“You put your finger on exactly why I love archaeology,” Nora said. She realized she would have to rein in his eagerness until she was sure she could trust his competence in field technique, but she was more than a little pleased at his lively interest.

Nora motioned to Salazar and Adelsky. “Grab your trowels and equipment and let’s go. And don’t forget gloves, hair nets, and face masks.” Nora had worked out an exacting protocol for the excavation work, so as not to contaminate human remains with their own DNA.

They connected their iPads to the local network and calibrated them. She assigned Salazar and Adelsky to one-meter squares, then she herself took the grid in which she’d found the tooth, B3. Salazar’s and Adelsky’s squares were not adjacent to hers—she wanted to open the site in different places, get a feel for the broader outlines, develop a sense of where things were.

As she put on her kneepads and knelt in the grass, Clive standing behind her, she felt butterflies in her stomach. This wasn’t a typical site—it was where an unspeakable tragedy had occurred. The place was owed a certain reverence. And dealing with historic human remains, where there might be living descendants—there were living descendants, like the man whose shadow was half covering her as he looked over her shoulder—made it an entirely different story.

Working carefully but efficiently, she removed the tarp from the sod layer she’d cut out two days before—labeled with a meter number—and examined the area of black earth where she’d found the tooth. She’d already discovered that the 1846 soil “horizon” was only ten inches down—an incredibly shallow excavation.

As she proceeded, she patiently explained each step to Clive. Taking the edge of her trowel, she gently removed soil a millimeter at a time, placing it in a bucket next to her, to be later dried and screened or put through flotation in search of carbonized organics and human hair.

She could hear the two others starting on their squares: scrape, dump; scrape, dump. A moment later, her trowel touched something else. Once again switching to a brush, she began to clean the surrounding area carefully.

“It’s the top of a human cranium,” she announced after a moment.

Clive dropped to his knees and looked at it closely, his head almost touching hers. “This gives me a really…strange feeling,” he murmured. “Seeing these human remains.”

“Me, too.”

Salazar and Adelsky immediately came over. “That didn’t take long.”

Nora brushed it off, exposing it to the edges. It was a piece about the size of two silver dollars, discolored brown edging to a crumbling whitish powder, crazed with fractures.

She worked ever so slowly, uncovering more of the skull. Her work revealed the forehead, eye sockets, and nasal opening, along with the mandible that had held her initial discovery—the tooth.

“Probably male, from the brow ridges,” she murmured.

They all watched in focused silence as she continued.

“That’s the coronal suture,” she said, pointing with the tip of her brush at a squiggly line running through the bone. “I’m no physical anthropologist, but I’d guess from its state of fusing this skull belonged to an adult.”

There was a silence. “The Lost Camp, according to my census, had seven male adults,” said Clive, his voice low. “A seventeen-year-old, three in their twenties, two in their thirties, and one who was forty. But Boardman, who was in his late twenties, escaped to the Donner camp, and the forty-year-old, Chears, was eventually rescued. So it couldn’t be either of them.”

“I’d guess this was one of the thirty-year-olds.”

Clive squatted closer. “Can you tell anything else from looking at it?”

Nora took a deep breath. “See these marks here and here?” She fished out a loupe and allowed him to examine them closely. “Those look like ‘anvil strike’ markings. They’re one of the six classic signs of cannibalism: the kind of scratches caused by a skull being placed on a rock and bashed open with another rock.”

Clive shook his head in faint horror.

She pointed at another spot. “And here we have a second classic sign: the crumbling edge on this bone could only have been the result of heating and cooking.” She sat back. “This person was decapitated, his head put in a fire and cooked, and the brain pan was bashed open to get at the, ah, cooked brain.”

This was greeted by a brief silence.

“Glad I kept my hands off that bacon at breakfast,” said Salazar.

“Brings it home pretty strong, doesn’t it?” said Clive. “So what are the other four signs of cannibalism?”

“Scraping marks inside the bone to get out the marrow; butcher marks made by stone or metal tools; the mashing of spongy bone to extract the nourishment—and pot polish.”

“Pot polish?”

“That’s where broken bones are boiled in a ceramic or iron pot to extract the grease. As they turn in the boiling water, the sharp ends become microscopically polished by the sides of the pot.” She paused. “Back in the lab, a physical anthropologist will examine these bones under a stereo zoom.” She stood up. “There’s probably a lot more of it—I mean him—to be found in this immediate area.” She hesitated. “Let me excavate just a little more before deciding on our next move.”

She knelt and began to work again, with Clive, Adelsky, and Salazar watching. Almost immediately she uncovered two more pieces of cranium and the burnt rim of the orbit. There were no vertebrae connected to the skull, but next to be exposed was a femur and what appeared to be a humerus.

“I’m no archaeologist, but the density of stuff is surprising,” Clive said. “I thought it would be more spread out. But it looks like a jumble, those skulls and long bones…” He shook his head.

“Well, I hate to put it this way,” Nora said, “but the area we’re working in appears to be a midden heap—where food trash was tossed.”

“As in, a lot of cannibalized bodies?”

“Yes.” She stood up again. “Jason, Bruce, under the circumstances I think you should leave your assigned quads for now and concentrate on the quads adjacent to this one, starting with B4 and A3. If this is a midden heap, it’s where the biggest cache will be.”

The men nodded and moved off to collect their equipment. Nora stepped back from the immediate worksite and Clive followed her.

“Ever worked on a site like this before?” Clive asked.

“In a way, yes. I worked on a site years ago that held the remains of young people murdered back in the nineteenth century by a serial killer. And I helped excavate a major prehistoric Pueblo cannibal site in Utah. That’s where I met my husband.”

“I didn’t know you were married.”

“My husband, Bill…well, he died.”

“I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” He took her hand spontaneously. She thought of withdrawing it, but didn’t. There was nothing more in the gesture than friendly concern, she told herself.

“I’m working on getting over it.” She didn’t want to tell him it had been more than seven years. In the past months, she thought she’d finally gotten over the worst of Bill’s death, but his memory and the hurt always seemed to resurface when she least expected it.