Carl flicked aside his mop of chocolate-brown hair and peered at the lump of blackish goo inside the Petri dish. It looked like overcooked spinach. Stomach contents always did. But this particular specimen had not come from any old John Doe, some random stiff found in a roadside ditch. It had come from someone famous, a bona fide celebrity.

As eager as Carl was to find out what this celebrity had eaten for their last meal, he first had to pee, really piss like a racehorse, whatever that meant. That last can of Mountain Dew had gone straight through him. Setting the Petri dish in a bed of crushed ice, he snapped off his latex gloves and headed down to the ground floor lobby.

Carl skipped past the security guard, sleeping cross-armed behind his desk, and burst into the restroom. Relieving his distended bladder, he exited the restroom without as much as a glance at the bathroom sink. It always gave him a little thrill to defy his mother's obsession with hand washing. Besides, as a biologist, he knew that in small doses germs were good for you. They kept the skin and gastrointestinal tract healthy. They prevented allergies and autoimmune disease. They made you strong.

Carl veered to the lobby vending machines looking for another jolt of caffeine. He slipped a ragged dollar bill into the slot and slapped the big green and yellow button for a Mountain Dew. A frosty can clunked into the receptacle. With the change, he bought a second can. Fully provisioned for a long night in the lab, he headed back to the elevators and tapped the call button repeatedly.

The security guard opened an eye. "You know that don't make it come any faster, right?"

He kept on tapping, and the guard resumed his nap.

Back in the lab, Carl flipped on the radio and spun the tuning dial, hoping to land on a little Mötley Crüe, maybe some Scorps—anything but Enya. The lab next door always listened to that crap. Finding nothing to his liking, he switched over to AM. More blithering about the upcoming presidential race. Like it mattered. As far as Carl was concerned, the candidates were just two giant turds racing each other to the bottom of the toilet. He was about to put in a mixed tape when he heard the unmistakable voice of a late night talk show host, deep and sonorous.

Welcome back to the Realms of Mystery. On last week's show, we brought you the amazing story of the Burns Ice Man, a mysterious body found trapped in ancient ice deep within an Oregon cave. Well . . . Oh my, it seems our Ice Man is causing quite a stir . . .

"They're talking about you, baby," he said to the Petrie dish, lying there on its bed of crushed ice. Donning a fresh pair of latex gloves, he took the dish and placed it inside the gleaming interior of a stainless-steel biosafety cabinet. He peered in through the glass shield, lifted the dish's lid, and began picking through the muck with a steel probe and forceps. He had been tasked with isolating DNA from the sample, however degraded it might be, and freezing it for later analysis. Anything recognizable to the human eye, he was to remove, catalog, and freeze separately.

Almost immediately, Carl found something in the muck: a tiny brown spherule no bigger than a pinhead, a grain of some sort, a seed. More picking produced another seed, then three more, each identical to the first, five in all. One by one, he dropped them into a small, transparent vial. He held it up for a closer look, his breath steaming the glass shield.

This was much better than degraded DNA. The seeds were intact. Hell, they might even be viable.

. . . according to state archaeologists, the ice in which the body was found is centuries old. How many centuries, you ask? Well, oh my. You're not going to believe the answer. But first a few words from our sponsors . . .

Carl had already seen the carbon-14 dating results. The Burns Ice Man was ten thousand years old, the oldest naturally preserved human body ever found, four thousand years older than the celebrated Ötzi, discovered the year before in the Austrian Alps.

Carl stared at the five little seeds inside the vial, the Ice Man's last meal. If he played his cards right, it would mean coauthorship on a paper in Science or Nature, the cover article probably. Those snooty grad schools who turned him down could kiss his lily-white ass.

But if he ever wanted credit for his discovery, he would have to document it. Snapping off his gloves, he picked up a dog-eared lab book and found a pen. The radio show host broke in with an update:

. . . in a shocking and unprecedented decision, the Ninth US Circuit Court has just upheld a lower court injunction on behalf of the Burns-Paiute Tribe, which has fought for months in court, claiming the Ice Man to be a dead ancestor and thus subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. According to the injunction, all scientific inquiry is to cease immediately, and all related materials and data is to be handed over to the tribe within forty-eight hours . . .

All scientific inquiry to cease immediately . . . all materials to be handed over to the tribe. It took a moment for the words to settle in Carl's caffeine-frenzied mind. When they finally did, he dropped his notebook and clutched the vial of seeds in his bare hands. How could a lousy bunch of Indians just take his discovery away? What right did they have? What right did they have to interfere with science? It was ludicrous. It was criminal.

Carl spun around, half expecting to see a federal agent standing there. But there was no one, just the phone hanging on the wall. Above it, the clock ticked away. He still had time.

***

Peter slept under the stars next to his broken-down car.

In the morning, he stowed his gear and waded across the river. Changing into hiking boots, he continued up the Jeep trail toward Demi and Delbert Mackai's house, wondering if it was just the two of them living there.

