The Serpent and the Crow

Book 3: Chapter Five

Wade ran his fingers across the jiggered cavern walls as water streamed down from out of nowhere. The sound of trickling hurt his ears.

Hank looked at the cave paintings, obscured by a steady flow of rainwater. He shed more light on the mysteries embedded upon an ancient rock. It was a tableau of Native Indian making.

It showed rudimentary pictographs of stick-men. White Man brandished muskets. Bodies of warriors laid upon the plains in red hues denoting the blood that fed the lakes of Solemn Pines.

Wade's eyes followed on to a pictograph. It showed the surviving Natives running to the hills and entering the cave. A tall Native appeared as the centre focal point to others worshipping him. A shaman.

Wade examined the next tableaux, highlighting the shaman holding hands with a similar figure except cloaked in dark hues. The pair of them held hands with a child. They take the child deeper into the tunnels.

It showed an underground lake in the last tableaux. The rock mound centred upon the underground lake. Shaman to one side of the mound. The dark man on the other. The mystic men held daggers above their heads. The child laid upon the rock with the same red hues as the dead warriors the white men killed.

"What tale does this thing tell? Only the dead know," Wade said.

"Tale? Or Warning?"

"I guess anyone faced with insurmountable odds, and the genuine possibility of being subjugated would turn to religion."

"You make it sound like they had a choice."

"I don't accept any of this hocus pocus crap, but it still creeps me out."

"Old Hank agrees."

"I wonder what the sacrifice was for?"

"I hope it was worth it, to give your child like that?"

"We both appreciate that child was likely to die with the arrival.... well, us."

"You don't know that."

"Neither did they. They took a desperate move in a desperate situation. These two con-men, shaman, assumed it would be enough."

"Whatever they turned to in their hour of need. It was too busy smoking the peace pipe to be bothered to lend a hand."

"We don't know that."

"We don't understand what it was they offered the kid too."

They did not want to admit just how much it disturbed them. It was important enough to paint in the very caverns these Natives sought refuge in.

The painting was the inspiration the killer drew his deranged thought process from. But it occurred to Wade that the miners did nothing to deface the drawings either. Why would they not deface such an abhorrent and creepy message? It would have been hard to not damage it through the process of pickaxe, dynamite, and American muscle.

The primitive paint seemed still wet as if they painted it just yesterday. The water seepage from the rainfall curved around the images like metallic flakes around a magnet. Perhaps the miners considered leaving it for nature to reclaim, yet nature let it endure.

Wade wanted to deface it. To dissuade others to follow in the tale, or the killer's motivation to follow the Natives deep into the recesses of their desperation to escape death. Perhaps the killer was a miner? Or a miner's descendant? Perhaps a shaman's descendant?

The longer Wade stared into the image, the more its power shone and stared back. Perhaps it is like any image; different viewers experience a different message. Wade's message was a message of caution for what lay at the heart of a desperate man seeking refuge from certain death. Wade was more troubled at the prospect of what lay at the end of his and Hank's journey.