WANDERER Part 19

Media Frenzy

“They can’t just take it away from us Pet,” Tass hissed, “those mucking bass Tardises.”

Pet didn't look up from the letter she was reading, “It was never ours, it always belonged to the State.”

“Why are you so calm about this?  Doesn't is criss you off?”

Petra was not angry, she had been expecting this and this was the reason she had held off making the announcement about the discovery of Bear Cave.  The cave was on land owned by the State of California and once that bear carving had been found, everything changed.  Runes were definitely not the work of the ancient natives of California so no one had cared about Pet’s expeditions, but a bear was something different.  That bear carving took the discovery from the realm of an obscure curiosity to a place of archaeological significance because the ancient natives did make carvings of animals.  Now it was officially protected and the only excavations would be state and native sanctioned ones that no one really had an interest in conducting.

However, Pet had seen all this coming from the very first moment she had looked down from the rocks and seen the fragments.  One of the benefits of being an outsider was not playing by insider rules and it had taken quite a lot of convincing along with some creative bribery to keep the hikers quiet until Pet was ready to reveal the cave.  But those hikers had kept their word; so Pet and Tass had plenty of time to do their own research before turning the cave over to the state.

Pet exhausted herself making sure that she wrung every possible drop of information out of the site before giving it up though.  There were thousands of photographs from all angles of the cave and the surrounding terrain; photos of all the carvings and any rock with even the possibility of a groove.  Samples of dirt, rocks, mosses and a host of other specimens had been collected and sent to the labs.  CaveWomen had even brought in a genuine scientist, a retired teacher from the area who was a longtime reader and supporter of the blog.

Dr. Garcia spent two days examining all the carvings before concluding that they were genuine and even suggested that all of the glyphs had been carved by the same hand.  A private geologist had come for a quiet consultation about the age of the glyphs, but even Pet had a hard time wrapping her head around the geologist’s findings.  She knew that the glyphs were incredibly old and even harbored the suspicion that they predated European examples by thousands of years.

Accepted history states that Christopher Columbus discovered the new world first in 1492, that no Europeans had come to the Americas before then and that it was still a ‘discovery’ even though there were people waiting for him when he arrived.  The gigantic egos that wrote history books were unconcerned about facts that did not support their story.  Actually, they were kind of antagonistic about those pesky facts and did their level best to hush the voices of dissent.

They had gone to war with Pet the very moment she had announced the finding of Bear Cave on her blog, which she had done without going to the authorities first and without asking the established order pretty please.  In fact, Pet had gone way outside of her usual comfort zone and sent out a press release because she knew there would be a surfeit of voices calling her a fraud, pretender or nutjob.-

The CaveWomen came out swinging with a full report including all the lab findings, photos and even the theory that the glyphs were carved at least five thousand years before Columbus was born.  But Pet would not fight in their arena, the odds were rigged in favor of the house and she did not have the patience for that glacial pace.  Pet and Tass took the fight out into the streets, if the scientists wanted to hang them out to dry then they would have to get past over a million readers to do so.  The best lesson Pet had learned from the computer age was that the only thing you needed to have credibility was to have a bunch of strangers saying that you were credible.

So she was ready for the fight, but it was not the fight that interested her.  All Pet wanted was to understand the glyphs, it was her life’s work, her calling and nothing would push her off course.  Tass however, was a different story.  Tass was a fighter, a scrappy contender who did not like to be pushed around or bossed around.  Tass was the face and voice of CaveWomen, Inc and she would happily go toe-to-toe with anyone who dared to call them fakes.

They were sitting at the table in the sunny kitchen, well Pet was anyway because Tass kept getting up to stomp around the room angrily.  “Well we can’t let them get away with this,” Tass fumed from near the sink.

“They have already gotten away with it,” Pet replied placidly, “but we got away with something too, don’t forget that.”

Tass sighed dramatically, “But what next Mahatma bucking Gandhi?  Do we just smile and let them talk all this Brit about us?”  Tass glared at Pet and sighed again extra loudly, “How do we know where to go next?”

Pet fished out a letter from the pile and held it out to her best friend, “We’re going to New York next.  David Letterman wants our help with a Top 10 list.”  Pet could only smile and then laugh at the flow of changing expressions on Tass’ face.  The scientists and academics could do all the criticizing they wanted, the people were speaking and those people wanted the CaveWomen.