The Goats Knew

You've Got To Have Heart

This late at night, he really should have been asleep. But lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, Scott couldn't get the images of the totems out of his mind. Any time he approached sleep, that tingle in the back of his head would start up again.

I know it means something, he thought. I just have to figure out what. The moon was waning, but just one night past full, it was still good and bright in his window. If he wasn't going to get any sleep anyway, he might as well be doing something productive. What would Dad do? Well, undoubtedly, Dad would head down to the town library and start doing research. Old people, right? He sat up and pulled his Chromebook out of his nightstand.

Sitting up in his bed, he powered up the little laptop. He sat there, staring at the Google page for several minutes, trying to think of what to search for. Take it from the top, he thought and typed "Native American Totem Poles". He punched the ENTER key and waited. About 1,860,000 results (0.88 seconds), was the reply.

"Ok. Two million hits. That sounds about right," he mumbled under his breath. He clicked the IMAGES tab and started perusing pictures of a variety of totem poles from around the continent. Nothing here really grabbed him, so he tried to narrow it down a bit.

This time he typed "Iroquois Indians" and hit ENTER. Google corrected his search string to "Iroquois Nation". He decided to start with Wikipedia, but when he followed that link he saw that he had redirected to "League of Nations." Scrolling through the entry he found a map that showed their land claims.

"Damn. They were everywhere," he exclaimed. He looked around guiltily as if he might have awakened someone. He saw that the map showed Iroquois land covering all of the Northeast and several central states as well.

"Still too much," he said and was about to try again when he spotted the list of tribes that belonged to the League. The Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca.

"Seneca'' Now he felt he was onto something. Seneca Lake's not far from here, he thought. He typed "Seneca Indians'' into the search field and hit the ENTER button once again. He could see immediately that he was on the right path. Even without clicking on any links, he saw that the Seneca were "south of Lake Ontario". That was the right area.

He changed the search string from "Seneca Indians" to "Seneca Totem Poles" and came up with another group of photographs. This time the style of the animals depicted looked much more like the ones on the pole Moran had been holding. Scrolling through the hundreds of photos was time consuming, but not boring. On the contrary, he was becoming quite absorbed by the variety and coloring of the images. Most of the Totem Poles he'd seen pictured while growing up must have all been by the same tribe. But these, although styled much the same, were all distinctly individual.

There were images of snakes, bears, foxes, wolves. If an animal had ever lived in the northeast, there were poles with their images on them. As he continued to scroll through the list, something caught his eye.

It wasn't quite what he had seen in Moran's hand. No, the images he was looking at now were more complex. More true to life than the stylized carvings in the picture he had taken. He zoomed in on the photo. That was definitely a lizard. This wasn't the first image he'd spotted with lizards, but all of the lizards were the same on this pole. Not only that, but the only other animal depicted looked like a wasp, or hornet. He clicked the link. He followed the hyperlinks through the maze of information. He settled on the Full Text of "Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths". He wasn't sure why. It just felt right.

Appearing on the screen was a document from the Smithsonian Institute, apparently from 1910. He began scrolling through the text, not really knowing what it was he was looking for. There were no pictures here, but he felt there must have been a reason he had selected this document. Hoping to find an image explaining the lizard and hornet carvings, he rolled the mouse-wheel, scrolling down through the document. Finally, something caught his eye.