I strode off alone into the woods, my spear in hand. The last time I went hunting, I was twelve years old. Deep in the forest I had turned and found myself nose to nose with a woolly rhinoceros. He licked my face, and I fainted dead away. When I came to, I resolved to become an artist. I had never picked up a spear again until this day.
I spotted a reindeer grazing in the distance. With all the strength I could summon, I hurled my spear. It landed so far from its target the reindeer lazily turned to me with a look that said, “You weren’t aiming for me, were you? You couldn’t have been aiming for me.” Then he strolled off, extra slowly as if to mock me.
I turned to my next victim, a not terribly large ibex. I threw my spear, and it lodged squarely in his shoulder. This didn’t kill him or even seem to hurt him — this had offended him. He charged me. I ran. He knocked me down. He kicked me and butted me, and when that got boring, he began whacking me with the spear handle, still stuck in his shoulder. Finally, in a fit of ibexy conscience, he let me go. I was beaten, bruised, and soaked with blood, some his, mostly mine.
As I trudged home that evening, I spotted a squirrel gasping on the ground after a bad fall. I conked him on the head with a rock — at least I wouldn’t have to face T.O.W.O.E. empty-handed. I entered my cave holding my puny trophy by the tail. “Mother, I know that this may not look like much, but if you add a few vegetables—” At this point the squirrel, not dead but merely dazed, sprang to life. It bit my hand, did two quick laps around our home, chirping and peeing on everything in sight, and sprinted out the door.
I wished for anything to break the sticky silence that hung between my mother and myself — and I got it. The shaman entered my cave and proclaimed, “Murf, in the name of our people, I accuse you of murder!”
I was stunned. “For the squirrel?”
“For Hax, the artist.” He explained that earlier that day, as Hax set to work repainting my mural, an unseen assailant had entered the sacred cave. There were signs of a struggle, and Hax had been stabbed in the heart.
“Well, surely you don’t suspect me.” As I gestured at myself, I remembered that I was covered with bruises and my clothes were soaked with blood. I started to explain that I’d been hunting alone all day, but that didn’t even sound believable to me. No one had seen me go hunting for fifteen years.
The shaman produced a bloodstained utility knife the length of a man’s foot; the bone handle was an intricately carved horse in full gallop. “This is the knife that killed Hax — its fine craftsmanship indicates only you could have made it.”
“Well... yes,” I said, flattered. It was a terrible situation, but I take my compliments where I can get them. “But I’ve made these for several customers. I kept one knife for myself, and that’s not it. Mine is right here with my art supplies.” I smugly opened my case and fished around inside: no knife. “Look, I know this looks bad, and I really regret my ‘sit on your hat’ remark—”
“I have judged the evidence and find you guilty of Hax’s murder,” said the shaman. “Tomorrow at dawn you will be stoned to death by the good people of this village.” He clapped his hands, and two of the strongest men in our tribe, Oof and Bubo, grabbed me roughly by the shoulders. As they dragged me away, I saw a look in my mother’s eyes I had never seen before. I think it was pride.
Oswald Plummer and the Jeter family stood above a perfectly round hole in the limestone, four feet wide, fifteen feet deep. “We believe a whirlpool created this hole naturally. However, etchings inscribed in the walls near the bottom indicate it had some ceremonial function — a repository for bones or holy relics, a place to contact the spirits of the earth... But it most certainly was not a urinal!”
“Sorry,” said Jason Jeter, zipping his pants.
I was thrown down into the Hole of the Gods to await execution. The hole was too deep and its sides too slick to climb out. The walls were scratched with the names of other inmates who’d done time in the hole. There were even multiple listings for Zaza the prostitute; Lu the male prostitute; and my dear departed dad, I’m sorry to say.
Who killed Hax, I wondered, and why? Perhaps he was killed to avenge my honor or protect my work. Could Mother have done this? No, it had to be someone who loved me. And that’s when I realized who the killer was. I called up to my captors. “Oof, Bubo, get Poot!” What a strange sentence, I thought as I heard it echo off the walls of the hole.
About an hour later Poot appeared at the edge of my hole. He was red-faced and snot-covered — he’d clearly been sobbing. “Poot, I’m going to be killed tomorrow for something I didn’t do.”
“But you my only friend,” he wailed. “Poot be all alone.” It was true; there had once been a great many of his people, but they were wiped out by — let’s say a lack of common sense. His father tried to mate with a bear. His dear mother got her tongue stuck to a glacier and died of exposure that winter. His uncle used a beehive as a pillow. And so on and so on.
“Poot, you were carrying my art supplies. Did you take my knife? Did you kill Hax?”
“He was bad to you. You are good man,” said Poot, and he walked away. About an hour later a thick vine was lowered into the hole. I grabbed hold as Oof and Bubo hauled me out. “You can go,” the shaman said. “Poot confessed.”
I sat alone in my home, Poot’s execution just hours away. Mother, who rarely left the cave, was already at the village center — she loved a public stoning and had been hoarding ten-pound “head-crackers” for just such an occasion. I poked at the dead embers in the cooking pit, stirring the ash hole, feeling like an ash hole myself. My best friend committed murder to defend my work. And then he confessed — he gave up his own life — just to save me. Most people considered Poot a brute, but there was an awful lot of nobility in that man.
All at once I felt something hard among the ashes — it was one of the pigment dishes from my supply case. Digging farther into the pit I found a charred paintbrush as well as a bent and blackened piece of bone — it was my utility knife! These objects must have spilled out of my supply case after my boozy pratfall over the bag; my dear half-blind mother swept them into the fire the next morning. So Poot hadn’t stolen my knife. And he hadn’t killed Hax.
I ran to the clearing at the heart of our village. My poor friend was tied up in the center surrounded by stone-waving villagers. “Stop the stoning!” I cried. “This man is innoc—” Bonk! A hefty rock hit me in the small of the back. I turned to see who threw it. “Mo-ther,” I said reproachfully.
I asked Poot why he’d confessed. “If you die, I die. If I die, you live,” he said. It was that simple. If I live to be forty, I’ll never see another such selfless act.
I showed the shaman my charred knife. “You’ll need more than that to stop the execution,” the shaman told me. “This is what these people live for. It’s good for morale, and it’s good for business.” Indeed, almost every merchant in the tribe was there peddling his wares — Grop the meatseller, Kuff the potter, Zaza and Lu representing the world’s youngest profession, Qaqaq the dentist-exorcist-artist... that’s when it all became clear to me. “People of the village,” I cried, “in one hour I will produce the true murderer. I ask only your kind forbearance—” Bonk! Another rock hit me. She had a good arm for an old lady.
The shaman and I paid a visit to the one merchant not at the execution. When we arrived at the tavern, we found Mog curled up in the corner, drunk on his own wares. I had realized that Mog would never have missed a stoning; he could sell more ale in an afternoon than he ordinarily would in a month. A search behind the bar turned up a bloody tunic and the big bag of cowrie shells that was to be my pay, and then Hax’s. “I just went to Hax to collect on his bar tab. I mean, it was huge,” Mog confessed. “He was holding this big bag of shells, but he wouldn’t part with any of ’em. We argued, he pushed me... I stabbed him.” The knife Mog used was one I had given him years ago, to pay off my bar tab. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.