"Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 3 - People Of The Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Neal Kathleen)

the archaeologists turned in."

Swenson squinted skeptically. "Better them blanket-ass Indians out
here than me. I'm in this country only long enough to make enough to
get back to civilization."

"Yeah, well, get back to work. We're paying you by the hour."

Swenson gave him a crooked grin. "And pile the back dirt so the
charcoal don't show, right?"

Skip grinned. "You got it. I want this place to look nice and
clean--just in case the BLM shows up. Hell, we don't want them to hold
up a thirty-million-dollar project--and for what? The damn Indians
aren't coming back. What the hell could we learn from a bunch of
savages who'd live in a country like this?"

Skip stooped to pick up a black rock. He rubbed sand off the smooth
surface and held it up. For a moment he couldn't believe what he held.
The polished stone couldn't be mistaken --a fossilized shark's tooth.
And a hole had been neatly drilled in the center, as if the tooth had
once been a pendant or an ornament.

"Well, how about that? Guess I got something for my fireplace mantel."
He paused thoughtfully. "But where in hell would they have picked up a
shark's tooth?" Fool, this whole country was ocean bottom a hundred
and fifty million years ago. Where in hell did the hydrocarbons we're
drilling for come from, anyway?

Swenson kicked around in the loose sand, trying to find another shark's
tooth. He turned up a bone, leached brown from millennia spent in the
soil. He reached for Skip's shovel, uncovering another and another of
the sand-encrusted bones
until he unearthed a human skull, surrounded by more of the polished
black shark's teeth.

"Holy shit!" Swenson cried, backing away.

Looking closely, Skip could see where the body had been laid in a
carefully dug hole. The sand changed color at the side of the grave,
marking the edge of the intrusion.

"Oh, Christ!" Gillespie groaned. "That's all we need. That'll get
the damned Indians involved. Then we'll have an Indian monitor running
around and being a pain in the ass." He looked at the shark's tooth in
his hand. Yes, part of a necklace--and buried with the skeleton all
those years.

"A damn dead man!" Swenson whispered.