Maureen Cole sat on the old-fashioned porch that wrapped around three sides of her small house in Niagara on the Lake. At the age of thirty-five, she looked ten years younger, or so she’d been told. No wrinkles marred her face, and her long straight hair shone a glossy black. Her traditional aquiline features, straight nose, dark eyes, full lips, came from her mother, a full-blooded Seneca. She wore a pair of faded button-front Levi’s and a white T-shirt.
She propped her moccasin-clad feet on the porch railing and leaned back in her big wicker chair. To the north, in front of her, Lake Ontario spread vast and blue. A glass of iced mint tea sat on the table beside her, the cubes melting. She had poured the glass an hour ago, and hadn’t yet taken a sip.
John, her husband, and best friend, had died on this day one year before. Of a heart attack. He’d been thirty-eight. She longed for a stiff scotch, preferably a twenty-five-year-old McCallan. Or maybe a bottle of Belgian Guinness. Belgians truly knew how to drink Irish beer. The stuff in Ireland couldn’t hold a candle to the rich creamy stout they served under the Guinness label in Belgium.
But she’d stopped drinking six months ago.
After John’s death she’d gotten herself into real trouble, learning firsthand what the phrase “drowning in the
bottle” meant. She had no desire to find herself there again.
She studied the hands laced in her lap. The nails were broken and uneven. John used to tease her about them. She’d never had paintable fingernails. Not even as a child. Though her mother was a devout Catholic, and had raised Maureen in the ways of the church, she had also insisted Maureen learn traditional Seneca skills, making pottery, doing porcupine quillwork, beadwork, basketry, even hunting, skinning, and tanning the hides she harvested. As her mother often reminded her: “Puny white women have perfect hands because everything living and dying frightens them. You, my daughter, will remember that your great-great-grandmothers were hunters and warriors. Five Iroquois women warriors received military pensions for heroic service during the American War of 1812. One of them, Julia John, is a relative of yours. Our women were leaders, not followers. If I ever find one of your moccasin prints inside someone else’s, you’ll be scraping fresh hides for the rest of your life.”
Having scraped dozens of fresh hides, and with the traditional stone tools, Maureen had vowed never to set foot in someone else’s moccasin prints.
She frowned at her nails, wondering if she could paint them. Probably not. If she got close to a bottle of pink nail polish, she would undoubtedly start clicking her heels to get out of there.
Maureen lifted her watered-down tea and took a sip. It went down cool and naturally sweet. She grew the mint in her own garden. The stuff they sold in Canada was an artificially sweet, lemony horror.
The United States didn’t have much going for it, but it did have iced tea. Now that she thought of it, the U.S. actually had two great assets: iced tea, and Dodger dogs.
She suspected that the rest, however, could be nuked and nobody would notice.
She swirled her tea, watching the pale green liquid wash the sides of the clear glass, then set it back down on the table.
Her wedding ring shimmered in the tree-filtered summer sunlight that streamed across the porch. Plain and gold, she’d never had it off. John had given it to her before their marriage, in the dark days when they’d been struggling to eat while they finished their Ph.D.s at McGill University in Montreal. It had been both an engagement and a wedding ring, a huge extravagance, and she cherished it more now than she had then.
Maureen covered the ring with her right hand and held it against her heart.
Around the west side of the house, to her left, the old floorboards creaked. Maureen knew from long experience what that meant: she had an unexpected visitor.
She turned, and saw a medium-sized man with thick gray hair come around the corner. He wore dusty clothing and a battered 1940s-style fedora. His gray mustache and bushy eyebrows quirked when he saw her.
“Dr. Cole, are you always sitting here on summer afternoons? I would think that the head of the anthropology department at McMaster University would have better things to do.”
Maureen smiled. “It’s July, Dale. Summer vacation? Ever heard of that?”
“No. That’s when we archaeologists work the hardest.”
“Well, we physical anthropologists need more time for lofty thoughts. You know, to contemplate the nature of reality, and the future of the human species … . What are you doing in Canada?”
He took off his hat and batted the dust off on his jeans. He walked forward. “Working.”
