Randy White - Ten thousand isles

There were raccoon skeletons in one of the cisterns. From the second, a rat the size of a dachshund flushed ahead of us while a red-shouldered hawk screamed overhead.

There were key lime trees flowered with ivory-yellow fruit; an avocado tree, a knarled grove of sour oranges, papaya on delicate, tuberous trunks, and a huge tamarind tree, too.

Survival food in a difficult land.

"Dorothy understood what all of these idiot treasure hunters never seem to realize. There are hundreds of stories about pirates burying treasure in this mound or that mound, and they are all absolute bull crap. There were no pirates in this area. Ever. You want to say to these dopes, 'Hey, dumbo, these islands weren't even on the trade routes, so what were the pirates going to steal? Oysters? Use your darn brain!"

I smiled at her indignation. The woman had a temper.

"Something else I think Dorothy understood was that the Calusa feared their dead. The more powerful the person, the more dangerous the spirit. The Calusa, to protect themselves from the dead, used water as a barrier."

I said, "You mean they floated the bodies out on funeral rafts?"

"No. What they did was… well, first you need to know that spirits can't cross water. That's an old, old belief. So they built moats around the burial areas. Back in archaic times, they actually buried individuals under water. Staked the bodies down or buried them in a low area and flooded it. There are water burials at Little Salt Spring near Sarasota; lots of places. You ever hear of the Windover site in Brevard? Same underwater burial system.

"Anyway, when it comes to power people, water's the key. People they feared, it made sense to bury them in water. Keep all those evil qualities from escaping. That's what I think, anyway. Which is one reason there's nothing to find in the mounds."

I mentioned that Tomlinson had me read something about a chief named Tocayo.

"Oh yeah, Tocayo was one of the really bad ones. According to the Jesuits, anyway. Tocayo lived right where we're standing now, or maybe Marco, we're not sure."

"You trust those accounts?"

"From the missionaries? Absolutely not. They were biased and self-serving hypocrites who were cruel as heck. But it's all we've got. What they wrote about Tocayo, though, is pretty consistent and comes from more than one source. For starters, they say that he made a sport of raping his own daughters; seemed to prefer sodomy. He cannibalized children because they were so tender. Columbus, on his second voyage, described how the Caribs would castrate boys because they tasted better when they got older. Tocayo supposedly did the same thing; that's why I think he was a Carib."

Nora had stopped at the base of the mound. She was peering down into the gloom of a mangrove swamp, black muck and shadows, comparing what she saw with the xeroxed map she carried. She said, "Here we are."

Meaning Dorothy's dig site.

"It all looks the same to me."

"Yeah. What we have to find is a real small area. What used to be a water court, but the shape is tough to see because of the mangroves. Even says in the notes that it's hard to find. What happened was, back when the state and developers drained the Everglades, it emptied some of the ancient lakes. The Calusa wouldn't have liked that. Expose the water burials, let all those evil spirits loose."

We'd gone so quickly from sunlight to shadow, that my eyes were having difficulty adjusting. I saw what looked to be a shallow creek bed, black muck spiked with mangrove roots. Lots of low brush and vines and some kind of fern growing up. There were shell inclines on each side: the basework of more mounds.

The creek bed looked exactly like a dozen other mucky areas we'd crossed, and Nora voiced the same question that was in my mind: "How could Dorothy have known? Out of all the places on this island, how could she have possibly known to dig here?"

I remembered Tomlinson saying, She didn'tfind things. Artifacts called to her…

Which made as little sense as the proposition that a teenage girl had found this place at random.

As we maneuvered through mangroves around the base of the mound, Nora stopped so abruptly that I nearly banged into her from behind. Heard her say, "Oh my God. Oh my God! You were right."

I said, "About what?" But then I saw what she meant.

Treasure hunters had found the place, too.

With all the equipment the looters had ferried out, the site looked more like a small construction area. It looked as if it were being cleared and plumbed for a sewage system and parking garage in preparation for condos.

Nora was moving from pit to pit, shaking her head. "These kind of people, they have no respect. It's ruined. They have absolutely destroyed the entire site."

Yes, they had.

This was a high-tech operation. A lot of time and expensive equipage had been invested.

There was a golf cart-sized backhoe with a metal cage over the driver's seat and controls. The machine was painted blue on white with "Nokonia MX" in big black letters on the side. There were a couple of shovels propped against it.

The backhoe had been used to dig a hole as large as the foundation of an apartment complex. They'd squared it off sloppily and dug down to sea level. The bottom was black muck, and water had seeped in, creating puddles.

Beside the pit was a troughlike flume made of plywood and aluminum. The flume was elevated shoulder-high at one end, was terminated by a screen sieve at the lower end. Near the high end of the flume was a stocky Honda generator and a portable pump with a fire department-sized hose running from it.

It is an old process; the same miners once used it to find gold: dump a bunch of mud in a sluice, jet some water, then watch the screen where the heaviest material separates naturally from the sludge.

It was an obvious and effective little operation. Use the backhoe to load the flume. Use the pump to hose the mud down the gutter. Use the shovels to clear the residual sludge while someone searched the filtering screen for artifacts.

"Know what I think we should do?" I could tell she was furious. Her movements had quickened; she couldn't stand still.

I said, "This sort of thing's against the law, correct?"

She was pacing now, looking at the generator, looking at the little backhoe. "Goddamn right it's against the law! A thing called the National Antiquities Act!"

Profanity. The first time I'd heard her use it. I could tell she was unaccustomed to forming the words. They came out awkwardly; each syllable enunciated with the precision of a novice attempting to speak a foreign language.

"The goddamn son-of-a-bitches! They're treating history like it's

… like it's a piece of crappy junkyard!"

I took pains not to show that I was amused.

"Calm down, take a few slow breaths."

"It makes me want to vomit what they're doing here!"

"I know. I don't blame you. But there's something about this that doesn't make any sense at all."

"Goddamn right it doesn't make any sense."

"Now wait. Listen to what I'm saying. I'm talking about all this equipment. Think about it. I expected to find signs of fresh digging, sure, but nothing like this. Someone's going to risk all this equipment to find a few artifacts? To get this gear out here, they had to use a barge. People would have seen them bring it ashore. We're only a quarter mile from Marco. Sound travels over water. People would hear them. In other words, this is more like a public operation. I think they've probably got permits."

"It's illegal, I'm telling you. I don't care if they used a helicopter to chopper it out. You can't intentionally destroy an entire…" She stopped for a moment. 'Jesus, you doubt what they're doing out here? Look at this goddamn stuff. You know what this is?" She kicked the side of a five-gallon can. I had to stoop to read the label. Carbowax.