It was a little unusual. The doorbell rang before the heelers started barking.

Guess they were sleeping in, too. So much for loafing in bed on a Saturday morning. I'm already throwing on a shirt and jeans when eldest son comes in to say it's for me.

Usually is.

A neighbor. Bearing questions. He wants to know if I can tell him what the object is in his hand.

See right away it's a tooth. A canine.

A bear canine to be exact. Larger than a black bear's, probably a grizz. Heavily worn down. The bear was old when it died.

The tooth is old, too, as I turn it in my hand. Stained brown from being buried, cracks and fractures along one side where it had been repeatedly dried and frozen.

So, I tell him it's a bear canine. He had already guessed that himself.

Where'd he get it?

Seems his son found it. Gave me a real general, vague description of the location. More a secret he doesn't want to share than a lack of knowledge.

Okay, I'm used to that.

There were a few bones with it. Just small pieces.

"Don't bear skulls hold up better than that?"

Well, no. They're thick in a few places, but most of their cranial bones are thin like ours. Like human ancestors, the teeth are what last the longest.

But the age? Well, ain't been no grizz in that country for well over a century. It's at least that old. And an elk hunter up north found a grizzly skull that the expert estimated had been buried for a thousand years.

Another fellow found the skull of a bighorn ram in a rocky canyon closer north. Huge horn bases, much larger than any bighorn alive now. Or any time in the past ten thousand years. A bighorn ancestor, hopping along the rocks shortly after the last Ice Age. Not fossilized, either. Just bones that had been buried in our dry dirt.

For over ten thousand years.

So, his son's bear tooth? I'd guess grizzly, or precurser to a grizzly. Anywhere from a 100 to 1,000 years old.

Two more times in our conversation on the porch, he asks me about the skull bones. Why they weren't there with the tooth. About the third time, it hits me.

About ten years back, wife and eldest son went on a county tour to a private ranch, in the general vicinity of where this bear tooth came from. Last stop on their tour was a low, exposed ridge that extended out from the base of the mountain into the sage flats.

An Indian burial ground. Where the local tribe had placed their dead high on wooden platforms, and allowed them to return to the Earth.

The ranchers actually encouraged their busload of tourists to get out and scour the ground, seeking loose beads on the empty ridge.

And now I know why there were no bear skull bones with the bear tooth.

And no, I didn't tell our neighbor.