Fatalis

Chapter Sixteen

On the way home Jim Grand decided to stop by the Hutash offices on Del Playa Drive to visit Joseph Tumamait. Maybe the paintings would intrigue him, maybe not Maybe he would talk, maybe he wouldn't. It was going to be tough, but it was long, long overdue.

The robust, thorny eighty-two-year-old Tumamait was a leading anthropologist, an expert on Chumash culture and one of Grand's mentors. Born in nearby Camarillo, the scientist was a UCSB graduate who had worked with Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before returning to the west in 1965. Mead's involvement with the mental and spiritual health of primitive peoples had fascinated Tumamait, who passed his love of primitive psychology on to one of his own students, James Grand.

From the first, the men were very close friends and colleagues. Tumamait often risked his reputation to back Grand's revolutionary ideas about the relationship between pre-and post-Ice Age peoples and the monsters they hunted. The ideas were revolutionary in part because they were not based on anthropological evidence but on Grand's own experiences in the field. Grand had become the modern world's foremost expert on prehistoric weapons. Collecting and studying ancient samples, then learning to make his own. Grand became convinced that the hunt was far more than just a matter of food-gathering. The use of weapons required daily refurbishing of blades, careful storage of feathered shafts in clean, dry places, and adjustments dictated by the weather-arrow wood, spearhead bindings, and even the herbal sleeping potions used in drinking water were affected by rain and snow, heat and cold.

Grand believed that the people best-suited to create these weapons-and perhaps to use them-were the shamans, the same people who rendered gods, animals, and tableaux of the hunt on cave walls. But if the shamans among the Chumash and other peoples believed that animals were holy, how could they hunt and consume them?

The answer. Grand felt-and Tumamait agreed-was that the entire process was aspirational. Preparing for the hunt, the shamans and their caste slowly became the animals-in spirit at first, tracking them as an animal would, and then in the flesh when they consumed them. The animal spirit and meat were then passed from the shamans to the tribe as a sustenance and religion.

The idea of warrior-shamans was a revolutionary one, and not wholly embraced by either the scientific community or most of the surviving Chumash. But Grand had the best kind of evidence. He had made weapons and he had dwelt in caves and hunted for food. The entire process made the hunter intimate with the stones and the trees from which he crafted his weapons; with his own thoughts and spirit when he set out; and finally with the elements, the land, and his prey. It was a process about creation, life, death, and spirit. If a young man were not a shaman when he first became a hunter, be probably became one in time. Apart from telling tales to the young or infirm or those who didn't hunt, the only way to express what he was feeling was through art.

Many scientists believed that prehistoric people were simple people, interested solely in survival. They regarded shamans as eccentrics who were feared because they knew some medicine and they knew a few tricks. Grand didn't agree, and Tumamait was his greatest advocate.

Then, seven years before-while Grand was working with the Smithsonian-Tumamait went up to one of the caves where a hiker had found pottery. While he was resting by his stone campfire, Tumamait was visited by the Great Eagle. The scholar later said the Chumash god gave him a mission: to protect the Chumash heritage by protecting the earth. The vision was so compelling that Tumamait came back to Santa Barbara, resigned his professorship, and put both his life savings and his passion into Hutash.

Grand understood how that had happened. He had felt the presence of spirits many times in the caves. They always came in the dark, when you were alone, when the senses were alert and the mind was open and undistracted. Sometimes they kissed the soul, sometimes they were an eerie prickle. But Grand had never been moved the way Tumamait had-perhaps, Grand suspected, because he approached experiences like these with the mind and not with the spirit. There were fewer roadblocks getting to the soul.

Tumamait's relationship with Grand changed after the elder's vision. He withdrew emotionally from those who were not Chumash. He tried to maintain his relationship with Grand until the young anthropologist began mapping the Santa Ynez Mountains and discovering new caves. Tumamait had come to regard the paintings as a resting place for the gods. To disturb them was to put the needs of men before the needs of the spirit world. He could not endorse that, nor could he share his insights with those who did.

However, Tumamait did not entirely close the book on the relationship. He also wrote, "Sometimes the gods test us. If they test you, then you will understand, as I have, that we are not masters but servants."

Because they had been so close, Grand always hoped there might be a way to reconnect at some time on some level short of a deific trial. Possibly through a Chumash find, one that would excite the anthropologist that was still somewhere inside Joseph Tumamait One that would convince him of something Grand had always believed, that being Chumash-or any people, for that matter-was a matter of conviction and dedication, and not of blood.

Perhaps the tunnel art was it.

Hutash became an influential environment organization.

Their chief rivals were powerful oil interests, the construction industry, and transportation groups that used shell organizations to channel money into civic improvements, political campaigns, University of California scholarships, United States Geological Survey research, and other groups and causes. The implicit goal of these donations was to remind Southern Californians that-as a Caltrans executive had once put it-it was not always possible to grow the quality of life without the land to grow it on. Like his ancestors, Tumamait had been able to slow but not stop the encroachment of what he called the Haphaps-the destroyers. There were even those at Hutash who believed that Grand's grant was given for two reasons. First, so that Chumash cave sites could be identified in order for housing construction to be undertaken without damaging them. And second, to strike at Tumamait by engaging one of his former star pupils. Grand didn't know if any of that were true. All he did know was that the more sites he found, the more Chumash caves and former dwellings would be protected now and for all time.

Hutash's offices occupied the top floor of a modest, three-story building that overlooked Window to the Sea Park in Isla Vista. The tan walls were decorated with turn-of-the-century photographs of Chumash people and settlements. The only artifacts were wall hangings and wood carvings that had been made by modern-day Chumash.

