The Dark Place (14 page)

A cool, predawn wind with a touch of moisture carried the scent of pine bark and sent strands of Julie’s hair drifting over his face. It was the
dear
that had done it—homely, old-fashioned word. Nora had called him
dear
sometimes. Or had she? My God, were the memories already dimming?

But they weren’t
already
. It was three years, three long years in which no one had called him
dear
and—of this he was certain—in which he had never once said or wanted to say to anyone, "I love you."

He moved his left arm slightly to ease the pressure of her body on it. Julie adjusted automatically, as if they’d been sleeping together for years. She caressed the hand on her breast, loudly kissed the empty air, and in a sleep-furred voice murmured, "Gideon."

His throat tightened and hot tears sprang unexpectedly to his eyes. He took his hand from her breast to enwrap her more fully in his arms and bent his head forward so his lips were against the downy, sleep-fragrant nape of her neck. "I love you," he whispered tentatively to the soft flesh.

That wasn’t bad at all. No queasy fluttering in his chest, no deeper, twisting knot of guilt. It felt good, in fact, to say it after all this time. Premature, of course—he’d just met her—but good.

He tried it out again. "I love you," he murmured, his mouth still against her. "I think," he added sensibly, then snuggled closer to her warmth and fell asleep.

   With a twig, Gideon prodded at the powdery gray charcoal in the circular fire pit and watched it emit a few dusty wisps.

"Well, something was certainly here not too long ago." He bit his lip. "Someone. Not for at least a day or two, but since the last rain. Otherwise the charcoal would be matted down."

"A very woodsmanlike observation," Julie said.

Gideon gestured at the two-foot slabs of bark that stood on end around the pit, forming a three-quarter circle. "What do you make of these?"

"Heat reflectors?"

"Could be. Could also be a screen to hide the glow. Notice how the opening faces the back of the ledge, away from the valley. From below, you’d never know there was a fire going up here."

"From below, you’d never know there was
anything
up here."

She was right. From their camp they had raked this mountainside with binoculars but had been unable to find the ledge. Yet from here there was a clear, broad view over Pyrites Canyon. The gravel bar on which they’d camped was in plain sight almost directly below, on the other side of the stream. The orange backpacks they’d left behind were clearly visible—just as visible, Gideon thought, as they themselves would have been in last night’s pellucid moonlight.

The ledge was obviously deserted and apparently abandoned, but Gideon was jumpy and vaguely apprehensive. Even in the daylight, with birds singing vigorously, he had continued to feel under scrutiny. Julie did, too. He could see it in the way her eyes darted at little snaps and creaks from the woods.

The ledge, about seventy feet long and thirty feet wide, was screened and camouflaged by trees that grew on it and on the slope beneath. Above, a forested, nearly vertical bluff rose two hundred feet. Below, the barely discernible path that had led them to the ledge, as it had led the Zanders, dropped steeply toward the river far below.

Part of his uneasiness, Gideon knew, stemmed from the weather. The temperature had dropped, and there was a high, pearly overcast, as heavy and solid as a stone roof. Underneath that, somber, iron-gray clouds were moving in from the west to pile and swirl against the mountains. Yet there was no wind. The air seemed viscous and torpid, dank and raw. Julie said the rainy season was on the way.

As they approached the eastern end of the ledge, Julie wrinkled her nose and frowned.

"Yes, I smell it too," Gideon said. "And I know the stories. Bigfoot lairs are always supposed to be pervaded by an awful stink. Or is that the Abominable Snowman?"

"No, that’s Bigfoot; a pungent, unidentifiable stench. That’s what made the Zanders think of Bigfoot."

"It’s pungent, all right, but I wouldn’t call it unidentifiable. It smells like a latrine that’s been stopped up for a week."

That was very much what it was: a circular depression at the very end of the ledge that had obviously seen a lot of use as a toilet pit.

"Either they had an army up here for a few nights," Gideon said, "or this ledge has been inhabited for a long time."

"Can we move back upwind, please?" Julie asked.