Maureen gestured to the wicker chair beside hers. “Have a seat. Working where? I thought it would take an AK-47—of which you have plenty in the U.S., for home defense, of course—to get you out of the American Southwest.”
Dale Emerson Robertson, the grand old man of American Southwestern archaeology, sank onto the soft pillows of Maureen’s wicker chair, and propped his dirty boots on the railing beside her moccasins. Almost seventy, his brown face bore deep wrinkles from the scorching sunlight in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and southern Colorado.
“Why don’t you let me have a sip of your iced tea?” he said.
She handed it to him, and watched him drink half the glass in four swallows. “I can get you one of your own, you know. We have refrigerators in Canada. The best of them all was invented in Yellowknife one December.”
“No, thanks. This is fine.”
Dale was a small-town western boy who didn’t know how to get down to business unless you provoked him, so Maureen said, “What happened? Have all the Anasazi sites in the Four Corners region succumbed to bulldozers?”
Dale’s wrinkles rearranged into a scowl. “Bite your tongue. Bulldozers are the least of our worries. Congress, along with several oil companies, are doing everything they can to undermine the preservation of our glorious American heritage.” He finished her iced tea and handed the glass back. Maureen set it on the table. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“I didn’t think so. What’s up?”
Dale’s brushy brows lowered over his blue eyes. “I have a site I want you to take a look at.”
“Really? Where?”
“Across the border, south of Buffalo, New York.”
Maureen tipped her chair back on two legs, and said, “I’ve been to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meetings. It’s crawling with bone people. Why do you need me?”
“Well,” he said and gazed out at the shimmering vastness of Lake Ontario. A quacking flock of ducks circled the water, landing in a series of splashes. “For one thing, you’re the best damned physical anthropologist in North America—”
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“—and for another thing, you’re Iroquois.”
She set her chair down hard, and gave him an unfriendly smile. “I do hope you’re not suggesting I play the ‘token Indian’ role to give you a way out of your screwed-up American cultural resources policies. What did you find? A burial? Who’s screaming about it?”
Dale turned in his chair and gave her his most charming smile. “Would you take a look at it? It’s an hour’s drive. I’ll have you back by supper.”
They passed through the Gestapo boxes at the border, showing their passports, answering inane questions, and Dale headed south on Highway 62. Just north of Eden, New York, he pulled onto a side road.
Towering beech and sugar maple trees lined the way, dappling the windshield with a patchwork of warm sunlight and cool shadows.
Maureen knew when they’d arrived. She saw the archaeological
field school, around thirty students, hard at work in the meadow. They’d dug at least eight two-by-two meter units, which meant they’d been here for a while. All wore shorts, T-shirts, hiking boots, and hats. Except one bareheaded hedonist. Tall and blond, he knelt looking down into an excavation unit where two female crew members dug. From the smile on his face, it seemed to be more ogling than business, however. He had broad shoulders, and a killer tan. He reminded her of one of Michelangelo’s visions of the perfect male, which annoyed her. She’d never felt comfortable around blond-god types. This one, fortunately, was also filthy. Which made her feel a little better.
Dale pulled to a stop in the cool shade of a pecan tree, and Maureen opened her door and stepped out. To her moccasined feet, last year’s pecans felt like small rocks. She hobbled out into the sunlit meadow, and waited for Dale.
He grabbed some notes off the dash, slammed the car door, and came to meet her. After he’d tugged his hat down over his eyes, he said, “Welcome to the Paradise Site.”
“Is that a play on the fact that the town of Eden is just down the road?”
“I can’t imagine how you guessed.”
“I’ve worked with archaeologists before, Dale. I’ve never met one who was particularly creative when it came to naming sites. Beers, yes. Sites, no.”
Dale’s mustache twitched as he smiled. “Well, let me deliver these notes to our crew chief, Myra Linn, and I’ll escort you to the burial.”
“Where is it?”
Dale pointed. “Over there at the edge of that grove of flowering dogwood trees.”
