Three days of surveying had changed the inside of the wagon to something less orderly and more like what her mother kept her portion like, Elisa thought. Sketches of the current terrain were pinned to the boards by thumbtacks, under them lay maps with elevation marks from the floor of the valley. While not the standard, it let them set up a few benchmark positions to later have resurveyed for the required claim maps. Black Coyote's brief departure to make arrangements with the tribes for supplies and the right to dig for fossils left Ivan and Elisa to their own for protection, but the May weather was still holding warm, a rarity some would say on this edge of the desert.
Foot paths broke the taller buffalo grass down, crossing again and again along the hillsides, through the valley and across much of the area around. One gully already started to yield up some bones, when searched carefully, but these were obviously disturbed from their bed, not whole, and most of them had some damage from being washed along the miniature canyons of clay and dirt. Still, it was progress, of the good kind. A rare period of dry weather had followed the rains, giving them time to mark the bones found on the maps and to label them for future reference. This was something new to the field, coming from many misassembled and poorly documented sites in the last decades leading to errors in the records and miscegenation of the bones when some made displays and automata. This failed the sciences, even if the efforts produced functional designs.
From those bones, they gained much excitement. Some were ungulate leg bones, a few from more recent periods, some older. One was clearly recognized by them both as fossil claws of one of the thunder lizards. A few hinted at predators and the great giant beasts of an age of ice thought to have occurred in the not too distant past. Each find, every possible dig site, especially the one near the edge of the hills, where a channel was carving into the foot of the hill, and the type of stones that the thunder lizards were found in other places. Those layers were well known to those of her profession, for the larger beasts posed less problems in adding power sources to. Yet it was the smaller automata that might gain her the most fame, if her new ideas proved out.
When Black Coyote returned, several elders of the nearest tribe traveled with him, to both make and observe the adherence to the terms in their actions. Elisa spent a day with Coyote translating for the elders, who spoke little English, working out who would gain from which parts of the enterprise, that if a mammut or other great beast should be found she would provide one automata for travel during winter across the prairies to the tribe, from the proceeds of the sale of that version. And that the tribes hunters would aid them, but guarding the site and gathering in provisions. Some of the younger tribe members, she was told, wished to come and participate in the dig, to learn the skills as a trade.
Elisa found the tribal demands and contract fair and just, though Ivan chaffed at teaching the youngsters anything at first. "They take the jobs away from we who pioneered the field!" The thundering of the old man was loud, and obviously amusing to the elders, one of whom showed some English skills, in a comment that it sounded like he had when told he was getting to old to hunt alone and take all the meat. That jibe, with much soothing from Elisa to say that it was his legend and skills that attracted the young, more than the desperation for some kind of job experience or chance at coins. It did leave here with difficulty in arranging for some way to pay the ones who would help the dig.
Unloading the various tools of the hunting part of her trade took time, time that she worried over wasting, for to mark the first dig site, the swamp the necromancer had found. Elisa was worried, this was the deepest pit needed, nearly forty feet if her concept of the terrain were correct, sixty feet was Ivan's estimate, and he felt that other layers above would provide more bones as they dug, ones that may be just as valuable. The spot was still a declivity, along one of the few terraces still showing in the terrain despite erosion over the millennium. Such would have remained a marsh all along, or so Ivan argued. Elisa felt it may indicate they were both wrong, and this was a buried sinkhole.
The marking out of the test trench took two days, as all wanted the site to prove out, and argued over the layout. One tribal elder mentioned that it might be best to go with the winds, which came from the northwest much of the time. Ivan felt a simple “V” trench, east west, with a southeast to northwest arm would be best. Elisa had to take charge in the end, decreeing that two trenches be dug, separated by twelve paces at their closest. The southern line went from east northeast to west southwest, while the northern line would follow the elders.
Ivan grumbled, but she had figured out his arguments source, he believed that smaller groups worked better when learning, so he desired to split the young folk up. Once she understood his reasoning, Elisa found herself agreeing, thirty young people were too many, but having the trenches meet would be just an invitation to disaster. Choosing the differing lines made strong sense, as it allowed two profiles to figure from before the next stage if they had found a good place, the total exposure dig.
It was nearly June when the first shovel bit the loess that lay over the site, the grasses proved to be very difficult to remove, compared to what one thought, roots spread out from each cluster, intermingling where they met below the surface, and the shorter grass between the taller clumps proved to have matted roots as well. Making wheel barrows too time too, until the elders pointed out a travios could work until the barrows were finished.
Things went well in the next few days, though all found the sudden daily thunderstorms to be frightening as the trenches reached below the man high mark. The sides proved very unstable so steps had to be taken towards shoring the sides, which meant more labor not aimed at digging. At first their students complained, until the day a storm sloughed the side over one student who had tried to use the water to speed things up. Two days later, his body was recovered, afterwards, all wished to increase the safety of the dig, so harvesting cottonwoods from the river banks of the Elkhorn became a duty each group donated labors for.
Then came the day they reached the tuff in the trenches, it was thick, nearly a yard of the stuff covering the site, and years of water getting in, turned it to a soft concrete, one that crumbled easily, but still was solid until worked. Now things slowed down, and rightly so. Halfway through the layer, the southern trench under Ivan’s guidance gave hollers of joy, as they reached bones, switching to smaller and subtler tools.
The next day the northern force Elisa instructed was able to celebrate even more, as they uncovered the tusk of a mammoth. With the exposure of that ivory treasure, the tribe dug with more care in both pits, now aware of the fortunes at stake for all.
“Look careful, dig more so!” Ivan now roamed both trenches, as Elisa set up a field desk to begin the first maps of the trenches, and record what was being found. She wished to have found a traveling daguerreotype expert to make the preserved images on the delicate silvered copper plates, but few of them traveled in these lands, as the glass plates to protect the images often suffered from the lack of roads, shattering or rubbing off the very images they were to protect inside their mounts.
So sketches became the medium of choice for now, though tales of a mammoth find would bring some sightseers soon, once word reached the rails or towns. There would be no stopping the spread of the tale, already the villages of the Omaha and Winnebago tribes, the ones working with them, knew of the find. Soon their name sake town and those in Council Bluffs would hear as well. But until they arrived, all the diggers could do was stretch tarps and erect a shelter over the delicate stone bones of the elephant’s distant kindred, long since vanished from the western hemisphere.
The dig continued, slowed, but now with a zeal they had only hints of before. The mammoth was small, young Elisa surmised. Perhaps small enough to still be near its mother and pod. Each night, she went over her notes, working diligently, and finding some of her helpers had taken schooling under the new policies of the day. Every step from this point forward would have to be careful, and the guard force doubled with out her askance. The elders knew of the dangers of thieves, and realized others would want the tusks alone, just for the ivory.
The economics of the dig had just changed, and perhaps, so had the fate of the villages now entwined in Elisa’s project.
