Chapter 10

 

 

   With a twig, Gideon prodded at the powdery gray charcoal in the circular fire pit and watched it emit a few dusty wisps.

"Well, something was certainly here not too long ago." He bit his lip. "Someone. Not for at least a day or two, but since the last rain. Otherwise the charcoal would be matted down."

"A very woodsmanlike observation," Julie said.

Gideon gestured at the two-foot slabs of bark that stood on end around the pit, forming a three-quarter circle. "What do you make of these?"

"Heat reflectors?"

"Could be. Could also be a screen to hide the glow. Notice how the opening faces the back of the ledge, away from the valley. From below, you’d never know there was a fire going up here."

"From below, you’d never know there was anything up here."

She was right. From their camp they had raked this mountainside with binoculars but had been unable to find the ledge. Yet from here there was a clear, broad view over Pyrites Canyon. The gravel bar on which they’d camped was in plain sight almost directly below, on the other side of the stream. The orange backpacks they’d left behind were clearly visible—just as visible, Gideon thought, as they themselves would have been in last night’s pellucid moonlight.

The ledge was obviously deserted and apparently abandoned, but Gideon was jumpy and vaguely apprehensive. Even in the daylight, with birds singing vigorously, he had continued to feel under scrutiny. Julie did, too. He could see it in the way her eyes darted at little snaps and creaks from the woods.

The ledge, about seventy feet long and thirty feet wide, was screened and camouflaged by trees that grew on it and on the slope beneath. Above, a forested, nearly vertical bluff rose two hundred feet. Below, the barely discernible path that had led them to the ledge, as it had led the Zanders, dropped steeply toward the river far below.

Part of his uneasiness, Gideon knew, stemmed from the weather. The temperature had dropped, and there was a high, pearly overcast, as heavy and solid as a stone roof. Underneath that, somber, iron-gray clouds were moving in from the west to pile and swirl against the mountains. Yet there was no wind. The air seemed viscous and torpid, dank and raw. Julie said the rainy season was on the way.

As they approached the eastern end of the ledge, Julie wrinkled her nose and frowned.

"Yes, I smell it too," Gideon said. "And I know the stories. Bigfoot lairs are always supposed to be pervaded by an awful stink. Or is that the Abominable Snowman?"

"No, that’s Bigfoot; a pungent, unidentifiable stench. That’s what made the Zanders think of Bigfoot."

"It’s pungent, all right, but I wouldn’t call it unidentifiable. It smells like a latrine that’s been stopped up for a week."

That was very much what it was: a circular depression at the very end of the ledge that had obviously seen a lot of use as a toilet pit.

"Either they had an army up here for a few nights," Gideon said, "or this ledge has been inhabited for a long time."

"Can we move back upwind, please?" Julie asked.

When they were a few feet away she spoke, frowning. "It’s awful that anyone would live this way: an open toilet—"

He looked at her in surprise. "Everyone lived like this until a couple of hundred years ago. There are plenty of people who still do. The toilet’s on the very end of the ledge, so the wind would almost always carry the stench away. Really, it’s better than indiscriminately fouling the forest or the river. And they’ve been scooping earth over the feces so they’d degrade quickly."

"Yes, but this isn’t a hundred years ago, and there aren’t any primitive people living in the rain forest." She shook her head. "That is, there aren’t supposed to be."

Gideon raised his eyebrows, "There wasn’t supposed to be anyone living in the rain forest."

"That’s right," she said, "but somebody obviously lives here. What’s this?"

They had come upon a smaller fire ring only about twenty feet from the first, also shielded with slabs of bark toward the open side of the ledge. Gideon knelt to poke at the cold charcoal.

"Two fire pits?" Julie said. "What would be the point of that? Two separate groups?"

"I don’t think so. See how there’s a layer of sand under the charcoal?" He scrabbled in the pit with a twig. "And then another layer of charcoal? I bet there’s another layer under that, of"—he dug some more—"of sand. See?" He sat back on his heels. "Know what this is?"

She shook her head. "Some kind of kiln? For firing pots? Baking bread?"

"You’re close. It’s a kiln, all right, but it’s for making stone tools. Right out of the Lower Paleolithic."

