Page 17 of Talk Story

We came around an outcropping of lava rock and the magnificence of the valley opened below us: the green sweep of steep, rugged, emerald-green walls catching the afternoon light, a distant silver thread of stream at its floor, the darker ruffle of ti plants and bright light green of kukui nut trees marking the edges of what had been ancient taro fields and homesteads.

From where we stood, the whole shape of the land was cradled between the vast ridges like something precious cupped in a hand. How quiet it was; how timeless. We stood silent, taking it in.

“Beautiful,” I said at last. Tiki gave a “meep!” from her carrier. Agreement, observation, or argument? With a cat it was hard to tell.

“Yes,” Pali agreed. “It is that. And more.”

“I feel privileged to see this,” Elle said softly. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

“You’re welcome,” Pali said. They locked eyes for a long moment.

Uncle Kalani was standing at the edge of the overlook, gazing at the valley with his eyes tracking slowly around its perimeters.

“The bones of our ancestors call out,” he said. “They’ve been waiting a long time for someone to hear them. For the stones they wrote on to be read and understood.”

I shivered—and hoped no one else noticed.

We went down toward the valley floor, descending on a narrow path behind Uncle Kalani who set the pace, using his sturdy staff to assist as he maneuvered around rock outcrops and across muddy sections of trail.

A cave entrance, off to the left of the route as it neared the bottom, was not obvious. Pali stopped at a section of the cliff face where a curtain of roots hung down over a shelf of dark rock. He ducked behind it without ceremony.

We followed, passing through a short tunnel dimly lit and seeping with water; trembling maidenhair ferns seemed to usher us along.

Inside the cavern, the air was cooler by at least ten degrees, carrying the mineral smell of damp stone and the mushroomy stillness of a place that doesn’t get much circulation. We’d brought headlamps, and I switched mine on.

The beam of it threw a pale cone into the dark and lit up a chamber about the size of a generous living room, with a ceiling low enough that Keone and I had to tilt our heads. The walls were volcanic basalt, pocked with the pores of ancient gas bubbles, slick at the base from moisture seeping up from the floor, but dry everywhere else.

Pali was already at the far wall of the cavern. His headlamp caught the carvings before mine did; I heard him give a stifled gasp.

The petroglyph wall ran the full width of the chamber’s rear face: human figures, their arms raised, their legs in the wide stance of warriors or dancers. ‘Iwa wings at the four corners, each one the size of my forearm. Family groupings arranged in clusters, some of the clusters nearly identical to others, like a notation repeating across a page.

And at the lower part of the wall, six rectangular depressions cut into the stone—neat as pulled teeth, each one was roughly the size of a cookie tray. The edges showed fresh tool marks, the pale inner rock not yet weathered to match the surrounding floor.

“I’ve been charting these with my archeology mentor, Dr. Nainoa Emerson,” Pali said. “Thank God we took photos and made impressions of the petroglyphs that were here before.”

“It’s awful,” I murmured; my words seemed so inadequate to express the desecration we were staring at. Returning the small carving I’d brought in Tiki’s carrier seemed like a bad idea in this moment.

Uncle Kalani had not moved from inside the entrance. He stood with his hands at his sides, his ti leaf lei motionless against his chest. His eyes were closed, his lips moving slightly in a pule.

He was praying; what a kahu did when he walked into a place that had been violated and the spiritual realms needed to know he was there, trying to make things right.

Tiki, in her carrier on my back, had gone very quiet. I felt her weight shift forward—she was pressed against the mesh, staring. I unslung the carrier and let her out. She immediately trotted over to the cavern’s stone wall and began sniffing along the ruined edge.

“There are more carvings to the left,” Pali said. He moved his headlamp slowly so we could track where he was looking.

Beyond the main composition, deeper into the chamber where the ceiling dropped and the shadows thickened, another section of wall showed more scarification from removed carvings. Beside them, wedged into a crack at waist height, something bright and wrong: a yellow plastic survey flag on a wire stake.

I photographed it without touching it. “They’ve been marking sections,” I said. “Choosing what to take next.”

“They haven’t finished,” Keone’s voice was flat.

We investigated through the chamber for the next twenty minutes. Keone took over photographing the damage and survey flags. There were four of the flags, marking panels along the lower section of the wall.

Pali moved through the space in a careful grid, documenting the depressions in the floor, the tool marks, the areas that remained intact.

I found a scrap of printed paper near the cave entrance, squashed against the rock by what might be a boot heel: the corner of a topographical printout, annotated in blue ink. I bagged it with a gloved hand and photographed the print.

From deeper in the cave, I could hear water trickling. I walked forward carefully.