Standing there beside the river, I tried to get the facts sorted out. Looking at the situation realistically, I had to reconcile myself to the idea that my chances of getting back to Willow Bend were small. That meant that there were a lot of things to do. First things first, I told myself. Shelter at the moment was more important than food. If necessary, I could starve for a little while. But before the fall of night, I had to find someplace where I would be sheltered from the wind, some small hideaway that might conserve my body heat. The important thing, I knew, was not to panic. I had not panicked so far; I could not afford to panic.
Shelter, food and fire—those were the three things that I needed. Shelter came first, after that, food; fire could wait a little while. Fish, once I had rigged a net, would supply food, but there would be other food as well. Probably tubers and roots, even leaves and bark, although I had no way of knowing which of these would be safe. Perhaps I could find out by watching what bears and other animals ate, take a chance that what they ate was safe. There would be, as well, slow game, small game, but for these, I’d need a weapon, a club. If I could not find another kind of club, the gun would work, but it would be heavy and awkward to handle. A stick would be better. Surely, somewhere, I could find a proper stick that would fit my hand—a well-seasoned piece that would not break at the first blow. A bow and some arrows would be better and, in time, I probably could come up with such a weapon. I’d have to find a sharp stone or a stone that could be broken to form a cutting edge. With it, I could cut down and shape a sprout into a bow. When I’d been a lad, I remembered, I’d been hell let loose with a bow and arrow. I’d need a cord, and fine roots—fine, tough roots—would serve. Was it cedar roots that the Indians had used to sew canoes? It had been years since I’d read “The Song of Hiawatha” and there was something in it, I was sure, that told about cedar roots being used to make canoes. Probably some of the evergreens that grew here were cedars and I could dig down and get the roots.
While I was thinking all of this, I had turned away from the river and was walking back toward the birch clump. I turned to the right and climbed the small slope above the clump, for it had occurred to me that I had better start right now looking for someplace to spend the night. A cave of some sort would be ideal. If nothing else, if no cave were available, I might make out by crawling into a grove of evergreens. The branches of most evergreens hung close against the ground, and while they might not afford much protection from the cold, at least they would keep out the wind.
I reached the top of the little rise and began to angle down it, looking for some ground formation that might lead me to shelter. Thus it was that I was almost on top of it before I saw it—the hole gouged in the ground. Stopping at its edge, I looked down into it. But it was some seconds before I realized what I had found.
Then, suddenly, I knew. This was the pit where I had been digging. It was old. There was no freshness to it. A bit bigger than when I had first come upon it, but still old; its walls were overgrown with grass and a small birch tree thrust out of the far wall, the tree tilted at a crazy angle.
I squatted down and looked at it and a curious wave of terror came over me. A terrible sense of time. If only the gouge could have been new and raw, I thought, I might have derived some strange comfort from it. But for some reason I could not understand, the oldness of the pit stirred a deep depression in me.
A cold nose touched my naked back and, instinctively, I leaped straight up, letting out a squall of fright. I came down on the slope of the pit, rolling to the bottom, the gun flying out of my hand.
Sprawling on my back, I stared up the slope at the thing that had touched me with its nose. It wasn’t a sabertooth or a dire wolf. It was Bowser, looking down at me with a silly grin on his face, his tail waving frantically.
On hands and knees, I scrambled up the wall of the pit, threw my arms around the dog and hugged him while Bowser washed my face with a slobbering tongue. I staggered to my feet and reached out to grab his tail.
“Git for home, Bowser!” I yelled at him, and the limping Bowser, one back leg stiffened by the Folsom wound, headed straight for home.
NINE
I sat at the kitchen table, wrapped up in a blanket, trying to get the frost out of my bones. Rila was busy at the pancake griddle.
“I hope,” she said, “that you didn’t catch a cold.”
I shivered; I couldn’t help it. “It was cold back there,” I told her.
“The idea of running out with nothing on but pajama bottoms.”
“There was ice north,” I said. “I could practically feel the ice. I bet I wasn’t more than twenty miles from a glacial front. This is a driftless area. The ice came down, time after time, moving south on each side of us, but never crossing this area. No one quite knows why. But twenty or thirty miles north, there could have been ice.”
“You had a gun,” she said. “What happened to the gun?”
“Well, when Bowser over there came up behind me, he close to scared me witless. I jumped and dropped the gun and when I saw Bowser, I never stopped to pick it up. The only thing that I could think of was that he could get me home.”
She brought a platter stacked with cakes to the table and sat down opposite me.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Here we are, talking about your going back in time as if doing so were an everyday affair.”
“Not to me,” I said, “but it is to Bowser. The thing about it is that he must go to many different times. He wouldn’t have been stabbed in the rump with a Folsom point at a time when he could have found dead dinosaurs to drag home.”
“To tangle with a Folsom point,” she said, “he couldn’t have traveled back much more than twenty thousand years. Perhaps, a great deal less than that. You are sure you saw no signs of man?”
“What kind of signs? Footprints? Broken arrows lying around?”
