The Bog Page 6

  “Well, sort of. But there have been lots of amazing women throughout history named Katharine. You were named after them too.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Catherine of Aragon, Queen Isabella’s daughter, or Catherine de Medicis, widely respected for the shrewdness she displayed in her influence on the governing of France.” He judiciously neglected to tell her that Catherine of Aragon was the first of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, or that Catherine de Medicis was also widely touted for the powers of deceit and treachery that she had inherited in her Medici blood.

  Katy began to soften.

  Trying a new approach, David said, “Well, if you had been there to be consulted, what would you have rather been named?”

  “Natasha,” Katy replied without blinking.

  He scoured his memory for famous Natashas in history, but drew a blank. “Where did you get that name from?” he asked.

  Her face grew slightly red. “From the Natasha on that cartoon show with Rocky and Bullwinkle,” she said sheepishly. “I just like the sound of the name better.”

  David’s heart sank, but slowed in its descent when he realized that at least she had blushed. He consoled himself with the affectionate realization that she was still in a curious transition between a child and a young woman, the child unabashedly announcing Natasha as her preferred name, but the woman slightly embarrassed at the ludicrousness of the source.

  “So call yourself Natasha,” he announced.

  “Oh, Dad, could I?”

  “Sure,” he returned, but then added some small print to the concession. “If it’s okay with your mother.”

  Katy’s face fell, but then broke into a humbled smile when she realized she had been duped.

  He kissed her good night and then went into Tuck’s room. Saying good night to Tuck was somewhat less complicated. He found Tuck lying straight as a board on top of his sheet and carefully lining all of his toy cars and trucks up and down along the sides of his legs.

  “Tuck, do you really want to sleep with those things?”

  “Why not?” Tuck asked earnestly.

  “Because if you roll over on them during the night they’re going to hurt.”

  Tuck looked up and down at the metal cars, reassessing the matter. “Ohhh,” he said, frowning gravely. Carefully and methodically he took them one by one and parked them in rows on the table beside his bed. As he did so David noticed that he too seemed unusually distracted. Even after he had finished and David was pulling the covers up around him, Tuck continued to stare off into space, absentmindedly doing the itsy-bitsy-spider routine with his fingers, a gesture that always meant something was weighing heavily on his mind. “Tuck, is anything the matter?”

  “Dad, do I have moxie?”

  David smiled, remembering that Tuck had been present when he had used the word earlier that day. “Not quite yet, Tuck,” he said. “But I’m sure you will someday.”

  “What is moxie?”

  “It’s courage. But not just any type of courage. It’s like being brave enough to face anything. It has to grow in a person.”

  Satisfied for the moment, all the tension left Tuck’s face and he suddenly looked very sleepy.

  “Good night, Tuck,” David said, kissing him on the forehead.

  “Good night, Dad.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  When he finally retired to his own bedroom he found Melanie sitting up in bed and looking very disturbed about something. He sighed. It just wasn’t his evening.

  “You’re not thinking of changing your name, or asking me if you have moxie, are you?” he asked.

  She looked at him, perplexed. “What?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. You just look concerned about something.”

  “It’s Ben,” she said. “Listen to him.”

  David paused and realized he could still hear Ben whining about something downstairs.

  “What do you think it is?” Melanie asked.

  “Just the newness of the place. The new smells.”

  “But he seems so troubled about something.”

  “Honey,” David soothed, “we’re out in the country now. I don’t mean to frighten you, but there are lots of little animals around, harmless animals, but lots of little animals nonetheless. Ben’s just not used to their sounds and smells yet.”

  “What kind of little animals?” she asked uneasily. “Oh, I don’t know... rabbits, foxes.”

  “Will the foxes bite Ben?”

  “I doubt it. I suspect they’re far more frightened of Ben than he is of them. They’ll keep their distance. They do, you know. Things like that can smell a dog.”

  David decided that perhaps the best thing to do was shut Ben outside for the night. At least that way Ben would start to get more of a feel for the place, run around and urinate on trees and stuff, and do all those things that a dog does to feel more comfortable about its territory. He went downstairs and put Ben out, but was chagrined when Ben’s whining did not subside but turned into barking. He continued to howl mournfully, woefully, all night long.

  The next morning when David entered the kitchen he was greeted by the smell of bacon frying. Melanie stood at the stove, cracking eggs into a second skillet, Katy sat at the table with a bowl half full of soggy cereal in front of her and reading a book, and Tuck was crouching on his haunches in front of Ben who was reclining in a corner.

  “Good morning, everybody,” David greeted. “Morning,” Melanie and Katy intoned together. Tuck looked up at his father’s approach.

  “Daddy, something’s wrong with Ben.”

  Melanie turned around with an expression halfway between mystification and I told you so. “He won’t eat,” she explained.

  David went over and crouched down beside his son and looked into Ben’s eyes. The retriever stared back at him wearily. In front of him was a bowl of his favorite food, untouched.

  “Maybe he’s just not hungry,” David said.

  “Oh, come on,” Melanie challenged. “You know him. He’s normally famished.”

  “I’ll bet he’ll eat this,” David said, standing and taking one of the pieces of bacon that was draining on a paper towel next to the sink and then crouching down again and wafting it in front of Ben’s nose. Ben sniffed it once and then looked up at him sadly, emitting an exhausted and frustrated whine.

  Tuck looked at his father worriedly.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing. He’s just depressed over the move. Dogs get depressed over things like that, you know.”

  Melanie gave him a skeptical glance.

  “Okay, okay,” David conceded. “If he’s not better in a day or two we’ll take him to the vet.”

  “Is he sick, Dad?” Tuck asked.

  “I don’t think so, but if he is we’ll see that he gets better.”

  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.