Ancient Echoes

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

The university group traversed a shale-like mountaintop with treacherous footing when Rempart fell to his knees, sweat running down his temples. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He said nothing.

The others stopped and stared at him, confused and worried by this sudden change.

He raised his arm and pointed at the valley floor. “Look!”

Below lay a wide, scrub-covered valley that seemed to continue on for more than two miles. In the center, the landscape rose to a single flat-topped hill, and on it stood two dark pillars. The two appeared to be the exact same height and width, and stood perfectly upright and parallel to each other.

“The twin pillars,” Melisse said as she ran an arm over her forehead, wiping off the perspiration.

“I knew we could do it.” Rempart brushed away his tears. His breath quickened as he struggled back to his feet. “We've got to get down there. We've got to check them out. It's an unbelievable find.”

“Are you kidding me?” Devlin shouted. “It’s a long way. We've got no food, no water. Brian is lost. We need help. We need to find people, a town, something. Anything!”

Rempart spun around to face him, his lip curled with contempt. "Do you intend to become an anthropologist or not?"

"We've got to get back," whimpered red-faced, chubby Ted. His reddish curls were wet and matted against his head.

“He's right,” Vince said, pushing his glasses higher.

“What's wrong with you? Are you men or boys?” Rempart asked derisively. “Those pillars are what we came for. It’ll be dark soon. We need to make camp, scout the area for food and water, and tomorrow act like anthropologists by going to those pillars. Only after that will we leave this area.”

“Poor Brian,” Brandi whispered to Rachel, but the others heard her.

“It’s time we admit it: Brian isn't alive,” Melisse answered.

Brandi began to cry.

“But the rest of us are,” Vince said, his thin little body shaking with indignation. “And it's Professor Rempart’s responsibility to get us home safely.”

“Absolutely.” Devlin's hands clenched into fists. “We don't give a damn about some old pillars. We want to go home now!”

The other students loudly agreed.

Flush with his fellow student's support, Devlin raised his chin high and squared off in front of Rempart. The professor was fairly tall, but his puny muscles were no match for Devlin’s football player’s build. “Are you coming with us, Lionel?”

Rempart's cheeks reddened at a mere student's use of his given name. “No, I'm not. Go where you want,” he said bitterly. “Go straight to hell for all I care. I'm going to investigate those pillars. I expect this will be the last great archeological find in the continental United States, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give it up because of a bunch of whiners.”

“Fine, then.” Devlin turned his back to Rempart and addressed the others. “Let's go.”

Melisse ignored him as she faced Rempart. “You’ve never told us why those pillars are so important.”

“They are a key to history”—Rempart’s voice rose with passion and eloquence in a way the students had never heard before—“a history only rumored and scoffed at until this discovery. Now, before our very eyes, we see that it exists. The man...or group...acclaimed as its discoverer will be right up there with the archeologist Alfred Kidder. Just as he garnered fame and wealth after finding the ancient, unique Navajo civilization he named the Anasazi, so will the discoverer of this. I will not walk away from it because of you slackers!”

At the mention of fame and wealth, the students looked from Rempart to each other, and several dropped their gazes to the ground.

“I don't care!” Ted fought back tears. “Don't listen to him. I want to go home.”

“We all need to keep in mind,” Rachel said in her calm, intelligent voice, “that we've already come this far. It won't take much longer to get to the pillars. Once we do”—she addressed Rempart now—“this should count for our futures, right? I mean, if we're the first, we're the discoverers. All of us.”

“Well,” Rempart demurred, “yes, I would say so.”

“I guess we could even spend a little time here figuring out what they mean,” Devlin added. “I mean, we can't discover something and then, when asked what it signifies, say we were too chicken s**t to stick around and find out.”

“But what if we stayed and someone else gets hurt?” Brandi stamped her foot, her face, eyes and nose blubbery. “I'm with Ted. I want to leave this horrible place!”

“Do we split up?” Vince asked. “Some stay, some go?”

“No,” Devlin stated. “We've got to stick together.”

“Vote?” Rachel suggested.

