by Ray Bradbury
“Someone told me in town you might have a wonderful fossil up here,” I finally ventured, poking in his box of arrowheads, and watching the shy, tense face behind the glasses.
“That would be Ned Burner,” he said. “He talks too much.”
“I’d like to see it,” I said, carefully avoiding the word woman. “It might be something of great value to science.”
He flushed angrily. In the pause I could hear the wind beating at the tar-paper.
“I don’t want any of ‘em hereabouts to see it,^he cried passionately. “They’ll laugh and they’ll break it and it’ll be gone like—like everything.” He stopped, uncertainly aware of his own violence, his dark eyes widening with pain. “We are scientists, Mr. Buzby,” I urged gently. “We’re not here to break anything. We don’t have to tell Ned Burner what we see.”
He seemed a little mollified at this, then a doubt struck him. “But you’d want to take her away, put her in a museum.”
I noticed the pronoun, but ignored it. “Mr. Buzby,” I said, “we would very much like to see your discovery. It may be we can tell you more about it that you’d like to know. It might be that a museum would help you save it from vandals. I’ll leave it to you. If you say no, we won’t touch it, and we won’t talk about it in the town, either. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”
I could see him hesitating. It was plain that he wanted to show us, but the prospect was half frightening. Oddly enough, I had the feeling his fright revolved around his discovery, more than fear of the townspeople. As he talked on, I began to see what he wanted. He intended to show it to us in the hope we would confirm his belief that it was a petrified woman. The whole thing seemed to have taken on a tremendous importance in his mind. At that point, I couldn’t fathom his reasons.
Anyhow, he had something. At the back of the house we found the skull of a big, long-horned, extinct bison hung up under the eaves. It was a nice find, and we coveted it.
“It needs a dose of alvar for preservation,” I said. “The ^Museum would be the place for a fine specimen like this. It will just go slowly to pieces here.”
Buzby was not unattentive. “Maybe, Doctor, maybe. But I have to think. Why don’t you camp here tonight? In the morning “
“Yes?” I said, trying to keep the eagerness out of my voice. “You think we might “
“No! Well, yes, all right. But the conditions? They’re like you said?”
“Certainly,” I answered. “It’s very kind of you.”
He hardly heard me. That glaze of pain passed over his face once more. He turned and went into the house without speaking. We did not see him again until morning.
The wind goes down into those canyons also. It starts on the flats and rises through them with weird noises, flaking and blasting at every loose stone or leaning pinnacle. It scrapes the sand away from pipy concretions till they stand out like strange distorted sculptures. It leaves great stones teetering on wine glass stems.
I began to suspect what we would find, the moment I came there. Buzby hurried on ahead now, eager and panting. Once he had given his consent and started, he seemed in almost a frenzy of haste.
Well, it was the usual thing. Up. Down. Up. Over boulders and splintered dead falls of timber. Higher and higher into the back country. Toward the last he outran us, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The wind whipped it away.
But there he stood, finally, at a niche under the danyon wall. He had his hat off and, for a moment was oblivious to us. He might almost have been praying. Anyhow I stood back and waited for Mack to catch up. “This must be it,” I said to him. “Watch yourself.” Then we stepped forward.
It was a concretion, of course, just as I had figured after seeing the wind at work in those miles of canyon. It wasn’t a bad job, at that. There were some bumps in the right places, and a few marks that might be the face, if your imagniation was strong. Mine wasn’t just then. I had spent a day building a petrified woman into a mastodon femur, and now that was no good either, so I just stood and looked.
But after the first glance it was Buzby I watched. The unskilled eye can build marvels of form where the educated see nothing. I thought of that bison skull under his eaves, and how badly we needed it.
He didn’t wait for me to speak. He blurted with a terrible intensity that embarrassed me, “She—she’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
“It’s remarkable,” I said. “Quite remarkable.” And then I just stood there not knowing what to do.
He seized on my words with such painful hope that Mack backed off and started looking for fossils in places where he knew perfectly well there weren’t any.
