The Dark Place (20 page)

The telephone rang, and John was already speaking as Gideon got it to his ear. "What’s up, Doc?"

Gideon washed down a piece of toast with a gulp of coffee.
"Ya’a hushol,"
he said.

"
Yakahooshle
to you, too. That was a good report on Hornick. Thanks. What did you want me to call you about?"

"When you come down to Quinault, you’re planning to go in after those Indians, aren’t you?"

"Sure. First thing I’m going to do is check out that ledge."

"I want to go with you." But they’re not at that ledge, he almost added, then thought better of it. It would be best to see where John stood first.

"Doc, I can’t do that. You know that."

"I can speak their language," Gideon said, feeling that a certain amount of overstatement was excusable under the circumstances. "And I know something about their customs."

"No, Doc, no way. These guys are killers. I’m not taking you along. What would be the point, anyway?"

"I could talk to them, kind of ease the way, make sure there isn’t any shooting—"

"Who’s talking about shooting? This isn’t cowboys and Indians. We’re just going to bring them in. If we find them."

"And if they don’t want to come? If they start throwing spears? These are people from the Stone Age. They’re not going to understand who you are, or what you are, or what you want to do to them, or why you want to do it. You’re going to need someone—"

"For Christ’s sake, Doc!" John was annoyed. "Do I tell you how to do your job?"

"Every goddamn chance you get."

"Goddamn it…!" Then, as Gideon knew he would, John burst into his easy, childlike laughter, melodious and infectious. And as always, Gideon couldn’t help smiling himself.

"Okay," John said, "maybe I do a little. But this is different. Me and Minor and the others, we’re a team. We can all predict what the other ones are going to do, you know what I mean? If we brought in someone who’s not trained, who doesn’t know the way we work, it’d be dangerous for everybody. Including the Indians."

When Gideon didn’t respond, John said, "Okay, what are you thinking?"

"Nothing. I’m just pouting."

"No, you’re not. You’re hatching something. What do you want to do, find them yourself?"

"I was thinking about it, yes."

"Well, what the hell for?"

"What do you mean, what the hell for? I want to talk to them, convince them we mean them no harm."

It sounded lame to Gideon as he said it, and lame-brained too. It did to John as well; a disgusted snort and a muffled "Jesus Christ" were audible over the telephone. Gideon could imagine his eyes raised to the fluorescent ceiling of the office in Seattle.

"Look, Doc, they already killed three people. You think you’re going to walk up to them and say, ‘How. Me friend,’ and they’re going to fall all over you with joy? They’ll spit you on one of those spears like a big barbecued chicken."

"Now, look, John—" Gideon said crossly, stung by the brief but uncomfortably cogent dismissal of what was, after all, his only-begotten plan so far.

"Doc, you’re not going with me. That’s all there is to it."

Gideon’s mouth tightened. If that’s the way he wanted it, that’s the way it would be. "Okay," he said, "you win."

It was too easy, and John was immediately suspicious. "What’s that supposed to mean? They’re not there, are they? At Pyrites Creek? Doc, if you know where they are, tell me. How are you going to feel if they kill someone else? You know something, and you’re not telling me."

"Now, John, you engage me from time to time to do skeletal analyses, and not, as you point out freely and often, to do your detection for you. Of course, if you agreed to take me along…"

"Not a chance, but if you know—"

"I don’t know nuttin’ and I ain’t sayin’ nuttin’."

John sighed. "You’re a damn difficult man to deal with. Look, let’s leave it at this: I can’t get down there till Friday anyway, so you go do whatever dumb thing you’re going to do. But on Friday I’m going to expect you to tell me everything you know about this. I mean it, Doc."

Gideon hesitated a moment, and John said irritably, "Come on, man, I’m giving you three days. Against my better judgment. Don’t make me go all legal on you. Let’s stay friends."

"All right, John, fair enough."

"Okay. And do me a favor, huh? If you find these guys, be careful, will you? They’re not exactly noble savages."

"Don’t worry. Believe me, I know exactly what I’m doing." The hell he did, thought Gideon.

"The hell you do," said John.

