The Canyon of Bones

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Skye was growing restless. “I think maybe we should consider it a threat, Mister Mercer. Someone might have some rather lethal plans for you.”

  “Oh, pshaw! This is legend, and legend is my meat! We shall carry on.”

  “I think not. You should not take this lightly, sir.”

  “Don’t be a tiddlywink, Mister Skye. This is grand. I haven’t seen the like since a human head the size of my fist was set in my path in the Mato Grosso of Brazil.” He turned to Winding. “Have you an opinion on it?”

  “It would be more comfortable if we were armed, sir.”

  “But I am armed in ways unknown to you. I know how to deal with all of this. Why, I’ve dealt with bushmen, cannibals, Zulus, and Lord Admirals of the Fleet. And never had to draw so much as a pocketknife. Here’s the secret. We’re big medicine ourselves. I make magic. My magic is bigger than their magic, eh?”

  He thumped his head and then his skull as a sort of exclamation point or two. “I am the great Wazoo, Moomumba, Atlatl, Kitchikitchi Bugaboo, Lord of the Universe.”

  “Wazoo, I ain’t going,” said Victoria.

  Mercer’s smile was all teeth again. “Very well, then. The men will carry on.”

  She glared at Mercer.

  The explorer mounted his nag, nodded to Winding, and the pair of them proceeded upriver, past the threshold of warning. Skye knew he could either try to protect his client or turn back. There was no stopping Mercer. Uneasily, he climbed aboard the buffalo runner and followed. The women resolutely started their pack animals upriver too.

  The going was peaceful enough. Here there was enough bottomland for a river road. Here and there the Missouri was hemmed by great cliffs, often weathered to odd formations, and at these points the trail climbed to the high plain and then down again to the bottoms.

  Skye kept a sharp look for ambush, for a glint of metal along the bluffs, or movement around the crenellated rock, or the startled flight of a bird, or a sudden shadow. But he saw naught but silent bluffs and he was tempted to think the warning wasn’t for his party. He knew better. He kept his old Hawken across his lap ready for use. But whatever befell them would be larger than a lone man with a lone rifle could cope with.

  The river flowed quietly here, the icy water hurrying on its way to the Gulf of Mexico an impossible distance away. He saw an eagle floating above, an osprey, an otter, and something he couldn’t identify. The canyon narrowed but a trail carried them to the plains above. The day was utterly peaceful. Mercer was enjoying himself; the thought of doing something forbidden had transformed the man into a daredevil, but also into a sort of invincible, invulnerable purveyor of magic.

  They paused at a place where the trail dived downward into the gloomy valley, where the rock changed from chalky to tan, and then oddly blue. The bones were not far ahead. Victoria squinted at Skye.

  “Maybe we will walk the star-path together,” she said.

  She was saying she loved him and also saying good-bye. This plunge into the forbidden was tormenting her far more than she let on to Mercer or anyone else. Skye saw Mary sitting resolutely on her pony. She had kept her feelings to herself and would go wherever he went, be with him wherever and whenever she could be with him. Hers was utter faith.

  He turned to Mercer. “The bones are close now. Maybe a mile ahead.”

  “Good. And no lightning bolts have struck us yet, Mister Skye.”

  But square on the trail before them was a blue arrow, this one unbroken, erect in the ground, made by the same arrow-maker as the red one. Skye dismounted and pulled it up. Its shaft was a deep blue, a dye not easily found in nature; maybe trading-post dye. It, too, had been fletched with owl feathers.

  Victoria studied the arrow and sagged. “I don’t know what the hell it means. It means something bad, but I don’t know it.”

  “Ah! More taboos! More mystery! Skye, old boy, this is getting better and better,” Mercer said.

  “It’s Mister Skye.”

  Mary studied the arrow. “This is an arrow of respect,” she said. “We must honor what we see and maybe the spirits will not torment us.”

  “How do you know that?” Mercer asked.

  Mary shrugged and turned silent.

