Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] Read Online Free PDF Page A

at all?"
    "Reynolds thought they might have got something out of his toolbox, I think, because he checked it. But nothing was gone."
    "And no artifacts missing? Not even chips?"
    "No way," Isaacs said. "I keep what I find in my shirt pocket here." Isaacs tapped the envelopes. "And when I knock off at dark I lock it up in the camper. Why do you think they stole something?"
    The Indian didn't seem to hear the question. He was looking toward Corn Mountain. Then he shrugged. "I heard they did," he said. "What are you digging here? Some sort of Early Man site?"
    The question surprised Isaacs. "Yeah. It was a Folsom hunting camp. You know about the Folsom culture?"
    "Some," Leaphorn said. "I studied a little anthropology at Arizona State. They didn't know much about Folsom then, though. Didn't know where he came from, or what happened to him."
    "How long since you studied?"
    "Too long," Leaphorn said. "I've forgotten most of it."
    "You heard of Chester Reynolds?"
    "I think he wrote one of my textbooks."
    "Probably that was
Paleo-Indian Cultures in North America
. It's still a standard. Anyway, Reynolds worked out a set of maps of the way this part of the country looked back at the end of the last Ice Age—back when it was raining so much. From that he worked out the game migration routes at the very end of the Pleistocene period. You know. Where you'd find the mastodons and ground sloths and the saber-tooth cats and the long-horn bison, because of surface water and climate when this country started drying up. And from that he worked out the methods for calculating where the Folsom hunters were likely to have their hunting camps. That's what this was." Isaacs gestured across the gridwork of strings waffling the grassy ridge. "That flat place down there was a lake then. Folsom could sit up here on his haunches and see everything that came to water—either at the lake or north toward the Zuñi Wash."
    Isaacs accepted a cigarette from Leaphorn. He sat on the frame of the sifter screen, looking tired and excited. And he talked. He talked as a naturally friendly man will talk when confronted—after days of enforced silence—with a good listener. He talked of how Reynolds had found this site and a dozen others. And of how Reynolds had given the sites to selected doctoral candidates, arranged foundation grants to finance the work. He talked of Reynolds' modification theory—which would solve one of the great mysteries of American anthropology.
    Leaphorn, who had always been fascinated by the unexplained, remembered the mystery from Anthropology 127. Folsom hunting camps had been found all over the central and southwestern states—their occupancy generally dating from as early as twelve thousand to as late as nine thousand years ago. During this era at the tag end of the Ice Age they seemed to have had this immense expanse of territory to themselves. They followed the bison herds, living in small camps where they chipped their lance points, knives, hide scrapers, and other tools from flint. These lance points were their trademark. They were leaf-shaped, small, remarkably thin, their faces fluted like bayonets, their points and cutting edges shaped by an unusual technique called "pressure flaking." Making such a point was difficult and time consuming. Other Stone Age people, later and earlier, made larger, cruder points, quick and easy to chip out and no less efficient at killing. But Folsom stuck to his beautiful but difficult design century after century and left anthropology with a puzzle. Was the lance point part of a ritual religion—its shape a magic offering to the spirit of the animals that fed Folsom with their meat? When the glaciers stopped melting, and the great rain ended, and the country dried, and the animal herds diminished, and survival became a very chancy thing, Folsom camps disappeared from the earth. Had Folsom Man been trapped by this time-consuming ritualism which delayed his adaptation to changing conditions and