I didn’t catch it all; I couldn’t possibly. The words came out in a long, aching torrent, the torrent dammed up for years in the heart of a man not meant for this place, nor for the wind at night by the windows, nor the empty bed, nor the neighbors twenty miles away. You’re tough at first. He must have been to stick there. And then suddenly you’re old. You’re old and you’re beaten, and there must be something to talk to and to love. And if you haven’t got it you’ll make it in your head, or out of a stone in a canyon wall.
He had found her, and he had a myth of how she came there, and now he came up and talked to her in the long afternoon heat while the dust devils danced in his failing corn. It was progressive. I saw the symptoms. In another year, she would be talking to him.
“It’s true, isn’t it, Doctor?” he asked me, looking up with that rapt face, after kneeling beside the niche. “You can see it’s her. You can see it plain as day.” For the life of me I couldn’t see anything except a red scar writhing on the brain of a living man who must have loved somebody once, beyond words and reason.
“Now Mr. Buzby,” I started to say then, and Mack came up and looked at me. This, in general, is when you launch into a careful explanation of how concretions are made so that the layman will not make the same mistake again. Mack just stood there looking at me in that stolid way of his. I couldn’t go on with it. I couldn’t even say it.
But I saw where this was going to end. I saw it suddenly and too late. I opened my mouth while little Mr. Buzby held his hands and tried to regain his composure. I opened my mouth and I lied in a way to damn me forever in the halls of science.
I lied, looking across at Mack, and I could feel myself getting redder every moment. It was a stupendous, a colossal lie. “Mr. Busby,” I said, “that—um—er—figure is astonishing. It is a remarkable case of preservation. We must have it for the Museum.”
The light in his face was beautiful. He believed me now. He believed himself. He came up to the niche again, and touched her lovingly.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to Mack. “We won’t have to pack the thing out. He’ll never give her up.”
That’s where I was a fool. He came up to me, his eyes troubled and unsure, but very patient.
“I think you’re right, Doctor,” he said. “It’s selfish of me. She’ll be safer with you. If she stays here somebody will smash her. I’m not well.” He sat down on a rock and wiped his forehead. “I’m sure I’m not well. I’m sure she’ll be safer with you. Only I don’t want her in a glass case where people can stare at her. If you can promise that, I “
“I can promise that,” I said meeting Mack’s eyes across Buzby’s shoulder.
“And if I come there I can see her?”
I knew I would never meet him again in this life.
“Yes,” I said, “you can see her there.” I waited, and then I said, “We’ll get the picks and plaster ready. Now that bison skull at your house . . .”
It was two days later, in the truck that Mack spoke to me. “Doc.”
“Yeah.”
“You know what the Old Man is going to say about shipping that concretion. It’s heavy. Must be three hundred pounds with the plaster.”
“Yes, I know.”
Mack was pulling up slow along the abutment of a bridge. It was the canyon of the big Piney, a hundred miles away. He got
out and went to the rear of the truck. I didn’t say anything, but I followed him back.
“Doc, give me a hand with this, will you?”
I took one end, and we heaved together. It’s a long drop in the big Piney. I didn’t look, but I heard it break on the stones.
“I wish I hadn’t done that,” I said.
“It was only a concretion,” Mack answered. “The old geezer won’t know.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. “Another week in that wind and I’d have believed in her myself. Get me the hell out of here— maybe I do, anyhow. I tell you I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”
“It’s a hundred more to Valentine,” Mack said.
He put the map in the car pocket and slid over and gave me the wheel.
THE RESTING PLACE by Oliver La Farge
The possibility that Dr. Hillebrand was developing kleptomania caused a good deal of pleasure among his younger colleagues—that is, the entire personnel of the Department of Anthropology, including its director, Walter Klibben. It was not that anybody really disliked the old boy. That would have been hard to do, for he was cooperative and gentle, and his humor was mild; he was perhaps the greatest living authority on Southwestern archeology, and broadly learned in the general science of anthropology; and he was a man who delighted in the success of others.