  Skye didn’t know. He thought he would need to know what blue meant to whoever fashioned the arrow. He liked the color. The Blackfeet used it a great deal on their lodges, in their clothing, beadwork, and quilling. For him, blue was the color of liberty. When he thought of himself as a freeman, it was always somehow associated with blue.

  “There you have it,” Mercer said. “What does blue mean? Anything. We will be respectful.” He nudged his horse forward, and suddenly they were all descending a rough path down into the shadowed bottoms of the Missouri past layers of blue-tinted sandstone, dropping precipitously, so much so that Skye worried that the travois might topple or twist the ponies off the trail. But soon they were at the river and entering a broad flat south of the water, a delta that had been carved from a tributary canyon and deposited there.

  This was the place. Skye recollected it now from his sole trip there years earlier. And he had the same eerie feeling now that he had then, a sense that indeed he was trespassing. It was quiet here, perhaps because no wind found its way into this sunken vault far below the high plains. There was blue sandstone layered up the south slopes, topped with tan sandstone streaked with red. He had the sense that this was an ancient place, one where the river itself was a newcomer, slowly sawing its way downward.

  They paused. Victoria pulled up her pony, and Mary did too. They were alert for trouble even without having any real reason to be alert. A great and old serenity lay upon the land. Skye felt a sort of sadness in him, and couldn’t say why. Maybe it was because he was about to experience the world’s darkness, something in these primeval bones that spoke of blood and ferocity and struggle.

  Mercer pulled up too, and Winding.

  “This is it?” the explorer asked.

  Skye nodded. He pointed toward a far blue escarpment.

  They rode quietly across the flat, which was sparsely vegetated with a coarse grass, and came at last to the blue sandstone wall.

  “I don’t see a thing,” Mercer said.

  “You will.”

  Skye noted evidence of other visitors. There was a medicine bundle hanging from a stunted cottonwood. On closer examination he found several amulets and totems, each suspended from a limb.

  He pointed these out to Mercer. “This is a holy place. This is a place the Indians come to when they are looking for guidance or needing the story of their people.”

  “Medicine bundles. Why are they here?”

  “They are put there in reverence,” Skye said. “They are offerings to the spirits that live here.”

  They dismounted. The horses stood quietly, content to be in this sheltered flat. Skye led them slowly across the flat to the tumble of detritus that had fallen from the blue stone above. The strata were actually layered in stair steps, with the higher strata farther back from the river, and the lower strata closer.

  Victoria knew the way better than Skye, and veered left toward a sector where the ancient tributary had cut its own passage through the sandstone.

  She began climbing slowly, working past talus that erosion had tumbled from above. She reached a bench that lay at the foot of an overhang that sheltered everything that lay below it, paused, and decided to head right. The rest followed, somehow silent as they approached what amounted to a shrine carved out of a cliff.

  Then she stopped, and stretched to the balls of her feet, proudly. The rest caught up and stared at what lay before them. Protruding from the rock was a long skull of unimaginable size, the head of a monster.

  thirty-four

  It was oddly quiet. No breeze penetrated here. There was nothing to say. They stood side by side, studying an elongated skull that rose only a little out of the sandstone in which it was embedded, revealing perhaps ten percent of its mass. But it was enough. The ancient
jaws held monstrous teeth, each larger than a man’s hand, and shaped to pierce. The powerful jaw could catch large prey if indeed the beast was a meat-eater.

  A huge eye socket, the hole larger than a human head, peered up at them. Slabs of humped skull bone formed a lengthy nose. The back of the skull stopped abruptly, almost as if broken off. Behind the skull, the spinal bones lay disordered, half buried in the stone. From the vertebrae rose flat-topped dorsal ribs, with smaller curved ribs below. From there, the fossil vanished into the stone, only to reemerge ten feet farther along. There were more vertebrae all in disarray, beyond the imaginings of the most learned doctors of nature. But here were giant ribs, familiar bones now that spoke of the chest cavity. And an array of tiny bones that formed forepaws. These were so small that Skye could not believe they belonged to the same animal. Maybe this was all an ancient boneyard, the grave of all sorts of strange beasts.