"You can make stone tools in a kiln?"

He laughed. "No, but you can heat-treat the rocks before you make them. There are certain kinds of rocks—coarse-textured ones like jasper—that need heat-treating before you can do a good job of flaking them. It’s very delicate. Glassier stones like obsidian and agate don’t need it."

"So you’re telling me somebody has been making stone tools here in 1982?"

"I sure am. Look."

She got down on her knees to watch him turn over the earth just outside the rim of the pit. "The ground’s full of little flakes of rock," she said.

"Yes, the pieces that get chipped away when you’re making a stone implement."

"But," Julie said, frowning, "if they can make stone tools why make those horrible bone spears? Aren’t stone points better?"

"Infinitely better, if you’re skilled at making them. But making stone points is different from making stone hammers, say. It requires some difficult techniques—percussion chipping, then striking off the core blades, then pressure-flaking. It’s not easy. Bone points, on the other hand, you can more or less make by carving and abrading; no specialized knowledge necessary."

She sat back on her haunches, her arms around her knees. Her voice was dreamy. "You’re saying, then, that whoever lived here is able to make crude stone tools but not fine ones. What would that make them equivalent to—Mesolithic people?"

"I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s right."

"And the Mesolithic ended in Europe, what, fifty thousand years ago?"

"Thirty-five thousand, say."

"All right, thirty-five thousand. Thirty-five thousand years! Gideon, you’re not saying these Indians, if that’s what they are, have been lost here for thirty-five thousand years?"

"No, of course not. Here in the New World the Indians had Mesolithic technologies, so to speak, until the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century. And in a lot of tribes, practically up to the twentieth century. No, what I’m suggesting is that some Indian group came here maybe a hundred years ago and has been here ever since." He shook his head suddenly. "It is on the fantastic side, isn’t it?"

"It really is. Look, why does it have to be an Indian group? Why couldn’t it be a bunch of hermits, or hippies maybe, who want to live a simple, more primitive life?"

He got up and brushed himself off, and brushed Julie off as well. "No. How would they know about heat-treating rocks?"

"They could have read about it in a book."

"Did you ever read about it in a book?"

"I never even heard of it."

"And you’re an anthro minor, so there you are. No, I think these are genuinely primitive people."

"But where would they actually live, sleep? Just out in the open?"

"I doubt it. There must be a shelter. Let’s look around some more."

In fifteen minutes of prowling among the trees they found the first hut. They had walked by it several times before they realized it was not a natural tangle of dead branches but a structure of lashed-together poles thatched with brush and capable of holding three or four people.

It took a while for Gideon to find the entrance, a low, covered opening through which he had to crawl. Inside it was dusky, but some light came through a smoke hole in the domed roof and through the interstices between the branches. It was just tall enough for him to stand slightly stooped. The hut was empty, but there were signs of human habitation. There was a small fire pit in the center, and the walls were black and greasy from many fires, and redolent of smoke. On the floor were a few fish bones. The floor itself was of earth, with many footprints, all naked—and none eighteen inches long.

The whole was drearily depressing, and he was happy to crawl back out into the daylight. There was a second, smaller hut, which received a cursory examination and turned up no additional information.

They made a final examination of the area around a large fire pit and found one more object of interest, manmade and man-used. It lay lodged between two of the bark slabs—an eight-inch stick about the thickness of an arrow shaft, broken at one end and tapering to a blunt point that was charred and worn down.

"Is it a fire drill?" Julie asked.

"Yes, the lower part of it. Do you know how it works?"

"Not exactly. Do you rub it against another stick?"

Gideon smiled. "No. Regardless of what any Boy Scouts may tell you, one cannot make sparks by rubbing two sticks together. You need to concentrate the friction in a very small spot. You take another piece of wood, a slab, and you bore a socket just large enough to fit this burned end of the drill. Then you gouge a channel from the socket to the edge of the slab. In the channel you place tinder… Why are you laughing?"

"I love it when you shift into your professorial mode. You get so serious. Not at all the sort of person who would fool around with a lady park ranger in a sleeping bag. But please continue."

