Bone and Calusa

The island was nothing but a low heap of oyster shells and the roots of cabbage palms that had been twisted by the salt wind into the shapes of old women. Sarah knelt in the excavation pit, her trowel scraping against a hard layer of dark, fatty earth that lay three feet below the sand. The air was thick with the scent of rotting marsh-grass and the sulfurous mud of the tidal flats, a smell that had probably changed very little in the thousand years since the shell-grows had been abandoned. Below her, the white shells shone like teeth in the grey dirt.

She found a fragment of pottery, its grey clay tempered with crushed shell and decorated with a simple, incised line that clawed around the rim like a fingernail. It was Calusa, or perhaps Timucua, a piece of a cooking pot that had sat in the fire before the Spanish ever brought their iron nails and their smallpox. Her assistant, a young man from Gainesville who spent his evenings drinking beer on the pier, was sieving the sand through a wire screen, the dry shells rattling against the mesh like dice in a leather cup.

She brushed the sand from the pottery fragment with a soft camel-hair brush, her hand steady despite the heat that had begun to make her temples thud. This was her third season on the key, and she had found nothing but these broken domestic pots and the bones of mullet, the scraps of thousand-year-old dinners that had been forgotten in the mud. She looked out over the salt marsh, where a white egret was standing in the shallow water, its neck curved like a hook, waiting for something small and silver to move in the dark silt beneath its feet.