The primitive Jeep trail soon joined a gravel road. As the road climbed the gentle slope of Steens Mountain, the sagebrush and juniper gave way to a wide-open landscape of subalpine tundra veined with golden aspen. A narrow drive plunged through a dense stand of trees and delivered Peter to the edge of a long meadow of high, tawny grass. At the far end, an old gray two-story house basked in the morning light, its roof agleam with solar panels. Behind it, towering over the aspens, three titanium-white wind turbines churned in the morning breeze.

As Peter neared the house, a muttered curse drifted down from the roof.

"Hello?" Peter called out.

A head of poked out from behind the chimney.

"Oh, hi. I'm Peter. Did Demi tell you I was coming?"

An old man stepped out from behind the chimney. He was short, barrel-chested, bow-legged. He spoke in a high-pitched singsong voice. "Come on up and give me a hand, won't you? There's a ladder around back."

It had to be Delbert. Peter crossed an expansive concrete patio. Someone had set up a freestanding basketball hoop and painted a three-point arc and key.

Peter climbed the ladder and crawled up between the solar panels to the chimney, barely gathering his balance before the old man shoved a mini satellite dish into his hands.

Delbert had to be at least eighty-five. His brown face was wrinkled, leathery, and hairless, dark eyes ringed with age. His hair was completely white, shorn close to the scalp, but his eyebrows were still black. "Now hold that thing to the bracket," he said.

Peter aligned the dish to the bracket on the chimney while Delbert inserted the bolts and tightened the nuts with a wrench.

"It was time for an upgrade," he explained as they worked. "Demi says I'll be able to record my history shows while she watches basketball. Better internet connection too. It's the only way we communicate with the outside world. No cell-phone reception on this part of the mountain. No land lines, either."

When Delbert had tightened the last nut, Peter asked, "Do you remember me?"

Delbert wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his hand. Then he smiled at Peter with a thousand wrinkles. "Of course I do. You were just a skinny little kid when your family came to visit. Now look at you. So, how are your parents?"

"My mom died seven months ago."

He paused, fiddling with the wrench in his hands. "I'm sorry to hear that." A bird warbled from high up in the trees. "And your father?"

"The two of us don't talk much anymore."

"I see." Delbert stuffed the wrench into the back pocket of his jeans. "Let's make some breakfast."

After a meal of pancakes, bacon, and canned peaches, Demi went outside to shoot baskets while Peter and Delbert took their coffee into the living room. The furniture was threadbare and dusty, the magazines out of date. On the windowsill behind an orange couch grew a lonely plant, its dark leaves rimmed with fiery blue. Tiny white flowers blossomed all about it, and dried petals littered the sill.

"Pretty little thing," said Delbert, settling into a chartreuse armchair. "It's the only plant I managed to keep going."

Peter sat on the couch and listened to the sound of Demi shooting baskets outside. He had played enough of the sport to recognize the cadence of a good shooter: swish, tap, tap, dribble, swish. Over and over. "Is it just you and Demi living here?"

"For the last three years," said Delbert after a long pause. "My wife and I raised her up from a child. But she's nearly grown. Does all her schooling online now, except for going into Burns twice a week for basketball and to visit her cousins. She's one hell of a student, especially in math and science. Top scores in the college-entrance exams. She runs all the computers for our wind turbines and hydrogen fuel cells."

"Is she applying for college?"

"She has a full-ride scholarship."

"Academic or basketball?"

"Neither." Delbert raised his coffee mug to salute one of several framed photographs hanging on the wall opposite the couch. It showed a younger Delbert in a dark suit shaking hands with a much taller man with brown skin and intense gray eyes. "He's paying for Demi's education."

"Who is that?"

"That's Jason Numec. He owns Numex Industries."

"You mean the biotech company?"

Delbert nodded proudly. "He's our tribe's benefactor. Built our health center in Burns. Paid for my solar panels and wind turbines." Again, he saluted the photo. "He helped us fight the scientists back then."

"The scientists?"

"Did you ever hear of the Old One? A lot of people called him the Burns Ice Man."

"Didn't some college kids find him in a cave back in the '90s?"

Delbert nodded. "Not far from here."

"Yeah, I learned about that in bioethics class. There was this big legal battle between the scientists and a local tribe—"

Delbert's incongruously black eyebrows danced up his forehead.

"Wait. Was that you?"

"Me and Jason Numec. The Old One was a Native person from way back, you know, one of our ancestors. And those scientists thought they could dissect him without even asking our permission. So we sued for custody. Jason Numec hired the best legal team money could buy, and we won, by God. Then we buried the Old One according to our customs." He picked at a loose thread on the arm of his chair. "I know what they wrote, all that stuff about scientific domain. But what it really boiled down to was respect, one tribe of human beings respecting another. But that's the problem, you know."

Peter nodded, and Delbert went on. "I'll tell you a story. There's this fellow in town, a white fellow, a law-abiding, church-going family man. One afternoon not long ago, he invited me to his home to see some Indian artifacts. He wanted to know if they were authentic. He probably wanted to sell them on Ebay or some such."

"What were they, like arrowheads or something?"

"They were bones, by God, and not very old ones from their looks. Three thighbones and two skulls, one adult and one child. The man kept them all on a bookshelf. Then he showed me this handwritten affidavit from some collector stating they were authentic Indian remains from over by Harney Lake."

