Chapter 4

1992

Portland, Oregon, USA

Carl flicked aside his mop of chocolate-brown hair and peered at the lump of blackish goo lying in the Petri dish. It looked like overcooked spinach. Stomach contents always did. But this particular specimen had not come from any old John Doe, some random stiff found in a roadside ditch. It had come from someone famous, a bona fide celebrity.

But as eager as Carl was to find out what this celebrity had eaten for their last meal, he first had to pee, really piss like a racehorse, whatever that meant. The last can of Mountain Dew had gone straight through him. Setting the Petri dish in a bed of crushed ice, he snapped off his latex gloves, hurried out of the lab and took the elevator down to the hospital's ground floor lobby.

The old security guard slept in his chair, chin to chest, arms crossed. Carl had chatted with him once or twice. He was Greek, and he had big family. But Carl did not have time for small talk. He scurried past the guard, crossing the empty lobby before bursting into the restroom. He promptly relieved himself, zipped up and exited without so much as a glance at the sink. It always gave Carl a little thrill to defy his mother's obsession with hand washing. Besides, as a biologist, and a molecular biologist at that, he knew that in small doses germs were good for you. They kept the skin and gastrointestinal tract healthy. They prevented allergies and autoimmune disease. They made you strong.

The security guard, now awake, gave a little nod of recognition as Carl veered toward the vending machines to secure another dose of caffeine. He slipped a ragged dollar bill into the slot and slapped the glowing green and yellow Mountain Dew button. A frosty can clunked into the receptacle. With the change, two quarters, he bought a second can. Now, fully provisioned for an all-nighter in the lab, he headed back to the elevators and tapped the call button repeatedly.

"You know that don't make it come any faster, right?" said the security guard from behind his desk.

Carl scoffed as he kept on tapping the button, faster now.

Back in his lab on the fourteenth floor, Carl switched on the mini-boom box he kept on the counter and thumbed its radio dial, hoping to land on a little Mötley Crüe, maybe some Scorps—anything but Enya. The lab next door always listened to that shit. Finding nothing to his liking, he switched over to AM. More blithering about the upcoming presidential race. Like it mattered. As far as Carl was concerned, the candidates were just two giant turds racing each other to the bottom of the toilet. He was about to put in a cassette tape when he heard the deep and sonorous voice of a late-night talk show host.

. . . Welcome back to the Realms of Mystery. On last week's show, we brought you the amazing story of the Burns Ice Man, a mysterious body found trapped in ancient ice deep within an Oregon cave. Well , oh my, it seems our Ice Man is causing quite a stir . . .

"They're talking about you, baby," Carl whispered to the Petrie dish, still lying there on its bed of crushed ice. Donning a fresh pair of latex gloves, Carl took the dish and placed it inside the gleaming interior of a stainless-steel biosafety cabinet. As he peered in through the protective glass shield, he lifted the Petri dish's lid and began picking through the muck with a probe and forceps. He had been tasked with isolating DNA from the sample, however degraded it might be, and freezing it for later analysis. Anything recognizable to the human eye was to be removed, cataloged, and frozen separately.

Almost immediately, Carl found something in the muck: a tiny brown spherule no bigger than a pinhead, a grain of some sort, a seed maybe. More picking produced another seed, and three more, each identical to the first, five in all. One by one, he dropped them into a glass vial the size of his little finger. His breath steamed the glass shield as he held the vial up for a closer look.

Seeds. This was way better than degraded DNA. These seeds were intact, which meant the DNA within them might be in good condition. Hell, the seeds might even be viable.

. . . according to state archaeologists, the ice in which the body was found is centuries old. How many centuries, you ask? Well, oh my. You're not going to believe this. But first a few words from our sponsors . . .

Carl already knew. He had seen the carbon-14 dating results. The Burns Ice Man was ten thousand years old, the oldest naturally preserved human body ever found, four thousand years older than than Ötzi, a frozen body discovered in the Austrian Alps a year earlier.

Carl stared at the five little seeds inside the vial, the Ice Man's last meal. If he played his cards right, his discovery could mean co-authorship on a paper in Science or Nature, the cover article probably. Those snooty grad schools who turned him down could kiss his lily-white ass.

But if he ever wanted to get credit for his discovery, he would have to document it. Snapping off his gloves, he picked up a dog-eared lab book and found a pen. The radio show host broke in with an update:

. . . in a shocking and unprecedented decision, the Ninth US Circuit Court has just upheld a lower court injunction on behalf of the Burns-Paiute Tribe, which has fought for months in court, claiming the Ice Man to be a dead ancestor and thus subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. According to the injunction, all scientific inquiry is to cease immediately, and all related materials and data handed over to the tribe within forty-eight hours . . .

