Return to Sender
by Jennifer Christine
Part One

This is the initial part to set up the story, tell me if you like the style and I'll continue - there's no gender stuff in this part but it will become evident in the next few chapters
Enjoy

I sat there a little frustrated by the lack of movement.
Not that I was due to go anywhere anyway for a while, it was just that the work I was doing seems to be totally devoid of reward — not even much pay.
I felt like a miner with no ore to show for it and no money either. In truth, I probably was one. A miner I mean. Though the total ‘output’ for the 2 months I’d been stuck in this cave valley would amount to about 2000 kilos of fine silt. About what had blown in over a period of 20,000 years or so.

There didn’t seem to be much else, neither weapon artifacts (the aborigine people didn’t have metal) nor even domestic implements. It appeared they didn’t even use plates or bowls. The only reason we were here was staring me in the eye whenever I raised my head.

A huge mural greeted my eye as I did just that, hearing my offsider scuffing her way into the area, she wasn’t happy much either.

“Hey Deb, getting anywhere?” I was interested in what she’d been doing as she’d been digging in a square nearby where there’d been signs of encampment.

“Oh hello Ian, I thought you were over the next gully with Ken.”

“Nah he said he wanted to finish off the layout without having to explain everything.” I returned morosely — I wasn’t upset, there’s nothing more boring than being the chainman for a surveyor who at best seemed as taciturn as the desert floor we were searching in vain.

Debbie crouched where I was scraping the soft dirt for clues, the area boxed off with string over the whole line of the mural. I’d removed about 250mm of dirt from most of the area which amounted to 20 metres long and two metres wide. I wasn’t trusted with anything more complicated, I was only an intern and not qualified toassessanything — so I’d been reduced to digging in my little sandpit as I watched the grads photo and sketch the walls and the other spurs and rifts that dotted the local area.

The mural was odd, it showed what were obviously Aborigine men and women and a sort of Michelin man with what looked like a shovel in his hand. There were the obvious local flora and fauna adorning the walls also, but the fat guy with the shovel was an anomaly. Hence the funding and ‘dig’ to find out if there was any evidence of ‘visitors’ to these humble cavemen.

I hadn’t even found any evidence of the cavemen, never mind the ‘visitor’.

If this gig didn’t put me off, they reckoned I would be able to finish my degree and maybe become a real archeologist myself.

“This dust is getting me down, it’s so fine that there’s not a crevice round here that isn’t filled with it” Debbie complained letting some fall between her fingers.

I looked at her innocently watching the dust and started to chortle. “I guess your Swedish origins allow you to be so personal about your bodily state?” I ventured. Suddenly the fist balled round some dust and it was stuck in my crevices as she stuffed it down my shirt.

We fell over backwards just as the professor walked round the corner. “We’ll never find anything if you don’t do any work you know,” he looked over is glasses like an aging school teacher. At45he was the expedition leader and he wasn’t happy either.

We were coming to the end of the dig with very little to show for it.

“I came over to let you know that Bill has seen signs of a dust storm so we’d better hunker down for the night — it’s likely to be here in a couple of hours.”

Bill was our Aborigine guide and tracker as well as being our driver. He was part of the local heritage trust and had as much power over the dig as the professor.
They were at loggerheads for awhile but had learned to respect each other.

We had individual tents and a mess tent that had wide verandahs to keep us shaded during the hot part of the day but it wasn’t what you’d call dustproof being open as it was.
We just helped put away in bags what we could to keep it from being ruined by the fine dust and retired to the 4 wheel drive bus that was our main transport. It was stuffy but we had plenty of fuel and Bill started the engine and we had airconditioning which was actually a luxurywehadn’t had in a while.

By the time the storm had abated, it was dark and very quiet by comparison.
“Bladdy starms ganna take some clearing up guys” Bill singsonged at us “Gonna be drifted well into the camp.” He went on to say that the wind almost never comes from that direction and it was going to be piled up where we’d been digging.

I groaned knowing my work was going to be cut out for the next two days just retrieving the results from the pervious work.
We settled in to sleep in the bus, our beds would be unusable.

Morning broke and we found that not only were we wrong, the camp was devoid of almost all the silt and the tents were sitting up against the valley walls as the tent pegs had come adrift as the sand was eroded. The place was a mess, but there was no silt at all.

The eight of us stepped down from the bus looking like tourists at the Taj Mahal — incredulous.

Where our tents had been was a large stone ring with other smaller rings round it — obvious permanent encampment dating back much further than we had dreamed possible. Nearly 40,000 years we worked out later — not the 20,000 that we’d surmised from the drawing on the cave wall.

Ken started to caper about like a man whose fortune had been made, “My god, this is unbelievable, we’ve found the base of first Aboriginal settlement. This has all the hallmarks of the Bridge Nomads.” These were nomads that had walked down from Papua New Guinea when there was a land bridge across to CapeYork.

Older by 20,000 years than any European Settlement ever found. The true mother hearth of mankind in Australia.

Over the next few hours we photographed and measured the whole area and dragged our gear away to an area clear of hominid dwelling. There were artifacts and implements all over the place.

I set to, cataloguing stuff and placing it in boxes as we progressed, not being quite as careful as we had little time before we had to leave and we had now a lot to get done before we left — if word got out of this, we’d have a lot of trouble with looters so we needed to get the stuff moved.

While we were excited it was frenzied but after a day or two we settled back into routine and just worked our tails off.

“Ian, come and look at this,” Debbie called over to me. I stretched from my kneeling position and straightened my back as I walked over to where Deb was scratching away at a depression in the base of the wall.

I walked over to her as she pried a scallop shaped lump of artifact from an obvious hiding place at the bottom of the depression.

“I wonder what that is, it’s not clay, it looks like a rusty box — but it would have preceded the iron age by 15,000 years.” She passed it up to me as she settled back on her haunches —
She looked beat but still very pretty with some of her hair hanging loose, escaped from her scrunchie in damp tendrils round her face. She smiled at me and said, “Well that’s me for the day there’s nothing more I want now than to lie down with a cold drink for a while and stretch my aching back.”

“I’ll take this over to the artifacts box and let the prof know about it , Gace and David should have a look too, they may date it out of the dig altogether as it looks a bit modern.

Grace and David were where we wanted to be in five years — Graduate Archeologists with specialities in different eras.

After looking at it, the professor and Grace and David all said it was metal and not involved in the dig — probably a passing explorer hid it from robbers or something.

“Don’t put it with the artifacts it’ll cloud the science.” The professor had spoken.

Since the lump of rust seemed heavy and quite solid, I thought I’d see if it contained anything more than dust — it wasn’t homogenous seeming to have striations in one direction.

Setting it up on the bench, I placed the spike of my hammer into a likely spot and struck it with a mallet. A large slab came away and fell to the floor and a load of dust bloomed up from the box. I waved it away like smoke and there before me, sitting in the box as if it had been placed there yesterday was a plastic and aluminium looking remote control. Well it looked like one anyway. On the face of it was a little green light that blinked slowly. Beneath it was a button.

I felt like Alice in Wonderland and wondered if the little markings below the button translated as “press me.”

SO I DID…….