An Angel in Stone

by Peggy Nicholson

  But their women, now there’s something! Bare tits and big smiles, that’s what a man calls a warm welcome. And can they cook—roasted up that deer pretty as you please and fed us till we near to burst.

  Then the exhausted waifs were led to the huts. Each family made room on its tiny sleeping platform for one overgrown, dirty, homesick stranger, and the starless night drew in.

  Raine closed the journal and lay, blinking drowsily at a firefly that had landed on her mosquito mesh. “A white dog,” she mused aloud.

  Ah San had called the Punan who brought him the tooth and the watch White Dog, hadn’t he?

  In all the time she’d been in Borneo, she’d yet to see a dog of that color. “But it can’t be the same guy. This happened, what—sixty-some years ago?”

  Coincidence. Had to be. Or maybe the Punan simply ran with a different breed of dog from the Dayaks?

  “You tell me,” she said to the deepening dark. And slept.

  Chapter 24

  When she awakened next morning, Raine found a gift waiting—four eggs. Each one was enclosed in a tiny rattan basket fixed to the end of a stick. The egg-sticks had been planted like a clump of four white flowers, near the head of her hammock. “I’m not Bungan,” she told the surrounding trees with a laugh. And nobody had ever explained what the goddess was supposed to do with her offerings, anyway.

  Boiled, they made a nice change from beef jerky.

  When she set out up the rising path, she found yesterday’s melancholy had vanished. But if she was happy again, she still could use some company. As the path rose gently mile after mile and she passed no more message sticks, Raine began to fear that she’d committed a gaffe, by eating the Punans’ eggs. A fertility goddess probably should have hatched them.

  By late afternoon she’d climbed from rainforest up into moss forest. The air was noticeably cooler and dryer. Now that the jungle creepers and bushes had given way to low-growing temperate flora, she could make out the bones of the earth. In the lowlands it had been granite. But now it was sedimentary rock, folded and faulted and broken. Rock that had been formed by layers of silt and mud—the only kind of rock that held fossils. “I’m getting closer,” she murmured aloud. “It’ll be terrain like—”

  Far down the slope, a dog yelped. Another joined in, then another, and another, in a high-pitched hunting song.

  Hunting me? Raine shrugged off her pack, then pulled out her blowgun. Extended and locked its sections. She’d seen dogs at every village she’d come to, big rangy hunting hounds. But did they also run wild, like the spotted packs of India that could take down a tiger? She dipped the point of a dart in her sack of gum, pushed it up the tube. Running with hunters or running wild, they were fast approaching, yelling hysterically on a scent.

  A glance to all sides showed no climbable tree; on this slope there were only pines, without a limb near the ground. She chose a wide one and put her back against it. Gummed up two more darts, to hold ready between the fingers of her left hand. Unsnapped the sheath on her ankle knife.

  Feral dogs could be the worst. They were damnably swift and they knew how to team up on their quarry.

  She could make out their separate voices now, the soprano bitches and the roar of the males, and below that a desperate panting, a lumbering beat. So it wasn’t she they were chasing, but if she looked like easier game? She aimed the pipe down the trail, drew in a slow, deep breath.

  Like a boulder rolling uphill, the boar burst into view. Hounds raced at his shaggy shoulders, nipped at his flying heels. With a wrenching squeal, the pig whirled around. Dipped his wicked tusks and heaved—a dog shrieked and went flying.

  As he wheeled, the wooden spear that dragged from his shoulders tripped a second dog. The boar squealed and went for him as he fell, but a white dog flew in, caught his ear, was flung aside.

  The pig turned to flee uphill—and saw Raine. Its massive head lowered.

  Down the hill came a yell of warning, but it was too late to pass on this fight. To the boar, she was just one more hateful spear maker. Raine moved the pipe from her lips, blew her spent breath out, sucked in…

  He lowered his gory tusks and charged.

  Looking down the length of her pipe, she would have sworn she had hours, years, a lifetime to choose her shot. The cold shaking sweats would come later, but for now, with adrenaline zinging through her veins, no fear, only serene calculation…His oncoming head was armored with bone. Not there. The right shoulder then, since the white dog was lunging in on his left. Raine blew gently…steadily. Pft!

