#saiduka

[imgibbon]

I should get back to writing my would-be Faction Paradox novel at some point...

Was going to be a semi-historical treatise on the Saiduka, a group of indigenous peoples in the Nevada region who were warring with the local Paiute tribes. They were more or less completely wiped out, but the Paiute describe them in their histories as a race of red-haired "giants" who lived in great pyramidal crannogs on and around the region's lakes, and according to some reports their name translated to "The Enemy" in the languages of the other tribes of the area.

Their numbers were eventually whittled down, and the remaining survivors holed up in the caves of Lovelock, where the other warring tribes walled them in and set fire to the entrances, eventually suffocating the lot of them. There are reports that they resorted to cannibalism before the end.

For decades their existence was considered a joke, and any scholarly investigation of them was met with derision. What few mummified remains were unearthed from the guano of the caves were purchased from local museums by various lodges in the 1930s, ground up, and smoked. Yes, you read that correctly.

Has all the trappings of a FP story, really.

I stopped working on it about a decade and a half ago since there was *very* little literature on them and what research existed was still largely scoffed at, but fortunately there's been more material published on them since then and I'd have a lot more to work from while constructing the narrative.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

It Came to the Wrong Town

The smell of meat roasting over the open fire sparked up conflicted feelings in his heart. His stomach growled and felt like a sharp blade made of pure hunger had just gotten rammed right into it—but a sense of guilt twisted the knife.

Something about that smell of burning wood—the stinging smoke in his nostrils, paired with the the scent of the roast—reminded him of his upbringing up north. But the thought of his dead horse being the source of his meal for the night elicited a deep and sorrowful sigh.

He looked up, squinting to see past the dancing flames and rising embers. A dead body rested by the campfire on the side opposite of the marshal, wrapped up in a blood-soaked blanket and tied up with rope so to not reveal his face. Little did the lawman know that he would be getting company soon—the living sort.

U.S. Marshal Ezrah McPherson rolled out a leather pouch on the dusty ground before him, laying it out. He started dismantling his revolver to clean it and distract himself from his depressing situation and current predicament. This way, it was easier to banish the thought of his loyal steed, Lightning, being dead.

He perished the thought of some dim-witted cattle thief by the name of Tobias Lonnie Stowell being responsible for Lightning’s untimely demise. The two-bit criminal had not even aimed at Lightning, he had tried to shoot the marshal.

Worse, McPherson loathed that bringing this outlaw to justice had been his only pursuit since arriving at the town of Dead End. Other things had led him here. Things he had prepared for, unlike petty crooks.

Unnatural things.

Even the circumstance of killing Stowell disappointed McPherson. He would have preferred to bring the man in alive and have him pay for his crimes. His aim had been off ever since a skinwalker claimed his left eye, so the shots had killed the crook, rather than disabling him.

The marshal sighed again and assembled his service weapon once more. Even missing a pinkie finger and some feeling in his left hand from a recent injury, he put the pieces back together with steadfast routine and swift precision. The gunslinger holstered the weapon in a flash and rolled the leather satchel with cleaning utensils back up, putting it into a saddlebag slung over a nearby rock.

He picked the skewer he had carved from the campfire and ate the roasted horse meat in silence.

“Waste not,” he murmured in between bites, chewing, and swallowing. His time with Tsela Hatali yielded such wisdom. He reminisced about his time with the medicine man—the shaman who had taken him in after his encounter with a skinwalker.

Although barely burnt and despite the meat smelling good, the bad feeling in his gut persisted. After the meal, he wiped his hands off on his pants. The night dragged on in silence with him retracing his route to get out here into the hills outside of Dead End, mentally mapping the way back to the trampled path from which he had chased Stowell.

He checked his pocket watch, closed it again, and pressed the secret button combination on it—causing tiny silvered blades to snap out from it. Using a whetstone from his duster’s pouch, he sharpened them to while away the time. The night’s cold set in, enveloping the pocket of comforting heat around the campfire, and the sharp contrast sent shivers down the marshal’s spine.

Without Lightning—or any horse, really—McPherson calculated it to take him three days to get back to the town of Dead End. Finding the way should prove no challenge.

He remembered the face of Miss Brubaker from the train ride over, quite comely and inviting. Then he remembered her sobbing face, twisted by fear and dread after encountering the madman they had killed in the freight wagon. Last he reckoned, she left town immediately the day after they arrived. The marshal pushed those memories back down into some dark recesses of his mind.

Then again, it was not like it was his fault. She had been too nosy for her own good. And she also had the luck to not know what the real threat on that train had been.

