He could have hauled a four-wheeler to the Air Force base and driven to the site, he could have hired a skiff down the coast and up the river, but for reasons best known to Professor Desmond X. McLynn, Ph.D. and archaeologist, he chose to fly. The site's airstrip was makeshift at best and liberally adorned with boulders and hummocks. Although Wy's Cub was equipped with tundra tires, the bluff upon which the village had perched so many years ago stretched only eleven hundred feet in length before it dropped forty-five precipitous feet straight down into the Snake. The Snake, a wide river that slithered southeast in a series of lazy S-curves, had over the years swallowed its share of boats, planes and snow machines, along with their drivers. The prospect of immersion made for a brisk few seconds during critical periods of flight, such as landing and takeoff.

Wy lined the Cub up on final. The Cub hit a thermal and the plane bucked, only slightly, but enough for Professor Desmond X. McLynn's hands to slap down on the back of her seat. “What's wrong?”

The Cub's wheels touched down in what would have been a runway paint job if there had been any paint, or any true runway, for that matter. Professor Desmond X. McLynn's rapid respiration could be heard over the sound of the headset. Wy didn't much care for the pompous little ass, but it served no purpose to scare him to death and she kicked the rudder over as soon as ground speed allowed, bringing the Cub around to halt a hundred feet short of the abyss.

The engine died and she folded back the door and got out to assist her passenger. His face was pale and his watery blue eyes showed a rim of white all the way around their irises. “Here we are, sir,” she said cheerfully.

McLynn was a fussy little man in his fifties who acted the age of most of the artifacts he dug up. His face was screwed into a perpetual frown of dissatisfaction, as if upon assembling the pieces to the puzzles of the past, the one essential fragment upon which the whole picture would be built had fallen out of the box and was lost forever.