"Just because I did it doesn’t make me the sort of person who does it," he said, laughing, "but I’ll skip the rest of the lecture. The point I was going to make, which is important, is that it’s very hard to do. Even when you know how, it takes a lot of muscle and determination. I’ve demonstrated it before classes several times, and I’m always smoking before the tinder is."

"I understand, but why is that important?"

"It’s important because it clinches the fact that these are genuinely primitive people. If I were just playing at returning to the Stone Age, or simply dropping out, the one concession I’d make to civilization would be matches. And if I didn’t have them when I left, I’d sure come back and get some after trying out this thing once or twice."

He turned the drill slowly in his hands. "Indians. For sure."

She frowned. "I still don’t understand why it has to be Indians. All right, forget the twentieth-century dropout idea, but why couldn’t they be some primitive Caucasians who have been living here, maybe for a hundred years?"

"Uh-uh. By the time the first Europeans set foot in Washington, in the eighteenth century, their technology was already way beyond this."

Julie nodded. "You’re right, of course." She shook her head slowly back and forth. "The idea that there might still be people here living in the Stone Age, hiding, watching us…" She shivered. "Gideon, can we go back now?"

He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. "Ready to get back to the twentieth century?" he said smiling.

"Desperately."

He tilted her chin up and kissed her softly on the lips. "Me, too. Let’s go."

 

 

   It took them only four hours to walk back to the trailhead, and an hour later, with Gideon driving, they pulled into the ranger compound at Quinault.

"I don’t know about you," Julie said, stretching as she climbed down from the cab, "but I need a hot shower before I do anything else."

"Me, too," Gideon said. He went to the back of the truck and hauled out the backpacks. "Maybe I can get a room at the lodge. I sure don’t want to drive back to Dungeness tonight."

"Are you joking? You’d have to book a month in advance, what with the crowds."

"Gee, that’s too bad," Gideon said mournfully. "I could really use a shower."

Julie laughed. "All right, you don’t have to look so sad. You can use mine. On the condition that you behave."

"Of course I’ll behave. What do you take me for?"

In an hour, clean, happy, and utterly relaxed after a long, shared, soapy interlude under the shower head, they sat in bathrobes in the living room of the old, forest-green frame house that went with the job of chief ranger.

"See?" Julie said, handing him her empty glass. "Isn’t civilization wonderful?"

Gideon poured a second dry sherry for each of them. "Rahther," he said. He knelt as he brought her her drink, and softly kissed her. "I say, old girl, frightfully considerate of you to suggest I might spend the night here."

"On the condition you conduct yourself in a gentlemanly manner."

"You certainly set a lot of conditions," he said, slipping his hand into her robe to caress her breast.

"God," she said, "aren’t you ever satisfied?"

"I am satisfied. I couldn’t be more satisfied." He put his other hand into her robe and embraced her with both arms. "I’m just being friendly."

Julie put down her glass to hold his face in both hands. "Mmm, I feel friendly, too. But I haven’t called into the office yet to let them know I’m back. I think I’d better do that."

"That’s supposed to motivate me to let go?"

"And the sooner we dress, the sooner we get some dinner."

"The restaurant doesn’t open for another hour."

"And we’ve just killed the last of the sherry. If you want some more, we need to go over to the lodge."

"That’s different." Gideon kissed her and promptly stood up. "You call your office and I’ll dress. Or would you like me to help you into your clothes while you’re on the phone? It’d save time."

"No, thanks. I don’t think it would work, somehow."

 

 

   The elderly woman at the wicker writing desk looked up from her letter and peered irritatedly over the tops of her reading glasses.

"Be quiet, you children," she said, her voice quivering with annoyance. "Go outside and play."

But the two little boys, falling over themselves in their excitement, dropping their quarters and scrambling after them under chairs, ran unheeding down the elegant old lobby of Lake Quinault Lodge to the far wall, where a table with an electronic game imbedded in its top stood anachronistically among the potted plants and fine old 1920s furniture. Once there, they dropped into the chairs with blissful, adult sighs, inserted their coins, and fell at once into deep trances over the screen, which emitted twitters, splutters, and beeps that could be heard all over the sedate lobby. On its perch the parrot muttered and complained.