A wolf howled in the distance.

Funny, that, McPherson thought. One of the fellow marshals had told him those things had been hunted to extinction in these parts.

Instead of feeling more alarmed or alert from the sound, the monotony of twigs and coal crackling in the fireplace, coupled with the sense of solitude that overcame him, let his thoughts drift and wander aimlessly. Exhaustion finally caught up to him. The marshal slumped against the flat of the rock where he sat.

He fell asleep very quickly. Too quickly.

He blinked and rubbed his eyes as he sat up, alarmed by the silhouette of a figure standing in front of him. He had drawn his six-shooter and aimed it at his unannounced visitor before any thoughts even crossed his mind. With the back of his free hand, he rubbed his nose and snorted to clear his nose, blinking again to clear his vision.

The figure must have been eight feet tall. The marshal thought this giant of a man was wearing furs, but on his second take, he realized that this person was covered in shaggy fur from head to toe. Dark brown or dark red, he could not quite discern, for the glow of his campfire had died down quite a bit.

McPherson swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. He regretted his prayers to find the unnatural things out here.

The silhouette stared at him. Dark eyes glowered, in which the dying embers were reflected, dancing as those eyes stared with a wordless cruelty. The creature studied him. He studied it in turn. It stood upright on freakishly long limbs and had fur all over. Its hands were twice as long as those of a large man, but not nearly wide enough to look natural.

“Howdy,” the marshal growled. He cleared his throat, surprised by how gravelly his greeting had drawled out of his mouth. He had wanted to make that sound a bit friendlier.

The giant stared at him. It offered no response.

McPherson lowered the gun and nodded to the stick upon which he had roasted meat from Lightning without breaking eye contact with the creature before him.

“Got some more if you’re hungry,” he said.

After another awkward stretch of silence but no signs of hostility from the creature, he holstered the gun.

“You ain’t much of a talker, huh?”

McPherson chuckled and wiped over his lips with a thumb and index finger.

“Ain’t much of a looker, either. Well, you’re in good company here, ‘cause I’m neither of those things myself.”

McPherson chuckled again, but this time, it died in his throat after half of what it should have been. The smile faded from his face. The unsettling silence from the shaggy giant continued.

“Well, I hate to be a bad host, but if you ain’t gonna be partakin’ in my meal or sharin’ at least some words of greetin’s, I’m gonna have to kindly ask you to leave. Mister?”

For some reason, the marshal had hoped that the shift to a higher pitch in that questioning tone would prompt the creature to finally respond.

It stared. It never blinked. Its gaze burned.

McPherson made an effort of sitting still, keeping the posture of a relaxed statue. Underneath the surface, his heart raced and his nerves frayed. One wrong move, one twitch, and he would sling his revolver back out and shoot this thing in the skull.

It finally broke eye contact with him. Its gaze swept past the fire and locked onto the dead body of Tobias Stowell. The marshal followed its line of sight and felt even more unsettled by how long the creature stared at the wrapped-up corpse.

The marshal clicked his tongue.

“No funny ideas, Mister. The outlaw over yonder’s comin’ back to town with me. Would hate to have to waste some good bullets tonight, truth be told.”

The creature’s head turned with sudden speed, transfixed on the marshal’s eyes again. That set of eerie black eyes stared into the one steel-blue eye and one milky-white eye of the lawman.

It turned, and left. McPherson expected sounds, but it moved with complete and unnerving silence.

He waited for seconds. Moments. Minutes. Time dragged on with painful slowness. He checked his pocket watch and noted the ungodly hour of night before hiding it away in his pocket again. He shot a nervous glance around him to confirm that the hairy giant was gone.

The marshal wished it was so, but it was not meant to be. He could not see it, but he felt its terrible gaze upon him. It continued to study him. He did not know this for a fact, but he pictured it with vivid imagination.

Time melted away. The darkness of sleep overcame him again. McPherson struggled to stay awake, but his body refused. He sensed his true exhaustion being overtaken by something abnormal—something unnatural. Just like the creature’s presence. Under normal circumstances, he could have stayed awake. The lawman pinched himself regularly, yet fell asleep again.

When he awoke, the fire was out. Smoke rose from it and it stank to the high heavens, as if someone or something had urinated on it. Clouds covered most of the waning moon and dim shapes formed in McPherson’s field of vision.

Strange sounds reached his ears. Slurping, snapping.

A small, shaggy figure stood on the opposite side of the smoking, fireless fireplace. Wrong—it was a giant, like the one from before, but squatting next to Stowell’s body. Rope lay splayed out, frayed where horrendous strength had ripped it apart. The blanket, disheveled, fluttered in a gust of wind where it hung from a bush nearby, rather than being wrapped around the dead man’s body.

