This is a tale of two adventures, one absolutely factual. In 1912 three young brothers build a rickety boat, adding two empty gasoline cans for extra flotation. Against the current of the river Volp in the French Pyrenees mountains, they paddle upstream into the darkness of a cave and discover wonders of paleolithic art engraved (scratched) on its walls. That happened just over one century ago. Now, plummet back one hundred fifty centuries deeper into time for the other adventure, the story of a 13-year-old girl who learns art and leaves her work where it can still be seen 15,000 years later. She draws the giant mammoth that roams her Ice Age land, and cave lions, cave bears bigger than grizzlies, bison and horses and huge wild bulls. People too---seldom drawn by others in the Old Stone Age. When hunger threatens her friends, she creates "magic" bison sculptures in the cave that she does not believe are magic. Then, on the land above and to her amazement, bison appear. She uses art to baffle her tribe's enemies. She even contends against the boy she loves, her rival in craft, becoming both artist and woman, Scratcher Woman, by adventure's end.
Charles Hammer knows how time passes because he's seen some, having been born in 1934 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He earned spending money first by caddying for golfers, later working his way through the University of Tulsa. After U. S. Army service in Europe, he joined the Kansas City Star and did much reporting on the American Civil Rights Movement, 1958-1972. It was there the story of time came back in the shape of J. Mett Shippee, a field archaeologist nearly 50 years for the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Missouri. As a newspaper reporter Hammer accompanied Mett on field trips to write of archaeological sites revealing the lives of ancient Native Americans, some from the archaic period 7,000 years ago. One brief life encountered was that of an Indian baby tenderly buried about 1,000 A.D. and discovered by Mett in the dry earth of Arnold Research Cave near Fulton, Mo. Another was that of Mattie Alkire, born on Christmas day, 1863, during the American Civil War, who died the following May and was buried just as tenderly a half mile from the Indian baby. Later Hammer probed further into time, becoming fascinated with the 1912 adventure of three French brothers, who paddled up a river into a deep cave and discovered a world of truly ancient art. Their story, and the tale of how that art might have been created, make this book. Hammer also taught journalism at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is co-author of "Unsportsmanlike Conduct," a history of collegiate sports, two youth novels for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a novel about elders in a nursing home, "Members of the Bored," and a Civil War novel: "Emancipating---Black Soldiers (and a Peckerwood white boy) Free the Slaves."
