Shadow of the Raven

by David Sundstrand

  “Caves and overhanging cliffs are not a common feature of the Mojave. Weathering is severe in the desert. The Chumash of the California coast made beautiful pictographs, but few have survived. Most have succumbed to weathering and vandalism.”

  Frank pushed the button to change slides. He liked being just a voice in the dim light, the students looking up at the screen, not at him.

  Bighorn sheep with sticklike legs appeared to be running across the bottom face of a rock dark from the sun. “This is one of the petroglyphs found in the Cosos, up in the Naval Weapons Test Range Center, about thirty miles from here. How many of you have relatives working at China Lake?” Frank looked around the classroom and saw several hands in the air. “Well, you’ll be happy to know that the navy tries to avoid bombing the petroglyph canyons. The greatest concentration of petroglyphs in North America are right here in the Cosos. You could say Ridgecrest is the petroglyph capital of the world, but on second thought, I’m not sure I’d begin any conversations that way.” Frank heard a few appreciative chuckles.

  “Now, you can see that these figures have been chipped into the rock itself. These are petroglyphs. The aboriginal artist used a hard, sharp stone and pecked the design into the rock, sort of a reverse tattoo, chipping away the dark surface to reveal the original color of the rock underneath.

  “The dark purplish brown surface of the rock is called ‘desert varnish.’ It happens when moisture and heat work together. The moisture soaks into the rock and then the sun bakes the rock, leaching the moisture out. When this happens, the water leaves mineral deposits on the surface of the rock, desert varnish. How long does it take? Well, that’s a problem.”

  Frank changed the slide. The petroglyphs of the bighorn sheep were in different clusters, two smaller sheep near the top face. These were done with greater attention to detail and proportion. Two small lines protruded from the stick legs, ending in a depiction of cloven hooves. The bodies of the sheep were in relative proportion to the heads. Directly below these were a line of sheep, touching nose to tail, as if they were in a stately parade. The heads of the sheep were tiny, but the horns curved around in large full arcs.

  “Now in this slide, there are two groupings of pictures on the same rock face, one much older than the other. How can you tell?” He waited, hoping not to have to answer his own question.

  Behind him, a female voice offered, “The figures near the top look like they’ve faded, started to turn color again. Are those the oldest?”

  Frank turned his head in her direction. He could just see the top of the young woman’s head. She was seated next to the door, by the boys. He craned his neck and caught the dark eyes framed by the dark hair. Again he noticed her faintly amused smile.

  “Right, the older petroglyphs are starting to gain color again, picking up a patina of desert varnish. The bighorn sheep depicted near the top of the rock are the oldest. The sheep in a line at the bottom are the most recent.

  “It’s not too difficult to tell which petroglyphs are the oldest in a given site. But it’s nearly impossible to tell how old the figures are, give or take a thousand years, and that’s because we aren’t sure how long it takes for desert varnish to accumulate, as there are different rates for different rocks and microclimates. On the whole, you’d have to leave a new rock out in the sun and rain from somewhere between two to five thousand years.”

  He changed the slide. A human figure grasping what appeared to be a club of some sort stood next to a bighorn sheep in flight, an odd sticklike club protruding from its body.

  “But there are other clues. See the figure of the bighorn sheep. Notice how his head and horns are in profile. This configuration is typical of the early period, when bighorns were hunted with the atlatl, or the spear-throwing device. See the stick with the hook at one end and what looks like a grip on the other end? That’s the atlatl. It worked like an extension of the arm, giving the hunter greater power and range. The same sort of figure is protruding from the body of the sheep. It’s as if the artist meant to represent the atlatl in its entirety, rather than showing its separate parts.

  “Any of you use a stick to throw another stick when you were about nine or ten?” Frank looked around the room. “Come on, throwing sticks is the next most important thing for a ten-year-old to throwing rocks.” Frank saw some hands come up, a few at first, then more than a dozen.

