On the eve of our next trip into Underworld, my mind was full of thoughts. Going back into Underworld didn't scare me, but that didn't mean I wasn't apprehensive. What Running Horse and I saw the first time in Underworld seemed to indicate it was just another valley.

The problem was, how did it get where it was?

Running Horse sensed the apprehension about who it was he was talking to in the spirit world.

"You need to trust me. We don't have a lot of time, Tall Willow," Running Horse told me as the day of the hunt got closer.

I trusted Running Horse. What I didn't trust were the spirits he was talking to.

Paradise Valley was a fine place. I didn't know what kind of place Underworld was. We had been a few miles, and we came back. We encountered nothing dangerous or threatening, but how did we know that was true of the rest of Underworld? Even if it was safe, did we belong somewhere that had no right being where it was?

Joe didn't stop doing the things he did. If he wasn't up top in the Eagle's nest, or in the Window cave, he was coming from one or the other on most days. It did surprise me when he showed up one morning about the time I was fixing coffee.

Running Horse told him to let him know if he found anything unusual.

"Chief in," he asked, leaning into the entryway.

"Chief's in, Joe. Come in and have a cup."

"The Cathedral cave is promising, Chief. I want you to come with me to take a look at what I've found," Joe said over coffee that morning.

"It goes where the Window cave goes?" Running Horse wanted to know.

"I can't say that. It is wide open below where the pond was about fifty feet below the entrance. Below where the pond stood, I found another cave. The western cliff seems riddled with passageways. This one is big enough for me to walk in standing up. I can't touch the ceiling, and standing in the center, I can't touch both sides when I hold my arms out.

This wasn't the first time Joe spoke of the size of the cave under the pond in the Cathedral cave.

"You've opened the Window cave to the ground, Joe?"

"We broke out at ground level two days ago. They are shaping it up and building supports to be safe. I let them do that, and I went to take a closer look at the Cathedral cave. As far as I have been in that cave, the size doesn't change much. I think someone dug the tunnel to make it easier to move around in the caves. Lots of cave ins have blocked them off from each other. I think they were once connected. If they were connected, the Cathedral cave is going to go down to the same place as the Window cave."

I wish I was as sure as Joe, but I wasn't. That meant we were going to go to see what he was talking about.

The trip into the Cathedral cave wasn't as confining as I found the Window cave to be. We went down the passageway behind the cathedral and Joe showed us the pond without water in it. The bottom was split open. As we began to walk into the crevice, Demon ran ahead of us. As far as I know, Demon hadn't been in the Window cave, but I remember him dashing ahead of me in the Cathedral cave, while I went to gather samples of rocks right after we found Paradise Valley.

We could hear Demon ahead of us as Joe lit a torch to show us how big the size of the cave we were in. He held the torch over his head, and it didn't touch the ceiling. Like the Cathedral cave's main chamber, it was a big cave, and we were walking down right away. There was no doubt this cave was sloping downward. We walked for quite a ways, and after Joe lit another torch, we stopped so Joe could explain it to us.

"It's like this all the way down, Chief."

"It is a big cave," Running Horse said. "It goes to the same place the Window cave goes?"

"Further along, I can hear the waterfall. I think it goes down on the north side of the Window cave," Joe said.

"I don't understand. If we are already on the ground in the Window cave, why another cave?"

I already thought of that question, but Running Horse asked it.

"Horses," Joe said.

"Horses?" Running Horse asked.

"It's big enough to take horses down to the land in the earth. Horses make exploration much easier. It is also safer to be on horseback if you run into trouble. It seems like a good idea, if we are going to continue taking a look at the land down there, horses would make it easier."

Who but Joe would think of taking horses down in a cave if it did go where you needed it to go. "Just how were you going to talk a horse into going down in a cave?" I asked.

"Horses?" Running Horse said again, as if it sounded sane. "Find out if it goes to where the Window cave goes. If it does, we'll talk about horses. If it doesn't, well the Window cave gets us to where we want to go."

The likelihood the Cathedral cave came out in the same place the Window cave came out seemed like a lot to chew on. In a perfect world, maybe the Cathedral cave and the Window cave went to the same place.

"How many cave ins have you run into in this cave?" Running Horse asked.

"None. It's like you have seen as far as I have gone. I think it might take us to the same place as the Window cave. We can take our time and if we think this cave goes to the same place, we can make an opening to see where we are and where the Window cave is."

"How many lands do you think can be down in the earth?" Running Horse asked.

It wasn't a question meant to be answered. They both knew we were about to venture into the unknown. One underground land seemed like enough to me. One cave going to Underworld seemed like plenty.

How did Joe intend to get a horse to go into a cave?

How Joe managed to talk warriors to go into the cave to dig out a way forward was a mystery. They went willingly, because it gave them something to do, and Paradise Valley didn't come with a lot to do here.

