by Siena West
Elena told him about the safety protocol they established for the survey. “And the surveyors will now record the GPS coordinates of beer cans left at pot-hunted sites and bag them for you guys. Can you lift fingerprints from beer cans? The things we’ll do to protect archaeological sites.”
“Actually, a beer can’s a good candidate for lifting prints,” he said. “Smooth metal, one of the easiest materials.”
Elena felt light-hearted, relieved to be away from the cares of the camp and the dead in the ossuary. Even drug cartels didn’t seem so threatening in the bright sunlight and sweet air.
“We have another safety issue,” she said, “and it concerns Maggie. You didn’t meet her—she was out on survey when you visited. Maggie’s doing a project on historical Apache sites for her dissertation and is staying with us. She plans to finish the last part of her survey on horseback and promised to ride with her boyfriend. At first, I thought it was a stupid idea, but now, I’m not sure. She’s been alone all summer, hiking. The boyfriend—and the horses—are improvements. What do you think about this scheme?”
Jorgensen unwrapped a sandwich and toyed with it, still more thirsty than hungry. “Don’t your survey crews also work on foot?”
“They do, but at least there’s a bunch of them. Maggie’s been alone until now.”
“Then the horseback survey isn’t a bad idea. You guys didn’t have to cope with a Mexican cartel before now. Make it an iron-clad rule that no one surveys, walks, or hikes alone—always go with a partner. And three people would be even better.”
Elena broke into laughter. “Three’s a crowd with Maggie and the boyfriend. They would not want a chaperone.”
“I get it,” he said. “But no excuses for the rest of you. Now tell me about this ruin, please. Was it excavated?”
“Back in the 1930s, Emil Haury dug here. He wrote the book that defined one of the ancient peoples who once lived in Arizona and New Mexico, the Mogollon.” It was obvious she loved to tell the story. “He was a towering figure in Southwest archaeology and one of my personal heroes.”
“Sure hope he didn’t hike here every day. He’d be crawling from exhaustion.”
Elena laughed. “Nope—Haury and his coworker camped at the ruin. Doc—that’s what everyone called him—hired a local rancher to pack in supplies on mules, and they rode here on horseback. When the archaeologists finished the excavations, the rancher picked them up again. They lived off rice, bacon, and beans, digging by day and writing their notes by lantern light.”
“Sounds uncomfortable. I see what you mean about the field being harsh.”
“But imagine sharing a bottle of whiskey around the campfire in the evening and falling asleep with the calls of owls and coyotes. Picture waking at dawn with the morning star still shining.”
“You are full of surprises, Elena. I thought you were a no-nonsense scientist when I first met you. But you are a romantic at heart, aren’t you?”
She made a dismissive sound. There was another side of the picture she did not share. Working and sleeping among the bones and spirits of the dead would have invited the ghosts to visit her. They would clamor aloud, insisting she articulate their stories. Since she became an archaeologist, the dead spoke to her in this way.
“Are you rested up enough to explore?” Elena said.
“I think so. My heart rate is almost down to normal.”
As they left the shade to begin the tour, Elena pointed at the view stretching to the south in green and rocky waves. Clouds were building. “Look at that. Maybe we’ll get rain.”
* * *
The first tour stop was a small room, its floor covered with silky, gray dust. Despite the dry air, the room was musty. The doorway was so low they stooped to fit through it. Jorgensen admired the view as Elena bent under the lintel.
“This was one of the first rooms built.” She explained tree-ring dating and showed him the dime-sized holes in the blackened roof beams that Haury had cored to get samples.
“Forgive me, but how can you get a date from a little piece of wood?”
“The core sample gives a total cross-section of the tree from the bark to the inside, or pith. Dendrochronologists—that’s the fancy name—have cored thousands of trees and created dated sequences. It’s basic—you match the unknown sample to the dated sequence. The inside ring marks the year the tree began to grow, and the outermost tells when the tree was cut—the exact year. It’s really a simple matter of counting rings.”
