Some story lines are obvious. Images and symbols are repeated again and again in the same order, and a language, a mythology, emanates from the ancients across the eons. Greg says the paintings in the White Shaman Shelter are like the Rosetta Stone for the Lower Pecos River people: the key to a symbolic language everyone understood and shared.
"There's big secrets out here," Greg says. "They're written on the walls." And then he adds, quietly, "You can learn a lot about yourself."
I am learning something. It has to do with the perspective of time and the cycles of the natural world; it has to do with letting go, with gratitude.
Later in the day we are in the state park's Seminole Canyon, looking up at a huge panther spitting what appears to be blood.
"Trying to figure out what this all means?" the park guide asks. "Well, everybody's theory is good."
Today, "everybody" means Greg and Patrick and me, plus a young couple from Oregon, a Texan here to climb rocks, and two children with their father and nearly blind mother. She stands near the paintings, listening, as if to hear from them what they mean. "This is a very sacred place," she says, to no one in particular.
We leave Spitting Panther and move along the nearly dry stone riverbed to the Fate Bell Shelter. We climb up to a huge stage carved into the limestone cliff, set back, safe from flash floods, above the high-water mark.
Unlike the White Shaman Shelter, which seems to have been used only for ceremonial purposes, people lived in Fate Bell. The walls are scarred with soot, and the floor is a 35-foot-deep midden of ash and rock fragments. From where I stand behind a rope, I can see the layered remains of housekeeping: woven mats of plant fibers to cover the dusty ash floor; flakes of flint from making tools and weapon points; metate stones for grinding food; charred snail shells and animal bone fragments, perhaps the scraps of dinners; hundreds of snail shells with holes drilled in them, to be strung together into necklaces--all of this I can see without moving a particle of dust.
Unfortunately, before these shelters were protected by the state of Texas, scores of artifact hunters moved more than a few particles. Great gaping holes descend through the top layers of the floor, disturbing for all time the fragile history recorded there. The art has survived largely because the Lower Pecos painters used a deeply penetrating mixture of animal blood, bone marrow and fat, yucca plant juices and iron oxide from ground pebbles.
