He had healed, incompletely but sufficiently, and he had gone on living.

He had arthritis.

The degeneration was visible in his joints — the accumulated evidence of years of physical labor, of carrying weight, of moving through a landscape that required constant effort from the body.

He had walked a long way in his lifetime, this ancient man.

His bones knew it.

And the stone point in his hip — the spear that had not killed him — was made of a rock type not found near Kennewick.

It came from somewhere else.

From a different region.

Another data point suggesting that this man had not spent his entire life in one place, that he was, in some fundamental way, a traveler.

But none of this — not the age, not the diet, not the old wound — was what caused the explosion that was coming.