“I see—I guess. What did they use to take samples?”
“Today, a portable generator and an electric drill, but Haury had to use a hand-held boring tool. It took a lot of strength to take samples.”
“Yikes. Horseback riding, hiking, camping—I won’t make any jokes about boring—”
“You better not,” she said, smiling at him.
“Any other macho things you must do to get an invite into the official archaeology club?”
Elena laughed. “Well, there’s the drinking. You’ll find out, if you spend any time in our camp.”
“Did Haury drink when he was digging here? If you took a wrong step in the dark, you might kill yourself.”
She laughed again. “When I knew him, he was a vodka drinker. Don’t know what he drank when he was a young man. But whatever his beverage, he was too smart to drink a lot here. No urgent-care centers back then and only horses to haul out an injured person.”
Next, she showed him a blocked and plastered doorway. Fingerprints showed in the plaster, the impressions of whorls and lines clear. Jorgensen matched his fingertips to the ancient ones. “These look like a child’s hands.”
“These people were small. You’d expect that, with poor nutrition, no medical care, parasites, and diseases. The women often died in childbirth, and most people didn’t live long. In their 40s, they’d be old. You and I wouldn’t have survived to our age under those conditions.”
“How do you know?”
“The same way your lab people can identify murder victims, figure out their age, and determine how they died—forensic anthropology.” Elena knew ghosts were here, spirits of the ancient ones the Apache called chidn. They would seek the warmth of past lives. They would sweep through the crumbling rooms at night, wrap their pale limbs around the roof beams, and stir up the long-dead ashes of the cooking fires.
As they walked out of the room and into the sunlight, Elena saw the thunderheads in the distance looming bigger and closer. The clouds were moving fast as they raced ahead of the wind. “We’d better finish the tour soon.
“Cholla House has an interesting story,” she said as they walked to the last stop on the tour. “The people who built this place fled from another village, perhaps because their farmlands failed. The refugees planned to build here several years before they moved—they stockpiled timbers for the roof beams.”
“Let me guess—you got that from the tree-ring dates.”
“Bingo! You’re catching on.”
The last stop was beyond the ruin where the floor of the overhang narrowed. A spring had once bubbled there, building up a deep travertine deposit. “It flowed when Haury dug here, but it’s dried up since then.” It would have been a magical, lovely place thick with greenery and bird song in the air. “This is where the archaeologists got water for drinking, cooking, and washing. They were lucky—few campsites have a living spring.”
Jorgensen shifted the talk to pot hunting as they returned. “Where are the pots and other artifacts? I’ve seen nothing here that pot hunters would want.”
“Remember, Haury excavated Cholla House, and the artifacts are in the State museum. But the people wouldn’t have left many artifacts on the floors in any case. They would leave heavy things like grinding stones or broken things of no value. Pot hunters go for burials. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Elena walked toward the edge of the overhang.
“The dead were buried with the things pot hunt
ers want—painted pots, turquoise and shell jewelry. See that talus slope? That’s where they put the burials. And their trash.”
“They chucked the trash down there? And the burials?”
“Yep. No other place to put either. You may have noticed there’s no flat areas here except where the rooms were built. But the people were smart. They built retaining walls to keep the rain from washing away the trash and the burials. And—”
Elena’s words died as she caught sight of the damage—three human-body-sized holes dug into the slope, piles of dirt next to them. A pot hunter could finish them in a day of illicit digging.
“Is that what—?” Jorgensen said.
“I’m afraid so. Let’s find out.”
Elena slid down the talus slope, digging in her heels to stop at the nearest pot hole with Jorgensen right behind her. She knelt and sifted through the dirt mounded beside the hole.
“I don’t see any bones. Perhaps there wasn’t a burial here—Haury dug almost 40 burials, and there may not be many left. It’s also possible the pot hunter didn’t dig deep enough.”
