Crisscross Moon - 5. Chapter 5

5.

We found the cave without any trouble though Cory said he would've missed it if he'd been alone.

"It's on your map," I pointed out. "It's pretty clear."

"But you know the area, and I would've gone right by."

The cave is fairly well hidden. It's a 20 minute hike from the nearest dirt road, and that's about 20 minutes from the nearest paved one. There's a kind of sharp, narrow ravine almost covered with high, dense growth. But when you work your way through the growth, the entrance is clear.

There's also an easier way in. You climb partway up the hill and slide back down. That puts you behind the brush, right at the cave entrance. Unfortunately, you can't get out the same way. The sliding part of the hill is too steep to climb again, and your boots won't grab hold. Instead, you have to pick your way through the brambles.

Inside the entrance are the usual things that make you squeamish - bats, birds, bugs, animals, and their leavings. And you have to crawl through and past them. The entrance is just a hole, knee high and maybe 2 feet in diameter. Then you crawl down a tight burrow for what seems forever but is really only a couple of minutes. The tunnel's also dark all the way.

I gave Cory my spare helmet, gloves, and kneepads. He'd changed into jeans and a sweatshirt at the car.

"You won't be warm enough," I warned.

"Yeah, I will."

"You're not even wearing a T-shirt. I've got a sweater over a work shirt over a thermal top. At least, take your jacket."

"Nah, I always sweat."

I told him we didn't want to hike back to the car once we were in the cave, but he just shrugged. So I figured it would be fun to watch the guy shiver.

Cory already knew how to work his helmet light and how to change batteries. We were mainly carrying those and water, and I figured we'd crawl into the cave, explore it for a while till Cory got bored, then come up for a late lunch.

The crawling went fine. The tunnel is mainly dry and straight, with a gentle slope down. There was only one point where either my father or I, who were both near Cory's height, ever had any trouble squeezing past, and we usually passed our backpacks forward to Mom or Sallie. I told Cory about this in advance, and when we reached that point, he gave me his backpack. After the squeeze, he put it back on.

"That was pretty narrow," he said. "There any other places you can't do that?"

"Not really. And people were probably smaller when they first used the cave. Probably had no trouble getting through."

"How old are the caves?"

"I'll tell you when we're inside." It was hard talking over my shoulder.

The caves were thousands of years old, and I thought Cory knew that from reading. But he might have been asking, "How long have the caves been used?"

That was something no one actually knew. Bone fragments found in some of the caves had been carbon dated, but even the better documented, more public areas still kept a lot of secrets. We knew the caves were used well before our ancestors reached them, and that was about 700 years ago, before the Spanish arrived. But we weren't sure how long they'd been in use.

This cave wasn't even all that big, maybe 20 feet wide by a 120 feet long. The ceiling was mostly right over my head, and the whole thing could have been formed in a 1000 years.

I tried to remember the first time I'd seen it, to tell Cory if he asked. The crawl had seemed extremely long then, but I'd been less than 5 years old. Sallie had been able to go for a year or 2 before me, but Mom and Dad insisted I wait.

"It's cold and dark, and you're on your knees all the time," Mom warned.

"Hell," Dad said. "Small as he is, he can probably walk."

I wasn't that small. And though there were places in the crawl where I then could stand. I mainly remember constantly asking "How much longer? How much longer?" because it seemed like we were never going to get there. Still, I was excited just to be in the cave, even if the crawling hurt my hands and knees.

The tunnel didn't seem to make any impression on Cory. He was almost silent all the way. He followed close behind me, and when I looked back, his face was pretty blank.

When we got out of the tunnel, the first thing I did was make an offering. It was only an apple I'd stuck in my pack, and I didn't make anything of it. In the dark, I almost hoped Cory wouldn't notice.

Instead, he asked, "What are you doing?"

"Paying respect."

"What is this place?" He was shining his helmet beam around the walls.

"A quiet space." I didn't want to use the word "sacred" because it wasn't. "It's a family place that not a lot of people know about. But I didn't want to put you off because you seemed set on seeing it."

"I knew some of that," he told me.

I wasn't sure he did.