When they were a few feet away she spoke, frowning. "It’s awful that anyone would live this way: an open toilet—"

He looked at her in surprise. "Everyone lived like this until a couple of hundred years ago. There are plenty of people who still do. The toilet’s on the very end of the ledge, so the wind would almost always carry the stench away. Really, it’s better than indiscriminately fouling the forest or the river. And they’ve been scooping earth over the feces so they’d degrade quickly."

"Yes, but this isn’t a hundred years ago, and there aren’t any primitive people living in the rain forest." She shook her head. "That is, there aren’t supposed to be."

Gideon raised his eyebrows, "There wasn’t supposed to be
anyone
living in the rain forest."

"That’s right," she said, "but somebody obviously lives here. What’s this?"

They had come upon a smaller fire ring only about twenty feet from the first, also shielded with slabs of bark toward the open side of the ledge. Gideon knelt to poke at the cold charcoal.

"
Two
fire pits?" Julie said. "What would be the point of that? Two separate groups?"

"I don’t think so. See how there’s a layer of sand under the charcoal?" He scrabbled in the pit with a twig. "And then another layer of charcoal? I bet there’s another layer under that, of"—he dug some more—"of sand. See?" He sat back on his heels. "Know what this is?"

She shook her head. "Some kind of kiln? For firing pots? Baking bread?"

"You’re close. It’s a kiln, all right, but it’s for making stone tools. Right out of the Lower Paleolithic."

"You can make stone tools in a kiln?"

He laughed. "No, but you can heat-treat the rocks before you make them. There are certain kinds of rocks—coarse-textured ones like jasper—that need heat-treating before you can do a good job of flaking them. It’s very delicate. Glassier stones like obsidian and agate don’t need it."

"So you’re telling me somebody has been making stone tools here in 1982?"

"I sure am. Look."

She got down on her knees to watch him turn over the earth just outside the rim of the pit. "The ground’s full of little flakes of rock," she said.

"Yes, the pieces that get chipped away when you’re making a stone implement."

"But," Julie said, frowning, "if they can make stone tools why make those horrible bone spears? Aren’t stone points better?"

"Infinitely better, if you’re skilled at making them. But making stone points is different from making stone hammers, say. It requires some difficult techniques—percussion chipping, then striking off the core blades, then pressure-flaking. It’s not easy. Bone points, on the other hand, you can more or less make by carving and abrading; no specialized knowledge necessary."

She sat back on her haunches, her arms around her knees. Her voice was dreamy. "You’re saying, then, that whoever lived here is able to make crude stone tools but not fine ones. What would that make them equivalent to—Mesolithic people?"

"I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s right."

"And the Mesolithic ended in Europe, what, fifty thousand years ago?"

"Thirty-five thousand, say."

"All right, thirty-five thousand. Thirty-five thousand years! Gideon, you’re not saying these Indians, if that’s what they are, have been lost here for thirty-five thousand years?"

"No, of course not. Here in the New World the Indians had Mesolithic technologies, so to speak, until the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century. And in a lot of tribes, practically up to the twentieth century. No, what I’m suggesting is that some Indian group came here maybe a hundred years ago and has been here ever since." He shook his head suddenly. "It
is
on the fantastic side, isn’t it?"

"It really is. Look, why does it have to be an Indian group? Why couldn’t it be a bunch of hermits, or hippies maybe, who want to live a simple, more primitive life?"

He got up and brushed himself off, and brushed Julie off as well. "No. How would they know about heat-treating rocks?"

"They could have read about it in a book."

"Did you ever read about it in a book?"

"I never even heard of it."

"And you’re an anthro minor, so there you are. No, I think these are genuinely primitive people."

"But where would they actually live, sleep? Just out in the open?"

"I doubt it. There must be a shelter. Let’s look around some more."

In fifteen minutes of prowling among the trees they found the first hut. They had walked by it several times before they realized it was not a natural tangle of dead branches but a structure of lashed-together poles thatched with brush and capable of holding three or four people.

