I laid him out in anatomical position on one of the lab’s long tables, and he stretched from one end all the way to the other. He was an adult, but a young one, I saw when I looked at his teeth. He had a complete set of molars—first, second, and third—so he must have been at least eighteen. But the surfaces of the molars, especially the third molars, showed little of the rapid, characteristic occlusal wear caused by the Plains Indians’ gritty diet of stone-ground corn. Clearly he was in his prime, and an impressive prime it must have been. Hoping to pin down his age more closely, I checked the distal end of a femur, as well as the medial end of a clavicle. Neither end had fully fused to the shaft just yet, so the man was probably not yet twenty-five. His relative youth was also corroborated by the cranial sutures, the joints in the skull. The sutures showed up as dark, sharp lines squiggling between the bones; they were only just beginning to blur and fill and smooth, as the body began to apply its own bony spackling compound to seal and conceal the joints. By the time he was sixty, those cranial sutures would be entirely obliterated . . . except that this magnificent young man would not, could not, did not make it to sixty. At twenty years of age, his left temporal bone had been shattered by a blunt object—a war club, I suspected—wielded by a Mandan or Pawnee or Sioux warrior who had been stronger, or faster, or stealthier than this remarkable young man.
The second box contained a young woman—a girl, really, no more than fifteen, when she died. She was tall for her age, I realized when I removed the leg bones from the box, perhaps five feet eight inches already, and still growing. I could see this because the epiphyses, the ends and edges of her bones, had not yet fully fused to stop her growth. Her sacrum, the assemblage of the five lowest vertebrae, was already large, suggesting that her pelvic cavity would have had plenty of room to bear strapping babies. But her hips not yet reached their full womanly width. The iliac crest—the outer, curving edge of the hip bones—was not yet fused to the body of the ileum, so the growth plate between the two surfaces was still building. She was still growing . . . except that, because of fever or exposure or some other cause that had left no signs of trauma on her bones, she wasn’t still growing. And she would never, of course, bear those strapping babies her body had been readying itself to bear. I laid her out in anatomical order, too, alongside the male, struck by the resemblance they bore to medieval European grave markers, the full-length stones bearing effigies of skeletons to remind the living of the inevitability of death.
The smallest, yet somehow the most powerful, was the third, a child. A meager cluster of bones—scarcely more than a handful—surrounded by crumpled newspaper and foam padding to keep it from rattling around in the vastly overscaled, adult-sized box. The teenaged girl’s hipbone had been as big as my hand; this child’s—there was no way to tell if it was male or female—was smaller than my ear. But what was most striking about the child—who was a month or so shy of its second birthday, judging by the presence of a full set of baby teeth—was the head: the disproportionately large cranium and eye orbits that make the skulls of babies and children look otherworldly, almost like little aliens. The child’s cranial sutures—at this stage rather like jagged sawteeth or the ragged edges of splintered wood—had not yet started to interlock, as they would begin to do by adolescence. As a result, after the soft tissue had decayed, the skull had literally fallen to pieces in the grave: the frontal bone, containing the forehead and the upper halves of the immense, staring eye orbits; the parietal bones, which had formed the left and right sides of the skull; the occipital bone, whose convex outer surface and ridged inner surface reminded me of the weathered shell of a dead tortoise I had found one summer when I was a boy.
A folded piece of paper was tucked into one end of the box. I took it out, unfolded it, and read the inventory of grave goods buried with the baby:
This burial was associated with many artifacts:
bison robe
shell pendant
glass marbles
small glass bottle
brass baby spoon
blue glass pendant
clay buffalo effigy
In addition, there were many types of glass beads with this burial, including the following types and numbers: 11,067 blue glass seed beads, about 300 of which were still attached to a bison robe; 70 white glass seed beads; 9 ellipsoidal, red, transparent beads; 16 ellipsoidal, white, wire-wound beads; 10 ellipsoidal, milky white, wire-wound beads; 1 ellipsoidal green faceted transparent bead; 2 tubular blue beads; 3 compound tubular red on white beads; 22 spherical peacock blue beads; 19 yellow-and-blue spherical transparent beads; 17 spherical blue beads with white and yellow spots; 5 spherical clear beads; 3 amber-colored spherical transparent beads; and 3 spherical green beads.
Marveling at the treasure trove of grave goods—the list took me back to the day we had unearthed the baby, and the crew and I had talked about how precious the child must have been in life, and how deeply grieved in death—I began laying out the bones, tucking them between those of the young man and the girl. Just as I finished, the bone lab’s door opened.
“Good Lord,” said Peggy. “What are you doing, and why are you doing it so early in the morning? It’s not even seven yet.”
“I woke up early,” I said.
“You always wake up early,” she said, with the same half-exasperated tone in which Miranda had said the very same words to me a few days before.
“I dreamed about Arikara Indians last night, so I came in to spend some time with them.” I turned and looked at her. “What about you? What are you doing here at this hour?”
“I wasn’t sleeping either,” she said, and I thought I saw her cheeks flush slightly. “I saw the lights on and thought Miranda forgot to turn them off last night.” She stepped through the doorway, came into the lab, and walked over to the table where I stood. Looking down at the three Arikara skeletons, she caught her breath. “They’re beautiful,” she said softly. “Were they a family?”