Dr. Hillebrand was the last surviving member of a group of men who had made the Department of Anthropology famous in the earlier part of the twentieth century. His ideas were old-fashioned; to Walter Klibben, who at forty was very much the young comer, and to the men he had gathered about him. Dr. Hillebrand's presence, clothed with authority, was as incongruous as that of a small, mild brontosaurus would be in a modern farmyard.
On the other hand, no one living had a finer archeological technique. Added to this was a curious intuition, which caused him to dig in unexpected places and come up with striking finds—the kind of thing that delights donors and trustees, such as the largest unbroken Mesa Verde black-onwhite jar known up to that time, the famous Biltabito Cache of turquoise and shell objects, discovered two years before and not yet on exhibition, and, only the previous year, the mural decorations at Painted Mask Ruin. The mural, of which as yet only a small part had been uncovered, compared favorably with the murals found at Awatovi and Kawaika-a by the Peabody Museum, but was several centuries older. Moreover, in the part already exposed there was an identifiable katchina mask, unique and conclusive evidence that the katchina cult dated back to long before the white man came. This meant, Dr. Klibben foresaw gloomily, that once again all available funds for publication would be tied up by the old coot’s material.
The trustees loved him. Several years ago, he had reached the age of retirement and they had waived the usual limitation in his case. He was curator of the museum, a position only slightly less important than that of the director, and he occupied the Kleinman Chair in American Archeology. This was an endowed position paying several thousand a year more than Klibben’s own professorship.
Dr. Hillebrand’s occupancy of these positions, on top of his near monopoly of publication money, was the rub. He blocked everything. If only the old relic would become emeritus, the younger men could move up. Klibben had it all worked out. There would be the Kleinman Chair for himself, and McDonnell could accede to his professorship. He would leave Steinburg an associate, but make him curator. Thus, Steinberg and McDonnell would have it in mind that the curatorship always might be transferred to McDonnell as the man with senior status, which would keep them both on their toes. At least one assistant professor could, in due course, be made an associate, and young George Franklin, Klibben’s own prized student, could be promoted from instructor to assistant. It all fitted together and reinforced his own position. Then, given free access to funds for monographs and papers . . .
But Dr. Hillebrand showed no signs of retiring. It was not that he needed the money from his two positions; he was a bachelor and something of an ascetic, and much of his salary he put into his own expeditions. He loved to teach, he said— and his students liked him. He loved his museum; in fact, he was daffy about it, pottering around in it until late at night. Well, let him retire, and he could still teach a course or two if he wanted; he could still potter, but Klibben could run his Department as he wished, as it ought to be run.
Since there seemed no hope that the old man would give out physically in the near future, Klibben had begun looking for symptoms of mental failure. There was, for instance, the illogical way in which Dr. Hillebrand often decided just where to run a trench or dig a posthole. As Steinburg once remarked, it was as if he were guided by a ouija board. Unfortunately, this eccentricity produced splendid results.
Then, sometimes Hillebrand would say to his students, “Now, let us imagine—” and proceed to indulge in surprising reconstructions of the daily life and religion of the ancient cliff dwellers, going far beyond the available evidence. The director had put Franklin onto that, because the young man had worked on Hopi and Zuni ceremonial. Franklin reported that the old boy always made it clear that these reconstructions were not science, and, further, Franklin said that they were remarkably shrewd and had given him some helpful new insights into aspects of modern Indians’ religion.
The possibility of kleptomania was something else again. The evidence—insufficient so far—concerned the rich Biltabito Cache, which Dr. Hillebrand himself was enumerating, cataloguing, and describing, mostly evenings, when the museum was closed. He was the only one who knew exactly how many objects had been in the find, but it did look as if some of it might now be missing. There was also what the night watchman thought he had seen. And then there was that one turquoise bead—but no proof it had come from that source, of course—that McDonnell had found on the floor near the cast of the Quirigua stela, just inside the entrance to the museum.