At the next hole, they found human bones, some complete, some broken, strewn across the mounded dirt. “That doesn’t necessarily mean the pot hunter broke them digging,” Elena said. “The cemetery area was so small, the burials were stacked on top each other. Sometimes the people disturbed an earlier burial interring a later one. There’s no way to know.”
The third pot hole was shallow, as if the thief quit before he struck anything of value.
There was no trash around the pot holes—no cigarette butts, sandwich bags, or candy-bar wrappers. The raider had cleaned up well.
“These holes are fresh,” Elena said. “It’s almost like the vandal was still here when we arrived.”
Jorgensen was glum. “I should document this—my first case.” He took photographs, and Elena helped him estimate the size of the pot holes and the age of the person whose bones had been scattered. “What’s the land jurisdiction here?”
“Cholla House is on the reservation. The pot hunter violated federal and tribal laws.” Jorgensen wrote everything in a notebook.
Intent on the discovery, neither had been watching the sky nor realized it had grown darker. The black clouds rose almost overhead. A rumble of thunder caught their attention.
“Yikes,” Elena said, looking to the sky. “Tour’s over, and we better move quick.” They collected their things and scurried back the way they had come with the wind chasing them. The hike uphill took longer than it had taken coming down, and big drops began to fall when they arrived at the mesa top. Swept north by thermal updrafts, the threatening thunderheads spilled their burden of rain just as they reached the truck.
* * *
As they started up the steep grade leading out of the canyon country, the rutted dirt track became slick. The four-wheel drive couldn’t keep the vehicle from slithering and sliding. Despite the wipers snickering and shuddering over the windshield, it was difficult to see. They had driven only a mile or two when the hail started, and then they drove in a waterfall of ice. Packed with hailstones, the wipers were useless.
Elena pulled over at a protected place tucked against the mountain side to wait out the storm. It would pass soon because summer thunderstorms in the mountains were intense and brief. Hail thundered on the cab roof, and water poured down the road, carrying rafts of bobbing hailstones along with it.
Jorgensen spoke first, his voice loud enough to carry over the din of thundering hail stones and rain. “Can I ask a personal question? Why did you become an archaeologist? It seems like such an—”
“Unsuitable job for a woman? I’ve heard that a lot.”
“No, what I meant is that archaeology appears to be an unfulfilling profession. There’s so much ambiguity.”
“That’s part of the fun—the mystery, the sense of the unexpected, the challenge of putting the pieces of the puzzle together. It isn’t all that different from what you do for a living—collecting evidence to make a case. Except we have to dig our up data.”
“It’s unfortunate, but we do that, too—I’ve worked on grisly cases and seen bodies left in shallow graves. Your excavated evidence is less gruesome than ours.”
The temperature had fallen, and the windows steamed up with the warmth of their breathing. Elena traced patterns in the condensation. A few moments passed before she answered his question.
“I grew up in New Mexico, and it’s a wonderful place, full of living pueblos and ancient ruins. My parents have owned a restaurant in Santa Fe for years, and it’s frequented by local celebrities—anthropologists, writers, artists, even a Hollywood type or two. One night when I was about nine, the restaurant had a private party on the back patio. I was a bratty kid and made a nuisance of myself table hopping, like I’d seen my parents do. When I reached his table, a very nice old gentleman pulled me onto his lap, no doubt to keep me from racing around and annoying the guests. I learned later, when my mom and dad corralled me and sent me home, that he was a famous anthropologist and the party’s host.
“He had courtly manners and talked like a professor. He shushed me. I can still remember every word. ‘Be still,’ he said, ‘and you will learn. Loud children, always in motion, will stay ignorant.’ As if a 9-year-old could understand something that Zen-like. Then the old man said, ‘someone told me your birthday is coming up, so I brought you a present. I think you will enjoy reading it, querida.’ It was a book, and it changed my life.”
“What sort of book?”