The tall, bald-headed Tumamait received Grand immediately. The men hadn't seen one another since Rebecca's funeral.

Grand was openly happy to see his mentor. Tumamait's welcome was courteous, with a hint-just a hint-of satisfaction in the heavy-lidded eyes. The Chumash elder obviously knew something that Grand did not. The men embraced briefly.

"Hyvasti," Grand said, using a traditional Chumash greeting.

"Petaja," Tumamait said, a formal expression of gratitude. "I thought you might come."

"Oh?"

"There was an owl feather on my stoop this morning," he said.

"The messengers of the Great Eagle," Grand said. So that was it, the reason for Tumamait's smile.

"The feather was the color of your hair and eyes and the eyes were damp with dew."

"Are you pleased?" Grand asked.

"I'm always pleased when my beliefs are vindicated."

Grand grinned. He detected a whisper of the old Joseph Tumamait in his manner. Tumamait wouldn't give Grand the satisfaction of admitting he was happy to see him. But Grand sensed he was.

Tumamait took a step back and looked his former student over carefully. "You look tired."

"I am."

"I mean inside," Tumamait said, touching his own chest.

"That too," Grand replied, his smile softening. "It's been difficult."

"You are tired because you keep Rebecca trapped inside," Tumamait said. "Her spirit is free. You must let it go."

"I know," Grand said.

The Chumash believed that unless the spirits of "the beloved dead" were ceremoniously put to rest, they stayed with the living. Frustrated at being unable to touch and feel, the spirits became malevolent and destructive-sometimes physically, as maniti-poltergeists-and sometimes emotionally. Tumamait had offered to help him send Rebecca away through fasting and recitations of a ritualistic wedding ceremony, bonding the widower to the earth. That would allow Rebecca to become nashu, "the next thing," an animal closer to the gods. Grand had declined. He wasn't ready to let Rebecca go.

"But you know me," Grand went on. "I carry a piece of everyone I ever met I carry a lot of you with me."

"My people call these 'scars,'" he teased.

"There are a few of those, but there are other things too," Grand smiled. "Mostly very good things."

"Not recently," Tumamait pointed out.

"No," Grand admitted. The smile softened. "Joseph, I came here because I need a favor. I need you to help me solve a puzzle."

"What kind of puzzler?"

The elderly man listened as Grand described the new discovery up in the mountains. Grand described the tunnel, the white circles and crescents, and the symmetry of the designs. When Grand was finished, Tumamait was silent, his expression unchanged. Grand had hoped that the nature of the discovery might spark some of the old curiosity. Apparently, it had not.

"I've never heard of a Chumash shaman creating astronomical art," Grand continued. "If that's what I've found in the caves, it could be an extraordinary discovery."

"For whom?" Tumamait asked.

"For all of us," Grand said.

"You know what I believe," Tumamait told Grand. "Those works were not created for all of us. They were meant for the eyes of the gods and for other shamans."

"I also know that we aren't certain who they were meant for or who looked at them."

"And we will never know," Tumamait said. "Why not leave them, then, as the creators wished?"

"Because I want to learn everything I can about an amazing civilization. And I want to show others how great they were… how great you are."

"What others think won't change my people."

"But it might help improve the rest of us," Grand said. "We think that our communications and medicines and knowledge are greater than anything that has come before. That isn't necessarily so."

"James, years ago I told you that when the Great Eagle came to me I realized the paintings of my people are not meant to be talked about and analyzed," Tumamait said. "They are not stories to be read. They were painted by the enlightened. They are doorways into another realm meant to be opened only by the gods. I'm sorry, but I can't help you with this. If the earth has chosen to speak to you, you will know it in time."

"'In time' may be too late," Grand said. "Strange things are happening in the mountains. Disappearances, caves opening, the past emerging."

Tumamait said nothing.

Grand felt like he was back in school, being pushed by his professor to discover things on his own. In this case, though, he wasn't sure whether his mentor wanted him to continue searching or whether he really wanted Grand to stop.

"All right then," Grand said. "Let's try this. Have you had other visions since the first one?"

"Many," Tumamait said.

"Were they all of the Great Eagle?"

Tumamait nodded.

Grand stepped closer. "Be my teacher one more time. Tell me one thing he's taught you."

Tumamait thought for a moment. "I will tell you this. Haphap is dangerously near," the elder replied.

"The Mountain Demon," Grand said. "How do you know?"

"The Great Eagle comes to me when the world is in discord and he is no longer content to be spirit," Tumamait said. "He came to me recently. He was changed."

"In what way?"

"His feathers were those of an owl."

"Why?"

Tumamait didn't answer.

"Is he well?" Grand asked.

"He is a god," Tumamait said. "He comes because the earth is not well."

"In what way?"

"That is for us to determine," Tumamait replied.

"And fix."

"And fix," Tumamait agreed. "Good luck."

Grand smiled and offered his hand. "I'm not sure what I need good luck with, but thanks for your time." The smile turned bittersweet. "I miss the old days, sir. I miss talks like these, our explorations of mind and land."

"Perhaps we will have them again."

"I want to," Grand said. "It's been too long." Tumamait clasped Grand's hand. "There are many roads to the same place. Hopefully, I'll see you at the end. Until then, James, be careful."

"I'll do my best," Grand said.

He left the office feeling-how had Rebecca put it once when she came back from church? Lightened but not enlightened.

Though be still didn't know much about the paintings he'd seen, he had reconnected with Joseph Tumamait. And that was something.