Chris Fountain had long suspected that, thousands of years ago, native Americans hunted and camped along the same eastern Greenwich shoreline where he grew up.
As a boy playing on the unspoiled banks of Longmeadow Creek, a tidal waterway that forms the border between coastal Old Greenwich and Riverside, Fountain and his pals unearthed mysterious piles of oyster shells and arrowheads from lush fields and thick woods -- areas since divided into lots and developed with mansions.
But Fountain, who remembers himself as an "avid searcher for artifacts," never found anything on his own.
Then recently, as the 52-year-old turned over the rich soil of a vegetable garden overlooking the creek, he unearthed the kind of prehistoric artifact he had always longed for.
All I ever find is peanuts the local jays bury and other things the local cats bury.