River Marked (19 page)

“What does that mean?” asked Calvin.

“I’m not sure yet,” I told him. Calvin couldn’t smell a lie. You could see it in his face that he believed what I said. I bet his uncle Jim would have called me on it. Adam gave me a sharp look.

There was a lot going on. Too much of it was mysterious and made no sense at all. And there were two other walkers, at least one of whom had known all about me before we met. The disappearing woman was one mystery too much. Though I was pretty sure she was my mystery and not something engineered by Gordon Seeker or anyone else we’d met there.

“Why don’t we go to the petroglyphs, then you tell me about Benny,” I told Calvin grimly. “I’ll see if the woman fits in anywhere.”

It wasn’t his fault. I had the feeling that he was even more in the dark than Adam and I were. Someone was playing games, and I was tired of it.

PICTOGRAMS ARE PAINT ON SOME SURFACE, ANY surface. Gang graffiti are pictograms, but usually the term refers to paints done by ancient man. Petroglyphs are carved into the rock. A lot more effort goes into them, and they take a lot longer to create. Like the displays in the museum, the petroglyphs at Horsethief Lake were on big chunks of rock that had clearly been cut from larger rocks. Unlike the ones in the museum, these were fenced off—look but don’t touch.

The first petroglyph I saw at Horsethief Lake looked like a pineapple.

Calvin didn’t quite hide his grin when I told him so. “Before the Columbia was dammed in 1959, the river was narrow and deep here, not the wide and tamed thing she is now. There were falls. Celilo Falls. We have photos.”

The young man stared out at the river. “You know, I wasn’t born then. My mother wasn’t even born back then. Some of the old ones still mourn the old river as if she were a living being who died.”

“Change is hard,” said Adam. “And it doesn’t much matter whether it is change for good or ill.”

The young man looked at him. “All right. Some of the change was good, some of it not so good. There used to be a canyon. Some people said that there were more petroglyphs on the canyon walls than any other location in the world. I don’t know, but there were a lot of them. When it became clear that the dam was going in, an effort was made to save as many as possible. These were displayed at the dam for decades before they were brought here. There are others in the museum and a lot, I suppose, in private collections—the tribes asked people to go in and take what they could as long as they would care for them. The ones left in the canyon are underwater, and I suppose they will be there forever.”

We were walking as he talked. Like the drawings on the rock, the carving was primitive. Some of it, like the pineapple person, were like trying to guess what a kindergartner had drawn. Some of them were extraordinary despite the stylization. I could have stayed looking at the eagle for an hour or so. But it was a rock that held a row of mountain sheep that clued me into something.

“I’ll be darned,” I said. “That’s why he sent us to look at the baskets.”

The men looked at me.

“Well, maybe not,” I conceded, thinking of the woman who’d stared at us in the museum, then followed us to the pictograms. “But those animals look like the ones woven on the baskets. If the only art you ever saw was on baskets and woven blankets, when you decided to carve something, you’d make it look like the baskets.”

“When we’re through here, you can write to the anthropological journals and tell them your theories,” said Adam.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Stuff that. I’ll write a doctoral thesis. Then I can go do what most of the other people with doctoral degrees in anthropology do.”

“What’s that?” asked Calvin.

“You don’t need to encourage her,” said Adam seriously, but his eyes laughed at me.

“The same thing that people with degrees in history do,” I said. “Fix cars or serve french fries and bad hamburgers.”

“This one is the one my uncle told me to point out to you,” Calvin said.

The rock had been broken, but the two pieces had been fit together carefully. The creature’s face looked a little like a fox—a mutant fox with very big teeth and tentacles. Its body was snakelike. It was like a cross between a Chinese dragon and a fox with the teeth of a wolf eel.

“We don’t know as much about these as we do the pictographs,” Calvin said. “They could have been carved ten thousand years ago by the first people, or a hundred years ago. We don’t know what this one was meant to represent, but we have a name for it. We call it the river devil.”

Its eyes were eager, intelligent, and hungry.

I’d seen them before. Bright green eyes in the water that I’d seen in my dream. I blinked, and the eyes were just eyes. No matter how avid they appeared, they were just carved in the stone. But I knew what I had seen.

“Now,” Calvin said cheerfully, while Adam watched me out of feral eyes, “there’s a Coyote story about a monster who lived in the Columbia in the time of the first people, before we humans were here.”

I tried a reassuring smile at Adam, who must have sensed my sudden recognition of the monster on the rock. I mouthed, “Later.” He nodded.

It had been a dream, I reminded myself fiercely. Just a dream.

Calvin missed all the byplay, which was fine. “This monster,” he said, “ate all of the first people who lived in the river. It ate up all the first people who fished in the river. Eventually, no one was willing to go near the river at all, so they asked the Great Spirit for help. He sent Coyote to see what was to be done.

“Coyote went down to the river and saw that nothing lived near the river. While he was watching, he saw a great monster lift out of the water. ‘Ah,’ it cried, ‘I am so hungry. Why don’t you come down so I can eat you.’

“That did not sound like a good idea to Coyote. So he went up into the hills where he could think. ‘Hee, hee,’ said his sisters, who were berries in his stomach.”

“They were what?” I asked, surprised out of my panic over a pair of hungry green eyes in a stupid dream.

“This is the polite version,” Calvin told me. “You can ask around if you want to find out the rude version. It is also rude to interrupt the storyteller.”

“Sorry.” I tried to figure out how berries who were sisters in Coyote’s stomach could have a rude version.

“‘Why are you laughing?’ asked Coyote.

“‘We know what you should do,’ his sisters said. ‘But we won’t tell you because you’ll just take all the credit like you always do.’

