"He’s right. Forget about Bigfoot, John. You’ll make yourself and the FBI look ridiculous. And I’m sure as hell not going to get involved."

"Look," John said, "I’m not stupid. I think it was a prank, too. But I’m not forgetting about anything that might be connected." After a moment he added, "You could at least look at the tracks."

"It wasn’t Bigfoot, John, and I’m not spending my time giving credibility to a set of joke footprints."

John was up again, thrashing the air with his hands the way he did when he was excited. "It wasn’t an Indian! It wasn’t Bigfoot! What was it, your average, everyday John Q. Citizen who walks around with a bone spear and kills people and buries them in the forest? Or maybe Eckert speared himself to death?"

After a lunch of ham sandwiches and chocolate milk from Lake Quinault Merc, Gideon aged and sexed the Indian burials, explaining to Julie and John as he went along: a man in his forties, another man of about eighty, two elderly women, and two infants, possibly twins, who had been buried in one grave and misclassified by Fenster as a single burial. He had identified a horrendous abscess in the upper jaw of the old man as a probable cause of death, but there wasn’t enough left of the others to provide any more information.

He put down the magnifying glass and the charred heel bone he’d been holding and rubbed the back of his neck.

"John, I’m not doing you any good. Why don’t I just go on back up to Dungeness and get back to my dig?"

"I guess you can if you want to, Doc, but why not relax and spend the night at the lodge? The Bureau’ll pick up your tab, and we’ll get you on a plane tomorrow."

"The food’s quite good at the lodge, if that’s any incentive," said Julie, then added, as if she’d been addressing John all along, "Professor Oliver would be a help at the press conference tomorrow."