Gideon smiled at Julie. "Well, you wanted the twentieth century. Welcome to it."

"I love it," she said, laughing and snuggling farther into her chair, her legs tucked beneath her.

Gideon sipped his amontillado and leaned back, enjoying the crackling fire in the huge brick fireplace. His wicker chair creaked dryly when he moved, a clean, leathery, masculine sound that went well with the sherry.

The woman at the writing desk, unable to bear the noise of the game table any longer, swept up her papers with a snort and marched out. On her way she stopped briefly near Gideon and Julie, her writing materials gathered against a formidable bosom.

"They shouldn’t allow those things in here," she said.

"I agree with you," Gideon said. When she was gone he turned to Julie. "Did she mean the machines or the kids?"

"I don’t know," she said, laughing. "Both, probably."

"Well, I agree with her."

"Gideon," Julie said after they had both looked into the fire again for a while, "I’ve been wondering why those Indians would have left anything as valuable as a spear behind for the Zanders to find. It must take a long time to make one."

"They were probably surprised and left in a hurry. Anyway, I don’t imagine that time management is a particular problem for them. Besides, the binding was rotten and the shaft was split. Those are what take all the time, you know. The point’s nothing."

"No, I didn’t know. There’s a lot they don’t teach you in school. Do you think they’ve deserted the place now?"

"I think so. The Zanders may have been the first people to stumble on that ledge. And now us. They’ve probably gone even farther from the trails and the people."

"That would mean going higher into the mountains. It’s going to be awfully wet and cold up there." She moved her head slowly back and forth, letting her lips brush the rim of the glass. "What a horrible life they must have. Shouldn’t we be trying to find them?"

"I’m not sure if we should or we shouldn’t," he said, debating with himself as well as with her. "Looking at the historical record, it’s hard to make a case for primitive people’s lives being much improved by contact with the outside world. They don’t have immunities to common diseases, their mores can’t stand the shock, their values get screwed up. What would we do with them, anyway? Put shoes and socks on them and send them to junior college? Put them on a reservation?"

"I know all that," she said impatiently, "but this is a tiny, frightened band of people cowering out there in the woods, living in leaky huts in a rain forest, for God’s sake. And if they really move higher they’ll be in the snow! We could at least get some clothing to them, and food, and tell them they don’t have anything to be afraid of."

"Except the FBI. Don’t forget, your wee, timorous, cowering band has committed at least two murders, if we’re right. Probably three."

"You don’t really think they’d be taken to jail…put on trial…?"

"I don’t see what choice the FBI would have. If they could find them."

"So we just leave them there?"

Gideon hadn’t meant to mislead her. "No, I want to find them, too, but it has to be done right. I want time to do some research, to think through the implications for them and for us, to get ready. I’d like to go next spring, after the rainy season."

"You? Do you mean alone? In the rain forest? Just you?"

"Your confidence is heartwarming."

"It’s just that, anthropologist or not, you’re basically a…a city person," she said, laughing. "You’d have gotten lost twenty times without me yesterday. I’m going with you."

The hell you are, he thought. Not with wild men running around with spears. Not now. Yesterday you were just another nice girl. Today you’re…more. "We’ll see," he said. "Maybe."

"Definitely. Now that I’ve found you, I’m not about to lose you." She looked suddenly at him. "That sounded possessive," she said soberly. "I’m not that way. I was only joking."

Sorry to hear that, Gideon thought. He had liked the sound of it. He could see that she had, too. He said nothing, but smiled at her, and they finished their sherries in an easy, companionable silence, gazing into the fire.

They walked into the dining room hand-in-hand and were conspiratorially asked by the hostess if they wanted a private booth. Julie said yes and Gideon said no, and they all laughed. They took a table at the window. In the cold, ashen light, the lawn was gray, the lake almost black. It was comfortable to be in the warm, clean dining room, awaiting a hot meal prepared by someone else. What would it be like to spend a gray, chilly winter out there in a hut of twigs?

A relish tray of raw vegetables was plumped heartily before them. "My name is Eleanor," the waitress proclaimed without recognizing them. "Enjoy."

