Them Bones

Bessie IV

The test trench, begun fifteen feet out, hit the large mound six feet off center to the left. William, Washington, and the diggers from Jameson’s team took the trench only to the original ground level before Kincaid sent them in toward the mound itself.

‘Do a one-foot profile, then on down,’ said Kincaid. ‘Bessie, make sure the grids stay marked. I don’t want to lose anything on this one.’

Jameson was fidgeting on the edge of the cut. He and Kincaid sent two of the diggers off to help unload the trucks, and helped with the digging to work off some of their nervous energy.

There were gathering clouds on the northern horizon. The day was becoming still and hot with a high hazy overcast. There was as yet no thunder and lightning to be seen even in the darker clouds.

Bessie kept running checks on the digging, drawing new profiles in her notebook, a cross section of the mound at one-foot intervals, ready to be filled in as they worked. She sketched quickly and surely, and had sixteen of them, numbered and in sequence, before the diggers had reached the center of the mound on their first one-foot cut.

Kincaid and Jameson waited until the workers had gone down off the mound’s crest to the ground level on the other side. Then they lay on their sides, one to left and one to right, crawling the entire length of the cut from one end to the other, staring at opposite sides. They looked like they were playing a child’s game, or were two thirsty men crawling across the desert in a newspaper cartoon.

The workers leaned on their shovels, talked, sweated and joked. Somebody said something really rich and they broke into hoots of laughter. Bessie jerked her head around at the sound.

Kincaid and Jameson were oblivious. They finished their crawl, careful of the grid markers, and came to their feet, brushing dirt from their hands and clothing.

They had a hurried consultation, then went to the workers. The diggers went back around to the side they had begun the trench on. Once again they started a slow careful cut, a yard wide, another foot deep, from the edge of the mound, over the top, to the far side, carrying the dirt carefully over to the sifting screens as they worked, where others went through it.

Bessie knew it had probably taken the Coles Creek people who built these mounds at least a month to get them to this size, perhaps longer. They had carried basketfuls, skinfuls of dirt at a time, to raise it. The dirt had been dug with hoes made of the shoulder-blades of animals strapped to handles, or with shells, even scooped up by hand. Making a mound took a long time; they stood for hundreds, even thousands of years. They could be taken apart in a few days by skilled workers, or as had happened in a few disastrous cases, in a few minutes by treasure seekers with the use of grader blades and dynamite.

William and Washington could dig a trench straight as a ruler, never varying the depth by more than an inch or two, pretty quickly. Kincaid said William had azimuths for eyes. There were a couple more, including a white man named Griggs, on Jameson’s team, who were good, and all could do fine work under William’s directions.

The second one-foot cut went faster than the first, since they had already gone through the roots of the ground cover in the first foot. The diggers stopped, and once more Kincaid and Jameson made their long crawls, this time more slowly, and from the ends opposite to where they had started the time before. They met near the top of the mound.

‘How you doing?’ asked Kincaid.

They both laughed for a few minutes, then continued on. One of the guys from up on the bluff lugged a new watercan down, passing the dipper around among the workers who lay resting in the heat.

Kincaid finished, got up, took a dipperful of water and drank it down.

Jameson came around the mound, pulled a collapsible metal cap from his shirt pocket, opened it, dipped it in the watercan and took a sip.

‘Bessie, come down here,’ said Kincaid.

The three put their heads together.

‘There’s no sign of an intrusion, on either of the sides. Either that, or the whole top has been taken off, which I doubt. We’re going to assume, from now on, and until we find differently, that the mound is original.’

‘And it’s possible,’ said Jameson, ‘that this may have been a religious platform, and has nothing in it. And that we’d be wasting our time on these one-foot profiles.’

‘Then what’s next?’ asked Bessie.

‘Right straight through?’ asked Kincaid.

Jameson nodded. They gave the instructions to William.

The camp shifted gears again, becoming not faster, but slower, smoother, as though it had more traction. Bessie could feel it. People moved more slowly but wasted no time. Things were put in order for the long haul, watercans appeared, a wheelbarrow line started, up to the sifting screens, where miniature mounds were starting.

Bessie sketched the left profile of the two-foot cut. There were the usual rounded forms where baskets of earth had been dumped and tamped, but Jameson and Kincaid were right – no intrusions. Only the differences in individual earthloads showed, and that one kind had been used for the lower and another for the upper, conical mound. Either the smaller mound had been built at a different, later time than the platform, or they had been built specifically of two kinds of earth – not unknown, but rare.

Everything about these mounds is uncommon, she thought. The location – below the bluff rather than on it – the shape, two connected mounds, and the strange platform and cone shape of the larger one – and their composition: aside from the horse bones, and the fact that only horse bones were in the smaller mound, there were also the two kinds of earth making up the larger one.

The labourers were in the test trench now. They were careful, but their shovels bit deep, carving into the mystery, throwing the layers of the past out into the waiting wheelbarrows.

Thunder rumbled.

A wind of relief blew across the digs, making the tents on the bluff crackle and flap.