by Mary Saums
“Is anyone there?” I said softly. “Are you all right?”
Homer, still locked in his stance, suddenly jerked forward, less than an inch, toward the door. His hunting instincts held him back to await my command.
Gathering my courage, I flung open the door. The total darkness inside made it impossible for me to see anything at all at first. There was no electricity to the shed. I made a mental note to bring a flashlight out to set inside the door.
But then, as I stared into the darkness, I saw it, hunched behind a packing crate. I realized the shed’s intruder needed no light to be seen. A choked sound, a cry, came from it, just before it stood quickly, made a run for it, and disappeared. Straight through the wall.
Homer gave chase around the side of the building. I managed to catch a glimpse of the figure, a man who looked real and solid one moment but shimmered like a phantom of smoke the next, a mixture of green and white clothing, running toward the creek that runs near the edge of my backyard. There, he vanished, dissolving into the thicker and much higher fog that enveloped the stream.
Homer barked, confused, circling and walking back and forth at the creek’s bank. He looked side to side, just as I did. He sniffed the ground but with no luck. The apparition was gone.
PHOEBE ARRIVED AT MY HOUSE WHILE I STILL GATHERED the tools I thought we might need on our trek. She tapped on the door as she opened it. “It’s me.”
“In the kitchen.” She entered, carrying a plastic Tupperware container filled, I presumed, with her apple danish ring. She wore a deep purple top with matching paisley stretch pants. Her earrings dangled with purple and yellow pansies on the ends. Her red hair, piled on top of her head in her signature style, displayed a hairpin with a small gold ornament amid the curly lockets. “What a lovely pin,” I said.
“Why, thank you. I bought it in Pigeon Forge when Ronald and I went up there for his uncle’s funeral.”
“I can’t quite make out the ornament. A tiny shell?”
“No, it’s a roly-poly bug. They take real ones and dip them in gold leaf or paint them in bright colors. After they’re dead, of course. The gold ones are more expensive.”
“Fascinating. How, um, artistic.” We made our way out of the house. Homer joined us from his ramblings in the backyard. He came up as we crossed the main road that leads into the Anisidi Wildlife Refuge. My own private refuge lay ahead of us.
My benefactor, Cal Prewitt, had left it all to me. We were not related, had not known each other for more than a few weeks, yet he knew that, in me, he had found a kindred spirit. I swore to preserve his woods, just as Cal’s ancestors had preserved them for many generations and as he had done all his life.
He trusted me to find a way to ensure its future, though as yet I didn’t know how I would accomplish such a task. I had no children of my own. It was difficult to know whom to trust, how best to protect it, not just for a few years or decades but forever. We walked across the front meadow toward the woods up ahead.
“When are we going to do some more practicing?” Phoebe asked as we crossed the first stream, one that marked the beginnings of the forest. She inclined her head to the left. There, some one hundred yards away, a number of boulders stood about chest high. Behind them, grass stretched another ten yards or so to the edge of the bluff. Phoebe and I call the boulders our shooting range. I gave her a few lessons when I first moved here and when the land still belonged to Cal. We’ve only been able to practice a couple of times since.
“Whenever you like, dear. I’m still getting used to the fact that I’m the boss now.”
“Yeah, you’ve got full run of the place. You could weave flowers in your hair and hop and skip buck naked around here all day long and nobody would ever know.”
“True. But unlikely.”
Phoebe certainly knew how to surprise me. Prim and old-fashioned one moment, earthy and unpredictable the next. A staunch churchgoer with a hidden wild streak. Her thinly veiled reference to me as a dancing pagan wood sprite who worshipped the forest in the nude made me chuckle. I could see the light of mischief in her eyes. She had managed to combine the two favorite topics she uses to kid me, religion and my love of nature.
Though I haven’t attended a proper church service since I was a teenager, I suppose others here see me as quite conservative. I am British, after all. Rather quiet as well. As to a hippie or naturist wild streak, no, though if Phoebe knew the truth of my background, she might think me decidedly “far out.”