All scientific inquiry to cease immediately . . . all materials to be handed over to the tribe. It took a moment for the words to settle in Carl's caffeine-frenzied mind. When they finally did, he dropped his notebook and clutched the vial of seeds in his bare hands. How could a lousy bunch of Indians just take away his discovery like that? What right did they have? What right did they have to interfere with science? It was ludicrous. It was criminal.

Carl spun around, half expecting to see a federal agent waiting there. But there was no one, just the phone hanging on the wall. Above it, the clock ticked away. He still had time.

***

Peter slept under the stars. In the morning, he stowed his gear, put some things in a rucksack and waded across the river. Changing into hiking boots, he continued up the Jeep trail toward Demi and Saul Gordon's house, wondering if it was just the two of them living there.

The trail soon joined a gravel road. As the road climbed the mountain's gentle western slope, it emerged from the pale sagebrush and bristly junipers onto a wide-open landscape of subalpine scrub, the browns and reds and yellows streaked through with stands of golden aspen. A narrow drive diverged from the gravel road, and plunging through a dense stand of aspens, it delivered Peter to the edge of a long meadow of tall, dry grass. At the far end, an old two-story house, painted gray, basked in the morning light, its roof agleam with solar panels. Behind it, towering over the aspens, three titanium-white wind turbines churned in the morning breeze.

As Peter neared the house, a muffled curse drifted down from the roof.

"Hello?" said Peter.

A head of white hair poked out from behind the brick chimney.

"Hi. I'm Peter. Did Demi tell you I was coming?"

Out stepped an old man, medium height, thin but barrel-chested and bow-legged. Balancing himself with one hand on the chimney, he spoke in a clear, surprising tenor. "Come on up and give me a hand, won't you? There's a ladder around back."

It had to be Saul. Peter crossed an expansive concrete patio equipped with a full-sized basketball hoop and Plexiglass backboard. Someone had even painted the concrete with a three-point arc.

Peter climbed the ladder and crawled up between the solar panels until he reached the ridgeline. No sooner had he stood and gained his footing than the old man shoved a mini satellite dish into his hands.

"Hold that," he said, taking a wrench from the back pocket of his dirty jeans. The man looked to be in his mid-eighties. A kind expression graced his wrinkled and leathery face, tanned skin doused with freckles and sunspots. His lush wavy hair had gone completely white, but a little red still clung to his bushy eyebrows.

Peter aligned the mini satellite dish to the bracket already installed on the chimney while Saul inserted the bolts and tightened the nuts.

He explained as they worked. "It was time for an upgrade. Now Demi can watch her basketball and I can watch my history shows. Faster internet, too. It's the only way we communicate with the outside world. There's no cell reception on this part of the mountain. No land lines, either."

When Saul had tightened the last nut, Peter asked, "Do you remember me?"

Saul wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his freckled hand. Then he smiled with a thousand wrinkles. "Of course I do. You were just a skinny little kid when your family came to visit. Now look at you. So, how are your parents?"

"My mom died seven months ago."

Saul paused, fiddling with the wrench in his hands. "I'm so sorry to hear that." A bird warbled from the branches of a nearby aspen. "And your father?"

"The two of us don't talk much anymore."

"I see." He pocketed the wrench. "Let's make some breakfast."

After a meal of sourdough pancakes, thick-sliced bacon, and canned peaches, Demi went outside to shoot baskets, while Peter and Saul took their coffee into the living room. Framed photographs hung on the wall above a decommissioned fireplace. An antique woodstove sat on a brick hearth in the corner formed by a partial wall dividing the entryway and living room. A chartreuse armchair faced the stove, and an orange couch was set beneath the large, curtained window. In a terra cotta pot on the sill grew a strange and lonely plant with dark-green leaves rimmed in blue. Tiny white flowers blossomed all about, littering the sill with desiccated petals.

Saul settled into the armchair and nodded toward the plant as Peter sat on the couch. "Pretty little thing. It's the only plant Demi and I managed to keep going."

Peter listened to the sound of Demi shooting baskets outside. He had played enough of the sport to recognize the cadence of a good shooter: swish, tap, tap, dribble, swish. Over and over. "Is it just you and Demi living here?"

"Since my wife passed." He paused, murmuring something to himself, a prayer perhaps. "We raised Demi from the age of four, after her parents died in an accident. We were the only ones who could provide for her special needs." A pause. "But she's all grown up now, finishing high school online, hell of a student, especially in STEM. She runs the computers for our wind turbines and hydrogen fuel cells. Fantastic athlete, too. She drives into Burns twice a week to play basketball, and to visit her cousins, on her dad's side."

"Will she be going to college?"

"She has a full-ride scholarship."

"Academic or basketball?"

"Neither." Saul raised his coffee mug to salute one of several framed photographs hanging on the wall opposite the couch. In it, two men in dark suits posed in front of a brick building, a courthouse maybe. One was Saul, younger by perhaps by a quarter century, his lush hair still red. He was shaking the hand of a much taller man with olive skin, long black hair and striking gray eyes.

