Fatalis

Chapter Five

Thanks to three cups of coffee, two hundred pushups-using just the first three fingers of each hand to strengthen them- and eagerness to get out of the house, Jim Grand was alert as he drove to the office. His office. The mountains.

The terrain of the peaks in the upper Santa Ynez Mountains was extremely steep and unstable, with loose boulders, muddy slopes, and ledges made of leaf-thin layers of rock. Eroded by millennia of wind, water, and tectonic activity, the ledges crumbled easily underfoot. Caves here were often the home to bobcats and brown bears while tumbleweeds and scrub frequently concealed deep pits and crevasses. On days when the clouds were low and covered the peaks, visibility was no more than three or four feet. At night, temperatures typically fell to well below freezing. During the winter, snow and fine, clear ice made the mountains as deadly as higher, more infamous ranges. During the warmer seasons, unwary climbers often rappelled into fields that were used for turkey shoots. Smug mountaineers who saw the peaks as a warm-up for tougher challenges frequently had to be hauled out by the highly skilled members of the Los Padres division of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Search and Rescue Team.

Jim Grand had climbed, fought, and studied the Santa Ynez Mountains for nearly seven years, ever since he'd returned to UCSB to take over the classes of his former professor Joseph Stroud Tumamait. Tumamait had abruptly left his post to found the environmental group Hutash, the Chumash word for earth. Grand knew the mountains well, he respected their moods, and above all he enjoyed the challenge of what Tumamait-when he still had a sense of humor- once referred to as "one of earth's most seductive and temperamental erogenous zones."

But then, the world of mountains, canyons, caves, cave paintings, and especially prehistoric civilization like the Chumash was one that Grand had loved for nearly thirty years.

Crouched on a narrow ledge in a dark, dome-topped cave, Grand was surprisingly rested. For someone who once called petrified wood a pillow, the desk hadn't been half-bad. When the alarm went off in the bedroom five hours later he was alert and ready to focus on the job at hand. He had no classes to teach until the following afternoon and, for the time being, the only ghosts he had to deal with were those of the ancients.

Grand was dressed in warm, light blue, waterproof microfleece pants and a yellow wool jacket The jacket was cut long to keep his backside and upper legs warm, though he had removed the large, zip-away peaked hood. Grand had always preferred to go bareheaded when he was exploring a cave. If something came loose from above he wanted to hear it; small stones often fell before larger ones. And if one of those bobcats or bears came along, or if he went someplace where there were rattlesnakes, he wanted to be able to hear them too. Right now, all he heard was the hollow but delicate trickle of water spilling in from the swallow hole and dripping down the sides of the ledge.

Grand finished checking the pulley rig. It was attached to the rock at the very edge of the cave ledge, held there by a widely set series of short pitons. Grand had designed the array himself to cause as little damage as possible to a site. Slipping the lightweight harness from his duffel bag, he fastened the thick waist-wrap tightly above his slender hipbones and slid his legs through the two, two-inch-wide nylon bands. He adjusted the slider buckles, leaving the leg loops relatively loose. This would give him extra mobility and also help to avoid "rug bum." Once the harness was on,

Grand attached two slender climbing ropes to the belay loop. The other ends of the two-hundred-foot nylon lines were coiled through the pulley system. He would hold one rope in each hand, using the one on the left to lower himself and the one on the right to pull himself up.

After making sure that the lines were secure and untangled, Grand lay them on the ledge and reached back into the bag. He slipped on his night-vision goggles. The four-inch-long cylindrical eyepieces amplified existing light from the visible through the infrared spectra and presented them in different intensities of green, shades to which the human eye was most sensitive. Then he hooked a compact 8-mm video-cassette recorder to his belt There was a lightweight headset and microphone built into the goggles and a small, silver tube attached to the right side of the frame. The tube contained a fiber-optic night-vision video camera, which was jacked into the tape machine. Everything Grand saw and described would be recorded. The tape was not only a useful study tool, it was a valuable precaution. Chumash cave art had been painted with brushes made of animal tails that had been dipped into bowls of powdered minerals such as hematite, diatomaceous earth, and manganese mixed for red, white, and black-the primary Chumash colors. Held together with a binder of animal fat, these pigments could be extremely volatile when exposed to air or light. Significant details, if not entire murals, could be lost within days of a cave being opened. In a geologically active zone, rock slides and earthquakes could also compromise or destroy the art. If anything like that happened here, at least there would be a record of the work.

