I did not run. Seventy nine year old men do not run on the edge of a bluff. I held up one hand, the way I used to when a canoe was about to tip, and I said very calmly, “Gentlemen, I would walk back toward your van, if I were you.” The older man took another step. Behind him the Buffalo River glittered a hundred and fifty feet down. Then a pickup truck came up my lane with the headlights on and a cloud of dust behind it. The truck door opened. The driver was Ranger Tomas Delgado of the Buffalo National River, and he had a Park Service badge pinned to his shirt.
I had called him from the road after the restaurant. I do not know why. A man who spends fifty years on a river learns to trust his hunches, and the sight of the van had given me a chill. Delgado walked up beside me with his hand resting casually on his belt. “Evening, gentlemen,” he said. “This is private property, adjacent to federal land. May I see some identification?” The two men looked at each other, and then at the truck, where a second ranger had just stepped out. They did not argue. They went back to their van like men late for a meeting.
“Mr. Pruitt, are you all right?” Delgado asked. I sat down on a rock, because my knees had decided for me. “Ranger, I need to show you something,” I said. “Something I have kept from the government for fifty years. I think it is time.” I had never said it out loud. Nadine and I swore an oath in 1974, on this very bluff, with a lantern in the dark. She had worried that if the cave were found, the bluff would be taken from us, or ruined, or turned into a tourist stop. But Nadine had been gone five years. My son had just sold her secret for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Two strangers with a metal detector, a cave sealed with river rock, and a secret worth more than silver.
We hiked down the slope behind my cabin with two flashlights, the ranger and I, through blackberry and sumac. At the base of the bluff stood the pile of river stones that Nadine and I had stacked in the autumn of 1974, covered in moss. I moved the stones one at a time. The ranger helped without being asked. Behind them, the dark mouth of the cave breathed cold, damp air on our faces. I switched on my flashlight. “Nadine called it the Cathedral,” I said. “She thought nobody had set foot in it for ten thousand years.”
We crawled in on our elbows for thirty feet, and then the passage opened into a great round chamber with a ceiling like the inside of a bell. Delgado raised his light, and then he stopped. The walls were covered in paintings. Red ochre and black charcoal, in long rows, animals and people and stars. Deer with branching antlers. Hands pressed into stone. A tall figure with a circle for a head. “Mr. Pruitt, these are Bluff Dweller paintings,” the ranger said, his voice shaking. “These could be two thousand years old. Maybe more.” I told him there was no silver. There never was. There was only this.
Nadine had sent a sample of the rock to a lab in 1975, because she wanted to know if the cave was dangerous. The report said limestone and trace pyrite, which is fool gold. Craig must have found the report in the shoebox and read the word assay, and his mind did the rest. It was the oldest mistake in the Ozarks. A man hears the word mineral and sees only a price. I stood in the chamber with a light in my hand and watched the old hands on the wall, and I felt Nadine standing beside me, grinning.
The Park Service sent a team of archaeologists from the University of Arkansas within the week. They mapped the cave for a month and found that the paintings were between nineteen hundred and twenty four hundred years old, the largest known rock art site in the Ozarks. I donated the cave and the surrounding forty acres of bluff to the National Park Service, on one condition. They would name it the Nadine Pruitt Cave, and they would keep the public out and let only scholars and tribal elders in. The Osage and the Caddo, I am glad to say, were invited to the first visit.
Ozark Peak Holdings, the other company, vanished the moment the Park Service arrived. The two men on my bluff were later identified by the Boone County sheriff as freelance prospectors with a long record of trespassing, and they paid a fine and agreed in writing never to return. Craig did not escape so easily. He drove up from Fayetteville on a Sunday in his black Escalade and stood in my yard with his hands in his pockets. He did not speak for a long time. Then he said, “Dad, I sold Mom, and I knew it.”
I said that was a heavy thing to carry. I did not forgive him on the spot, and I did not turn him away. I said, “Son, come with me.” I took him down to the river, where I keep two aluminum canoes, my first ones, from 1972, with the dents still in them. I handed him a paddle. He looked at it as though it were a snake. We pushed out onto the green water, and for two hours I did not say a word. I let the Buffalo do the talking. When we pulled out at the gravel bar, he was crying quietly, and I saw that the river had done its work.
The following summer, he took a leave from the insurance office and came to work as a volunteer guide for the Park Service on the lower river, for no pay. He wore the flat hat and the green shirt. In August I rode with him on the first float of the day, in the bow of the old dented canoe, while he sat in the stern and steered. The sun came down through the sycamores, the elk grazed in the cane, and a heron lifted off the shoals. “Dad,” Craig said, softly behind me, “do you think Mom would have liked this?” I trailed my hand in the water, and smiled.