“I say we make camp now, and tomorrow morning we go with the Professor,” Melisse said.

Devlin studied the teaching assistant a long moment, then joined her. Finally, so did Rachel and Vince, and then, reluctantly, Ted and Brandi.

Jake’s fury built, took hold and twisted inside him as he pulled torn human remains from a creek. The boy’s body had caught in some brambles near the bank. Given its condition, Jake doubted he’d been killed nearby, but most likely floated some distance before reaching the ranch of a local resident, Polly Higgins.

The water had washed away the blood, and before him lay a bloated body with gashing bite marks on its head and shoulders, and a gaping hole where the stomach should have been. The boy’s shirt was gone, but wet jeans clung to his body, wedging a wallet in a back pocket. Jake pulled it out. A laminated Idaho driver’s license with the name Brian Cutter confirmed his worst fears.

The possibility that Lionel Rempart and all his young, bright students had met a similar fate was all too real. Ugly memories of Los Angeles rushed at him as well, and the combination consumed him with anger and frustration.

He wanted to look for the college kids himself. Forget these nicey-nice search teams, high-tech equipment, and hourly reports in triplicate. He wanted to put his own boots on the ground. To hunt.

Could he have done more? Acted more quickly? Better? He tried to shake off the doubts, both past and present, but knew from experience that they'd return again and again, especially at night when he lay in bed alone. And then the nightmares when he slept. He had hoped Lemhi County, Idaho would be different. He’d been wrong.

He backed away when the county’s on-call forensics team, a pair of retired San Francisco Crime Scene Unit investigators, arrived.

“Any thoughts on what happened to him?” Michael asked, breaking the silence that had surrounded the body from the time Jake placed it on dry land. He and Quade stood by the sheriff’s side through all this, but Charlotte remained many feet away, a silent, worried, and upset observer.

“The evil spirits got him,” Polly said. She stood with a shotgun in hand, a small, seventy-five-year-old woman in loose Levi’s, a bulky insulated jacket, and Gortex boots. Three large shepherd mix dogs stood at her side. She ran the ranch alone after her husband died and her only son left for a less lonely existence. Ownership of her ranch had been grandfathered into the Federal wilderness area. “When I was a girl, my best friend Clara, a Shoshone, said her grandmother called it Nininbe. She warned us never to go west of Devil’s Gulch. This here creek flows down from that area. Clara’s granny used to tell us that Nininbe created thunder and attacked strangers, tearing their bodies apart. Those not eaten disappeared. That’s why no one, no Indian, no whites, not even the Feds spend any time up in that area. They won’t admit it, but they know.”

“No spirit did this,” Jake said. As a boy he had heard the kind of stories Polly talked about, but they were just stories.

“Have there been deaths like this before, Sheriff?” Quade asked. Being careful not to touch the body, he inspected the wounds.

“Not that I’ve ever heard.”

“In the old days there were lots of stories.” Polly gave the odd-looking Quade a once-over as if trying to decide exactly what he was. “Since the Feds took over and the gold prospectors are gone, nothing happens out here anymore. Except…let me see, when was that?” She tapped a bony finger against her lips as the others waited. “Ten years? I’m not sure. Six men, not your usual hunters and fishermen, came out this way. People talked about them up at the Telichpah Flat General Store. They wanted to know about some pillars, two pillars, that made thunder and lightning. Most folks didn’t know. But the old ones, the ones who remembered the Indian legends, they knew and said nothing. The men, we heard, headed west. They never came back. They disappeared, just like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“They could have gone straight through the forest, or got on the river and came out somewhere downstream,” Jake said. “It’d be known if six men disappeared around here, and I’ve never heard about it. Excuse me.” He went to check on Charlotte, to be sure she was all right after seeing the grisly discovery.

“Why do you say those men weren’t hunters or fishermen, Mrs. Higgins?” Michael asked.

She shrugged. “Simple. They had no fishing gear, and the rifles and handguns they carried were a lot more firepower than anyone needed to take down a moose. Those who saw them said they looked like ex-military guys.”