The Devil Colony(5)

His dog—a stocky, trail-hardened Australian cattle dog with one blue eye and one brown—sat at his side. The dog’s name, Kawtch, came from the Ute Indian word for “no.” Maggie smiled as she remembered Hank’s explanation: Since I was yelling it at him so much as a pup, the name sort of stuck.

“So what’s the pulse like out there?” Hank asked as she joined him with a quick hug of hello.

“Not so good,” she answered. “And likely to get worse.”

“Why?”

“I was speaking to the county sheriff earlier. Tox report came back on the grandfather.”

Hank bit harder on the cigar clamped between his teeth. He never lit his stogies, just liked chewing on them. It was against Mormon practices to use tobacco, but sometimes concessions had to be made. Though full-blooded Native American, he had been raised Mormon, one of the northwestern band of Shoshone who had been baptized back in the 1800s after the Bear River Massacre.

“And what was in the tox report?” he asked around his cigar.

“The old man tested positive for peyote.”

Hank shook his head. “Great. That’ll play right for the cameras. Crazed Injun hopped on drugs kills his grandson and himself during a religious frenzy.”

“For now, they’re keeping that detail under wraps, but it’ll eventually come out.” She sighed in resignation. “The reaction to the initial report was bad enough.”

County law enforcement had been the first on the scene to investigate the murder-suicide of the young Ute and his grandfather. With an eyewitness—a friend of the murdered boy—the case had been quickly closed, the bodies shipped by helicopter to the state morgue in Salt Lake City. The initial coroner’s report blamed the tragedy on dementia secondary to chronic alcohol poisoning. Afterward, op-ed pieces appeared in both local and national papers, weighing in on the abuse of alcohol among Native Americans, often reinforcing the caricature of the drunken Indian.

It wasn’t helping matters here. Margaret knew the delicacy with which such issues had to be broached, especially here in Utah, where the history of Indians and white men was bloody and strained.

But that was only the edge of the political quagmire. There was still the matter of the other bodies found down in the cave, hundreds of mummified remains.

Hank waved toward the path down to the cave. His dog took the lead, trotting with his bushy tail high. Hank followed. “The surveyors compiled their report this morning. Did you see it?”

She shook her head as she joined him on the trail.

“According to the surveyors, the cave entrance is on federal land, but the cavern system extends under reservation territory.”

“Effectively blurring the jurisdiction line.”

He nodded. “Not that it’ll make much difference in the long run. I read the brief filed by Indian Affairs. All this land, going back to 1861, was once part of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. But over the past century and a half, the borders of this reservation have waxed and waned.”

“Which means Indian Affairs can still make a strong case that the contents of the cavern belong to them.”

“That still depends on the other variables: the age of the bodies, when they were interred, and of course, if the remains are even Native American.”

Maggie nodded. It was the main reason she had been summoned here: to evaluate the racial origins of those bodies. She had already conducted a cursory physical examination yesterday. Based on skin tone and hair color and facial bone structure, the remains appeared to be Caucasian, but the artifacts and clothing were distinctly Indian. Any further testing—DNA analyses, chemical tests—were locked up in a legal battle. Even moving the bodies was forbidden due to an injunction imposed by NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

“It’s like Kennewick Man all over again,” Maggie said.

Hank raised a questioning brow toward her.

“Back in 1996, an old skeleton was discovered along a riverbank in Kennewick, Washington. The forensic anthropologist who first examined the remains declared them to be Caucasoid.”

Hank glanced to her and shrugged. “So?”

“The body was carbon-dated at over nine thousand years old. One of the oldest bodies discovered in the Americas. The Caucasian features triggered a storm of interest. The current model of North America puts early man migrating to the region across a land bridge from Russia to Alaska. The discovery of an ancient skeleton bearing Caucasoid traits contradicts that assessment. It could rewrite the history of early America.”

“So what happened?”

“Five local Indian tribes claimed the body. They sued to have the bones reinterred without examination. That legal battle is still going on a decade later. And there’ve been other cases, other Caucasoid remains found in North America, and fought over just as fiercely.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “The Spirit Cave Mummy of Nevada, Oregon’s Prospect Man, Arlington Springs Woman. Most of these bodies have never been properly tested. Others were lost forever in anonymous Indian graves.”