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Last year he had worked a case involving possible graft among personnel in the DNR itself, and he was still disappointed and bitter about the outcome. He had put civilians in jail, but insiders had retired and escaped unscathed.
    “You said you talked to the AG’s office?”
    “I did, and they didn’t know shit, but they handed me off to a deputy and I did a whole bunch of research and got the assistant AG up to speed. Last week, absolutely out of the blue, the sonuvabitch retired and joined an association of archaeologists as its executive director.” She sighed. “My problem is that according to the records Toliver cites, this place was pre-Ojibwa, and abandoned
before
the Ojibwa even migrated to this area.”
    Service asked, “What about the Iroquois remains he talked about?”
    “As far as I know, nobody’s ever looked for them at that location,” Sedge said. “Only Katsu claims there was a battle here, and even he doesn’t know exactly where. The stories say the Iroquois camped in this region, dragged their canoes onto the sand, and got drunk. They were headed west on the war road. Katsu claims his people first spotted them to the east, closer to Bay Mills, and followed them west, maintaining a safe distance. The enemy force was nearly three hundred strong, plus some captives they’d collected along the way. The Ojibwa had help from their Odawa brothers and some others, and fell on the
Na-do-we-se
before sunrise. It was over almost before it began. According to the legend, the attackers killed all but three of the enemy, cut the heads off the dead, lined up the severed heads on the beach, and told the survivors to go back to their homeland and tell their people thatif they ever again came onto Ojibwa land, the Ojibwa would build a road of skulls all the way back to their land.”
    “Very dramatic. Did they come again?”
    “Apparently not,” Sedge said.
    “Santinaw says humans can’t own land.”
    “There’s so much damn Native American crap to sort from fact,” she said.
    Service said, “Katsu claims occupying is temporary ownership even by old tribal standards, occupation and stewardship being synonymous in some cases for some people.”
    She nodded. “I listened to the same story and told him it’s
public
land, and he can’t legally block the public from using it. Katsu said to me, ‘Even if they are tearing up our heritage? Every time they shoot through here on their machines, they destroy remains.’ ”
    “I corrected him. ‘Artifacts,
not
human remains.’ ”
    “ ‘Don’t quibble,’ he told me. He insists there are bodies out there.”
    “Corroboration?” Service asked.
    This earned him another sour face. “Not exactly, but I learned that about ten years ago a professor from Whitewater State in Wisconsin conducted a dig there. No bodies were found, but months later—the next spring—she reported finding remains that the winter storms and sand-shifts had uncovered. More likely she was back digging again, the second time without authorization, but, having found a body, was afraid someone would find out, so she reported it as being found on the surface. She said she reburied it, but refused to say where.”
    “Who’d she tell this to?” Service asked.
    “State archaeologist’s office, in writing, and the SAO wrote its own report, in effect declaring, ‘No harm, no foul.’ I had to get the damn thing through FOIA—on my own dime. The department’s lawyers in Lansing were too busy to help me.”
    “But you figure she was digging without proper clearance.”
    “I wasn’t there, but it smells that way to me. There were some known artifact caches that disappeared at that time. The DNR even knew where they were—we’d cataloged them ourselves—then word got out about the remains and the artifacts went missing.”
    “Wouldn’t it make sense to locate the
Na-do-we-se
burials and push the State to reclassify the ground?”
    “Katsu insists the remains are there and that