Chapter 45 He found early on that his venture up the river was not a fruitless effort. Ron Oldhorse discovered a plethora of manmade blemishes along the terrain that would have gone completely unnoticed by most people. Sporadic footprints, overturned rocks along the damp earth of the riverside, and trampled vegetation. Oldhorse determined that they were left by a single individual who’d shuffled his pace back and forth between a brisk jog and a tired walk.
After he took a moment to scoop up a splash of cold river water into a leather canteen given to him by an elder tribesman, he lifted his head to the steep and rocky shoreline. Far ahead from where he stood at a ravine base, several sizable and mostly round rocks rested in an angled clump along a sheer section of the gorge. They seemed t
