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end. Once
again, Cleo found herself alone in the woods.
     
    ***
     
    For the next two mornings, she waited just beyond the tree
line, but the children did not come outside. On the third day, she watched
through her binoculars as they tentatively opened the back door of the house,
squinted at the rhododendron, and slowly walked out into the yard. Cleo was
desperate to know how to communicate with this tribe, so when the children were
called inside for lunch, Cleo went straight home and ran up the stairs to the
first library. The rest of her day was spent poring over articles and books
related to anthropology. Frustrated, she sought out her father’s advice.
     
    Darwin was in his office, painstakingly measuring designs on
a wrinkled, leathery stick. Cleo crept closer, until she was right at his elbow
before he even noticed her.
     
    “What is that?” she asked.
     
    “An arm,” he said, as he made a notation in his book.
     
    Cleo squinted at the thing and leaned closer. “From what?”
she asked.
     
    “A person,” said Darwin. She raised an eyebrow and looked so
much like her mother that he didn’t know whether to laugh or roll his eyes.
“This is a preserved human arm, found in a bog, which is what makes it look
like this.”
    Cleo reached out and lightly ran her fingers over the deep
brown surface. “It feels just like a leather chair, only harder,” she said.
     
    “That’s what the bog environment does to human skin. A body
can be a thousand years old and still look like this when someone digs it out,”
he said. He carefully flipped the arm and began looking at the other surface
with a magnifying glass. “I’m looking for tattoos still visible on the skin.”
     
    She watched him for a few minutes, and then remembered that
she had her own inquiry to pursue. “Dad, what do you do if you can’t communicate
with a tribe that you want to study?”
     
    Darwin didn’t look up from the magnifying glass, but said,
“Well, there is always the old ‘conversation starter’ routine, where you show
them something really interesting.”
     
    “Doesn’t work,” she said.
     
    He frowned. “Well, you could try observing them for a few
days to see what parts of their routine you could participate in.”
     
    “Nope,” said Cleo.
     
    For two minutes, he didn’t speak. He just continued to study
the bog arm. Cleo was getting ready to poke him when he said, “Well, the
nuances of human culture can be infinitely varied, but there are always certain
unifying themes. But, our capacity for culture, and for interacting with
ourselves and our environments, is determined in part by the functional
capabilities of our brains. And, at the end of the day, our brains work the
same, physiologically speaking.”
     
    Cleo just looked at him.
     
    “Try the psychology journals,” he said.
     
    She watched him with the arm for another minute, not
realizing that years from now, whenever she would think about her father, it
was this moment that would materialize in her brain.
     
    Cleo spent all night in the library reading about the human
psyche. It was a little after 4:00am when she had her breakthrough. “Eureka!” she whispered, and fell asleep smiling.
     
    When the sun was up and her bag was packed, Cleo tiptoed to
the closet by the back door. The hinges groaned mercilessly, but a quick glance
over her shoulder confirmed that Vera hadn’t heard the sound. Cleo reached up
into the darkness and smiled when her fingers met the rough canvas dog leash.
She lifted the metal ring off of the hook and went in search of Juniper.
     
    Because they had a fenced in yard, Juniper wasn’t used to
the leash. He thought it was more fun to play tug of war with it, shaking his
head so hard that Cleo almost fell down twice. She finally got it hooked to his
collar, and then spent the next twenty minutes trying to pull him through the
hole in the fence. She finally threw half of her peanut butter sandwich through
the hole, and then had