"But I didn't know you still made offerings," he went on. "Is the cave still used for that?"

"For what?"

He didn't say, and I couldn't imagine what he meant.

"My great-grandparents told stories about the cave being used," I explained. "I never knew my great-grandparents, but my parents did. And my grandparents are still alive, so I hear their stories. My dad jokes that he'd like to be buried here - in the traditional way. But that's not what the cave was for."

"Buried" was the wrong word anyhow, and I wondered how long it had been since someone in our family was sealed in a giant clay pot. That's the part Dad thought was cool.

"It's probably not even legal," Sallie had insisted.

"To hell with today's laws," Dad had said.

"And it's not our land," I'd added.

"It's not anyone's," Dad had gone on.

"Tell that to the park service," my mother had argued.

At that point, Dad would always grin. "In any case, it won't be my problem."

We hoped it wouldn't be anyone's for quite a while. People in our family go into their 80s.

"Can you imagine if he really wants that?" Sallie had once asked me quietly. "If he writes it in his will? You and me dragging an old, dead guy down into a cave when we're already in our 60s."

"Our kids can do it. They'll be old enough by then."

"Even they wouldn't be able to get a giant pot through that hole."

That assumed there would be kids, and they could be conned into doing it. In my great-grandparents' time, there were over 30 families who knew and regularly visited the cave. But no one knew of anyone being buried there.

"I knew it wasn't a burial ground," Cory said. "I read that." I think he almost said, "Sallie told me," and I'm glad he couldn't see me smile in the dark. "But I didn't think you still needed to make offerings."

"You don't... but we always do." Then I thought about that. "No... it's something I always do. I was never taught... never told. It's just something I've done since I was a kid. Maybe as a prayer to get me out of this place alive."

We both laughed at that, though I'd never felt any danger.

"You think other families have special places here?" Cory asked. "I noticed you went straight to yours."

It was just a crevice, a tiny rock shelf. I don't know how or when I'd found it, or if I'd used some other place before. This one occurred naturally in the stone, and I'd always left food there.

Other than that, the walls weren't marked. There were no special family spots. Over the years, fewer and fewer people had come into the cave, maybe as other families lost interest or simply lost their maps.

"How can you not remember the way?" Sallie used to ask. "I can find it at night."

"That's because we come here every year. Sometimes, more than once. But that's just us."

To other people, it was just a dark cave. There were no piles of skulls as in ancient crypts. You couldn't easily bury something if you wanted to. The floor was stone, and it would take hours just to chip out a small hole.

Cory seemed disappointed by the lack of display, but that's what our ancestors wanted. "If they can't find us, they can't hurt us," I'd been taught to sing and remember. It was the chorus of several songs and the theme of many family stories. That's why the cave was so isolated.

"How far down are we?" Cory asked.

I didn't really know, though I'd asked that question myself. I was told we weren't so far down so much as dug into the side of the hill. There was tons of earth above us.

"Not even one marking," Cory almost complained, as he moved his light across the walls. "From a tribe famous for its pottery."

I never liked the word "tribe," and I didn't like "clan," either. And anyone who read even the least bit about our history knew we weren't "Mogollon." Juan Mogollon was a Spanish governor who'd named the mountains after himself long after our families had begun using them. But when modern historians needed a label, the name stuck.

"Other caves are full of drawings," Cory went on. "There are hundreds of them."

"Our families insisted on no markings."

"But this could be any dumb cave. This could be something you see in a movie." He laughed right after he said that and added, "Sorry... I didn't mean to offend anyone... Especially not someone who's dead."

"I'm sure you haven't. And it doesn't matter anyway. I've been down here for hours... overnight sometimes. You don't think I didn't use part of the place as a john."

"Really?" Cory said. "'Cause I've kind of had too much coffee..."

I had to laugh, and then he laughed, but I'm sure not for the same reason. I was thinking, "I'm trapped here with a frat boy. What was Sallie thinking?"

"There's a place we all use," I told Cory, and I pointed my helmet beam to a far corner. It was maybe 80 feet away, but on fairly even ground. I knew he could get there alone.

(continued)