People of the Owl: A Novel of Prehistoric North America (North America's Forgotten Past) Read Free Page A

yards.
    “Worth?” Anson shrugged. “In dollars, not much. But when it comes to information—to the questions we can answer—it’s priceless. This is a satellite site, an outlier tied to the Poverty Point site a little ways up Bayou Macon.” He pointed to the thicket of trees that dropped off toward the muddy bayou no more than fifty yards beyond the brush.
    Patty Umbaugh said, “We have a registry of sites—”
    “Nope!” Arnold shook his head categorically. “First you register it, then every tourist in the damned world wants to trespass on your property to see it, and some government bureaucrat wants to tell you how to run it.” He waved a finger. “The answer is no. Period.”
    She looked pissed, but he had to hand it to her, she did a good job of covering.
    Anson rubbed his jaw. “If you don’t want to work with the state to preserve the site, that’s fine. Would you mind, however, if we brought field schools, students, up from time to time to dig here? Everything that we find belongs to you, of course. You can keep the artifacts here, or at your corporate headquarters, or we would be happy to curate them at the university.”
    Arnold rolled his lip over his chew, and slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so, Dr. Anson. First off, there’s liability to think about. What if one of your students fell and broke his neck, or some such thing? Or they snuck in at night to dig for arrowheads? And third, sure, BARB might own this site free and clear now, but who’s to say what’s gonna happen in the future? I heard tell of folks got taken to court over down by Lake Charles by some Injun group over a burial ground. We don’t need those kinds of headaches.”
    Anson looked as if he were about to throw up. “But, you will preserve the site, right?”
    Arnold smiled. Hell, cowboys and Indians never did get along together. “Yeah, well, we’ll take it under consideration. Like I said, either we’re efficient, or, well, just like your Indians. Extinct.”

    A rnold squinted in the midday sun. The soft Gulf breeze blew up from the southwest. It sent puffy clouds sailing across the sky and brought the promise of afternoon rains. The big yellow Caterpillar growled and roared as it dropped the rippers and rolled a sweetgum stump out of the damp black soil. The roots popped and snapped like firecrackers.
    The Hoferberg farm was unrecognizable now. The old oak trees that had shaded the lane had been cut down and sold for lumber. The house and barn, the foundation, the cisterns, and outbuildings had been flattened or plucked up with the backhoe and trucked off. Where the trees had somberly guarded the archaeological site, now an unrestricted view of the Bayou Macon could be seen; only the cane brakes under the slope of Macon Ridge remained standing.
    Arnold had made a special effort to be here for the leveling. He’d never seen an archaeological site until Dr. Anson brought him here. And he sure as hell had never seen one scraped flat before. So he was curious. As the Cat cut great swaths through the mounds, he walked along with his cup of black coffee—because real cowboys drank it that way—in his hand. He spat his Copenhagen every now and then, and looked at the black dirt.
    Most of Macon Ridge was a tan-brown loess, a silt blown clear down from the last glaciers up north. But the dirt in and around the mounds was crankcase-dripping black. Every now and again he had picked up one of the oddly shaped clay balls—finding them the perfect weight to fling out into the bayou—and wondered what the Indians had used them for.
    Little flat flakes of stone came up, and yes, he had even found a gray-stone arrowhead a while back. He had wanted to find an arrowhead just as much as he wanted to see Indian bones come rolling out of the ground, but the rich loamy soil seemed against him on that one. All in all, there wasn’t much exciting to see. So how, then, could that Dr. Anson have spouted all that nonsense about