The coffee was still warm, and the bacon and eggs weren’t quite cold, so Gideon propped the map on the table and munched while studying it. Finley Creek was not much more than a mile from the road along Lake Quinault’s north shore, but it was a mile of unbroken, trailless rain forest. Impossible to get in that way. He’d be lost in five minutes, even with a compass. Instead, he’d have to drive to the North Fork Ranger Station seven or eight miles farther on and walk back along the abandoned Matheny trail. Surely it would still be passable; it couldn’t have grown over in six years. All told, including a three-hour drive and allowing for a rough trail, it would take him eight or nine hours to get to Finley Creek from where he was sitting. If he left now he’d arrive in Yahi territory at about dark. Not the most enchanting idea in the world. It’d be better to take the rest of the day to learn some more Yahi, and leave early Wednesday. He thought briefly of calling Julie and spending the night at Lake Quinault, but she’d worm out of him what he was doing down there and then either try to dissuade him or insist on coming along. No, it would be best to work right where he was all day, go to bed early, and get on his way the next day at 4:00 a.m. or so. That would put him on Finley Creek with plenty of daylight to spare. Much better. He folded up the map, took one more bite of cold toast, and got out the Yahi dictionary.

By late afternoon, his head was so full of the strange morphemes he was afraid that if he tried to cram in one more syllable there would be an explosion, and
hoori’ma’a’nigi
’s and
zicin’mauyaa
’s would go ricocheting off the walls. He closed the book wearily, stretched, and made himself a ham and cheese sandwich, which he ate standing at the sink, washing it down with a glassful of milk, blessedly vacant of mind.

Then he slipped his poncho over his head, dashed through the rain to his Rabbit, and drove down the wet and blackly shining road toward Sequim, ten miles away. He needed to do some shopping for his expedition.

The rain shadow gods were at work. Directly over Sequim there was a big, bright blue, raggedly circular hole in the thick clouds, through which sunlight streamed in visible rays, suffusing the streets with tawny light. The effect was that of a Tiepolo fresco. All it needed was a rosy-nippled shepherdess peeking through the hole, and a couple of buttery cherubs on top of the lamppost at East Washington and Sequim Avenue.

He stopped first at Southwood’s Department Store to buy a five-dollar lightweight plastic tube tent, which someone had told him was a useful thing to have in the rain, a bottle of liquid purporting to waterproof shoes, and a day pack. Package in hand, he was making for the exit when a discounted box of necklaces made, apparently, from ball bearings caught his eye. Trinkets. How could you go looking for a lost tribe without trinkets? He bought four of them for a dollar apiece, then went back to the cosmetics section. Mirrors also were
de rigueur,
and he bought two purse-sized ones.

A few yards of cloth would round out the obligatory items, but Southwood’s didn’t stock it, so he got a packaged set of kitchen curtains, yellow with red fleur-de-lis, instead. On the spur of the moment he went to the toy section and bought a $1.09 rubber turtle named Squeekie who, predictably enough, squeaked cheerfully when squeezed. A fair sampling of the wonders of civilization for $10.88.

"This it?" the grandmotherly clerk said, punching at the cash register. "A few goodies for Daddy’s little darlings?"

"Yes," Gideon said, smiling. "And I’ll have one of these, too." He picked up a throwaway plastic cigarette lighter for $0.69. If that didn’t convince them that civilization had something going for it, he didn’t know what would.

He put his purchases in the car and walked a block to the Mark & Pak supermarket. The blue hole still was directly overhead, and he enjoyed the sunshine. He bought a small loaf of wheat bread, a pound or so of grapes, and ten cans of sardines (in tomato sauce, mustard sauce, and olive oil for variety). Not the most appealing menu imaginable, but nutritious and protein-rich. He didn’t have a camp stove, didn’t want to buy one, and didn’t want to carry one on his back for ten miles each way. Or carry pots and utensils. It wouldn’t kill him to eat cold food for a couple of days.

In the evening he was in a lighthearted mood. He had just finished a note to John describing what he was planning to do. He’d drop it off at John’s Quinault office tomorrow morning, and if all went well, he’d be back before John saw it. And if not, the prospect of John thundering after him was reassuring. He put the note in a manila envelope, enclosed a Forest Service map with his route marked in fluorescent ink, and sealed it. Then he loaded his pack, applied the liquid to his shoes (it seemed to work), puttered happily until 9:00 p.m., and went to bed.

