He had seen the thing from a distance, lying in an arroyo that ran along the base of a line of low cliffs, and he had thought he’d struck gold: a gnarled madrona trunk, he’d thought, something that had washed down from the wooded areas higher up during the last rainy season. Madrona was the best of all firewood, rarely found and hard to chop, but how it burned! Not only that, but this was a big trunk, thick as a man. It would save him an additional four-kilometer, mostly uphill trek to where the trees started, and his legs weren’t what they once were. He hurried to it, hauling along the braying, increasingly stubborn burro. But Nacho’s eyes weren’t what they’d once been either, and he was almost on it before he grasped its real nature. So shocked was he that his eyes had rolled up in his head and he had fallen down on the spot in a dead faint.

It wasn’t as if the old man had never seen a mummy before. Anyone who spent any time in these parched hills and valleys had come across them: shriveled, sun-blackened mice, rabbits, birds, even the occasional goat that had strayed from its herd and been lost. But a man? A withered, grinning mockery of a man still dressed in a few shreds of human clothing? It was the devil’s work, enough to make anyone swoon.

When he had come to, he had hurriedly untied the two old canvas feedbags from the burro’s back with shaking hands and had ridden the animal home to tell his wife, who had sent him to tell the priest, who had told the jefe.

That had been late yesterday afternoon, too late to do anything about it before dark. But this morning, Sandoval, old Nacho, and the burro had gone out into the hills to retrieve the body. They found it where Nacho said it was, in an arroyo at the base of a cliff, not more than a hundred meters from where the little girl’s skeleton had been found earlier (a bad omen, Sandoval thought at the time). Pepe, the junior of Sandoval’s two policemen, had come along to help with the lifting that would be necessary.