They nodded, and Julie fingered the dent.
'That's just what bones look like in ancient-man sites where they've been broken open with a stone chopper to get at the marrow. I've turned up a couple like this at the dig I'm working on.'
'Couldn't another animal have done it?” Julie asked. “Or a bullet? Or a fall?'
Gideon looked at the bone for another long second, and flung it over his shoulder into the woods. “You're absolutely right. Even world-renowned authorities have one-track minds.'
They continued down the trail, and emerged so suddenly onto the road that Gideon almost walked into the truck.
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Chapter 5
* * * *
Gideon lay on his stomach in the dirt, at the back of the low, shallow cave, cramped and aching, his knees and elbows scraped raw. He had been wedged in like that for hours, choked and half blinded by the showers of pebbles and dust every movement brought down. His hair was heavy with dirt, his nostrils caked with it, his teeth on edge with it.
He was happy as a clam.
He lay the tiny pick and brush next to the newly uncovered humerus and inched his big frame backward on his elbows, bringing down a rain of pebbles. At the entrance, where the cave widened, he sat up and stretched, wincing as joints creaked and muscles burned.
He found the last of the apple juice he'd had with lunch and drank a great gulp from the bottle. It had warmed in the sunlight, but it washed away the dust in his throat. Aching and content, he sat back against the cliff face and looked at the lovely scene below. It would have been far less pleasant thirteen thousand years ago.
The cave dwellers who'd lived there would not have been thirty feet above a small, pretty beach of dark pebbles, but miles from the water's edge, facing a huge, gray expanse of desolate land scoured flat by the retreating Cordilleran glacier. Treeless it would have been, and swampy, and full of kettle lakes holding the slowly melting, stagnant ice that the glacier had left behind. Far in the distance they would have seen the ribbon of invading seawater that was the Strait of Juan de Fuca aborning. On the very horizon would have been the trailing edge of the immense ice sheet itself, black with churned-up rocks and earth, slowly retreating back into what is now British Columbia.
There was no ice sheet now. Where its grim edge had been was the green, soft outline of Vancouver Island. And between Vancouver and the algae-covered beach just below him was only the thin, white curve of Dungeness Spit a thousand feet offshore, and twenty miles of water. Juan de Fuca Strait—named by an eighteenth-century English captain for a sixteenth-century Greek sailor traveling incognito on a Spanish vessel—had swelled and flowed over the glacier-scarred land until it formed a deep, mighty channel, from Vancouver to the Olympic Peninsula, and from the Pacific to Puget Sound.
He finished the last of the apple juice and stood up on the narrow ledge, looking with pleasure at the placid water, glasslike except for the sporadic, silvery splashes of leaping salmon, always where one didn't expect them. Overhead, seagulls and elegant, black-headed Caspian terns cried and planed in great, flat circles.
Gideon sighed happily. There was still almost a month of this before heading back to the teaching routine at Northern Cal. And tomorrow morning he'd be driving back down to Lake Quinault, not to look into some musty, ancient murder, but to see Julie. If the investigation was still going on, they'd drive elsewhere to be away from it; to the beach, perhaps to Kalaloch or La Push.
With three easy, powerful strides he clambered up the old, warped planking that he had dragged up to serve as a ramp to the clifftop. As always, the scene at the top startled him momentarily. It was a constant source of surprise that ten feet above this marvelous, seemingly isolated site in the side of a beach cliff was Dungeness with its wide, carefully tended lawns and flowerbeds, its big homes and sedate cottage motels.
He walked across Marine Drive directly onto the close-cropped lawn of Bayview Cottages, five tidy, gray- shingled little houses with white trim that looked as if they might have been transported whole from the coast of Maine. All were identical except for little rustic signs over the porches. Seagull Cottage, said Gideon's.
Inside, he picked up the telephone and dialed a Sequim number.
'Hello, Bertha,” he said. “Is Abe there?'
A few seconds later, an old man's voice, thin but full of energy, said, “Hello, Gideon, this is you?'
Gideon smiled. Abe Goldstein had been born in a ghetto near Minsk and had fled to the United States at the age of seventeen, speaking no English, having no money, and possessing no marketable skills. He had peddled thread and ribbons from a pushcart on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn and gone to night school to learn English. In six years he had graduated from the City College of New York, and four years later, in 1934, he had a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. For twenty years he'd taught at Columbia, then gone to the University of Wisconsin for another twenty, where he'd been Gideon's professor. He'd finished his teaching career with a few distinguished years at the University of Washington.
Almost sixty years in America, most of it spent as an eminent scholar of worldwide repute, and he still spoke like an immigrant ribbon peddler. Most of the time, anyway; the accent varied noticeably. More than one academic adversary had suggested it was a studied eccentricity, and Gideon, no adversary, was inclined to agree. If ever there was a studied eccentric, it was Abraham Irving Goldstein.
'Yes, Abe,” he said, “this is me.'
'So how is the dig?'
'So how should it be?'
'Of an old man you shouldn't make fun. So tell me.'
'I had a great day, Abe. That's why I called. Uncovered a juvenile humerus today, eleven, twelve years old,
