Spirit and the Skull
Page 19
But The Mother couldn’t have told her that. Or could she? Perhaps it’s only another dream. No matter. My time ends. Will my spirit join friends around those countless campfires in the sky? Will my soul return again and again? And one day share my story? I close my eyes and wonder if…
Afterword & Acknowledgements
Once upon a time, I spent a summer on the North Slope of the Brooks Range in Alaska, one hundred and forty-three miles north of the Arctic Circle. The land was every bit as beautiful and harsh as I’ve depicted it in this novel. Within hours of disembarking from a floatplane, two of us encountered a great bear. Like Raven and Down. A grizzly, in our case. We were better clothed and armed, but we didn’t shoot, or intend to shoot. Bears weren’t what we hunted there, and we knew our chances of stopping a charging grizzly were next to nil. Fortunately, this one, after an uncomfortably close inspection, chose to go elsewhere.
We spent ninety days in the field, from mid-June to the end of August. It rained two days out of three and snowed about once a week. Temperatures ranged from ninety-four to nine degrees Fahrenheit. While there, we saw more bears as well as moose, caribou, wolverines, foxes, dall sheep, ground squirrels, ptarmigan, songbirds, a host of waterfowl, and grayling (a form of arctic freshwater salmon). We saw no wolves, just their tracks in the same places we frequented. Ghosts.
Those invisible wolves lead me to something else about the Arctic I’ve tried to portray in these pages. There exists an oddness that’s hard to explain. It’s a sense that magic would be normal there. That usual rules don’t apply. That you could climb a ridge one morning and see a band of prehistoric big-game hunters creeping up on the mammoths feeding at the edge of the lake below. Or watch a herd of caribou thick enough to blanket the Earth in their tens of thousands—something we actually witnessed.
Those familiar with this landscape know how commonly it affects the people, both positively and negatively, who live there or visit it. Look up Arctic Hysteria. Then apply the term to us, if you think it’s appropriate.
We were forty-seven miles from a geological field camp at Umiat on the Colville River, and forty-four miles from the nearest permanently occupied human habitation, an Eskimo village at Anaktuvuk Pass. Yet we heard voices. On several still evenings, while curtains of fog draped the tundra, we clearly heard conversations. We could never make out the words. Maybe geologists or hunters were somewhere in our area. If so, the occasional floatplanes that brought us supplies and visitors didn’t know about them. Maybe conditions were right and allowed the sound of voices to carry extraordinary distances. Or maybe Raven’s band passed nearby.
One member of our party looked up and saw a woman in skins and furs standing beside the creek where we did most of our work. Could it have been Down, perhaps? Or The Mother, gracing him with her presence—or warning us away—before she disappeared into thin air?
I loved my brief time above the Arctic Circle. That summer was among the most valuable learning experiences of my life. I wish I’d gone back. The memory of that place still haunts me. Sometimes, I think if I could return to that ridge I mentioned earlier, I could cross it, go down, and join that band of mammoth hunters. I know exactly where The Mother’s cave is now, though we couldn’t find it while we were there. Maybe, all these years later, I’ve begun to understand the words I heard whispering through the fog and shared them here with you.
For those who want to know how accurately The People’s culture has been portrayed in this novel, there’s no way to know for certain. These undocumented immigrants to the New World probably carried a Clovis-like toolkit. But permafrost archaeology doesn’t cooperate with confirming that. Frozen soil churns, tumbling artifacts, and other materials deposited on the surface, moving them inconveniently up, down, and sideways. We, for instance, found the remains of a mammoth tusk that had clearly been cut by humans. Who knows when, since Eskimos harvested mammoth ivory for tools and artwork long after the last of the mammoths died. But we found a mammoth tooth there as well. That would seem to indicate the rest of the beast lay nearby. We began excavating in search of it and found nothing. Nothing except frozen soil, and when we’d return, a trench filled with permafrost melt that had to be bailed out before another inch or so of muck could be scraped from the bottom. One or two more bailing sessions might have uncovered it. Or a thousand more might not. I was always certain it lay close by. If we’d only known exactly where or how deep to dig, we’d have found it along with the weapons the big-game hunters used to bring it down.
What we did find was a collection of unusual artifacts, far more primitive than Clovis, in the gravels of one small creek. Those tools were absent from adjacent waterways. They’re a fascinating hint of what might have been the tools of some of the first people to enter the Americas. Or not.
I considered and rejected using more formal language in the novel to indicate that The People spoke in a different and simpler way. In the end, I decided they’d have had a large and complex vocabulary, and when they spoke to each other, the patterns they heard would have been as full of contractions and shortcuts as modern English. I’ll have to admit the bear/bare pun probably wouldn’t have worked the way I used it. Something quite similar might have, however. And tribal peoples are noted for their earthy sense of humor.
I suspect I’ve been too generous with many tools my version of The People had available. Atalatls, sure. Bows and arrows, maybe. Wine, not likely, especially for immigrants traversing such a difficult environment. The same goes for the penicillin-like mold. We do know, however, that prehistoric societies studied and understood their habitats thoroughly. Items with healing properties, and alcohol—for its purely medicinal properties, of course—were independently discovered early and often. And those fermented beverages never lost their popularity.
There are no Paleolithic ivory Venus figurines in the New World. But The Mother, The Goddess of the animals, was certainly here. Maybe Raven independently invented an art form common to another place and time. Or maybe we haven’t found the ivory Venus carvings of the Americas yet.
Thanks to my readers and editors—Annette Rogers, Barbara Peters, Elizabeth Gunn, Susan Cummins Miller, Barbara Hayes, J. Carson Black, and Janet Dailey. Life has been so complicated during the writing of this novel, that I might never have gotten this mess sorted out without their kind assistance. For any errors that remain, the author alone is responsible.
JMH
Sedna Creek, AK, and Tucson, AZ
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