The Dark Place (10 page)

Abe frowned at the chess board. "Always with that damn bishop. This time you’re not going to catch me." With the back of a finger he pushed his king’s rook’s pawn up one square. "Ha. Now let me see you come in with that knight, Mr. Wise Guy." He settled back, pleased with himself.

Gideon smiled. For all his brilliance, Abe had never gotten the hang of chess.

"Look at him, so sure of himself," Abe said. "I got a few tricks up my sleeve, wait and see." He took another sip of milk. "Look, Gideon, they’d have to be invisible, just about. That place, that Olympic rain forest, it’s pretty remote in there, but it’s still America. You got hikers, surveyors, botanists, shmotanists, everybody. But in a hundred years nobody ever saw them? It’s pretty hard to believe."

"It’s happened before, Abe."

The old man was silent a while and serious, his tongue probing the inside of his cheek. "The Yahi, you mean. Ishi."

   Ishi. The most romantic name in the annals of American anthropology. Ishi, the Wild Man, who had staggered naked and starving into the little California town of Oroville one summer morning in 1911 and collapsed, terrified, in the corral of a slaughterhouse. Ishi, the last of his people, who had grown to adulthood on the isolated slopes of Mount Lassen. For decades white men had believed the Yahi extinct, killed off by settlers and gold prospectors in the 1850s and 1860s. But a small band had lived on in the most remote forests, barely self-sufficient and constantly dwindling. By December of 1910 there were only two left, and when the old woman died in December, her son Ishi lived in awful solitude through the winter and then finally stumbled blindly down from the hills, hopeless and desolate beyond imagining, for in all the world he was the only one who spoke his beautiful Yahi, who knew the Yahi ways. In all the world no one else would ever remember his mother or sister or his own young manhood. And when he died, all of it would be as if it never was.

But he didn’t die. The astounded Oroville sheriff, finding him cowering in the dirt, covered him with an old shirt and put the exhausted, near-dead Indian in the jailhouse. Word quickly spread, and within a few days the great anthropologist Alfred Kroeber had come to him in the jail and sat patiently and kindly with him and learned a few Yahi words and even made Ishi laugh when he mispronounced them.

The rest of the story was no less incredible. Kroeber took Ishi back to San Francisco and found a place for him to live—the University of California Anthropology Museum on Parnassus Heights. There Ishi maintained simple quarters and earned money for his needs—he wasted no time developing a taste for sugar and tea—by giving popular demonstrations of point-carving and arrow-making to an appreciative public.

In the four years before he died of tuberculosis, Ishi developed a deep, genuinely reciprocated friendship with the brilliant Kroeber. During their long conversations and their trips back to the Yahi country, Kroeber learned as much about Ishi’s early life as one man can acquire from another. He learned how the little band of Yahi, certain they would be killed if the white man ever found them, had walked from stone to stone so they wouldn’t leave footprints and had walked under and not through the chaparral, traveling for miles on all fours. He learned how they had lain perfectly still when whites were nearby, sometimes from morning until dark, and how they had lived in tiny, camouflaged huts impossible to see at fifty paces, shielding their fires with tall rings of bark.

And for forty years, no one had even vaguely suspected they were there.

Ishi’s name was enough to end Abe’s resistance. "It’s possible, it’s possible," he said, his eyes glowing. "Why not? A little band of Indians in the rain forest. What better place to hide? Not luxurious, but they wouldn’t freeze either, and they’d have plenty to eat.
Oy,
Gideon, think what we could learn—a Stone Age people, maybe—what a thing it would be!"

"What a thing, indeed," Gideon said. "But…they’re almost
too
primitive—bone spears, atlatls. Even the Yahi were more advanced, and certainly the Northwest Coast Indians were way ahead of that even a hundred years ago. So who
are
these people?"

"Well, remember, they’ve got to be a small band, like the Yahi were—five, six, a dozen people. Even if they walk on rocks you can’t hide a hundred people."

"True, and the cemetery is small. Not many people for a hundred-year occupation, assuming that’s their only burial ground."

"Right. And when you get a group that small and that isolated," Abe said, "you get what I would call the cultural drift phenomenon."

