Говард Уолдроп: Them Bones

A ton of foam shot into the air.

‘Hoo-eee! Hoo-eee!’ yelled Took. The thong stretched tight. The spear shaft went cartwheeling up the rawhide and slammed into the trees overhead.

‘Yaz!’ he yelled.

Other men were already running out of the village and the fields.

As I ran toward him I saw my javelin arc out into the frothing water. A huge coughing noise came from the River. As I ran through the grass I saw other large dark shapes, which I had not seen before, disappearing downriver.

Some of the guys got there before I did. They threw their spears out. The water turned red and quit splashing before I got there.

Others jumped into canoes at the landing, yelling, paddling toward where the other dark shapes had gone.

I reached Took and grabbed the thong he was holding. Someone came over in a canoe, dropped a rope down into the bloody water, then threw the end to us. We heaved and hoed.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

First came a flat forked tail, then wrinkled mounds of pink skin, then flippers with spears in them, and last, something like the head of a walrus without the tusks. The damn thing must have weighed half a metric ton.

Its face was covered with bristles the size of No. 2 pencils.

It was a manatee, the largest I’d ever seen. In the time I came from, they were nearly extinct. They were always (before the War) getting run over by assholes in speedboats, or shot by kids with .22s, or something. Once there had been huge numbers of them in the rivers of the south.

Well, they’re still here . A couple of the canoes had harpooned one, and there was shouting all up and down the River as the rest of them got away.

There was general happiness all around. A ton of meat was a ton of meat. They began to dress out the two manatees on the shore.

I went around to the head of the one Took had harpooned. It still had a water lily hanging out of one side of its wide flat mouth.

The whole village was ecstatic.

This is a place for boys and girls who never grew up.

While they were waiting, the first of the trucks drove up.

The crew led by Dr. Jameson arrived just after noon. Bessie and Kincaid had gone up to check the survey and the preliminary stakedown on the larger mound, and planned the trench to take them a few feet off center, from ten feet out to twenty feet beyond the mound.

Jameson looked at the horse skulls and the cartridges, then without a word went down to the trench in the smaller mound and crawled under the tarp to have a look for himself.

He came back wiping sweat.

‘I couldn’t see any goddamn intrusions,’ he said to Kincaid. ‘Uh, pardon me, Bessie.’ His sunburned face went redder. He was just over forty, already stoop-shouldered from crawling around digs with no headroom in them.

He was dressed in dark brown jodhpurs, a khaki shirt and an old Marine campaign hat. Bessie knew that his role model (from the field of paleontology, not an archeologist at all) was Roy Chapman Andrews, whose spectacular find of dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia was the biggest news since Carter opened Tut’s tomb in ’26.

Jameson had eyes the color of the dust he was always covered with.

‘It’s possible we’re dealing with two things here,’ he said, taking off his hat, spinning it and catching it repeatedly as he talked.

‘One, a post-Columbus survival of the culture, entirely possible, combined with a Spanish incident, perhaps de Soto, perhaps as late as the French. That would be rare enough itself.

‘And, two, an intrusive cartridge burial.’ He stopped.

‘Don’t say it. Someone shot a bunch of rounds into the mound, one of which just happened to hit one of the equines. Then the spent cartridges worked themselves down to that level in a few years.’ He looked at them.

‘It’s a hoax,’ he said. He looked at them a minute more, while they said nothing. On the desk before them were the skulls, cartridges, potsherds and field notes.

‘I need a drink,’ he said finally, and sat down on a camp stool.

‘It’ll have to be lemonade or water,’ said Bessie. ‘I don’t think Washington made a run to the bootlegger this week yet.’

‘Well, I did,’ said Jameson. He disappeared out the tentflap, returning a moment later with a hip flask. He offered them a drink, which they refused.

He looked over the field notes again. ‘Goddamn Coles Creek rolled rim potsherds,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen enough in the last two weeks to keep me the rest of my life. I sometimes think all those people did was sleep, eat, bury their dead, and make pots.’

‘Well, it’s good that they did,’ said Kincaid, ‘or we’d all be out of jobs.’

‘Gillihan at least got that rock shelter down by the river,’ said Jameson. ‘He was real pis – very upset that you wanted him pulled out of it. He’s got the students with him, of course, and this is the best shelter we’ve ever seen. It had some big cat bones with it.’

‘Well, the real question is,’ said Kincaid, ‘do we start on the mound trench now, or do we wait for the director?’

‘I don’t want my shovels to cool off,’ said Jameson.

‘Bessie?’

‘Let’s do it. Only thing is, we’re going to have to answer some questions all over again when Gillihan gets here.’

‘We’ll leave a note on the tent telling them to look over this stuff before they come down.’

‘By the way,’ said Jameson, ‘you know it’s been raining up north for two days straight now?’

Smith’s Diary

Let me tell you about the dog.

The second day at the old airfield, which will someday sit right up there on the bluff, Spaulding noticed that one of the men had an old Dalmatian (which he was of course calling Sparky) with him.

The soldier said he’d found him when we arrived, and that the vet needed to look it over, if that was okay.

Spaulding told him yes, but not to become too attached to it, as there was no way he could keep it on the mission.

The vet looked Sparky over, kenneled him, as the dog was all banged up and emaciated. Every day the soldier came to talk to Sparky and play with him.

Then Heidegger got here a week later, and started sending the mice back, then the monkeys, calibrating the portal. How he kept track of the comings and goings, I don’t know. Heidegger’s so far out of it nobody could talk to him.

Anyway, Heidegger needs something to really calibrate the machine, looks around and sees Sparky over in the vet’s office. What does he know? So one night he takes Sparky and puts him into the machine.

Sparky knew something was up, tries to chew Heidegger’s arms off (I don’t blame him). Heidegger wrestles him into the machine. Sparky goes wild, throws himself into the walls, hurts himself. Heidegger throws the switch.

Five days earlier, or whatever, Sparky hadn’t shown up.

Heidegger’s blown it (since Sparky was over there in the cage, Heidegger didn’t know what he was waiting for). After Heidegger sent the dog back, the soldier shows up to play with Sparky. Sparky’s gone. Where’s my dog? he asks. The vet doesn’t know. They go to Spaulding. Spaulding goes to Heidegger.

‘Lost, I guess,’ says Heidegger. ‘I’m sorry I lost your animal. I thought it was for the experiments. And I’m sorry I hurt it.’

‘Hurt him? Just what the hell did you do?’ asked the soldier, crying.

‘While he was trying to bite me, he hung his dewclaw on the machine and tore it. There was some blood. I’m sorry.’