"Hold it,” he said sharply.
They stopped. “What, what's the matter?” Russ said with the tone of someone who expected to get blamed for it, whatever it was.
Gideon pointed toward the ground at the base of the boulder. “That's a human skull. Part of it, anyway."
It took the others a few seconds to locate it.
"That?" Russ said, his eyes popping. “I saw that before, when we put the tools down. I thought it was, you know, some kind of upside-down crab shell. That thing's a piece of somebody's head?"
His surprise was understandable. It was half imbedded in the soil, a stone-gray, slightly concave disk about five inches in diameter, thickly caked with dirt over much of its surface, rough-edged, and furrowed with deep, branching grooves. And it was thoroughly beaten up, looking every bit as if it had spent thirty years or so grinding along in a glacier. It lay no more than a dozen feet from where Russ had found the glasses.
Gideon knelt to have a closer look, rewetting his knees but not noticing this time. “It's a parieto-tempero-occipital fragment,” he said.
"No,” Owen murmured. “You're kidding me."
"The right side of the cranium,” Gideon explained, and used his hand to trace the area on himself. “From a little in front of the auditory meatus-the ear hole-to the occipital protuberance at the back of the head, and about halfway up the cranial vault."
"Those grooves,” Frannie said. She was leaning intently over, hands on her knees, her dark face taut with interest. “What are they?"
"Those are channels for blood vessels."
"Blood vessels?” She seemed confused.
"The veins and arteries that supply the brain.” He looked up at her. “This is the inside of the skull we're looking at."
"Oh.” She grimaced but kept her place.
They all looked at him, waiting, he supposed, for some Skeleton Detective wizardry.
"There's not much to be told from the inside,” he said. “I'll need to turn it over."
They waited. Gideon put a finger against one edge and pushed gingerly. The fragment didn't move.
"Stuck,” he said. “I don't want to push too hard. The bone seems sturdy enough, but it might be wet through and I don't want to take any chances. We better dig it up with the soil it's on. I can get it out later."
With a trowel he quickly scooped out a foot-wide trench around the fragment, then used one of the spades to undercut the central pedestal of gravelly dirt and lift it out, parieto-tempero-occipital fragment and all.
"Damn,” Owen said, “I forgot to bring a box."
"We can carry it down to the boat right on the spade,” Gideon said.
Russ reached for it. “I'll do it!"
Gideon looked at him. "Carefully."
"You bet!” Holding his breath, Russ took the spade from Gideon and held it stiffly in front of him, moving erectly downhill with exquisite care.
Seen from the Spirit of Adventure they must have seemed an odd procession: four people in a row, marching slowly down the barren slope, led by a uniformed giant gravely bearing something before him like a treasure on a salver. Later Julie would say that the scene had started her humming the triumphal march from Aida.
Chapter 6
The question is,” Bill Bianco said, holding up a liter-and-a-half plastic bottle of Jim Beam at the front of the passenger cabin, “will Chief Park Ranger Owen Parker over there agree to forget about it if I break the rules and pour us all a little something to warm us up? Or will he turn us in?"
"Why, what bottle is that, Bill?” Owen asked mildly, to a chorus of cheers.
Gideon had reboarded the Spirit of Adventure to find Julie and her classmates almost as cold-looking and bedraggled after their session on Margerie Glacier as he was after Tirku. He had gotten a mutually warming hug from her, downed a cup of hot chocolate, and just begun to unthaw when Bill broke out the bourbon. And very welcome it looked.
The instructor moved slowly along the aisle, pouring a couple of fingers of the amber liquid into the plastic cups that were held out to him. With Julie, Gideon went to the rear and topped off their cups from the hot-water urn.
Julie gestured at the galley. “I bet I can find us some lemon in here."
Gideon went with her. Russ had put the skull fragment and its bed of earth on the galley's counter, carefully setting it on the sliced-off lid of a Del Monte ketchup carton. (Gideon was going to have to write a letter of appreciation to Del Monte if this kept up.) In the warmth of the boat's interior, the bone seemed drier, less fragile. He was anxious to have a look at the outer side, the side pressed into the earth, where any potentially useful information was likely to be, but it didn't pay to take chances with it. What was the rush? His tool kit had probably arrived at the lodge during the day, and this evening he could take whatever time was needed to free the skull from its context. It always paid to do it right.
But leaving Gideon Oliver with an unexamined skull fragment was like handing a four-year-old a candy bar and telling him to leave it alone until after dinner; it wasn't realistic to hope for too much. He poked it with his finger. It felt solid enough. With a fingernail he scraped at a little clotted black dirt. It came away without taking any of the bone with it. He scraped some more.
"Found one,” Julie announced. “Some cinnamon too.” She got a kitchen knife from a rack, set the lemon on the counter next to him, and sliced out a couple of wedges.
Gideon glanced up from the piece of skull. “I'm not sure the health department would approve of this setup."
"I'm not sure I do,” she said with a sidewise glance at the silvery gray bone. She squeezed the wedges into their cups, then dropped them into the hot liquid while Gideon rubbed away some more dried mud. “Want some sugar?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Look at this."
"At what? That little clump of dirt in the middle?"
"That little clump of dirt is plugging a hole, Julie. See? You can just make out the margin over here."
"Oh boy, a hole,” she said. “Here we go again.” She set down her cup. “What's so strange-this is not an argument, okay?-but what's so strange about a hole in a skull that's been through an avalanche, followed by twenty-nine years of tumbling along inside a glacier?” She gestured at the fragment. “The skull itself's been smashed to pieces. Why shouldn't it have a few holes in it?"
"Well, you have a point.” He sipped at the toddy. “Mm, perfect.” The sharp, lemony fumes seemed to drift up, warm and pungent, behind his eyes, then fan out to heat his throat and shoulders. “All the same, I'd sure like to get this thing out of the dirt and see the other side."
He got three fingertips around the occipital margin where the bone was thickest and tugged lightly. Nothing happened. He held his breath and tugged marginally harder. The bone popped cleanly and satisfyingly out of the dirt.
"Ah,” he said.
Owen Parker put his head through the doorless entry. “Oh-ho, I figured that's what you'd be doing back here. Finding out anything?” He came in, bourbon in hand.
"I don't know yet. You're just in time to see. Grab a paper towel and put it on the counter, will you?"
With Owen and Julie watching closely at either side, Gideon turned the fragment carefully over, brushed away most of the clinging dirt, and set it on the towel, outer side up. The hole was still filled and mostly hidden, plugged by its clod of dried mud. He pushed cautiously at the dirt. It didn't budge.
If this hole was what his gut-or rather his soundly based but intuitive assessment-told him it was, it wouldn't pay to take chances with it. Preserving the margins would be important.
"You think there might be something thin and sharp in one of those drawers?” he asked. “A skewer, maybe?"
Julie rummaged until she found a seafood fork with a narrow, probe-like end, and Gideon began to push gently at the clod.