An old timey knife (story)

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Raymond1000

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Oct 8, 2006
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http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/155/

I stumbled onto this, and thought of Jackknife. Here’s the scene Roger Pickney sets:

After half a lifetime of roaming, I’m back home, lying low in this season of winds. The house is all boarded and the porch furniture lashed down. There’s a generator and gas to run it, a propane hotplate, a couple of jugs of good whiskey.
My neighbors are similarly equipped. There are just two hundred of us on five thousand acres and it’s the last of the last. Last island before Georgia. Last island with no bridge. Last place the way things used to be down here, dirt roads, deep woods, folks still wresting a living from land and sea. Last place for folks like us to stand. Hilton Head to the north, Tybee Island to the south, and we’re right in the middle, a sore thumb against the Atlantic.
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The action starts with Ed Peckles, a foreigner working short term on the island.

When we met on the road after the storm had passed, he waved me down. I turned off my truck and he turned off his and we leaned from the windows and he said, “I found a bone-handled knife in the surf.”
I asked if it was a Boker Tree brand, a Barlow—fine folding knives someone might have lost forty years ago.
“No,” he said, “it’s stone.”
“Stone?”
“It looks like an arrowhead. It’s lashed to a deer-bone handle.”
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And a bit later:

“But it’s fake,” Bobby said.

“Who said?” I asked.

“The university,” he said.

I stroked the handle with my thumb. “Could you fake a patina like this?”

“Oh the point is real enough,” he said, “and it’s old.”

“Mississippian?” I asked.

“Times ten.” Bobby paused like he was dredging up the courage to say more. “That’s fifteen thousand years.”

I lay the knife on his table. He had been keeping it in a wooden box with a velvet lining. Though I no longer held it, the electrons still flowed.

“Pre-Clovis,” Bobby said.

Clovis points are the most delicately worked points from antiquity, from a late Ice Age people who hunted mammoths, mastodons, and elk in the very shadows of retreating glaciers.

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as Pre-Clovis,” I said.

“Well, you’re looking at it,” Bobby replied. “Something called Taylor Notched.”

“If the point is real, how come they think it’s a fake?”

Bobby picked up the knife and held it in his right hand. “Cause nothing like this has ever been found before. Archeologists are a strange bunch. They try and work a puzzle when nine-tenths of the pieces are gone. They get all itchy when something comes along that don’t fit. One time I showed them a piece of pottery with a perfect outline of a mullet. They called it fake, too, ‘cause there were no Christian Indians.”
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Ah, well. There is no science more superstitiously reactionary than the bone diggers and grave robbers. They have so little to work with, and so many Wu-wu theories to shoot down. Questions of "Is it real" are always a crap shoot with the anthropologists.

I still think it's a fun article.
 
Moving to the General Discussion Forum.
 
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