  “Well, you creative stick throwers know that it’s an advantage. You can throw farther. You probably controlled a couple of vacant lots and a hill fort, right? Anyhow, the atlatl was an effective hunting tool for thousands of years, but then something important happened about two thousand years ago. The rocks tell the story.”

  Frank changed slides again, moving fairly quickly through a series depicting bighorn sheep and the figures of ancient hunters pecked into the dark stone surfaces. He stopped on the figure of a sheep surrounded by hunters clutching primitive bows. The sheep’s body was penetrated by arrows.

  “Things have changed. These hunters are using the bow and arrow. They can shoot the arrows from behind rock blinds, and they don’t have to stand up.” From the corner of his eye, Frank could see that the cluster of males near the door was sitting up, craning to see the slide. “They can kill sheep at a greater range. Things are looking up”—he paused—“but not for the sheep.

  “Over a period of time, the aboriginal ancestors of the Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, and Comanche were probably too successful. They killed off a principal supply of food, emptied the store. At the same time, the last pluvial period was coming to an end, and the Pleistocene lakes were drying up. It was time to move on or starve.

  “Look at this slide. The figures of the sheep have become stylized. The head shape is merely representational, still in profile, but the horns are frontal. The body has a straight back and a bowshaped belly. The artist made no attempt to depict hooves.

  “In this slide, there is a shaman figure. He’s holding three arrows in one hand and what could be a medicine bag in the other. Are these stylized figures ritual symbols? Were the last inhabitants of the Cosos trying to bring the sheep back? I think so. But it was too late. The damage had been done. As a matter of fact, bighorn sheep have never returned to the Cosos. There are a few in the Panamints and scattered throughout the ranges of the Mojave, but their survival is still questionable.

  “All-terrain vehicles make much more of the desert accessible. Increased accessibility puts the sheep into contact with poachers and threatens the habitat. Unfortunately for the sheep, the poacher’s high-powered rifle reaches even farther than the bow and arrow. Perhaps we can learn from those who went before us and not repeat their mistakes.”

  After Jan turned on the lights, Frank offered to take questions. Lots of hands went up.

  “Why didn’t later Indians make petroglyphs?”

  Frank explained how the bow and arrow changed everything. How the atlatl required that the hunter get close to the quarry. The hunt shaman and his special magic had been a necessary part of a successful hunt, he said. With the bow and arrow, the sheep were much easier to kill. Ritual magic wasn’t needed for hunting sheep any longer. The shamans probably had other things on their minds.

  “Why are there so many petroglyphs in the Coso range?” someone asked. The students were experiencing moments of awakened curiosity, making teaching possible. Perhaps the great clustering of rock art in the petroglyph canyons of the Cosos had been a flowering of desperate incantations for the return of the vanished sheep, Frank suggested. He saw that the class period was nearly over.

  “In any case, about a thousand years ago, the Shoshonean-speaking peoples began their diaspora. Those tribes that continued to live within the bighorn range carried the rock art with them, but the greatest concentration of petroglyphs is in the Cosos, Panamints, and Death Valley.

  “Yes.” He pointed to an intense-looking girl wearing a single feather earring.

  “Then you think the original people weren’t living in harmony with their
environment. They were no better than we are?”

  “Well, probably not.” Frank thought for a moment. “What happened to them might not be much different from what’s happening to us. If you think about it, the development of the bow and arrow was a technological change. It extended their power. They were able to kill lots of sheep, and perhaps they didn’t value them in the same way. Certainly the nature of the hunt changed. They were just people living on the land and making mistakes.”

  “Following that logic, if they had had guns, they would have killed everything off and starved to death,” she said, and turned her head slightly, trying to see how the class would react to her comment.

  Frank pushed on. “Probably not. However, technological change usually requires cultural adjustment. I like the thought of the Pilgrims armed with bows and arrows and Squanto and his pals armed with flintlocks. The westward expansion might’ve ended at Plymouth Rock.”

  There were a few chuckles. The girl gave him a dark scowl, so he searched the room for someone with a friendly face who had raised a hand.

  “Is the poaching of bighorn sheep still a problem in the Panamints, inside Death Valley National Park itself?” The question came from the same dark-haired young woman by the door, more businesslike now, her face turned serious.