"And what would I call it?"

"You wouldn’t call it nothing because I just named it, but it’s got to be true. Like genetic drift, where you got only one guy with blue-eyed genes. He gets killed, and good-bye blue eyes in
that
gene pool. Look, you got one guy, say he’s the bowmaker, the only one who knows how. One day he falls off a cliff, and poof"—he snapped his fingers inexpertly—"good-bye bow technology. You just lost five thousand years of cultural evolution."

Gideon thought about it and nodded. "And you’re more isolated and scared than ever. You see the jets go over, you hear the automobiles, maybe see them sometimes, and you retreat farther and farther, where you’re safe, where those strange beings can’t kill you or eat you or whatever they think is going to happen."

"And if someone gets too close, you kill him? Like Eckert?"

Gideon had almost forgotten. "Yes. I think so."

Abe finished the last of his milk and licked his lips. "And you’re going in the rain forest and find them."

"When did I say that?"

"You don’t got to say it. You think I don’t know you?"

He was right, of course. "Abe, think what it’d be like to go in there and
talk
to them!"

"Yes, sure, only they kill people who get close, remember?"

"Well, yes, but I’m an anthropologist, not a casual drop-in. I’d research the language, I’d—"

"Very nice, only what language? You don’t know who they are, you don’t know what they speak. Look, are we playing chess, or aren’t we?"

Gideon picked up his queen, hesitated, and waved it vaguely about. "Well, I didn’t say I was going in tomorrow. I have the Dungeness dig to finish, for one thing. Then I have a lot of research to do before I try it. I was thinking of next summer." He put the queen down in front of Abe’s advanced pawn.

"Already the queen?" Abe said. "On the third move?"

Gideon pushed his chair back from the chess table. "I think I’d better get going, Abe. I have to be up early."

Abe looked up from the board in surprise. "In the middle of the game?"

Gideon grinned at him. "Checkmate."

Abe stared at the board in rueful confirmation. "In three lousy moves," he said bitterly.

"Child’s play," Gideon said, smiling. "I try that on you about once a year. It always works, and you always say you’ll remember to watch for it next time."

"Next time I’ll remember." He laughed and patted Gideon on the back of the hand. "Gideon, you’re a physical anthropologist, not a cultural anthropologist. I don’t say you don’t know ten times as much as any of them, but why not leave it to the trained ethnologists? Report it to the university. Let them take it from there."

"But the university says there can’t be any Indians in there. I’m not sure I could convince them otherwise."

"You’re not sure you
want
to, you mean."

"Maybe I’m not," Gideon said.

Abe took a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering sigh. "Ah, in your shoes I wouldn’t be either. Boy oh boy, I wish I was ten years younger. I’d go with you. But this damned arthritis…"

"I wish it too, Abe, with all my heart," Gideon said.

   The jingling of the telephone was fading to an echo as Gideon opened the door to Seagull Cottage, and the caller had hung up by the time he got to it. He stood there a little worried—it was 1:20 a.m.—waiting for it to ring again. It didn’t.

"I
know
you’re going to ring again if I get into the shower," he said aloud, glaring at it. He brushed his teeth slowly and packed his bag for the weekend, waiting all the time for the ring. After fifteen minutes, he gave up, took off his clothes, and stepped under the shower.

The telephone rang.

"Doc, where the hell have you been?"

"John? What’s up? Where are you calling from?"

"Lake Quinault. I’m at the lodge. Julie told me you were coming down tomorrow, and I wanted to catch you before you started out. There’s—"

"Wait, let me get a towel."

He came back to the telephone, rubbing vigorously. It was cold in the cottage, and he’d forgotten to turn on the electric wall heater. "Okay, I’m back."

"Doc, can you bring your tools down with you? We’ve kept on digging around that cemetery, and we’ve turned up another body—a partial skeleton, that is. It looks like Hartman."

"Who the hell is Hartman?"

"Hey, what are you getting mad about?"

