Aaron Elkins: The Dark Place

Gideon stopped and stretched his lips in a smile. "I come in peace," he said in Yahi.

In response he got a slight curling of the Indian’s upper lip. The man was taller than Gideon had thought, massively muscled, slender only in the hips and legs. His face would have done better on a lordly Mayan than a lowly Yahi. Gideon had seen similar ones carved on the ruined walls of Tikal and Palenque: a high-bridged, lavishly curved nose, delicately angled, almond-shaped eyes, sensual, exquisitely formed lips. All were set in an oval, flat face of blank planes and angles, so that the total effect was oddly disturbing, as if a seductive and willowy youth peeked through the eye slits of a stony, brutally masculine mask.

"I come in peace," Gideon said again.

The sybaritic eyes behind the slits continued their leisurely inspection. The shapely upper lip curled once more. In Gideon’s world it would have been a sneer.

Gideon felt an active dislike begin to simmer. That, he knew, would not do. He was not thinking like an anthropologist. What, after all, did he know of the nuances of Yahi posture and tone? Nothing. The sneer, the arrogant pose were artifacts of Gideon’s own ethnocentric perspective. How could he tell what they connoted in Yahi culture?

"Bullshit," he muttered to himself-the man, the fallible human being, addressing the schoolish scientist. "I know when I don’t trust somebody."

The Indian on the rock suddenly turned loquacious. Gideon could not follow everything he said, but it seemed to be a sort of welcoming speech. He heard "friends" and "peace" more than once. When he had done, the Indian jumped lightly down from the considerable height of the rock and joined the old ones. He moved, as Gideon knew he would, with a casual, surefooted grace. Like a movie Indian, Gideon couldn’t help thinking. The others were not like movie Indians. They huddled together in a woebegone clump, shoulder to hunched shoulder and elbow to elbow, quaking and terrified.

The young one shouted something and gestured with his spear, apparently urging Gideon and Julie to come forward.

When they hesitated, his full lips twisted-it was unquestionably a sneer; Gideon would bet on it. Ostentatiously the spear was flung to the ground and the Indian’s open, empty hands were displayed to them. The ax in his belt remained where it was.

Gideon was far from easy, but he had come to meet with them, and meet with them he would.

He turned to Julie. "You stay here," he said. "See how it goes with me."

"No way," she said, and came from between the rocks to stand at his side.

"Now, you listen-"

"Gideon, we don’t want to have a scene in front of them, do we?" She reached for his hand again. Her fingers were not as cold as they’d been.

"All right," he said, smiling. "I think it’s going to be okay."

"Of course it will. But keep your eye on the big cheese."

"Don’t worry, I will. Let’s go." One more squeeze of her hand and they walked cautiously forward. Gideon took the opportunity to study the four elderly Yahi. The one who had been straightening the shafts was the oldest of them, with a fierce-eyed, hawklike patriarch’s face but a spine so contorted by disease or injury that his torso was like a gnarled old tree trunk, lumpy and asymmetric, and twisted nearly into a knot.

The man who had been stone-chipping had a big, kindly face badly pitted by what appeared to be smallpox scars, and a squashed, meandering nose that sat on his face like a baked potato. His eyes were very large and very gentle. At about sixty-five he was the youngest of them and the largest, with a broad, fleshy chest that once must have been powerfully muscled.

The third person, Gideon realized belatedly, was an aged woman, with scanty hair cut as short as the men’s, and flat breasts like wrinkled, empty paper bags. Her clothing was almost the same as the others’: She wore a skirt a little longer than the small aprons that fronted the men’s breechclouts, and her cape was of feathers rather than skins. In her hand she held the twine she had been working on, and Gideon’s inner anthropologist recorded with approval that, among the Yahi, women’s work was still done by women. Her head was tipped alertly, as if listening for something, and she stared fixedly off to the side. She was, Gideon understood, blind.

The other old man appeared to be no less frightened than he’d been at the gravel bar. As he had then made pitifully threatening motions with an ax, now he gestured feebly and intermittently with the wooden-pronged harpoon he’d been binding.

With every step of the two intruders, the four old people drew closer together still, drawing strength from each other’s nearness. When Julie and Gideon, moving very slowly, were ten feet away, the oldest man could bear it no longer and spoke nervously to the young Indian. The others quickly joined in, so that all four of them were chattering at once in whispery agitation. The young one barked a few curt words and they stopped immediately, looking, Gideon thought, a little sheepish.

He had grasped enough of the words and body language to understand the exchange. The old ones were frightened and wanted to run off right then; the young man, surprisingly, had told them that would be unthinkably rude, kuu Yahi -not the Yahi way. Guests were to be treated with respect. Gideon found himself wondering if Eckert and the others had been treated with respect but pushed the thought from his mind. It was, he decided, time for his piece de resistance, the only complete and formally correct speech he had managed to memorize in Yahi.

"I bring gifts in your honor," he said. "I apologize for their being poor and worthless and not to be compared with your own belongings, but I beg you to accept them."

He delivered his little address with what he hoped were properly expansive gestures, but nonetheless he experienced a slight sinking sensation as he spoke. A rubber turtle in their honor?

The four older Indians, who were still huddled together, showed for the first time that they could understand him. Quick glances moved among them, and the man with the big, gentle, pockmarked face looked him shyly in the eye for an instant before shifting his gaze downward.

Even the young Indian seemed a little taken aback. The curl left his lip, and he too stared Gideon in the eye, for once without insolence. "No," he said. "First we eat. Then gifts." He was being very proper-the Yahi way again-and he was speaking very slowly and simply, apparently so that Gideon could understand.

"What’s going on?" Julie said. "Are we in trouble?"

"Only if the food’s bad. We’ve just been invited to dinner."

The food, at least to begin with, was far from bad. The woman, with some help from the old men, uncovered a pit-oven-a hole in the ground lined with rocks and covered with damp branches-releasing a cloud of fragrant steam. From the hole she scooped out four small fish with a green stick that had been looped and tied at one end. The fish were placed at Gideon and Julie’s feet in a much-used platter-shaped basket. There was no ceremony and no speech. The food was simply plumped down in front of them as it might have been by a tired counterman in an all-night diner.

The young Indian suddenly threw himself to the ground and sprawled on one elbow, watching them. He was, Gideon noted, in easy reach of his spear. The others followed his lead and squatted on their heels, clasping bony knees in skinny arms. Their faces were impassive.

Gideon and Julie sat down on the ground. Gideon reached for a fish.

"Gideon!" Julie said. "You’re not going to eat this, are you? They’ve given us their own dinner."

"Of course I am," he said, picking up a fish, pushing back the skin with his fingers, and biting into the tender white flesh of the back. "Eat up, Julie. If you don’t, it would be implying that it isn’t good enough for you, or that they don’t have enough for them and us both."