The Canyon of Bones (19 page)

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Authors: Richard S. Wheeler

BOOK: The Canyon of Bones
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S
kye glanced at Victoria. She shook her head. She didn't know either. Mary studied the Indians and shook her head also. None of them could identify this band of painted men walking their ponies toward them.
Mercer saw them too, and hastily moved his robe so it did not cover any of the bones he was rendering to pictographs.
“Who?” he asked Skye.
“Don't know.”
Mercer began his own preening, straightening hat, adjusting his shirt. Winding stood, watching the painted Indians, a certain resignation in him.
Now the warriors, walking their ponies single file, were close enough so Skye could make out details. The ponies were painted too. The lead horse had a set of pointed teeth across his chest, like an alligator jaw. The hideously painted warrior held a staff burdened with feathers. Not a weapon was visible among any of them. They were all splashed with umber and red, black and tan, with circles and giant eyes painted on their chests, and chevrons on their arms.
“Mercer. Stay quiet. They're not painted for war.”
“Got it, old boy.”
But Skye wondered whether the explorer did get it. The band now rode toward Mercer and Winding, parading their ponies along the path that bordered the bones, studying Mercer's pictographs painted on his robe.
Skye held up his hand, palm out, the peace sign, and then did the friend sign. The chief of this band did likewise. For the moment, anyway, trouble receded. Skye beheld about fifteen young men of unknown tribe, all silent, all dressed in outlandish ways, but plainly exhibiting the most powerful medicine they could manage from their paint pots.
They reined their ponies to a halt and stared at the white men.
“Who are they, Mister Skye?” Mercer whispered.
“No idea,” Skye replied.
“Well find out, blast it.”
The explorer who had just discharged his guide suddenly had need of him. Skye allowed himself a moment of amusement.
“I am Skye,” he signaled, pointing to the sky and his chest. “Who you?”
“No Name here,” the leader signaled back. A man who concealed his name.
“What people?”
The leader gave the sign for Sarsi but Skye didn't recognize it.
“Sarsi!” whispered Victoria.
“Sarsi? They're Sarsi,” Skye said to Mercer.
“Never heard of 'em.”
“Canadian.”
“Ah, the queen's very own!”
“I doubt it,” Skye retorted laconically.
He knew little about them. The band had lived on the Saskatchewan plains, been driven west by Cree about the turn of the century, and had found protection and support from their friends the Blackfeet.
“Sonofabitch,” muttered Victoria, who was no friend of anyone associated with her mortal enemies.
“Who him?” signaled the one who owned no name, pointing to Mercer.
“He storyteller, makes pictures, from the land of the Great Mother.”
Skye's hands flew, his fingers formed and re-formed image after image. Sign language was never easy.
“Why here?” No Name pointed at Mercer.
Skye paused. He had to be very careful.
“To tell story of bones.”
No Name dismounted and stooped over the robe to study the pictographs.
“What's he doing, Mister Skye?” Mercer asked.
“He is reading your signs as best he can.”
Others dismounted and crowded around the robe, pointing at this or that image. Mercer was plenty nervous and kept smiling, flashing a row of white teeth at one and another of the Sarsi. Then they began arguing in a tongue Skye could not grasp.
“What are they saying?” Mercer asked.
“Who knows?”
“I have to know!”
Skye smiled. “Mister Mercer, at this moment your life depends on the way you behave. Give no offense.”
All of our lives, Skye added silently.
“What do you make of it, Victoria?”
“Secret society. Sarsi come here to get big medicine from bones. Maybe bone society. All young sonsofbitches, eh?”
“What are our chances?”
“No one ever got killed here. What you call it, a truce here. Big truce.”
“But if they decide Mercer has done evil?”
She shrugged, not wanting to answer that one.
The dispute among the Sarsi seemed to escalate. And it involved the robe. That was plain from the gesticulating and pointing.
Skye signaled Mercer to be cautious but Mercer mixed right in with the young men, smiling, making friends or so he thought.
Finally, the Sarsi headman approached Skye, hands and fingers moving swiftly once again. “The storyteller. Does he know the story of the big bones?”
