Fatalis by Jeff Rovin Page B

missing anything. She also grabbed what was left of Karen's tuna fish sandwich and took it with her.
    The drizzle had stopped and the gray skies were a shade lighter than they'd been since morning. The rain left behind damp and darkened roads, an unseasonable chill, and a sense of calm that was somehow more ominous than reassuring.

Chapter Sixteen
    On the way home Jim Grand decided to stop by the
Hutash
offices on Del Playa Drive to visit Joseph Tumamait. Maybe the paintings would intrigue him, maybe not Maybe he would talk, maybe he wouldn't. It was going to be tough, but it was long, long overdue.
    The robust, thorny eighty-two-year-old Tumamait was a leading anthropologist, an expert on Chumash culture and one of Grand's mentors. Born in nearby Camarillo, the scientist was a UCSB graduate who had worked with Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before returning to the west in 1965. Mead's involvement with the mental and spiritual health of primitive peoples had fascinated Tumamait, who passed his love of primitive psychology on to one of his own students, James Grand.
    From the first, the men were very close friends and colleagues. Tumamait often risked his reputation to back Grand's revolutionary ideas about the relationship between pre-and post-Ice Age peoples and the monsters they hunted. The ideas were revolutionary in part because they were not based on anthropological evidence but on Grand's own experiences in the field. Grand had become the modern world's foremost expert on prehistoric weapons. Collecting and studying ancient samples, then learning to make his own. Grand became convinced that the hunt was far more than just a matter of food-gathering. The use of weapons required daily refurbishing of blades, careful storage of feathered shafts in clean, dry places, and adjustments dictated by the weather-arrow wood, spearhead bindings, and even the herbal sleeping potions used in drinking water were affected by rain and snow, heat and cold.
    Grand believed that the people best-suited to create these weapons-and perhaps to use them-were the shamans, the same people who rendered gods, animals, and tableaux of the hunt on cave walls. But if the shamans among the Chumash and other peoples believed that animals were holy, how could they hunt and consume them?
    The answer. Grand felt-and Tumamait agreed-was that the entire process was aspirational. Preparing for the hunt, the shamans and their caste slowly became the animals-in spirit at first, tracking them as an animal would, and then in the flesh when they consumed them. The animal spirit and meat were then passed from the shamans to the tribe as a sustenance and religion.
    The idea of warrior-shamans was a revolutionary one, and not wholly embraced by either the scientific community or most of the surviving Chumash. But Grand had the best kind of evidence. He had made weapons and he had dwelt in caves and hunted for food. The entire process made the hunter intimate with the stones and the trees from which he crafted his weapons; with his own thoughts and spirit when he set out; and finally with the elements, the land, and his prey. It was a process about creation, life, death, and spirit. If a young man were not a shaman when he first became a hunter, be probably became one in time. Apart from telling tales to the young or infirm or those who didn't hunt, the only way to express what he was feeling was through art.
    Many scientists believed that prehistoric people were simple people, interested solely in survival. They regarded shamans as eccentrics who were feared because they knew some medicine and they knew a few tricks. Grand didn't agree, and Tumamait was his greatest advocate.
    Then, seven years before-while Grand was working with the Smithsonian-Tumamait went up to one of the caves where a hiker had found pottery. While he was resting by his stone campfire, Tumamait was visited by the Great Eagle. The scholar later said the