“What have you done with your little dog?” I asked.
Phoebe watched the trail closely as she progressed through the woods. “It’s not my dog. It’s temporary. But he’s fine. He’s in the house. I hope I don’t come home to find my sofa and chairs ripped up with stuffing floating in the air. Boy, this place is a mess,” Phoebe said as we picked up branches that lay across our path. “Now, tell me again what we’re looking for.”
“Cal calls it ‘Rock Wall’ on his map. His notes say it is the highest point of the forest. Depending on which of his notations are correct, we will be looking for a wall. Or a rock overhang. Or a hole in the ground. Or possibly a tree.”
“Well that narrows it down. Did he not know himself? We need to take into account that we’re talking about a guy known to take a nip or two.”
“It’s puzzling. Yes, he did know where it was because he said he covered part of it with brush. Still, he seems to be calling one spot all those things.”
From what I could tell, the site of the rock wall on Cal’s map was not far down the main path, actually wide as a road at this point. Farther along, it narrowed on the map and led to an offshoot cut away to the right and not far into the woods. A main trail that ended at “Rock Wall.” Cal drew a line of dashes, and then showed the main trail picking up again on the other side of whatever “Rock Wall” was. An arrow indicated it continued off the page. At the edge, his shaky lettering spelled a name I recognized.
Above the arrow, the words “Smuggler’s Run” gave me pause. It served as a highway, a major trail that traversed many states from North Carolina to Louisiana. Both it and the side path we turned on were passable by car now, but only just. Cal must have driven this way often, for it was quite wide and remarkably clear—other than the storm debris—for a road so far into the woods.
I was thankful Cal had been so ardent in keeping the trails clear and easy to follow. The land rose gently at first, but as the woods thinned, we steadily climbed, higher and higher, until we reached a ridge. We stopped there and found ourselves looking across a wide clearing, one that appeared both natural and designed. The rock floor of the clearing stretched out to an overlook to the valley far below. The view took our breath away. The green flat pastureland looked tiny and miles away. Sometimes I forget how high in the mountain both the town of Tullulah and my own place here on its outskirts sit.
“Is this the place?” Phoebe said.
We each looked across the clearing at the same time. Both of us saw the remains of a low rock wall to the left of the clearing and continuing out of sight. As we looked in that direction, we saw the other map feature a distance behind the wall where the tree line began, an angled indention of solid rock that created an overhang about twenty feet high.
Yet the site of the rock overhang, which we saw at a different angle than that in Cal’s photos, did not occupy my mind at the time. It temporarily took second place to the gigantic root ball of a fallen tree beside it. From where we stood, I could see two large burned areas on its trunk, blackened by lightning.
“Heavens,” I said. “I think I saw this happen.” I turned around, walked to the rock wall, and looked down into the valley. Yes. I could see the road and the place I stopped during the storm.
“It smells smoky here,” Phoebe said as she sniffed the air. “Look right there at that burn mark. And another one.”
She pointed to the lower burned area. Lightning had struck at the tree’s base, toppling the trunk to the ground and upending the roots.
The tangled wood tendrils now rose in the air, at least ten feet high, perhaps higher.
“The same tree struck twice?” I said. “In one night? Is that possible?” In addition to the blow, which appeared to have knocked it over, a long and wide black mark charred much of the tree on either side of a great split in the wood. More than two yards separated this burned area from that at the tree’s base.
“Sure it could happen,” Phoebe said. “My brother Gerald got hit three times, right in a row.”
“Good heavens. Is he, that is, did he survive?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s still bugging the fire out of me every chance he gets. He was playing golf in a thunderstorm like a fool. He got zapped, then he ran, then he got zapped again and it knocked him down, then it hit him again while he was flailing around in the wet grass.”
“How terrible. And no lasting affects?”