“No.”
“But he has told the story on his robe.”
Skye nodded.
“He will tell the story to us.”
“He does not know the story.”
“But he has painted it on his robe.”
Skye sensed he was trapped. “Mister Mercer, they believe you know the story of the bones because of what you've put on the robe, and now they want to hear it. I'll have to use sign language.”
“But, Skye, I'm really not a storyteller.”
“I told them you are one.”
“What'll I say?”
“Tell them what Victoria's people believe the bones to be.”
Victoria glared at Skye and retreated into herself. But Skye sensed she was secretly pleased.
No Name signaled Skye. “We will learn the story of the sacred bones. The Storyteller will tell us. We will dance and pray. We have begged the four winds for the Storyteller and now he is here. This is a great omen. The Mystery of the Bones will be opened to my people. This day will be remembered for all times.”
“What's he saying, Mister Skye?” Mercer asked.
Skye pondered how to put it. “Mister Mercer, they have waited a long time to learn the mysteries of the big bones. This is a pilgrimage. They come from the north. They have come here to pay their respects to the bones and learn about them. And now they will find out from you. For a long time they have pleaded for you to come here and now you are here. You are the high priest of the big bones. Perhaps one of their shamans prophesied that you would be here. I don't know. This evening they will listen to you, and dance and pray to the big bones.”
“High priest?”
“You, yes. Behave accordingly. Consider yourself the archbishop of bones.”
“Gad, Skye, I am not a high priest of anything except women.” He was grinning again, even white teeth on display.
“Sir, take this seriously. I repeat, your life depends on it. False priests are the first to feel the battle-axe.”
“But I am to make up a story? How can I take that seriously?”
“A myth is not made-up. The story of Victoria's people, the people of the great bird, is not simply manufactured. It's an ancient tradition to explain their origins.”
Victoria absorbed that solemnly.
Mercer sighed. “Storytelling is my calling, it seems.”
It was eerie. The Sarsi dearly believed this encounter was preordained, fated by the gods, and dearly had foreknowledge of Mercer's visit. There were powers of the universe that Skye didn't grasp, this understanding of the hours and days and months ahead.
The secret bones society of the Sarsi made camp on the flat dose to the river. They had brought no tents, only a sleeping robe each, and necessaries. Some of the young men had drums; each had his own paints. They carried only a little jerky, just enough to stave off starvation.
That afternoon, they lionized Mercer, bringing gifts to lay at his feet. The high priest of the bones received two robes, a Hudson's Bay axe, a battle hatchet, an awl, a knife, a King James Bible from who knew where, a small medicine bundle carefully strung over his neck, a fringed elk-skin jacket, and a sacred pipe with a red pipestone bowl.
“Gad, Skye, I'm rich! Now I can dig bones!” Mercer said.
A cold fear coursed through Skye. “Leave them alone if you wish to live.”
The great ceremony began at sundown, when chill suddenly pervaded the gloomy canyon of the Missouri and a soft lavender light replaced the bold blue of day.
Skye grasped that there would be no food; these Sarsi were fasting, and expected their guests to fast. This was the moment of the big bones and it would be remembered in their tribal history for all time.
At last No Name summoned his men to sit dose to a fire, where they could see Skye's gestures and learn the story of the bones. One by one, these young men settled, mostly cross-legged, some of them with their robes cast over their shoulders.
“The floor is yours, Mister Mercer,” Skye said.
“Blast it, Skye, I have no story to tell. So I'll tell them some science, at least as far as my addled mind can come up with some science. They want truth. From me, they'll get science, and not wild stories.”
Skye waited with dread for the explorer to begin.
T
here was this quality about Mercer: he stood there like a Greek god, gathering the light about him, so confident and whole and magical that the expectant gaze of every Sarsi was upon him. What was it that Mercer radiated? Skye could not say. This man was Hermes, god of travelers, luck, roads, music, eloquence, commerce, young men, cheats, and thieves.
