As Faye stood on the creek’s low bank, unpacking the bag holding her tools and field notebook, she was focused on the bluff above her. Kali must be a morning person, too, because Faye was pretty sure the girl was already up there. She had heard leaves rustling above her the whole time she was approaching the bluff. As the quiet footsteps had pattered along, Faye had expected them to bring a little face to gaze down at her, half-fierce and half-friendly. She had been wrong.
It was embarrassing to admit it, even to herself, but she was hurt that Kali had chosen not to climb down to the waterline and say hello. Faye had thoroughly enjoyed the mile-long conversation between Kali’s free lunch pickup and this spot, but Kali apparently hadn’t enjoyed it as much as she did. If she had, she wouldn’t be up there hiding from Faye.
Two people can learn about a lot about each other while taking a long walk. Kali might not have known who Lassie was when they set off walking—and how many ten-year-olds did?—but she’d known the entire discography of Isaac Hayes. How many ten-year-olds could say that?
“My Uncle Laneer worked with Isaac Hayes at the meat-packing plant back in the day,” Kali had said. “Played bass in his band for a while, till the boss put him on the third shift and he had to quit. Third shift pays better, but you can’t play the clubs when you’re working midnights.”
Faye had agreed that was true, then started singing the guitar intro to “Shaft,” complete with wah-wah effects. Her funky “Bomp-bugga-bomp-a-bomp” must have been good, because Kali had laughed until she splashed butt-first into the water. Faye considered this one of her finest musical moments.
Knowing that her fellow funk-lover was keeping her distance this morning hurt Faye more than it should have, but she shook it off. The only sensible thing to do was to leave the child alone and get to work.
This spot at the edge of Sweetgum Creek would have been pretty minus the green scum on the surface. The scummy water burbled over a pebble-studded sandy bottom, cutting through a small ravine it had carved for itself. Some of the trees lining the creekbed were the sweetgums that had given the creek its name. When a breeze rustled through all those leaves, Faye understood why Kali chose to be outside in the July heat. This was a peaceful place. And a fascinating one for an archaeologist.
Sweetgum Creek had clawed its groove all the way across Memphis, exposing some fascinating strata. Millennia ago, a primeval version of the Mississippi, far larger than the current river, had flowed over the area, covering it with thick layers of silt. Those layers of sediment had entombed ancient tree trunks which were now petrified, mineralized into gleaming, colorful rock. In other parts of Memphis, Sweetgum Creek had exposed those old trunks and much more.
More pertinent to Faye’s expertise were the traces of Paleolithic humans that had been uncovered by this flowing water. They had left little behind but their magnificent spear points of fluted stone and, sometimes, the fossilized skeletons of the wooly mammoths brought down by those spears. Across town, Sweetgum Creek had uncovered one of those woolly mammoths, and a handful of Paleolithic tools, too. Faye burned to find a woolly mammoth.
When she looked at a map showing such spectacular finds upstream from where she stood, she asked herself the question that had kept her going for her entire career: “Why not here?”
Then she gave herself the same answer she always did: “You won’t know unless you look.”
Faye was in Memphis because the state of Tennessee had a problem. They wanted to expand a campground that brought in good income for this park, and their problem had taken the form of a longtime resident of the surrounding neighborhood showing up with a sheaf of old photographs. Those photos showed that a campground along this creek would be nothing new.
When the park had been developed in the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps had done the work of clearing trails and building bridges and structures out of rough-hewn brown stone. It had taken months to do this, maybe years. The CCC had built a huge camp to house their crew, and they had done it right here along Sweetgum Creek.
The thing Faye found most interesting about this camp was that every last one of the workers had been African-American because the CCC program had been segregated. Even the New Deal hadn’t managed to treat everybody the same way. It had been the same old deal.
Those people were part of the park’s history now, and they had a story to tell. The state was going to have to cool its heels until Faye did a cultural resources survey to find any traces the CCC workers had left behind. The time she’d spent poking around at the foot of this bluff had been above and beyond her scope of work, but Faye had been willing to do it, because, well…mammoths! If she was going to be this close to the possibility of a mammoth, she was damn sure going to try to find one.
Never mind that she wasn’t a paleontologist. Some things were bigger than trivia, like whether a lot of self-guided study and a raging sense of curiosity qualified her to do paleontology.
As Faye noted the date in her field notebook, she heard another sound from above, and it wasn’t footsteps. It was a human voice, but the soft, muffled sounds were not words. Was it Kali?
If the little girl was hiding, why would she be making these noises? More concerning to Faye was the pain in the sounds she was hearing. Somebody was in trouble.
Faye laid her trowel down and didn’t waste time by running
