People of the Raven (North America's Forgotten Past) (2 page)

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Authors: W. Michael Gear,Kathleen O'Neal Gear

BOOK: People of the Raven (North America's Forgotten Past)
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T
he call comes at 10:32 P.M. I know because I look at the digital clock on the white wall of my basement laboratory.
Ten thirty-two and twenty-four seconds.
While I dry my sweating hands on my blue jeans, my three colleagues around the room straighten. Dr. Kim Lacey, recently retired as chair of the Anthropology Department at McGill University in Quebec, wets her lips. Kim seems to be working very hard to ignore the ringing phone. She bends over the skeleton and continues measuring the femur, the thighbone. Peering over her glasses, she jots in her notebook as fast as she can. Beads of perspiration glisten on her wrinkled forehead and mat her short graying brown hair to her temples.
Dr. Sam Collier, twenty-eight years old, with blond hair and bright green eyes, squints at the ringing phone, then resolutely returns to measuring the orbits, the eye sockets, of the skull.
My basement laboratory in Lynden, Washington—just a few miles from the Canadian border—stretches twenty by thirty feet. One window, high on the wall, looks out at the street—but tonight it’s draped with a heavy dark blue curtain. The lab is dim, and every wall is covered with shelves filled with books, archaeological specimens, artifacts. Only the fluorescent bar hanging from the ceiling glares to illuminate the ancient skeleton laid out on the stainless steel table in the middle of the room.
I glance at the old man sitting on the stool in the dark corner. Moss Pale Horse is a stoop-shouldered little man with a round face and hooked nose. He frowns at the concrete floor. His gray braid drapes his shoulder like a fuzzy snake. He is gently rubbing the “medicine bag” that hangs from a leather cord around his throat; it’s filled with sacred things, things his Spirit Helper told him to collect when he went on his first vision quest at the age of twelve.
I pick up the receiver on the tenth ring. “Dr. Catherine Garren.”
“Cathy, they’re coming,”
my friend, the archaeologist at the local BLM office, says.
“Somebody told them you took the remains to your home. You’ve got twenty minutes maximum.”
I close my eyes. “Thanks, John. I know it’ll end your career if anyone finds out you called me. I mean it.
Thank you.
”
He hangs up, and the loud click of the phone seems to echo around the quiet lab.
I put the receiver back in the cradle.
Sam takes a tentative step forward. “How long?”
He finished his Ph.D. last summer. He’s barely started his career in forensic anthropology. I hurt for him.
“Twenty minutes. Maybe.” I lift a hand and point to the video camera on the paper-strewn shelf behind Kim. “We’re not going to have time to finish this. Let’s videotape as much as we can.”
Sam picks up the camera. As he lifts it to his eye, he asks, “Where do you want to begin?”
I tuck a loose lock of damp black hair behind my ear and try to think. I was born in Ontario forty-three years ago. I have shoulder-length straight black hair and the broad face and brown skin of most Iroquoian peoples.
“Here,” I say, and carefully lift the skull. My hand shakes.
This is one of the most important archaeological finds in the world—the only mostly complete skeleton dating to this time period ever found in North America. But he’s about to be destroyed, reburied in some secret place, out of context with his past. Within a year, the acidic soils of the Pacific Northwest will have done their job. I’m losing him to religious zealots with lawyers.
I turn the skull to face the camera. A century from now, if anyone is alive to care, if the laws have been changed so that this isn’t a crime, someone will look into his empty eye sockets and say,
Dear God, what was a White man doing in North America nine thousand years ago?
I have to brace my elbows on the table to keep the skull still for the camera. “As you can see from the long, narrow shape and marked constriction of the forehead,” I narrate, “this is a Caucasoid male.
The sutures on the braincase are closed, almost obliterated, suggesting a man of advanced age, forty to fifty.” I tip the skull to show the backs of the teeth. “Note the dental morphology. He is not a Sinadont. I mean the backs of his incisors are not ‘shovel-shaped,’ which is typical of Indian peoples. They are flat, a characteristic common to many European skulls.”
I tip my chin to Moss. “Get a close-up of Moss’s face, will you, Sam?”
Sam walks across the lab, and Moss looks up. His dark eyes are sad. He has a deeply seamed brown face—one of those elderly faces in which all the world’s despair seems to be concentrated.
For the camera, I say, “Gull Man proves there were at least two racial groups in North America at the end of the last Ice Age. Moss’s people were Mongoloids, traditionally called American Indians. They generally have broad faces, round heads, straight black hair, and shovel-shaped incisors.” I tip the skull again. “Pan back to me, Sam.”
Sam walks the camera back and stands looking down, filming my hands as I turn the skull. “Gull Man’s people were related to modern Caucasoids.”
I’m having trouble focusing my eyes. I squeeze them closed for a second, then open them and continue. “We’re discovering that the peopling of the Americas is a lot more complicated than we thought. The first arrivals, both in North America and South America, must have been ancient mariners of extraordinary skill. They also must have used the stars to guide them on their long journeys, indicating detailed astronomical knowledge. They were scientists and explorers par excellence.”
I gently place the fragile skull on the table and move to the spine. As I run my finger down the table beside the shattered vertebrae, I feel nauseous. When did I last eat? I can’t remember. “A short time before Gull Man’s death, he was speared in the hip. His chest was also apparently crushed by a powerful impact.”
Kirk adds, “Proving that interpersonal violence between humans is nothing new.”