  Frank sensed a logical intelligence at work. “Despite the fact that hunting the desert bighorn has been illegal in California since 1876, there are still poachers.”

  “Why? Why would someone want to kill desert bighorn sheep?”

  Frank could see that she was taking notes. “The desert bighorn is hunted as a trophy. Despite the invention of firearms, hunting the bighorn on foot requires stalking skills and marksmanship. There are four major varieties of bighorn sheep in North America, from Alaska to the desert. The Holy Grail of big-game hunting in North America is the grand slam, the taking of the four major species of bighorn sheep.”

  “‘Taking’?” Her tone was quietly challenging. The room was very quiet. Frank realized his credibility was on the line.

  “Okay, killing. The favored term among hunting advocates is harvesting. It implies a food supply, so people tend to go along with the ‘harvesting’ of game animals. But the bighorns are no longer hunted for their meat, so I chose a more neutral term, a word hunters used before everyone started choosing up sides.”

  Her look was direct, curious; Frank could feel her mind at work. “Well, if hunting the desert bighorn has been illegal since 1876, then how does someone become an accepted member of the club, make a grand slam?”

  “The answer is simple: They hunt illegally. They hunt in Baja California, or they get lucky with the lottery. The state of California has a lottery for a few spots, maybe ten or twenty at most, so Desert bighorns can be hunted legally with these special permits. Of these, the state may auction off two or three to the highest bidder. The money goes to fund the study of the desert bighorn and to support habitat programs. The bidding has gone as high as a hundred thousand dollars for the chance, just the chance, to take a trophy. So you can see that the motive for illegal hunting can be very strong.”

  Frank saw a tattooed arm raised in studied nonchalance. It was the slender blond man seated up front. He was not as young as most of them. Frank could see that now.

  “Are you the BLM ranger who discovered the dead poacher in Surprise Canyon?” He looked at Frank as if experiencing some sort of personal communion.

  Jan Rockford got to her feet. “I’m afraid we’re out of time. I want to thank Officer Flynn for coming to our class and for the interesting and informed discussion of rock art. Perhaps he will come back another time and share some more of his knowledge and insights.” The applause was more than halfhearted. Frank was surprised and pleased. He hoped it was because the students found the subject interesting and not because he’d finally finished.

  Students for the next class began filing into the classroom. Jan reached for Frank’s hand with both of hers. “Frank, thank you so much. They loved it. I could tell. Please, come back soon. Unfortunately, I have another class. But if you have time, I’d like to take you to lunch. There’s someone I want you to meet, and I know a place where the food’s good and the beer’s cold.”

  He nodded. “Sure, sounds great. I’ll wander around campus and meet you back here in an hour.”

  The classroom was nearly full again with incoming students. As Frank slipped out the door, he waved good-bye and stepped into the covered walkway. The young couple with the tattoos was waiting for him just outside the door. The man stuck out his hand. “Hey, man, that was really interesting. Sometimes you see things without really looking at them.”

  Frank shook his hand. “Frank Flynn.”

  “Uh, yeah, Mitch Cooper.” He shuffled from one foot to the other. There was obviously something else on his mind. Frank waited. “I read about the dead guy in the desert. You the guy who found him?”

  Frank nodded. He caught the girl’s watery blue eyes looking at him, and then she quickly looked away, her eyes cast down at grimy feet. “Yes, that’s right.” He paused. “I’m the guy.”

  Cooper’s whole body seemed to fidget. Finally, he met Frank’s eyes, tossing his stringy shoulder-length hair back with a defiant flip. “Well, I might know him. I mean, who he was. But I got another class, and then I have to go to work.”

  Frank spoke to Cooper in his best matter-of-fact voice. “Look, Mitch, why don’t you give me a call.” He took a card from his wallet and carefully printed his cell phone number on the back. “Give me a call, and we’ll meet someplace.” Frank wished he’d worn civvies. Outside in the sunlight, his uniform obviously made Mitch skittish. Frank smiled reassuringly. “I’d really appreciate anything you can tell me that would help to identify the body.” This one would be easy to scare away, and Frank didn’t want to do that. Not now, when he was considerably closer to finding out who the second man was. He might still be around. Maybe he was a poacher of men as well as of sheep.

