The Night Visitor (13 page)

Though Horace Flye had a certain animal cunning and considerable criminal cleverness, the man had learned not one lesson from his many errors. Like the
pitukupf
, Horace was who he was. But Horace was a practical, simple man. Once things were going his way, he lived each day as if matters would take care of themselves. It was with this positive attitude that he approached his work with the Silvers. And so the first few days were like fine pearls threaded on a silken strand.

On Monday, he was introduced to the site. It was laid out, he thought, like a small version of a miniature housing development. There were wooden stakes joined by strings. The stakes had numbers on them. He asked what the numbers meant. Cartesian coordinates, Moses said, as if this explained anything. But Horace was content to nod sagely at those things he did not understand. By noon, he began to move dirt removed from grids not intimately associated with the fallen mammoth. This was taken to a great pile near the mechanized sifter.

On Tuesday, he was allowed to assist Delia in the photographic work which documented every phase of the excavation. Being close to her was a delight. And he sensed that she was comfortable with him.

On Wednesday, he assisted her father in cataloging specimens. It was bewildering to Horace. These were not even bones. Mostly just little bits of soil selected from carefully recorded places in the gridwork. The old man explained that there would be pollen samples in the dirt. And all sorts of other fascinating things. But to the practical man from Arkansas it was just a lot of trash to put in bottles and label.

On Thursday morning, he was trained to use the mechanized sifter. But only under constant supervision.

On Thursday evening, as he was leaving for his trailer high on the piney spine of Buffalo Saddle Ridge, Delia followed him from the tent. Where her father would not hear their conversation. “Mr. Flye?”

He removed his battered hat. “Yes'm?”

She hugged herself. He was strong. Not bad-looking. Good-hearted. And not overly bright. He lusted after her, of course. Except for the fact that he was not wealthy, this was the description of an ideal man. “I'm having some trouble keeping warm at night.”

Horace Flye tried very hard to think of a response. He could not, but it would not have mattered if he had. His throat felt like he'd tried to swallow a dried apple whole.

She watched him with some amusement. “Do you know anything about gas furnaces?”

Though he managed to swallow the apple, his voice was raspy. “Oh… maybe a thing 'er two.”

Such a modest man. “My cabin is… Calamity Jane.”

“Yes'm. I know.”
Oh my.

“I thought perhaps you could stop by. And have a look at my… heating system. That is… if you have time.”

He felt his knees wobble. “You just say when, ma'am.”

She smiled. “How about… this evening. Nine-ish?”

He nodded eagerly.

Horace Flye showed up when the full moon was two hours above the crest of the San Juans. And got to work right away.

He was, Delia Silver observed, good with his hands. He smelled of honest sweat and roll-your-own tobacco that he
carried in a sack in his shirt pocket, but it was an agreeable aroma. And he was rather nice.

He fixed her thermostat so it'd By Gosh stay fixed. The cabin temperature went up ten degrees in as many minutes.

She was quite pleased. And aware that furnace work was not a part of his normal assignment. Moreover, Mr. Flye had worked overtime without any pay at all. No, it just wouldn't be right to send him away without some kind of reward. And as it turned out, Delia had something in mind. Something special.

“Mr. Flye?”

“Yes ma'am?”

“You've been very kind.” She hesitated. “I want to return the favor.”

Horace felt his pulse quicken.

She looked out the window toward her father's cabin, then pulled the shade. “But it'll have to be… our little secret.”

He tried to speak, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. So he nodded.

On Friday, Horace was processing loose dirt through the motor-driven sifter. The noisy machine vibrated the soil through a stack of increasingly finer wire screens. All the larger rocks stayed on the top. Intermediate-sized pebbles stopped at various levels, according to size. The stuff that fell all the way through was almost like face powder. It was late in the morning when he found something very pretty on the uppermost mesh, among the rough assortment of stones.

Flye hurried to Moses Silver with his find.

The old man removed his thick trifocals, and held the specimen within six inches of his nose. “Ahhhh,” he said, obviously quite pleased. It was a short projectile point, with side notches. Made of a pale reddish-white chalcedony. He slipped the spectacles back onto the bridge of his blunt nose and blinked at Horace Flye. “So… you found this in the sifter?” He checked his notebook. “That batch would be quadrant J-22, wouldn't it?”

Horace's head bobbed in agreement.

The paleontologist patted him on the shoulder. “Well, good
for you.” He turned to place the specimen in a small plastic box.

“D'you reckon,” Horace said, “that this mighta been used to kill the elephant?”

Moses shook his head. “Afraid not. This projectile point was rather far from the remains for us to assume any association with the mammoth.” Now a merry twinkle glistened in the old man's eye. “Moreover, the artifact is of much too recent origin to have been associated with an ice-age mammal.”

“Oh,” Flye said, evidence of his disappointment spreading across his face. “I guess you can just tell by lookin'—how old one of them flint arrow points is.”

“Within a thousand years or so.” Moses chuckled. “But don't be discouraged… just keep up the good work.”

Horace returned to his chores.

Delia sidled up to him and whispered. “I see you found the projectile point.”