Grand touched a button on the videocassette recorder. The machine began to hum.

"This is Jim Grand," be whispered. He was speaking softly so his voice wouldn't echo and cause dangerous vibrations. "I'm in a cave that's about fifty feet from the summit of La Cumbre Peak and about twenty-four-hundred feet above sea level. The opening of the cave is roughly a one-hundred-foot climb from East Camino Cielo Road. I came here after finding what seemed to be a reference to the mountain in the Chumash map painted in a cave on Figueroa Mountain. I found the entrance yesterday, on September thirteen, after it was exposed by a rockslide. There's a slide-path directly from the cave opening to a pile of boulders scattered thirty to fifty feet down. In size and composition the boulders match the sandstone on the summit. Their presence in the cave mouth could have been the result of tectonic activity or they may have been placed there by design."

Grand turned toward the dim light coming through the narrow roof entrance.

"What you're looking at is the cave ingress," he said. "It's a swallow hole and it's about seven feet behind me. The hole itself is about three feet across and five to six feet deep. Water from the higher peaks and from ongoing rainfall is continuing to pour into the swallow hole and spill over the sides of the ledge I'm on. The slope of the ledge is approximately twenty degrees from the bottom of the hole to the edge, which is consistent with long-term erosion from running water. However, until the La Nina effect there probably hasn't been any runoff in here since the late Pleistocene flooding. That's very promising. A dry interior would have suited a Chumash artist. The height and also the inaccessibility of the site also would have been appealing to a shaman looking for solitude. The cave elevation is approximately one hundred and fifty feet higher than any I've found in this region."

Grand turned back toward the heart of the cave.

"From where I'm standing, the size of the cave is deceptive," Grand continued. "It's only about thirty-five feet to the other side of the cave but it goes down quite a way." The scientist stepped to the edge and looked over. "It's a little over two hundred feet to the floor of the cave. And as soon as I finish gearing up I'll start my descent."

Grand paused the video camera. He squatted and removed a tiny flashlight and a packet of thick, white chalk from the duffel bag. The chalk was to make temporary notations on the rock, if need be, from water-flow patterns to a record of his own travels. He put both in his jacket pocket, then put his research pouch in another pocket. This was an oblong leather case that contained a scalpel for scraping off paint samples, tiny plastic bags for storing them, and a magnifying glass. Then he pulled out a pair of work gloves. After slipping them on, Grand stood and looked out at the cave.

Before returning to the UCSB, Grand had spent two years working as a field researcher for the anthropology department of the Smithsonian Institution. During that time, and before that when he was in grad school, he had explored caves in Russia, Spain, France, Turkey, Australia, and the United States. Wherever Grand was, when he was alone in a cave, searching for prehistoric art and artifacts, he felt as though he'd come home. Yet he had always felt a special closeness to the Chumash. The early inhabitants of the American West Coast had a singular view of nature and their place in it.

Though Chumash meant "bead maker" in their native tongue, these ancient people were much more than that. Migratory bands of Chumash had apparently come to Southern California as far back as a thousand years ago, drawn by the warmer and drier climate that followed the Ice Age. Unlike most hunter-gatherers of the time, who followed the seasonal movement of animals, the Chumash made permanent homes in the mountains and ravines. They harvested food from the sea and rivers, collected nuts and berries from the Lower Santa Ynez River Canyon, and trained themselves to be exceptional predators, because those who were not were chotaw-prey. Grand had found the remains of many of their weapons in the caves and along the riverbeds. He marveled at their precision, at the aerodynamic arrows made of hollow bird-bone and the rocks that had been split so carefully that their edges were sharper than modern razor blades. The Chumash also left paintings on cave walls. Grand had personally studied and interpreted more than a dozen of these, adding to the handful that anthropologists had already found.

The paintings were fascinating because they didn't only depict daily activities. The Chumash were deeply religious and used small, hidden places like this to document their beliefs with art. They believed that life was a game called Peon, in which the benign and destructive gods collected knowledge and experience. When the game was over, it would start again. If the benign gods had won, all living things would benefit. If they had lost, the world would suffer.