"Were they?"

"They might have been." Delbert's face remained placid, kindly even, but his brown eyes smoldered. "That big skull looked an awful lot like my Grandma Sara. We always said she had a big noggin. But the child's skull definitely wasn't one of my close relations. We Mackais all have straight teeth." He leaned forward, gripping the armrests. "What difference does it make if they were authentic or not? They were human bones, human remains, someone's mother, someone's child, you see? How would you feel if you found your grandma's skull up on someone's bookshelf? You'd be horrified. You'd be outraged. You might even get violent." He fell back into his chair, seemingly exhausted. "We've been dealing with this for a long time."

"I'm sorry." Peter had never thought about it that way. "Aren't there laws against possessing human remains?"

He scoffed. "Sure. But they don't seem to apply to Indian remains. It's like we're not quite human. We had to get our own special law. It's called NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1990. Without that law, we wouldn't have got the Old One back."

Outside, Demi's basketball beat a steady rhythm on the concrete.

Then Delbert asked, "Do you know what day it is on Monday?"

"Columbus Day." Peter was slightly annoyed it was going to count toward his vacation time.

"Not many of us celebrate it."

"I can imagine that."

"It commemorates the start of our holocaust, you see? Columbus and those who followed murdered millions. Then came the diseases. They wiped us out. We had no resistance at all. Then came more genocide at the hands of the US government. It's all there in the history books, the ones that tell the truth at least." He picked at another loose thread. "Before Columbus came, there were twenty million people living on this continent, maybe more. Twenty million human beings. Do you know how many of us were left at the 1900 census?"

Peter shook his head.

"One hundred and fifty thousand." His hands clenched into gnarled fists. "But even that was too many. So they tried to kill our culture. They took our land, forced us into reservations and boarding schools, cut our hair, whipped us for speaking our native languages. That went on right up until my time. Now, we have an epidemic of poverty, drugs, and violence. It's the worst holocaust nobody seems to remember. And we're still living through it." He unclenched his fists and rubbed the white stubble on his scalp. "It never did grow back properly."

Peter lowered his gaze, wordless.

Delbert sighed and looked to his wall of framed photographs. One photo showed a much younger Delbert with his arm around a tall, regal woman who might have been his wife. Another was a sepia portrait of a handsome middle-aged man with oddly childish bangs and a wide-brimmed hat.

"That's Jack Wilson," said Delbert, as if reading Peter's mind. "Some people called him Wovoka, because he used to chop wood. My Aunt Cora had that picture autographed down in Truckee."

"Was he famous?"

"He was a great prophet of the Numu. Some people called him the Indian Jesus, because he died and came back to life. That was way back in 1889. Wovoka used to say that if Indians did the Ghost Dance and were righteous, God would clear the land of white people. The Lakota heard that and thought that God had finally taken their side in the fight against the US Army. They even made special Ghost Shirts they thought could stop bullets. Then the army came and murdered them, three hundred Lakota children, women, and men. That was at Wounded Knee Creek, 1890, December the twenty-ninth." Outside, Demi's basketball had fallen silent. "God was never on our side."

Later that morning, Demi offered to drive Peter into the town of Burns so he could rent a car and arrange for the Corolla to be towed out and repaired. She knew a shop where he could get a good deal if he was willing to wait. They were about to pull away when Delbert waved them down and leaned into the open passenger-side window. "Send my regards to your father."

Peter promised he would. "That reminds me. Why did he come out here in the first place?"

"What did he say about it?"

"I've never asked him before."

"Well, I'd start there. Goodbye now." He slapped the roof of the car, and away they went.

At sunset, two days later, Peter found himself heading east on Interstate 84 along the Oregon side of the Columbia River. Pulling over at a state park, he got out of his rental car and meandered down to the shore. The evening air was warm and hazy, the river wide and still, the weird light of sunset spreading across its surface like an orange slick.

According to the interpretive display, this stretch of the river once crashed over a mighty cataract called Celilo Falls, or Wy-am. For fifteen thousand years, Indigenous people had gathered at Wy-am to fish and to trade. Then, in 1957, the US Army Corps of Engineers closed the spillways of the newly constructed Dalles Dam, twelve miles downstream. People gathered on the high bluffs and watched and listened as the falls fell silent beneath the rising water. But it turned out the falls were still down there. With high-resolution sonar, engineers had spied them, sixty feet below the placid surface, abiding in the depths, roiling in the dark.

Returning to his car, Peter felt his cell phone vibrate. It was his father again. Reluctantly, he tapped the screen and put the phone to his ear. "Yeah?"

There was no response, just static. Not electronic static, but a wet, organic noise. Then came the familiar hacking cough.

"Dad?"

"Peee . . . errrr."

"Dad, are you OK?"

"Seh . . . mee . . . naaah . . ."

"What?"

"See . . . nah . . . pees." A series of ragged breaths, then again: "Seh-mee-nah . . . see-nah-pees!"

"Dad? What are you saying? Dad?"

The call had dropped.

Peter tapped the callback icon, but it went straight to voice mail. He tried again. Then he called 911.

____________________