“But they were his sisters, and Coyote was very persuasive. He promised that this time he would tell everyone who was responsible for such a clever plan. At last they told him what to do. Following their advice, he took nine flint knives, a pouch of jerky, a rock, a torch, and some sagebrush and walked down to the river.

“‘Come eat me,’ he told the monster.

“And it did. As soon as it had swallowed him, he used the flint and stone to light his torch. Inside the monster were all of the first people it had eaten. They were very hungry, having not had food since they had been eaten by the monster. They were also cold because the monster was as chill inside as the river was outside.

“Coyote lit the sagebrush and shared out his jerky among them. He told the first people that he was going to kill the monster. Then, he told them, they would have to find their way out as best they could.

“So he took his first flint knife and started carving his way through to the monster’s heart. He hadn’t worked very long on the tough flesh before his first knife broke, and he had to bring out his second. The second knife broke, the third, and the fourth. Until at last he was down to his very last knife. But that one cut into the heart of the monster.

“ ‘Run!’ he told the trapped people. ‘Get out.’ And they did, escaping the dying monster any way they could. Out its mouth, out its gills, and out its bottom.”

“I thought this wasn’t the rude version,” I said.

Calvin grinned but kept going. “Beaver was the last to leave. He just barely escaped out the beast’s sphincter—and that is why the beaver’s tail is flat and has no hair.”

I groaned.

“At last it was only Coyote and the monster in the river, and Coyote had the upper hand.

“‘I will let you live,’ said Coyote, ‘only if you promise never to eat anyone ever again.’ The monster promised, and Coyote let it live. The beaten river monster sank to the bottom of the Columbia and never was heard from again. The grateful people threw a feast for Coyote, and he ate twice as much as anyone else.

“‘ Tell us,’ the people said. ‘How did you come up with such a clever plan?’

“And Coyote forgot the promises he made because he is vain and forgetful. He claimed all the credit for rescuing the people.”

Finished with his story, Calvin turned to look at the river devil hovering on the rock. “There’s no saying that the river devil and the monster in the Coyote story are the same beast, but I was told to tell you the story after you saw the rock.”

“And about Benny,” Adam reminded him.

“He’s going to be okay,” Calvin said. “Physically. The police are giving him a little bit of a bad time because he told them he doesn’t remember what happened or where his sister is, and the doctors are having trouble with figuring out what happened to his foot. But Benny’s not talking to them because it is none of their business, and they wouldn’t understand anyway.”

Calvin leaned against the fence that protected the petroglyphs. He looked at us. “I don’t see what this has to do with you. Why my uncle and my grandfather think it has anything to do with you. I mean, I understand why he thinks you won’t run away from the crazies when we start talking river monsters that eat people. But why is it your business?”

“Good question,” I agreed. “I’d be happy if someone had some answers.”

“Tell us about Benny,” said Adam, who was used to taking responsibility for the world on his broad shoulders. If there was a problem, and he thought he could help, he would.

Calvin looked at him as if he were seeing him for the first time. Maybe he heard Adam’s willingness to put his life on the line for a bunch of people he didn’t know, too. After an awkwardly long moment, he said, “Benny told my uncle that he and Faith were out fishing, like they do a couple of times a month in the summer. They’d caught a couple of fish yesterday and were about ready to pack it in when something hit Faith’s line hard enough that she thought they’d snagged some garbage. She could have just cut the line, but she and Benny, they’re good folk. They don’t like leaving hooks and line in the river if they don’t have to.”

A truck was pulling into the parking lot next to Adam’s. It was battered and sported three colors in addition to the bright orange primer, and its motor purred like a happy lion.

“My uncle,” said Calvin unnecessarily, since we could all see him getting out of the truck. “So maybe all of us will get some answers.”

Adam glanced over his shoulder, then looked at Calvin. “So what did Faith do?”

Calvin, like most people, obeyed Adam’s tone of voice without even thinking about it and continued the story as his uncle approached. “She reeled it in, and the line kept coming. She leaned over the boat. Benny, he was leaning the other way to keep the boat from tipping, so he couldn’t see what she did. But she said—”

“‘There’s something funny on the line, Benny. It looks like tentacles. What do you suppose . . .’” Jim let his voice trail off, and then he said matter-of-factly, “And the next thing Benny knows, Faith is in the water. He jumps in after her, and something bumps his leg—he figures that was when his foot went. The water started frothing, and he got the impression that there was something really big in the water. Faith came up to the surface, and he grabbed her in one arm and grabbed a gunnel of the boat in the other. She opened her eyes, and says to him, ‘It’s so peaceful here,’ then her eyes go fixed. Benny, he’s seen people die before, so he knows she’s gone. About that time, he realizes that there isn’t any of her below her rib cage. So he makes the smart decision and drops her body so he can vault into the boat. He lies down on the bottom and feels something that bumps and bobs his boat all over the place. He’s gone shark fishing in the ocean, and he said it felt like when there’s a fish out there a lot bigger than your boat. At some point he passed out and woke up here and there until you found him.”

Jim paused and looked at Adam and me. “After I heard his story, I called in Gordon Seeker because he knows more about this kind of stuff than anyone I know. He listened to Benny’s story and decided nothing would do but that he go down to that new campground and check out the werewolf. Whatever he found in your trailer made him believe that you are right in the middle of it. Part of it seems to be that you”—he centered his gaze on me—“are river marked now. Whatever that means.”

He didn’t sound nearly as friendly as he had last night. But that seemed only natural. For all that he was human, and his cheerful manner was out there for all to see, Jim Alvin had all the hallmarks of an alpha, and we were intruders in his territory.