Them Bones

THE BOX V

Smith’s Diary

They call us the Music People.

I never thought about it. In any kind of primitive society, you don’t have music unless you have people making it right then and there. Without music, there’s nothing but natural noises; people talking, birdsongs, squawks, all that.

That must have been the first thing they noticed about us.

What we noticed about them first is that they don’t look like movie Indians.

They’re tattooed, a lot of the ones we’ve seen. They have feathers, but not many birds. A lot of them have shaved heads, the men, that is; the few women we’ve seen have their hair up in a sort of bun or French twist on the top or sides of their heads, keeping it out of the way.

Their tattoos are weird – circles, lightning bolts, strange designs with hands and tears, skulls, birds, snakes, a sort of three-sided swastika, like a bent Y.

Their skins range from a dark brown to a very light copper colour. Some of them wear these big ear spools, like those lip things you always used to see Ubangis wear in cartoons, only these stretch their earlobes all out of shape.

A couple of them have pointy heads, though they seem to be intelligent, not microcephalic at all. From rumor I hear they are from much farther north, people who have married into the tribe we’re dealing with.

Splevins gave us all a briefing on what we know so far. These people represent one or two villages which belong to a sort of loose-knit bigger tribe, on both sides of the Mississippi. They are pretty advanced in the arts (I’ve seen some of their handiwork; it’s beautiful in a strange kind of way) and minor sciences (they work metal cold, they have flood-irrigation agriculture, mainly corn, beans, and squash) and are at peace with everyone for fifty kilometers in all directions.

From best guesses, they speak a sort of pronto-Muskeogan language among themselves, and have a well-developed sign language with which to communicate with others (and us). They worship various totem animals (this tribe is part of the larger Turtle clan) and they have a matriarchially descended chief system. (They call their chiefs Sun Men, because they worship the sun; these Sun Men are both spiritual and active leaders of the villages. Their most important Sun Man, who lives some thirty kilometers away, they call the Sun King, which conjures up visions of Louis the XIVth with tattoos and feathers.) They have great reverence for their dead, whom they place in mounds of earth, raised around the cremated (in the case of nobles) or buried remains of the dead.

(There seems to be another religious movement within the larger one having to do with the actual worship of death itself – hence all the tattoos with the tears, hands, eyes and snakes. We learned that about half of each of the villages belongs to this death cult.)

Some of their mounds are twenty meters high, great ceremonial places with temples atop them, for the big sun worships each year. Mostly the mounds are within their villages or just outside them. The ones outside they bury the dead in; those inside are for the temples.

Splevins and Putnam have actually seen the Indians’ village – they went yesterday. Then they came back and gave us the briefing.

They are an industrious clean people, who should be able to help us in many ways, and we them.

The bad news is that we are the only black or white people they have ever seen. No Nordics, no one who could be thought of as Spanish or French, no Irish, no Chinese. The only other peoples they know about (aside from their large confederation) are some hunting tribes who live far to the northwest, who they trade with once a year in the summer, and a couple of emissaries (who sound a lot like Mexican Amerindians to Splevins) who drop by every three years or so to tell them what a good thing they have going way down south.

They have never seen horses before.

They have never seen iron or steel, though they do work with copper and gold.

Splevins is of the inescapable conclusion that we are in some time before the European discovery of America.

(It would take a CIA man that long to realize it.)

We have missed the mark by 400 years, maybe more. We are stuck in this past, unless they figure out something Up There in 2002.

Well, now we have a 400year head start on the future, rather than only seventy. Time for SDO duty.

PS: The Indians seem to like In the Mood best when they visit.