“I was thinking of smoke.”
“There wasn’t any smoke. The only solid time clue that I have is a mastodon that damn near ran me down.”
“You’re sure you did go back? You aren’t having fun with me? You didn’t just imagine the whole thing?”
“Sure. I went out in the woods and hid the gun, then whistled Bowser to me and grabbed him by the tail …”
“I’m sorry, Asa. I know. Of course, you didn’t. You think that cat-faced thing has something to do with it? Here, get started on those cakes before they get cold. Drink some of the coffee. It is hot. It will warm you up.”
I forked cakes onto my plate, buttered them, poured on syrup.
“You know,” said Rila, “we just might have something.”
“That’s right. We have a place where it isn’t safe to go looking for a fox.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “We may have something big. If you have discovered time travel, think of what you could do with it.”
“Not on your life,” I said. “I’m not fooling around. I’ve had it. When I see Catface again, I’m going to turn around and walk rapidly away. You could get trapped back there. I couldn’t count on Bowser to come back every time and get me.”
“But supposing you could control it.”
“How could you control it?”
“You could make a deal with Catface.”
“Hell, I can’t even talk to Catface.”
“Not you. Hiram, maybe. Hiram could talk with Catface. He talks to Bowser, doesn’t he?”
“He thinks he talks with Bowser. He thinks he talks with robins, too.”
“How do you know he doesn’t?”
“Now, goddamn it, Rila, just be sensible.”
“I am being sensible. How can you be so sure he doesn’t talk with Bowser? As a scientist …”
“A scientist of sorts.”
“All right, even as a scientist of sorts, you know very well you can’t take a position, either negative or positive, until you have some evidence. And remember what Ezra said about Catface coming around and making arrangements for Ranger to run him.
”
“Old Ezra is crazy. Very gently crazy. But crazy just the same.”
“And Hiram, too?”
“Hiram’s not crazy. He’s just a simpleton.”
“Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons and dogs to do things we can’t do. Maybe they have abilities we don’t have.…”
“Rila, we can’t turn Hiram loose on Catface …”
The screen door creaked and I swung around. Hiram came bumbling through the door.
“I heard you,” he said. “You was talking about me and Catface.”
“We were wondering,” said Rila, “if you ever talked with Catface. Like you do with Bowser.”
“You mean that thing that hangs around the orchard.”
“You have seen it, then.”
“Lots of times. It looks something like a cat, but it isn’t any cat. It’s just got a head. You don’t never see a body.”
“Have you ever talked with it?”
“Times I have. But it doesn’t make no sense. It talks about things that I don’t understand.”
“You mean it used words that you don’t know.”
“Maybe. Maybe some words. Ideas mostly. Ideas I never heard of. Funny thing, it doesn’t move its mouth and it doesn’t make no sound. But I hear the words. Come to think of it, that’s the way with Bowser. He never moves his mouth and there isn’t any sound, but I hear the words.”
I said, “Hiram, pull up a chair and have some breakfast with us.”
He shuffled in embarrassment. “I don’t know if I should. I already had my breakfast.”
“There’s batter left,” said Rila. “I can make some hot ones.”
“You never pass up breakfast with me,” I said. “No matter how many other breakfasts you have had. Don’t change because of Rila. She’s a friend who came visiting. She’ll be around, so get used to her.”
“Well, if it’s all right,” said Hiram. “I’m partial, Miss Rila, to cakes with lots of syrup.”
Rila went to the stove and poured more batter on the griddle.
Hiram said, “Truth is, I can’t feel friendly with this cat-face thing. At times, I’m a little scared of him. He’s a funny-looking jigger, with just that great big head and no body you can see. That head of his looks like someone had up and painted a face on a big balloon. He never takes his eyes off you, and he never blinks.”
“The thing is,” I told him, “that Rila thinks it might be important for us to talk with him, but we can’t talk with him. You’re the only one who can.”
“You mean no one else can talk with him.”
“No one but you can talk with Bowser, either.”
“If you should agree to talk with Catface,” said Rila, “it must be a secret. No one but the two of us must know that you have talked with him, or what you talked about.”
“But Bowser,” protested Hiram. “I can’t keep any secrets from Bowser. He is my best friend and I would have to tell him.”
“All right, then,” said Rila. “I guess it would do no harm if you told Bowser.”
“I promise you,” said Hiram, “that he will never tell a soul. If I ask him to, he’ll never breathe a word of it.”
Rila looked at me, unsmiling. “Is it all right with you,” she asked, “if he lets Bowser in on it?”
“Just so long,” I said, “as it is understood Bowser will tell no one.”
“Oh, he won’t,” Hiram promised. “I’ll warn him not to.” And having said this, he turned his full attention to the stack of cakes, shoveling up great mouthfuls of them, leaving a smear of syrup clear across his face.
Nine cakes later, he was ready to resume the conversation.
“You said there was something important I should talk to this Catface about?”
“Yes, there is,” said Rila, “but it’s a little hard to explain it exactly right.”
