The Bog (8 page)

Tuck looked back down at the dog and tenderly stroked his head. “You get better,” he ordered gently.

“Tuck, come finish your breakfast,” Melanie said, pulling his chair out at the table.

“It’s soggy now,” Katy murmured from behind her book. Seeing that that didn’t seem to make any difference to Tuck, she added another barb. “And there’s a bug in it.”

Tuck looked horrified.

“Katy!” Melanie broke in. “Why do you say things like that?” She turned to Tuck. “There’s no bug in it. Come on.”

“Well, I think I’ll be going,” David said.

Melanie looked at him, dismayed. “But you haven’t eaten breakfast yet.”

“I know, Mel, but it’s my first full day at the digs. I’m kind of excited to get there.”

“But I cooked the bacon especially for you.”

“I thought it was for the kids.”

“The kids have cereal. You can see that.”

“I’ll have some bacon,” Katy offered.

“Me too,” Tuck chimed in.

For a moment David thought it might be his out, but when he saw the look on Melanie’s face he realized that if he knew what was good for him, he’d better have some also. He sat down at the table.

“There are eggs too,” Melanie said in a stern monotone.

David watched as she whacked two rubbery yellow eyes down on his plate.

“She makes us eat them too,” Katy said dryly from behind her book.

Melanie turned around holding a spatula aloft threateningly. “Remember the movie
The China Syndrome
? Well, Mom’s about to have a meltdown, so watch it.” David took a large bite of egg and bacon, grinning widely and chewing with gusto. Mollified, Melanie turned back around.

Trying to change the subject, David noticed that she had been looking through the copy of
The Little Telegraph
that he had left on the counter for her.

“See any ads for housekeepers?” he asked.

“There’s a classified section, but no ads for housekeepers looking for work. Looks like I’m going to have to place an ad in myself.”

“Are you going to ask for live-in, or just days?” Melanie looked around her at the house. “Well, this place is big enough for a live-in. What do you think?”

“I’ll leave it up to you. I don’t really care either way.” Melanie smiled and David secretly felt pleased. He knew she liked it when he left such judgments completely up to her.

He quickly wolfed down his breakfast, kissed Melanie good-bye, and turned to leave. Just as he reached the door, Tuck ran up to him.

“Dad, can I come with you?”

“No, Tuck.”

“Why?”

“Because Daddy’s going to be there all day long, and you’d get bored.”

“Can I come for a visit?” Tuck countered.

“Not today. Maybe sometime.” He noticed Melanie looking at him reprovingly from behind. They always made it a point not to discuss the bog bodies in front of Tuck because Melanie deemed it a subject unsuitable for a six-year-old’s consumption. Personally, David recalled all of the ghastly and lurid things he had been into as a young boy and thought that Tuck would have been able to deal with it. After all, they had allowed him to see the mummies at the British Museum. But to this Melanie always countered that the bog bodies were far more frightening than mummies because they were unshrouded and much more perfectly preserved, and with this David had to agree—although he still thought Tuck would be able to deal with it.

He was just about to leave when Tuck looked up at him again.

“Dad?”

“Yes, Tuck?”

“I’ll finish the dolphin book today, okay?”

“That would make me very proud of you, Tuck.”

Tuck smiled jubilantly and padded off.

Melanie came up beside him, and together they watched as Tuck vanished into the living room. “He worships you, you know.”

“I’m pretty fond of him too,” David said. He kissed Melanie one last time and then left.

The digs were about two and a half miles from the hunter’s cottage, and he had agreed to travel the distance on foot so that Melanie could have the car for errands. As in his trip here to see the body Brad had discovered, there was a nip in the air, and a pall of early morning fog still hung over the moors. He walked briskly, but to his surprise it still took him about half an hour to reach the campsite.

He arrived to find Brad already hard at work, continuing to enlarge the pit containing the body of the young woman.

“Good morning,” David greeted him.

“Good morning,” Brad returned with an air of excitement. “This is just amazing. I’ve just about uncovered ill of her body, and she’s one of the most perfectly preserved specimens I’ve ever seen.”