  The dart flew true—bloomed where his neck met his shoulder—the pig was here! She smelled its reeking breath, the coppery blood; she pivoted around the tree as the beast slammed it head-on, shaking it to its roots.

  Shoving her second dart up the pipe, Raine peered around the trunk.

  The boar lay like a slab of mountain, dropped from the sky. The dogs snarled as they worried its bristly coat—then they skulked away as their masters arrived, yelling commands.

  The Punan.

  “Hi,” said Raine shakily, averting her blowgun. “Pleased to meet you.”

  There were half a dozen hunters—small, stocky men, panting from their chase. Barefoot and clad only in breechclouts, not a one of them stood high as her chin.

  The leader patted the white dog that hurried to lick his hand. He walked to the boar, gazed down at it—then let out a yell. He swung to give her an accusing glare, pointing down at the boar as he made a loud, disgusted pronouncement.

  Raine turned her hands palm up. “I’m sorry. I know he’s yours. Believe me, I’d have left him for you, but he was about to rip me to—”

  More yells, more accusations. Whatever she’d done, it wasn’t good.

  “You know, I’m sorry. But we need to talk, and we need to talk now. Listen up, guys! I use curare. It’s a paralytic. Mr. Pig could wake up any second now and when he does—”

  The white dog’s owner stamped his bare foot in frustration. He grabbed Raine’s hand and led her to the boar. Made her touch the tail of her dart. He scowled at her and shook a scolding finger.

  “Ohhh. You think I used poison? Now we can’t eat it? Well, I’ve got good news—and bad.” With a reassuring smile, she took his hand, and drew it down till…“Uh, just where would a pig’s heart be?” She pressed his palm to the boar’s larded rib cage.

  He gave her a look that in any culture meant, “Lady, are you a few darts shy of a full quiver?”

  “Heart, you know.” She released him and patted her own, which had finally realized how close they’d come to being pig fodder; it was merrily galloping. She pat-patted the hunter’s bare dusky chest, then pointed at the pig. “Heart! Find where it is, and you’ll find it’s still—”

  His eyes widened as he got it, but still he didn’t believe her. He shrugged indulgently, put his palm to the animal’s chest—and let out a yell—just as the boar staggered drunkenly to its feet.

  With whoops of startled laughter, the hunters fell back. The dogs roared in. Raine stepped out of the way and turned her head.

  Some mountains could fool you. You’d figure for sure that was the top, there, just over that next rise. You’d hump yourself up that bump—and find you’d been suckered again. So Szabo didn’t get his hopes up, this time, as he topped the rise.

  He dug in his heels and stopped short. “Whoa-baby!” The ridge fell away in a sand-colored cliff, like Godzilla had taken a bite out of this side.

  At its foot, half a mile below, the jungle was broken by a green, smooth field, mowed in the shape of an enormous, lopsided butterfly. He rubbed a sweaty wrist across his eyes. “Somehow…that don’t seem precisely right,” he told Gran. He’d been talking to her for a couple of days now, since he didn’t have the Dayak to bounce his thoughts off of, anymore.

  “Looks like one of those fancy courses, designed by some washed-up pansy pro who shoulda stuck to his wood irons. But if that’s what it is…where’s the golf carts?”

  A
white bird sailed below, some kind of stork, gliding in over the grass. It landed on tiptoe with wings spread wide, pretty as you please, on about the eighth hole.

  Like a bass hitting a june bug, something black and big slashed up out of the earth. A frantic flurry—and the bird was gone. Nothing but a puff of feathers, drifting on the breeze.

  “Holy shit!” What was that, some sort of giant killer mole?

  A ring formed on the grass…Expanded like a slow greasy shadow. No, hang on there! He was looking at ripples. A lake, covered in some sort of duckweed or something.

  “If that was a bass ate that bird, it was big as a couch.” He sat abruptly.

  “Must be getting jungle rot in the brains,” he muttered, unslinging his pack. This was the lake he’d been looking for! The lake beyond the mountains, like the Chinaman back in Long Badu had said Ashaway asked him about.

