Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  “Just where is this field site?” Claire interrupted with a bit more edge in her voice. She’d been out of touch and the sprawling Center for the Study of Evolution, which housed anthropology, sponsored many field projects.

  “I’ll get to that, but hear me out. This study is a big ticket for both Delamain and us. As you know, the mandate of Delamain is to promote the understanding of the relationship between humans and animals”—Claire knew that the Delamain spinster whose money funded the foundation had died without heirs, but for seventeen cats—“The project has to do with a new theory about the domestication of horses. It’s a big deal for them, and with the field season just beginning, they don’t want it to be leaderless.”

  “But I’m needed here,” Claire said, only partially succeeding in keeping a plaintive note out of her voice.

  “Actually, the trustees said that you’d so effectively set things up that—and I think I’m quoting you—‘The project could run itself.’”

  Fuck, thought Claire, as the tumblers fell into place on the surprise visit and the arched eyebrow.

  Sensing that he had the advantage, Friedl had plowed on. “I think it would be a good thing to do this, Claire. I know you did some work on domestication as a grad student, and if you’re going to get that full professorship in the anthropology department, don’t you think it would help if you actually did some research that directly related to humans?”

  The message was loud and clear: “Don’t rock the boat.”

  Claire wanted to say that her work was related to humans, but she knew she was trapped.

  “So, where?”

  There was silence.

  “Where, William? If I’m going to go there, you’re going to have to tell me at some point.”

  “Kazakhstan.”

  THE KAZAKH STEPPES

  3

  In the Quonset, Claire fretted with her dirty-blond hair and stared at her laptop as she turned her attention to the email that she had been dreading, a report to her funders that would—without laying blame—give them a sense of her first impressions of where the project stood.

  Claire was settling in. She’d been at the site for three weeks now. The research team had been standoffish and nervous at first. Claire had explained that the project had to be a high priority for both Rushmere and Delamain, as they had requested that she put aside her own work to make sure the research continued here. She’d also said that she had no ambitions to bigfoot onto their territory, take credit for their work, or change the direction of the project. She told them that she was just there as an administrator until Russell could return.

  The trouble was, Russell’s three years of exploration really hadn’t turned up much. Which was too bad, because she had been pleasantly surprised when she dug into the proposal and initial field reports. Russell had proposed to explore the origins of horse domestication in the Botai culture of northern Kazakhstan. The Botai and horses had been bound together sometime around fifty-five hundred years ago, when the relationship shifted from predator-prey to partnership. It would have helped, however, if, over the past three seasons, the researchers had subsequently found one horse bone dated more than fifty-five hundred years old to submit for DNA sampling, or any archaeological evidence at all that might have supported Russell’s thesis that domestication did not occur in Kazakhstan, but Mongolia, and had traveled West with nomads.

  Russell had been intrigued by new evidence that cats had domesticated humans—DNA evidence showed that domestic cats from the Middle East traveled into Asia, suggesting that rather than different peoples domesticating their local cats, the cats themselves had chosen to follow nomads and invaders eastward—he had wondered whether other animals, horses for instance, also had undergone a more complicated history of domestication.

  Claire now had plenty of time to bone up on the project, since she was confined by the weather to quarters on the harsh verge of the Kazakh Desert. A particularly sharp gust of wind rattled the Quonset and brought her thoughts back to her initial status report. Claire was about to take another stab at writing when she heard a knock at her door.

  She started to get up to answer when she remembered that she wasn’t really dressed. “Just a sec,” she called as she threw on a khaki shirt and pulled on a pair of shorts, wondering who in the world would be out in this storm. Most likely it was one of her research assistants. She prayed it wasn’t Tamerlan, the creepy minder from the government she had taken an instant dislike to when she had made the initial round of introductions.

  It wasn’t. She opened the door a crack to see a tall, rangy man she didn’t recognize, covered in dust and shielding his face from the stinging wind. “Dr. Knowland,” he said from behind his shielding arm, “I’m Rob Rebolet, head of security for Transteppe—you know, the mining company.”

  Mystified, Claire didn’t know what to say. “Uh-oh. Has one of the team taken a bulldozer for a joy ride? I promise I’ll make them return it,” she stammered.

  The man offered a small smile and said, “Maybe I could step in?”

  “Uh, sure.” Claire cracked the door so he could slip through along with a few pounds of windblown sand.

  Once inside, he remained standing. There was no place to sit except for Claire’s chair.

  “OK,” said Claire, all business. “What’s up? Something must have happened to cause the chief of security to trek forty miles in this weather.”

  The big man looked at his hands. “Well, that’s the thing …” He paused and changed directions. “I heard that the team here is researching horses, ancient horses, right?”

  Claire relaxed and nodded cautiously. She knew this drill. On any dig, someone, usually a tribesman, would show up with samples of what they were looking for, usually concocted in the previous few weeks. “You should know that I’m brand-new here. Russell, the project leader, got sick and had to be taken home.”

  “I’d heard about that. I think we supplied the medevac helicopter. I hope he’s OK.”

  Claire nodded her head. Nobody was hoping for Russell’s speedy recovery more than her. “We all do. Thanks. So what’s up?”

