Them Bones

Bessie II

They looked like a bunch of ants. They were doing several things at once with a minimum of frenzy. Picks and shovels rose, fell, ladled. Two workers were tossing dirt in the air over a fine wire mesh screen. Only Kincaid’s shoes and elbows showed out of the test trench.

Bessie coated the second horse’s skull with shellac. It had no bullet holes in it. There was such a tangle of bones in the mound that it was impossible to leave the topmost in situ and still find out anything. Bones of horses, all in a twisted pile, five, six, maybe more complete skeletons.

Bessie looked up at the large double mound with it rows of stakes. A small shiver went through her. She rubbed her arms. The air was hot and blue, with no seeming promise of rain.

The Suckatoncha Bayou was gray and flat through the brush. In the great flood of two years ago, thirty people had been drowned by its waters. Livestock, bloated and ruptured, had floated in it for weeks. Whole houses had been found fifty miles from their pilings. Water had come halfway up the bluff.

Under Huey ‘Kingfish’ Long, the state had set up the Suckatoncha Bayou Relief Project, a series of dams to hold back future floods. The first of the dams was ten miles away, and the land around the bayou was to be slowly covered during the next two years. The state Salvage Survey had mapped those archeological sites which would be flooded (and found a few new ones in the process). Now Bessie, Kincaid and five other teams were digging along the edges of the Bayou, trying to learn what they could before the waters covered them forever.

The Salvage Project had started with the understanding that there were three months left before the first of the mounds would be covered. That had been before spring rains caused the state water people to shut the dams ahead of schedule. The spillways ten miles up weren’t completed yet, so they had shut some farther downstream, starting the waters creeping upward.

Time and rain were the enemies now. If rainy weather set in, the waters would rise at a tremendous rate in a few days. They would also stop or slow down work on all the digs at the same time. All the salvage crews’ time would be spent trying to keep the opened mounds and village sites dry and intact.

There was a chance of rain that afternoon, the usual southern evening thunderstorms. The air was humid and thick though as yet there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Early morning had been no less busy. Kincaid had driven to Suckatoncha, used the town marshal’s telephone, and called the University. He’d talked to the Project Director and laid it on the line. He wanted to pull in two other teams, plus the office staff, photographers, artists, and curators, to the site.

That had been on the basis of the first equine skull.

While he was in town, Bessie had taken the second out of the test trench. Now Kincaid was back, submerged in the dig.

William brought her a few potsherds with Kincaid’s ink-scribbled location numerals on them. She recognized them immediately; Coles Creek red, white, and black rims. That would normally mean somewhere between 700 and 1500 a.d. No surprise there, except the upper date. That might explain the horses – not really, though. The first hadn’t been on the continent until the second or third decade, none known in this area until de Soto’s march north of here in 1540.

It was possible this segment of the Coles Creek culture could have lasted a few more decades, maybe until the middle of the century, still been viable when the Spanish came through.

What about the cartridge, though?

That was no Spanish musket ball, no arquebus load. Most of the conquistadors depended on crossbows for their main armaments until the mid–1500s anyway. Usually they only had ten or twelve firearms, plus a few small cannon, for each hundred soldiers. This was a modern brass cartridge.

There must be a modern intrusion. The soil was layered and undisturbed on each side of the test cut. They had cut a second trench in from the other end. It would meet the first trench slightly off center of the mound.

So far the soil there too was undisturbed, evenly layered, as Kincaid had said in his last note brought in with the shards.

Bessie left the sorting tent and went down the bluff to the dig. She stepped into the trench behind Kincaid. All she could see of him was his back.

‘How are the potsherds?’ she asked.

‘If this is a hoax,’ he said, dusting away with a small paint brush, ‘it’s a good one. Come down here.’

Bessie wedged herself down in the trench beside him. The smell of drying earth filled her nose, surrounded her, got in her clothes. She let her eyes go up from the floor of the trench, paved with horse bones, to where Kincaid pointed.

Embedded in the dirt, above the bones and skulls, were grave goods – weapons, pots, black mold where the wooden handles of axes had been. Each was broken, in one place on the projectile points, with a single hole through the clay pots, making them useless in everyday life.

But not the life beyond. The people who had made these mounds had broken the objects they placed in the graves with their dead, killing them as dead as the persons or animals buried there.

Bessie stood up. She brushed her hands on her jodhpurs, straightened a marker stick on the trench lip. Kincaid stood up too.

‘William! Washington?’

The two men put down their work and came over.

‘Yassuh?’

‘Put the number-two tarp over this mound, will you. Put spike markers in all the stick holes, but leave it just like it is. Maybe a support in the center of the trench. Stop the digging here. I want it just like this when the Director gets here.’

‘Can do,’ said William. ‘What about the other test trench?’

‘More horses?’

‘Two or three, maybe more.’

‘Grave goods?’

‘Yessir.’

‘What I expected. I knew you would have called if you found anything else unusual. We’ll finish this one as soon as the others get here.’

‘Once I got used to finding them horses, I was okay,’ said William. He wiped his hand across the stocking he wore over his hair while digging.

‘This is going to turn into the major dig. How are we for food?’

‘Fine for us. How many people coming?’

‘The other crews will have their own supplies. The office staff will come. I think they’ll bring the big tent.’

‘We can stretch it, I guess,’ said William. ‘We have to reprovision the end of next week anyway. Might have to move it up a few days.’

‘Well, let me know when the mound is secure. We can figure out what to do from there.’

Bessie walked beside Kincaid up the bluff to the sorting tent and sat down at the table. The first horse skull with the bullet hole in it stared at them like a three-eyed monster.

‘It’s not like you not to talk,’ said Kincaid, taking off his hat and lighting his pipe.

‘Well, this is where our reputations go on the line, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘I mean, there could be some explanation that makes some sense.’

‘I can see it now,’ said Kincaid, smiling. ‘Someone dug a hole, filled it with dead horses, shot them with a new rifle, put the cartridges in the pit, filled it up to the level of the horses, put in Coles Creek grave goods, finished off the mound and planted a tree on top of it.

‘And they did all this at least sixty years ago, when the first metal cartridges came into general use, so they could pull a good one on some poor damn fool university professors in the year of the Lord 1929.

‘That’s the obvious explanation,’ he finished.

‘Are we going to leave it like this until the Director gets here?’

‘Mound 2B anyway. As soon as William gets the tarp on, and I finish my pipe, let’s go start trenching 2A.’

Bessie walked to the open tent flap, watched the men covering as much of the small mound as they could. She heard the snick of Kincaid’s match, the puff of his pipe.

He was staring into the eyeholes of the horse skull as if they could tell him something.

She looked back at the large mound, which loomed over the other like a small fort. Her knees shook.

‘Damn,’ she said quietly.

Kincaid looked at her through his thick glasses. ‘Ditto,’ he said.