Dr. Rodney Matson was a little surprised to get the letter from Gil Evachevski. Though he’d known Gil since he’d been a small child, back in the days when Barbara and Gil used to baby sit for Carrie and him, he’d never really gotten to know him well, since Gil had mostly been out of town while he was growing up. Usually any news from or about him came through Carrie.

The letter said that Gil had tried to get him on the phone at his home in Ft. Collins; however, Rod hadn’t been there for a couple months and wouldn’t be back for another one. He knew he could be a tough man to track down in the summer months, but every so often a neighbor of his would collect his accumulated mail, pack it up, and send it out to the site where he was working.

This summer, Dr. Matson had been busy excavating the few remnants of an American Fur Trading Company post far up the Missouri River in central Montana. Though reasonably well documented in the literature of the era, there were a lot of unanswered questions. It was an interesting dig, and he’d worked on it for three years now. It wasn’t anything spectacular, and would probably never wind up in the pages of National Geographic, but they were turning up some interesting stuff, a little of which challenged some long held assumptions about the latter part of the fur trading era.

As Rod read through the long handwritten letter, he found his memory falling back many years. Yes, he’d known Henry Toivo – not well, Henry had been many years behind him in school – but he’d been senior patrol leader of the Boy Scout troop just when Henry moved up from Cubs, and he’d helped him with his Tenderfoot skills. That had been ages ago; he hadn’t even thought about Henry in years, and had no idea that he’d been in the service, or was missing in Vietnam.

Rod Matson was very much his father’s son. His father, Garth, had bucked the pacifist trend among college students in the 1920s, and had been in an early ROTC. When he’d gone to work with the Spearfish County Bank in 1928, he’d joined the local National Guard unit, mostly because he thought it was his duty, and he stayed with it because he enjoyed it. That had led to his World War II service, commanding first Battery D, and later the whole battalion in Italy. After the war, when his grandfather Caleb Matson had died, Garth took over the helm of the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank – there had been a complicated merger and renaming following the national bank crisis in 1933 – and only then did Garth retire from the guard, with twenty years of service and not far from becoming a general in the state guard.

Rod had always looked up to his father and hoped he could follow in his footsteps, but always, there was his left hand. It looked normal, it felt normal, and people didn’t often notice it until they took a close look, but he was missing the little finger, clear back up to his wrist. From the time Rod had gotten out of high school back in ’65, he’d tried to get into the service, but his three-fingered Mickey Mouse hand always kept him out. He tried off and on to get into the service, up through about 1970 before he gave it up. It always irritated him a little; in an era when so many of his contemporaries would have been willing to cut off a finger to stay out of the service, he’d have been glad to take one of them so he could get in. He was a rarity on the college campus at Athens, where he’d done his undergraduate work – he’d never even bothered to file for a student deferment. He did finally get drafted, to his temporary relief, but didn’t get near passing the physical.

That may have had something to do with the decision of what he wanted to do with his life. He’d gone to college with the idea of studying business, to come back and work with his father in the bank, but somehow, he felt he didn’t measure up. He didn’t feel totally comfortable with the idea when he couldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps in other ways, especially in one where he felt it counted for a lot.

But it was the archeology class in Athens his freshman year that changed his life. It was just a freshman level elective, an intro course that Rod had taken because there was nothing else available in that particular time slot. He’d always had a keen interest in history, but getting some ideas of the stories that artifacts could tell really excited him. He pulled straight A’s in the class, and since he needed more electives, took a higher level course the following semester, mostly because he was interested in it, not because he thought he’d make a life out of it.

Late in the second term, the professor, old Dr. Kruger, a tweedy-looking older man who perpetually smoked a pipe, took a number of students out to a patch of woods for sort of an exercise. Dr. Kruger had salted the woods with a number of arrowheads, and he was trying to teach the students not just to look, but to see what they were looking at.

Rod never quite could understand how he could pick out detail that others would miss, but reasoned that somehow what nature had taken away on one hand, so to speak, it had given back with another. He found a number of the arrowheads that others had literally walked right over – and he was able to tell a fair amount about them that others had missed. For example, he was able to quickly pick out the fact that most of the arrowheads were modern fakes, probably bought from some tourist junk shop – he could almost glance at them and see “Made in Taiwan” stamped on them – but Dr. Kruger was sneaky. There were a few real ones there, but the styles and flint indicated they weren’t native. And there was one that had to be really old. “This isn’t from around here,” he’d told Dr. Kruger flatly, “And it isn’t new: Clovis, right?”

