Meleagris crassipes. A distal end of a tarsometatarsus was obtained from a pack rat nest. The nest had been burned by vandals, so the bone was somewhat calcined. The fragile specimen was damaged after identification, then restored. The plane of the trochlea and curvature of the distal-most end of the shaft distinguish this species from the common turkey, M. gallopavo.

In my dream, a dream that I did not trust from its onset, probably because of the furnishings, I was not myself but instead someone who knew me well and pretended to be me. He, as me, arrived home to sit at the dining room table with a woman who pretended to be my wife and my daughter, who was, in fact, my daughter. My daughter knew that neither of her parents were really her parents, but she didn’t let on. She was frightened, quietly so, the worst way to be afraid, more scared than I had ever seen her. Even the fake me was taken by this fear, and wherever the real me was, I was feeling cold deep in the pit of my stomach. My daughter moved her food around on her plate with a spoon, and the fake me found this odd. Her fake mother and fake father talked about things that never happened. Then, in my dream, I complained about my dream, singled myself out as the maker of the dream, then laughed. Laughing, I didn’t know if I was me or the pretend me. I awoke with the same feeling.

Some officials in Juárez considered that devil worshippers might be the killers of the women. They sketched a map showing that the locations of past murders outlined a pentagram. People see what they want. With so many sites of murders one could construct a Christmas tree or a poodle’s face.

Hilary Gill was an assistant professor. Her area was earthquakes, and unfortunately she had yet to do anything groundshaking. She was extremely young, an attribute that upon her hiring had suggested genius but now after five unproductive years came across as immaturity. She came to see me in the eleventh hour, asking how she might gain tenure and escape dismissal.

“What’s in the works?” I asked. “Any papers near done?” I already knew the answer to this question.

“Not really.”

We were sitting at a café on campus near the football and soccer practice fields. Flip-flop-clad athletes, men and women, strolled by with their shuffling gaits. Hilary kept looking around uncomfortably.

“Where does your fieldwork stand? What kind of shape is that in?”

“I have a lot of data.” Always a bad answer.

I sipped my coffee and watched her as she wouldn’t look at me. A couple of years earlier I had instructed her to ignore the advice of colleagues who told her to attend every conference she could. I had suggested that she refuse all committee work. She hadn’t followed my advice and here she was, scrambling to make scant data fit into poorly conceived experiments. And, of course, no grants.