The Dark Place

They threaded their way among campsites cluttered with clotheslines strung between majestic pines, and around TV-antennaed recreational vehicles and dusty pickup trucks with racked rifles in the backs of the cabs— those would belong to the lean, grim men, Gideon thought. At the lakefront there were few people and no commotion. They sat on a log a few feet from the water, enjoying the minute, silky sound of the tiny waves. Gideon picked up a handful of gravel and began flipping pebbles into the water. Julie watched him quietly for a while.

'It isn't,” she said, “just your article—'

'I wish you'd stop calling it my article. I was framed, as you know only too well.'

Julie laughed. “Led on, perhaps. Taken advantage of, maybe, but not framed. You did it unto yourself, I'm afraid. But aside from the Bigfoot hubbub, the Quinault Valley is back in the news as Disappearance Valley again, and it's brought a lot of people out of the woodwork. We've had reports of two flying saucer landings, one of them complete with—don't laugh—little green men. We've had ten Bigfoot sightings, including a group of five hundred of them on the lawn at Lake Quinault Lodge at dawn...all this in addition to seven broken limbs and thousands of cuts and bruises. We're practically out of Band-Aids.'

'Sounds awful,” Gideon said.

'That isn't the worst of it. The Hornick family—that's the girl who disappeared last week—has offered a fifty- thousand-dollar reward for finding her, or her abductors, or her killers. And there's some Texas millionaire who's gone on national TV and renewed an offer of a hundred thousand dollars for a Bigfoot, dead or alive.'

'Whew,” said Gideon. “That accounts for the people with the guns. What a mess.'

'Indeed it is. And if someone actually finds a Bigfoot, it'll be even worse. Not that there are any,” she added quickly.

'Of course there aren't,” Gideon said. “And we don't, thank God, need to hypothesize anymore about superhuman strength.” He told her about Abe's deduction concerning the atlatl and about their conclusions.

'An Indian group,” she mused, “hiding in there. Just like the Yahi. Ishi all over again. Wouldn't that be fascinating?'

'It would be fascinating if we had some concrete proof, but it's little more than speculation at this point.'

Julie poked at the gravel with the toe of her boot. “Well, as it happens, I just might be of help there. I think one of the reports of a so-called Bigfoot campsite might interest you.'

'You jest. I'd be happy if I never heard of Bigfoot again.'

'But they found a bone spear there. They brought it back. I've seen it.'

'A bone spear?” Gideon paused in the act of tossing a pebble. “Like the one that was in Eckert?'

Julie nodded. “I think so. The people who found it are in Site 32. I told them who you are, and they'd be glad to show it to you.'

* * * *

Marcia Zander was one of the sturdy, chunky girls, an experienced hiker. Louis Zander was softer and chubbier, with a downy moustache, a blank, slightly sullen expression, and a cloudlet of marijuana fumes about him. The two sat on the wooden bench on one side of the table, while Julie and Gideon sat on the other. The long, bone-pointed spear lay down the center of the table, looking disconcertingly crude in the bright morning sun. Gideon stared at it, and the others looked at him, waiting for him to speak.

'Let's see what we have here,” Gideon said to start his observational processes going. “It's a little under six feet, I'd say.'

Louis Zander nodded vacantly. “Right, man.'

'It's five feet, ten inches,” Marcia Zander said earnestly. “I measured it against my shoe.” Her short, straight blond hair fell over her eyes as she leaned forward. She brushed it impatiently away, only to have it come down again. “Does anyone have a bobby pin?” she asked. No one did.

The shaft of the spear was obviously made from a tree limb that had been painstakingly smoothed and straightened. One end had been carefully thinned and split, and between the two prongs of the resulting fork, in the manner of prehistoric peoples everywhere, a rough bone blade, much like the one in the vertebra, but whole, had been lashed.

'You're the local ethnology expert,” Gideon said to Julie. “Does it look like anything from around here?'

She shook her head. “It's a little like some of the old Makah points, but they live way up north and always have, around Cape Flattery. What it looks most like,” she said doubtfully, “is...well, one of those Middle Paleolithic points you see in the textbooks, from Germany or France.” She looked quickly at Gideon, as if expecting correction.

'It does, doesn't it?” he said mildly.

'But those are forty thousand years old!'

'Curiouser and curiouser,” Gideon said. He peered more closely at the head. “The binding is nearly rotted through. Look at it, will you? No one bought that in a store. It's sinew; deer or elk, scraped thin and smooth. Between someone's teeth, probably.'

Louis Zander seemed to shake himself awake. “Well, so, is that a Bigfoot spear or not?'

Gideon looked at him closely, but the boy seemed to be in what must have passed in him for a state of earnestness. “I don't think so. I wouldn't give much credence,” he added gratuitously, “to any of the tales going around about Bigfoot.'

'Huh?” said Louis Zander, letting his mouth hang unpleasantly open for considerably longer than was required, while his dull eyes blinked twice. “I thought you were the Bigfoot expert.” He turned to Julie with a look of stolid accusation. “I thought he was the big-deal Bigfoot expert.'

'All right, kids,” Julie said brightly, “do you suppose you could show us where you found this, on a topo map?'