Mesa Verde Victim. Scott Graham
the sandy bottom of the gorge, their needled tops nearly even with the canyon rim. Bunchgrass and thickets of scrub oak sprouted among the ponderosas in the canyon bottom. A narrow defile, ten feet deep and walled with sandy soil, cut down the middle of the canyon floor, channeling water that flowed into the gorge when rains came to the plateau.
Maintaining his grip on Rosie’s hand, Chuck walked with her along the sandstone shelf to the head of a narrow cleft in the flat stone rim of the gorge as Samuel had directed. The cleft sliced steeply downward, a rock-walled slot descending all the way to the canyon floor.
Rosie smiled and clapped her hands as she looked down the chimney-like passage. “This’ll be fun.”
She entered the slot first, pressing her hands to the facing rock walls as she descended. Chuck followed close behind, ready to steady her if she stumbled. But she scrambled over chockstones and slipped past mountain mahogany bushes growing in the cleft without difficulty, reaching the bottom of the slot in less than five minutes.
Chuck followed Rosie out of the cleft and onto the flat floor of the gorge. The chink of a shovel striking soil echoed up the canyon to where they stood.
“Hear that?” he asked Rosie. “Maybe we’ll get to do some archaeology after all.”
“Bazunga.” She looked up at Chuck and explained, “That means ‘great.’”
The digging grew louder as they hiked down the canyon along the base of the cliff. High above their heads, the ponderosas thrummed as the afternoon breeze coursed through the trees’ long needles.
Rounding a bend in the canyon, they came upon a dirt-floored, stone-roofed alcove eroded into the base of the canyon wall. The shadowed recess faced southwest from the bottom of the cliff, the overhanging roof shielding the dirt floor beneath it from rain and snow. Two women stood facing Chuck and Rosie on the far side of a depression dug into the floor of the cavern-like space. Samuel Horvat wielded a shovel in the neck-deep depression, the back of his head visible above the alcove floor.
At the appearance of Chuck and Rosie, the older of the two women crossed her arms over her narrow chest, observing their approach with piercing, electric-blue eyes. She was short and slight, weighing no more than a hundred pounds, and looked to be about Chuck’s age, in her mid-forties. She wore dusty white sneakers, khaki slacks, and a cotton jacket over a bright white, button-up shirt.
The second woman was in her late twenties. She wore faded jeans and a crimson T-shirt with the blocky, easily recognizable H of Harvard University emblazoned on its chest.
An assortment of dig implements rested in the dirt beside the women—plastic hand scoops and metal trowels, a hatchet, a hammer and chisel, and stackable buckets made of heavy plastic. On a flat piece of sandstone, out of the dirt, sat a camera bag and zippered computer satchel.
Samuel tossed a shovelful of soil onto a pile of dirt at the edge of the cavity. A small cloud of dust rose into the air as the dry soil landed on the pile.
“Hey, there,” Chuck called as he approached the depression with Rosie.
Samuel turned to them. Sweat gleamed on his forehead beneath the brim of the stained felt fedora he’d worn for as long as Chuck had known him. Samuel was well into his fifties, his face deeply lined from decades of work outdoors beneath the harsh, Four Corners sun. Thick, gray hair covered his ears and tumbled from his hat down the back of his neck to his shirt collar.
Chuck stopped at the edge of the depression and looked down at Samuel. The longtime Southwest Archaeology Enterprises archaeologist wore heavy leather boots, brown denim work jeans, and a heavy cotton shirt with the letters SAE embroidered in red on its left breast, the middle A shaped like an arrowhead.
Samuel stabbed the blade of his shovel into the dirt at the bottom of the cavity and rested his gloved hands on top of the shovel’s handle. “Thanks for coming,” he said to Chuck.
Rosie stopped at Chuck’s side.
“And who might you be?” Samuel asked her.
“I’m Rosie.”
Chuck put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her to him. “She wanted to come along. She’s studying archaeology in school right now.”
“Good for you, young lady,” Samuel told her. He leaned the shovel on the side wall of the depression and said to Chuck, “I was just doing a little cleaning up. The walls were caving a bit.”
He pulled a bandanna from the back pocket of his jeans, pushed his fedora to his hairline, and swabbed his forehead with the blue cloth. He tucked the bandanna back in his pocket, repositioned his hat, and looked up at Chuck, his lips flattening into a hard line. “It’s true?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I didn’t want to believe it, but the texts kept coming. That’s why I called you.”
Chuck turned his attention to the two women on the far side of the depression. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Kyla Owens,” the young woman introduced herself. “You’re Chuck Bender, as in Bender Archaeological, right? I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Kyla’s brown hair was long and shaggy, falling past her shoulders from beneath the flat brim of a trucker’s cap she wore low over her eyes. She was of medium height, stocky and thick limbed.
Samuel caught Chuck’s eye from the bottom of the cavity. “This is Kyla’s first time out West. She’s a bit of a legend considering her age—Princeton undergrad, Yale PhD, now finishing up a post-doc fellowship at Harvard.”
Kyla’s face flushed. “I’m honored to be part of the team.”
“She’s been out here for a couple of weeks, doing some research for her fellowship advisor. She’s been working in the Collection,” Samuel said, using the nickname for the Mesa Verde National Park archives, complete with row upon row of
climate-controlled artifact storage cabinets, in the research wing of the Visitor and Research Center.
The older woman leaned forward from where she stood at the edge of the depression next to Kyla. “I am Ilona Koskinen,” she said with a thick Scandinavian accent. Her platinum-blond hair was parted down the middle. Bangs covered her forehead like a white picket fence, ending at her bleached-blond eyebrows. “I have come here from the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki.”
Samuel asked Chuck, “What exactly happened in Durango?”
“What have you heard so far?”
“Not much. No one seems to know anything.”
“I don’t know all that much myself.” Chuck related what he knew to Samuel, Ilona, and Kyla, keeping his account brief, and concluded to Samuel, “Then you called.” He looked over his shoulder toward Durango. “To be honest, I’m kicking myself right now for having driven all the way out here.”
“This won’t take long,” Samuel assured him. “Come on down here with me. Like I said on the phone, you have to see this with your own eyes.”
The SAE archaeologist stepped aside, revealing a dark, oval-shaped opening the size of a manhole cover at the bottom of the depression. Pie-sized chunks of thatched sticks and mud leaned against the side of the cavity.
“Someone already opened this up at some point in the past,” Samuel said. He pointed at the pieces of thatching. “Those had been set back in place over the opening. Kyla says they came right out when she pulled on them.”
Chuck slid into the depression and stood over the dark opening with Samuel.
Rosie jumped up and down at the cavity’s edge. “I want to see, too! Can I, please? Can I?”
The soil gave way beneath her feet and she tumbled down the side of the depression. Chuck caught her and placed her upright beside him.
“Oops,” she said. She combed dirt from her hair with her fingers.