People of the Earth Read Free

clunking hollowly on rock. He levered up a
piece of sandstone. "Grinding slab," he said. "See where they
wore out the top like a trough? That's from grinding seeds and stuff into
flour.''
                   "What's under it?" Swenson got down
on his hands and knees to look. He brushed away the sand and scooped up a
handful of charred seeds.
                   "Storage pit. Just like the Injuns left
it. Been waiting there like that for thousands of years." Skip chuckled.
"I read that damn report the archaeologists turned in."
                   Swenson squinted skeptically. "Better
them blanket-ass Indians out here than me. I'm in this country only long enough
to make enough to get back to civilization."
                   "Yeah, well, get back to work. We're
paying you by the hour."
                   Swenson gave him a crooked grin. "And
pile the backdirt so the charcoal don't show,
right?"
                   Skip grinned. "You got it. I want this
place to look nice and clean—just in case the BLM shows up. Hell, we don't want
them to hold up a thirty-million-dollar project—and for what? The damn Indians
aren't coming back. What the hell could we learn from a bunch of savages who'd
live in a country like this?"
                   Skip stooped to pick up a black rock. He
rubbed sand off the smooth surface and held it up. For a moment he couldn't
believe what he held. The polished stone couldn't be mistaken—a fossilized
shark's tooth. And a hole had been neatly drilled in the center, as if the
tooth had once been a pendant or an ornament.
                   "Well, how about that? Guess I got
something for my fireplace mantel." He paused thoughtfully. "But where
in hell would they have picked up a shark's tooth?" Fool, this whole
country was ocean bottom a hundred and fifty million years ago. Where in hell
did the hydrocarbons we 're drilling for come from, anyway?
                   Swenson kicked around in the loose sand, trying
to find another shark's tooth. He turned up a bone, leached brown from
millennia spent in the soil. He reached for Skip's shovel, uncovering another
and another of the sand-encrusted bones until he unearthed a human skull,
surrounded by more of the polished black shark's teeth.
                   "Holy shit!" Swenson cried, backing
away.
                   Looking closely, Skip could see where the body
had been laid in a carefully dug hole. The sand changed color at the side of
the grave, marking the edge of the intrusion.
                   "Oh, Christ!" Gillespie groaned.
"That's all we need. That'll get the damned Indians involved. Then we'll
have an Indian monitor running around and being a pain in the ass." He
looked at the shark's tooth in his hand. Yes, part of a necklace—and buried
with the skeleton all those years.
                   "A damn dead man!" Swenson
whispered.
                   " Dead's right.
He's been lying under the dirt this long, he won't mind a while longer."
Skip pointed to the end of the pad where the backdirt had been piled.
                   "You mean you want me to ..."
Swenson's mouth dropped open, exposing his two missiiteeth .
                   "Damned right I do." Skip gestured,
his gaze drawn to the skull that stared up at him with sightless eyes.
"You'd have crunched him with the Cat on the next pass. What's the
difference? Hey, what's this? You going goofy over a dead Indian? Aren't you
the guy that cleaned out that bar down in town?"
                   "Yeah, but-"
                   "Then get on that Cat and hit it, Red.
The longer this thing's exposed, the more nervous I get."
                   Swenson cocked his head, squinting in the sun.
"You know, I heard about a guy up by Gillette. Found a mammoth tusk and
took it home. Made it all the way up to crew chief in the mine he