Mercer smiled at Skye and his women and then turned calmly toward his hosts, but now his gaze was different, mysterious, as if he were tapping some powers of heaven that eluded lesser men.
“The world is very old. Older than any person can imagine,” he began, and Skye had no trouble translating that into hand-signs. The Sarsi followed easily enough.
“The world changes. Long ago there were oceans here. Mountains rise and fall. Rivers cut through rock and carry land into the sea. Ice carves valleys and cuts down mountains. All this happens so slowly that no one can imagine it. But there are fossils of seashells high in mountains. Nothing stays the same.”
Skye marveled at this strange tale of a world so plastic that mountains rose out of seas and ice and rain wore them down again. The Sarsi were marveling too.
“The world is so old that people are newcomers. We have been here only a little while,” Mercer continued, while Skye turned that into the universal language of the plains. Good. If Mercer stuck with simple words and ideas, Skye knew he would have no trouble conveying them.
Mercer spoke quietly, yet his voice carried easily to the farthest Sarsi, a boy sitting well behind the others.
“Long before there were people, there were creatures, large and small, creatures of the skies, the oceans, the land. They are all unknown to us. Many disappeared. Some became other things.”
Skye suddenly realized that Mercer was flying a long way from the biblical beliefs of the English, the creation story found in Genesis.
“There were giants among them such as the giants whose bones you see here. They are gone forever. They lived before our type came. We do not know what they were or why they went away.”
This was certainly not Genesis. This world was not made in six days. Skye meant to inquire about it, when he could catch Mercer afterward.
“These bones we have here, the bones you have come to honor, are the bones of that which has no name. But maybe these bones are the grandfather bones of creatures we know. Maybe these bones are the first bird or the first lizard.”
How could that be? How could any species change? What God wrought was what God wrought. Was Mercer some sort of heretic?
Mercer talked of these things another little while, of
creatures forming and dying and changing into other creatures, of land rising and falling, of ice and rivers changing everything, of those bones and shells found in rock all over the world, the bones of creatures unknown to anyone.
The Sarsi were rapt. Mercer, whatever his other gifts, had the magic of the storyteller in him, and the stranger the story, the more attention he won from his auditors.
If the Sarsi were rapt, Skye was even more so. For this man was not talking about eternities, a world forever the same from beginning to end, but a world in endless flux, as if God could not make up his mind, and was forever erasing continents and species, and creating new ones. Was the world made of India rubber? Were creatures, including mankind, here today and gone tomorrow? Skye had never heard of such a thing, though his own observations had hinted at them sometimes. Who was Mercer? How could he know these things? Or even theorize about them?
By full dark, Mercer was done.
The Sarsi expressed their thanksgiving at this great revelation, and made camp down beside the river.
Skye was done with the sign language and it had become too dark for the Indians to follow his fingers and gestures anyway. He glanced at his bemused women, who were absorbing Mercer's strange talk of a world in flux, where nothing was permanent, and monsters of old became something else.
“I say, Skye, thank you. I was in a bit of a bind, you know, not being able to talk with those chaps.”
“Yes, Mister Mercer, you were in a bind, all right. You are still alive.”
“Right you are, old boy. You saved my bacon. That's an expression I got from the Yanks. What do you suppose it means,
saved my bacon, eh? The thing I want to talk to you about, sir, is my mistake. I shouldn't have let you go. I need you. That was a scrape, all right. I simply must have someone with me who'll translate.”
“I will take you to Fort Benton and you can hire a translator there, sir.”
“Ah, you still object to my taking a few specimens.”
“Exactly.”
“Then we can't resolve it. I am going to take some specimens and thanks to these Sarsi chaps I have some tools to do it.”
“Then I cannot be associated with you, Mister Mercer.”
The explorer smiled. “I'll go it alone, eh?”
“This place is still a church to these people and I will not desecrate a church. But speaking of that, sir, would you tell me where all this came from? I've heard things this night that I never thought I'd hear from an Englishman or a Christian.”