The snapping came from the bones that the giant split apart like the skin or shell around some succulent fruit. Sinew tore, flesh ripped, and the creature slurped again, sucking marrow from the insides of the corpse’s opened bones.

With delay, McPherson realized he had gasped once the creature and he locked eyes again. He reached for his gun, but it took forever to draw, for his hand weighed a million tons. His vision blurred and he squeezed his eyes shut to stop seeing double. Raising the gun and aiming at the creature, his arm swayed. He squeezed his eyes shut again, all the while feeling the dreadful gaze of this creature upon him.

Saiduka.

His finger curled around the trigger and squeezed, but all strength had escaped him. Even if he could have taken the shot, he might have missed—or worse, he might have shot himself in the foot.

The creature continued to stare at him. Saiduka, he thought, remembering Tsela Hatali’s lessons about the Manitou and the monsters. “The Paiute wiped them out. That is all you need to know about them, warrior,” Tsela had told him. Would his lips have obeyed him now, the marshal would have uttered profanities this very second, swearing up and down what kind of devil had ridden Tsela to share so little about them.

McPherson also wanted to say something, perhaps to shout and scare it away, but unseen forces continued to rob him of any strength and cognition. His tongue lolled and no sound escaped his lips. The claws of sleep grabbed at him still, dragging him back into a dream realm. For a moment, the marshal even wondered if this was real at all.

But his heart pounded like a drum. This was all very, terribly real.

The creature’s mouth opened, proving to be much larger than he had imagined. Its teeth were sparse and strangely rounded, disappearing again once it bit down on the femur and sucked more marrow out. Slurping, suckling, hungry. The smell of human refuse and feces now hit the marshal’s nose.

And the slurping sounds made McPherson’s stomach knot. Bile started climbing back up his throat, making him feel like vomiting.

But he was powerless—his hand plummeted to the ground, the revolver bounced down into the dust beside him. Some sort of spell must have crippled the lawman. This savage-looking creature wielded unnatural power.

It gingerly laid the femur onto the pile of mangled and dismembered body parts that used to be Stowell’s corpse and rose to full height.

Just blinking, McPherson missed how it had taken silent steps to stand right above him, towering over him. Although no light cast reflections in its eyes now, he felt its stare, piercing into his skull, penetrating his mind and soul.

He blinked again and it had crossed half the distance of squatting down next to McPherson. The rest of its body froze while a hand with impossibly long, lanky fingers, pitch-black and smooth like snakeskin, reached out to him. It crept closer and closer to his neck.

The clouds cleared up, the moonlight rendered the fur framing its silhouette into a bright and bloody crimson.

Before the creature’s gnarled fingernails could pierce the flesh of McPherson’s neck, it howled. A howl unlike any animal out here. A howl unlike anything a human would ever emit. It jolted back into standing, shying away from the small leather satchel hanging from the marshal’s neck.

The Saiduka hissed, and spat onto the ground. The dust and rocks sizzled where the spittle hit, dissolving the earth like acid.

It arched back and its hands curled, trading out any semblance of humanity for monstrous claws. It howled again, this time towards the sky. Hunching over and stumbling away from McPherson, it retreated, staring at him with hate. Its eyes darted back and forth between his face and the satchel from the medicine man that hung from his neck like a talisman.

The marshal managed to grasp the satchel and hold it tight. With every fiber of his being, he knew that something about the charm had warded this creature off. He clung to it like his life depended on it.

The creature retreated farther away, then lunged at him, hissing and snarling and baring its stumpy fangs at him. It then darted to the side, and snatched up a human leg from Stowell’s remains. It stared at the lawman with defiance, as if stealing away any morsels from the corpse was a hard-won victory.

McPherson’s eyelids grew heavy once more and he fought with all his might to keep them open. But the darkness of unwanted sleep overcame him once more.

A piercing cry awoke him. Hawk, he reckoned. McPherson scrambled to get back up on his feet, pawing around till he gripped his trusty revolver and slinging out the second one in his other hand. He swiveled several times, blinking furiously to regain his vision in the blinding daylight.

The creature was nowhere to be seen and flies already buzzed around the mutilated remains of Stowell. McPherson gagged and covered his mouth with the back of a hand, fighting the urge to vomit again. The smell of excrement and decay clung to his nostrils, having crept in there for the past hours as he lay unconscious by the extinguished campfire.

He shouldered the heavy saddlebags and staggered away from the grisly campsite.

