David Drake: Balefires

The mound was built on the north end of the ridge. That part had never been opened as a field because the soil was too thinly spread above the bedrock. The mound was oval, about fifteen feet long on the east-west axis and three or four feet high. Though small, it was clearly artificial, a welt of earth on the smooth table of the ridge. Kernes' trench was in the center of the south side, halfway in and down to the level of the surrounding soil. Deehalter was examining the digging when the jeep heaved itself up behind him and was cut off again.

"We just kept hitting rocks," the smaller man explained. "We didn't get near as far as I'd figured before we started."

Deehalter squatted on his haunches and poked into the excavation with a finger like a corncob. "You didn't hit rocks," he said, "you hit a rock. One god-dam slab. There's no way we're going to clear that dirt off it without a week of work or renting a bulldozer. And even if we cleared downto the rock, that slab's a foot thick and must weigh tons. We're just wasting our time here-or we would be if we didn't go on back right now."

Kernes swore. "We could hook a chain to the Allis-" he began.

Deehalter cut him off. "We'd have to get the dirt off the top first, and that'd take all goddam summer. This was a bad idea to start, and it got worse quick. Come on, let's go back." He straightened.

"What about dynamite?" blurted Kernes.

Deehalter stared at his brother-in-law. The smaller man would not meet his gaze but continued, "There's still a stick under the seat from when you blew up the beaver dam. We could use it."

"Kernes," Deehalter said, "you're so afraid of that dynamite that you'd rather leave it in the jeep than touch it to get it out. Besides, it'll blow the shit out of anything under that slab-if there is anything and the slab's not flat on bedrock all the way across. What're you trying to prove?"

Kernes' red face grew even brighter with embarrassment, oranger."Look," he said, "I'm gonna get into this goddam thing if I got to hire a contractor. I said I would and I will. You don't want to help, that's your goddam business."

Deehalter eyed him a moment longer. "Oh, I'll do my part," he said. He gestured to the pick and added, "You see if you can cut a slot an inch deep and maybe eight inches long in the seam between the top slab and the bedrock. I'll get the dynamite ready." He grinned. "Unless you want to do that instead?"

Kernes' only response was to heft the tool with a choked grip and begin chopping at the stone.

Deehalter flipped the jeep's seat forward and lifted out the corrugated cardboard box beneath it. There was, as Kernes had said, still one stick of dynamite left along with a roll of wire and a smaller box of blasting caps. The explosive terrified Kernes in the way snakes or spiders do other men. Deehalter had deliberately refused to take the stick out of the jeep despite his brother-in-law's frequent requests. Finally Kernes had ceased to mention it-until now. Kernes was so stubbornly determined to have an Indian skull that he had overridden his fear of the explosive. It occurred to Deehalter that he was doing the same thing himself with his fear of the mound.

The big farmer leaned against the jeep as he dug a fuze pocket in the dynamite with a pencil stub. Kernes was chipping the soft rock effectively, even in the confined space. "Not too wide," Deehalter warned as he twisted the leads from the blasting cap onto the extension wire.

He didn't like what they were doing. Shapes from long-ago nightmares were hovering over his mind, unclear but no less unpleasant for that. He'd never heard of Indians using stone in their mounds, and that bothered him too. Still, why not? The Mississippi Basin was rich in soft yellow limestone, already layered by its floodings and strandings in the shallow seas of its deposition. So it wasn't the stone or anything else rational which was eating at Deehalter; it was just that something felt cold and very wrong inside him.

"That enough, Dee?" Kernes asked, panting. His sleeveless undershirt was gray with sweat.

Deehalter leaned forward."It'll do," he acknowledged. Kernes was shrinking back from the explosive in Deehalter's hand."Run the jeep over the crest of the ridge and get the hood open. There's enough wire to reach to there."

While his brother-in-law scrambled to obey, Deehalter knelt in the trench and made his own preparations. First he set the blasting cap in the hole in the end of the dynamite. Then he carefully kneaded the explosive into the slot Kernes had cut in the rock. The heavy waxed paper and its fillings of sawdust, ammonium nitrate, and nitroglycerin were hot and deformed easily. A lot of people didn't know how to use dynamite; they wasted the force of the blast. Deehalter didn't want to blow the mound open, but he'd be damned if he wouldn't do it right if he did it at all.

When the dynamite had been molded into the rock, the big man shoveled dirt down on top of it and used his boots to firmly tamp the pile. The thin wire looped out of the earth like the shadow of a grass blade. Deehalter hung the coil on the pick handle, using it as a loose spindle from which to unwind the wire as he walked to the jeep.

"This far enough away?" Kernes asked, eying the mound apprehensively.

"Unless a really big chunk comes straight down," Deehalter said, silently pleased at the other man's nervousness. "Christ, it's just one stick, even if it is sixty-percent equivalent."

Kernes bent down behind the jeep. Deehalter squatted at the front, protected from the blast by the brow of the hill. He held the bare end of one wire to the negative post of the battery, then touched the other lead to the positive side. Nothing happened. "God dammit," he said, prodding the wire to cut through the white corrosion on the post.

The dynamite exploded with a loud thump.

"Jesus!" Kernes shouted as he bounced to his feet. Deehalter, more experienced, hunched under his baseball cap while dirt and tiny rock fragments rained over him and the jeep. Then at last he stood and followed his brother-in-law. The smaller man was now cursing and trying to brush dirt from his head and shoulders with his left hand; in his right he carried a battery spotlight.

Acrid black smoke curled in the pit like a knot of snakes. The sod walls of the trench looked as they had before the explosion, but the earth compacted over the charge was gone and the exposed edge of the rock slab had shattered. Because the limestone could neither move nor compress, the shock had broken it as thoroughly as a twenty-foot fall could have.

Kernes bent down over the opening and grasped a chunk of stone to toss out of the way. The dynamite fumes looped a tendril over his face. Kernes coughed and quivered, and for an instant Deehalter thought the other man lost focus. Then Kernes was on his feet again, fanning the shovel blade to clear the smoke faster and crying, "By God, Dee, there's really something in there! By God!"

Deehalter waited, frowning, as Kernes shoveled at the rubble. A little prying with the blade was enough to crumble the edge of the slab into fist-sized pieces like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. More dirt fell in, but that was easily scooped away. The actual opening stayed small because the only cavity in the bedrock was a shallow, water-cut basin. It sloped so gradually that even after a two-foot scallop had been nibbled from the overlying slab there was barely enough room to reach an arm into the hollow.

The fumes had dissipated. Kernes scattered a last shovelful of dirt and gravel, then tossed the tool aside as well. Kneeling down with his face as close to the opening as he could get it and still leave room for the spotlight, he began to search the cavity. "God damn," Kernes said suddenly. "Goddamn!" He tried to reach in left-handed, found there was too little room, and shoved the light back out of the way since he had already located the object in his head. The spotlight beam touched grass blades shaded from the sun, a color rather than an illumination.