The Anomaly(18)

“I don’t see anything,” Molly said, squinting against the slanting sun. “Are you sure…Oh, okay. Huh.”

Everybody else stood and looked, too. Dylan did something with the front oars, and for thirty seconds the boat was relatively still on the water.

“I don’t know about you, mate,” Ken said quietly, “but that, to my untutored eye…looks a lot like a fucking cavern.”





Chapter

11



The beach was smaller this time. It was nestled in a bend twenty minutes downriver from where we’d made the sighting, semiprotected by an overhang. It was angled so as to catch the last of the afternoon sun, too, heat the rock would presumably hold for at least some of the night. Molly was, dare I say it, mollified. It wasn’t clear yet what we’d found, but we’d found something—and the mood was cautiously buoyant.

Once all our stuff had been taken off the boat, Pierre found a shady spot behind a boulder and Ken and I crouched there together to take a look at the footage of the canyon wall. Maxing out both optical and digital zoom, and the rocking from the boat made it blurrier than Pierre’s usual rock-steady work, but it was enough to confirm there was a small opening in the cliff face, less than a quarter of the way up.

This was only about three hundred feet above the river, far lower than Kincaid’s description, thus validating (I hoped) my suspicion that he’d seeded misinformation into his account. Three hundred feet is still pretty high. The opening wasn’t large, and looked even smaller from below because a lip of rock obscured it from view except within an extremely narrow angle of vision.

“Heck of a job, Pierre,” I said. “That would have been easy to miss. Well, we did miss it, for a couple hours.”

“I got lucky,” he said. “Plus you took us to the right place. That’s got to be it, right?”

“It’s definitely something,” Ken said. “Worst case, we’ve found a feature that other people don’t know about. The question is how we’re going to get up there.”

Pierre scrolled back through the footage. He played a section, then stuttered forward with a few pauses before letting it run again. “We can climb that,” he said.

“Fuck off,” Ken said. “Have you met me?”

“It’s not a walk in the park,” Pierre admitted. “But there’s a consistent concave in the wall, and a ton of crevices and handholds. We can use the rowing gloves. If we take it slow, it’s totally doable.”

“Maybe for you,” I said. “But we’re not all you.”

“So I’ll go first,” Pierre said. “Establish a route. If it can’t be done, it can’t be done, and you can figure out a plan B. But I know Molly’s done some bouldering, and from the look of her in the water yesterday Feather’s pretty athletic, too. I don’t know about Gemma, but my guess is she can hack it.”

“Great,” Ken said. “I can ride on her back.”

The three of us laughed and looked at each other.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”



Midevening found Gemma and me sitting on opposite sides of the fire down by the water. Molly was applying liberal quantities of aloe vera to her face—and muttering darkly when it turned out her little pot of lip balm was empty. Feather was doing yoga. Pierre was cycling out batteries on his equipment and making backups of the footage he’d taken onto portable hard drives. Dylan was reading a book, weirdly. Only Ken was nearby, resplendent in a camp chair, looking up at the stars and smoking one of my cigarettes and sipping what was—by his standards—a remarkably small vodka.

Gemma looked at me. “Congrats,” she said.

“Everybody gets lucky once in a while, huh?”

She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant you should be feeling pretty good about yourself.”

“Not yet.”

“You do take all this stuff seriously, don’t you.”

“Yes. Because not all of it is just made-up shit,” I said. “It’s remarkable how much of it ties together, too. Take Tutuveni, as a relevant example.”

“And that would be?”

“A collection of a hundred sandstone boulders in a nearby corner of Utah. ‘Tutuveni’ means ‘newspaper rock,’ and on just one of them there are five thousand petroglyphs, engraved into manganese-iron deposits on the surface. The official story says they’re clan symbols, carved by young Hopi men on a ceremonial rite-of-passage pilgrimage, over the course of a thousand years. Their way of proclaiming ‘I’m here, in honor of my tribe and the gods, as my forebears were before me.’ And there are plenty of images that do look like coyotes or cornstalks or other traditional symbols. But there’s weird stuff, too. Footprints, and most look right. But a couple with four toes, and a few with six—which look a lot more like fingers. And if there’s one thing a person who takes the time to chip something in rock tends to know—however ‘primitive’ their culture—it’s how many fingers and toes we have.”

“So they’re some kind of paw symbol.”

“Name me an animal with six toes.”

“Elephants,” she said. “And giant pandas.”