Mercer nodded and settled on the ground near the dying fire. “There's a ferment in England, sir. Seems most everyone looking at the natural world is objecting to the Genesis account of how it came to be. Blasphemy, my friend, and subject to action by the crown, you know, but that has hardly slowed anyone down.”
“Tell me of it.”
“You've been out here, far away from England, so I don't suppose you've heard of it. There's a fellow named Charles Lyell who's done a bang-up book about geology. I pretty closely followed his ideas when I talked to these Sarsi chaps tonight. He thinks the world is truly ancient, and there have been enormous changes wrought in it by natural forces. Land masses rising and falling, oceans now where they weren't before, and land now where it wasn't before. Mountains coming
up out of the bed of the sea and that's why you find fossil seashells on mountaintops. A world of constant geological change, Mister Skye, but over aeons of time.”
“How much time?”
Mercer shook his head. “No one can even fathom the time. But there's more. Chap named Darwin, Charles Darwin, one of that bright Wedgwood tribe, been on a long sea journey to South America. He's a keen observer and he's shared a few of his ideas with me, but cautiously. He doesn't want the crown on his neck. He's admitted to the Royal Society, 1839 that was, and also the Athenaeum, 1838 that was. That's a little club for the leading minds in the arts and sciences. And of course the Royal Geological Society. He's a man of parts, sir, and he's working on something that'll rock the world. It was 1842 that he did a little sketch about what he's up to, and he tells me he's about ready to publish his outline of a whole new hypothesis, drawn from observation of all forms of life, about species and where they came from. He thinks that they evolved from other forms of life. Too long to go into here but let me put it the other way. He doesn't think God thought up a bug or an elephant and plopped the creature down on earth full-made and ready for life.”
“Heresy, then?”
“Oh, I wouldn't say that. But you might find most of the men in the natural sciences thinking that Genesis is a poetical account of creation, and not a literal one.”
“This is what you call science, Mister Mercer?”
“Yes, exactly. Observation, analysis, deduction. Rational examination of a phenomenon.”
“And that's what you brought to the Sarsi?”
“You have it just right, Mister Skye. You've called me a storyteller, and that's a good way to letting those fellows know
what I do. So what does a storyteller do? In London, I'll tell them about the creation story of your wife's people and their belief that these are the ancestral bones, and let them marvel at the banquet table when I'm done. But here, among the Sarsi chaps, I'll tell them about Lyell and Darwin, and let them marvel. That's what a storyteller does, you know. I bring them new things, meat they never tasted before.”
That was an insight into Mercer. Skye, who knew he had no storytelling gifts at all, felt a faint surprise at Mercer's ways of dealing with radically distinct audiences. Tell the creation legends of the plains tribes to Londoners; tell the latest ideas raking scientists to the tribes. Skye laughed. It took all types to make a world.
“Who's this Darwin, sir?”
“He's got a fine brain, if you ask me. He found the fossils of seashells at twelve thousand feet in the Andes and began asking the right questions. He found species on the islands off South America unlike others, and well adapted to their environment, and began asking questions. I tell you, sir, I can barely wait for his outline to come out. Last I know, and I talked to him just before coming to North America, he was ready for the printer. I hope it's out when I return. I tell you, Mister Skye, this man Darwin's going to rattle every cage.”
“Rattle the idea of God?”
Mercer smiled. “It might Some will argue that it might even overthrow God.”
“That is not something I want to hear.”
“Of course not, Mister Skye. I don't want to hear it. I'm a good Church of England man myself. Everything we are in England, it all flows from our beliefs and our faith. That's why I dread this a little, even while applauding it. There's Darwin and another chap named Wallace who thinks the same way,
and many others asking questions. We're on the brink of an earthquake, I'd say.”
It was odd, sitting there beside the embers of a campfire in one of the most remote corners on earth, listening to all the latest ferment in London. For a moment or two Skye wished he could be there, in his old home, following all of it. But he saw Victoria and Mary, sitting pensively, blotting all this up, and knew his home was here and always would be here.
“Well, Skye, are you going to help me pry up some bones tomorrow?” Mercer asked.
“No, sir, I won't,” Skye said. “And we'll be far away.”

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