  “Anyway, in the lower quarter of the concession, which is basically desert, the wind uncovered something—bones.” Rob, sensing her skepticism, looked embarrassed. “The thing is, the bones were arrayed, they were big, but I don’t think they were horse bones.”

  Claire made an effort to sound interested. “Have you seen many horse bones?”

  “Some—my family works a ranch outside Prescott.”

  Claire realized that she was sounding like a jerk and changed her tone. “If they aren’t horse, what do you think they are?”

  “Don’t know. But they’re big.”

  “Big?” said Claire, distracted. “How big?”

  “Bigger ’n any horse bone I ever saw.”

  Claire was disappointed. The ancient horses she was looking for were much smaller than the present-day animals.

  Knowing now that he came from a ranching background, she said, “Cow?”

  Rob shook his head, “Seemed thicker, longer—would be a cow for the ages.”

  Claire pulled out the chair for her desk. “Please sit down.”

  4

  Not willing to sit while Claire stood, he launched into his tale.

  As Rob described the array the wind had uncovered, Claire tried to remember what other animals had inhabited the area during its prehistory. She came up blank. Then she remembered something he had said earlier.

  “You said they were arrayed. What do you mean by that?”

  “We thought that they looked like someone had laid them out on purpose.”

  The word we brought another thought to mind. “Have you reported this find to your boss?” She knew little about Kazakhstan, but she knew that mining companies never liked to interrupt operations or exploration for a dig.

  Once again Rob looked embarrassed. “Dr. Knowland, you’re putting me on the spot …” He trailed off. He looked directly at h
er. “You’re new here, but I’ll bet you know how things work in places like this?” She nodded. He looked at her. “Do you have a minder?”

  She nodded and grimaced as she thought of Tamerlan. “He wouldn’t call himself that, but yes.”

  Rob was expecting her answer. “We’ve got more. We’re a mining company. This country lives off oil and mining payments. Our concession is a multibillion-dollar project for chromium, lead, and manganese. The law requires a complete review if exploration uncovers a site of historical significance, and a complete review could slow down a project for a year or more—and also exposes the company to a whole new group of bureaucrats who could speed up the process for a price.

  “Then think about the larger context. The president made a huge bet that an oil concession in the Caspian would produce enough money that he could buy off the masses who’ve been promised a piece of the supposed riches. That oil is eight years overdue, and there’s no knowing when it will begin flowing. There have already been riots in the capital. So, knowing all that, what do you think the government mining ministry would do if they heard that a windstorm uncovered some bones that might be of historical significance?”

  Claire knew exactly what they’d do—either bury those bones so deep they would never be found, or, equally likely, some corrupt official would use them as leverage to extract more money from either the concession, the government, or both. What would not happen was a professional archaeological dig. “Won’t someone else see them?”

  “For sure, but maybe not for a while. The geologists have to finish their assessment before they decide whether, how, and when to enter this quadrant. That’ll take a few months.” Rob assumed an innocent look. “The bones have nothing to do with our work, and if someone took them, who’d know that they were gone?”

  Claire caught his drift. “What kind of strata were they buried in?

  Rob smiled. “That’s a question for a geologist, not me. There’s one you might want to meet—the guy who discovered the bones. He’s a Russian, Sergei Anachev. I can vouch for him, though he’s only been with us a year—he’s a good guy. He knew what would happen if our minders got wind of this, and he couldn’t come to you without drawing attention. That’s why he asked me to make contact—as head of security, I’m always on the go. Anyway, Sergei will help. He’s dying of curiosity. Frankly, so am I.”

  Claire was confused and conflicted. She was here for ancient horses, not to pursue the paleohistory of the Kazakh Plain. She remembered Friedl’s subtle warning to not rock the boat. But she was intrigued. “Tell me again what made Sergei think these bones were worth asking you to trek up here.”

  “Well, as I mentioned, they seemed too big to be horse. Sergei couldn’t think of any really big mammal that lived on the plain in historical times, so maybe they’re really old, but, the other thing was the fact that they seem to have been arranged. And the question occurred to Sergei—and to me, too, though I’m not qualified—that if they were really old, who would have been around to arrange them?”

  Good question! Claire decided then and there that she could hold off submitting her status report for a few weeks. She was excited and worried at the same time. She had told the team that she was not going to make any big changes, and she remembered her admonition to herself—“Don’t screw up!” Still, it would be dereliction of scientific duty not to follow up. Claire felt a fire stirring in her that had been absent in her solid but conventional research. If Rob and the Russian had found something really significant, she would kick herself the rest of her life if she let it go just to be safe. She was going to see where this went.

  She shook hands with the tall man standing by her desk. “Well, Mr. Rebolet, you’ve got me hooked.”

  After she let Rob out, Claire sat down in her chair and looked down. “OK, Lawrence, give it to me straight. Is he on the level?”

  The object of this question hopped up onto her makeshift desk and pushed his forehead into her shoulder. He was covered in dust, and Claire coughed as she tried to brush him off. She scratched him affectionately behind his ears. He’d come in as Rob had exited, and now the tomcat made himself comfortable on top of Claire’s papers, scattering a few to the floor.

