After smirking at Ray, the man addressed his partner. “What’s up?”
“Found this guy on the trail.”
The smirk became a scowl. “Another Wolf?”
“Says he’s a cop.”
The man took another look at Ray, squinting at him this time. “A cop?”
The specialist shrugged. “Thought maybe the docs would recognize him. They know most of the Wolf people.”
“If he’s lying …” the stubby man said. He completed the comment in another language, then burst into laughter.
The specialist joined in on the joke, snapping back with a paragraph of gibberish. After another round of belly laughs, he asked, “Where’s the boss?”
“In the hole.” Stubby nodded stiffly, proving that his head was not anchored in concrete atop his ponderous shoulders but could actually tilt and rotate slightly.
The threesome marched in single file along the near edge of the dig zone as if conducting a prisoner transport. All that was missing were the handcuffs. The specialist turned crisply around the corner stake and took them up the right side. When they were approximately halfway across the square, they stopped, and the two gargoyles looked stupidly at a huddle of people ten yards inside the excavation area.
Three youths in the eighteen-to-twenty range were hunched over what appeared to be a raised, carefully exposed collection of coffee-colored twigs. The teens were entranced, their expressions solemn, eyes wide as they watched another person caress the sticks with a toothbrush, meticulously whisking away pebbles and flecks of soil. The individual with the brush was squatting, back to Ray and his newfound friends, long blond hair spilling from a baseball cap.
The hat wearer, sensing their presence, abruptly ceased working, rose and turned to face them. It was a woman. She had on a purple T-shirt with “U-DUB” emblazoned across the front in gold. Tall and slender, she filled out the shirt with a vengeance. Long, tan legs extended from her cuffed shorts, curving smoothly into a pair of Nike boots. Beneath the brim of the cap, two remarkable blue eyes inspected him. They were accessorized by full, sensuous lips, and the thin, almost gaunt cheeks of a fashion model.
“Doctor,” the specialist called, as if she was blind and hadn’t noticed them. “We found this guy hanging around on the trail. Think he’s from Red Wolf.”
Her lips formed a pronounced pout as she considered this assessment.
“You’re in charge, ma’am,” the specialist continued. “But my advice is that we send a message to the miners. Let ‘em know we won’t put up with any more crap.”
Her face screwed at this. She glanced down at the sticks, then at her entourage.
“Do we have your permission to rough him up a little, ma’am?”
Ray smiled at her, pleading with his eyes. “I’m not from Red W …” The specialist jabbed him with an elbow. Gasping, Ray dropped to one knee.
“Zach! Doug!” the woman called. Her gaze was directed at a pit where two men were shoveling dirt. A pair of heads shot out of the hole. “Seen this guy at Red Wolf?”
The shirtless diggers leaned on their shovel handles and examined Ray. After several seconds of scrutiny, one of them shrugged and shook his head. The other took a deep breath and continued his examination. He seemed unsure. Climbing out of the pit, he dropped his shovel and walked to the woman’s side.
“Mmm … Could be a miner. But … they don’t have many Natives over there.”
“Too undependable,” the other man called from the hole.
“I don’t recognize him,” the woman said. Frowning, she retained her appeal.
After a final glare, the man announced, “Nah … He’s not one of them.”
The woman walked over and helped Ray up, offering a penetrating smile. Extending her hand, she said, “I’m Dr. Farrell.”
EIGHTEEN
“RAY ATTLA.” HE shook the hand she was extending. “Nice to meet you, Doctor.”
“Call me Janice,” she insisted, still radiating sensuality and charm. “Sorry about all of this. We’ve been having some trouble.” She looked Ray up and down. “You’re big.”
“For an Eskimo,” Ray said, completing the familiar comment.
To the brutes she said, “You can go now, fellows.”
“You sure, Doc?” the specialist asked. He was giving Ray the evil eye.
“Yes. We’re fine.” She turned and started back across the digging site. Ray followed, grinning over his shoulder at the guards. They scowled at him before departing.