“Not bad, Mr. Matson,” the formal old professor told him, “Not bad at all.”

Athens didn’t have a strong archaeology department, but in the following three years Rod took all the classes he could. He graduated in 1969 with a degree in business administration, and a minor in archaeology. Rod’s dad thought he could get him into one of the big business schools in the east, but Rod had other plans. He wound up getting his Master’s Degree from Brown University in archaeology. He wasn’t terribly satisfied with the program; a lot of it had to do with Biblical archaeology, and for one reason or another he was more interested in North America and more recent puzzles, so he got his doctorate at UCLA in 1973. There had been a small thought in the back of his mind that he might find himself replacing Dr. Kruger at Athens when he retired, but Dr. Kruger apparently planned on living forever and had no plans on retiring. There really aren’t a lot of jobs in the field, but Rod found himself after a while at Michigan Tech, where he was involved in the industrial archaeology program there, and when an assistant professorship became available at Colorado State, he was quick to hop onto it.

Teaching classes was all right, as far as he was concerned, but he lived for the field work. He spent most of his summers in the field, mostly working on traces of the old fur trade of the early 1800s. There were a lot of sites that had never been fully explored, and there was plenty of work to be done. But he also worked on other aspects of the frontier settlement era, and found them equally fascinating.

When Rod first read Gil’s letter, it sounded like an interesting problem – and an interesting and different challenge, too. Undoubtedly there were people who were better qualified to assist in such a search, but they hadn’t known Henry Toivo, or might not have the motivation. Somehow, he knew this was a way that he might be able to make a contribution his hand had denied him. He finished the letter, got in the Bronco, and headed fourteen miles to the nearest telephone to call his brother in law.

“I’m very interested in your Toivo expedition,” Rod told Gil. “I’ll be glad to go if I get the chance. But, I’ll warn you right now, there’s going to be much of the time that I’m not going to be available. Like, I could sneak off from here for a day or three for personal business, but this is grant funded and that means I’ve pretty well got to be here. And, it can be difficult to get away from classes.”

“We’ll blow that bridge when we get to it,” Gil told him. “We haven’t got any idea of when, or even if, we’re going to be allowed in there to search for him. What we do need, and badly, is a quick course on the techniques of how to handle what we’re probably going to run into if any of us get to go.”

“I could come and talk to you,” Rod replied. “But I really need to set up a better course, with some better training materials. There’s no way I can get away from here to do it before school starts, and we probably wouldn’t want to try to do field training in the winter around Spearfish Lake. We’re probably looking at next summer sometime. I can send you some films and videos and some text work to look at in the meantime, though.”

“Should be all right,” Gil told him. “I really don’t think we’re going to be able to go anytime soon.”

Rod was as good as his word. Over the next months, the Toivo Expedition meetings usually featured a film or videotape that Rod had sent them, on search procedures and excavation techniques, and some that involved actual field excavations. They were good materials, and the veterans learned a lot from them, sometimes viewing them several times.

In the meantime, Rod prepared a long-weekend seminar, and got some special materials together for training exercises. It was Labor Day weekend of 1982 before he was able to get together with the Toivo expedition for the long-promised session, and they were extensive sessions that lasted all day and into the evening for two days.

Over the course of the winter, Rod had asked Gil to find a patch of woods that could be used for a training exercise, and Mark volunteered the woods in back of his airstrip. On Labor Day morning, Rod led the veterans out into the woods. “OK,” he told them. “Let’s assume this is Vietnam. Somewhere around here, there are some signs that something happened that I planted out here last Friday. See what you can find.”

The vets spread out and began to scan the site, with Rod standing back and looking mysterious. It was several minutes before Hekkinan spoke up. “Here’s some brass, but it looks pretty old.”

“Good eye,” Rod told him.

“But, this is all corroded and beat to shit,” Hekkinan protested.

“So, it’s been what? Ten or twelve years in a corrosive environment.”

The vets looked for the next hour, but turned up nothing else. Well, Joe found an arrowhead, and showed it to Rod, who frowned and said, “Good question what this is doing around here. It’s probably a thousand years old, at least, and something that you’d be more likely to find in the southwestern desert, so it’s had a hell of a trip. If flint could talk, this thing could really tell a story.”

Finally, Gil said, “If I didn’t know you’d set something up, I’d say there was nothing much here.”