"He's paying for Demi's education. He also paid for our solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells."

"Who is that?"

"That's Jason Dayan, founder of Dayex Industries."

"You mean the biotech company?"

Saul nodded. "We worked together in the '90s. I was an attorney and a rancher back then, among many other things. We were supporting a local Native American tribe in their fight against the federal government."

"Over what?"

"Have you ever heard of the Old One?"

Peter shook his head.

"How about the Burns Ice Man?"

"Oh yeah. Wasn't that an ancient body some college kids found in an ice cave?"

"Not far from here."

"Yeah, yeah. We talked about this in bioethics class. It was a huge legal battle between Native people and government scientists."

Saul's reddish eyebrows danced up his freckled forehead.

"That was you," said Peter.

"When the tribe of affiliation sued for custody of the body, Jason Dayan stepped in and threw his considerable financial weight behind their effort. And he recommended me for lead attorney." A pause. "You're probably wondering why I got involved."

Peter nodded.

"Well, many reasons, I suppose." Outside, Demi continued her practice. Tap, tap, dribble, swish. "But mostly my daughter, Leah, Demi's mother. She fell in love with a young man from the Burns-Paiute tribe, and they married. She got me to see the truth. She convinced me to help the tribe in their legal fight."

"I see. Did the tribe win?"

"They did, I'm proud to say." Saul picked at a loose thread on the arm of his chair. "The scientists thought they could do whatever they wanted with that body, based on precedent and scientific domain. But the truth is, the Ice Man was never a thing to be studied, to be argued about. He was a person, a member of the tribe, an ancestor. One of Demi's ancestors. Jason Dayan and I helped win an injunction, and eventually the tribe was awarded full custody of the remains. They buried the body in a secret spot, according to their customs."

"I hadn't heard that."

Saul shook his head. "Not many have. Not many outside of Native communities understand what they've gone through, what they're still going through, the trauma, passed on from generation to generation. I mean, I'm the son of Jewish immigrants, and we Jews know a little about the trauma from centuries of persecution and pogroms, the Holocaust – but I can't understand what Native people endure, not really."

Saul seemed to reflect on something. "Let me tell you a little story. It happened just a month ago. This local rancher heard I was an attorney with connections to the Native community and invited me to his home to look at some Indian artifacts, to see if they were legal. I think he wanted to sell them on eBay."

"What were they, like arrowheads or something?"

"No. They were bones, human bones, and not very old ones from their looks. Three thighbones and two skulls, one adult and one child. He kept them in a box on the bookshelf in his living room. He showed me a handwritten affidavit from some collector stating they were authentic Indian remains from over by Harney Lake."

"Were they?"

Saul set his coffee on a side table, his face placid, kindly even. But his dark eyes smoldered. "They might have been. I told him the big skull might have been my son-in-law's grandmother, Sara. His family always said she had a huge noggin. But the child's skull definitely wasn't one of his close kin. That family all has straight teeth." Saul leaned forward, gripping the armrests with his arthritic fingers. "What difference does it make if they were authentic or not? They were human bones, human remains, someone's mother, someone's child, right? How would you feel if you found your grandma's skull up on someone's bookshelf? You'd be horrified. You'd be outraged. You might even get violent." He fell back into his chair, seemingly exhausted. "Native people have been dealing with this shit for a long time. And so have mine."

It was not a point of view Peter had ever considered. "Aren't there laws against possessing human remains?"

Saul scoffed. "Of course there are, but they never applied to the remains of Native people. They had to get their own special law. It's called NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Without that law, I don't think we would have won our suit."

Outside, Demi's basketball beat a steady rhythm on the concrete.

Then Saul asked, "Do you know what day it is on Monday?"

"Columbus Day." Peter was slightly annoyed it was going to count toward his vacation time.

"Not many indigenous people celebrate it."

"I can imagine that."

"It commemorates the start of their long holocaust. Columbus, and all those who followed, murdered millions. Then came wave after wave of European disease, killing millions more. Then came genocide at the hands of the US government. It's all there in history books, at least the ones that tell the truth." He picked at another loose thread. "Before Columbus came, there were twenty million people living on this continent, maybe more. Twenty million human beings. Do you know how many Native Americans were left at the 1900 census?"

Peter shook his head.

"One hundred and fifty thousand. But even that was too many, so they tried to kill Native culture. They took their land, forced them onto reservations and boarding schools, cut their hair, whipped them for speaking their own languages. Demi's paternal grandparents were raised in those boarding schools."

Peter knew better than to speak. Instead, he gazed at the framed photos hanging on the wall. In one, a young and casually dressed Saul had his arm around the waist of tall, regal woman. A raven-haired toddler hid in her skirts. Nearby, a black-and-white photo depicted the bust of a handsome middle-aged man smiling subtly from beneath the wide brim of a white felt hat. In another framed photo, and old bearded man in a black robe and black fez-like cap stared back from the sepia past.