 

 

   In the morning they breakfasted in the window nook of Julie’s kitchen, looking out on a day that was colder and more drearily overcast than the one before. They munched hot bran muffins with butter and jelly, and drank steaming coffee, and felt very cozy and protected.

"Winter’s coming," Julie said dreamily. "It’s the time of year I start wishing I was a bear about to hibernate."

"I thought you liked the wet weather."

"Oh, I didn’t really mean hibernate. I meant I’d like to hole up in a nice, snug house like this one, and have fires in the fireplace, and eat hot soup out of mugs, and listen to music, and have some lovely male animal at my beck and call."

"To light the fires, and make the soup, and turn on the phonograph?"

"And other duties as assigned. Kiss, please."

"Is that illustrative of other duties, or is it a request?"

"A request. Demand."

"Yes, ma’am." Gideon slid along the cushion of the window seat and kissed her gently. "Umm," he said, "delicious. You taste like apricot jelly."

Julie laughed and put her arms around him. "I can’t tell whether you’re amorous or hungry."

"Are they incompatible?"

"Well, would you like to go back to bed, or would you rather have another bran muffin?"

Gideon frowned, thinking hard. "Do I get jelly with the bran muffin?"

"You’re awful," Julie said, pushing him away. "I’m not even going to respond to that." She resettled herself. "Gideon, I’ve been thinking. You really can’t wait until next spring."

"Why not? They’ve managed to get along in there for a century."

"Maybe, but there’s never been a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on them, or a hundred-thousand-dollar reward. The woods have never been so full of crackpots with guns. Someone’s bound to find them, maybe shoot them. And don’t forget about the FBI. John will be here tomorrow, and he’ll want to go right out and check the ledge."

"You’re right," Gideon said. "They won’t be at the ledge anymore, but the FBI’s likely to come up with a lead on where they went. Do they still use bloodhounds?"

"I don’t know. I think maybe they do."

"You know, as good a person as John is, he has to go in regarding them primarily as murder suspects. That’s some way to introduce them to civilization, isn’t it?"

"So what’s to be done?"

"There’s nothing we can do. I don’t know where they are, and if I did, I couldn’t communicate. And if I could, what would I say? ‘Greetings from Great White Father. You are going to prison.’ Maybe nobody’ll find them, and maybe by next year I’ll have learned some more."

"Maybe and maybe. Not too satisfactory a resolution, is it?"

Gideon agreed, but before he could reply, the telephone rang and Julie went to answer it. At the kitchen doorway she turned and muttered, "You’ll figure something out. And whenever you go, I’m going with you."

"Hello," she said into the mouthpiece. Then she paused and darted a sidewise look at him, a little uncomfortably, he thought. "Uh, well, no, I don’t exactly know where he is, but I can probably find him. I’ll let him know."

She came back from the kitchen. "For you."

He smiled. "Don’t tell me you’re a little shy about letting people know I’m here at seven-thirty in the morning?" He was sorry, as he said it, for the flip, sleazy sound of it.

"No," she said angrily, and two spots of color appeared on her cheeks. "He just caught me by surprise. And I didn’t know how you’d feel if people knew you were here. You are on the stuffy side, you know."

"I am?" he said, surprised. That he was a little stuffy, he knew. That Julie knew it was a bit of a shock.

"Well, sometimes, yes. How would you feel, anyway?"

"About people knowing I’m here? Julie, you must be kidding. I’m proud of it. I’d like it if everyone knew."

"Well," she said, still looking angry, "I wasn’t sure." She giggled suddenly. "I think I need another kiss, and a hug, too. I guess I’m feeling insecure."

He rose and took her in his arms, squeezing until she yelped. "Enough!" she cried. "I’m secure, I’m secure!" He kissed her and felt her throat tremble, and trembled himself. Again he almost told her he loved her, and again a niggling prudence held him back. "What was the call about?" he asked.

"Oh. Two things. First, a couple of teenagers from Hoquiam admitted faking those Bigfoot tracks."

"No surprise there. And second?"

She took her head from his shoulder. "Gideon, they’ve found another body. They think so, anyway."