The thefts—if there had been any—had taken place in April and early May, when everyone was thinking of the end of the college year and the summer’s field trips. A short time later, and quite by accident, Klibben learned from an associate professor of ornithology that old Hillebrand had obtained from him a number of feathers, which he said he wanted for repairing his collection of katchina dolls. Among them were parrot and macaw feathers, and the fluffy feathers from the breast of an eagle.
Klibben’s field was not the American Southwest, but any American anthropologist would have been able to draw an obvious conclusion; turquoise, shell, and feathers of those sorts were components of ritual offerings among the modern Hopis and Zufiis, and possibly their ancestors, among whose remains Dr. Hillebrand had carried on his lifework. Dr. Klibben began to suspect—or hope—that the old man was succumbing to a mental weakness far more serious than would be evidenced by the mere stealing of a few bits of turquoise and shell.
The Director made tactful inquiries at the genetics field laboratory to see if the old man had been seeking corn pollen, another component of the ritual offerings, and found that there the question of tfre evolution of Zea maiz in the Southwest was related to the larger and much vexed question of the origin and domestication of that important New World plant, so interesting to archeologists, botanists, and geneticists. Dr. Hillebrand had been collecting specimens of ancient corn from archeological sites for a long time—ears, cobs, and grains extending over two millenniums or more, and other parts of the plant, including some fragments of tassels. It was, Klibben thought, the kind of niggling little detail you would expect to find Hillebrand spending good time on. Dr. Hillebrand had been turning his specimens over to the plant and heredity boys, who were delighted to have them. They, in turn, had followed this up by obtaining—for comparison—seed of modern Pueblo Indian, Navajo, and Hopi corn, and planting it. It was natural enough, then, that from time to time Dr. Hillebrand should take specimens of seed and pollen home to study on his own. It might be clear as day to Klibben that the old boy had gone gaga to the point of making ritual offerings to the gods of the cliff dwellings; he still had not
hing that would convince a strongly pro-Hillebrand board of trustees.
Even so, the situation was hopeful. Klibben suggested to the night watchman that, out of concern for Professor Hillebrand’s health, he keep a special eye on the Professor’s after-hours activities in the museum. Come June, he would arrange for Franklin—with his Southwestern interests, Franklin was the logical choice—to go along on Hillebrand’s expedition and see what he could see.
Franklin took the assignment willingly, by no means unaware of the possible advantages to himself should the old man be retired. The archeologist accepted the addition of the young man to his staff with equanimity. He remarked that Franklin’s knowledge of Pueblo daily life would be helpful in interpreting what might be uncovered, while a better grounding in Southwestern prehistory would add depth to the young man’s ethnographic perceptions. Right after commencement, they set out for the Navajo country of Arizona, accompanied by two undergraduate and four graduate students.
At Farmington, in New Mexico, they picked up the university’s truck and station wagon, and Hillebrand’s own field car, a Model A Ford as archaic as its owner. In view of the man’s income, Franklin thought, his hanging on to the thing was one more oddity, an item that could be added to many others to help prove Klibben’s case. At Farmington, too, they took on a cook and general helper. Dr. Hillebrand’s work was generously financed, quite apart from what went into it from his own earnings.
The party bounced over the horrifying road past the Four Corners and around the north end of Beautiful Mountain, into the Chinlee Valley, then southward and westward until, after having taken a day and a half to drive about two hundred miles, they reached the cliffs against which stood Painted Mask Ruin. The principal aim of the current summer’s work was to excavate the decorated kiva in detail, test another kiva, and make further, standard excavations in the ruin as a whole.
By the end of a week, the work was going nicely. Dr. Hillebrand put Franklin, as the senior scientist under him, in charge of the work in the painted kiva. Franklin knew perfectly well that he was deficient in the required techniques; he would, in fact, be dependent upon his first assistant, Philip Fleming, who was just short of his Ph.D. Fleming had worked in that kiva the previous season, had spent three earlier seasons with Dr. Hillebrand, and was regarded by him as the most promising of the many who had worked under him. There was real affection between the two men.
