The Dark Place

'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.'