June 28
Found an otter charm, probably off a visor. Man, did the old folks know how to carve! There is more art in an Aleut visor than there is in a '57 Chevy. Says a lot about a people when they could make something so necessary and so functional so beautiful as well.
July 1
A family from Icky came down the river today in skiffs. Looked like they were going fishing. Said they were descendants of the people who lived on this bluff. Lynny pissed off the father when he said this was now Park Service land and they were trespassing. Daughter sure was pretty. Tried to talk to her but Mom wasn't having any. Maybe I'll look her up, if Lynny ever gives me any time off. Hasn't happened yet.
July 6
Uncovered a storyknife today. Made of bone, old enough for the carving to be worn smooth. Lynny's all torqued because it's too far east.
July 9
There's a dump site of some kind a mile east from camp. Lynny's not interested in anything but what we can find here. Which means what he can find to support his thesis. Academics.
The one-word condemnation made Liam smile. He'd been to graduate school himself. The truth was that Nelson, if he was a graduate student, would eventually have evolved into an academic himself, scrambling to defend his own thesis from the attacks of competitors. The fight for an original thesis was bellicose and bloody, especially since the advent of offset printing. If you wanted tenure, you had to publish. If you wanted to publish, you needed a thesis topic sexy enough to satisfy your committee and attract a publisher. Liam had suffered through his share of required texts, and his opinion was that academic writers who could get through a hundred thousand words without once using the phrase “As we shall see” were deserving of the Nobel Prize in literature, not to mention the grateful adulation of advanced students everywhere. But then, not everyone could be Barbara Tuchman. Liam was still mad at her for dying.
He flipped to the last page of the journal, which was dated the previous Saturday.
July 25
Lynny went to town yesterday, like always. He told me to work on three-C but I poked around the dump site instead. Hate to admit it but I think it's modern. Feeling sick. Couldn't eat. Don't know how I could have picked up a bug out here. Lynny must have brought one back from town.
Poor Nelson. The sick and the dead, he thought irrepressibly. He chastised himself for the irreverence, and pocketed the journal to read through completely later. Frank Petla had seemed familiar with the village site and the surrounding area; perhaps he'd made a habit of dropping in to see what he could scrounge in the way of marketable artifacts. Perhaps that habit had been witnessed by Don Nelson. Perhaps Nelson had noted it down in his journal. The district prosecutor, a short, bellicose redhead of Irish descent who advocated the return of the death penalty, would like that. The jury would positively love it.
He picked through the rest of the detritus, not finding much. There were a lot of tools, and six large three-ring binders labeled “Costumes,” “Weapons,” “Utensils,” “Hunting,” “Crafts,” “ Religion.” They were filled with a cramped, deliberate handwriting totally unlike Nelson's sprawling penmanship, by which Liam deduced that they were McLynn's notebooks. They included penciled drawings of various artifacts of such precision and delicacy that Liam reluctantly revised his opinion of McLynn's talents up a notch.
There wasn't much else. Some clothes that smelled as if they hadn't been washed in weeks, some recreational reading featuring such diverse characters as Emma Woodhouse, Richard Sharpe and Job Napoleon Salk. There was a Walkman with a dozen tapes, including the Beastie Boys, Loreena McKennitt, Fastball and theTitanicsoundtrack. Liam was not impressed, but then under Bill's tutelage he was learning to appreciate Jimmy Buffett. Plowing straight ahead come what may. That's me, Liam thought, the cowboy in the jungle.
He poked around some more, but there wasn't much else to find. He was reluctant to leave, though, and not just because Colonel Charles Bradley Campbell was waiting for him at the other end. Liam had never been on the site of an archaeological dig before and he admitted to some curiosity. All the neat little squares with all their neat little layers being revealed one at a time. There were half a dozen brushes of various sizes and kinds of bristles lying around; Liam realized that the brushes must be what were used to reveal the next layer down, and marveled at the patience the science required. It was probably enormously taxing physically as welclass="underline" long hours of crouching over a specific section of dirt, moving the bristles patiently back and forth, back and forth. There was a square sieve made of wire mesh in a wooden frame; they must strain the dirt before they tossed it so they didn't miss any pieces, however tiny. Kind of like casework, Liam thought. Only in casework he was the sieve.
It was by now late afternoon, and the sun still beat on the outside of the tent, raising the interior temperature to what felt like ninety degrees. Flies buzzed over the patch of dried blood, but they didn't sound very enthusiastic about it. During the excavation process the flaps would probably have to remain closed to keep the bugs out, so there would be little or no circulation. Liam preferred a job that kept him outside much of the time, even if it meant that he must occasionally suffer the slings and arrows- not to mention the knives and bullets-of outrageous citizenry. But he'd take fresh air with a bullet over crouching in an old grave in a closed tent any day.
He went back outside and drew in a breath of that fresh air. It tasted good. It was a beautiful view, too, he thought, without knowing it joining Wy in her admiration of the fall of ground from in front of the bluff to the river below, the scattering of glittering lakes and streams, the distant surface of the bay gleaming blue in the sun. Yes, the old ones had known what they were doing when they built here. A defensible position, an accessible escape route, food, water and a vista that went on forever. He wondered what they had thought about the edge of the ocean where it vanished over the horizon. Did they fear it? Yearn after it? Was it where they ascended to heaven? Was it where they placed their gods' homes?
He turned and looked at the dig, the two tents, walls flapping in the afternoon breeze. The prospect seemed somehow forlorn, almost lonely, and a fragment of verse from his favorite poet came to his mind, describing another forsaken graveyard nobody visited. So sure of death was this place, too, from which living men shrank, as if denying a place of death denied your own. Liam knew better.
So did Don Nelson, now.
A mile from the dig he found the dump Nelson had referred to in his journal and, glad to delay the inevitable, stopped the fourwheeler. It was a mound of dirt fifty feet across, and some of it had been there long enough for the grass to sprout. There was even some Alaska cotton, white tufted blooms waving in the breeze, and some dwarf fireweed, although those two hardy plants would probably sprout before the lava cooled off after a volcanic eruption. Over the other, fresher dirt, there were marks of some tracked vehicle, a small bulldozer maybe, or a backhoe. Liam walked all the way around the mound, and found a hole dug in the far side, away from the dig. He wondered if Don Nelson had been digging there. He kicked at the sides of the hole, and the clods came away easily, not yet hardened into place by the passage of time. He didn't see anything but dirt and more dirt, so he climbed back on the four-wheeler.
It took over an hour to get to the Air Force base, and by the end of the journey Liam was heartily sick of trying to keep the four-wheeler upright. There was nothing intrinsically unstable in the design-handlebars, a seat and a freight rack equally balanced over four wheels-but for some reason it threw his balance off. The only time he'd been on the direct path to the base was when he'd been crossing it, and he'd had to get out and push his way through the mud three times, which didn't improve his frame of mind. The knowledge that he was going to face his father for the first time in over three years with a stained uniform and muddy footgear soured his mood even further.