  5

  Frank followed Jan’s beat-up Gremlin up the road toward Ridgecrest. The car was a little like Jan, wide-bodied, unusual, and, according to Jan, dependable. Cars told the tale. Fat cats in fat cars. Poor folks in junkers, leaking oil in sad little puddles wherever they stopped on their journey to the junkyard, or, more likely, to the last stop in some desert gully. The desert was dotted with rusting shells, the final remnants of disposable dreams, from gleaming showroom to desert detritus.

  He was living in a glass house again. His ’53 Chevy pickup marked him a latent Luddite with a streak of vanity—no air conditioning, no power this or power that, just a carburetor and distributor, mechanical fuel pump, stuff he could work on. It had all been carefully restored—shiny and bright, neat and clean, like his faded khakis, which were always ironed, with just a touch of a crease.

  The truck was his time capsule, insulating him from the frantic present. After a couple of beers, sitting in the cab of his truck at night, he could hear the distant echos of the past, a steam train working its way up the grade to Keeler, the yellow light from the caboose flickering across the tops of the creosote bushes. He shook his head, thinking that perhaps he ought to buy a new four-wheel-drive truck. If nothing else, it would save a lot of digging, but he knew he wouldn’t.

  Jan was zipping along at seventy, faster than Frank usually drove. He pressed on the throttle and listened to the even ripple of the tappets, a little bit noisy—time to adjust the valves.

  He followed Jan onto Highway 178. Where was she going? They had almost run out of town. Then she turned into an abandoned gas station, the service island a deserted strip of cement, the asphalt cracked and weedy. Jan pulled under the shade of a tattered canopy. At the far corner of the commercial lot, a squat cube of whitewashed cement block had been recently erected. It stood there, glaringly bright in the afternoon sun. A hand-painted sign ran along three edges of the roof, announcing Ralph’s Burritos. Ralph’s Burritos? He’d withhold judgment on Ralph, but anything could happen. Rece
ntly, on one of his infrequent trips he’d eaten a great chile relleno made by a Korean, but that was in L.A., the mecca of ethnic food.

  He pulled up next to Jan’s Gremlin, where she stood waiting with a younger woman, the dark-haired woman from the class. He hadn’t been expecting this, but he should have. For some reason or other, he seemed to awaken a maternal response in older women. Maybe it was his size or his shyness, but it made him apprehensive and irritated. He could do without the well-meaning matchmaking that seemed to plague his life.

  Jan took his arm and propelled him toward her companion. “Frank, I want you to meet Linda Reyes. She’s with the InyoKern Courier.” The name was familiar. He had declined to be interviewed about finding the body in the Panamints. He was glad to leave that stuff up to Dave Meecham, who preferred to deal with the press. What was Jan up to?

  He took Linda’s outstretched hand. The grip was firm and dry. “Pleased to meet you.” For some reason, he grinned, feeling a bit foolish, as if he’d been caught at something he shouldn’t have been doing. Damn Jan Rockford.

  They took stools on the side of the whitewashed stand that was somewhat protected from the sun. Jan suggested he try Ralph’s special burrito, which was okay with Frank. The smells of chili, cumin, and cilantro wafting up from the stainless-steel pots reminded Frank how hungry he was.

  Ralph, who looked more like Pancho Villa than a Ralph, wrapped beans, rice, and pico de gallo in a huge steamed tortilla, frowning at his customers as he worked.

  “Wet or dry?”

  Frank opted for dry and was immediately sorry when Ralph ladled a rich onion and tomatillo salsa over Jan and Linda’s burritos. He pushed his paper plate back toward the scowling Ralph.

  “Make mine wet, too.”

  Ralph’s scowl deepened. Evidently, he didn’t like weak-minded costumers. He eyed Frank.