Bestiary

“It’s a mano, used for manual chores like—”

“I know what it is,” Running Horse had said, witheringly.

Carter let that pass. “But look at the striations on it, and the way that it has been broken in half.”

“So?” Running Horse replied. “Lots of these are found broken.”

“Not like this,” Carter said. “Not against the natural cleavage plane, and not defaced like this. This was done deliberately, as punishment or retribution.”

Running Horse said, “The Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act is not about manos or arrowheads or pottery shards. It’s about bones, Dr. Cox. Human bones.”

“So it is.”

“So show me where you have stashed the bones of my ancestors, and I will take them and put them where they belong.”

“They’re already there,” Carter said.

“Where?” he shot back skeptically.

“I’ll show you.”

Del turned and walked across the closed lobby of the Page Museum — Carter, not wanting to start up any further ruckus with Gunderson about what he was planning, had picked a time when the museum was officially closed — and into the atrium garden.

It was a beautiful afternoon, late in the day, and birds were twittering in the branches of the gnarled gingko tree. The garden, open to the blue sky above, was cradled within the glass walls of the museum, and today, more than ever before, Carter felt what a magical place it was. Small and tranquil, traversed by a single quiet footpath, its running stream inhabited by nesting turtles and glittering orange koi… it was as close to the primeval landscape of the region as any of present-day Los Angeles was likely to get. It was like stepping back into a tiny patch of the Pleistocene epoch, and as Carter led Running Horse toward the waterfall at the back, he hoped that some of that feeling was rubbing off on him, too.

“Very nice,” Running Horse said, “but I’ve been in here before.”

Carter wasn’t sure the magic had worked yet. He paused beside the burbling waterfall, and let Running Horse soak up the peace and the harmony of the place. Del hung respectfully back, like a funeral director.

“I want you to do something for me,” Carter said.

Running Horse didn’t look amenable. His dark eyes were obdurate and his chin was set.

“I want you to take that stone, the one right there, from the center of the waterfall.”

Running Horse looked at the waterfall splashing down a short rock face and into a small elevated pool. “Why?”

“Because I want you to see something.”

Running Horse stepped off the pathway and onto the grassy earth. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, and he stopped to roll up the sleeve before leaning close to the little fall and retrieving the glistening rock.

When he turned back, Carter was holding out the mano the La Brea Woman had been found with. “Now compare them,” Carter said. “Put them together.” It had come as a sudden revelation to Carter — and he hoped it would have the same effect on Running Horse.

Running Horse took the woman’s mano and joined the two together between his hands — the pieces fit perfectly.

“And look at the defacing marks,” Carter said.

Running Horse lifted the stones and studied them more closely. He could see that the slashes and cuts neatly meshed.

But he still didn’t understand what all of this was leading to.

“The bones of the La Brea Woman were brought here, and buried here,” Carter said, “by some means I do not begin to understand.”

Running Horse remained silent.

“And that stone was placed there, in the waterfall, as a marker. A tombstone.”

Running Horse waited still.

“We — that’s Del and I — have buried the bones of the La Brea Man beside them,” Carter explained. “We believe that these two people were together in life, and that they were killed, perhaps because of some transgression, together at the end. The stones prove it.”

“Here?” Running Horse finally said, in a voice still fumbling toward comprehension.

Carter gestured at a spot of freshly smoothed earth, away from the path, in the shade of a tree.

“This is where they lived,” Carter said, “and this is where they died.” Carter gestured at the lush foliage and babbling brook. “This is a world they would know, even today.”

Running Horse stood silent, contemplating all that he had just been told. Carter and Del moved away to allow him some time to commune with his thoughts, and when he turned toward them again, he said simply, “Then let it be.” He replaced the broken mano in the waterfall, and nestled beside it the other half. Under his breath, he chanted some words, unrecognizable to Carter, then bent down and touched the recently turned earth with the flat palm of his hand.

When he stood up, he didn’t offer to shake hands with Carter, or speak any words of reconciliation, but he didn’t challenge him or argue anymore either. He walked out of the atrium garden, letting the glass door close slowly behind him, and Carter had neither seen nor heard anything from him since…

And there had been no further disturbances in the museum at night.

“You see the L.A. Times today?” Del asked now, as he steered the truck through the morning traffic on Pacific Coast Highway.

“Nope,” Carter said, laying his cast on the center armrest. They sure made trucks a lot nicer than they used to.

“There’s a big photo of that Derek Greer, the man of the hour.”

Carter knew he should have been following the news more closely, but he just couldn’t bear to. There was too much he didn’t want to think about.

“He’s the one who pointed the cops to those Sons of Liberty bastards,” Del went on. “The leader, some guy named Burt Pitt, was caught at the Mexican border, of all places. Now I guess he wishes the borders were more open than they are,” Del said, with a grim chuckle.

Even as they drove along PCH, a ribbon of highway that hugged the ocean shoreline, Carter could see, in the hills and palisades, burn scars where the fires had swept down through the chaparral before running out of fuel on the concrete roadway and the broad beach beyond. But in their terrible progress the flames had destroyed hundreds of houses, consumed untold millions in property, and taken dozens of lives.

But what Carter was looking for, as he scanned the cliff-sides, was something else.

Del had the radio on — a country-western station, of course — and he tapped his fingers on the wheel in time to the music. The singer was claiming that there was a reason God made Oklahoma, but Carter hadn’t been paying attention, so he didn’t know what it was.

At the turnoff to the Temescal Canyon hiking trail, there was a chalkboard sign saying that, although the trails were open, it was advisable only for experienced hikers to proceed. “Fire danger still exists,” the sign said. “Report any indications of fire immediately.”

“And hey, look at that,” Del said, pointing to another sign in the lot where the parking validations used to be dispensed. “Parking fees have been waived.” Nothing pleased Del more than a bargain. “God help me, I’m starting to love this town.”

Carter had never seen such a turnaround. For a guy who had hated L.A. — its noise, its commotion, its traffic, its phonies with cell phones welded to their ears — Del had made a near miraculous conversion. And it was the Fourth of July — or Gotterdammerung, as Del liked to refer to it — that had made the difference. On that day, he had seen things in Los Angeles that no other place on earth could ever have offered. He had seen creatures — living and breathing and hunting — whose petrified bones he had studied all his life. He had seen, on al-Kalli’s lawns, a glimpse of a prehistoric world hundreds of millions of years old. And even in the fires — the raging, deadly, uncontrollable conflagration — he had seen the power of nature unleashed, and he had seen the city scourged, like Sodom, and in his eyes reborn to a rough kind of beauty. He rooted for Los Angeles now.

Which explained, Carter thought, the purple and gold Lakers T-shirt.