Free The Bog by Michael Talbot Page B

David’s first task was to determine whether the tanning process that had been begun by the bog water had extended uniformly throughout all of the young girl’s internal organs. To accomplish this it would be necessary to make a deep incision in both the young girl’s abdomen and her hip, but as he looked down at her he found himself filling with qualm over the procedure. For all of his drive and yearning for knowledge, he always felt mixed when it came to cutting into one of the bog bodies. They were so perfectly preserved, and were such silent and awesome emissaries from the past that part of him viewed it as an extraordinary sacrilege to slice into them as if they were no more than just another specimen for dissection. He looked at Brad and saw that the younger man was filled with the same apparent misgivings.
    “Well, here goes,” he said, taking a scalpel and neatly cutting into the young woman’s eerily obsidian flesh. To his relief, he noted when he peered into the resulting wound that the flesh was a uniform brown throughout. That meant that they would not have to continue tanning the body, soaking it in a wooden trough filled with distilled water and oak bark for untold weeks. They would, however, have to further preserve it using other processes. As Brad prepared the first chemical bath, David took a small sample of the young woman’s flesh and placed it in a plastic bag. This they would send to Oxford to be carbon-dated.
    Once Brad had the equipment ready, they lifted the girl, plywood slab and all, and gingerly placed her in a large polyurethane tub. As they did this David once again caught a glimpse of her face, and found himself wishing that the cleaning procedures could be done more quickly, but he knew that it would still be several hours before they even had the peat off of her.
    Then he placed the end of a long rubber hose next to her side and turned the spigot on a nearby drum. Slowly the tub began to fill with a mixture of Formalin and acetic acid. Once the body was completely submerged it would have to sit for several hours. Then they could slowly start to siphon off the Formalin and acetic-acid solution and gradually replace it with alcohol. After that they would replace part of the alcohol with toluene, and only then could they initiate the numerous other processes that lay before them. They would lave the body in Turkish red oil and then lanolin to protect it and keep it pliant. Next they would treat different portions with mixtures of various hot waxes, and finally they would inject the more decomposed areas of the anatomy with collodion. David knew that only after all of these steps were complete could they feel secure that they had made the girl as immortal in the open air as she had been during the many centuries she was buried in the bog.
    As soon as they finished with the first phase of the procedures, the pungent smell of the Formalin and the acid forced them to leave the tent. Outside, David once again surveyed the excavations. Both of the bodies they had discovered thus far lay on the rim of an ancient bog caldron. Presumably, when they had been interred the peat in the caldron had been much soupier and the bodies had just been tossed onto its surface and then slowly sank. Nonetheless, samples taken at various levels of the peat and then carbon-dated should give them reasonably accurate corroborative evidence to compare against the age of the body once they had it carbon-dated. He was about to turn to Brad to instruct him to proceed with the taking of peat samples when the younger man smiled knowingly.
    “I know,” he said, holding up several sample bags.
    David smiled. “While we’re waiting for the first soaking to be finished, I’m going to take a walk around.”
    Brad nodded. “See you in a bit.”
    David turned and strolled in the direction of the hill to the west of them. His purpose in the walk was to get more of a feel for the land these people had inhabited. Part of the