Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 5 - People Of The Sea

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People Of The Sea

Kathleen O'Neal Gear & W. Michael Gear

By: Kathleen O'Neal Gear & W. Michael Gear from Tom

Doherty Associates the anasazi mysteries

The Visitant the first north americans series

People of the Wolf

People of the Fire People of the Earth People of the River

People of the Sea

People of the Lakes

People of the Lightning

People of the Silence

People of the Mist People of the Masks

By Kathleen O'Neal Gear

Thin Moon and Cold Mist

Sand in the Wind This Widowed Land .

By W. Michael Gear

Long Ride Home

Big Horn Legacy

The Morning River

Coyote Summer

PEOPLE OF THE SEA

W Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware

that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and

destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher

has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in

this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events

is purely coincidental.

PEOPLE OF THE SEA

portions thereof, in any form.

Cover art by Royo

Maps and interior art by Ellisa Mitchell

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

wwwtor.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN: 0-812-50745-2

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-26556

First edition: November 1993

First mass market edition: September 1994

Printed in the United States of America To Lorena Sanders, and in

memory of

Benjamin Sanders. For their generous spirits and love of the sea.

We miss you, Ben.

Acknowledgments

We owe debts of gratitude to several people. Dr. Cal Cummings, senior

archaeologist for the National Park Service, and Dr. Linda Scott

Cummings, director of Paleo Research Laboratories in Golden, Colorado,

graciously helped with research. Dr. Dennis Gallegos sparked a book

on California in a discussion at the Society for American Archeology

meetings in New Orleans. H. Gene Driggers, archaeologist for the U.S.

Forest Service, kindly loaned us copies of unpublished reports from

projects on which he had worked in California. Sierra Adare spent many

hours locating and ordering books and articles--not to mention running

front-line defense in difficult times.

Michael Seidman is never far from our thoughts.

Linda Quinton, Ralph Arnote, Yolanda Rodriguez, John DelGaizo, Maria

Melilli, Natalie Farsi, Rae Lindsay and Ellisa Mitchell deserve special

thanks for their superb work on our behalf.

And Harriet McDougal continues to be the heartbeat of this series. Her

talent and caring oversight keep it, and us, going.

Last, our readers should be aware that the opinions expressed by the

characters in this book are not necessarily those of the authors!

Foreword

During the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene epoch), the Pacific coast,

from Vancouver to Southern California, was a very different place than

it is today.

The Sierra Nevada mountain range in California underwent extensive

glaciation. In the region between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, an ice cap

three thousand feet deep stretched eighty miles long and forty miles

wide. The Merced drainage, the San Joaquin River drainage and the

Kings and Kaweah basins, as well as Kern Canyon, were sculpted by ice

fields and glaciers. A coniferous forest of Douglas fir, cypress,

giant redwoods and pines thrived along the coast--where now there is

only chaparral.

East of the Sierras, the glacial climate spawned enormous inland lakes.

Honey Lake in California and Pyramid Lake in Nevada are tiny remnants

of Lake Lahontan, which covered forty-three thousand square miles and

was five hundred feet deep. Lake Bonneville, of which the Great Salt

Lake is a vestige, was twice the size of Lake Lahontan.

Because so much of the earth's water was tied up in glaciers and lakes,

the world's sea levels dropped approximately two hundred and eighty

feet. The Pacific shoreline extended ten to thirty miles farther west

than at present. Familiar places such as San Francisco Bay did not

exist. The Channel Islands, off the coast of Santa Barbara, were one

long island, seventy-eight miles long by twenty miles wide, that

stretched to within seven miles of the mainland.

The great North American glaciers--the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice

sheets, which covered most of Canada and

scooped out the Great Lakes--began rapid melting about eighteen

thousand years ago. But between ten and twelve thousand years ago, the

Sierra Nevada mountains were locked in a glacial advance. Called the

Tioga glaciation, it depressed sea surface temperatures, cooled the air

and caused increases in precipitation. July probably felt like March.

Cooler temperatures decreased the amount of summer evaporation and

significantly affected the current desert regions of central and

southern California, Arizona and Nevada. Tremendous rains created and

sustained over a hundred pluvial lakes that covered the San Joaquin

Valley, the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin regions," turning them

into marshlands.

Human hunters entered California during this period and found an Ice

Age landscape populated by camels, imperial mammoths, dire wolves,

horses, giant sloths and saber-toothed cats, among other now extinct

animals. The California lion, the largest cat on record, was

approximately twenty-five percent larger than the modern African lion.

The most terrifying predator of all was the giant short-faced bear, the

biggest carnivore to ever inhabit North America; it weighed more than a

ton and had long legs designed for great speed and agility.

The question that has plagued scientists for generations is whether the

mammoths, mastodons and other "megafauna" were killed off by human

hunters or succumbed to the dramatic environmental changes that altered

the face of the continent.

We know from paleontological discoveries that before humans arrived,

the late-glacial megafauna populations were declining and struggling

for survival. The body size and stature of mammoths decreased,

probably in response to the capricious weather, which resulted in

habitat deterioration. We have a modern analogy to this in several

species of caribou in Canada. In order to conserve energy during

periods of cold and scarce grazing resources, the basal metabolic rates

of these caribou drop by about twenty-five percent and the animals

undergo a period-of no body growth. But we also know that megafauna

populations had survived at least four

xiv Foreword earlier periods of equally severe environmental stress

during the Pleistocene.

