Klas scrambled along the hillside in a low crouch, his face and hands caked with dust and lips chapped from a morning under the blazing sun. He dropped onto his hands and knees and crawled up to the crest of the hill and peeked over, staring through his sunglasses at the archeological dig a quarter-mile away. He could see land sectioned off in squares of twine, red flags sticking out of scores of the squares.
He wriggled on his belly below the crest and slipped his backpack off, pulling from it a pair of binoculars and a canteen. He took in a mouthful of water and held it in his mouth for a second, letting it seep into his tongue and wash over the inside of his cheeks. He capped the canteen and looked around behind him, checking for one of the security guards who occasionally made walks of the perimeter. He was alone.
He pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead and squirmed back up to the crest of the hill, dust floating up and again sticking to his lips. He looked through the binoculars at the dig site, scanning across it looking for the workers with small spades and brushes. Earlier that morning, he had seen the workers moving stretchers away from some of the squares, putting what looked like skeletal remnants in neat piles near one of the tents. He hadn't, though, been close enough to get a clearer look at the remains and had worked his way all morning to this closer point, the last hill before the terrain descended into a large depression that stretched for a mile or two away from him.
He slipped back below the hill and pulled a notebook and pencil from his pack and began sketching out the dig site from his new perspective, noting the tents and the irregular shape of the excavation area. He drew in small flag symbols where he remembered them and noted in which squares the men at the site were working. He crawled back up to the top and spied on the camp again, adjusting the focus of the binocular lenses on one of the closest squares with men in it. He could make out little for several moments as two men crouched with brushes, their backs to him. When one of them moved he could see a skeletal head, its cranium large, thick and protruding forward above the eye sockets. The other man moved aside and began brushing something else, and Klas could see that much of the unearthed skeleton was blackened, as if it had been burnt. He put the binoculars down and drew a quick sketch of the head, making a notation alongside it that the skeleton appeared charred.
He scanned the area behind him, again, checking for the khaki uniformed men wearing ball caps and carrying small machine guns. None. Perhaps it was too hot for them; perhaps they had grown tired of patrolling the area and never finding prowlers. Klas took another drink from his canteen and squirmed a little further forward on the hilltop.
He searched through the binoculars for the tents and came to the scattering of skeletal remains next to one of them. They were divided into three groups, with the bones of two piles neatly lined up, small tags attached to the larger bones. There appeared to be no indication that the men at the site were trying to reconstruct the skeletons at the moment, rather, they were merely cataloguing where the bones had been found and arranging them by the color of the tag. The skulls were too small to make out distinctly, appearing as little more than bony orbs and loose jawbones.
Several men walked in front of the pile at which he was looking, set down a new set of bones, each bearing a sky-blue tag, and moved off with their litter. They set it down on the ground and one of the men began tossing the bones unceremoniously into the pile. Klas squinted hard through the binoculars, sure that the bones in the pile were charred, burnt by some long ago conflagration. The men picked their litter from the ground and moved out of his view and Klas wished he had stronger binoculars as he stared at the unmarked jumble of femurs, ribs and skulls.
Klas wondered why they weren't cataloguing the burnt bones, why they weren't carefully stacked. He had never seen any other archeological digs, but was sure such the haphazard care of the items uncovered wasn't scientific procedure. After this dig was over, the entire area would become a large hotel resort, and Klas wondered if this were some archeological way of hastening the process of excavation by separating the useful artifacts from the unrecoverable ones.
He held the binoculars with one hand as he reached for his notebook and pencil, dragging it closer to him and setting it near his chin. He picked the pencil up and began sketching out the piles, peeking quickly through the binoculars for details. He scanned a few feet to the right and saw a pelvic bone, burned like the rest. And then he saw it, there on the right side of the bone, a deep cleft as if someone had tried to chop open the bone. He looked at a different pelvic bone and saw the same thing, only it appeared as if this one had had a hole hammered right through it.
Klas licked his lips and raised his eyebrows at the pile of hip bones and wondered at the various wedges and holes carved in them. His heart beat faster as he wrote a note to himself in his notebook, drawing a crude pelvic bone missing a wedge of bone on the right side.
Another pair of men bearing a litter walked up to the pile of charred bones and dumped their load unceremoniously on top of it. A third man walked up to them and motioned to a pickup truck parked nearby. The other two men nodded, one of them looking down at the charred pile of hip bones and rubbing his chin. The third man then pointed out to an area below Klas's field of vision, sweeping his hand from the left to the right and then circling an area with his index finger.
Klas crawled down from the slope, his heart beating, certain he was onto the biggest story the world had ever seen. He looked around for a patrol, saw none, and packed his things quickly. His side burned hotly, singing a call of the dead, a song that demanded redemption, survival. If only he had a camera.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.
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