It measured four inches long, about three-quarter-inch wide. Later, we would discover it was an atlatl point, the killing end of the throwing stick that predated bows, a point probably 5000 years old. We didn't know that then, but we did know we had made a wondrous discovery—not an archaeologically significant find, perhaps, but a revealing, tangible connection between past and present, between our hunting ancestors and our hunting selves.
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here. What sort of man threw this point? we wondered. Tough, surely. Even 5000 years ago this spot was 12,000 feet high. He, too, would have struggled to breathe in the altitude, slipped on the scree, frozen his feet in crossing the icy stream. What took shape in our minds now, what dominated our thoughts, was the idea of 5000 years of men climbing the same mountain with the same goals, the same passions, the same needs. His tangible wants were greater than ours, but spiritually we were kin. The continuum awed us and at the same time partially satisfied our desire to kill that big buck. The presence of that point meant our early hunter had failed at least once, too.
The last day we chose to ride to the west side of the mountain, find the bowl that held those deer seven years ago, and simply watch. If you've put in a good effort and had a good time and made a discovery or two, as we had done, the spirit is strengthened, even if the larder is not filled. So we rode and hiked until we came to that last stand of aspen before timberline, and there we shucked our packs and glassed the mountain. And there, high above the scree, on a narrow trail circling the bowl, a trail that cut up a shoulder of the summit to drop into the side we had hunted the day before, an access route from one face to the other that we had never found, there we saw the deer. Some day—or perhaps some age—we hoped that we or our spiritual kin would hunt that deer once again. |
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