So why did they disappear ten to twelve thousand years ago--at exactly

the time when human hunters were spreading rapidly throughout the

Americas?

The extinctions could have been the consequence of the environmental

changes at the close of the Pleistocene. We cannot rule out the

possibility that for some unknown reason, the megafauna simply could

not counter these changes as they had countered similar changes in the

past. There may have been climatic stresses that we do not, at

present, understand. But the fact remains that they should have been

able to survive.

We do know for certain that humans hunted these massive animals and

killed them with extraordinary skill. We find archaeological sites

containing dart points embedded in the bones of mammoths and surrounded

by butchering tools. But we also find sites where mammoths appear

merely to have died in large numbers--sites where there is no evidence

of hunting or butchering.

It is likely that a combination of factors led to the extinctions. The

struggling megafauna had undoubtedly been weakened by the dramatic

environmental changes and were dying of natural causes; diseases may

have attacked them, but their weakened state also made them easy prey

for human hunters. Megafauna populations would have sought out and

congregated in areas with reduced environmental stress; certainly the

coast of California would have been one of these places. The Tioga

glaciation of the Sierras would have provided the megafauna with a

welcome refuge, a place where the plants they favored and the animals

they ate still lived.

Human hunters would have followed. Although various species of

megafauna had lived in North America for a million years and had

certainly developed skills for combating environmental changes, they

had no skills with which to face such a ruthless and relentless

predator. While humans were probably not the exclusive cause of the

extinctions they did not "kill off" all the megafauna--they

undoubtedly contributed to their demise and may well have been "the

straw that broke the camel's back."

And, as always--witness the Paiute prophet, Wovoka, and the

establishment of the Ghost Dance in the 1870s, or the modern

environmental movement--when human beings begin to notice the dwindling

numbers of animals and inexplicable changes in the world, they become

confused and worried. In the times under discussion here, they would

probably have prayed for a return to the old days, to the "golden age"

of a paradise now lost. We call these "nativistic" movements. In this

book, Sunchaser's Mammoth Spirit Dance is such a movement.

The myths and rituals you will find in the following narration are

taken from a number of California and Arizona tribes. The Miwok

believed there was an opening on the horizon that led souls to the

Skyland. The "Dying God" theme is based upon the stories of the

Luiseno, who lived in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties.

Sunchaser's maze comes from the Pima and Papago peoples. The Talth

Lodge existed among the Yurok tribe of northern California until the

1940s.

Many plants were utilized for their medicinal properties, particularly

plants in the willow family such as cottonwood, poplar and aspen, which

contain the aspirin-like compound salicin--an analgesic and

anti-inflammatory. Finally, the Ant Ordeal and the visionary uses of

Datura, nightshade, morning glory and tobacco--were practiced by tribes

throughout California, Nevada and Arizona, but specifically by the

Kitanemuk, Luiseno, Tubatulabal, Chumash and Gabrielinos.

People of the Sea takes place at the end of the Tioga glaciation, when

the rapidly changing climate generated unstable and unpredictable

weather patterns. The great animals that prehistoric peoples had

relied upon for food and shelter were swiftly disappearing. The

grasses, the trees, even the very ground beneath their feet, were

changing.

They must have been deeply frightened.. ..

Prologue

Not much had changed in the last century, Mary Crow Dog decided as she

studied the bland conference room in the Bureau of Land Management

district office. Just like all the others she'd been in, it had a

twelve-foot-long table with twenty chairs arranged neatly around the

sides, big windows on the northern wall and a coffeepot that smelled as

if it had been sitting on the burner for three days straight. A large

map representing southern California hung on the wall. White parts

were private land, yellow were BLM-administered public land and green

showed the national forests.

A century ago they would have had a map, too, hand drawn and smudged

with dirt and grease. But the faces of the government officials would

have looked a great deal like the ones she now saw: smugly superior,

thinly masked by a professionally artificial pleasantness. Instead of

the noonday sun, fluorescent light illuminated the meeting, and instead

of a fire ring, the long, wood-grain veneer table separated them.

As Mary opened her file, still more BLM personnel filtered into the

room, coffee cups in hand, note pads or manila folders under arms as

they talked softly among themselves-office small talk, to ease the

coming tension. Each studiously ignored her.

From the way they acted, their eyes darting uneasily, she had the

feeling that the decision had already been made, as it had been in the

old days. This meeting, like so many others, was for form only.

Patience, Mary. Endure. Maybe you're wrong.

She reached down, smoothing the brown twill skirt she'd

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PeopleOfTheSeabyKathleenO'NealGear&W.MichaelGearBy:KathleenO'NealGear&W.MichaelGearfromTomDohertyAssociatestheanasazimysteriesTheVisitantthefirstnorthamericansseriesPeopleoftheWolfPeopleoftheFirePeopleoftheEarthPeopleoftheRiverPeopleoftheSeaPeopleoftheLakesPeopleoftheLightningPeopleoftheSilencePeopl...

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Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 5 - People Of The Sea

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