Twenty minutes later he wheeled the bags back and snapped a half dozen plates onto a light box. We studied the gray-on-grayer jumble.
Bones mixed with a pebbly sediment. Nothing densely opaque.
“No metal,” Hawkins said.
“That’s good,” I said.
“No teeth,” Hawkins said.
“That’s bad,” I said.
“No skull.”
“Nope,” I agreed.
After donning my protective gear, sans goggles, I opened the twist tie and emptied the uppermost bag onto the table.
“Holy buckets. Those look like the real deal.”
In all, there were eight semi-fleshed hands and feet, all truncated. I placed them in a plastic tub and asked for X rays. Hawkins carried them off, shaking his head and repeating his comment.
“Holy buckets.”
Slowly, I spread the remaining bones as best I could. Some were free of soft tissue. Others were held together by leatherized tendon and muscle. Still others retained remnants of decomposing flesh.
Sometime in late Miocene, roughly seven million years ago, a line of primates began experimenting with upright posture. The locomotor shift required some anatomic tinkering, but in a few epochs most kinks had been ironed out. By the Pliocene, roughly two million years ago, hominids were running around waiting for someone to invent Birkenstocks.
The move to bipedalism had its downside, of course. Lower back pain. Difficult childbirth. The loss of a grasping big toe. But, all things considered, the adjustment to upright worked well. By the time
The bones I was viewing didn’t fit that pattern. The hip blades were narrow and straight, the vertebrae chunky, with long, swooping spinous processes. The limb bones were short, thick, and molded in a way not seen in humans.
I drew a sigh of relief.
The victims in the bag had run on all fours.
Often bones delivered to me as “suspicious” turn out to be those of animals. Some are leftovers from Sunday dinner. Calf. Pig. Lamb. Turkey. Others are relics of last year’s hunt. Deer. Moose. Duck. Some are the remains of farm animals or family pets. Felix. Rover. Bessie. Old Paint.
Boyd’s find fell into none of those categories. But I had a hunch.
I began sorting. Right humeri. Left humeri. Right tibiae. Left tibiae. Ribs. Vertebrae. I was almost through when Hawkins arrived with the X rays.
One glance confirmed my suspicion.
Though the “hands” and “feet” looked jarringly human, skeletal differences were evident. Fused navicular and lunate bones in the hands. Deeply sculpted ends on the metatarsals and phalanges of the feet. Increasing digit length from the inside toward the outside.
I pointed out the latter trait.
“In a human foot, the second metatarsal is the longest. In a human hand, it’s the second or third metacarpal. With bears, the fourth is the longest in both.
“Makes it look like the critter’s reversed.”
I indicated pads of soft tissue on the soles of the feet.
“A human foot would be more arched.”
“So what is it, Doc?”
“Bear.”
“Bear?”
“Bears, I should say. I’ve got at least three left femora. That means a minimum of three individuals.”
“Where are the claws?”
“No claws, no distal phalanges, no fur. That means the bears were skinned.”
Hawkins chewed on that thought for a while.
“And the heads?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
I flipped off the light box and returned to the autopsy table.
“Bear hunting legal in this state?” Hawkins asked.
I peered at him over my mask.