  There was a pathway that took them farther along, a path worn by countless visitors. A pathway recently used, with faint imprints in the dust. Next was a few square yards of disorder, a great jumble of ribs and vertebrae, and then odd-shaped pelvic bones, broken into several pieces, mostly buried in rock. And then the shocking thing: monstrous leg bones, each taller than a tall man, mostly buried in rock, but the outlines visible. These were impossible bones, larger than wild imagination could fathom. Bones of an animal as tall as a house. And a few yards away, a well-preserved three-toed foot, a bird’s foot, delicately formed but still a pedestal that could support this monster. Beyond was a scatter of other bones, smaller and smaller, yard after yard, as if this strange beast had a twenty- or thirty-foot tail.

  Skye had been here before, and now had the same response as before. Did this come from God?

  Now he watched Mercer; watched the man visibly abandon the notion that this was a carved shrine, some religious artistry worked by an ancient sculptor. This beast had perished beside a river or on a beach and had been gradually covered with sand, and over aeons had become a fossil caught in sandstone until some giant upthrust had pushed this rock high, and erosion had worn through the sandstone and bared these unimaginable things.

  Mercer took off his hat. He was not smiling this time.

  “How old, do you think?” he asked.

  Skye shook his head.

  “There’s more,” Victoria said. She led them silently along the worn path that skirted the sandstone outcrop, until they came to another ledge jammed with bones, these disordered so much a mortal could hardly put them together to mean anything. But there they were, a carpet of bones, mostly broken into small pieces, and yet parts of a beast as formidable as the more complete skeleton they had just visited. But no, this was not the same beast, for when they came to the skull, or the fragment left of it, they found a peculiar horn rising from its snout, a blade where no blade should be, an illogical blade that would serve no fathomable purpose. So here was another monster of the deep, another nightmare to float through a man’s soul when sleep beckoned.

  “How would you like to run into one of these on your path?” Winding asked.

  “Why are they here?” Mercer asked.

  Who could say? The sandstone overhang protected them; that was all Skye could make of it.

  Mary was careful to touch every bone she could reach. She ran her small brown hand over the rock, her fingers into creases and over bulges, as if the bones were there to give her strength, and the more she touched them the stronger and wiser she would be. Victoria frowned. For her, the bones were sacred relics of her own origins, for she was one of the people of this bird. But Mary saw these bones her own way. Skye smiled at her and she smiled back. Touching the bones was giving medicine to her and she was harvesting the strange powers that lay within them.

  “Many more,” Victoria said, pointing. Indeed, the trail ran another fifty yards through the mortuary of giants somehow trapped here and hidden from air and sun and wind until recent times.

  Slowly Mercer hiked to the end of the bone yard and retraced his steps back to the monster that lay almost intact, the very first they had seen.

  “So you suppose the earth, the whole universe, is very old?” he asked. “I mean, hundreds of thousand of years. Maybe a million years. Do you imagine that God is recent; the universe is older than God?”

  Skye smiled. “That sort of thing is beyond me.” He would not speculate on things that seemed forever beyond understanding.

  “Well, I’ve seen the bones,” Mercer said. “Now let’s measure them. As it happens, the length of my belt is exactly a yard, and I’ve marked off feet on the belt. It’s my wilderness measure.”

  He pulled the belt from its loops. There indeed, on its interior side, were foot markers, and half-foot markers, and a set of six inches marked in some sort of ink or dye.

  “How am I going to record all this when I lack so much as paper and pencil?” he asked.

  It was a good question.

  “I will bring your robe. We will put the marks on the robe,” Mary said. The Shoshone was dealing with the bones a lot more easily than Victoria, who turned tight and silent and maybe angry.

  Skye watched Mary head back to the travois. But Mercer was already heading for that giant skull.

  “I say, Skye, I owe you an apology. I didn’t imagine these bones could be real. Just a mystery or some madman’s art. Not something that taxes my limited grasp of geology. Not something that turns my world, my theology, my universe, inside out. I’m glad you brought me here.”

