Sediment accumulated above the mastodon’s remains.

The lake filled in.

What had been an open water body became a wetland, then a meadow, then farmland.

Thirteen thousand nine hundred years passed.

And through all of those years — through climate changes, through the extinction of the mastodons and the mammoths and most of the other Pleistocene megafauna, through the colonization of the landscape by the peoples who have lived in the Pacific Northwest since the end of the Ice Age, through all of the geological and biological and human history of the Olympic Peninsula — the tip of the bone point remained inside the mastodon’s rib, locked in place, mineralized, preserved by the specific accident of having struck bone rather than soft tissue.

If it had not struck the rib.