by Scott Graham
Lex set a slow, steady pace up the slope. They were over nine thousand feet in elevation here, the air thin. Finally, after six months of anticipation, the climbers’ discovery waited just ahead.
The hikers passed the toe of the center ridge and turned into the second canyon. As in the lower canyon, tundra blanketed the upper canyon’s south-facing wall, and snow covered the opposite slope.
Chuck’s heart thudded as he headed up the narrow defile. He’d looked forward to this moment since the offer had come his way from the Greater Yellowstone Anthropological Foundation to be the initial on-site archaeologist to investigate what first had been spotted by the climbers last fall, before winter snows entombed the park’s high country.
Ahead, the canyon canted sharply upward. Before its recent retreat, Trident One Glacier had worn the pitched granite floor of the canyon to a smooth sheen over thousands of years. The hikers helped one another up the steep, glistening rock, their boots slipping on the canyon floor’s burnished surface.
The canyon leveled and turned south, matching the dogleg in the lower canyon. The hikers continued the steady climb up the drainage. The air in the bottom of the canyon was cool and wet. Chuck’s nostrils filled with the mossy scent of fungal spores launching from the surrounding tundra with the onset of summer.
The walls of the canyon closed in from both sides and the last of the winter’s snow filled the shaded canyon bottom. Carmelita and Rosie scurried atop the crust while the adults sank to their knees, post-holing through the snow. Behind Chuck, Clarence plunged to his waist at regular intervals. Each time, Chuck pulled him back to the surface.
“Snow snakes,” Chuck said upon offering his hand a third time. “They’ll get you every time.”
“Not snakes.” Clarence patted his belly. “Burgers and fries.”
The walls fell back near the canyon’s head, allowing the sun’s rays to reach the canyon floor. The snow gave way to rock and mud. They rounded a sweeping turn and came to the end of the defile. They spread out, gaping at the scene before them.
Where the mountainside fell almost vertically from the summit to the head of the canyon, the white blanket of mountaintop snow was broken by a wall of aquamarine ice rising twenty feet from the canyon floor—the last remnant of what once had been Trident One Glacier. The wall of ice glittered like a long-lost jewel in the midday sun, but the real treasure waited at the foot of the ice, newly exposed to the elements by the glacier’s retreat.
“Remarkable,” Lex whispered.
“Unbelievable,” Sarah said, staring.
“Jesucristo,” Clarence murmured from where he stood at Chuck’s shoulder.
Chuck’s breaths came fast and shallow. At the foot of the wall of ice stood what he’d waited all these months to see.
17
Twenty reed baskets sat in two uneven lines at the base of the shimmering ice wall. Each basket was three feet high by two feet wide and half encased in mud. The baskets rested next to one another, some upright, others on their sides, with dank, loamy sludge spilling from their mouths. Geometric designs showed through the crust of dirt that covered each of the storage vessels. The designs, simple zigzags and squares, consisted of thicker strips of reeds woven through the thinner reeds that made up the main bodies of the vessels.
Rosie lifted her shoulders to her ears in an exaggerated shrug. “It’s just a bunch of muddy baskets.”
“Yeah,” Carmelita said. “I don’t get it.”
“Actually,” Chuck told them, his voice trembling, “this is as good as archaeology gets. Somebody left these here in the ice a long time ago. What were they doing here with so many baskets? Why didn’t they ever come back?”
“They must’ve forgotten where they put them,” Rosie reasoned.
“Maybe they got chased away by grizzly bears,” Carmelita said.
“Or wooly mammoths,” Kaifong added with a smile.
“Grizzlies, maybe,” Chuck said. “Not mammoths. Or saber-toothed tigers, either, for that matter. That would date these baskets to the time of the Ice Age, twenty thousand years ago.”
“They’re not that old?” Kaifong asked.
