Aaron Elkins: The Dark Place

"You’d send me off, walking all alone, defenseless and vulnerable, in a forest full of naked men with axes and spears?"

"Hmm. That’s a point."

There were other points: She knew the rain forest infinitely better than he did, knew how to read it and use it; two heads were better than one; and she was a reasonably expert tracker. Of the last point he was courteously skeptical, but the others made sense.

In the end, they agreed to look for the Yahi together. They would leave the tent and cooking equipment where they were and carry their personal gear with them. If they didn’t encounter the Indians in a few hours, they would turn back so they could reach North Fork before dark. John could take over the quest the next day. They took Julie’s sleeping bag with them in case they lost their way and had to spend the night.

They began by searching for signs of the old man where Gideon had last seen him. Julie quickly found some vague depressions in the ground cover and announced that they were human tracks made within the past two hours, possibly by a person with one crippled foot.

"And," she said, pointing downstream through the dense trees, "they lead that way. Let’s go."

Gideon followed, impressed by her confidence but still not convinced of her expertise. His doubts were removed half an hour later, however. They had laboriously followed the faint indentations for about a hundred feet when they came to a large expanse of granite covered only by a skin of moss on which an accumulation of damp leaves had collected. Without soil, nothing remotely resembling a footprint was visible.

"Okay, expert," he said, "what now?"

Julie got to one knee, then lay full length on the ground and pushed herself about on her elbows to study the area from different angles. After a few minutes she emitted a self-satisfied "aha," stood up, and brushed the leaves from her. "He went thataway," she said.

Gideon studied the ground. He could see nothing. "Now, how can you tell that?"

"The leaves. The undersides of fallen leaves turn yellow first, and a stepped-on leaf tends to curl. If you get down next to the ground and look at them at an angle, sometimes the yellow edges of the curled leaves stand out. The amount of curl gives you some idea of how old the track is."

"I’m impressed," Gideon said truthfully. "You do know what you’re talking about."

"Well, of course I do. Didn’t I say so?" He could see that she was delighted.

In the next few hours, transformed into an attentive and respectful student, he learned that twigs stepped on by human beings are usually splintered, while those broken by the sharp hooves of elk or deer generally fracture cleanly; that the broken end of a twig is light-colored when first snapped but darkens with time; that trodden grass takes one to six hours to straighten again; that a spider web takes from six to eight hours to spin, depending on the type of spider.

The trail twisted many times, sometimes back on itself. Twice they had to crawl on their abdomens under masses of sword ferns only two feet high. The old man moved like a Yahi, all right. And a pretty limber one, considering his age and condition.

At a little before one o’clock, they found what they were looking for. They had been following the tracks along the foot of a cliff, and when they threaded their way between two big boulders, there it was. A huge mass of rock had fallen away from the cliff wall near its base, leaving a concavity about eighty feet long and thirty feet high-a shallow, roofed, flat-bottomed cave. In the limestone country of the Dordogne it would have been called an abri, and the hands of any anthropologist who saw it would have itched to get hold of a shovel and search for Cro-Magnon remains.

No anthropologist would have seen it, however, except through the most fortunate accident. The sloughed-off rock, a colossal, semicircular monolith, lay in front of the cave that it had created, completely blocking it from view and allowing ingress only at one point-where the giant boulder had split and separated enough to allow a person to get in.

It was a perfect place for the Yahi village, and there the tiny village lay. At the far end of the opening, surrounded on three sides by walls of rock, there were two dome-shaped huts like the ones on Pyrites Creek, but these were winter quarters, covered with skins instead of brush. In front of them was a fire pit shielded by cedar bark, and around the fire sat four Indians quietly absorbed in homely and simple tasks. One of them was the man Gideon had startled-and vice versa-at the gravel bar.

The scene was astonishingly domestic. It was like looking at a museum diorama: Everyday life in the Old Stone Age. Gideon recognized at once what each person was doing, although he had previously seen the tasks performed only in old ethnographic movies. The old man he had seen before was binding the two prongs of a fishing harpoon to its shaft with a length of sinew. Another man, even older, was heating wooden shafts against a hot rock from the fire and pressing out irregularities with his thumbs. A third was stirring something in a large pot or basket, and with the flat of his other hand was braiding grasses into rope by rubbing them against his thigh; that had been women’s work among the Yahi of old. The fourth man was bent over a rock in his hand, pressure-chipping it with a piece of antler.

"Gideon," Julie whispered, "they’re so old."

They were; the youngest of them appeared to be in his mid-sixties.

"They don’t look like killers," Julie said. "They look so…pacific. There must be others, mustn’t there? Younger ones?"

"Maybe, but not many. There are only two huts."

The question was answered more definitively by a movement off to the left and above them. A fifth Indian was slowly rising from a sitting position in a cleft in the big rock that fronted the cave and was looking down at them with an expression that was far from pacific. Gideon could feel the hostility radiate from him.

Like the old people, he wore a breechclout, but his shoulders were naked, not covered by a ragged cape. Like them, he gleamed with grease, and his short hair was clotted with it. There the resemblance ended. This was a lithe, slender man of thirty or less, who might have been carved from dark marble. He stood, in fact, remarkably like a barbaric David, confident and arrogantly relaxed, his narrow hips canted, one sinewy hand hanging loosely curled at his side. The other hand was at his shoulder, but where Michelangelo had chosen to put a sling, there was a long, bone-pointed spear cradled almost casually.

The Indian said something in a sharp, nasal voice, and the old people stood up quickly, if shakily, saw the two strangers, and stared, open-mouthed.

Julie’s fingers, ice-cold, crept into Gideon’s hand. "Be of stout heart," he said, calmly enough to surprise himself. "This is what we came for. He doesn’t seem to be pointing that thing at us."

Julie surprised him, too. "At least he doesn’t have an atlatl," she said lightly, but her voice was barely audible.

"You stay here." He squeezed her fingers, dropped her hand, and stepped forward.

"Ya’a hushol," he said loudly, feeling stagey and embarrassed.

"Ya’a hushol," answered the Indian on the rock-the first real proof that Gideon could communicate with them. But the voice seemed to be heavy with mockery.

Gideon walked cautiously toward him. "Ai’niza ma’a wagai," he said. "I am a friend." He noticed for the first time that a stone ax was thrust through the Indian’s waistband. The one that had nearly brained him? Instinctively, his fingers crept to the bandage on his head.

Without expression the Indian watched him approach. If anything, there was a faint look of disdain in the intelligent, black eyes. When Gideon was ten feet away, the naked shoulders tensed slightly, and the feet shifted to a squarer stance. The spear was more firmly grasped.