“Okay. Before you go, I assume you’re the project director, who’s in charge—”
“I’m one of the project directors. My partner …” Dale squinted, gestured to the blond god, and said, “There he is. That’s William Stewart, he’s actually heading up the fieldwork. I’ve known him for years. Mostly in the Southwest. He’s here on a one-year appointment, teaching in Buffalo—”
“Wait.” Maureen held up a hand, and gave Dale an askance look. “You don’t mean Dusty Stewart? The Madman of New Mexico?”
Dale wiped his sweating brow. “You’ve heard of him.”
Her mouth gaped. “Heard of him! What I’ve heard is petrifying! Donita Rodriguez told me he was a womanizer, a scoundrel, a glorified pothunter—”
“Yes, well, everyone is entitled to their opinion,” Dale said with a casual wave of his hand. “I admit he’s a colorful character. He’s also fluent in Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Apache, and Arapaho. He’s one of the few archaeologists in America whom strong traditionalists trust, and—well—he’s a fine archaeologist, too. Give him a chance.”
Maureen propped her hands on her hips. “All right, Dale. For you. But I’ll only give him one.”
“Fair enough. Now, let me deliver these notes, and I’ll show you around.”
Dale walked to the far southern edge of the site, to Maureen’s right, and stood talking with a woman wearing reflective sunglasses. After five or ten minutes, Maureen got antsy. She headed in the direction Dale had pointed, toward the burial site.
As she passed excavation units, she peered in, smiled at the students, and proceeded on her way. It didn’t look as though they’d found anything particularly impressive
yet. A couple of fire hearths, some lithic debitage—the chips of stone left over after someone made a stone tool—and what looked to be a living floor. At this point, the students had only begun to reveal a roughly circular soil discoloration. She didn’t see any post holes, or associated artifacts, but it might be a small lodge.
Maureen continued through the tall green grass. As she approached, she could see that the two-by-three-meter excavation was relatively shallow, about a meter in depth. She hadn’t seen this one from the road. It sat in the shade near the cluster of flowering dogwood trees. Fragrant white blossoms covered the branches and scented the air. For centuries her people had boiled flowering dogwood roots to make a magnificent red dye. Historically, the powdered bark was used as a quinine substitute.
She knelt beside the unit and looked down. What she saw filled her with awe. “My … God,” she whispered.
“Excuse me!” someone called. “Who are you? What are you doing there?”
She looked up to see Dusty Stewart trotting toward her with a sour expression on his face. “Ma’am? Do you have a reason to be here? This dig is not open to the public!”
“Really?” she called back. “I didn’t see a sign saying Keep Out!”
He stopped on the other side of the excavation unit from her, breathing hard. Around his hairy, tanned legs, Maureen saw Dale striding through the field school as fast as he could, calling “Dusty? Dusty!”
Maureen stood up and faced Stewart. “I’m here with Dr. Robertson.”
“Are you?” he said and propped his hands on his hips. “Well, I wasn’t informed.”
“Gee. Do you think maybe Dr. Robertson doesn’t trust your judgment? Why would that be?”
His bright blue eyes narrowed, then he stabbed a finger at her. “Listen. I don’t know who you are—”
“She’s Dr. Maureen Cole,” Dale said, panting as he stopped at Stewart’s side. Sweat sheened his wrinkled face.
“Oh.” Stewart slowly lowered his finger. “Uh. Hi.”
Maureen said, “I hope your vocabulary improves when it comes to the archaeology.”
Dale tugged his fedora down over his forehead. He said, “Allow me to properly introduce you two. Maureen, this is Dusty Stewart. Dusty, this is Dr. Maureen Cole.”
“Nice to meet you,” Stewart said, but he shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts as though he didn’t mean it. “What do ordinary people call you? Maury?”
In her haste to get to his throat, she almost stumbled into the pit. “No,” she said, “ordinary people call me Dr. Cole. What do people call you?” Asshole?
He smiled, as if reading her thoughts, and showed her a row of perfect pearly whites. “You mean to my face?”
“Not necessarily.”
Dale put a hand on Stewart’s shoulder. “Why don’t we get down to business. I promised I’d have Maureen back to her home by supper.”
“Sure, Dale. I’m all business. You know that.”