“Unfortunately not. No improvement whatsoever.”
“Amazing.”
“Not really. I think the Lord was sending him a message to quit being so mean. Didn’t work out like that. Gerald kind of absorbed the shocks and got meaner. Like a battery being recharged.”
“Goodness. You certainly have an interesting family.”
“Honey, you don’t know the half of it.”
We walked to the base of the tree, the heart of the lightning strike. A black rectangle approximately three feet long and perhaps a foot across at its widest point covered the tree’s side. Phoebe put her hand over the blackened bark, rubbing it back and forth, then both hands, prying into the cut and studying it from all angles.
From where we stood, we could see a slight indentation in the ground beside the huge upturned root ball, just beside the rock overhang to which Cal referred. I took out one of the photos he had taken of the area to compare. Phoebe looked over my shoulder.
“Looks like the place. Except now the hole in the ground is a whole lot bigger.” She touched the photograph then pointed. “Now you can see that rock that’s jutting out better.” She walked toward the overhang. I had no idea it was so large from the photograph. Nor had I grasped the amount of engravings. They covered virtually the entire front slab that faced the downed tree.
“Hey, Jane.” I looked over to see Phoebe at the far edge of the cleared area that sloped upward. “Over here. I bet this is it.”
I caught up with her and followed her gaze down into a small hollow. She pointed her finger and moved it across. “Tree. Or it was. Bushes. Indian stuff. Hole in the ground. Maybe there’s a cave down in there somewhere.”
Several flat rocks lay spaced just so between the tree and the overhang. I saw more on the other side of the huge tree trunk, following the line from the overhang to where the clearing was covered entirely with more flat rocks.
Phoebe wouldn’t let me walk on the flat stepping stones until she had used a fallen branch with its leaves still attached like a broom to sweep them clean of wet leaves.
“We don’t want to fall and break our hips and then have all my friends call me feeble. That would be the pits.”
“Quite right.” With ginger steps across the slippery floor of mud and leaves, we made our way to the overhang, forming a small cave-like space beneath. Its underside was above my head with perhaps another five feet of room to spare. Phoebe and I used our fingers to wipe away dirt and pieces of leaves that covered some of the “Indian stuff,” which was revealed as three lines of many symbols each, and a fourth shorter line of different markings, all wondrously strange and completely undecipherable.
The cool air, the earthy smells of wood and smoke, the warning chips of territorial chickadees, the ancient wonder beneath my hands as I wiped moss and wet dirt away, all blended together in a heady mixture, akin to draughts of strong incense, that transported me above the ground and into another world. I was in heaven.
Phoebe brought me abruptly out of my reverie. “Are you feeling all right, Jane? You’ve got a freaky look on your face. You’re not about to have a heart attack or anything, are you?”
“No, dear. Quite the opposite. This glorious place makes me feel euphoric.”
Phoebe stared at me, her eyebrows raised, her head of red curls leaning closer to my ear to whisper, “It’s a rock, Jane. Covered in mud. The wind is going to give us both earaches, and that bird that just flew over missed splattering my arm by less than an inch. Euphoric, it ain’t.”
I laughed. “Oh, stop teasing. You’re not fooling me, my girl. You can’t tell me these etchings don’t interest you. Not with your love of all things Native American.”
Her face changed in a snap from incredulity to smiling mischief. “Ha! Okay, I give you that. I do like the writing.”
Once done, we saw two rather nice petroglyphs nearer the broken wall of rocks. The rock drawings were small ones that Cal had indicated on the map with arrows and a notation of only one word: “Carvings.”
While Phoebe walked slowly around and under the overhang, I took out my notebook to jot down my observations about the two rock carvings, then we photographed them. One was the familiar circular spiral often seen in many ancient sites throughout the world. The other required more concentration in my rendering, several lines containing a number of native symbols that would require one of Cal’s Cherokee dictionaries to decipher.