“The field journal of a famous archaeologist, written in the 1920s. When I got home, I stayed up all night reading it. That wonderful old man somehow knew it would touch my heart. And here I am today. A real, bona fide archaeologist.”
“Who’s stuck in a rainstorm.”
“With an FBI agent, no less. Who knew?”
Jorgensen reached across the seat to take her hand. “No matter how you got here, I’m glad to be with you.” The pressure of his hand again raised tiny jolts of electricity as when they first met, and Elena experienced a curious sense of déjà vu.
Elena and Jorgensen grinned at each other, caught in a moment of intimacy. The afternoon dissolved into evening. Wrapped in their conversation, they had not noticed that the hail had stopped, and the rain had tapered off as the storm moved away. The runoff was slowing, too.
Elena wiped off the window with a sleeve and peered out. “What do you think? Are you ready to chance it?”
“What’s the worst that could happen? Stuck with you for a little longer? I wouldn’t mind it.”
She blushed. To cover her confusion, she made a disrespectful sound and started the engine.
* * *
It was slow going out of the canyon country. The storm had been intense and damaging. Water carved gullies into the cutbanks, the steeper cuts had caved in, and boulders washed down into the road. The truck crept up the plateau escarpment, the engine laboring. Elena feared getting mired in the mud and put the vehicle in four-wheel-drive, but the road was just a thin veneer of dirt over bedrock. There was more danger of sliding over the slick road and into a ditch than getting stuck in thick mud. She negotiated around the rocks that had fallen into the road.
When they reached the top at last, the land was dry as dust. The fickle Arizona rainstorms drenched one spot with all the water in the world and left the ground only a quarter-mile away dry. Back in two-wheel drive, Elena speeded up, leaving a rooster tail of dust behind them.
Evening washed in with the bruised colors of a broken heart. “We’re low on gas,” Elena said. “We’ll stop at Canyon Day.” The Apache-owned convenience store was the only place for miles around to buy gas and groceries. “Get something to eat, too. Lunch was a long time ago.” She sighed. “Talking about the restaurant made me realize how much I miss the food at home.”
“There’s no shortage of Mexican food in Arizona,” Jorgensen protested.
“True, but i
t’s Sonoran Mexican, not northern New Mexican—and there’s a big difference. Sonorans specialize in enormous flour tortillas—they make cheese crisps and chimichangas with them. Then there’s carne seca—that’s sun-dried beef—and tacos made with pieces of cow you don’t want to know about, believe me. The best thing is the Sonoran hot dog.”
“What’s that?”
“A dog wrapped in bacon, covered with beans, jalapeños, cheese, chopped tomatoes and onions, and served in a toasted soft roll, called a bolillo. Absolutely delicious. And no diet in the world would sanction it.
“Nothing like that in New Mexico. We have sopaípillas, blue-corn tortillas, green chile, red chile, posole, carne adovada. With an emphasis on green chile. You’ve never had blue-corn enchiladas like my mama makes, filled with chicken and covered with green chile and cheese. It’s known they cause men to fall in love.”
She blushed again as she realized what she had said. The darkness protected her. She hadn’t meant to be flirtatious, but they had grown so easy with one another, and she was so tired and hungry, the comment had just slipped out.
“I don’t doubt it. Not for a minute.”
* * *
The little cluster of buildings at Canyon Day blazed with lights, looking like a ship at sea. Elena filled up as Jorgensen went in search of a restroom, and when the tank was full, she took her turn. When she came back, she noticed a pickup and horse trailer parked in the lot.
It looked like the silver truck Otis Greenlaw had driven when he brought Maggie’s horses to camp. Sure enough, the door panel showed the Pinedale bird logo. Where is Greenlaw? In the restroom? Elena peered into the trailer at a gray gelding that was haltered and tied. The animal wore a saddle with a loosened cinch and looked like he’d been ridden hard. Sweat had dried white and stiff on his shoulders and flanks.
Red mud covered the wheels and undercarriage of the truck and trailer, just like Elena’s truck.