“Dr. Farrell, I was hoping you might have a radio,” Ray said. When Farrell didn’t reply, he added, “I left a couple of friends back at the river. They’re hurt and …” She continued on, oblivious, a pace ahead of him.
Reaching the grid, she glared at the ground and jabbed the air with the toothbrush. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?”
Ray glanced at the dirt. No, it didn’t. Despite the approach of dusk, he could make out exposed soil, pebbles, the cluster of mocha twigs … Not exactly buried treasure.
“You do have a radio, don’t you?”
Farrell missed this, her concentration complete. She bent and began fussing over the sticks, carefully whisking away soil. “But this represents a significant find.”
Ray eyed the “find,” his mind struggling to determine what was significant about old, weather-hardened wood. Unless … “Are those bones?”
Farrell’s head nodded slowly, her gaze still on the ground.
Glancing around, Ray realized that the crooked stalks the doctor had exposed were lying on the edge of another larger, perfect square that was cordoned off by more yellow string. The fifteen-by-fifteen square was stepped, each miniature pit littered with similar piles of bones. They were everywhere, rising from the earth at odd angles, in contorted, tangled arrangements.
“What are they?” he finally asked. There were no skulls in evidence, no antlers. Still, they could have been musk ox. More likely, caribou. This was, after all, right on the migration path. “Caribou?” he suggested.
One of the students, a nerdish-looking kid with hornrimmed glasses, scoffed at this. “Thule,” he sniffed, as if this explained everything.
Ray squinted, his mind slow to grasp the idea. “Thule?”
“A culture predating Eskimos,” the kid offered.
“I know who they were,” Ray assured him. He winced at the realization that they were standing atop the site of an ancient human tragedy or massacre.
“…The aboriginal group indigenous to this region,” the kid continued unabated. “They swept eastward around 800 B.c., waging war with the Dorsey People.”
“That’s Dorset People,” Ray corrected. It was bad enough to be lectured by a pimple-faced dweeb. But to be told where his own people had come from … “And they didn’t wage war with them, so much as they absorbed them, starting about 800 A.D.”
His abbreviated history lesson drew a frown from the wonderkind. Farrell’s lips curled into a wry smile. Ray wasn’t sure if she was amused, surprised by Ray’s knowledge, or if this was an admonishment for mixing it up with a lowly undergrad.
“We’re not positive it’s Thule,” she clarified. The toothbrush had become a baton, and she waved it enthusiastically, conducting an invisible orchestra. “But we do know we’re dealing with the ASTT period.”
“That’s the Arctic …” dweeb-boy started to say.
“Arctic Small Tool Tradition,” Ray said, cutting him off. “Expert hunters, accomplished tool and weapon craftsmen …” This kid was starting to get on his nerves.
“ASTT made its way across the extreme north, reaching Greenland by around 2000 B.C.” the kid rattled off, obviously trying to put Ray in his place. The other students were slack-jawed, watching the battle. “When the Bering Land Bridge flooded in 10,000 b.p.,” the boy droned, “the peoples of the Arctic were separated from the peoples of Asia.”
Ray blinked at this, trying to remember what “b.p.” stood for and, at the same time, silently willing the arroga
nt little twerp to a fiery resting place. Farrell looked at him expectantly, waiting for a rebuttal. Unable to recall what the letters stood for, he retorted, “The Thule moved inland after the climate shift of 1200. The summers got shorter, the winters longer. Sea ice choked off the straits and bays, restricting whale movement. The Thule were forced to move south and take up a nomadic hunting lifestyle.” So there.
“Thule hunted the same animals and employed basically the same methodology as the Eskimo,” the kid explained in a know-it-all tone. “Contemporary Eskimo and Aleut dialects suggest that they all stem from a common language, probably that of the Thule.”
“About the radio …” Ray tried to interrupt, but the kid was on a roll.
