The trail twisted many times, sometimes back on itself. Twice they had to crawl on their abdomens under masses of sword ferns only two feet high. The old man moved like a Yahi, all right. And a pretty limber one, considering his age and condition.
At a little before one o’clock, they found what they were looking for. They had been following the tracks along the foot of a cliff, and when they threaded their way between two big boulders, there it was. A huge mass of rock had fallen away from the cliff wall near its base, leaving a concavity about eighty feet long and thirty feet high-a shallow, roofed, flat-bottomed cave. In the limestone country of the Dordogne it would have been called an abri, and the hands of any anthropologist who saw it would have itched to get hold of a shovel and search for Cro-Magnon remains.
No anthropologist would have seen it, however, except through the most fortunate accident. The sloughed-off rock, a colossal, semicircular monolith, lay in front of the cave that it had created, completely blocking it from view and allowing ingress only at one point-where the giant boulder had split and separated enough to allow a person to get in.
It was a perfect place for the Yahi village, and there the tiny village lay. At the far end of the opening, surrounded on three sides by walls of rock, there were two dome-shaped huts like the ones on Pyrites Creek, but these were winter quarters, covered with skins instead of brush. In front of them was a fire pit shielded by cedar bark, and around the fire sat four Indians quietly absorbed in homely and simple tasks. One of them was the man Gideon had startled-and vice versa-at the gravel bar.
The scene was astonishingly domestic. It was like looking at a museum diorama: Everyday life in the Old Stone Age. Gideon recognized at once what each person was doing, although he had previously seen the tasks performed only in old ethnographic movies. The old man he had seen before was binding the two prongs of a fishing harpoon to its shaft with a length of sinew. Another man, even older, was heating wooden shafts against a hot rock from the fire and pressing out irregularities with his thumbs. A third was stirring something in a large pot or basket, and with the flat of his other hand was braiding grasses into rope by rubbing them against his thigh; that had been women’s work among the Yahi of old. The fourth man was bent over a rock in his hand, pressure-chipping it with a piece of antler.
"Gideon," Julie whispered, "they’re so old."
They were; the youngest of them appeared to be in his mid-sixties.
"They don’t look like killers," Julie said. "They look so…pacific. There must be others, mustn’t there? Younger ones?"
"Maybe, but not many. There are only two huts."
The question was answered more definitively by a movement off to the left and above them. A fifth Indian was slowly rising from a sitting position in a cleft in the big rock that fronted the cave and was looking down at them with an expression that was far from pacific. Gideon could feel the hostility radiate from him.
Like the old people, he wore a breechclout, but his shoulders were naked, not covered by a ragged cape. Like them, he gleamed with grease, and his short hair was clotted with it. There the resemblance ended. This was a lithe, slender man of thirty or less, who might have been carved from dark marble. He stood, in fact, remarkably like a barbaric David, confident and arrogantly relaxed, his narrow hips canted, one sinewy hand hanging loosely curled at his side. The other hand was at his shoulder, but where Michelangelo had chosen to put a sling, there was a long, bone-pointed spear cradled almost casually.
Chapter 17
The Indian said something in a sharp, nasal voice, and the old people stood up quickly, if shakily, saw the two strangers, and stared, open-mouthed.
Julie’s fingers, ice-cold, crept into Gideon’s hand. "Be of stout heart," he said, calmly enough to surprise himself. "This is what we came for. He doesn’t seem to be pointing that thing at us."
Julie surprised him, too. "At least he doesn’t have an atlatl," she said lightly, but her voice was barely audible.
"You stay here." He squeezed her fingers, dropped her hand, and stepped forward.
"Ya’a hushol," he said loudly, feeling stagey and embarrassed.
"Ya’a hushol," answered the Indian on the rock-the first real proof that Gideon could communicate with them. But the voice seemed to be heavy with mockery.
Gideon walked cautiously toward him. "Ai’niza ma’a wagai," he said. "I am a friend." He noticed for the first time that a stone ax was thrust through the Indian’s waistband. The one that had nearly brained him? Instinctively, his fingers crept to the bandage on his head.
Without expression the Indian watched him approach. If anything, there was a faint look of disdain in the intelligent, black eyes. When Gideon was ten feet away, the naked shoulders tensed slightly, and the feet shifted to a squarer stance. The spear was more firmly grasped.
Gideon stopped and stretched his lips in a smile. "I come in peace," he said in Yahi.
In response he got a slight curling of the Indian’s upper lip. The man was taller than Gideon had thought, massively muscled, slender only in the hips and legs. His face would have done better on a lordly Mayan than a lowly Yahi. Gideon had seen similar ones carved on the ruined walls of Tikal and Palenque: a high-bridged, lavishly curved nose, delicately angled, almond-shaped eyes, sensual, exquisitely formed lips. All were set in an oval, flat face of blank planes and angles, so that the total effect was oddly disturbing, as if a seductive and willowy youth peeked through the eye slits of a stony, brutally masculine mask.
"I come in peace," Gideon said again.
The sybaritic eyes behind the slits continued their leisurely inspection. The shapely upper lip curled once more. In Gideon’s world it would have been a sneer.
Gideon felt an active dislike begin to simmer. That, he knew, would not do. He was not thinking like an anthropologist. What, after all, did he know of the nuances of Yahi posture and tone? Nothing. The sneer, the arrogant pose were artifacts of Gideon’s own ethnocentric perspective. How could he tell what they connoted in Yahi culture?
"Bullshit," he muttered to himself-the man, the fallible human being, addressing the schoolish scientist. "I know when I don’t trust somebody."
The Indian on the rock suddenly turned loquacious. Gideon could not follow everything he said, but it seemed to be a sort of welcoming speech. He heard "friends" and "peace" more than once. When he had done, the Indian jumped lightly down from the considerable height of the rock and joined the old ones. He moved, as Gideon knew he would, with a casual, surefooted grace. Like a movie Indian, Gideon couldn’t help thinking. The others were not like movie Indians. They huddled together in a woebegone clump, shoulder to hunched shoulder and elbow to elbow, quaking and terrified.
The young one shouted something and gestured with his spear, apparently urging Gideon and Julie to come forward.
When they hesitated, his full lips twisted-it was unquestionably a sneer; Gideon would bet on it. Ostentatiously the spear was flung to the ground and the Indian’s open, empty hands were displayed to them. The ax in his belt remained where it was.
Gideon was far from easy, but he had come to meet with them, and meet with them he would.
He turned to Julie. "You stay here," he said. "See how it goes with me."
"No way," she said, and came from between the rocks to stand at his side.
"Now, you listen-"
"Gideon, we don’t want to have a scene in front of them, do we?" She reached for his hand again. Her fingers were not as cold as they’d been.
"All right," he said, smiling. "I think it’s going to be okay."
"Of course it will. But keep your eye on the big cheese."
"Don’t worry, I will. Let’s go." One more squeeze of her hand and they walked cautiously forward. Gideon took the opportunity to study the four elderly Yahi. The one who had been straightening the shafts was the oldest of them, with a fierce-eyed, hawklike patriarch’s face but a spine so contorted by disease or injury that his torso was like a gnarled old tree trunk, lumpy and asymmetric, and twisted nearly into a knot.