The Crowded Grave

paintings of Lascaux were farther up the river. It was a source of pride to Bruno that he lived in this valley that could claim the longest continuous human habitation of anywhere on earth.
    Bruno had attended a couple of Horst’s lectures, delivered in excellent if strongly accented French. He had visited his digs and read a couple of articles Horst had published in the popular monthly
Dossiers d’Archéologie
. Normally a quiet man, Horst became passionate when he talked of his subject, the great mystery of the replacement of the Neanderthals by the Cro-Magnons some thirty thousand years ago. Had it been violent? Did they interbreed? Were the Neanderthals wiped out by some plague or disease? It was, said Horst, the crucial question regarding our human origins. Whenever Horst spoke, Bruno caught a sense of the excitement that gripped the scholar.
    “Horst,” he answered. “How are you? I was just on my way to see you at the dig.”
    “Good, we need you here right away. And you had better bring a doctor with you. We’ve found a body.”
    “Congratulations. Isn’t that what you wanted to find?”
    “Yes, yes, but I want skeletons from the distant past. This one is wearing a St. Christopher medal around his neck and I think he’s also wearing a Swatch. This is your department, Bruno, not mine.”

2
    As Horst led Bruno past the parallel trenches and the chessboard pattern of white string that defined the work of the site, Bruno was struck as always by the careful dedication of the archaeological team. Using fine brushes to tease away the soil from a possible find and sifting each handful of earth through a sieve, they barely looked up as he passed. Some of them were in trenches so deep that he had to peer down to see them, provoking them to look up as his body blocked what little sunlight they had.
    He heard a shout. “Bruno!” He turned to see a pretty girl with fair hair and a slim build jumping across the trenches toward him.
    “Dominique,” he exclaimed, as he received the embrace of a young woman he had known since she was a child. Her father, Stéphane, was one of Bruno’s regular hunting partners. He ran a small dairy farm in the hills and made the Tomme d’Audrix cheese that Bruno loved. Each winter since Bruno had arrived in St. Denis he had been invited to the killing of the family pig, and he and Dominique always had the job of rinsing out the intestines in the freezing water of the nearest stream. Now at the university in Grenoble, she was a militant but very realisticmember of the Green Party. “I was coming up to the farm to see you. Your dad invited me to Sunday lunch.”
    “You’re here for the body?” she said, hanging on to his arm.
    “Right. I’d better get a look at it, but I’ll probably see you Sunday.”
    “No, I’ll see you tonight at the museum. You have to come to the professor’s lecture. It’s a big announcement, but we’re all sworn to secrecy.”
    She darted off, leaving Bruno to cast his eyes over the site. Close to the overhang of rock, the trenches gave way to a large pit, at least twelve feet square and nine feet deep, with metal ladders propped against the sides. At the bottom, a large flat rock with curious cup-shaped holes in its surface was being worked on by three archaeologists. They were using brushes so fine they could have belonged to portrait painters. Even from this height, Bruno could see the brown smoothness of newly exposed bones. He looked inquiringly at Horst, assuming this was the skeleton that had prompted the call. The people working with the brushes did not look up. Their continued concentration struck him as even more remarkable, given the ghoulish nature of the discovery. Maybe archaeologists were accustomed to bones and death.
    “Sorry this grave is so crowded, but your body is this way, to the side of the main dig,” said Horst. His beard was a little whiter than the previous year, his hair more sparse, and he was still wearing the English tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches that Bruno remembered from last year and many years before. “Those bones down there are from three bodies over thirty thousand years old. Your skeleton is over here.”
    Steering Bruno past a small winch with a system of pulleys attached to a tripod, Horst led Bruno across to a long, narrow trench, perhaps six feet deep. Beside it an attractive girl and an older woman with red hair, wearing what Bruno thought was aman’s shirt in green and white