On this particular morning, the boy was not at his usual stop when the big yellow bus rolled up and opened its doors. He’d left the house at 7:15 but turned left instead of right. That wasn’t a mistake—he did know left from right—but older boys had told him about an abandoned construction site where they’d been finding arrowheads in a patch of churned dirt. The boy liked arrowheads—most every boy did—but for him, it went deeper. His grandfather had been full Cherokee, descended in a straight line from the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, those not forced to walk the Trail of Tears all the way back in 1838. He was dead now, but the boy remembered his lessons.

Pride of people.

Pride of place.

Arrowheads and spearpoints were to be preserved and treasured, not traded like comic books and baseball cards. And he was good at finding them. When they’d built the baseball field, for instance. Or that time the river dropped. They rarely lay flat—that was the key. Inexperienced hunters looked for the telltale shape, as if they’d been placed on purpose the day before. The boy knew better than that. He looked for the edges, the points, the small bits raised above the dirt. After heavy rainfall was a good time to look, especially in plowed fields and new subdivisions. He didn’t know how old the construction site was or why it had been abandoned, and didn’t care, either.

Turning off the roadside, the boy cut the corner where his neighborhood ended and a four-lane stretched off as far as he could see. The construction site was on the other side and two miles down, a building seven stories tall and incomplete, just the frame, the elevator shafts, the cinder block stairwells. The spot, they’d said, was behind it where a hilltop had been cut down and spread out to fill a gully. When the boy arrived, he stopped where a chain-link fence paralleled the road. Cars sped past, but no one noticed or cared or slowed. Squeezing through a half-open gate, he followed the construction road, his eyes on the red-dirt verge. The boy liked corner-notched arrowpoints the best, but loved the basal-notched and the stemmed almost as much. Even a leaf-cut or a simple triangle made his heart skip a beat. He’d found a flint knife once, and a Clovis point as long as his hand.

Ax-heads. Grinding stones. Scrapers.

Anything was possible.