Aaron Elkins: The Dark Place

The Yahi’s moan died away, and the streaming face was lowered with its slitlike eyes closed. And then he was gone, bounding noiselessly through the mist and disappearing behind an outcropping of the boulder.

Julie’s forehead was still pressed tightly to his back, her hands clenched on the cloth of his shirt. Over the hammering of his own heart, he could feel hers thumping against him.

"Shh," he whispered, stroking her arm. "It’s all right. He’s gone."

What had happened seemed clear. Big Cheese had seen the old man get up to go to the toilet pit-perhaps it happened every night, and the young Indian had been waiting for his chance. As soon as Startled Mouse was out of sight, Big Cheese had run to where he thought the saltu were sleeping. If they’d been there, Gideon thought, their heads would be smashed now, and Big Cheese would be back in the hut, rolled up in his skin and snoring, when the old man returned. In the morning, Big Cheese would be as surprised as the rest at the deaths of the strangers. Startled Mouse might be suspicious, but he couldn’t know for sure what had happened.

"Wh…where did he go?" Julie asked without moving.

"I don’t know. Hunting for us, I guess. He won’t look up here."

Without confidence, Julie asked: "Why not?"

"Because," whispered Gideon, straining for lightness, "I chose this spot with the acumen for which I am so well known. Ishi told Kroeber no one slept under an open night sky. All sorts of spirits and disease lurk out there. It won’t occur to a Yahi that we were batty enough to move out from under the overhang."

Julie rallied. "They’re right," she said. "We’re soaked." He could feel her relax a little, and it steadied him.

Quietly, he folded back the top flap of the bag and began to rise.

"Where are you going?" she asked sharply. "Don’t-"

"Shh, I’m not going anywhere. I just want to stand up and look. I can’t see where he ran." He peered cautiously over the top of the boulder and was able to see all the way to the end of the rockbound enclosure, to the narrow cleft through which he and Julie had entered it.

"Do you see him?"

"There’s nothing. The sky’s getting smudgy out that way, though. It’ll be light soon."

"Thank goodness."

The entire little compound lay before him, permeated with a gray, predawn stillness. He wiped the moisture from his eyes. Already the strangely saturating mist had penetrated his shirt and trickled icily down the small of his back. Unless it was cold sweat, which was entirely possible. Where was Big Cheese? What had become of Startled Mouse? Gideon dropped his eyes to the ground at his feet. Where was the ax?

The two cries, urgent and horror-stricken, exploded in his ears one after the other.

"Ciniyaa!" someone shouted from behind him. "No!"

Behind him…on the other side of the big boulder, away from the cave! Big Cheese must have run out through the narrow entrance, doubled back, and come up behind him…

Gideon spun violently just as Julie screamed, " Gideon! Oh, God…!"

The shining, naked figure crouching atop the rock swelled and reared up over him, gray and luminous in the murky light, the terrible stone ax raised to the zenith of its arc and already sweeping down.

Without thinking, Gideon leaped forward to meet it. His outthrust hand caught the plummeting wrist, caught it and brought it up short. Wild black eyes glared crazily at him, inches from his own, while the ax teetered and then toppled over, heavily thumping Gideon’s shoulder and sliding down his back. Long before it hit the ground he had balled his right fist to ram it into the gleaming, dark abdomen. His shoulder muscles had already bunched to drive the blow home when the red, mindless haze of sudden violence abruptly cleared. He saw who stood before him.

Startled Mouse.

With a shudder of pity and revulsion he dropped the writhing, slippery wrist-as frail and scrawny as Abe’s. The old man, too, shook himself, as if with disgust at the saltu ’s touch, and screamed what might have been a Yahi curse or only a wordless shriek of loathing. He ran a few feet along the top of the boulder, spiderlike and dragging his mutilated foot after him, to where a jumble of loose stone fragments lay in a rough depression, and tried to pick one up. It was too heavy, and the old man moaned his frustration. He grasped a smaller one in both hands and jerkily raised it over his head, grimacing with the effort.

Again there was a shout in Yahi from the other side of the boulder. "Ciniyaa!" Big Cheese stood below, his smooth face raised in the gray rain to the old man. Startled Mouse looked over his shoulder at the cry, and Gideon saw his sound foot slip a few inches on the wet rock. Off-balance from the weight of the stone, he began to tip backward over the edge of the boulder.

"The rock!" Gideon shouted. "Throw it down!"

Gideon sprang toward him, and Julie started from the sleeping bag, hands outstretched. Below, Big Cheese moved a step, his arms raised to catch the old Yahi. Gideon knew none of them would reach him in time, and knew that they knew it, too.

Startled Mouse knew it as well. The rock was held aloft on rigidly extended arms. The collapsed old face was defiant, the flaccid, nervous mouth for once clamped shut. Like a bizarre statue toppling from its base-a tilting, pathetic Moses hurling down the tablets-the old man inclined slowly backward and hung impossibly over empty air. Gideon had very nearly reached him after all when the rock finally fell away, and Startled Mouse dropped headfirst after it.

Mercifully, the clatter of the stone drowned out the sound of fragile, thinly cushioned bone striking the rocky ground ten feet below. Gideon clambered quickly down the side of the boulder, but Big Cheese was there before him, on his knees.

The old man was dead. He had landed on the back of his head, and the brittle skull had ruptured, so that brains and blood were already mixing with the rain. His face was undamaged, but the mouth hung loose again, and the eyes were eerily askew, one nearly shut, the other open and unfocused.

Gideon heard Julie come up behind him. "Oh!" she said softly. Instinctively, Gideon knelt and gently closed the old eyes with two fingers. He looked up to see Big Cheese, his face streaming with rain, staring strangely at him. There was a long, long moment of silence. The Indian sat back on his heels. The sensual nostrils flared as he drew in a lengthy breath.

"You know," he said in flawless English, "he had a legitimate grievance."

"Yeah," Big Cheese said, "I’m Dennis Blackpath." The onetime graduate student leaned forward to blow on the dry shreds of moss and bark that had come from the deerskin pouch around his neck, and the crawling spark flickered, gasped, and puffed into flame. In the young Indian’s hands the fire drill had been ridiculously easy to use. Now he added bits of wood, gradually increasing their size. When the fire was going well, the three of them, sitting on the ground, leaned close to it. Julie and Gideon shivered in their wet clothes. Blackpath, with the moisture beaded on his greased skin, didn’t seem cold.

"You’ve been living with them all this time?" Julie asked, not bothering to conceal her astonishment. "Since 1975?"

"That’s right," Blackpath said, adding more wood. "Nobody believed there were Indians, but I found them. And once I found them, I stayed. I’d had enough of the white man’s rotten world. I went to live as my forefathers had lived, in harmony with nature. In tranquillity."

It was the sort of cant Gideon ordinarily found banal and tedious. But Blackpath was another matter. He had committed seven years of his life to it; he’d actually managed to bring it off. Except for the tranquillity.