David too felt a crackle of excitement as he looked down at the body. Her legs, her feet, everything except for the slight decomposition around the neck was in perfect condition.

“Any sign of how she died yet?”

Brad shook his head. “Nothing. I just can’t figure it out. There are rope marks here on her wrists, so at least we know that she was tied before she was killed, but that doesn’t tell us all that much. And even though part of her neck is covered, I’ve removed the peat from the side here and there’s no sign that she was strangled. There are also no knife wounds, no visible contusions or fractures. As I say, unless her wounds are concealed under her body we have a real puzzle on our hands.”

David crouched down beside the pit and stroked his chin. “You know, I’ve been thinking about this. From the expression on her face and the rope marks on her wrists it seems clear that she didn’t die of illness or natural causes. She had to have been murdered in some way. However, if she had been murdered because of adultery or some other social crime, her head would have been shaved. That was the Celtic custom. And if she had been accused of being a witch or possessed or something, she would have been weighted down with rocks or oak palings to prevent her spirit from returning and once again walking the earth. By process of elimination, although we have yet to determine the precise cause of death, the only thing I can come up with is that she was a sacrificial victim of some sort.”

Brad grunted from exertion. “That’s exactly the same conclusion I arrived at.”

David chuckled. “Sorry, Brad. I keep forgetting, you hardly need these lectures. Don’t worry, I’ll learn.” Brad looked up at him and smiled, and it struck David that the slight tension between them had dissipated.

“I just wish we could figure out the cause of death,” Brad said.

“Don’t worry,” David returned. “As soon as we begin to get the sludge off of her I think we’ll find that out.” For the next several hours David took over the digging, and by midafternoon they had expanded the pit enough so that they could fit a large sheet of plywood under the body lengthwise. Only then could they lift the body out plank and all, and thus avoid the risk of breakage. Finally they began the long and arduous task of separating the body and the sheet of plywood from the sticky and tenacious peat beneath it. Then, together, and with their boots sinking deep into the peat at the bottom of the pit, they lifted the body out.

David looked up at the campsite. While he had been busy packing and moving his family, Brad had also been busy setting up a second tent, much larger than the one he slept in, and filling it with all of the equipment, barrels of solvents, tables, and the portable generator they would need to operate their field laboratory. They climbed out of the pit and carried the body up the hill to the tent.

After they had placed it on the examining table, David’s first task was to determine whether the tanning process that had been begun by the bog water had extended uniformly throughout all of the young girl’s internal organs. To accomplish this it would be necessary to make a deep incision in both the young girl’s abdomen and her hip, but as he looked down at her he found himself filling with qualm over the procedure. For all of his drive and yearning for knowledge, he always felt mixed when it came to cutting into one of the bog bodies. They were so perfectly preserved, and were such silent and awesome emissaries from the past that part of him viewed it as an extraordinary sacrilege to slice into them as if they were no more than just another specimen for dissection. He looked at Brad and saw that the younger man was filled with the same apparent misgivings.

“Well, here goes,” he said, taking a scalpel and neatly cutting into the young woman’s eerily obsidian flesh. To his relief, he noted when he peered into the resulting wound that the flesh was a uniform brown throughout. That meant that they would not have to continue tanning the body, soaking it in a wooden trough filled with distilled water and oak bark for untold weeks. They would, however, have to further preserve it using other processes. As Brad prepared the first chemical bath, David took a small sample of the young woman’s flesh and placed it in a plastic bag. This they would send to Oxford to be carbon-dated.

Once Brad had the equipment ready, they lifted the girl, plywood slab and all, and gingerly placed her in a large polyurethane tub. As they did this David once again caught a glimpse of her face, and found himself wishing that the cleaning procedures could be done more quickly, but he knew that it would still be several hours before they even had the peat off of her.