  Claire looked at the animal affectionately. He was an orphaned sand cat, an endangered desert hunter of small mammals and birds, who had been found and brought to the camp as a kitten by one of the cooks. The cat had the run of the camp, but in the past few weeks he had taken a shine to Claire, who often sought his advice. “I agree,” she said to the cat after a moment, “he looks like he’d be a reliable supplier of cat food.”

  At the mention of food, Lawrence’s ears seemed to perk up (though she never could be sure). He looked her directly in the eye. “OK, OK,” said Claire, getting up. “Stop exercising mind control.” She picked up a can of cat food and popped the top. “I think you’ll like my new recipe,” she said, plopping the food into a dish. “I worked on it all day.”

  5

  By the fifth day of the windstorm, Claire was going stir-crazy. Her frustration was supercharged by her hunger to see the bones. She had some geologic maps of the region, but they did not cover the areas Rob had described. To keep from completely losing it, she took to spending more time at the mess Quonset. Other members of the team lingered as well, either catching up on paperwork or playing cards. She demurred when a couple of graduate students asked her if she wanted to join a game of Pictionary. The background chatter from the game—“Duck!” “Pterodactyl!” “Dracula!”—was enough to drive out the chill of isolation. Put aside the mummifying dryness and the heat and it was almost cozy. There was only one human voice she did not want to hear.

  And there it was.

  “Hello, Claire, what a nice surprise,” said the square-faced Kazakh with unreadable eyes, as though Claire might have been doing any number of things on this fine day in the middle of nowhere with the wind driving sand hard enough to strip the paint off a car. Unbidden, he sat down on the opposite side of the long mess table.

  “Tamerlan,” she said, looking up briefly from her reading, hoping that he would take the hint. Hints, however, were not something that the Kazakh official ever took. He sat there smiling, a little insolently, and waited as though he had all the time in the world. Sighing, Claire finally looked up. “Can I help you?”

  “Terrible about this weather, isn’t it? I hear it’s going to break, though.”

  At this Claire looked up, trying to mask the hope in her eyes.

  When she didn’t say anything, Tamerlan continued. “So what have you been doing to keep yourself occupied?”

  “Not very much … Paperwork.”

  “Ah, paperwork …” He was content to leave the sentence hanging.

  Claire shrugged. Tamerlan couldn’t know about Rob’s visit, could he? Yet Tamerlan never said or did anything casually. The last thing she wanted was to arouse suspicion. She stood up and gathered her papers. “Speaking of paperwork, I’d better get back to it.” She gave Tamerlan a bright smile. “I really hope you’re right that the weather’s going to break.”

  She’d almost escaped when she heard Tamerlan’s voice behind her. “Before you go back to your paperwork,” he said, “please indulge a request.”

  Claire stopped and turned around, almost succeeding in keeping a neutral smile on her face. “Of course.”

  “My nephew Sauat is a university student in Astana. He has gotten, how you say—the bug—for archaeology, and asked if he could spend some time on the dig. I promise he won’t get in the way.”

  At this point, the last thing Claire wanted was another set of eyes in the camp, but she noted that his second sentence indicated that her decision was a foregone conclusion. “I’m sure we can find him something to do.”

  As she left, Tamerlan’s smile faded.

  6

  Two days later, the wind had abated to the point where Claire could begin to execute the plan she and Rob had cooked up. She kept a running diary of the dig on he
r website, and they’d agreed that when the weather cleared, she would post an innocuous item about getting back to work. This would be a signal for a prearranged rendezvous the following day.

  They decided to use this means of communicating given the very real chance that they were both being monitored. Rob suggested they meet at a junction where an old caravan trail crossed a dried-up stream and then proceed into the desert quadrant of the mining concession. She figured that no one would miss her if she kept her absence to a few hours.

  She looked at her watch. Six a.m.—just before dawn. It was time. She quickly donned lightweight khaki pants and a shirt. She actually preferred US Army-issue desert khakis, but she didn’t want to look military in the unlikely event she encountered Kazakhs in the field. A scarf that could serve as a dust screen and a broad-brimmed hat completed the ensemble.

  After making sure the coast was clear, she scribbled a note saying that she would be back in the afternoon and stuck it on her door before she dashed out with her field pack of tools and day pack filled with water bottles. She quickly hopped in the beaten-up Land Cruiser and headed out, thankful that no one seemed to have seen her. Once clear of the camp, she headed south. The sun rose, and, as it peeked over the horizon, shooting lava-orange beams into the lapis-blue sky, a breeze immediately followed. The steppe could summon a wind from nothing.

  Twenty kilometers along the road, she started looking for the cairn and thornbush that marked the turnoff Rob had described, which would put her on the old caravan path that led to the stream crossing. The air was mercifully still here, and cool pockets of air, relics of the night, quickly disappeared as the sun rose. Dust billowed up behind the Land Cruiser, telling anyone for miles where she was. She reassured herself that there was no one near except for Rob and the geologist, Sergei, presumably waiting at the stream crossing. Still, she worried about the telltale dust.