Stewart crouched at the head of the two-by-three-meter unit. Both burials had been nicely pedestaled, meaning the dirt had been cleared away around the bodies, and associated artifacts. Over the female’s head a triangular arrow point nested inside a ring of broken pot shards. The male had been wearing a cowl embroidered with olivella and marginella shells, and two gorgets, one copper and one made of exquisitely etched shell.
Maureen sat down cross-legged, and Dale bent over and braced his hands on his knees.
She examined the remains. The artifacts dazzled her. She indicated the shell gorget. “What is that?”
Stewart responded snidely, “We call that a necklace, Doctor. Do you see that intricately etched figure in the middle? That’s Bird-Man. He was very big with Mound Builder folks. A little like the Archangel Michael. He flew back and forth between heaven and earth delivering messages to doomed humans.”
Maureen felt the corners of her lips tightening, and had to grit her teeth to quell the reaction. “Dale?” she said. “What is that?”
“It’s a Mississippian gorget.” He pushed his hat back on his head, revealing damp gray hair, and gave Stewart an irritated look. “Mississippians are the people who built the grand mounds in Cahokia, Illinois; Spiro, Oklahoma; Moundville, Alabama; and dozens of other places.”
“Ah, yes, I remember,” she said. Of course she did, but her ignorance seemed to provoke such interesting comments from Stewart. “I’m sure they were mentioned in the few boring archaeology classes I took.”
Stewart’s nostrils flared.
“And that?” She pointed to a shiny black arrow point lying inside the pot rim. “It looks like obsidian.”
“Congratulations,” Stewart said. “You must be a rock hound.”
“I—”
“Maureen,” Dale interrupted, “that’s Yellowstone obsidian. From northern Wyoming.”
“Wyoming?” She frowned at the two skeletons. They both rested in flexed positions, on their sides with their knees up, but the female’s right arm rested under the male’s ribs. Her left arm over his left arm—as if she’d
been holding him. It struck an emotional chord in Maureen’s soul. The woman must have loved him very much.
She squinted against the sun to look at Dale. “What are Mississippian gorgets and Yellowstone obsidian doing here in New York?”
Stewart leaned toward her, and whispered, “You mean you don’t believe that aliens brought them?”
After a moment, she said, “Are you a scientist? Or a radio talk-show host?”
“Neither,” he answered bluffly. “I’m an archaeologist.”
Maureen’s face froze. She nodded stiffly. “Good answer, Stewart.”
His mouth smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
Maureen leaned over the pit. “Are those cord-wrapped stick markings on the pot shards?”
“Yes, they are, Doctor,” Stewart replied.
Many peoples wrapped a cord around a stick, and pressed it into the clay before firing the pot to provide a simple decoration, but these looked distinctly like Princess Point ceramics. While archaeologists loved to argue about dates, the Princess Point culture had thrived between approximately A.D. 500 and A.D. 1000. Geographically, Princess Point sites encompassed an area in south-central Ontario, from Long Point to the Niagara River along the north shore of Lake Erie and around the western end of Lake Ontario, north to the Credit River.
But New York had several sites which contained Princess Point–like ceramics—theoretically copies made by other peoples. This might be one of those.
“So,” Dale said, “what do you think about the remains?”
“Rather spectacular,” she answered. “I’ve never seen an individual with such severe achondroplasia survive. Usually they die at birth. Notice the—”
“Is that English?” Stewart asked Dale.
Dale said, “Just try to listen, Dusty. I’ll explain later.”
Stewart’s right brow arched. “For you, Dale.”
“Thank you. Please, go on, Maureen.”
“Well,” she said, pointing, “notice the sharp lordotic angulation in the region of the lumbosacral junction, the shortness of the limbs, and bowing of the lower extremities—”
“Are you trying to say,” Stewart asked with exaggerated interest, “that he was a dwarf?”
Maureen nodded. “Yes.”
Stewart threw up his arms. “Jesus Christ, Dale, I could have told you that! You had to bring in an outside specialist for that stunning observation?”
Dale’s mouth quirked. “What else, Maureen? Can you determine age?”