“A group of climbers spotted the baskets from high on Trident Peak last October. The baskets were just emerging from the melting ice. One of the climbers dropped down here and tore off a piece of one of the baskets—not the correct thing to do, but that’s what she did. At least the climbers were smart enough to keep their pictures of the baskets off the internet so thieves wouldn’t come prowling. The climbers turned over the basket piece and their photos to the Greater Yellowstone Anthropological Foundation. The foundation carbon-dated the specimen over the winter.”
“And?”
“The baskets date to between four and six thousand years old.”
Randall whistled.
“Yeah,” Chuck said. “Not the Ice Age, but pretty old nonetheless. Archaeologists have known for a long time that Native Americans came over the Absarokas from the south to the Central Yellowstone Plateau during the summer months. They’ve found obsidian hunting points on the banks of Yellowstone Lake smeared with blood of bison, elk, deer, bear, rabbit, you name it. Carbon dating of the blood shows that most of the hunting and gathering by natives on the uplift was concentrated in the last fifteen hundred years, with the vast majority in the last five hundred years.”
“But you just said the baskets are thousands of years old,” said Kaifong.
“That’s what makes this find so incredible. The age of these baskets, their large size, and their significant number indicate that substantial visitation to the Yellowstone uplift by Native Americans appears to stretch back thousands of years further than previously thought. The carbon dating of the basket piece has chucked a wrench in everything Yellowstone’s anthropologists thought until now about the park’s human timeline. This discovery is the sort of thing archaeologists live for.”
“Wait, I’m confused. Archaeology or anthropology?” Kaifong asked.
“Both. Anthropology is the study of people. Archaeology is the study of people’s old stuff and what that stuff tells us about ancient peoples.”
“And these baskets...?”
“May have a lot to tell us about the correct human-history timeline on the Central Yellowstone Plateau,” Chuck said. “Clarence and I have been hired to initiate the process of finding that out. The GYAF’s members are all retired anthropologists and archaeologists from around the country. They’re too old to make the trip to the site. They contracted with my company to complete a preliminary survey of the baskets on behalf of the foundation and the park service.”
“Is there anything we can do to help? We don’t have anything specific on our agenda today.”
“Except saving dogs,” Randall said.
“Which,” Keith said, “I totally appreciate.”
“No worries, dude.”
“Well,” Chuck said to Kaifong, “now that you mention it, maybe there is something you can do. Clarence and I are scheduled for several days of survey work here. Today, we’ll take pictures and do our initial measuring and plotting. I’d love to provide the foundation with some aerial footage of the site, if you’re up for it.”
She nodded, studying the baskets and glittering wall of ice. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
Chuck pointed at the snow covering the slope above the wall of ice. “I’d appreciate your scanning the snowfield up there to see if there’s any sign of anything else melting out. We’ll climb up and have a look, too, of course, but your eye-in-the-sky might spot something we can’t see from ground level.”
“Anything else we can try to capture for you?” Kaifong asked.
“Yeah, man,” Randall added. “Our camera is ultra high def. In good light like today, whatever we shoot is crisp as bacon.”
Chuck crossed his arms, studying the reed storage containers. “Maybe,” he said. “People are pretty fired up about the in-situ placement of the baskets.”
“T
he what?” Kaifong asked.
“The way they’re lined up in such orderly fashion. It’s obvious they were placed here for a reason. Care to guess the experts’ opinion so far?”
“The baskets are filled with dirt. Was it for constructing insulated earthen homes of some sort?” Kaifong ventured.
“Not a bad idea,” Chuck said. “But check out the color of the contents—dark brown, almost black—significantly darker than normal soil.”
“It’s not dirt.”
“It’s not dirt yet. Based on the climbers’ pictures, the thinking is the stuff in the baskets is in the process of becoming soil.”
“So it used to be something else.”
“As of a few thousand years ago.”
“Hunters and gatherers,” Kaifong noted. “That’s what you said the Indians were. It stands to reason, then, that these baskets contain the remains of something they hunted or gathered.”
“You got it. Which takes us to the next question. Why did they leave such a huge store of what they hunted or gathered buried way up here in the ice?”