It took a while for Gideon to find the entrance, a low, covered opening through which he had to crawl. Inside it was dusky, but some light came through a smoke hole in the domed roof and through the interstices between the branches. It was just tall enough for him to stand slightly stooped. The hut was empty, but there were signs of human habitation. There was a small fire pit in the center, and the walls were black and greasy from many fires, and redolent of smoke. On the floor were a few fish bones. The floor itself was of earth, with many footprints, all naked—and none eighteen inches long.

The whole was drearily depressing, and he was happy to crawl back out into the daylight. There was a second, smaller hut, which received a cursory examination and turned up no additional information.

They made a final examination of the area around a large fire pit and found one more object of interest, manmade and man-used. It lay lodged between two of the bark slabs—an eight-inch stick about the thickness of an arrow shaft, broken at one end and tapering to a blunt point that was charred and worn down.

"Is it a fire drill?" Julie asked.

"Yes, the lower part of it. Do you know how it works?"

"Not exactly. Do you rub it against another stick?"

Gideon smiled. "No. Regardless of what any Boy Scouts may tell you, one cannot make sparks by rubbing two sticks together. You need to concentrate the friction in a very small spot. You take another piece of wood, a slab, and you bore a socket just large enough to fit this burned end of the drill. Then you gouge a channel from the socket to the edge of the slab. In the channel you place tinder… Why are you laughing?"

"I love it when you shift into your professorial mode. You get so serious. Not at all the sort of person who would fool around with a lady park ranger in a sleeping bag. But please continue."

"Just because I did it doesn’t make me the sort of person who does it," he said, laughing, "but I’ll skip the rest of the lecture. The point I was going to make, which is important, is that it’s very hard to do. Even when you know how, it takes a lot of muscle and determination. I’ve demonstrated it before classes several times, and I’m always smoking before the tinder is."

"I understand, but why is that important?"

"It’s important because it clinches the fact that these are genuinely primitive people. If I were just playing at returning to the Stone Age, or simply dropping out, the one concession I’d make to civilization would be matches. And if I didn’t have them when I left, I’d sure come back and get some after trying out this thing once or twice."

He turned the drill slowly in his hands. "Indians. For sure."

She frowned. "I still don’t understand why it has to be
Indians.
All right, forget the twentieth-century dropout idea, but why couldn’t they be some primitive Caucasians who have been living here, maybe for a hundred years?"

"Uh-uh. By the time the first Europeans set foot in Washington, in the eighteenth century, their technology was already way beyond this."

Julie nodded. "You’re right, of course." She shook her head slowly back and forth. "The idea that there might still be people here living in the Stone Age, hiding, watching us…" She shivered. "Gideon, can we go back now?"

He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. "Ready to get back to the twentieth century?" he said smiling.

"Desperately."

He tilted her chin up and kissed her softly on the lips. "Me, too. Let’s go."

   It took them only four hours to walk back to the trailhead, and an hour later, with Gideon driving, they pulled into the ranger compound at Quinault.

"I don’t know about you," Julie said, stretching as she climbed down from the cab, "but I need a hot shower before I do anything else."

"Me, too," Gideon said. He went to the back of the truck and hauled out the backpacks. "Maybe I can get a room at the lodge. I sure don’t want to drive back to Dungeness tonight."

"Are you joking? You’d have to book a month in advance, what with the crowds."

"Gee, that’s too bad," Gideon said mournfully. "I could really use a shower."

Julie laughed. "All right, you don’t have to look so sad. You can use mine. On the condition that you behave."

"Of course I’ll behave. What do you take me for?"

In an hour, clean, happy, and utterly relaxed after a long, shared, soapy interlude under the shower head, they sat in bathrobes in the living room of the old, forest-green frame house that went with the job of chief ranger.

"See?" Julie said, handing him her empty glass. "Isn’t civilization wonderful?"

Gideon poured a second dry sherry for each of them. "Rahther," he said. He knelt as he brought her her drink, and softly kissed her. "I say, old girl, frightfully considerate of you to suggest I might spend the night here."