Lost and Now Found

The summer sun was blasting down from directly overhead. If not for the shade of the white tents dotting the area, we would all be dying of heat-stroke. The local vegetation leaned more toward low scrub and brush than anything an outsider would call trees. Men and women in jeans and hiking boots wearing matching t-shirts carefully sifted through loose dirt in screens. I was here mostly because my family had been hunting in these woods for generations, so I hired on as their guide.

"You there," the voice itself wouldn't have induced the teeth grading reaction I had under any other setting, but I was beginning to think the woman was refusing to acknowledge that I had a name to prove that I wasn't worthy of her time. "I said, You there. Are you deaf?"

"What can I do for you, Miss Riley?" I asked as I plastered on the best fake smile I could muster.

"That's Professor Riley to you," she said for the umpteenth time. "The map I found shows a structure over that way," she said, gesturing off to the west. "Is there anything in that area you know of?"

I thought about the area and how far we had already come and took a second to think about the few landmarks I could see from here before I answered. I had already discovered that it was far better to take an extra second and be sure of an answer than to be anything less than specific when dealing with this one.

"There is an old dirt road a few miles that way, then we get out of the hills and into mostly scrub brush and arroyos for the next hundred miles. This part of Texas is very sparse. If the structure you're looking for was that way, then I'm sorry, I don't think it's there anymore."

While I was talking, she was scribbling notes in the thick black notebook she carried with her everywhere. She was never without it and never let anyone else look inside, so we were all curious about it. I could see bits of folded paper sticking out where she had shoved them in rather than transcribing things from other sources and possibly losing some small detail in the translation.

"I'm sending one of my guys that way to check it out," she said absently as she turned away. "Go with them and make sure they don't get lost."

"Yes, m..." I was going to respond but realized there was no point. She had already dismissed me entirely from her consciousness.

"Come on, buddy," one of her men said as he walked by. At six feet and a bit, he was almost as tall as me, but where I was lean and lanky with a perpetual sunburn on my pale neck, he was muscular and bald with skin like dark mahogany. Feltch was as open and easy-going as his boss was rude and distant.

"So be honest with the local boy," I said half an hour later. "What the hell are we out here looking for? I've been hunting and camping this area my whole life and never found more than a few rabbits and some scrawny deer."

"All I know for sure is that the boss lady got her hands on an old hand-drawn map that she thinks is of this area. That notebook she was writing in is her personal unicorn diary."

"Her what?"

"That's just what we all call it. Everyone who gets into archeology had some lost treasure in their head at some point in their lives that they think they are going to be the one to find. I think we're here to look for hers. The notebook is full of all the clues she has dug up and collected since she started looking for it."

"So what is she looking for? Some lost mine or a settlement that disappeared?"

"Nobody knows. She won't tell us anything."

"So what the hell are you guys looking for sifting through all that dirt? How are you supposed to know when you find something?"

"Right now, we are just looking for evidence of humans in the area during the time just after the conquistadors landed in South America."

"So you guys are out here digging in the summer sun, and she hasn't even told you what you're looking for? That's just wrong."

As we were talking, the small game trail we were following led us around and into a small arroyo, the first of many created during the last season of rains.

"Hey Buddy, these arroyos, are they stable?" he asked as he moved to inspect the washout wall.

"Not really, the rain causes flash flooding that washes out the loose sand and cuts these meandering trenches all over the place. Next season this one will be filled with sand, and another will take its place snaking in a whole new path until it meets up with a stronger current and the water drys up."

Just as I said that, the ground opened up and swallowed me.

I'd like to pretend that I was one of those guys you see in the movies that the bottom falls out, and they take the fall in determined silence, with gritted teeth and a curse for fate.

I'm not.

I screamed all the way down and wet myself before hitting bottom and nearly drowning in four feet of water fifty feet below the surface.

The aquifer I landed in was natural sandstone, smoothed by the passage of underground water over eons. I was lucky not to break the small waterproof flashlight I kept in my vest pocket. As I flashed its beam around the cavern, I spotted a ledge that made its way up ten feet above the waterline.

"Buddy!"

The faint sound of my name being called down the shaft echoed to my ears as I tried to figure out how I was going to get out of here.

"I'm here!" I called out. "Go back to camp and bring back help!"

"What do you need?"

"First, get me a radio, so we don't have to yell! Then get me a lot of rope!"

I tried to make my way over to the ledge so I could get out of the water but stubbed my toe on something heavy. When I reached under the water to figure out what it was, I came up with a small statue.

"What the hell is this?" I asked as I tried to wipe the crud off of it.

The glint of gold under my flashlight told me that I had found something important. As I took a good look around the cavern, I realized that there was a lot more down here than I originally saw. The white of bone glinted from the highest area on the small ledge, and what looked like the learning face of a skull sat under the water.

It took two days to transfer everything from the water cavern under our feet up to the surface. We could only go up or down one at a time, and the corkscrewing opening was difficult to maneuver.

"What we have here is over three hundred years of random people falling into that shoot as it opened when the seasonal rains happened to cut the arroyos close enough to open the passage," Professor Riley said to the gathered men and women.

The table in front of us held everything from gold statues that looked like they came from the Incan Empire to bits or prospecting equipment from the turn of the 19th century.

The only thing not on the table that had been found in the cavern was the large leather bag filled with cash that we found on the top of the ledge. From the scraps found in and around it, we had probably found some kind of gangster from the twenties, probably bringing a bag of cash to Mexico to buy bootleg liquor. After talking it over, it was decided that I would get to keep the bag and we would just pretend that it never existed. I had to count it twice but it contained twenty thousand dollars.

Not bad for a job as a guide. I even got my name in the paper as one of the team to find the historical artifacts that would be sent to museums all over the country.