Aaron Elkins - The Dark Place

Gideon’s mind was buzzing. An atlatl. A spear thrower. How could he possibly have failed to make the connection? The atlatl was one of the most primitive of weapons, a step above the hand-thrown spear, a step below the bow and arrow. It had been common among prehistoric hunters all over the world.

Its use took skill, but the principle was simple: The atlatl added an extra joint to the arm, and more length, in much the same way as did the sort of slingshot one whirled around one’s head. The spear was laid on the atlatl, its butt against the peg. Both objects were held in the hand and the spear was flung from the atlatl, more or less catapulted from it.

The result was a projectile that could be thrown with many times the force that could be achieved without it. The Spanish conquistadors of Aztec Mexico had found to their considerable discomfort that an atlatl-propelled spear could pierce metal armor. And not five miles from where they were at that moment, at the Manis site, an atlatl-launched spear point had been found deep in a vertebra of a twelve-thousand-year-old mastodon. Certainly there was no doubt about its ability to penetrate the seventh thoracic vertebra of a mere human being.

Gideon frowned as he turned off the road at the big, wooden SunLand sign and drove down the dark entry drive. A doe stepped lightly from behind a pine tree, her eyes beaming back the headlights. She froze momentarily, then bounded across the road in two arcing leaps to disappear into the foliage, her graceful, raised rump remaining as an afterimage. Gideon barely noticed her. Twelve thousand years. And the atlatl he’d found this morning, if that’s what it was, was even older. As far as he knew, the atlatl had been extinct in North America for hundreds of years. Until March 1976.

Abe gave a final cluck, cleared his throat, and opened his eyes as Gideon braked to a stop in front of his compact modern home. "Already?" he said. "How about some chess?"

"Chess? It’s practically midnight."

"Well," Abe said, his voice cracking pitifully, "an old man like me never knows how much time he’s got. He’s got to take his enjoyment when he can. But maybe you’re right."

When Gideon helped him out of the car, Abe sighed and groaned. "I guess an old man can’t expect you young people should want to spend an hour with him," he said mournfully, "even if there isn’t much time left."

Gideon laughed, but he was dismayed to find his hand completely encircling Abe’s upper arm. Through the sleeve of the coat it felt like a dry wooden stick sheathed in loose, papery leather. "Okay," he said, "let’s play some chess. Maybe you can beat me for once."

Bertha had waited up for them and shuffled off in furry slippers to make some tea. They sat down at the chess table in the den.

"Bertha!" Abe bawled suddenly as Gideon held out his hands, a pawn concealed in each. "Gideon wants another bite to eat!"

"No, really-" Gideon said.

"Quiet, you’re a growing boy. So, you agree it was an atlatl?"

"I’m sure it was."

"You think it was. Don’t be so sure."

"But-"

Abe waggled his hand at him. "All right, let’s assume it was. Now, the next question: Who goes around using an atlatl in 1982? Who killed this guy?"

"It was 1976."

"Oh, that’s entirely different. All right, 1976."

Gideon extended his hands again. "I thought you wanted to play chess."

"You can’t talk and play chess at the same time?"

Abe chose the left hand. "All the time I get black," he said. "That’s how come you always win."

"Take white if you like."

"To beat you I don’t need any favors. So what do you think? Who killed him?"

"Well," Gideon said, "there’s the atlatl and the fact that he was buried in a hundred-year-old Indian cemetery-"

"So therefore it was Indians who killed him?" asked Abe, a cheerful devil’s advocate. "What kind of logic do you call this?"

Gideon pushed his king’s pawn up two squares.

Abe frowned at the conventional opening as if he’d never seen it before. "There’s a law that only Indians can use atlatls? A Caucasian or an Eskimo couldn’t have buried him in an Indian cemetery?" Abe moved his own king’s pawn out to face Gideon’s and looked up. "What’s to smile at? Is it such a terrible move?"

"No, I’m smiling because you’re telling me exactly what I told John Lau last week when he was so sure it was Indians."

"But now you think so, too?"

"Let’s just say it’s emerging as the most probable hypothesis."

Abe laughed. "Let’s just say you think so, too. Boy, you cloud-nine Ph. D. s!"

"Okay," Gideon said, grinning, "let’s say I think so, too. Look, you say anybody could have buried him in that cemetery, but, as far as we know, there wasn’t anybody who knew -except the Indians themselves, of course-that there was a cemetery in there at all. The federal archaeologists never heard of the cemetery or an Indian group, and neither did the universities."

Bertha padded in with a glass of hot milk and honey for Abe, and tea with coffee cake for Gideon.

"Just the tea for me, thanks, Bertha," Gideon said.

"Don’t look at me," Abe said to Bertha. "He changed his mind."

Bertha fussed over her father for a few minutes while he grumbled and told her he wanted a stiff bourbon, not baby food. She pooh-poohed him, patted him a final time, and left.

Abe sipped his hot milk. "I actually like this stuff, you know? But don’t tell Bertha." He put down the glass. "I got another question: If there are Indians in there, how come nobody but you knows it?"

"All I can think of is that they’ve kept themselves hidden," Gideon said weakly. Abstractedly he swung his king’s bishop off to the right, where it focused on the opposing king’s bishop’s pawn. "And since the cemetery’s been in use at least a century, they must have been hiding all that time. What do you think? Is it possible?"

Abe frowned at the chess board. "Always with that damn bishop. This time you’re not going to catch me." With the back of a finger he pushed his king’s rook’s pawn up one square. "Ha. Now let me see you come in with that knight, Mr. Wise Guy." He settled back, pleased with himself.

Gideon smiled. For all his brilliance, Abe had never gotten the hang of chess.

"Look at him, so sure of himself," Abe said. "I got a few tricks up my sleeve, wait and see." He took another sip of milk. "Look, Gideon, they’d have to be invisible, just about. That place, that Olympic rain forest, it’s pretty remote in there, but it’s still America. You got hikers, surveyors, botanists, shmotanists, everybody. But in a hundred years nobody ever saw them? It’s pretty hard to believe."

"It’s happened before, Abe."

The old man was silent a while and serious, his tongue probing the inside of his cheek. "The Yahi, you mean. Ishi."

Ishi. The most romantic name in the annals of American anthropology. Ishi, the Wild Man, who had staggered naked and starving into the little California town of Oroville one summer morning in 1911 and collapsed, terrified, in the corral of a slaughterhouse. Ishi, the last of his people, who had grown to adulthood on the isolated slopes of Mount Lassen. For decades white men had believed the Yahi extinct, killed off by settlers and gold prospectors in the 1850s and 1860s. But a small band had lived on in the most remote forests, barely self-sufficient and constantly dwindling. By December of 1910 there were only two left, and when the old woman died in December, her son Ishi lived in awful solitude through the winter and then finally stumbled blindly down from the hills, hopeless and desolate beyond imagining, for in all the world he was the only one who spoke his beautiful Yahi, who knew the Yahi ways. In all the world no one else would ever remember his mother or sister or his own young manhood. And when he died, all of it would be as if it never was.