Them Bones

Bessie XI

‘That’s all we know,’ said Jameson to Captain Thompson.

Thompson was tall, thin, with a small clipped mustache. He wore his dress uniform, and his issue raincoat dripped onto the sorting tent ground cover.

‘The Navy and the Department of the Treasury searches have all been just like ours,’ he said. ‘A few of the names match, but everything else is wrong, the ranks, dates of birth. May I see the things now?’

‘Certainly,’ said Jameson. He opened the oiled rag on the table. ‘Use these tongs. Here’s the magnifying glass.’

It was quiet in the tent except for the constant spatter of rain on the tent roof.

‘Do you know what these are?’ asked Thompson.

‘Pieces of metal with names on them.’

‘No, I mean, the tags themselves. Dog tags. They’re like the ones the French and British used in the Great War. There’s a move afoot to get us to adopt them in times of war. They wore them around their necks. When a body is found, the finder is supposed to put the tags between the incisors of the dead person, and to wedge them in with their rifle butts.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Bessie.

‘Some bodies lie on the battlefields for months, or years. You’d know that metal wedged in the teeth would be about the last thing to disappear. Where are the inscriptions?’

‘Hold them at a slant. They’re pretty well obliterated by rust.’

‘Got it. Your eyes are a lot better than mine. You got the seventy-five inscriptions off these?’

‘There are eighty-two of the tags,’ said Bessie.

Thompson read: Putnam, Robert NMI RAO 431–31–1616 DOB 06–01–73 Catholic.

‘No middle initial. Officer rank. The numbers aren’t right. They’re not ours. We use seven digits. The dates of birth are what’s really throwing us. Most of these were from the ’seventies and ’eighties. We’ve never used identification tags like these. I went through all the personnel orders on the train, all the way back, trying to find anywhere or anytime these could have been issued. Nothing, nowhere. And of course the latter parts of the century before last are out of the question.’

‘So you can’t explain it any better than we can?’

‘I don’t even know what I’m looking for. How exactly were these found?’

Jameson sighed. ‘Bessie’ll take you down there in a few minutes, as soon as we find you some high rubber boots. Kincaid’s still down there with Perch and the photographers.

‘There’s a conical mound atop a platform mound. That’s unusual. Connected to the bottom of the platform mound is another mound, filled with the skeletons of horses which seem to have been shot to death.

‘The bottom platform mound is filled with headless skeletons. There are probably as many skeletons as there are tags, maybe more. They’re lying feet outward, and fill up the whole mound. It is, we decided, what’s usually called a trophy mound.’

‘That usually indicates a great victory of some kind,’ said Bessie. ‘What usually happened was that when a leader suffered a great victory, he had all his enemies killed, beheaded and buried in one place. This is one of the largest of those ever found.’

‘What happened to the heads?’

‘The chief usually kept them as trophies as long as he lived.’

‘Pretty outré.’

‘In this case,’ said Jameson, ‘they buried their great leader on top of his own trophy mound.’

‘You’re sure it’s the same Indian?’

Bessie looked at Jameson. ‘Pretty sure. One, the connection between the mound full of horses and the one with the human skeletons. On top of the one with the skeletons, they build another mound, using different soil. The bottom of that upper mound was paved with human skulls, lots of them. Atop them was a log tomb, with an upright burial. They usually reserved that for their royalty. The burial was filled with grave goods. Some of them were anomalous.’

‘What?’

‘They shouldn’t have been there. Anyway, around the upright skeleton was a necklace, with these identification tags on the necklace.’

‘That makes you sure it was him?’

‘Nothing makes us sure of anything,’ said Jameson. ‘Remember I told you the horses had been shot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, the chief buried in the upright position had a gunshot wound in the elbow. The wound had healed badly. It looks as if the person lived another twenty years after the injury. Why else would they bury you with a bunch of heads, on top of a mound of headless skeletons, unless those heads belonged to you?’

‘Let me get this right. Those people were killed with firearms, and the ID tags give their birth dates as in the ’seventies and ’eighties? I thought all the Indians were run out by Andy Jackson in the 1830s?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out, Captain. Either we’re dealing with a remarkable hoax, and if we are, why don’t the numbers match like you say, or else we’re left with the only conclusion we have – that the people who built these mounds died out around the year 1500 a.d.’

‘Jesus Christ on a crutch!’ said Thompson.