River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(41)

Chapter 7

PICTOGRAMS ARE PAINT ON SOME SURFACE, ANY surface. Gang graffiti are pictograms, but usually the term refers to paints done by ancient man. Petroglyphs are carved into the rock. A lot more effort goes into them, and they take a lot longer to create. Like the displays in the museum, the petroglyphs at Horsethief Lake were on big chunks of rock that had clearly been cut from larger rocks. Unlike the ones in the museum, these were fenced off--look but don't touch.

The first petroglyph I saw at Horsethief Lake looked like a pineapple.

Calvin didn't quite hide his grin when I told him so. "Before the Columbia was dammed in 1959, the river was narrow and deep here, not the wide and tamed thing she is now. There were falls. Celilo Falls. We have photos."

The young man stared out at the river. "You know, I wasn't born then. My mother wasn't even born back then. Some of the old ones still mourn the old river as if she were a living being who died."

"Change is hard," said Adam. "And it doesn't much matter whether it is change for good or ill."

The young man looked at him. "All right. Some of the change was good, some of it not so good. There used to be a canyon. Some people said that there were more petroglyphs on the canyon walls than any other location in the world. I don't know, but there were a lot of them. When it became clear that the dam was going in, an effort was made to save as many as possible. These were displayed at the dam for decades before they were brought here. There are others in the museum and a lot, I suppose, in private collections--the tribes asked people to go in and take what they could as long as they would care for them. The ones left in the canyon are underwater, and I suppose they will be there forever."

We were walking as he talked. Like the drawings on the rock, the carving was primitive. Some of it, like the pineapple person, were like trying to guess what a kindergartner had drawn. Some of them were extraordinary despite the stylization. I could have stayed looking at the eagle for an hour or so. But it was a rock that held a row of mountain sheep that clued me into something.

"I'll be darned," I said. "That's why he sent us to look at the baskets."

The men looked at me.

"Well, maybe not," I conceded, thinking of the woman who'd stared at us in the museum, then followed us to the pictograms. "But those animals look like the ones woven on the baskets. If the only art you ever saw was on baskets and woven blankets, when you decided to carve something, you'd make it look like the baskets."

"When we're through here, you can write to the anthropological journals and tell them your theories," said Adam.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Stuff that. I'll write a doctoral thesis. Then I can go do what most of the other people with doctoral degrees in anthropology do."

"What's that?" asked Calvin.

"You don't need to encourage her," said Adam seriously, but his eyes laughed at me.

"The same thing that people with degrees in history do," I said. "Fix cars or serve french fries and bad hamburgers."

"This one is the one my uncle told me to point out to you," Calvin said.

The rock had been broken, but the two pieces had been fit together carefully. The creature's face looked a little like a fox--a mutant fox with very big teeth and tentacles. Its body was snakelike. It was like a cross between a Chinese dragon and a fox with the teeth of a wolf eel.

"We don't know as much about these as we do the pictographs," Calvin said. "They could have been carved ten thousand years ago by the first people, or a hundred years ago. We don't know what this one was meant to represent, but we have a name for it. We call it the river devil."

Its eyes were eager, intelligent, and hungry.

I'd seen them before. Bright green eyes in the water that I'd seen in my dream. I blinked, and the eyes were just eyes. No matter how avid they appeared, they were just carved in the stone. But I knew what I had seen.

"Now," Calvin said cheerfully, while Adam watched me out of feral eyes, "there's a Coyote story about a monster who lived in the Columbia in the time of the first people, before we humans were here."

I tried a reassuring smile at Adam, who must have sensed my sudden recognition of the monster on the rock. I mouthed, "Later." He nodded.

It had been a dream, I reminded myself fiercely. Just a dream.

Calvin missed all the byplay, which was fine. "This monster," he said, "ate all of the first people who lived in the river. It ate up all the first people who fished in the river. Eventually, no one was willing to go near the river at all, so they asked the Great Spirit for help. He sent Coyote to see what was to be done.

"Coyote went down to the river and saw that nothing lived near the river. While he was watching, he saw a great monster lift out of the water. `Ah,' it cried, `I am so hungry. Why don't you come down so I can eat you.'

"That did not sound like a good idea to Coyote. So he went up into the hills where he could think. `Hee, hee,' said his sisters, who were berries in his stomach."

"They were what?" I asked, surprised out of my panic over a pair of hungry green eyes in a stupid dream.

"This is the polite version," Calvin told me. "You can ask around if you want to find out the rude version. It is also rude to interrupt the storyteller."