“You guys haven’t even been watching where you step,” Rod told them. “Look some more.”

After some time, Mark found a small chunk of rotted pistol belt and a badly corroded piece of buckle, and Rod called the exercise to a halt. “OK, I think I’ve made my point,” he told him. “When you – we – get out in the jungle looking for Henry, there’s not going to be any great big lighted signs saying, ‘Hey, here I am.’ But, there may be some signs if you’re looking for them. You’re going to be looking for subtle hints, probably pretty unrecognizable when you first see them. Now, let’s see what there actually is, here.”

He walked around within yards of where he stood, stopping to pick up something now and then – more expended cartridges, a couple of coins, a few bits of fabric. “I had some people in the chem lab artificially age some of this stuff,” he told them. “Actually, the brass came from the Guard unit in Ft. Collins last fall, and some of the other stuff came from their trash, but you can make it look pretty grungy with the right treatment. Now, I’ll admit, I’m cheating, since I planted this stuff, but you should have found more of it than you did. Now, let me show you something else.”

He walked over to a slight mound next to Ryan’s feet. “I watched at least four of you almost step on this,” he said. “But look at this mound. It’s natural, I think, without digging into it, but it looks a lot like what you’d expect a body to look like if it had just laid there for a dozen years, with leaves falling on it, maybe animals getting to it in the first part, and all the rot and corruption that goes on. Look carefully in this area,” he continued, pointing out a circle a foot or so across with his hand. The vets gathered around. Finally, Bud pointed to a little patch of grayish, yellowish white. “Is that what you’re trying to point out?”

“You got it,” Rod told them, brushing back some leaves, revealing a broken piece of rib. “This is actually plastic,” Rod told them. “It used to be part of a skeleton in the anatomy department, but some kids played a prank and it couldn’t be repaired. They were going to throw it out, but I had a use for it. But, you guys walked right over the body and never saw it.”

“Jesus,” Gil said. “If we’re going to go looking through the woods, you better damn well go with us.”

“I will if I can,” Rod confirmed. “Look, let me pick up a few other things you guys missed. They might prove useful in a student exercise. Now, I couldn’t actually bury parts of the skeleton here without disturbing the ground so you’d notice it, but over a ways I did find a site for you to excavate, so I can at least show you some of the techniques.”

Rod led them a hundred yards through the woods to a small opening, where there was a patch of exposed ground that obviously had been recently dug up. A small pile of tools lay nearby. “I didn’t try to hide the site,” Rod told them. “And, I will tell you that there are a few plastic bones in there. But there’s some other small things that might prove to be important.”

By now, they’d seen several videos of excavations, and had a long lecture from Rod about them, too, so they at least had a rough idea of the techniques. This actually went better; they found the bones, and a couple of metal items, but even with running the soil through a grate, they missed a couple things that Rod pointed out to them. “This is an incisor,” he pointed out. “A couple more teeth, and the right dental records or x-rays, would go a long way toward making an identity. This piece of glass – it’s small, but it could be from a pair of glasses, and a good optician can tell you what the grind on the lens was. That can go a long way toward narrowing an identification down, too. At this point, we’re actually getting away from archaeology and into forensic pathology, but there’s a lot of crossover in the techniques. Remember, even if you find a body, you’re not finished. That body has to be identified before you’re sure it’s Henry.”

Finally, along in the afternoon, Rod called the exercise to a halt. “I’ve got to be getting down to Camden and on the plane,” he said. “I’ve got a class in Ft. Collins in the morning. But, I’ve got time for a wrap-up.”

“Let’s do it back at the house,” Mark said. “I think Jackie was going to have some sandwiches or something ready for us.”

“Fine with me,” Rod said. He picked up the materials they’d accumulated, and the veterans hauled the tools they’d brought with them.

With their hands wrapped around cokes and beers on Mark’s back lawn, they went over what they’d learned. “This whole exercise has been sobering,” Gil said flatly. “We’ve talked a lot about searching through the woods on a direct line from Target One for signs of Henry. Hell, that’s miles. It’d take a couple dozen people with eyes like yours months to do that, with no guarantee you’d ever find anything.”

“Right,” Rod told them. “You need to do everything you can to narrow the search area. Even then, there’s no guarantee.”

“Well, that settles that,” Gil said. “Steve, your part of it just became a lot more important.”

“Yeah,” Steve summarized the obvious. “Without local information, we don’t stand squat of a chance.”