  Szabo pulled a folded paper out of the top section of his pack. He’d made a sketch of the map inside his granddaddy’s watch, before he’d mailed it on back to Gran. “Yeah!” He hadn’t noticed when he drew it, but it did look like a raggedy swallowtail. “Now we’re getting some place.”

  All he had to do was get across to the lake’s far side. From there you looked for a creek, draining out of the lake, headed northeast, and you followed that till you came to…he squinted northeast and laughed aloud. “Bingo!”

  Out on the misty horizon stood a two-tit mountain, looking not much bigger than the picture that his granddaddy had scratched inside his watch cover. A couple of green D cups, joined by a low saddle between. “That’s gotta be what I’m looking for,” he told Gran.

  To reach it, he had to get past this lake. “And forget swimming.” So go left—or go right?

  To the left, the ridge sloped away to low land. Maybe low enough to be swampy? Lot of smooth duckweed-green showing between the trees. Whatever was cruising the lake, might be paddling around in there, as well.

  On the other hand, to the right, the cliffs continued for miles. Could be a hell of a scrabble.

  He fingered his left arm reflectively, where Lia’s bite still hadn’t healed. Itched him like crazy, and it was weeping some. “Whichever way I go, what happens if Ashaway comes traipsing along? Takes the other route and beats me to it?”

  He should have finished her off when he had the chance. But he’d gotten to worrying, while he was torching her boat. What if the bitch was upstream, burning his? So he’d waded on back to camp, telling himself that without a dugout, she was out of the contest. She’d have no way to follow him.

  But there was something about her, kept him fretting. Who’d have believed a girl would make it this far? “Stubborn. Like the alligator snapping turtle that won’t let go till it thunders.”

  Or maybe it was Gran, the blonde put him in mind of. Hanging on to her hope of treasure all these livelong years. Never taking “no” for an answer. Pushing first his daddy, then him, to go find it for her. A man didn’t like to admit it, but sometimes women could be downright…scary.

  “Aw, hogwash.” He hauled himself to his aching feet, and struggled into his pack. If Ashaway was still sniffing up his trail, well, when she came to his boatman’s body, that should scare her off, for once and for all.

  “’Less he’s still alive,” Szabo muttered, turning right along the cliff.

  In that case, if the Girl Scout hadn’t packed a saw or a hatchet…“She’s probably back there, gnawing that trunk with her teeth.”

  He glanced back the way he’d come and grinned. “And sugar, you better gnaw fast.” ’Cause it sure looked like rain.

  “No, thank you. I’m really not hungry,” Raine assured the chief, when he offered her a strip of smoked pig.

  She just might swear off bacon for life. The first night’s feast after the boar hunt, she’d matched her hosts bite for succulent bite. After the Dayaks’ boiled fish and rice, then her own freeze-dried trail food, pork roasted with herbs in banana leaves had been heaven.

  Then the next day featured pork served in ant sauce. Not bad, actually, with the insects’ formic acid giving it a mouth-puckering lemony flavor. But that dish had been breakfast, lunch and dinner while the women busied themselves, rendering the boar’s fat in an ancient iron kettle. They’d stored the precious lard in bamboo tubes for trade or future use, while their men smoke-dried the rest of the carcass, cut into long strips.

  Late on the second day—yesterday—the rain had drifted across the forest in a silvery curtain. They’d bundled the half-dried jerky into their tiny sleep platforms—and insisted that Raine crawl in with them, too.

  Frankly she’d have preferred the quiet and privacy of her own hammock, with its overarching rain flap. But it could be bad manners to reject hospitality, especially the headman’s invitation. So she’d spent the night with White Dog’s family, wedged between his two squirmy toddlers—with the increasingly smelly strips of boar dangling from the rafters, a few feet above her nose. At least they didn’t have to reach far for breakfast.

  Now, after a nap, apparently it was snack time. “No, really, I couldn’t,” she repeated, when White Dog’s wife Abat offered again. She patted her stomach, smiled and groaned with repletion. In bad weather, eating must be the main amusement.

