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

Isaacs pulled another envelope out of the file. "One more thing," he said. He emptied about a dozen flakes of pinkish stone into his palm and extended it. "These are pressure flakes. Typical and unmistakable workshop debris from a Folsom camp. And they're out of the same silicified petrification."
    Leaphorn raised his eyebrows.
    "Yeah," Isaacs said. "That gets to be quite a coincidence, doesn't it? That two different bunches of hunters, two thousand years apart, would work the same quarry and then carry the stuff two hundred miles to work on it."
    "I think you might call that real fine circumstantial evidence," Leaphorn said.
    "And we're going to find enough of it so they'll have to believe it," Isaacs said. "I'm sure it happened here. The date's right. Our geologist tells us that high-calcium layers were only formed about nine thousand years ago. So these were very late Folsoms." Isaacs' eyes were looking at a scene very distant in time. "There weren't many left. They were starving. The glaciers were long gone and the rains had stopped and the game herds were going fast. It was getting hotter, and the desert was spreading, and the culture they had lived by for three thousand years was failing them. They had to make a big kill at least every four or five days. If they didn't, they'd be too weak to hunt and they'd die. There just wasn't enough time anymore to make those fancy points that broke so easily." Isaacs glanced at Leaphorn. "Want some coffee?"
    "Fine."
    Isaacs began preparing the pot. Leaphorn tried to guess his age. Late twenties, he thought. No older than that, although his face sometimes had a wizened, old-man look about it. That was partly from the weathering. But something had aged him. Isaacs was conscious, Leaphorn had noticed earlier, of his teeth. They were slightly buck, and they protruded a little, and Isaacs called attention to them with an unconscious habit: he often had his hand to his face, shielding them. Now with the pot on the fire, he leaned against the wall, looking at Leaphorn. "It's always been presumed that they couldn't adapt so they died. That's the textbook dogma. But it's wrong. They were human, and smart; they had the intelligence to appreciate beauty and the intelligence to adapt."
    Through the small window over the burner Leaphorn could see the red flare of the sunset. Red as blood. And was that blood under the piñon tree the blood of Ernesto Cata? And if so, what had happened to his body? And where under that garish evening sky could George Bowlegs be? But there was no possible profit in pondering that question now.
    "I wonder, though," Leaphorn said. "Would changing your lance point make that much difference?"
    "Probably not, by itself," Isaacs said. "But quite a bit. I can make a very rough version of a Folsom point in two or three hours on the average. They're so thin that you break a lot—and so did the Folsom Men. But you can whack out a big parallel-flaked point in maybe twenty minutes, and it's just as good as the ones Stone Age man used."
    Isaacs fished a box of sugar cubes and a vacuum bottle cup out of a drawer and put them on the table beside Leaphorn. "We think he developed the Folsom point with all that symmetry in it as a sort of ritual offering to the animal spirit. Made it just as beautiful as he could make it. You're a Navajo. You know what I mean."
    "I know," Leaphorn said. He was remembering a snowy morning on the Lukachukai plateau, his grandfather touching the barrel of his old 30-30 with sacred pollen, and then the chant—the old man's clear voice calling to the spirit of the male deer to make this hunt for the winter's meat right and proper and in tune with natural things; giving it the beauty of the Navajo Way.
    "Reynolds figured—and he's right—that if Folsom was willing to change his lance point, he'd be willing to adapt in every other way. Under the old way, they'd be sitting in camp all day turning out maybe five or six of those fluted points, and maybe