Little artifacts from Russ's rambles

Russ had an uncanny way of spotting artifacts. Out in some remote place, he would suddenly pause, look about, and say something like, "Hmm, this may have been a Maidu hunting blind... oh look, here's an arrowhead." And sure enough, he'd stoop and pick up a barely discernible tiny flaked piece of stone, an artifact of a life lived long ago, of people Russell somehow resonated with through the intervening centuries.

He collected some of these finds, keeping the small ones in a Sierra cup on a shelf by the mandala window in his cabin, and larger ones on his "treasure rock", an outcrop of volcanic mudflow between his original "little cabin", and the "big cabin" which he built to accommodate his family when we were expecting Janet in 1989.

Janet spread out all the little artifacts last night and we took this photograph. Arrowheads, Chinese coins and "Go" game pieces, bits of trinkets from miners, crystals, fossilized whale bone, etc. In recent years, he left such things lying where he spotted them, and hoped other would do the same.