"That's Rabbi Yisrael Salanter of Vilna, one my ancestors. He was a famous rabbi from Lithuania who taught that religion was empty without ethics and moral sensitivity. That other picture there, that's Wovoka. I got it from my son-in-law's aunt a long time ago. Wovoka was a great prophet of the Numu – that's what some Native people around here call themselves. Back in the late 1800s, Wovoka used to preach that of people performed a special dance – the Ghost Dance – and acted righteously, God would clear the land of settlers and return it to Native people."

"That sounds kind of apocalyptic."

Saul nodded. "Wovoka was raised Christian, and he blended indigenous beliefs with the Hebrew Bible. People started calling him the Indian Jesus, because he claimed to have died and come back from the dead during a solar eclipse in 1889. His Ghost Dance religion spread like wildfire across the West. The Lakota people thought that God had finally taken their side in the fight against the US Army. They even made special Ghost Shirts they thought could stop bullets. And then the 7th Cavalry Regiment came and put an end to that, slaughtered three hundred Lakota children, women, and men at Wounded Knee Creek." Outside, Demi's basketball had fallen silent. "God was never on their side."

Later that morning, Demi offered to drive Peter into the town of Burns so he could rent a car and arrange for the Corolla to be towed out and repaired. She knew a shop where he could get a good deal if he was willing to wait a few days. They were about to pull away when Saul waved them down and leaned into the open passenger-side window. "Send my regards to your father."

Peter promised that he would. "That reminds me. Why did we come out here to visit you in the first place?"

"What did your father say about it?"

"I've never asked him."

"Well, I'd start there. Goodbye now." He slapped the roof of the car, and away they went.

At sunset, two days later, Peter found himself heading east on Interstate 84 along the Oregon side of the Columbia River. Pulling over at a quiet state park, he got out of his rental car and meandered down to the shore. A warm evening breeze rustled the lush broadleaf trees growing there. The river was a mile wide, calm and placid, the setting sun spreading across the water like an orange slick.

According to the interpretive display, this stretch of the river once crashed over a mighty cataract called Celilo Falls, or Wy-am. For time immemorial, indigenous people gathered at Wy-am to fish and trade. Then, in 1957, the US Army Corps of Engineers closed the spillways of the newly constructed Dalles Dam, twelve miles downstream. People gathered on the high bluffs and listened as the falls went silent, watched as Wy-am slipped beneath the rising water. But it turned out the mighty falls were still there. Using high-resolution sonar, engineers had spotted them, sixty feet below the placid surface, abiding in the depths, roiling in the dark.

As Peter returned to the rental car, his cell phone began to vibrate from his back pocket. It was his father calling. Again. Just five minutes earlier, he had called and left a voice mail, but Peter was driving and missed it. He had missed two more calls as well, both from the same unknown number.

Peter's phone vibrated again, and with a sigh he tapped the screen and put it to his ear. "Yeah?"

There was no response, just static. Not electronic static, but a wet, organic sound. Then came the familiar hacking cough.

"Dad?"

"Peee . . . errrr."

"Dad, are you OK?"

"Seh . . . mee . . . naaah . . ."

"What?"

"See . . . nah . . . pees." A series of ragged breaths, then again: "Seh-mee-nah . . . see-nah-pees!"

"Dad? What are you saying? Dad?"

The call had dropped.

Peter tapped the callback icon, but it went straight to voice mail. He tried again. Then he called 911.

____________________

Author's note:

Thank you for reading chapter 4!

What do you think seh-mee-nah see-nah-pees means? What language is it?

How did you react to Saul's story about the bones? Have you ever seen American Indian cultural items (including human remains) in a museum or curio shop and wondered where they came from, who they belonged to?

Enacted in 1990, NAGPRA requires U.S. agencies and institutions receiving federal funding to return certain cultural and funerary items to their affiliated American Indian bands, tribes and nations. It does not address the innumerable cultural items and human remains unethically held in private collections.

Wovoka and the Ghost Dance movement probably played a role in the Wounded Knee Massacre by further heightening tensions between American Indian and U.S. Army forces. The site of the massacre is memorialized at Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, within the borders of South Dakota. If you'd like to read more about Wovoka and Ghost Dance, I recommend Michael Hittman's Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, Expanded Edition from University of Nebraska Press.

One of my favorite images in the story is that of Celilo Falls. My grandfather used to talk about going there and buying salmon from "the Indians" who lived and fished at the falls. There they would be during the spring and fall runs, up on rickety wooden platforms scooping the fish out of pools with nets attached to the end of long poles. Those days are long gone.

All comments welcome.

-Frode

Dip netting at Celilo.