It would be easy to look back upon myself, at the wheel of my Corvette, and say that this was the night, that along this road the resolve formed in me to become the leader of the Keno excavation, that, after a silent, contemplative drive, I opened my car door a changed man, a captain. But the truth was that such a moment of clear decision never came. I simply couldn’t be alone a minute longer, and I sought only the company of other humans, the sound of their voices, a place beside the fire with my kin.
I rolled to a stop by Trudy’s hot rod and fished a flashlight from under the seat. Then I headed across a field that grew lighter and darker as small, fat clouds crossed the moon. I scanned the bare branches of windbreak trees with my flashlight, checking for owls. All clear.
A path had formed from our trips back and forth — a streak of tamped snow scribbled through with Pomeranian tracks. Nearing the lodge, I found Eggers and Trudy down in the mud, exposing artifacts amid the stagger and play of torchlight. Fire smoke had blackened the oil of their faces. The casino back-dropping them looked like a grand nineteenth-century painting of Byzantium.
Rib bones littered the site.
Trudy was sitting cross-legged, hunched over something I couldn’t make out by firelight. Eggers was on his knees, moving dirt with a crudely fashioned spade. He looked up, smiling smugly, as if he’d known all along I’d be out here tonight. “Dad always said I’d be a ditch digger,” Eggers announced. “If only he could see me now.”
His beard in the torchlight looked thin and tangled as fishing line.
I kicked a rib bone toward him.
“What?” he asked defensively. “Can’t a guy even gather?”
“Scavenge is more like it,” Trudy said.
I picked up another bone. There was still some sauce on it.
I asked him, “Won’t this contaminate the site?”
Eggers shot back, “I think we can manage some things on our own — like telling a Pleistocene-era artifact from a barbecued baby-back rib.”
I gave him a look that said, I have my doubts, but I wasn’t out here to give anyone a hard time. I’d been rough on them earlier. Now, standing under the stars with them, I found it hard to remember what the fuss was about. Here were my students, dedicated, ambitious, and in need of guidance. Here was an anthropological site begging for serious inquiry. I rubbed my hands together, watching everyone’s breath in the dark. If other people didn’t prefer my company, if some folks didn’t even have time for a simple salad at the airport, well, so be it.
I tossed the bone into the fire. Sparks streamed from the flames like the words of an ancient story. We watched them plume orange, cool, and vanish.
I said, “Are you going to show me what you found, or what?”
Eggers smiled. “You won’t believe it,” he said.
He led me to the excavation pit. The earth was peeled like a cadaver, and amid the carefully exposed striations of soil, I could see a set of gypsumlike forearms — radius and ulna — their joint sockets sheened oystery where they’d worn smooth from use. And beyond that, as if the arm had been reaching for something, was a shape in the dark. I fixed my flashlight’s beam. There, nested in a bowl of exposed soil layers, was a sphere.
“We found it below the finger bones,” Trudy said. “Like she died holding it.”
Eggers and Trudy looked nervous, wild-eyed.
“Is this for real?” I asked. “Are you two playing some kind of joke?”
I knelt to examine it, my breath glowing amber in the flashlight’s path.
The sphere was a little larger than a melon and seemed formed from unfired river clay that had, over the eons, mineralized as hard as cement, capturing in its surface the impressions of fingers and palms, the very prints of the hands that had formed it. God, were they Keno’s? Little divots and grooves pitted the surface, probably the result of river grass and seeds that were patted into the mud and had long since rotted away.
“Trudy,” I said, “is it heavy? Is it hollow? Report.”
“We haven’t touched it,” she said. “When we first encountered it, we thought it might be the skull, but, exposing its surface, we realized it wasn’t bone. We figured you’d know what it was.”
I handed the flashlight to Trudy, who focused the beam as I lifted the ball. It was cold in my hands, absolutely hard, though it looked as slick and wet as the riverbank from which it was shaped. And it weighed a fair amount — heavier than a bag of sugar. When I rotated it to inspect the underside, I felt something shift, though it could have been my imagination.
“Is it some sort of vessel?” Trudy asked.
“Clovis Tupperware?” Eggers asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like it, though. There’s no evidence of Clovis being associated with pottery. Hunter-gatherers in general didn’t use clay. It’s heavy and bulky, and it wasn’t employed until people needed it, until they’d started agrarian lives and had things to store for long periods.”
“It could be some sort of funeral offering,” Trudy said. “Maybe something for Keno to take with her to the afterlife.”
“The problem is,” I said, shielding my eyes when Trudy pointed that light at me, “that the idea of taking material things into the next world really only comes about with the rise of agriculture, when people settle down and begin to accumulate things. That’s when cultures first start wanting to take it with them. It wouldn’t even occur to a hunter-gatherer to bring stuff to the afterlife. I have to say, this discovery bodes ill for the authenticity of this as a Clovis site.”
“But we found a Clovis point,” Eggers said. “What better proof is there?”
“Let’s say Keno was sort of an anthropologist, like us,” I answered. “A thousand years ago, Keno runs across a ten-thousand-year-old spear point, which she, I mean he, picks up and carries around until an untimely death.”
“We’ll just radiocarbon the bones,” Trudy said. “If we get a Pleistocene date, then we know the Clovis used primitive pottery.”
“What lab in the country would test artifacts without proper paperwork, especially if they just happen to turn out to be the oldest in the hemisphere?”
“Enough mystery,” said Eggers. In one hand he lifted his torch, eyes shining from the fire, and in the other he hefted that spade. “Let’s crack this nut.”
I pulled the ball close. “Don’t even joke,” I said.
Trudy pointed the flashlight at the ball. “Maybe it’s filled with wampum,” she said. “You know, beads and shells. Or maybe even precious minerals, some raw quartz or obsidian, a cache of materials to flint-knap blades with.”
Eggers said, “What if there’s a head in there?”
We all stared at the ball. Nobody said anything for a moment.
“We haven’t found the skull,” Eggers added. “It could be Keno’s mummified cranium.”
We spoke in a flurry:
“The shape’s too round,” Trudy pointed out.
“The weight’s all wrong,” I said.
“Plus, the size seems a bit too small,” Trudy added.
“There’s no head in here,” I declared, holding the sphere away from me a little.
Despite our efforts to convince each other to the contrary, there was suddenly no way to look at that ball without imagining a severed head at its center.
“Look,” I said, “it’s time to be realistic. This job’s too big for us. This is a job for an entire research team, for Hatitia Wells at Harvard.”