked with patience and method, while Eggers had shown an uncanny instinct for nosing his way through the soil. But this slapstick before me evidenced neither science nor intuition: They had none of the equipment from our lab, so there was no way to measure anything, not even alkalinity or leaching. There was no way to acid-bath the remains or coat them in hardener — they couldn’t even tag the bones, let alone make casts of them. And for all Eggers and Trudy may have learned about reading rock matrix and soil strata, they had no clue how to coax bones into sharing their secrets, let alone telling your own in return.
I closed my eyes and turned away. “You two don’t know enough to do this yet.”
Trudy looked at me. “You’re the one who taught us.”
“Yeah,” Eggers said, “you’ve taught us everything you know.”
“No,” I told him. “No, I haven’t.”
“But—” Eggers said, then stopped. Something had caught his eye in the distance beyond us. I followed his gaze to the road, where a sheriff’s cruiser was coasting to a stop on the side of the highway. It was far enough away that you couldn’t hear its tires in the slush, and the ghostly part was that the squad car seemed driven by no one.
I rose, as did Trudy and Eggers.
In the distance, the cruiser’s door swung open, and a tiny man emerged, flanked by a posse of small, jumping dogs. He tripped over one of them, falling into the snow. A moment later, he stood, yelled something we couldn’t make out, then headed our way, dusting the powder from the seat of his pants. This was clearly Gerry marching toward us across the field, his team of Pomeranians leading the charge.
“Shit,” Trudy said.
Gerry trudged, head down, through snow deep as his knees, and something inside me said to get the hell out of there. “I got to use the bathroom,” I told everyone, and wincing at the place where Eggers had been doing his business, I turned, to make my way through the mud toward the casino.
“You’re not running away, are you?” Trudy asked.
“I have business to attend to.”
“Dr. Hannah, you can leave a place — I’ve had to move away from more cities and army bases than I can count — but you don’t quit people who need you.”
Gerry was almost in our camp. A legion of lapdogs was now upon us. You couldn’t even count them — a ball of tumbling fur would suddenly split into two dogs that leapt, tail-spun, then blurred into other yipping tangles. One dog began tugging at the fur of Eggers’ lodge, while another attacked something in the latrine.
Gerry came to a stop in front of Eggers and Trudy. The fur-rimmed hood of his sheriff-brown coat gave his face the pinched, beady look of one of his own dogs.
“Hey, Hanky,” Gerry said when he recognized me. “What’re you doing out here?”
Eggers smiled, opened his hands. “Why, what can we do for you, officer?”
“Yes, officer,” Trudy said, “how can we help you today?”
“Well, I was looking at that GTO over there,” Gerry said, still looking at me quizzically. “Any of you folks see somebody messing with it?”