I reached into the open toolbox on the tailgate and pulled on my heavy black EOD work gloves in the morning wind off the beach.

Kenneth passed me the brass scraping tool from the canvas roll.

“The fuse casing is showing on the north seam,” he said.

We knelt in the wet dune sand three feet from the rusted nose cone of the World War II practice bomb.

The salt air smelled of damp kelp and old iron.

I scraped a line of coarse sand off the brass threads.

The casing had sat under six feet of beach sediment since 1944, but the firing mechanism inside was still spring-loaded.