Ancient-looking.

Dark and mineralized in the way that bones become when they have spent a very long time buried in soil.

He called in James Chatters.

Chatters was a forensic anthropologist — a scientist who studies human skeletal remains for law enforcement purposes, trained to determine age, sex, ancestry, and cause of death from bones alone.

He was well-known locally and had worked on dozens of historical cases in the Pacific Northwest.

Johnson figured this was probably a pioneer-era burial, maybe nineteenth century, maybe a little older.

Nothing out of the ordinary for the Columbia River basin, a region rich with the scattered evidence of human habitation across centuries.

Chatters came out to the riverbank and began examining what could be found.

Over the next few days, he and others collected nearly all of a complete human skeleton — 380 separate bones and bone fragments, representing roughly ninety percent of one individual.

It was an extraordinary recovery.