Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,35
was still in my mind when Futch said, “You boys hold on,” and banked the plane sideways, Tomlinson’s voice moaning, “Whooooooa, Mamma!” through my headphones. Then: “Float on, Sky King!”
At tree level, water glittered beneath us as we carved a switchback trail, following the river at a hundred knots. Geysers of wading birds, egrets and herons, erupted off our wingtips and sprayed white arcs into the sky. Manatees, four or five adults, plus infants, gathered like hippos in the drop-off pools, and cormorants slapped the water ahead of us, desperate for flight.
“Up here’s what I want to show you,” Dan said. “We’ll circle it so you see what I mean.”
It was the only explanation he offered for suddenly climbing to fifteen hundred feet and flying east until mangroves gave way to sawgrass, which marked the freshwater boundary of the Everglades.
“Now we circle back,” Dan said. And we did. Lostman’s River was to the north, mangroves below, when he pointed again and said, “See the scars! Right there!”
No . . . not at first. But then I did: slight furrows in the mangroves. Two . . . maybe three separate lines not easily noticed because the tree canopy was so dense. The curvature of each indentation reminded me of old propeller scars on a grass flat.
We began to circle while Futch oriented us. “Years ago, something cut a path through those trees. Cut their tops off. I didn’t notice until after Justin found the throttle plate.”
Justin was his nephew.
“One night I was on Google Earth, that’s when I spotted it. They’re more visible from five miles up. This is the first chance to actually look for myself. See there!” The seaplane’s portside wing provided an axis for a tight circle that froze the spot beneath us. “Two definite scars . . . but I’m seeing three now.”
“Could’ve been tornados,” I offered. “But I know what you’re getting at.” Planes, out of fuel, could have also plowed those furrows.
“Okay,” he said, “here’s the best part.” He turned the wheel until the plane leveled, then dipped our starboard wing. “One of the scars ends here. See it? That’s Hawksbill Creek.”
Below was a vein of glittering water, not much wider than a sidewalk, that disappeared into a mangrove island. Several hundred yards into the interior, though, was an abrupt crown of gumbo-limbo trees. High ground.
“There’s the Indian mound,” I said.
“Calusa pyramid,” Tomlinson corrected. He used the name in a generic way meaning Florida’s first people.
The pilot shook his head. “The highest mound’s pure sand. A burial mound, we figured, so always left it alone. There’re a couple shell mounds, too.”
“The Bone Field,” Tomlinson said softly.
“Nope. The Bone Field’s off in that marl flat. You can’t see because of the trees. If we had a canoe, I’d put us down here and we could paddle. Instead, we’ll land on the other side and hike in.”
We didn’t respond, so Futch agreed with us, saying, “Thick as hell, I warned you. I’ve never cut my way in before—the times I’ve been here, we trailered a boat to Everglades City. So, who knows, maybe we’ll find something new.”
It’s the sort of thing people say even though they don’t expect to be surprised.
Not this time.
10
IN THE FABRIC OF UPROOTED TREES WERE BONES. Human bones.
It took awhile to train the eyes. A cranial plate blended with clamshells. A jawbone was lichen-splotched, edged with brown—just rotting wood until the teeth jumped out at you. Human incisors, a partial skull grinning. Half a grin here, an upside-down smile over there.
There was a technique. Kneel and focus on one small spot . . . allow details to blur, then refocus. Once my eyes had learned the trick, the next step was to reconstruct.
An unbroken piece of femur . . . so the ribs should be . . . where?
More than once, I marveled at my blindness. When parts of human scaffolding finally assumed form, I would scold, How in the world could you have missed that!
Once unmasked, though, it was the bones themselves that refused to liberate my eyes. Soon, I was surrounded. Pieces of the dead lay everywhere: sprouting from gray marl where nothing grew, scattered beneath a mangrove cavern that did not permit sunlight. People who had lived and laughed and dreamed, Tomlinson reminded us when we’d made our first discovery, and who had ended their journey here.
So we looked but did not touch. Moved from spot to spot, calling out our finds, but in low voices. Then knelt to inspect.