After taking a break by the side of a stream, splashing his face with water and counting his blessings, he started looking for tracks. Before long, he found a footprint of something vaguely human but far too large, imprinted in the mud, followed by tufts of reddish hair clinging to branches where the woods began.

The lawman peered into the darkness beyond, where the forest swallowed up all the light. In his mind, the Saiduka stared back at him from there. He shook his head and shot that thought down the moment it started welling up.

McPherson decided to return to Dead End instead. He left the tracks behind him. He needed supplies and he needed to conduct some research. This thing was not going to elude him for long. McPherson thought one more thing as he began his march back to Dead End.

It came to the wrong town.

—Submitted by Wratts

[eldoqmentalista]

Gigantes En América encontrados en La Cueva Lovelock y la cultura e hist...

Gigantes En Norte America

Los Paiutes, una tribu indígena de Nevada, tienen una tradición oral que contaban a los primeros colonos blancos de la zona sobre una raza de gigantes blancos pelirrojos o "bárbaros" a los que sus ancestros llamaban "Si-Te-Cah".  La historia fue escrita en 1882 por Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, hija de un jefe indígena Paiute en su libro Life Among the Piutes: Sus Errores y Reclamos.  Estos "gigantes" fueron descritos como viciosos, hostiles y caníbales.  En esta historia, los Paiutes hablan de una gran batalla que llevó a su exterminio en el sitio conocido hoy como la Cueva de Lovelock.  A principios del siglo XX, los arqueólogos encontraron miles de artefactos en el interior de esta cueva que condujeron a una larga excavación del yacimiento y a la especulación de que la leyenda de Paiute era real.

"Si-Te-Cah" o Saiduka se traduce literalmente como "tule-eaters" en la lengua Paiute del Norte.  El tule es una planta de agua fibrosa, que según la leyenda, los gigantes se entretejieron en balsas para escapar de los ataques de los Paiute.  Utilizaron las balsas para navegar a través de lo que quedaba entonces del lago Lahontan, un lago antiguo que cubrió la mayor parte del norte de Nevada durante la última era glacial. Según cuenta la historia de Paiute, después de años de guerra, todas las tribus de la zona se unieron para librarse de la Si-Te-Cah.  Un día, mientras las tribus perseguían a los últimos gigantes pelirrojos que quedaban, se refugiaron en una cueva.  Los Paiutes exigieron que su enemigo saliera de la cueva y peleara, pero los gigantes se negaron.  La coalición de tribus procedió a lanzarles flechas mientras iniciaba un gran fuego en la boca de la cueva.  El humo expulsó a unos pocos que murieron en una lluvia de flechas, mientras que el resto fueron quemados vivos o asfixiados.  Con el tiempo, la entrada a la cueva se derrumbaría dejándola accesible sólo a los murciélagos y aislada del contacto humano.

Lovelock Cave, conocida también como Bat Cave, Horseshoe Cave, Sunset Guano Cave y Indian Cave se encuentra a 20 millas al sur de la actual Lovelock, Nevada.  Es una cueva muy antigua que data de antes de los humanos en el continente y que en tiempos prehistóricos se encontraba debajo del lago Lahontan.  En 1886, un ingeniero de minas de Lovelock llamado John T. Reid fue informado de la leyenda por los indios locales, que lo llevaron al sitio para probar que existía.  Reid no tuvo éxito en conseguir una excavación arqueológica comenzó inmediatamente, pero dos mineros, James Hart y David Pugh, se dieron cuenta del valor del guano como ingrediente de la pólvora, y crearon una compañía para empezar a excavar en 1911.  Sacaron una capa de guano de la cueva de aproximadamente tres a seis pies de profundidad, usando un pico y una pala con poca consideración a los artefactos, y enviaron unas 250 toneladas a la Compañía de Fertilizantes Hawaiana en San Francisco.