Kaifong frowned. Then her brown eyes brightened. “Got it,” she said. “They were using the glacier as a deep freeze.”
“Precisely,” Chuck said. “At least, that’s the general consensus. It’s one of the things the foundation wants to find out for sure.”
“You’re saying there’s something else we can do to help with that?”
“The working theory, so far, is that the baskets were filled with berries or nuts or smoked and dried meat at the end of the summer. They were then stored in holes gouged in the ice before the natives headed for lower ground with the coming of winter. When the Indians returned over the divide the next spring, the food stored in the glacier served as an early-season supply depot for them on their way to the lower parts of the plateau like Hayden and Lamar valleys.”
“Seems like pretty sophisticated planning for such ancient people,” Kaifong said.
“The first thing is to find out if it’s true.”
“How do you go about proving something like that?”
“We’ll gather samples of the baskets’ contents along with more reed samples from the baskets themselves. A full dig later on, by a full archaeological team, will provide lots more evidence.”
“Could there be more baskets than just these?”
“I don’t think there’s enough ice left for that. But you and Randall can help us be sure.”
“You got it.” Kaifong turned to Randall. “Shall we?”
“Yes, dear.” Randall looked at Chuck. “This is our third summer together. She has no idea how to chill. I’ve even met her parents.” He chuckled. “Talk about the perfectly predictable guerrilla-girl result of a Tiger Mom upbringing.”
“Impressive,” Kaifong shot back. “A sexist and racist comment, all in one breath.”
Randall grinned. “My abilities are straight-up awesome, babe,” he told her. “But, of course, you already knew that, didn’t you?”
They bumped fists.
Lex rolled his eyes and turned to Chuck. “What about the rest of us? We’re at your service, too, if you’d like.”
“It’d be great to have everyone’s help with an outlying survey.” Chuck faced the group. “Clarence and I will assess the baskets and the area immediately surrounding them. The rest of you can search outward in all directions. The idea is to use an informal, expanding-circles approach. Your movements can be pretty relaxed; everything we’re doing at this point is preliminary, to get a sense of how to proceed.”
“What are we looking for?” Lex asked.
“Anything manmade. Scarring on any remaining glacial ice. Hunting points, of course. Any further signs of baskets or reed material. No one should touch whatever they come across. I’ll warn you, though: the most likely scenario is that nobody will find anything. That’s the nature of archaeology—lots of looking, little finding.”
Janelle said, “Hear that, girls? Let’s help look.”
Lex said to Carmelita and Rosie, “I’ll bet you’re going to be famous archaeologists someday, just like your dad.”
“Maybe,” Carmelita said.
“Not me,” Rosie announced. “I’m going to be an astronaut.” She swung her hips back and forth. “Or a supermodel.”
After a quick group lunch, Chuck took pictures, made notations in his tablet computer, and drew rough diagrams on his sketch pad while Clarence pounded a length of rebar into the ground, fixing the central datum point for the basket site. He measured and recorded in his tablet computer various site and artifact dimensions and distances from the datum point—the size of individual baskets, the lengths of the two lines of baskets, the range of the baskets in relation to each other, and the projected depth of the baskets in the muddy soil at the base of the ice wall.
Kaifong and Randall launched their overview flight with the drone from the far side of the canyon. A few minutes later, Randall flew the drone back to a smooth touchdown on Kaifong’s outstretched hands.
Kaifong called across the canyon to Chuck, “With the earlier flight at the thermal area, the batteries are about dead. But we’ll still have plenty of footage to review with you.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?” Chuck asked her.
“We won’t really know until we see what we’ve got back at camp.” She hesitated. “But…”
“Yeah?”
“It’s probably nothing. From over here, though, it looks like there’s something stuck in the ice.” She pointed at the glacier. “It’s white, or whitish.”
Chuck looked where she pointed. He saw only the blue of the ice and, in several places, the gray of the rock, behind the ice, where the glacier met the mountain. He made his way across the canyon to Kaifong’s side.
