The Shaft

The photograph is bad. Grainy, taken at an angle, the colors flattened by whatever light they could get down there. You can make out a bison on its side, entrails suggested more than drawn. Beside it a figure — human, or meant to be — horizontal, arms stiff, a bird's head where a face should be. To the left, a stick with a bird perched on top of it. The bird is not doing anything.

He is the only man painted in the cave.

He is also the worst drawing in the entire cave.

Nothing else like it appears anywhere.

It was painted at the bottom of a shaft, seventeen feet down. The main chambers above hold bison that still seem to be moving. Horses mid-run. Whoever painted them knew how they moved — the shift of a shoulder blade at full gallop, where light catches a flank.

Nobody knows why the man is down there. Nobody knows what happened in that shaft. The image has been sitting there for seventeen thousand years and it still doesn't answer.

I keep coming back to the bird on the stick. It isn't flying. It isn't feeding. It is just there, watching something that is already over, and it occurs to me that this is the oldest unsolved message in human history — scratched into rock by someone who had no word for what they needed to say.

The bison fell before the man did.

It went down heavy, not all at once but in stages — front legs first, then the shoulder, then the full weight of it finding the ground. The animal was down but not finished and the man was moving toward it when the bison turned.

After that the order of things is unclear.

The bison on its side, still breathing in the shallow way.

The man on his back, not breathing at all — or breathing the same shallow way. From a distance you could not tell the difference.

The spear in two pieces.

A bird on a stick. Not flying. Not feeding. Just there.

He stood at the edge of it and looked for a long time without moving.

Then he went back to the fire.

That night he ate. Not much but he ate.

The fire was the same fire. The others were the same. Someone had brought back a hindquarter and it passed around the group, beginning with those closest to the fire. He took what was handed to him. He held it longer than he needed to, longer than the others did. Then he set it down near the fire where it would stay warm and did not pick it up again.

Nobody asked.

He went where the others went. He carried what needed carrying. Once, near the end of the second day, the group moved along the ridge above the valley and he could see down into the place where it had happened. He did not stop walking. He looked for a moment and then looked ahead again and kept moving.

He slept at the edges of the group now. Not outside — not exposed — but at the margin where the firelight thinned. He had always slept near the center before.

The hall was where the others went in the evenings sometimes. He had gone too, before. He knew those walls. He had watched the painters work: the shoulder, the flank, the weight of the animal in motion. He did not go now. The hall held the herd. What he had seen was not the herd.

He went to the edge of the shaft twice before he went down.

He went down on the third morning before the others were moving.

The ladder was already there — a trunk set into the shaft. He went down hand over hand in the dark, his feet finding the notches cut into the wood, and when he reached the bottom he stood for a moment while his torch found the space, the flame drawn upward, thin and red.

The bison was already there too.

Someone had painted it before him. It was painted the way the hall bison were painted — with the shoulder, the weight, the animal in motion. He stood in front of it for a long time.

Then he mixed the pigment.

He knew what the painters did. He had watched them work the ochre, watched them test the line on their own skin before committing to the wall. He did not do that. He put the pigment to the wall and he made the man.

It was wrong from the first mark.

The arms were wrong. The legs were wrong. He gave it a beak because that was what he had seen — the mask, or whatever it was — and the beak was the only thing that held. He made it horizontal because the man had been horizontal. He made it falling because the man had been falling.

He stood back and looked at what he had made.

It did not hold.

He painted it anyway. He left it there on the wall.

He went back up the ladder and did not go down again.

The photograph is still bad.

I have looked at it for thirty years, off and on, the way you look at something that will not explain itself. The grain is the same. The angle is the same. The bison on its side, the man horizontal, the bird on its stick not doing anything.

What he made down there did not hold. He knew that when he left it. He went back up the ladder in the dark, the flame drawn upward, thin and red, and he did not go down again.

But he put it somewhere.

That is the only fact that crosses seventeen thousand years without losing anything in translation. He could not carry it. He could not leave it in the open. He went down into the only place in the cave that was also alone and he left it on the wall.

It did not hold.

It held.