She studied the skull. At birth, the bones of the cranial vault were thin, and plastic. The sutures, the joints in the skull, remained open, to allow the brain to grow. “Well, all the cranial sutures have ossified, but not only that, look at the epiphyseal cartilage plates. I—”
“The what?” Stewart asked. “Is that in the head?”
Maureen braced her elbows on her knees. Epiphyseal cartilage grew at the ends of leg bones, and arm bones. It thinned as a person aged, until it disappeared. “Well,” she answered, “that would certainly explain a lot about your head, or at least make it more interesting than it currently appears.” She sighed, and tossed long black hair over her shoulder. “My point, Dale, is that they’re not there. I’d guess this little guy was between fifty and fifty-five when he died.”
“And the female?” Dale asked.
Maureen shook her head. “She died at around sixty, but it’s amazing she lived so long. You can see fractures in the three ribs on her left side, but take a look at that
lesion on her skull. Do you see the small area of bone necrosis? It’s surrounded by a zone of hypervascularity. That must have happened when she was young. Part of the bone reabsorbed, but—”
“You mean somebody hit her in the head?”
“Oh, good work, Stewart,” she said, “you’re catching on fast. The interesting thing is that all those injuries healed. She took a lot of punishment, but survived.”
“Warfare? Slavery?” Dale smoothed his fingers over his gray mustache.
“You’re the archaeologists. You tell me. The only thing I can say for sure is that somebody didn’t like her very much.”
“Another stunning observation,” Stewart said, with a smile.
Maureen smiled, too. “Don’t you have a student you can annoy? Preferably somebody male. I’m sure the females are tired of pretending they have to pee every time you show up.”
She’d never known a man whose mouth could curl down as quickly as up. He glowered at her.
Maureen looked at the male burial and said, “Several of the male’s phalanges are missing. Did you recover them?”
“The finger bones?” Stewart said. “No.”
“Not even one of them?”
“I’ll expand the excavation unit and keep looking, all right? Can I have ice cream, now?”
She gave him a stony look, and turned to Dale. “Given the exotic trade goods, I’d say these two were extraordinary traders. Is that your assessment?”
“Possibly. If so, they traveled over half the continent. But this may just be an example of down-the-line trade. You know, the arrow point and gorget traveled a few miles at a time, being traded from one hand to the next.”
She frowned at the shell gorget. It shimmered in the sunlight. “What’s your guess for cultural affiliation?”
Dale opened his mouth, but Stewart responded, “Princess Point.”
“Really?” she said. “Why? Other than the pot shards I see no—”
“We’ve collected and analyzed seven C-14 dates for the site. They all come out to between A.D. 900 and A.D. 1050.”
“Yes,” Maureen said with practiced reserve. “There are many cultures in this region which date to that time period, why—”
“Call it a hunch,” Stewart said.
“A … hunch?” She cocked her head. “Is that a scientific term?”
“Yea. It’s a scientific term. My kind of science,” he said hostilely.
Maureen smiled. “Which is a lot like military intelligence, I suppose.”
His face went blank. He propped his hands on his hips again. “Just wait,” he said with authority, “when all this is finished, your theories are going to be dog meat, sweetheart.”
“My people have always been very fond of dog meat. It has to be a puppy, of course, and cooked slowly in the coals, but—”
“I’m telling you,” Stewart insisted, “these two are early Iroquoian people. They—”
“I thought you said they were Princess Point?”
“I did.”
“Then they’re Algonquian.” She rose to her feet and crossed her arms. The issue had been debated long and hard in Ontario, and she’d always liked the “migration” hypothesis, which presumed that Iroquoian peoples had moved out of the United States around A.D. 900 and migrated
northward, conquering the Algonquian-speaking peoples who’d lived there.
Stewart shook his head. “You need to get out of the laboratory, dear. Hunches come from dirty hands. And hunches are the very heart of good solid science.”
“Solid science is based on facts, Mr. Stewart, not conjecture. Something you archaeologists have never really learned.”
He pointed a finger at her again, but this time he didn’t stab it like a dagger. “It will turn out that these two people belonged to the early Iroquoian cultural tradition. I will show you.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “Do show me.”