“There,” she said, pointing again. “See?”
He put his hands to the sides of his cap brim, shading his eyes from the glaring sun. In the middle of the wall of ice, eight feet above the canyon floor, visible only from Kaifong’s oblique viewpoint because of undulations in the face of the melting glacier, a small, light-colored object shone in the sunlight.
“Good work,” he told Kaifong.
He edged behind the baskets, his boots sinking into the mud at the foot of the ice, until he stood before the object, looking straight up at it.
He knew immediately what it was—a sliver of bone, two inches long and an inch wide. The sliver was off-white, almost tan. It sat out from the glacial wall on a thin ice tendril shaded from the sun by the piece of bone itself. The tendril of ice appeared ready to give way at any second, sending the bone fragment tumbling into the mud.
He took pictures of the bone fragment from several angles, then noted the distance from the hanging sliver to the datum point set by Clarence. Finally, he pulled from his pack a clear, plastic Ziploc bag and plucked the sliver from the wall of ice. The sliver of bone was soft to his touch; it would not have lasted long had it fallen unnoticed into the mud, there to rot away to nothing.
He held the sliver of bone beneath his nose and sniffed. It exuded a slightly rotten smell that mixed with the clammy odor of the wet earth at his feet.
He sealed the sliver in the plastic bag and held it up before him. The shard was uniformly beige except at one end. He brought the bag close to his eyes. Four indentations, spaced a quarter-inch apart, marked the end of the piece of bone.
A blast of adrenalin coursed through him. The indentations clearly were cut marks. Sometime in the distant past, a human had butchered meat from the bone and discarded the sliver here, in the ice.
This sort of discovery—this direct connection with the past—was what Chuck loved about archaeology. Even as he marveled at the butchered sliver of bone, his blood running hot in his veins, he knew most others wouldn’t understand why he found this kind of thing so enthralling. He didn’t blame them for their lack of understanding; in fact, he barely understood it himself.
He gave a thumbs up to Kaifong. “Excellent!�
� he called to her.
“Glad I could be of service,” she said.
The group’s outlying survey revealed no additional signs of human activity at the head of the canyon. No matter, though. In Chuck’s view, the day was an unrivaled success. The baskets had been waiting, recently melted out of the winter snow, as he’d hoped. And they’d discovered an accessory find in addition to the baskets themselves.
Chuck rubbed the sliver of bone, through the baggie, with his thumb. Before the sliver’s discovery, he’d have bet the loamy substance in the baskets would turn out to be rotted nuts and berries. But the piece of bone sent his thoughts in a new direction. Until now, butchered bones on the Central Yellowstone Plateau had been discovered only on the shores of Yellowstone Lake. The finding of this butchered piece of bone so high in the Absarokas would engender all sorts of fresh thinking about how extensively the park’s ancient human visitors had hunted on the plateau—and, thanks to Kaifong’s keen eye, Chuck would get to report the new discovery to the archaeological world.
He tucked the baggie containing the sliver in the outside pocket of his pack, where it wouldn’t be crushed, and returned to the survey work with Clarence.
At Chuck’s request, Lex broke from the return route to camp and led the hikers up the side canyon between Trident Peak’s middle and lowest ridges. They found Trident Two Glacier melted away to nothing, leaving no manmade objects—baskets, bone slivers, or otherwise—on the muddy ground at the head of the canyon.
They stopped for an afternoon snack on the hillside overlooking Thorofare thermal basin. The smell of sulfur rolled up the slope from the bubbling pools. Keith kept Chance leashed tight. Chuck shook dried cranberries into the cupped hands of Carmelita and Rosie. Randall stretched out full length in the middle of the trail, his face to the sky and his hands clasped over his chest.
“Check this out,” he called to the girls.
Carmelita and Rosie stuffed their cranberries into their mouths and ran to him. Rosie flopped to her back on the grassy hillside next to Randall and imitated him, knitting her fingers over her plump stomach and looking up at the sky. “What?” she demanded.