"I’m getting mad because, one, you got me out of the shower and I’m freezing, and two, because it’s going to be a beautiful day tomorrow and Julie and I were going to take off for Kalaloch Beach as soon as I got to Quinault, but you’re going to ask me to work all day in a dusty workshop on some dumb skeleton, and I’m going to rant and rave and say no, but eventually I’ll do it out of a ridiculous sense of friendship or service or something equally absurd." He gasped for breath. "That’s why I’m getting mad!"

John laughed, the delighted, childlike burble that always broke down Gideon’s defenses. "I thought you liked working with bones."

"I
do
like working with bones. I
love
working with bones. There are just some things I like even more." Gideon sighed. "All right, who’s Hartman?"

"He’s the other guy who disappeared."

"I thought that was a girl. Claire Hornick."

"No, I mean six years ago, the same time as Eckert. Hornick disappeared last week. She’s still disappeared."

"What makes you think it’s not another Indian burial, an old one?"

"Well, we’ve tentatively identified it through dental records, but I’d sure appreciate it if you’d have a look anyway."

"Okay," Gideon said, "okay. I’ll see you about nine. Uh, John?…I’ve been talking the case over with an old professor of mine…"

John listened quietly for ten minutes while Gideon told him about the discussion with Abe, interrupting only to ask for an explanation of atlatls. After Gideon had finished, the line remained silent.

"John? Are you there?"

"I’m here. I’m just in shock."

"Well, after all," Gideon said magnanimously, "you were the one who first suggested Indians—"

"I know. That’s what I’m in shock about. I never won an argument with you before. You’re actually telling me I was right and you were wrong? I can’t believe it!"

"Come on, John," Gideon said, laughing, "I’m not that unreasonable. Sometimes even
you
make sense—to a certain degree, of course, and in your own way."

"Thanks a lot. I wish I could say I deserved such fantastic compliments. But," he said, his voice dropping to a lower, grimmer register, "I’m afraid this new body doesn’t do much for your theory."

"What theory?"

"That wild Indians are running around bumping off people with Stone Age spears. Doc, this guy was shot."

"Shot? With a gun?"

There was a pause, and Gideon knew John was nodding soberly. "Yeah, with a gun. He’s got a neat little round hole drilled clean through the side of his skull."

   "Hmm," Gideon said, almost as soon as he had sat down and looked at the ivory-colored skull on the worktable. "Huh."

John had his chair tipped back against the wall, and his hands were clasped lazily at his belt line. "I don’t like that ‘hmm, huh’ stuff," he said. "It always means you’re about to screw up my case. Not that I have a case."

"He wasn’t shot, John," Gideon said quietly.

The front legs of John’s chair came down on the linoleum tile. "Not shot…!" He gestured expressively at the circular hole in the left side of the skull.

"Not shot. In the first place, look at the placement. High up on the coronal suture, almost at bregma. Isn’t it pretty unusual for someone to be shot so high up on the head?"

"No, as a matter of fact."

"Really?"

"Sure," John said, obviously relishing the unaccustomed role of instructor. "It’s a fairly common placement in suicides."

"And what would he have used to leave a hole that big? An elephant gun?"

"Doc," John said easily, "no offense, but aren’t you a little out of your league with this forensic pathology stuff? Little bullets can make big holes."

"Maybe," Gideon said, "but when they make big holes they make big
sloppy
holes, not neat round ones like that. And consider this: To drill a hole that cleanly, a bullet would have to be traveling at a heck of a velocity, wouldn’t it?"

"So? That’s what bullets do. Say fifteen hundred feet a second—three thousand if you assume it was a rifle. Muzzle velocity, of course." John was still teaching and enjoying it.

"Then where’s the exit hole?"

John chewed the inside of his cheek. He was beginning to waver. "Lodged in the brain, probably, then fell out later."

"A projectile that big, going that fast? It would have plowed through the brain like so much vanilla pudding and exploded the forward right side of the skull on the way out—here at the temporal or the sphenoid; both very fragile, thin bones."

"Unless," John said, "it had a soft tip. Then it could have stayed inside."

"But—"

"I know. It wouldn’t have made such a neat hole." John leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, looking glum. "Okay, Doc, I give up. You’re right. Let’s hear your theory, but try to keep it to words I can understand, okay?"

"This was a trephining, not a shooting."

"Oh, one of those."