The Dark Place

Abe frowned at the conventional opening as if he'd never seen it before. “There's a law that only Indians can use atlatls? A Caucasian or an Eskimo couldn't have buried him in an Indian cemetery?” Abe moved his own king's pawn out to face Gideon's and looked up. “What's to smile at? Is it such a terrible move?'

'No, I'm smiling because you're telling me exactly what I told John Lau last week when he was so sure it was Indians.'

'But now you think so, too?'

'Let's just say it's emerging as the most probable hypothesis.'

Abe laughed. “Let's just say you think so, too. Boy, you cloud-nine Ph.D.s!'

'Okay,” Gideon said, grinning, “let's say I think so, too. Look, you say anybody could have buried him in that cemetery, but, as far as we know, there wasn't anybody who knew—except the Indians themselves, of course—that there was a cemetery in there at all. The federal archaeologists never heard of the cemetery or an Indian group, and neither did the universities.'

Bertha padded in with a glass of hot milk and honey for Abe, and tea with coffee cake for Gideon.

'Just the tea for me, thanks, Bertha,” Gideon said.

'Don't look at me,” Abe said to Bertha. “He changed his mind.'

Bertha fussed over her father for a few minutes while he grumbled and told her he wanted a stiff bourbon, not baby food. She pooh-poohed him, patted him a final time, and left.

Abe sipped his hot milk. “I actually like this stuff, you know? But don't tell Bertha.” He put down the glass. “I got another question: If there are Indians in there, how come nobody but you knows it?'

'All I can think of is that they've kept themselves hidden,” Gideon said weakly. Abstractedly he swung his king's bishop off to the right, where it focused on the opposing king's bishop's pawn. “And since the cemetery's been in use at least a century, they must have been hiding all that time. What do you think? Is it possible?'

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.'

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Chapter 7

* * * *

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