All gods, good and bad, were pictured as animals. The Chumash did not hold humankind in high regard. They considered them awkward and vulnerable, which was why they worked so hard to hunt and to live in packs and to become more like the wolf or the bat or the insect.

The Chumash believed that the chief of the gods, the Great Eagle, carried the sun, moon, and stars in its beak and talons. During the day the sun prevented the Great Eagle from being seen; at night it was hidden by the darkness. The Great Eagle was served by the Sky Coyote, who dwelt in the clouds above the earth. The Sky Coyote nourished the inhabitants of our world by making it rain. Meanwhile, roaming the earth itself in spirit, the Bear Mother protected the Chumash by keeping the monstrous denizens of the lower world at bay. The Chumash believed that this underground realm was ruled by the chief of the evil gods, a pair of giant serpents, on whose backs the world rested. Sometimes the snakes stirred, causing a great shaking. Only the diligence of the Bear Mother kept them from emerging. But sometimes the shaking woke the evil Nunashush, monstrous creatures that lived in the foot of the mountain peaks and came out at night to eat all living things.

Curiously, though the Chumash had left behind paintings of the other spirits as well as many animals of the late Ice Age, Grand had never found a rendering of the Nunashush. Most students of Chumash mythology believed that was because evil was a personal thing, different to every member of the tribe. To some it might be a wasp or a shark, to others a hurricane or a rival tribe member.

Grand disagreed. The Chumash were extremely articulate, art-wise. The shamans who created the bulk of the art-work had ascribed symbolic meaning to everything. Spiders and their webs were life and its changing nature, snowflakes were death, fish were the young, and wolves were the old. Grand believed that the shamans knew exactly what the Nunashush looked like. He felt that the holy men didn't paint them because they had found a different way to portray them. Perhaps they painted them beneath a rock from which they couldn't escape or on tree bark, which they burned in effigy.

Standing here and thinking that the last humans to see this place may have been the Chumash reminded the scientist of when his parents had taken an unhappy six-year-old to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon. Now, as then, he felt immortal and humble at the same time.

After checking to make sure there were no paintings directly below the ledge, Grand was ready. Stepping over the double ropes so they were between his legs, he turned his back to the ledge, knelt, and took one rope in each hand.

"I'm going over," he said as he stepped off the side.

Grand descended at a forty-five-degree angle. The pulleys kept the ropes from rubbing on the rock ledge as he literally walked down the face of the cliff, his strong arms constantly working the lines. Releasing the down-rope not only allowed him to descend but gave him the ability to walk from side to side. Tightening on the up-rope brought him back to center. The combination of his angle and the horizontal play enabled Grand to read the entire escarpment as he descended.

It took nearly an hour to crisscross the top half of the cave wall. Grand moved slowly so he wouldn't miss anything; Chumash paintings were sometimes just single icons that could easily be mistaken for moss, seepage stains, or a mineral embedded in the wall. As he knit his way back and forth along the cave wall, Grand occasionally recorded a note about something that wouldn't be apparent to the fiber-optic lens: the length of the escarpment, which was about thirty feet; the degree of declination, which was about ten degrees off-plumb, the wall sloping in toward the base; the dampness of the air the lower to the ground he got; and the fact that there appeared to be large, vertical cracks on both sides of the cave at ground level. Grand wouldn't know for sure whether it was an opening or a shadow until he got to the bottom, which would be soon. Typically, Grand's time limit in the harness was about ninety minutes. There was the strain on his arms, chafing from the leg loops, and exhaustion from the intense, careful concentration. The air was also thin in these high caves, adding to the strain. It wasn't that he couldn't push himself; but he was afraid he might miss something if he did. He would go back up in a few minutes, rest and change the tape, then come back down.

Just below the halfway point, on the right side of the cave, Grand suddenly stopped.

"Hold on," Grand said into the microphone. "There's something here."

Grand straightened his knees so that be could step back slightly from the escarpment He stared at the relatively smooth expanse of rock. There were definitely images there, large shapes that appeared to cover nearly the entire bottom right-hand quarter of the cave wall. From the corner of his eye Grand saw something on the opposite wall. He turned to look across the chasm. The same images had been rendered there as well.

Grand didn't know exactly what he was looking at. He was certain of only one thing.

He'd never seen anything like them.