Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [96]
For a moment the markings incite his curiosity. They look deliberate. But then his mind moves on to the size of the flint itself. He can see how three separate tamahaken blades could be struck from it, and he thanks Great Father Sun for the find.
Now only two silent messengers remain.
In 1865, a young Confederate lieutenant on the run from Union forces, leading a ragtag band of soldiers unwilling to accept that the civil war is over, rests his aching back against a rock. With tired eyes, too old for such a young face, he watches the languid river in front of him as his fingers twist through coarse grass. And, yes, they find the sharp edge of a stone. Before the war he was a student of history, and the faint lines of writing on the stone fascinate him. He puts the curious piece of rock in his saddle-bag and resolves to take it to a professor of natural history he once knew in Charleston when he eventually can. But later that same day the Union cavalry regiment finally catches up with the lieutenant and his men. And before the sun has set they – soldiers and officer – lie in a shared unmarked grave not far away from the Paluxy River.
And so just one last tablet remains.
CHAPTER 53
2 May 1941, Somervell County, Texas
Grady Adams watched his brother goofing about in the water below with growing irritation. ‘Watch it, Saul … you gonna scare off all the fish!’ His brother ignored him and surface dived into the sedate Paluxy River.
Grady ground his teeth. His younger brother could be a complete ass at times. No, strike that … all the time. He settled back on his haunches, his toes curled over the lip of tan-coloured rock overhanging the river. The stone was hot against the bare skin of his feet, egg-frying hot, that’s what Pa would say. The sun had been beating down on it all morning, and the pool of water that had dripped off him from his last swim in the river half an hour ago had long since evaporated.
He looked up at a nearly cloudless sky and realized there wasn’t going to be any momentary respite from the heat of the sun. To his left, several dozen yards along the ledge of rock, a small, withered cypress tree was clinging to the side of a large craggy boulder. He could see it was casting a small pool of shadow, at least big enough for a part of him to keep out of the sun.
He stood, grabbed his fishing rod and walked carefully along the narrow ledge. Carefully, because from time to time, right near the edge, bits of the sandstone rock broke away and splashed into the river a yard or so below. That had happened to Grady before, scratching up his hips and chest as he’d slid into the water.
Saul came up again, noisily splashing the surface of the river, no doubt scaring any remaining fish well away from the float bobbing nearby.
‘Saul! For crying out loud!’
His brother gave him a toothy grin and paddled across to the far bank, deliberately kicking his feet on the surface and making as much of a ruckus as he could.
Grady hunkered down in the shadow, his back now against cool rock, and to his right a dried earthy wall of orange soil and gnarled roots from the small tree poking out from it. He prodded at the loose layers of soil, light and dark, like the layers of some fancy sponge cake. He’d once found a Paiute tamahaken blade among a bank of earth like this. Those layers folded away such fascinating things along this river. He remembered there was that team of men last summer, digging around along portions of the riverbank, looking for monster footprints in the rock. Dinosaur tracks, that’s what they’d said they were looking for.
Grady and Saul had seen a few in their time along here, big ones like he’d imagined an elephant might leave, and small ones too, three deeper dents and a shallow one. Saul even claimed he’d once seen a human footprint in the rock, just exactly like a shoe. Silly ass was always coming up with doofus nonsense like that.
Grady knew no cavemen wore shoes back then