Dawn of the Epoch

Chapter X - Hunter's Obsession

Hunter’s father, Terry, raised his son, Hunter, according to principals that his father, John, had raised him by. Hunter’s grandfather learned these principals from his father and so on and so on since the early days when the Prices emigrated to America.

The Prices called themselves Scotch-Irish to distinguish their heritage from the large numbers of destitute Catholic Irish who began migrating to America halfway through the nineteenth century in the time of the Irish Potato Famine. The Price family stuck together and indoctrinated their children with a sense of duty to unify and support the family. The Price elders also preached frugality, financial savvy, and the value of education to their children.

Throughout the centuries, the Price family waxed and waned in its influence and wealth. By the late nineteenth century, however, there existed a strong core group of relatives, intent on advancing their mercantile interests. They realized that they could accomplish more together than on their own and they formed an informal, kindred business empire. They met regularly to discuss the advancement of the empire as well as their family and religious values and duties. They vested their assets with John Christopher Price, the first Price family magnate and Hunter’s great great great great grandfather.

Hunter’s father, Terry, taught him about assets, liabilities, corporations, trusts, and partnerships. He taught Hunter to think of everything that he owned in terms of its future return prospects. As a ten-year old boy, Hunter could not name the G.I. Joes or the aliens from Star Wars. He could, however, tell you that because of Proctor and Gamble’s reasonable dividend, strong free cash flow, and growth prospects that P&G common stock looked like a good buy between sixty and seventy dollars per share. Furthermore, the rising debt and inability to generate core business sales of a company like Eastman Kodak made it only interesting as a value investment at a price to earnings ratio to which it would probably never sink.

Terry Price considered himself somewhat of a stock market dilettante. His investments consistently outperformed the Standard and Poor’s 500 index. He, consequently, accumulated a substantial amount of wealth.

The real value in the Price family, however, did not exist in Terrance Price’s skill in security selections. The real value existed, as it always had, in the Price family patriarch, the family magnate and heir to John Christopher Price’s duty and responsibility, i.e., Terry’s brother Robert William Price Jr. or, to Hunter, “Uncle Bob.” Uncle Bob consulted with Terry and his brothers and cousins, aunts and uncles, but ultimately called the shots and oversaw the Byzantine system of trusts, partnerships and corporations that the Price family had spent centuries forming and refining.

Bob directly owned twenty-three thousand acres of prime farm land in Nebraska and Kansas. The Price family, however, through a convoluted system of ownership designed to retain their privacy, owned a vast and difficult to calculate amount of land all over the Midwest. Their land received only the most efficient and cutting-edge farming. They farmed it very profitably. Over the last hundred years they had consolidated thousands of smaller farms into their empire. Many of these generated only marginally less profit than the Price farms, but the economies of scale and fierce competition inherent in capitalism allowed Price farms to subsume them into itself.

Hunter had the passion of his father, his uncle and his great great great great grandfather all put together, just not in the area of business or finance. He felt a greater calling. He had a passion for exploration. He sought knowledge. He read gaps into the world, gaps which called out to him. Building great wealth and a vast financial empire seemed almost trivial to Hunter. Ferdinand Magellan in the 16th century became the first person to sail completely around the earth. Hunter wanted to leave that kind of a legacy. In the prior century, Giovanni de’ Medici founded the Medici Bank, became the wealthiest man in Florence, and set the stage for one of the most powerful family political dynasties in history. The Medici legacy did not particularly interest Hunter.

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Hunter’s fame in the archaeological world started with the finding of the Ding. While digging beneath pyramids near Dashur, Egypt, Hunter’s team had unearthed an enormous bronze tripod cauldron, the “Ding.” Cauldrons of that sort were crafted in the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Age throughout East Asia. The cauldrons were used for the preparation of ritual offerings to the pantheon of deities. They were a symbol of power, of royalty.  They were called dings.

The ding had nine large glyphs on its outer wall. Hunter unmistakably linked the glyphs to the petroglyphs of the long-gone ZhangZhung Kingdom, which once occupied what is now modern-day Tibet. Linguists around the world were fascinated by the clarity of the glyphs, which were suspected to be representative of a proto-Tibeto-Burman language.

Below the large glyphs on the ding were smaller glyphs and a scene. The ravages of time had nearly obscured the scene, but confocal microscopy imaging revealed it. It depicted what Hunter believed to be the gods of the ZhangZhung Kingdom building the Pyramids of Egypt.

Ancient ZhangZhung tradition spoke of a land called Olmolungring. It was a pure land where spiritual enlightenment was easy and abundant. Over time, as Buddhism’s influence increased, Olmolungring became the mythical kingdom of Shambhala. Shambhala was a place of truth, knowledge, grace, and order. Even though ancient texts described it as a spiritual rather than a physical place, Hunter believed, with fervor, that it existed both physically and tangibly. He intended to find it. It was pure guesswork, but over the years, Hunter’s associates had come to trust his gut. He relentlessly followed through on his hunches, and it had led to great things.

Finding the ding brought Hunter fame, influence and glory. The buzz around the discovery created an almost palpable energy. Hunter fed on this energy like a mosquito on a throbbing vein. He was not alone. His entire team seemed different, electrically charged. Every reporter or dignitary that called on them sent waves of endorphins through their bodies. They all shared the feeling. They all loved the feeling. They all planned on riding the wave of enthusiasm as far as it would take them. They hoped it would take them right to the source, right to the answer of some deep historical secret that would forever change what we know about our great ancestors.

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