  That was the thing about Mercer. He was always redeeming himself. Skye nodded and smiled.

  Mercer crawled up on the shelf and began measuring. Victoria looked ready to explode. He ran his belt over the skull and finally pronounced his verdict “Six feet four inches from the extremities.” Then he measured the eye socket. “Over a foot No make that fifteen inches.” And then he measured the largest of the exposed teeth. “Can you imagine it? Eleven inches or so!”

  Mary returned with the robe, some reed paintbrushes, and the small sack of ochre greasepaint These she handed to Victoria. “I do not know how to make the marks,” she said.

  “Don’t give it to me,” Victoria snarled. The explosion was so dark and pained that Skye and the men paused.

  “We’ll be leaving directly, Victoria,” Skye said. “We will be very respectful and do no harm.”

  Victoria sullenly turned her back on him. Skye had never seen her in such a state, and it worried him.

  “Oh, not quite that fast, Mister Skye,” Mercer said. “I’ll want some sketches. Blast it for not having paper. But I’ll do what I can on the back of the robe. What else can a man do?”

  Mercer laid the robe, hairy side down, directly on the bones and began the slow process of painting line drawings of what he saw. There was little room left on the robe, which now was filled with stick figures and pictographs. Mary cheerfully helped him but Victoria stormed away.

  Skye saw the depth of her anguish and headed her direction, catching her at last well out of earshot of the others.

  “He will doom us,” she said. “He has no respect.”

  Skye didn’t argue.

  “That is the Mother of my people. That is the great bird that came out of the heavens and gave birth to my people. That is the bird the ancient ones, the storytellers, speak of. We are the people of the great black bird. And whoever touches those bones will perish.”

  Skye didn’t believe the legend. It was ingrained deeply in her very soul but he could not share it with her.

  “You and I have not touched the bones or shown them disrespect,” he said.

  “But Mary has! And so have the white men.”

  “What will happen, Victoria? What does the legend of the Absaroka say?”

  “We should not even be here. We should not even approach these bones without a purifying. A sweat and the smoke of sweetgrass and gifts to the spirits. You saw the gifts as we came here, bundles given to this spirit. The spirits of these birds are here. They are offended.
Now we will perish, all of us, and I am at fault. I brought you here. I am a daughter of the People, a daughter of these ancient ones. They are my fathers and my grandfathers.”

  Tears filled her eyes.

  “I’ll fetch Mercer and the rest. We’ll leave the grandfathers alone, Victoria.”

  “It is too late.”

  Skye left her and went back to the bones, now resting in deep and cool shade under the sandstone ledge. Mercer was busy painting ribs and vertebrae.

  “I don’t know what half these bones are,” he said. “How am I going to persuade anyone I ever saw them? London is a city of skeptics. The Royal Society is a body of squinting old men.”

  “Time for us to leave, Mister Mercer. This is a holy place.”

  “Leave! I just got here. I don’t have much to dig with, but I’m going to take a tooth. That’ll shake a few timbers.”

  thirty-five

  Mercer began hunting for a tooth he could pry out with his belt knife but Skye tried to stay him.

  “Mister Mercer, don’t. This is sacred to Victoria’s people. And other people who live here.”

  “Skye, it’s nothing but a boneyard. Bones scattered everywhere. I plan to take a few with me. It’ll be my contribution to science.”

  “Mister Mercer, let’s think about this. If you took a tooth back to London they’d say exactly what you said before you got here. It’s a fraud. Someone carved it. A few fossil bones won’t make believers of them.”

  Mercer grinned. “Have to try, Skye. This is the biggest find of my life. My Lord, this’ll make me a Knight of the Garter. Sir Graves Duplessis Mercer, K.G.” He laughed. The idea tickled his fancy. The ancient order was the highest civil honor the crown could bestow and entitled the recipient to be called “Sir,” and to add the K.G. after his name.

  So Mercer was hell-bent to make himself a knight. Skye chose another tack. “Mister Mercer, this is a holy place. If you pry up bones it would be no different from someone sacking Westminster Cathedral for relics.”