As the waitress scurried away to put in our order, Vickery nibbled his cigar briefly, then took it out and frowned at it. The tip was crumbling, and flecks of soggy tobacco clung to his lips and tongue. He laid the cigar across the ashtray, pulled a few napkins from the black-and-chrome dispenser, and swabbed his mouth. “So tell me, Doc,” he said, “what put the ‘forensic’ in anthropology for you? How come you’re hanging out with cops instead of fossil hunters or museum donors?”
“One thing led to another,” I said. “Early in my career—while I was still working on my PhD dissertation—I spent summers in South Dakota, excavating old Indian graves for the Smithsonian. It was pretty quiet out there; big ranches, not many people. Not much excitement for the police, either. DUIs, mostly; occasionally a burglary or barroom fight or some cattle rustling. So we got a fair number of visits from the sheriff’s deputies and the state police. They’d come by almost every day—just to make sure we were okay, they said, but mostly they were bored, and we were the most reliable entertainment around. So whenever they’d come by, we’d show them what we were excavating that day, or bring out something interesting we’d found a day or two before—scalping marks, bashed-in skulls, whatever.”
“So instead of the bookmobile,” Angie cracked, “y’all were the bonemobile.”
“I guess we were.” I laughed. “One of the skeletons became kinda famous, and we had cops coming to see him from half the state. It was an adult male in his forties—no spring chicken, by Plains Indian standards. He had an arrowhead embedded deep in his right femur, about halfway between his hip and his knee. Right about where his thigh would’ve been gripping the ribs of a horse, riding bareback.”
“Cool,” said Vickery. “You think he bled to death? Or died of infection?”
“Neither.” I grinned. “That was what was so interesting about it. The bone had healed and smoothed around the arrowhead—remodeled, we call it—which meant that he’d lived for years after being shot with the arrow. It was so deep they couldn’t get it out, so they just cut off the arrow, and he carried the point around in his leg for years. Probably hurt like hell for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. Then, five or ten or twenty years later, he got clubbed to death—back of his skull was completely crushed—maybe because he couldn’t run fast enough when some Sioux came after him with a battle-ax.”
“Wow,” said Angie. “That’s a great show-and-tell exhibit. Beats the pants off our plaster casts of Ted Bundy’s teeth. I’d sure come out and take a look, if I were a South Dakota deputy. It’s like the History Channel meets CSI.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Listening to the bones, hearing the story they can tell, even if the story’s two centuries old. Anyhow, one day, a South Dakota state trooper who’d seen the arrowhead skeleton came back out to the site. This was back before cell phones were everywhere, mind you, and there was no way to get ahold of us except to come out there in person. We were way off the grid.” Vickery nodded. “So this state trooper comes out. Corporal Gustafson, I think his name was. No, wait; that’s almost it, but not quite. Gunterson. Yeah, Gunterson.” I gave my head a shake. “Funny how I can dredge up that guy’s name after thirty years, but can’t remember where I left my pocketknife this morning. Anyhow, Gunterson asks if I’d be willing to take a look at a skeleton that a cattle rancher’d just found.”
“What kind of skeleton? Old or new? Indian or white or what?”
“That’s exactly what the trooper wanted to know. I said I’d be glad to take a look.”
“And?”
“Exposed bones in a dry wash. Not Indian.”
“How’d you know?”
“Indians have shovel-shaped incisors—their front teeth are scooped out on the back side. So do Asians. Caucasian incisors are pretty much flat across the back.”
Angie rubbed her teeth, then asked, “Old bones, or new?”
“Old enough to be bare and sun-bleached. New enough to have an amalgam filling, though that could have been anytime in the twentieth century. She—it was a woman in her twenties—had only two cavities, so she was probably born sometime after the 1950s.”
“How do you figure that?”
“That’s when America’s cities and towns started adding fluoride to their drinking water.”
“A dastardly commie plot,” teased Vickery.
“Indeed,” I said. “Those Communists wanted our kids to have strong teeth. So this woman was all set for the commie takeover, dentally speaking. Although it’s possible that she grew up earlier, before fluoridation, in an area where the groundwater’s naturally high in minerals.”