Then he placed the end of a long rubber hose next to her side and turned the spigot on a nearby drum. Slowly the tub began to fill with a mixture of Formalin and acetic acid. Once the body was completely submerged it would have to sit for several hours. Then they could slowly start to siphon off the Formalin and acetic-acid solution and gradually replace it with alcohol. After that they would replace part of the alcohol with toluene, and only then could they initiate the numerous other processes that lay before them. They would lave the body in Turkish red oil and then lanolin to protect it and keep it pliant. Next they would treat different portions with mixtures of various hot waxes, and finally they would inject the more decomposed areas of the anatomy with collodion. David knew that only after all of these steps were complete could they feel secure that they had made the girl as immortal in the open air as she had been during the many centuries she was buried in the bog.

As soon as they finished with the first phase of the procedures, the pungent smell of the Formalin and the acid forced them to leave the tent. Outside, David once again surveyed the excavations. Both of the bodies they had discovered thus far lay on the rim of an ancient bog caldron. Presumably, when they had been interred the peat in the caldron had been much soupier and the bodies had just been tossed onto its surface and then slowly sank. Nonetheless, samples taken at various levels of the peat and then carbon-dated should give them reasonably accurate corroborative evidence to compare against the age of the body once they had it carbon-dated. He was about to turn to Brad to instruct him to proceed with the taking of peat samples when the younger man smiled knowingly.

“I know,” he said, holding up several sample bags.

David smiled. “While we’re waiting for the first soaking to be finished, I’m going to take a walk around.”

Brad nodded. “See you in a bit.”

David turned and strolled in the direction of the hill to the west of them. His purpose in the walk was to get more of a feel for the land these people had inhabited. Part of the “new” archaeology that David was helping establish was the philosophy that to truly understand an ancient people, to see the world through their eyes, one had to do more than just catalog their artifacts and their bones. One had to also try to put oneself in their shoes, as it were. This included not only understanding what they experienced when they physically moved about the land they inhabited, but also knowing the plant life, the climate, even the animal species that had come and gone since they had lived. This was why David was so knowledgeable when it came to the flora and fauna and even the geological conditions that went into the making of the bog. But even if he had not deemed it useful to his profession to know and understand such a wide-ranging array of information about the world around him, he would have learned it anyway, for when it came to knowledge his appetite had no limit.

When he reached the top of the hill he looked up and noticed that a kestrel had caught an air current and was hovering motionlessly high above the moors. The sight made him recall with curiosity the incident involving the bittern a few days previous. As he continued to watch the kestrel he wondered if it too would collide with the apparently invisible barrier, but then it caught another vagary of the breeze and slowly soared off in a different direction. For a moment David wondered again what had caused the bittern’s strange behavior, but as he gazed into the tranquil gray sky he dismissed the incident as just a freak occurrence.

Then he noticed the kestrel again hovering motionlessly at an even higher altitude, and suddenly jealous of its superior vantage, he decided to move to the top of the next hill. From this new location he could now see a part of the valley that he hadn’t seen before. He scanned it with interest, and some distance away spotted a ramshackle little moorland cottage with a crumbling stone roof and surrounded by a clutter of junk, dilapidated plows and wagons, a chopping block, and several sloppily stacked mounds of wood. Sheep dotted the hillocks around the cottage, and the entire place, although clearly inhabited, had a look of waste and ruin about it. As he continued to gaze at the rustic but peaceful sight, he noticed something else. Not too far from the tumbledown cottage, and strolling dangerously close to one of the seductively verdant arms of the bog, was a little girl.

She looked to be around six or seven years old, roughly the same age as Tuck. Her hair was a drab brown, and even in the distance he could see strands of it straying across her face in the wind. Her white calico frock also had a look of the hand-me-down and the timeworn about it, and seemed more Victorian than something a contemporary child would wear.

She walked toward the bog with determination, and strode so close to its treacherous edge that David almost called out to her. But then she stopped and just gazed into the abatis of blackthorn and dead trees. She stood there for many long moments, lost in some apparent contemplation, her dress fluttering sadly in the wind. And then she turned and walked back toward the house.