Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (4 page)

"Reynolds thought they might have got something out of his toolbox, I think, because he checked it. But nothing was gone."

"And no artifacts missing? Not even chips?"

"No way," Isaacs said. "I keep what I find in my shirt pocket here." Isaacs tapped the envelopes. "And when I knock off at dark I lock it up in the camper. Why do you think they stole something?"

The Indian didn't seem to hear the question. He was looking toward Corn Mountain. Then he shrugged. "I heard they did," he said. "What are you digging here? Some sort of Early Man site?"

The question surprised Isaacs. "Yeah. It was a Folsom hunting camp. You know about the Folsom culture?"

"Some," Leaphorn said. "I studied a little anthropology at Arizona State. They didn't know much about Folsom then, though. Didn't know where he came from, or what happened to him."

"How long since you studied?"

"Too long," Leaphorn said. "I've forgotten most of it."

"You heard of Chester Reynolds?"

"I think he wrote one of my textbooks."

"Probably that was
Paleo-Indian Cultures in North America
. It's still a standard. Anyway, Reynolds worked out a set of maps of the way this part of the country looked back at the end of the last Ice Age—back when it was raining so much. From that he worked out the game migration routes at the very end of the Pleistocene period. You know. Where you'd find the mastodons and ground sloths and the saber-tooth cats and the long-horn bison, because of surface water and climate when this country started drying up. And from that he worked out the methods for calculating where the Folsom hunters were likely to have their hunting camps. That's what this was." Isaacs gestured across the gridwork of strings waffling the grassy ridge. "That flat place down there was a lake then. Folsom could sit up here on his haunches and see everything that came to water—either at the lake or north toward the Zuñi Wash."

Isaacs accepted a cigarette from Leaphorn. He sat on the frame of the sifter screen, looking tired and excited. And he talked. He talked as a naturally friendly man will talk when confronted—after days of enforced silence—with a good listener. He talked of how Reynolds had found this site and a dozen others. And of how Reynolds had given the sites to selected doctoral candidates, arranged foundation grants to finance the work. He talked of Reynolds' modification theory—which would solve one of the great mysteries of American anthropology.

Leaphorn, who had always been fascinated by the unexplained, remembered the mystery from Anthropology 127. Folsom hunting camps had been found all over the central and southwestern states—their occupancy generally dating from as early as twelve thousand to as late as nine thousand years ago. During this era at the tag end of the Ice Age they seemed to have had this immense expanse of territory to themselves. They followed the bison herds, living in small camps where they chipped their lance points, knives, hide scrapers, and other tools from flint. These lance points were their trademark. They were leaf-shaped, small, remarkably thin, their faces fluted like bayonets, their points and cutting edges shaped by an unusual technique called "pressure flaking." Making such a point was difficult and time consuming. Other Stone Age people, later and earlier, made larger, cruder points, quick and easy to chip out and no less efficient at killing. But Folsom stuck to his beautiful but difficult design century after century and left anthropology with a puzzle. Was the lance point part of a ritual religion—its shape a magic offering to the spirit of the animals that fed Folsom with their meat? When the glaciers stopped melting, and the great rain ended, and the country dried, and the animal herds diminished, and survival became a very chancy thing, Folsom camps disappeared from the earth. Had Folsom Man been trapped by this time-consuming ritualism which delayed his adaptation to changing conditions and caused his extinction? Whatever the reason, he vanished. There was a gap when the Great Plains seem to have been virtually empty of men, and then different hunting cultures appeared, killing with long, heavy lance points and using different stone-working techniques.

"Yeah," Isaacs said. "That's about the way the books explain it. But thanks to Reynolds, they're going to have to rewrite all those books."

"You going to prove something else happened?"

"Yeah," Isaacs said. "We damn sure are." He lit another cigarette, puffed nervously. "Let me tell you what those bastards did. Two years ago, when Reynolds started working on this, he read a paper on his theory at the anthro convention and some of those stuffy old academic bastards walked out on him." Isaacs snorted. "Got up and walked right out of the general assembly session." He laughed. "Nobody's done that since the physical anthropologists walked out on the paper announcing the original Folsom discovery, and that was back in 1931."

"Pretty serious insult, I guess," Leaphorn said.