“You want me to talk to him about this thing you have in mind, then tell it back to you. Just the four of us will know …”
“The four of us?”
“Bowser,” I said. “You are forgetting Bowser is the fourth.”
“Oh, yes,” said Rila, “we must not forget old Bowser.”
Hiram asked, “It will be a secret just with the four of us?”
“That is right,” said Rila.
“I like secrets,” Hiram said, delighted. “They make me feel important.”
“Hiram,” Rila asked, “you know about time, don’t you?”
“Time is what you see,” he said, “when you look at a clock. You can tell if it’s noon or three o’clock or six.”
“That’s true,” said Rila, “but it’s more than that. You know about us living in the present and that when time goes by, it is known as the past.”
“Like yesterday,” Hiram suggested. “Yesterday is past.”
“Yes, that’s right. And a hundred years is the past and so is a million years.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes,” said Hiram. “All of it is past.”
“Have you ever thought how nice it would be if we could travel to the past? Go back to the time before the white men came, when there were only Indians. Or back to a time before there were any men at all.”
“I have never thought of it,” said Hiram. “I have never thought of it because I don’t think it can be done.”
“We think Catface may know how to it. We’d like to talk with him to find out how to do it or if he’ll help us do it.”
Hiram sat silently for a moment, struggling visibly to let it all sink in.
“You want to go into the past?” he asked. “Why would you want to do that?”
“You know about history?”
“Sure, I know about history. They tried to teach me it when I went to school, but I wasn’t any good at it. I never could remember all them dates. It was all about the wars they fought and who was president and a lot of stuff like that.”
“There are people,” Rila said, “called historians who make it their business to study history. There are a lot of things they are not sure about because people who wrote about it wrote it wrong. But if they could go back in time and see what happened and talk to people who were living then, they would understand it better and could write better histories.”
“You mean we could go back and see what happened a long, long time ago? Actually go and see it?”
“That’s what I mean. Would you like to do that, Hiram?”
“Well, I don’t rightly know,” said Hiram. “Seems to me you could get into a lot of trouble.”
I broke in. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “you wouldn’t have to go unless you wanted to. All we want you to find out, if you can, is whether Catface really knows how to do it and if he can show us how.”
Hiram shrugged. “I’d have to prowl around at night. Probably out there in the orchard. He shows up sometimes in the daytime, but it’s mostly at night.”
“Would you mind doing that?” I asked. “You could sleep daytimes.”
“Not if Bowser could go with me. Night is a lonesome time, but if Bowser was with me, I wouldn’t feel so lonesome.”
“I suppose that would be all right,” I said, “if you put a leash on Bowser and keep him close beside you. And another thing: when you see the Catface, just stand there talking to him. Never walk toward him.”
“Mr. Steele, why shouldn’t I never walk toward him?”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “You’ve just got to trust me. We know one another fairly well and you know I’d never tell you wrong.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” Hiram said to me. “You don’t need to tell me why. If you say so, it’s all right. Me and Bowser will never walk toward him.”
“And you’ll do it?” Rila asked. “You’ll talk with Catface?”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Hiram. “I don’t rightly know what’s going to happen, but I’ll do my best.”
TEN
Willow Bend is a small town, its business section no more than a blo
ck long. On one corner stands a small supermarket, across from it a drugstore. Straggling up the street are a hardware store, a barber shop, a shoe store, a bakery, a clothing shop, a combined real-estate and travel bureau, an electrical store and repair shop, a post office, a movie house, a bank and a beer joint.
I found a place to park the car in front of the drugstore and went around to open the door for Rila. Ben Page came hurrying across the street to intercept us.
“Asa,” he said, “it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you. You don’t get down this way too often.”
He held out a hand and I took it. “As often as I need,” I said. I turned to Rila and said, “Miss Elliot, meet Ben Page. Ben is our mayor and the banker.”
Ben thrust out his hand to Rila. “Welcome to our town,” he said. “Are you staying for a while?”
“Rila is a friend,” I said. “We were in the Middle East together on a dig some years ago.”
“I don’t know how long I’m staying,” Rila said.
“You from New York?” asked Ben. “Someone told me you were from New York.”
“How the hell could anyone know?” I asked. “You’re the first person she has met.”
“Hiram, I guess,” said Ben. “He said the license plates were New York plates. He told me someone had shot Bowser with an arrow. Is that right?”
“Someone did,” said Rila.
“I tell you we got to do something with these kids,” said Ben. “They’re up to something all the time. They have no respect for nothing. They are just running wild.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a kid,” I said.
“Who else would it be? It’s just the kind of thing they’d do. They’re a bunch of monsters, I tell you. Some of them let the air out of my tires the other night. Came out of the picture show and I had four flats.”
“Now why would they do that?” asked Rila.
“I don’t know. They just hate everyone, I guess. When you and I were kids, Asa, we never did stuff like that. We used to go fishing, remember, and hunting in the fall. And there was the time you had all of us digging in that sinkhole.”
Mastodonia Page 5