As the machine crawled along, I checked the cut’s depth repeatedly with a wooden stake I’d cut to length. To play it safe, the machine would make multiple passes, each one shaving off another two inches of topsoil. The soil was grayish brown, almost as fine as flour or cocoa powder. As the blade bit deeper and deeper into the earth, the walls of the trench began to resemble a cutaway drawing from a soil-science textbook. Below the mat of roots, the soil was darker and denser, sprinkled with round pebbles and the occasional larger rock—the size of a fist or a grapefruit—that had once been a mighty boulder, before its encounter with the glacier. Whenever I saw one of the larger rocks, I worried that it might be a skull, that the grader just cut through a grave and a destroyed a skeleton. My relief upon seeing that no, it was just a rock, was mixed with disappointment: no, it was just a rock.
Pass by pass—two inches, four, six, eight, ten, twelve—my anxiety deepened along with the cut. Perhaps my bold experiment was a failure. Perhaps I’d laid out a swath that contained no graves at all . . . or perhaps graves galore dotted the ground on either side of my trench, their skeletal inhabitants grinning at my foolishness in picking exactly the wrong path. Or perhaps there were indeed graves in the grader’s path, but the blade somehow masked them in its passage.
Midway along the ninth pass of the eighty-foot cut, just as I started to despair, my eye caught a subtle difference in the surface of the exposed dirt. There: eighteen inches down, was a faint, familiar circle in the soil, three feet across, slightly darker in color and almost imperceptibly looser in texture than its surroundings—like a powdery version of a fresh asphalt patch plugging a big highway pothole. Could I be imagining it? I knelt to examine it, my heart racing. At the nearer edge of the rim—the edge first crossed by the steel blade—the soil within the circle had separated slightly from the soil outside the circle. The curved, quarter-inch gap marked a line where looser, disturbed dirt had been pulled away from the denser, undisturbed soil surrounding it. On the far side of the circle’s rim, the blade had shoved a corresponding handful of the loose dirt outside the margin of the circle, where it had tumbled onto the packed dirt in a miniature avalanche.
As I leaned closer, my eye caught a flash of color amid the drab soil. Taking my trowel from the back pocket of my pants, I flicked away crumbs of soil with the tool’s triangular tip, revealing a tiny sphere of cobalt blue, pierced by a cylindrical hole. The blade had uncovered a blue glass bead, the sort used as currency by the Indians and early white traders. The bead told me beyond a doubt that this circular disturbance in the prairie soil was the grave of an Arikara Indian, containing bones and a few possessions and trade goods for the afterlife.
Over the rumble and growl of the diesel engine, I heard a shout and looked up. Doug, one of the ten undergraduate students on my summer crew, was standing in the cut ten feet beyond me, pointing at the ground and waving his straw hat in excitement. I stood for a better look. By now the grader was nearing the end of the swath we’d marked with flags. Between where I stood and where the machine was slowing to an idle, the other nine summer students were dancing, pointing, and dropping to their knees in the dirt, clustering around another half-dozen faint circles, another half-dozen graves.
I raised my trowel high above my head and cut loose with what I imagined to be the battle cry of a triumphant Arikara warrior. The students stared at me, then, one by one and two by two, they joined in.
Unlike whites, the Arikara tended to bury their dead in a folded position, either sitting up or lying on one side, tightly tucked in a fetal position. The reason was simple: two hundred years ago, the Indians had only the simplest of tools. To dig graves, they used crude hoes, which they made by lashing a buffalo scapula to a stick or to a buffalo femur. These Bone Age tools were wielded by women, for burying the dead was considered women’s work. Try burrowing down through prairie sod with a buffalo bone and you, too, would surely settle for a compact, shallow grave, just as the Arikara squaw who’d dug this grave had doubtless done.
Pulling rank, I claimed the first grave as my own private dig and began troweling into the soil. A few inches down, I came to a layer of crumbling wood, the remnants of the sticks and brush that had been put here two centuries before to deter scavenging by coyotes and rodents. Carefully I teased the wood fragments apart, setting them on a wire screen that would be used to sift everything that came from the ground.