"The worst kind. I wasn't there, but I heard about it. They say Reynolds was ready to kill somebody. He's not used to that kind of treatment and he's not the kind of man you push on. They said he told some of his friends there that he'd make those people accept his theory if it took the rest of his life."

"What's the Reynolds theory?"

"In brief, Folsom Man didn't die out. He adapted. He began making a different kind of lance point—some of those that we've been crediting to entirely different cultures. And, by God, we're going to prove it right here." Isaacs' voice was exultant.

It seemed to Leaphorn a hard case to prove. "Any chance of talking to Reynolds? Will he be back?"

"He's coming in this evening," Isaacs said. "Come on down to the camper. You can wait for him there, and I'll show you what we're finding."

The camper was parked amid a cluster of junipers—a plywood box of a cabin built on the bed of a battered old Chevy pickup truck. The inside was fitted with a narrow bunk, a linoleum-topped worktable, a small pantry, and an array of metal filing cabinets on one of which sat a portable butane cooking burner. Isaacs unlocked a cabinet, extracted a tray of grimy envelopes, counted them carefully, and then put all but one back. He motioned Leaphorn to the only stool and opened the envelope. He poured its contents carefully into his hand and then extended his open palm to Leaphorn. In it lay four chips of flint and a flat rectangle of pink stone. It was perhaps three inches long, an inch wide, and a half-inch thick.

"It's the butt end of a lance point," Isaacs said. "The type we call 'parallel flaked'—the type we always thought was made by a culture that followed Folsom." He pushed it with a finger. "Notice it's made out of petrified wood—silicified bamboo, to be exact. And notice these chips are the same stuff. And now"—he tapped the side of the stone with a fingernail—"notice that it isn't finished. He was still smoothing off this side when the tip snapped off."

"So," Leaphorn said slowly, "that means he was making it up there at your Folsom hunting camp and that he didn't just come along and drop it. But he still could have been making it a couple of thousand years after the Folsoms were gone."

"It was on the same stratum of earth," Isaacs said. "That's interesting, but in this sort of formation it doesn't prove anything. What's more interesting is this. There isn't any of this silicified bamboo anywhere near here. The only deposit we know of is over in the Galisteo Basin south of Santa Fe—a couple of hundred miles. Around here there's plenty of good flint—schist and chalcedony and other good stuff not half a mile from here. It's easy to shape, but it's not pretty. The other cultures used what was handy and to hell with how it looked. Folsom would find himself a quarry of clear, fancy-colored stuff and carry chunks of it all over the country to make his lance points." Isaacs pulled another envelope out of the file. "One more thing," he said. He emptied about a dozen flakes of pinkish stone into his palm and extended it. "These are pressure flakes. Typical and unmistakable workshop debris from a Folsom camp. And they're out of the same silicified petrification."

Leaphorn raised his eyebrows.

"Yeah," Isaacs said. "That gets to be quite a coincidence, doesn't it? That two different bunches of hunters, two thousand years apart, would work the same quarry and then carry the stuff two hundred miles to work on it."

"I think you might call that real fine circumstantial evidence," Leaphorn said.

"And we're going to find enough of it so they'll have to believe it," Isaacs said. "I'm sure it happened here. The date's right. Our geologist tells us that high-calcium layers were only formed about nine thousand years ago. So these were very late Folsoms." Isaacs' eyes were looking at a scene very distant in time. "There weren't many left. They were starving. The glaciers were long gone and the rains had stopped and the game herds were going fast. It was getting hotter, and the desert was spreading, and the culture they had lived by for three thousand years was failing them. They had to make a big kill at least every four or five days. If they didn't, they'd be too weak to hunt and they'd die. There just wasn't enough time anymore to make those fancy points that broke so easily." Isaacs glanced at Leaphorn. "Want some coffee?"

"Fine."

Isaacs began preparing the pot. Leaphorn tried to guess his age. Late twenties, he thought. No older than that, although his face sometimes had a wizened, old-man look about it. That was partly from the weathering. But something had aged him. Isaacs was conscious, Leaphorn had noticed earlier, of his teeth. They were slightly buck, and they protruded a little, and Isaacs called attention to them with an unconscious habit: he often had his hand to his face, shielding them. Now with the pot on the fire, he leaned against the wall, looking at Leaphorn. "It's always been presumed that they couldn't adapt so they died. That's the textbook dogma. But it's wrong. They were human, and smart; they had the intelligence to appreciate beauty and the intelligence to adapt."