Despite her usual revulsion for being outdoors for very long, Phoebe certainly enjoyed the carvings, going back and forth from one to the other. “Here, take a picture of me next to this one,” she said as she wrapped her arm around it.
I obliged then set the timer for a shot with both of us in the frame. We also posed by the charred hole in the fallen tree. We moved farther down the tree and skirted the great upstanding roots carefully to explore the “hole in the ground” they had enlarged.
“Hey, take a picture of this here,” Phoebe said. “It can be like an art picture, like they show in fancy galleries.” She held her arms out straight, her hands squared as if she were a movie director framing a scene. “Right like that. See how the roots look?”
“Yes. An excellent idea. I like that. I wish I’d brought a camera with black-and-white film.”
Phoebe stood aside, moving her framed palms out to find more potential art subjects. “Get this, too,” she said with her director’s frame held down to the ground. “See that? It looks like an arm, kind of. And a hand, with little fingers on the…Yaaaaah!” She screamed as she leapt backward, grabbing my arm in the process and dragging me away from the tree roots.
“Your foot! Your foot!” she yelled.
I looked down at the spot she had forced me to vacate. At first, I couldn’t make sense of what was before me. A slight indentation in the wet, brown earth was all I saw. Judging from Phoebe’s agitation, I’d thought she must surely have seen a snake. Instead, what I saw held no danger, yet chilled me through and through just the same.
Within the bare patch where the tree’s giant root-ball had been, a pattern of small yellowish white cylinders protruded from the wet brown dirt.
“It is!” Phoebe said. Her voice trembled in a higher pitch than normal. “Tell me it isn’t, but I know good and well it is.”
They were bones. No question. Nor was there any doubt they were human bones. One eye socket of a skull peeked at us from out of the mud.
Phoebe didn’t move, only stared at our discovery. “Well, Jane. I cannot believe we have gone and done it again. Except this body is a whole lot deader than that last one.”
Twelve
Phoebe and the Bones
Jane had shivered all over her body like a herd of possum had run over her grave.
“Are you all right?” I said after we both realized we were looking at somebody’s bones. Unlike me, Jane is the delicate type. I worried that she’d faint or have a heart attack or, worse, go all bananas on me like she did that last time we found the dead guy.
“Of course. I’m fine. I’ve seen many a bone in the ground in my day.”
“Huh.” I looked her up and down. She put o
n a good act, I give her that. “I suppose you have. So now what do we do? You want to have another one of those Indian ceremonies?”
“Perhaps that would be a good idea later on.”
“Because I’ve been thinking about it for a while, in case we ever needed to do one again.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Yeah. This time, I want us to smoke something. Like in a powwow. With a peace pipe. I don’t have a real one yet. But I do have some of my granddaddy’s old pipes. We could use one of those, if it’s an emergency bone thing.”
Jane squatted to have a closer look. “I’m not sure what to do next,” she said. “I suppose the first thing to do is call the police.”
“What for? Whoever it is, he’s not on the missing persons list. He’s been in the ground a while. The police don’t care about nothing from ancient times. Besides that, the writing over there on the wall is probably like the tombstone, don’t you reckon? So it was an official burial. Whenever it was.”
“Possibly. Probably so.” Jane knelt beside the bones, eyeballing them all over, left and right. She didn’t touch them, but she did put a fingertip on the dirt at the edge of the hole left by the tree trunk.
“What we’ve got here is an Indian cemetery. Only, I don’t think this is like the trees where we did the smudging,” I said. “This body isn’t right up under the tree. See, it’s too far away. Unless he had his arm way back like this.” I reached backward as far as I could like I was doing a backstroke in the air.
Jane nodded. “I believe you’re right. He, or she, was most likely buried farther out in the tree’s shade. Though the bones could have moved into strange positions. See how the roots have grown and shoved those aside.”
I bent down beside her. “What is that sticking up over there?” I reached toward a bump but Jane stopped me.