the way out here. Why in God’s name had he agreed to head for the far reaches of Mesa Verde only three hours after Barney’s murder in Durango?
5
The secondary road turned south after ten miles onto Wetherill Mesa, aiming for a handful of small Ancestral Puebloan villages known as Badger House, Long House, and Kodak House. Rather than follow the road to the villages at the southern tip of Wetherill Mesa, however, Chuck turned west yet again, still following Samuel’s instructions, leaving the pavement for a dirt road headed toward the park’s western
border.
Dust billowed into the air behind the truck as he drove a mile through the forest to a turnaround spot and graveled parking area at the end of the graded dirt track. Samuel’s black Ford pickup sat in the parking area between a pair of late-model vehicles—a silver mini SUV and a lime-green subcompact. The two vehicles were unfamiliar to Chuck, their shiny newness indicating they most likely were rental cars.
Chuck nosed his truck to a stop beside the subcompact and climbed out. A well-maintained hiking trail led south from the parking area. He helped Rosie down from the passenger seat and headed away from the trail with her into the untracked piñon-juniper forest to the west.
“Where are we going?” Rosie asked as she hiked behind Chuck through the patchwork of shade and sun created by the outstretched branches overhead.
“To a canyon.”
“But there’s only a bunch of trees.”
“Just you wait. We’re walking on Mesa Verde, which is a big, flat chunk of sandstone with just enough soil on it for trees to grow. Sandstone is one of the softest kinds of rock there is. It crumbles and washes away wherever water runs across it.” He glanced back at her as they walked. “You can probably guess what that leaves behind.”
“Canyons!” she cried.
“Exactamente.”
They emerged from the forest after ten minutes onto a sunlit bench of beige sandstone. The stone shelf ended abruptly twenty feet from the edge of the forest, falling straight down into a hundred-foot-deep canyon. The opposite wall of the canyon, a vertical cliff of matching tan stone, faced them a few hundred feet away. Here and there, boulders worn from the mesa top rested on the edges of the facing cliffs, poised to tumble to the floor of the canyon as the process of erosion gradually enlarged the gorge over geologic time.
“It’s deep!” Rosie exclaimed, striding toward the edge of the cliff.
“Not so close,” Chuck said, hurrying after her and grabbing her hand. “There’s lots of loose stuff, big boulders and little pebbles, ready to fall into the canyon at the slightest touch. It could take you with it if you’re not careful.”
He peered down into the walled canyon. Ponderosa pine trees grew from the sandy bottom of the gorge, their needled tops nearly even with the canyon rim. Bunchgrass and thickets of scrub oak sprouted among the ponderosas in the canyon bottom. A narrow defile, ten feet deep and walled with sandy soil, cut down the middle of the canyon floor, channeling water that flowed into the gorge when rains came to the plateau.
Maintaining his grip on Rosie’s hand, Chuck walked with her along the sandstone shelf to the head of a narrow cleft in the flat stone rim of the gorge as Samuel had directed. The cleft sliced steeply downward, a rock-walled slot descending all the way to the canyon floor.
Rosie smiled and clapped her hands as she looked down the chimney-like passage. “This’ll be fun.”
She entered the slot first, pressing her hands to the facing rock walls as she descended. Chuck followed close behind, ready to steady her if she stumbled. But she scrambled over chockstones and slipped past mountain mahogany bushes growing in the cleft without difficulty, reaching the bottom of the slot in less than five minutes.
Chuck followed Rosie out of the cleft and onto the flat floor of the gorge. The chink of a shovel striking soil echoed up the canyon to where they stood.
“Hear that?” he asked Rosie. “Maybe we’ll get to do some archaeology after all.”
“Bazunga.” She looked up at Chuck and explained, “That means ‘great.’”
The digging grew louder as they hiked down the canyon along the base of the cliff. High above their heads, the ponderosas thrummed as the afternoon breeze coursed through the trees’ long needles.
Rounding a bend in the canyon, they came upon a dirt-floored, stone-roofed alcove eroded into the base of the canyon wall. The shadowed recess faced southwest from the bottom of the cliff, the overhanging roof shielding the dirt floor beneath it from rain and snow. Two women stood facing Chuck and Rosie on the far side of a depression dug into the floor of the cavern-like space. Samuel Horvat wielded a shovel in the neck-deep depression, the back of his head visible above the alcove floor.
At the appearance of Chuck and Rosie, the older of the two women crossed her arms over her narrow chest, observing their approach with piercing, electric-blue eyes. She was short and slight, weighing no more than a hundred pounds, and looked to be about Chuck’s age, in her mid-forties. She wore dusty white sneakers, khaki slacks, and a cotton jacket over a bright white, button-up shirt.
The second woman was in her late twenties. She wore faded jeans and a crimson T-shirt with the blocky, easily recognizable H of Harvard University emblazoned on its chest.
An assortment of dig implements rested in the dirt beside the women—plastic hand scoops and metal trowels, a hatchet, a hammer and chisel, and stackable buckets made of heavy plastic. On a flat piece of sandstone, out of the dirt, sat a camera bag and zippered computer satchel.
Samuel tossed a shovelful of soil onto a pile of dirt at the edge of the cavity. A small cloud of dust rose into the air as the dry soil landed on the pile.
“Hey, there,” Chuck called as he approached the depression with Rosie.
Samuel turned to them. Sweat gleamed on his forehead beneath the brim of the stained felt fedora he’d worn for as long as Chuck had known him. Samuel was well into his fifties, his face deeply lined from decades of work outdoors beneath the harsh, Four Corners sun. Thick, gray hair covered his ears and tumbled from his hat down the back of his neck to his shirt collar.
Chuck stopped at the edge of the depression and looked down at Samuel. The longtime Southwest Archaeology Enterprises archaeologist wore heavy leather boots, brown denim work jeans, and a heavy cotton shirt with the letters SAE embroidered in red on its left breast, the middle A shaped like an arrowhead.
Samuel stabbed the blade of his shovel into the dirt at the bottom of the cavity and rested his gloved hands on top of the shovel’s handle. “Thanks for coming,” he said to Chuck.
Rosie stopped at Chuck’s side.
“And who might you be?” Samuel asked her.
“I’m Rosie.”
Chuck put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her to him. “She wanted to come along. She’s studying archaeology in school right now.”
“Good for you, young lady,” Samuel told her. He leaned the shovel on the side wall of the depression and said to Chuck, “I was just doing a little cleaning up. The walls were caving a bit.”
He