Alfred Kroeber, fundador del Departamento de Antropología de la Universidad de California, fue contactado por Hart y Pugh cuando reportaron haber encontrado artefactos prehistóricos.  Esto impulsó la primera excavación arqueológica de Lovelock en 1912 dirigida por L.L. Loud también de la Universidad de California.  Una segunda excavación tuvo lugar en 1924 y después de terminar las excavaciones, Loud colaboró en un informe que se publicó en 1929.  Lo que L.L. Loud encontró fue nada menos que asombroso.  Aproximadamente 10,000 especímenes arqueológicos fueron descubiertos incluyendo herramientas, huesos, canastas y armas.  Según el informe, se desenterraron 60 momias de altura media.  Se excavaron señuelos de pato (entre los más antiguos que se conocen en el mundo con plumas) y una sandalia de más de 15 pulgadas de largo.  Se encontró una piedra en forma de dona con 365 muescas talladas en el exterior y 52 muescas correspondientes en el interior, que algunos científicos creen que es un calendario.  Interesantemente, la datación por radiocarbono realizada en visitas de seguimiento encontró material vegetal que data del año 2030 a.C., un fémur humano que data del año 1450 a.C., tejido muscular humano que data del año 1420 a.C., y cestería que data del año 1218 a.C. Los arqueólogos concluyeron que la ocupación humana de la cueva de Lovelock, por esta cultura, comenzó en el año 1500 a.C.  Muchos arqueólogos creen que la cultura Lovelock fue reemplazada por los Paiutes del Norte.

Existe cierto debate en cuanto a la veracidad de las afirmaciones hechas con respecto a los Gigantes de Lovelock.  Durante las excavaciones iniciales, hubo reportes de restos momificados de dos gigantes pelirrojos - uno, una hembra de 6.5 pies de alto, el otro macho, de más de 8 pies de alto. Sin embargo, no quedan pruebas de ello.  En el libro de Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Sus Wrongs and Claims (Errores y reivindicaciones), no menciona a los gigantes, pero se refiere a los "bárbaros".  Los escépticos afirman que las manchas químicas en la tierra después del entierro fueron una razón probable por la que los restos momificados tienen el pelo rojo en lugar de negro, como la mayoría de los indios de la zona.  Un estudio realizado en la Universidad de Nevada indica que los "gigantes" medían unos seis pies de altura, y no hasta 8 pies como se había dicho.

Para otros, el descubrimiento de sandalias de 15" en la cueva de Lovelock es prueba suficiente de que el cuento de Paiute es real.  En un artículo publicado en el Nevada Review-Miner en 1931, en febrero y junio de ese mismo año, se reportó que dos esqueletos muy grandes fueron encontrados en el lecho seco del lago Humboldt cerca de Lovelock, Nevada.  Uno midió 8.5 pies de alto y luego fue descrito como envuelto en una tela cubierta de goma similar a las momias egipcias.  El otro tenía supuestamente 3 m de largo.  Otras pruebas de los Gigantes de Lovelock incluyen un conjunto de imágenes que muestran una huella de mano, más del doble del tamaño de la mano de un hombre normal impresa en una piedra en la cueva que fue publicada por los investigadores de Bigfoot MK Davis y Don Monroe en 2013.  A lo largo de la frontera Perú/Bolivia se han encontrado cráneos cerca del lago Titicaca, con afirmaciones de que eran de gigantes de pelo rojizo y cráneos alargados.  Las leyendas cuentan que los indios Uros fabricaban barcos de caña y vivían en islas del lago Titicaca similares a los Paiute.  Al parecer, los incas los llevaron a vivir de esta manera, al igual que los antepasados de los Paiutes lo hicieron con los gigantes del lago Lahontan.

Hoy en día, muchos de los artefactos originales encontrados en Lovelock (pero no los gigantes) se pueden ver en un pequeño museo de historia natural ubicado en Winnemucca, Nevada.  Objetos como los señuelos de los patos se encuentran en el Museo Smithsonian en Washington D.C., y la cestería y los huesos pertenecen al Museo Estatal de Nevada.   El sitio es significativo en un contexto arqueológico porque es un ejemplo de evidencia que apareció, y fue analizado científicamente para confirmar la leyenda que los ancianos Paiutes les contaron a los niños de la tribu durante años, aunque no todo fuera completamente exacto y explicado.  El Museo de Antropología Phoebe A. Hearst de la Universidad de California publicó un artículo sobre la cueva de Lovelock en 2005:  "El sitio ha sido extensamente cazado con marihuana y muchos materiales permanecen en colecciones privadas. La cueva Lovelock, a pesar de años de destrucción, es uno de los sitios más importantes en la historia de la arqueología norteamericana".  La cueva de Lovelock fue designada oficialmente como sitio histórico en 1984.

[megalithicmarvels]

RADIO INTERVIEW: Megalithic Marvels: Footprints of the Fallen

RADIO INTERVIEW: Megalithic Marvels: Footprints of the Fallen

I was honored this past week to join Justen Faull on the Fourth Watch Radio Network! Below is the program’s official description of our exciting interview…

In this episode Justen and Dee discuss his research into the Ancient Megalithic Marvels that surround the World. The adventure includes Mysteries of the Easter Island Races and Oral Traditions, Lovelock Cave and the Slaughtered Saiduka…