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hand—traditional trowel excavation of the tunnel’s rocky base having proved impossible—and Thursday to reassemble the final stretch of floorboards and reattach the tracks.
    Kirina addressed the members of her team. “Let’s hit it, ladies.”
    Along with Chuck’s suggestion to hire Clarence for one of the field school’s two team-leader positions, Professor Sartore had suggested hiring Kirina, a graduate student from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, a few hours southwest of Durango. From day one, Kirina had impressed Chuck with her no-nonsense style. He’d learned over the course of the summer that her flat face, receding chin, and small, inset eyes hid a backbone of steel.
    At one point, Chuck had overheard Jeremy refer to Kirina as “Hatchet Face,” at another, he’d caught Jeremy referring to her derisively as “one of those square-faced dykes who swing both ways.” If Kirina had heard those or any other derogatory remarks about her over the summer, she hadn’t let on. She worked the students hard at the mine site, but always workedharder herself. Best of all, she did a far better job than Clarence of keeping an eye on the students during their off hours at Raven House, enabling Chuck to relax and enjoy his evenings and weekends with Janelle and the girls.
    Kirina was a semester away from completing her Ph.D. in archaeological anthropology at NAU. In her mid-twenties like Clarence, she’d worked a number of digs during her grad-school years, making it easy for Chuck to put her in charge.
    Chuck settled his hardhat on his head while Kirina led the members of Team Paydirt across the plateau to the site of the collapsed cabin. The students had numbered and stacked to the side the timbers from the collapsed cabin, and had staked and strung the cabin’s cleared floor area using long iron spikes and white nylon cord to form a rectangular grid five units long by four units wide. So far, the students had excavated seventeen of the meter-square units a foot or two deep, to where the rocky soil beneath the cabin gave way to bedrock. The final three units of the twenty-unit grid awaited excavation over the next two days. Thursday, the students would refill the excavated grid and replace the cabin logs where they’d lain after their collapse a century or more ago, returning the cabin site to its original condition as required by Professor Sartore’s contract with the National Park Service.
    Kirina popped the lid off a plastic equipment bin next to the excavation grid and distributed trowels to Team Paydirt. Chuck walked with Clarence and Team Nugget to the mouth of the tunnel, which extended underground where the triangle-shaped plateau narrowed to a point in a fold in the face of Mount Landen. A rusted iron door in a thick metal frame was bolted into the mountainside, covering the mouth of the tunnel. The bottom half of the heavy door was solid iron, the top half a lattice of inch-wide iron bands welded to form six-inch squares. Hanging from the frame were a heavy chain andkeyed padlock that served to secure the door when the site was unoccupied.
    Chuck pulled the door open with a noisy creak and stepped aside, allowing Clarence to lead his team into the tunnel.
    The six teammates, close friends from their past three years at Fort Lewis, were among the annual wave of high-school graduates who found their way over the mountains to “the Fort,” as the college was known, from the cities and suburbs lining Colorado’s Front Range.
    Jeremy’s irascibility aside, Chuck liked the members of Team Nugget. Though they wore the air of easy privilege about them like cloaks, all six were willing enough to put in the long hours and physical labor required of the field school despite the fact that only two were anthropology majors. The other four had signed up for the course simply as a way to spend the final summer of their college years together