Through the small window over the burner Leaphorn could see the red flare of the sunset. Red as blood. And was that blood under the piñon tree the blood of Ernesto Cata? And if so, what had happened to his body? And where under that garish evening sky could George Bowlegs be? But there was no possible profit in pondering that question now.

"I wonder, though," Leaphorn said. "Would changing your lance point make that much difference?"

"Probably not, by itself," Isaacs said. "But quite a bit. I can make a very rough version of a Folsom point in two or three hours on the average. They're so thin that you break a lot—and so did the Folsom Men. But you can whack out a big parallel-flaked point in maybe twenty minutes, and it's just as good as the ones Stone Age man used."

Isaacs fished a box of sugar cubes and a vacuum bottle cup out of a drawer and put them on the table beside Leaphorn. "We think he developed the Folsom point with all that symmetry in it as a sort of ritual offering to the animal spirit. Made it just as beautiful as he could make it. You're a Navajo. You know what I mean."

"I know," Leaphorn said. He was remembering a snowy morning on the Lukachukai plateau, his grandfather touching the barrel of his old 30-30 with sacred pollen, and then the chant—the old man's clear voice calling to the spirit of the male deer to make this hunt for the winter's meat right and proper and in tune with natural things; giving it the beauty of the Navajo Way.

"Reynolds figured—and he's right—that if Folsom was willing to change his lance point, he'd be willing to adapt in every other way. Under the old way, they'd be sitting in camp all day turning out maybe five or six of those fluted points, and maybe breaking ten or twelve to make a kill. They couldn't afford that anymore."

"Couldn't afford the beauty." Leaphorn laughed. "I went to a Bureau of Indian Affairs high school that had a sign in the hall. It said 'Tradition Is the Enemy of Progress.' The word was give up the old ways or die." He didn't mean it to sound bitter, but Isaacs gave him a quizzical look.

"By the way," Isaacs said. "Have you asked the people over at Jason's Fleece about those boys?"

"Jason's Fleece? Is that the hippie place?"

"They hung around there some," Isaacs said. "If they ran away from home, maybe they're over there. There's a girl over there that's a good friend of theirs. Nice girl named Susanne. The boys liked her."

"I'll go talk to her," Leaphorn said.

"That Bowlegs boy's a funny kid," Isaacs said. "He's sort of a mystic. Interested in magic and witchcraft and all that sort of thing. One time he was looking bad and I asked him about it and he said he was fasting so that his totem would talk to him. Wanted to see visions, I think. And one time they asked me if I could get them any LSD, and if I'd ever been on an acid trip."

"Could you?"

"Hell, no," Isaacs said. "Anyway, I wouldn't. That stuff's risky. Another thing, if it helps any." Isaacs laughed. "George was studying to be a Zuñi." He laughed again and shook his head. "George is sort of crazy."

"You mean studying their religion?"

"He said Ernesto was going to get him initiated into the Badger Clan."

"Could that happen?"

"I don't know," Isaacs said. "I doubt it. I think it's like a fish saying it's going to become a bird. The only time I ever heard of such a thing was back at the end of the nineteenth century when they adopted an anthropologist named Frank Gushing into the tribe."

Outside there was a sound of a motor whining in second gear—driving too fast over the bumpy track.

"Reynolds?"

Isaacs laughed. "That's the way the silly bastard drives."

Reynolds was not what Leaphorn had expected. Leaphorn had expected, he realized, sort of a reincarnation of the stooped, white-haired old man who had taught Leaphorn's cultural anthropology section at Arizona State. The typical scholar. Reynolds was medium-sized and medium everything. Perhaps fifty, but hard to date. Brown hair turning gray in spots, a round, cheerful face with the field anthropologist's leathery complexion. Only his eyes set him apart. They were notable eyes. Protected by a heavy brow ridge above and a lump of cheekbone below, they stared from their sockets with sharp, unblinking bright blue alertness. They gave Leaphorn, during the brief handshake of introduction, the feeling that everything about his face was being memorized. And a moment later they were studying with equal intensity the chips Isaacs had found that day. Joe Leaphorn, Navajo policeman, had been sorted and stored out of the way.