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| Pestles left on Pounding Stone |
A quarter-century after I first snaked
through a secluded foothill valley, down
along a dying creek at the base
of the foothills, I found the village sites
of a people who had vanished over a century ago,
some pounding stones only a few feet
from the road, one with pestles still on top
less than a hundred feet from the barbed wire fence,
the mortars blanketed by dry leaves and shielded
by the drooping limb of a huge oak. The paths
that I once thought had been made by cattle led
into clearings where the earth appeared trampled,
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| House Pits (where huts once stood) Near Pounding Stone |
bare and dark and a little greasy in places,
pounding stones nearby, and I followed them all
from Kings River to Dry Creek, a web connecting
ancient village sites across the foothills. Once,
at dusk, a band of coyotes began howling
by the creek, close to my car. I waited, straining
to see a ghost, until the howls began to drift away
into the valley, but nothing manifested. Twenty-five
years ago, a boy drove here with his father,
and they imagined deer, antelope, elk gathering
by the creek, predators never far away, flocks
of migrating birds and butterflies drifting through.
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| Pestles, Sierra Nevada Foothills |
Now, woodpeckers make granaries of rotting
fence posts. Once, following a trail away
from the creek, I spotted at eye level several rocks
on top of a large stone. I climbed a few feet
and found eleven pestles on a pounding stone,
as though just left the day before, one pestle
inside a mortar with a little grass growing around it.
Standing on a ridge, I gazed a long time
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| Pestles on Pounding Stone near Road |
into the valley where in just over
one hundred years almost every trace of wildness
has been wiped out. I thought of an activist
who sued developers to preserve in trust
a few acres of farmland, what he called the last vestige
of nature in the Valley, no longer working as a subsitute
again after a city official complained
about his organization to the school district;
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| Pestles near Pounding Stone |
of another activist fined over $100,000 for submitting
a "frivolous lawsuit" to stop urban sprawl on farmland;
of my own organization brought down by a bogus lawsuit,
tantamount to legal extortion--forced to settle
because of court costs, a lawsuit I can't describe
without fear of being sued; of those threatened
or fired because of their activism.
On that ridge, I was a ghost
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| House Pits near Pounding Stone |
of the Gashowu, seeing not herds
of antelope and deer and elk but a herd
of cattle in the floodplain, the new freeway
extension less than ten miles away,
the city lost in deepening smog,
a long pestle jutting
from a deep mortar at my feet, the woods
cold but still, a last howl far off in the distance.