“Little is known about the proto-Eskimo because predators scattered most human remains. However, it is believed that the Dorset were large people, well-accomplished hunters. The Thule were small and timid.” He sneered triumphantly.
“Close,” Ray said. “According to folklore, the Dorset were the dwarfs and the Thule were the giants. And that probably had nothing to do with actual body size. More than likely it was the size and shape of their dwellings that gave rise to the myth.” Touché!
The expression on the kid’s face, a mixture of anger and embarrassment, gave Ray a perverse sense of pleasure. Before he could savor the victory, his conscience reminded him that he had just engaged a college kid in a childish round of one-upmanship. Not exactly something to get excited about.
“You know your anthropology,” Janice noted, clearly impressed.
Ray shrugged. “I took a few courses in college: basic anthro, basic archaeology.”
“College? But you’re a …” the nerd began.
A glare from Ray was all that kept the word “Native” from falling out of the kid’s less-than-diplomatic mouth. Nodding, he specified, “Inupiat.”
“Where did you go to school?” Farrell asked. Her focus had reoriented itself on Ray, and she was staring intently at him, making him rather uncomfortable.
“U. of A., Anchorage.”
The kid sighed at this, as if the University of Alaska was truly a second-rate institution, a glorified junior college. “The main campus is in Fairbanks.”
“Do you have a radio?” Ray pleaded. One more insult, and he might have to hurt the kid.
“A radio?” Farrell asked. She crinkled her nose at him, puzzled. The expression on her face caused Ray to wonder if she knew what a radio was. Five long seconds later, she replied, “Of course.”
“May I use it, please?”
“Certainly.” Turning on her heels, she set off for the tents. Ray was about to follow her when the kid mumbled something, something about Eskimos that elicited a stifled chuckle from one of his fellow students. If Ray hadn’t been exhausted, he would have gone right back and demonstrated the famous Eskimo high kick for Mr. Smarty Pants. Instead, he ignored the remark.
Above, the dark indigo sky was dotted with winking pinpricks of light. The dig area was fading away like a mirage. Ray could hear the men in the pit swinging their shovels, but could no longer see them.
As they reached the first tent, Farrell barked, “Lights, Craig.” Seconds later a generator hummed to life and an array of halogens on tall poles flickered on, bathing the excavation site in a glare of white.
“The season’s almost over,” Farrell explained, still walking. “We’re doing everything we can to finish up before the weather changes.”
She entered a large dome tent, ushered Ray inside, and zipped the bug screen shut. After activating a battery-powered lantern hanging at the center of the tent, she led him through a collection of shallow crates, each bearing various artifacts and bones, to a card table that was wedged into the curve of the dome. It held a PC, several notepads, burgeoning file folders, a cellular phone, and a shortwave radio. Lines from the computer and shortwave ran along the floor, snaked by the crates and exited through an insulated hole near the door. They eventually found their way to the generator, Ray guessed.
“Phone’s dead,” Farrell announced, glaring at it. “The battery croaked. But the radio works. Most of the time. Mark manages to call out when he needs to.”
“Mark?”
“My husband.”
Ray instinctively glanced at Farrell’s left hand, his eyes searching for a ring.
Farrell caught him. “I don’t wear my ring in the field,” she explained.
“Oh.” It was all Ray could think to say. For some reason, he was vaguely disappointed to learn that she was married. Why, he wasn’t sure. Her personal life was no business of his. “Is your husband an archaeologist too?”
“Anthropologist. We both teach at the U.W.” She pronounced the initials as they were written on her shirt: U-Dub. “We’re co-leading this dig.”
Ray nodded, feigning interest. He was ready to try the radio. Flicking the power switch, he froze. “Oh … I’ve got two friends out there,” he told her.
“Friends?”
“Yeah. They got hurt in a …” He paused, trying to decide how much he should disclose. “In a river accident.”
“Where are they?” she asked calmly. “I’ll have the enforcers go get them.”
“You mean those two horses?”
Farrell nodded and stepped out to page them: “Chang! Chung!”