He gave the old man a furtive glance. “Yes ma'am. And I'm much obliged to you.” She had showed Horace the pretty little arrowhead only last night. And told him what her father was up to. Moses would plant the artifact where his hired hand would be certain to find it. If the Arkansas man pocketed his find, he'd be marked as a thief and sacked at day's end. Horace Flye—an uncomplicated soul—was not offended that his honor would be put to the test. These folks had a perfect right to find out if a stranger they'd hired would swipe everything he could stuff in his pockets. And it wasn't like he hadn't stolen one or two necessities in his time. Well, maybe a little bit more than one or two. But most of all, he was greatly impressed with such a clever ruse. Old man Silver had a pint or two more brains that he'd given him credit for.
Maybe educated people ain't necessarily dumb. It's somethin' worth keepin' in mind …

Armed with Delia's warning, he had passed the test and was now a trusted member of the excavation team. The Arkansas man rubbed thoughtfully at his whiskered chin. “Your daddy says the arrowhead's not all that old. Looks plenty old to me.”

I really shouldn't tell him.

She sure had a funny little grin on her face. “So where'd you find that little flint rock?”

Delia was enjoying her part in this small conspiracy against her father. “I didn't find it. I
made
it.”

His mouth fell open. “Made it? But when …?”

“Yesterday evening. Right before you came over to fix my furnace.”

Flye stared at her, openmouthed. “No… you're teasin' me.”

She smiled. He was such an innocent.

And so the day proceeded toward sundown. The odd trio was happily content.

Moses Silver had his ancient bones. And nourished his secret hopes that this dig would be different from all the mediocre ones. And it would.

Delia, who was pleased with Horace Flye, busied herself with a hundred small tasks.

Flye—whose goals were simple—was pleased merely to have a job of work.

It seemed that nothing could be added to such a perfect day. But when heaven's blessings fall like the sweet rains of spring …

It was precisely three o'clock in the afternoon. Moses Silver was painstakingly uncovering the lower section of the great beast's pelvis. He looked up at his daughter; Delia was moving lights and reflectors about, preparing to make archival photographs. The old man's voice was tinged with enthusiasm. “I've measured the oblique height of the pelvic aperture. And the width of the illium shaft. By applying Lister's criteria on pelvic measurements, and the work of Vereschagin and Tichonov on the ratio of tusk length to basal diameter—there's no doubt about it. We have ourselves a bull mammoth. A good-sized one, too.”

Delia smiled with affection. Even so far from his classroom, Daddy was an incurable academic.

Determination of gender was a boost for morale, though hardly a cause for jubilation. But as Moses worked through the afternoon, he uncovered a great knob of femur. The joint
of the thigh bone was neatly articulated to the hollow acetabulum on the pelvis. So it seemed that they might have an intact skeleton.

This brought a shout of joy from the old paleontologist.

Delia hugged her father.

These were good, solid bones. A great sweeping tusk. Another still to be uncovered. Reliable gender determination.

And just perhaps—a mostly articulated skeleton.

It would hardly seem that so many favors could be granted in such a brief span of time. But the hours of this day were not yet exhausted. Nor were its great store of blessings. If blessings they were …

Moses, his back aching from his labors, was gently brushing the soil of ages off the upper femur.

The old man paused, holding his breath. Could this be an illusion?

His daughter had also seen it. Delia reached to adjust the flood lamp to better illuminate this discovery.

Along the surface of the bone were shallow, almost parallel incisions. “My God,” the paleontologist said, “oh my God …”

“Daddy,” she said, reaching to touch his trembling hand. All his life, this is what he had most wanted.

Horace Flye, who did not understand what all the commotion was about, kneeled beside the excavation. “Whatcha find?”

The old man looked up, shaking his head in childlike awe. “Mr. Flye… we have butcher marks on the bone. This is a human kill site.”

Moses had grabbed the gold ring. He had a site where early humans had killed a mammoth! Not the first one to be uncovered, of course—nor probably the most important.
But mine own!

The mammoth fossils, he realized, would be about eleven thousand years old. Give or take a thousand. It could not have been much earlier. It was a widely accepted maxim—despite scattered hints here and there of more ancient human habitation—that humans had not set foot on the North American
continent until about eleven or twelve millennia ago. And the great mammoths had perished within two thousand years of that auspicious arrival of Homo sapiens. Probably from over-hunting, though that hypothesis remained controversial. And now, in the remains of a swampy pond long since dry, man had returned to find evidence of his past.

But things are often not quite as they seem.

A week earlier, Professor Moses Silver had Fed-Ex'ed several samples from the site to a private firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the very moment he had found the marks on the bone, a young woman—surrounded by an array of artifacts of this highly technological society—was working in a laboratory filled with marvelous instruments. The bone fragments had been hydrolyzed to carbon dioxide, which in turn was purified and converted to benzene. Though all the numbers were already stored on a computer disk, and despite the fact that Dr. Weber was a mere thirty-three years old, she had an old-fashioned attitude about recording data. So she took the time to inscribe the information by hand in a bound laboratory notebook.

Too bad, Dr. Weber thought. Moses Silver—who was such a nice old fellow—had always wanted a human kill site more than anything in the world. But this particular beast had died far too long ago for that.

Moses Silver was in his cabin, with his laptop computer connected to the single telephone line. He was scanning his day's electronic mail. Two dozen missives; much of it was departmental chaff from his colleagues at Rocky Mountain Polytechnic.
Announcements of departmental meetings. A talk by the bright young archaeologist from Stanford. And near the bottom, a note from Dr. Weber. He smiled. She was an efficient young scientist. Already had the bone fragment and the plant material dated. He clicked on the line and opened the mail. And read the brief report.

He shook his head in appalled disbelief. It was one thing to have a mammoth kill site… there had, after all, been others. But never one whose age exceeded twelve thousand years. And Weber's analysis of the bone samples yielded an age of thirty-one thousand years. Could he be wrong about the butcher marks? No. Certainly not. He felt his head swimming.