Running Horse led the way, I followed him, Samuel followed me, and Young Antelope followed Sammy Boy. Barking Dog and Turtle brought up the rear. Big Bear withdrew from the trip when it was coming too close to the birth of his child. He wanted to be close to his wife, and he wanted to be there when the child arrived.

We thought we had plenty of hunters, and we wished Big Bear well.

Joe went ahead of us to keep torches lit, and it was easy to follow him to what was now an opening on to the new land. He didn't know how long it would take them to dig down to put an opening where the ground was, but it took a little less than a week. We no longer had to be lowered by rope. This time we stepped out on the ground we were about to explore.

The air was fresh. The temperature fine for walking, and our supplies sat on the ground next to the Window cave. Running Horse went about distributing equal amounts of dried meat, and the food pouch and water pouch we would fill as we walked. We knew there was plenty of water, so after filling the food pouches, we walked toward the lake that was on the other side of a grove of trees.

The hole was still there twenty-five feet off the ground, and faces appeared in the opening, and warriors waved as we moved away from the cliff. They wished us well, but they had the harder job, waiting.

On the way down, we stopped at the upper window high up in the Window cave. We all took a good look around, as Running Horse spoke of how far we would be going today. He didn't plan to reach the river until tomorrow. We were in no hurry, and Running Horse and I had been on this section before. We knew what we were going to see, and if anyone had second thoughts about going into Underworld, no one said anything.

We were going to look over the forests to see what game we could find. We would stop to hunt today, and that way we preserved the dried meat for later, if we needed to eat dried at all. The entire point of this trip was to hunt and maybe be able to bring a little meat back to have a feast when we returned. That would prove there was plenty of game down below to feed us. At least we hoped that was what we would prove.

Joe had arranged our goods for each of us to have a water skin, a food pouch filled with dried venison and rabbit, a sharp knife for cutting, our bows with quivers of arrows. We would carry no bedroll, but we had enough clothing to be able to add a layer if it cooled more than it did our first trip to Underworld. And we could always strip out of our undergarments and use them for a pillow at night.

We each checked everything twice, and Joe wished us well as we began walking after Running Horse.

I gave some thought to Lewis' and Clark's Expedition. They began their journey in territory that was known and settled for the most part, but once they got into the middle of the country, they spent much time documenting new finds that were different from anything that was seen before by anyone in the group.

Sketches were made and the habits of animals were documented for Jefferson, who purchased the territory for over $15,000,000, doubling the land mass of the country. Lewis and Clark were hired to find out what President Jefferson bought, and they were diligent explorers who kept records on everything, collecting specimens when they could.

The one discovery they made, they needed Indians to help them get where they were going. Indians knew white trappers who were on their land and traded with them. Trappers would pay a good price for animal pelts, which they sold along with what they trapped. These were successful collaborations with the people who lived on the land thousands of years before any white men came.

Lewis and Clark met friendly Indians who traded horses once the explorers couldn't go further on their boats that went up the rivers of the west. Certain they would find a watery passage to the West Coast, they were stopped at a mountain range, and they went on horseback from there, trading their boats for horses at the Continental Divide. Friendly Indians gave Lewis and Clark's expedition the help they needed to cross the Rockies. Sacagawea, wife to Charbonneau, a French guide and translator, was a Shoshone. It was her people who let the Lewis and Clark expedition winter with them. Sacagawea had a six-month-old child with her, and this was immediately evidence that Lewis & Clark were on a peaceful mission that Indians happily assisted.

Once they got over the mountains, they traded their horses for canoes to finish their trip to the Columbia River and the Pacific coast, even then, the Nez Perce helped the expedition to get them down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. Not being out of the woods yet, local Indians help them survive a harsh winter.

It gave me something to think about, after spending weeks studying Lewis and Clark in school. What took them almost two and a half years to do, took us two or three weeks to read about in our textbooks. I'm sure it was more difficult doing it than to study it, but it was how Europeans ended up coming to the land Jefferson bought and the United States claimed.

For the first time, white men were on the plains and all points west. We weren't that ambitious and finding game and friendly habitat was what we were looking for. Because the cave came out of the cliff where it did, it didn't mean that was the best place to live. Considering the cavalry, I thought finding a place far from the cliff might be a better idea, but I kept it to myself the first day we were back in Underworld.

The expedition faced little resistance. They weren't interested in living on Indian land. Had they expressed the desire to move in on the Indians, there would have been a different reception, but once news returned that there was no Northwest Passage that would make trade easier. What would they do with all that land now that they found out that there was no Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean?