   When the alarm rang it was a different story. No one is a hero at 4:00 a.m., a wise man has said, and Gideon found it true. He had lain under the covers for fifteen minutes, reluctant to leave his warm bed, and then, more reluctant still to face the black, slanting rain, he had managed to use nearly an hour making and consuming a pot of coffee with toast.

Now, three hours later, having swung by Quinault to tack the note to John’s door, he slowed to a stop in the deserted North Fork campground. If he was not precisely reluctant, then he was not exactly anxious, either, to walk off into the dark and dripping forest.

The campground was closed for the winter, and the campsites were all empty. Small wonder. Who’d be out in weather like this? It was barely light. The only sounds were the pattering of the rain on the hood of his poncho, and the dripping of rain from the limbs of the trees, and the trickling of rain down the runnels at the edges of the gravel paths. For a man who had always liked rain, Gideon found the scene dispiritingly gloomy and forlorn. Already he regretted his decision not to bring a stove. A hot cup of coffee would have gone a long way to brighten things.

Finding the trailhead took more time than he expected. Only after an hour’s prowling of the barren campground, when he was beginning to fear he wouldn’t find it—or to hope he wouldn’t; he wasn’t so sure which—did he come upon it, not in the campground itself, but a hundred feet back down the road. It was an unmarked, decayed trail, corroded and rutted by six seasons of hundred-forty-five-inch rains, obliterated in places by robust intrusions of ferns, bead-ruby, and cloverlike oxalis. Still, it looked passable and easy enough to follow. The towering green walls of moss-draped cedar and spruce that hemmed it in would make it difficult to lose, even where it was overrun with smaller plants.

He struck out determined to walk off the slightly down-at-the-mouth feelings he’d awakened with, and, with his usual resilience, soon did so. Potholes and obstructive vegetation notwithstanding, he quickly settled into an easy stride and found himself humming and thinking with pleasure about meeting the Indians, talking with them, befriending them. The walking warmed him, and the cool rain sliding down his face was fresh, and sweet-tasting when it ran into his mouth. Except for his face and hands, he was as dry as toast.

After a couple of miles the trail began to climb gently. Must be skirting the southern flank of Finley Peak, Gideon thought sagely, trailwise and proficient in the ways of contour maps and rain forests. Eyes to the uneven path, he noticed that the air had lost its green, underwater cast, and he looked up to see that the trees had thinned. He was indeed on the flank of a mountain, with a clear, stupendous view to his left.

He found a relatively dry spot under a mossy rock overhang and sat down to look at the scene before him. It was like a photograph taken from a small airplane, the opening picture of a jungly
National Geographic
article perhaps titled, "Four Months on the Matto Grosso."

Below him lay the Quinault Valley, an endless, wet, billowing blue-green carpet, humped and bulging in places, like a stupendous, lumpy mattress tossed carelessly down between the mountain ranges. Here and there the Quinault River glinted dully through the green. Off to the west a flat, crescent-shaped segment of Lake Quinault could be seen, mirroring the sky’s gray, but pinkly tinged and luminous, like a disc of abalone shell.

Gideon suddenly realized he was hungry; all he’d eaten was the slice of toast before dawn. He opened a can of sardines in olive oil, found them delicious, and had another with a few slices of bread and some water from a stream that gushed down the rock a few feet away.

When he was done he got out the map and compared it to the terrain, nodding complacently to himself. The trail wasn’t on the map, of course, but he knew approximately where it should be, and he thought he knew just where he was. The mountains directly across the valley had to be Colonel Bob and Mount O’Neil. Off ahead five or six miles the southeast shoulder of Finley Peak edged gracefully into the rain forest, just as the contour lines said it did. On the other side of that, according to the map, in the little canyon between it and Matheny Ridge, ran Finley Creek, and there the Yahi would be. It didn’t look difficult to get to. With mountains as reference points on either side, he’d be able to find it easily, even if the trail petered out, which it gave no sign of doing.

Revivified, content, and feeling very much the outdoorsman—city person, indeed!—he started confidently out once more.

Twenty minutes later he was as lost as he’d ever been in his life. The trouble was that the trail descended at once, back into the rain forest, and there it
did
peter out, or at least become so overrun with huckleberry, horsetail, ferns, and even some fledgling trees that it required more concentrated attention than he gave it, engaged as he was in reciting Yahi vocabulary.