I pause to check the clock. Have seven minutes really passed?
I blink. I’ve started seeing a ball of light flashing at the edge of my vision. I fight to shake off the exhaustion.
A car screeches to a stop on the street outside, and everyone gasps and stares at the curtained window. A man shouts,
“Goddamn deer, get out of the road!”
Breath escapes my lungs in a gush of relief. I constantly have deer in my yard, especially in the winter.
“What’s wrong, Cathy?” Kim asks and frowns at me over her glasses. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”
“No, I—I keep seeing a ball of light. It bounces around the room, just at the corner of my eye.”
“You’re exhausted.You haven’t slept in two days. Just stay on your feet and recording for another ten minutes, kiddo. Let’s get as much information as we can.”
I nod and see Moss shift on his stool.
“Is it one ball of light or many?” he asks in his gentle old voice.
“Just one, Moss,” I say as though in another couple of hours I expect to see thousands of them. I run a hand through my hair.
Moss slides off his stool and quietly pads across the floor to stand beside the table, near Gull Man’s feet. He glances at the window before turning back to me and softly saying, “My father was Lakota, but my mother’s people, the Onondaga, believe that deer have a special purpose. They guide the spirits of the dead to the afterlife.”
I love Moss. He’s my great-uncle and he’s been a friend for forty years, but in the most inappropriate times, like now, he often goes into long tribal stories that seem to have no relevance whatsoever to the job at hand.
I say, “Sam, film the long bones. Get a really good shot of that stone point embedded in the innominate, the hip bone, and the cranial lesion where he was struck in the head.”
“I’m on it,” Sam says, and moves down the length of the body to the andesite spear point they had dated to around 9,300 years ago.
Moss pushes closer to me. He has his wrinkled face tipped up, staring at me with kind eyes. He continues. “Sometimes a person’s spirit becomes lost when it’s trying to find the star road to the Village of Souls. You may see such spirits wandering through the forest or down busy streets. Sometimes a soul must wait for a long time because of the things the person did when he was alive.”
“Moss,” I say, barely able to keep tears of frustration at bay. “We have a lot of work to do, and our time has almost run out.”
I edge by him and point to the spear point for the camera. “When we were first called in to analyze Gull Man, the coroner thought he was a White pioneer. But in the process of analysis, we discovered this point. The Stemmed Point tradition is contemporaneous with the Pebble Tool Tradition in the Pacific Northwest. Both date to between nine and eleven thousand years ago. This Stemmed Point is a classic examp—”
Moss softly interrupts. “When a soul leaves the body, it takes the shape of a ball of light. Most humans can’t see it, but the deer can.
When the deer see a soul wandering around, lost and confused, they chase after it. The deer catch the light in their antlers and throw it into the sky, so the soul can see the star road better, and start its journey.”
My eyes are inevitably drawn to the open newspaper spread on the counter behind Kim. The big bold headline reads: COURT RULES SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH VIOLATES TRIBAL RELIGION. In slightly smaller letters the subtitle proclaims:
Bureau of Land Management officials say, after the recent court decision, there will be no more study of the remains of Gull Man! Science is sacrilegious!
“Forgive me, Moss.” I look back at him and try to apologize. “You know I love that story. I’ve loved it my entire life. It’s just that religion got us into this mess.”
He smiles sadly. “I know.”
As he slowly ambles to the head of the table to peer into Gull Man’s empty eye sockets, I say, “Okay, Sam, let’s get some pictures of the—”
Down the street sirens wail.
No one makes a sound, but we all look at the clock. Eighteen minutes have passed.
I say, “Kim, hand me the phalanx fragment.”
Kim lifts the plastic bag containing a tiny piece of finger bone and tosses it to me. I tuck it inside my jeans. If I’m very lucky, I’ll be able to sneak it out to a DNA lab somewhere. Then maybe we’ll know if Gull Man’s people interbred with the Mongoloid population, the American Indians. I suspect they did. After all, people drop their “genes” at the drop of a hat. If they did interbreed, Gull Man may be an ancestor to most people currently living in America and Canada.
“Thank you,” I say in a trembling voice. “Now, grab your notes and get out of here before they come. I pray none of you gets caught.”
Kim tucks her notebook under her arm and swings her coat around her shoulders. On her way out, she grabs my hand and stares into my eyes. “Never be ashamed of standing up for what’s right, Cathy. Fact is fact. I don’t care what religious ‘truths’ the fanatics try to push on the public.”
Hastily, she climbs the basement stairs, and I hear her sprint for the back door.
“Hurry, Sam. Moss?”
Sam stuffs everything, including the video camera, into his backpack and kisses my cheek on the way out. “Thank you, for all you’ve
taught me about what it means to be human,” he says with genuine affection. Fear lives in his eyes.
“Thanks for caring, Sam.”
The sirens are growing louder.
Sam runs. He must have flung open the back door, for it slams twice.
“Moss?” I look down into his elderly face. “You have to go.”
He takes my hand in a tender grip and seems to be examining the freckles that dot my skin—the legacy of my Irish father. “It’s a form of murder, you know?”
“What is?”
“These crazy fundamentalists, they’re killing the history of a continent. It’s … geographic genocide,” he says thoughtfully.
Geographic genocide.
He may have just coined a new phrase.
I think of the great lengths to which governments have gone to erase the multiracial heritage of their nations: the Chinese with their Caucasian warriors, Americans with the Indians, Europe and the Jews …

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