Jefferson bought it from the French, who got it from the Spanish who had a dubious claim to Louisiana Territory. When Napolean realized his army was spread too thin to defend it, he sold it to Jefferson. He made a fast $15,000,000 which didn't hurt his feelings any. The French had never been there, even if the French waylaid the British fleet in Chesapeake Bay, which led to the defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Buying it from the French, Jefferson acquired it for the United States. No one bothered to ask the Indians, and that was an oversight that was going to cost a lot of people their lives. While the French, Spanish, and English spent a lot of time laying claim to land that wasn't theirs, the people living there didn't think that because they showed up one day, they owned the place. They might have asked the people who lived on the land their opinion on the subject.

We had no idea if anyone was already living in Underworld, but we were a bit pressed for time, and we needed to find out what we could in order to be able to keep on living.

I was no longer sure how accurate the account we studied was. Mrs. Taylor told us details that weren't in the textbook. She had a knowledge acquired by living through the times she taught us about. I didn't necessarily believe that she was in the habit of lying to us, but I thought she could be misinformed by the people who wrote the textbook to tell the story of the land she lived on and once belonged to the Indians.

Mrs. Taylor thought that the Lewis and Clark expedition was one of the most exciting events in our history.

Going to a new land went as well as it could have gone, and they collected information that told Jefferson about the land he bought, but without help from the Indians, Lewis and Clark might still be wandering around.

Our exploration was about to begin, and giving thought to other explorations was on my mind. Maybe ours would go as smoothly as it did for Lewis and Clark. Maybe no one was living in Underworld.

Running Horse told the people enough to explain our absence. He didn't describe what we found, but he told them that he was going to explore it and might be gone a week or more. The warriors who had been digging with Joe told of what they saw and what they did in the caves. No one was completely in the dark, and Running Horse left it at that. There wasn't much he could say about a land we little knew.

The idea there could be buffalo down there intrigued me. If there was a place where the buffalo survived, perhaps people could survive there too. With so little to go on, it was hard to say what else might be down there, but our hunting expedition would go out until we knew something more about the new land we found. Having game to hunt would determine if Underworld could supply the things we needed to survive there.

Each of us had a food pouch with meat enough for a few days. We each carried a skin pouch for water. We knew there was fresh water a short distance from the opening to the ground, and we would make sure our water skins were full before we left there. We would go straight to the river from there, find a way to cross it, and see what was on the far side. We could see the river from the window in the Window cave, but except for seeing how it ran off toward the south, it was hard to tell what the land was like on the far side of the river.

After we crossed the river, each morning we would decide if we would keep going another day or turn around.

Going west, or what we believed to be west, would take us to the river. We had been there once, but this time we would find a way to cross. While Running Horse didn't have much to say about it, he wanted to find out what made the dust storm from the week before. If we found buffalo in large numbers, that would make the trip as exciting as any trip could be. What if we did find buffalo. That would be amazing.

Did it mean our destiny was in Underworld? I couldn't say. It would be a good reason to think about moving.

We each had enough dried meat to nibble on as we walked, but the plan was to hunt and live off the game. If we could do that, and if there were no predators that wanted us for supper, we would consider future steps we could take in Underworld. There were unlimited possibilities when you looked into the unknown.

"Look over by the tree line," Young Antelope said.

We were three or four hours into the trip when something was moving along the tree line a few hundred yards away. It was moving at the same speed we were moving, and we watched it walking along with us.

"It's a bear. Could be a griz or a black bear," Samuel said as he watched it move.

I couldn't tell it was a bear. I saw it moving, but not clearly enough to identify it.

"It's big," Running Horse said. "Look at how it looks big against what are fully grown trees."

We did look. I remembered the huge beast on the walls of the cave. It wasn't a bear, but it was big. We watched the bear for a few more minutes, and we moved on. We saw what looked like a hawk overhead. It glided on air and circled around us as we kept walking at a steady pace. He lost interest and glided in the direction of the forest. By that time the bear lost interest in us too. He disappeared in among the trees.

"Let's stop here," Running Horse said. "We'll wait until the morning to go into the forest. The river shouldn't be far once we leave the forest. Samuel and Young Antelope, try your hand at hunting. I would rather we do it with plenty of light for this time of day. We still don't know what kind of animals are down here, and once you reach the forest, don't go beyond where you can see the tree line. I don't want you getting lost."

Samuel went toward the left to enter the forest, and Young Antelope went off toward the right. We set up where the camp would go, and Running Horse began making a firepit for the game. We had plenty of meat for two or three days, but we expected to be able to kill game and save the dried meat for the trip back if we didn't want to stop to hunt once we were on the way home.

The temperatures in the open was cool and comfortable. We would probably need the fire tonight to help keep us warm, but more to keep the animals at a distance. We saw one lonely bear, a few birds, and things we couldn't identify that were too far away to see what they were. We mostly walked in the open, and most critters were going to be mindful that there were strange creatures about.

On to Chapter Fifteen
"Hunts"
Back to Chapter Thirteen
"Valley High, Valley Low"
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