  Other than sex, judging from the giggles coming from the nearest shelters. So far, thank heavens, Raine’s presence was putting a damper on that pastime at White Dog’s house.

  Still she supposed she owed them some sort of distraction. Careful not to bump the jerky, she sat up and reached for her pack. “Let’s see…What have we got here?”

  Not the photographs. She’d made several attempts to question everyone already. But all the photos proved was how far from the twenty-first century she’d traveled in space and time. Shown the pictures of Ashaway family members with various dinosaur skeletons, the Punan had all reacted the same way. They’d study the images for several minutes with polite frowns—then they’d reverse each photo, looking for the backside of the scene.

  She’d watched Otto the cat do much the same, once, back in the city. He’d poked his nose behind a TV set, searching for the birds that were being shown on a National Geographic special.

  Seeing in two dimensions didn’t come naturally to humans, any more than it did to cats. It was a learned skill that the Punan had never needed in the forest. Some of the tribe were intrigued by these peepholes into a place where strangers had no bottoms or backsides. Others glanced at her uneasily, then hurried off to tend the fire or snatch up a child, as if they needed the reassurance of their normal, well-rounded world.

  But nobody drew the least connection between Raine’s photos of dinosaurs—and anything they’d ever seen in their own life.

  “So no more photos.” And for the same reason she couldn’t draw sketches or maps of what she was seeking. Too abstract.

  She’d tried showing White Dog her opals, hoping the shiny stones might remind him of the opalized fossil he’d traded to Ah San. If he really was that same Punan, with the same white hunting dog.

  But if he was the man she was looking for, he’d failed to recognize a link between her small fiery stones and the big iridescent dinosaur tooth. He’d admired her necklace, especially the fossil feather. Then he’d proudly showed her his own totem: two enormous, curving boar’s tusks, flanked by two tiny burned-out lightbulbs, all strung on a leather cord with some gorgeous blue feathers.

  “So you’ve been to Long Badu or some town at least once,” Raine had concluded. But if she couldn’t find a way to ask him what he’d traded and where he’d found it? Had she come all this way for nothing?

  “Meanwhile…” she rummaged deeper into her pack, while the headman’s family watched with avid attention. “Could I play you the kazoo?”

  But she’d done that already, when it had fallen her turn to entertain at the pig roast. She’d gone “on stage” directly after the tribe’s best mimic. He’d given a blow-by-blow, wickedly comical rendition of Raine’s encounter with the snake
at the boulder, which had set the whole group to weeping with laughter.

  They’d liked it so much, they’d insisted he do an encore—complete with popping eyes and knocking knees and silly feminine shrieks—then yet another, where a second hunter played the snake, and White Dog came forward to reenact how he’d aimed his darts.

  Finally Raine had jumped up to steal the show out of sheer self-defense. “No…enough with the kazoo.” Her fingers brushed the little notebook. “Then…how about a bedtime story?” She needed to read the rest of Szabo’s journal. And the Punan seemed to like listening to her voice, even though it carried less meaning for them than a birdcall. A rainy day in the jungle, she supposed any novelty would do.

  She pulled it out, then remembered. “You brought this to Ah San, also. Right?” She handed it to White Dog. “Yes? Seem familiar?”

  He touched it gingerly, then looked up at her, smiling but perplexed.

  “You’re wondering how I would have gotten it, when you took it to Long Badu? Or you’re asking yourself, do strangers all carry one of these things?” With a sigh, she took the book back from him, flipped to the right page, and commenced reading:

  “We stayed in camp a couple of days, till the venison ran out. Professor is trying to learn their lingo, but the rest of us are getting along fine without it. We just open our mouths and point and grunt, when we’re hungry. Then last night, Carleton grabbed one of the girls and pointed at his privates. She just giggled and scooted off into the bushes. Professor got mad and said we shouldn’t mess with their women. Sez who knows how they feel about that?

  But we’ll never know if we don’t ask ’em, is the way I see it.”

  “And you’re the guy with a pregnant wife back home,” Raine muttered, looking up. Seeing she had everyone’s rapt attention, she continued.