Ray wasn’t sure this was a wise course of action. Chang and Chung, the Asian bookends, didn’t strike him as the search-and-rescue type. More like search and destroy.
The two men came jogging up, muscles rippling, heads poking into the tent.
“Where are they?” Farrell asked Ray.
“Back at the river. About fifty yards south of your Zodiacs. Beyond that ravine.”
“Ray has two friends fifty yards south of our boats,” she repeated slowly, as if the men required a special translation. “They’re hurt.” She turned to Ray. “How badly?”
“One can walk. The other needs help.”
“No problem,” Stubby grunted. They hurried away, discussing the mission in hushed tones.
Ray’s face screwed into an expression of concern.
“Don’t worry,” Farrell assured. “They’re the best.”
“At security,” Ray agreed. “But will they bring my buddies back in one piece?”
“I’m telling you, they’re good. They’re the reason we’re still here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we would have given up and gone home if Hunan hadn’t sent us Chang and Chung.”
“Hunan?”
“That’s who our grant’s from: Hunan Enterprises. It’s a Chinese conglomerate.”
“I thought this was a U-Dub thing.”
“It is,” Farrell said. “But Hunan is footing 95 percent of the bill. Anyway, when they found out we were having trouble, they sent the enforcers.”
“What sort of trouble were you having?” Ray wondered. Aside from an occasional bear, there was little out here to cause trouble. Then it dawned on him. “Headcase? The wacko downstream who grows marijuana?”
“Oh, you mean ZZ?” Farrell paused to laugh. It was lyrical, soothing: water falling from a high precipice into a placid pool. “He doesn’t bother us if we don’t bother him. You just have to keep your distance and steer clear of his little dope ranch.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Ray deadpanned.
“No, our problems have been coming from Red Wolf.”
“The mine Chang and Chung thought I worked for?”
She nodded, grimacing. Even with her features contorted, Farrell’s beauty seemed pure and undefiled. “They were giving us a hard time. Messing with the site. Stealing artifacts. They sabotaged our generator one night. They even took a few potshots at Mark when he was on his way to the village to meet the supply plane.”
“What does Red Wolf have against archaeology?”
“Nothing, per se. But this particular dig is a threat to their operation.”
“They’re mining zinc, right?” Ray asked.
Ray knew a little about the Red Dog. It was reported to be the largest zinc mine in the Western world. Still holding the radio mike, he tried to imagine a feud between a zinc producer and a university-sponsored excavation. “I don’t understand,” he finally admitted.
“Last year, Mark and I came up here by ourselves between quarters to scout possible dig sites for our summer fieldwork program,” Farrell began, straddling a folding chair. She wrapped her feet around the legs and leaned forward, face and chest uplifted. The shirt seemed ready to burst. Ray was suddenly overly warm.
“We found a few tools just north of Anaktuvuk Pass, pretty much by accident—which is the way science tends to work. ASTT stuff: part of a bone handle, a stone knife … So we decided to come back here in June with a crew for a four-week dig. The kids turned up a couple of other tools. Nothing earth-shattering. We were getting ready to pack up and head home, when one of the grad students literally stumbled onto a prehistoric caribou corral. She was heading out with a roll of TP to find a tree to squat behind and tripped on something. It turned out to be a boulder. She uncovered another, and another, until a V-pattern took shape. Apparently it was a trap that ancient hunters herded caribou into for slaughter. We dug up several carcasses at the point of the V.”
“Inukhuit,” Ray muttered. Literally translated it meant likenesses of men. The idea was to use rocks as scarecrows in a V formation. When the caribou showed up, women and children herded them into the V where the men waited in pits with weapons.
“That was just upstream from here. About a week later, I found this site. Same way. I was out hiking, and I stepped into a hole. Something cracked. In an hour, I was able to expose a bone pile. That was two months ago.” She paused to stretch her back, pushing her chest at Ray. “The going theory is that it was a hunting camp.”
Season of Death Page 12