‘That’s way too big,’ said Jameson. ‘We’re going to have to decide whether we save Mound One or not. I say no.’
‘Bessie?’ asked Perch.
She looked at the far mound, totally typical, left unopened and alone with its grid markers. ‘We can’t take a chance on losing Two A and Two B,’ she said. ‘Oh, hell, what if it’s just as full of stuff as this one?’
‘Kincaid?’
‘Oh, hell with it. Put the dam here, just below Two A. Bring it back around to the bluff on each side, maybe dig drainage over here, if we can.’
Bessie looked at the grid map.
‘Dr. Perch, can we bring it out another ten feet, over here?’ She pointed past the eastnortheast shallow depression. ‘If we’ve got time, I want to dig here.’ She stabbed the map with her finger.
‘We won’t have time,’ said Jameson.
She told them about Basket and the flood legend.
They all looked at the shallow spots. ‘They could be nothing but burrow pits,’ Perch said. ‘That what you want to save?’
She had a moment of uncertainty. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Call up the crews,’ said Perch. ‘The three of you get down there, go straight in and down on the mound. Find out what happened here. I haven’t been out in the woods for a long time, but I still know how to make dams.’ They had the dam outlined and shovels started to fly.
In the platform of Mound Two B, they found the first of the human skeletons by midmorning.
It lay, feet outward, directly below the test trench. William found the feet, and called Kincaid over. Slowly they removed dirt from the bones, to the pelvis, the ribcage, the shoulders.
There was no skull. The neck ended abruptly.
Kincaid dug to the right and left.
‘Bessie,’ he said, ‘get the shellac and come in behind me and coat the skeleton. We’ll leave it in situ. It’s brittle. There wasn’t any covering; this skeleton was just lain on the original ground line and the mound raised over it.’
Bessie dolloped thick globs of shellac onto the paper-soft bones, then slowly spread it with a fine brush.
‘Look at this,’ said Kincaid.
The left arm of another skeleton lay exposed to the right of the first.
‘Right about there, I’d say,’ said Bessie, pointing to the left of the first skeleton she worked on, ‘and up a little.’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Kincaid. He began to dig where she had pointed. Soon he had the right arm bones of another skeleton exposed to view.
‘Jameson,’ he called softly.
Jameson came around from his work on the other side of the mound’s test trench. He had his hat off, but his eyes were bright like a squirrel’s. He smiled.
‘It’s a trophy mound, isn’t it?’ said Jameson.
‘I think so,’ said Kincaid. ‘I surely do think so. How many skulls have you found yet?’
‘None. They don’t have heads.’
They both looked up at the conical burial mound which sat atop the platform mound. It was untouched as yet, except for the two-foot profile cut.
‘I vote we go in there,’ said Bessie.
‘Get the photographer and artist down there on those skeletons,’ said Kincaid.
Thunder rumbled. ‘Shit!’ said Jameson.
THE BOX X
Smith’s Diary
I was talking with Colonel Spaulding in his bunker.
‘When I was a boy,’ he said, taking a book out of his personal locker, ‘this book was it.’ It was The Book of Mormon.
‘You were raised a Mormon?’
‘The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints,’ he said, almost automatically. ‘I still do that, listen to me. And I haven’t been to services in thirty years.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Well, you’ve probably never read it,’ he said. ‘Most people never have, never will. But parts of it keep coming back to me.
‘See, there are a couple of narratives within narratives. It took me a long time to realize that as a kid. The golden plates were supposedly found at Cumorah, but they also recapitulate earlier records also buried there, from an even earlier time.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, the earliest migration involved prophets who sailed from Jerusalem and came to America. They built great cities here, but fell to fighting among themselves. They divided into the Lamanites and the Jaredites. The Lamanites were punished, their skins turned red, and all their cities fell to waste and ruin.’
‘Those are the Indians?’
Spaulding laughed. ‘I know, sounds like the old Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, or lost Phoenicians, or Egyptians, doesn’t it? When I was a kid, I was hot on archeology. But I’ve forgotten most of it, like I thought I’d forgotten most of The Book of Mormon. Seems some stuck with me, though.’
‘It would be a lot easier if it were true,’ I said. ‘Maybe Arnstein can go speak with them?’
Spaulding laughed, a different tone. ‘From what I remember, those theories about lost Romans and such came about because the early white settlers who found the mounds and earthworks couldn’t believe the Indians had built them. The only Indians they knew were the ones still in the area, who hadn’t moved there in many cases until fifty years before the whites got there. The Indians didn’t know where the mounds came from, either. So the settlers thought they predated the Indians themselves. And were a much more advanced civilization than the Indians could have had.
‘So they searched around for examples of Old World civilizations who had ever used mounds and high fortifications. That was nearly everybody, of course – Welsh, Mongol, Roman, Egyptian, all of them came in for their turn as the original Mound-builders.’
‘These people we’re fighting are certainly better at warfare than we thought they would be,’ I said.
‘The old adage is that primitive doesn’t mean stupid,’ said Colonel Spaulding.
‘Shooting at us is one thing,’ I said. ‘But I think it was the radio business that really upset everybody.’
‘Well, we deserve it,’ said Spaulding, with an anger I didn’t know he had. ‘We’ve disrupted their lives. We killed them as surely as if we held weapons to their heads. They can’t understand we didn’t want it to happen.’ He went quiet, staring down at his desk.
‘We’ve seen enough killing. We’ve seen the whole world killed. Now we’re killing the past, too. None of us wanted this, least of all the Indians.’ He picked up The Book of Mormon again, opened it.
I stood up. ‘I’d better check the guard.’
‘Certainly, Marie,’ he said. ‘Send Putnam over here, will you?’
I saluted and left. Sometimes Spaulding was hard to figure out.
Leake X
‘Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, pompous in the grave.’
I never saw so much stuff traded in my life. Skins, furs, food, shells, art and pipes went into the ship, and out came beads, knives, tools, cloth, copper, and brass.
I helped as much as I could, going from one haggle to another. There seemed to be no set price for anything on either side. I kept busy, and watched the interaction of the merchants and the people of the village.