Aaron Elkins - The Dark Place

The shining, buttonlike eyes focused on the still, brown heap before it, nearly invisible among the huckleberry and ferns, and the squirrel’s body froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. So it remained for a long time in the quiet, sunshot undergrowth, staring at the unfamiliar, motionless pile. Finally the nose twitched, the whiskers waggled once, twice, and the squirrel, choosing the better part of valor, gave the strange heap a wide berth and scampered for home on a roundabout route.

When it had gone, the heap gathered itself together, got to its knees, and became a man. The man crouched behind the thick brush, brown and rough-skinned, like a part of the ancient forest itself, with damp fragments of bark and dead leaves clinging to the grease that coated him.

Through a screen of matted hair, deep-set eyes watched the saltu clamber down the slope to the gravel bar, then walk to the water. The nearly naked brown man swayed slowly back and forth with a high-pitched, singsong muttering. His shoulder muscles jumped and twitched, and on the hand that held the stone ax the tendons stood out like ropes.

Big Creek was not very big, but it flowed fast and satisfyingly noisily. Schools of small, brown fish, invisible against the brown pebbles on the bottom, briefly twinkled silver when they veered sharply in unison, then vanished again. On the surface, brown leaves billowed and spun slowly on the tiny swells and were borne away toward Lake Quinault.

At the stream’s edge, Gideon immersed the pot. He remained on one knee for a few moments, lulled by the splashing, purling water, and by the warm morning sunlight on the back of his neck. As he rose he was conscious of a small movement behind him. Julie, probably, come to -

A tremendous concussion jarred his skull, and his head was filled with a great white light that quickly broke into tiny, yellow pinpoints on an endless field of velvet black. He was floating, tumbling slowly in the dark, and there was an odd, faraway noise, an inexplicable scraping sound. He was losing touch with his mind and fought to hold on against the overpowering fascination of the pinpoints, which had become smoothly revolving spoked wheels. The noise, he realized cunningly, was the pot clattering on the gravel. How absurd, how tasteless, he thought, that it should make so mundane and ordinary a racket at a time like this, at so presageful a moment, so augural a juncture, so, so…

He began to spin faster, in the opposite direction from the wheels, too fast to continue his interesting reflections. The wheels gradually contracted again to pinpoints, and slowly, one at a time, blinked out.

He was lying on his side, his left shoulder under his head. There was a soft breeze, and the air was sweet and fresh. The sharp gravel pressed uncomfortably against his side. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. His head hurt.

He opened his eyes and looked up into the timid, brown face of an old man crouched on his haunches ten feet away, peering apprehensively at him, as if Gideon were a beached shark that might or might not be dead. When Gideon looked at him the old man shrank convulsively back. Up shot the gray eyebrows and down fell the toothless, sunken mouth in a near-caricature of terror.

Gideon searched through a dazed and cloudy mind for the Yahi words. "Ya’a hushol," he said, each syllable thumping in his head like a hammer. "Ai’niza ma’a wagai."

The old man uttered a shocked sound between a gasp and a whimper and began to back away rapidly, brandishing a not very large stone ax in a pathetic counterfeit of ferocity.

A stone ax! Despite his whirling, chaotic mind, something in Gideon exulted, some tiny homunculus-anthropologist tucked away in the corner of his brain: They existed. He had found them.

The man was crippled, Gideon saw, with a terribly atrophied left leg and a foot that was no more than a knobby lump, so that he moved sideways, jerking the foot after him at each step. He was almost naked, clothed only in a breechclout with a small deerskin apron in front, and some tattered rabbit skins tied over his shoulders. Authentic winter dress, noted the inner anthropologist with satisfaction.

Gideon sat up, wincing at the pain in his head. At the movement, the old man stopped, petrified, chewing his gums frantically, his eyes rolling, and then scrambled for dear life toward the trees.

"Wait!" Gideon called stupidly in English, but the old man hopped up, surprisingly nimbly, onto the thick forest floor and disappeared instantly into the bushlike willows at its edge.

Gideon rose painfully to his feet and put his hand to his head. The fingers came away sticky with blood, but the skull was whole.

"Ya’a hushol!" he shouted at the forest, trying to make his voice friendly, but how the hell did you sound friendly in Yahi?

"There," Julie said, pressing the adhesive strip into place with cool fingers. "It’s not going to hold very well on account of your hair, but it’ll do. You’ll live."

Gideon nodded vacantly. He was sitting on a tree trunk in front of the tent. During the cleaning and dressing of the wound he had been docile and dreamy.

"Gideon, you are all right, aren’t you?"

"All right? Julie, I’m wonderful! Paleolithic people! That could have been a Cro-Magnon looking at me, or even a Mousterian Man…except for the race, of course," he emended properly, "which wouldn’t have been Mongoloid. But, my God, a stone ax, a deerskin breechclout, a body greased against the cold…"

She laughed. "Somebody sneaks up behind you and whomps you on the head, and you couldn’t be more pleased." She snapped the first-aid kit shut, straddled the log, and sat down at his side. "Gideon," she said seriously, "what would be the point of hitting you on the head?"

"I must have gotten too close to their village. Maybe they thought I saw them."

"But then why not kill you? What good would it do just to hit you and then leave you to tell the tale? All they had to do was bop you again while you were unconscious." She illustrated with a dip of her wrist. "Bop."

"It seems to me," he said, gingerly fingering the bandage, "you’re taking a rather cavalier attitude about my head. Bop, indeed. Anyway, they probably thought I was already dead."

"I doubt it. With all due respect to your head, it isn’t that bad a wound, and you didn’t bleed a lot. I don’t think you could have looked very dead. Do you think it was the old man who bopped you-"

"Julie," he grumbled, "I wish you wouldn’t keep saying ‘bop.’ It trivializes a very painful-"

She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. "You’re funny. How about ‘clobber’?"

He kissed her back and nodded judiciously. "’Clobber’ is acceptable."

"All right, do you think it was the old man who clobbered you? Do you think he was creeping up on you to finish the job when you woke up?"

"No, I don’t think so. He was scared to death. I think somebody else must have hit me earlier. Then the old man came along and saw me lying there and was just having a very tentative, careful look when I terrified him by waking up. How long was I gone altogether?"

"Not even ten minutes, before I heard you yelling those funny Yahi words. So you couldn’t have been unconscious very long."

"Hmm," Gideon said. "It seemed longer."

"Well," Julie said after a pause, "what do we do now?"

"I go find them-"

"Find them? After they’ve clobbered you-"

"A mere bop. If I could talk to them-"

"You talked to the old man, and that didn’t get you anywhere."

"He was too frightened. But he understood me; I could see that in his eyes."

"All right," she said, "so we go and find them-"

"I go and find them. You walk back to North Fork and get in your car and go to Lake Quinault."