Expedition notes 4

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Expedition 4 (July 1) - Bone Cave A, Gum Wrappers

• One thing not mentioned so far is that it is *hot*. There’s a sticky heatwave going on, and the caves are pleasantly cool, even chilly in comparison
• .George brings the rabbit bundled inside the hoodie he’s planning to wear once inside; there are rabbit pellets when he shakes it out before putting it on, but no pee, thank goodness. James is upset that he brought it, but Jane’s only worried about how it was packed. She brought a roll of string (why? // I was reading Greek mythology and figured if it worked for Theseus in the labyrinth, it might be a good idea for us to have some too // that was magic string that never got shorter // okay, yes, but look! We now have it to keep the rabbit from running away and dying horribly alone in the dark) and they manage to turn it into a sort of harness. It probably wouldn’t actually restrain the rabbit if it was determined to escape, but so far it’s been weirdly docile, and it remains so even as George carries it tucked down the front of his hoodie.
• James brought the kitchen timer because it was the only non-digital way of tracking time he could find; he writes down the time at the entrance of the cave, before turning off his phone and setting the timer for 55 minutes.
• They go a bit faster this time, and get further in, where the passage widens a bit, but also has more debris and some ankle-turning cracks in the floor.
• The next opening they find first appears to be a shelf, about shoulder-height for George, and James has to boost him and Jane up. It curls back into the rock a little, and then turns into a vertical shaft (remember, they’ve been going down this whole time, so a shaft is now moderately reasonable) that has naturally-formed ledges around the walls. And every ledge is covered in bones.
• James and Jane both get a bit heebie-jeebied, but George reacts as any natural-born collector would, and starts examining it with a professional eye.
• This is a fairly small alcove, though, taller than it is wide, so after George scrutinizes the bones a bit more closely and Jane and James calculate distances for their map/written record, they keep going down the main passage. (NB: George puts the rabbit down while they’re here; it definitely poops in a corner.)
• Although there’s a crack in one side of the alcove that they could probably squeeze through, they decide to stick with the main passage. James’s theory is that it’s best to map things out in connection with a more or less stable landmark before they start going off into the edges. Jane just prefers to go where they can walk instead of crawl.

• There’s several steep scrambles down after this, until they finally arrive at another side cave. They have to squeeze sideways through a crack, but it’s just tall enough that James doesn’t have to crouch. The cave they enter is the opposite of the previous one: wide, but with a ceiling low enough that James would smack his head against any sort of protrusion; he can feel the hair on top of his head brushing against the ceiling.
• In contrast with the roughness of the ceiling, the floor is unnaturally flat; James actually crouches down and puts his face against it, looking down the beam of his flashlight, looking for bumps or dips, and there’s none. It feels like it should be in a room, but the cave is roughly oblong, with uneven walls, rather than the half-expected rectangle. They’re so distracted by the weirdness of the floor that it takes them a minute and George to realize that the edge of the floor is entirely lines in little pieces of paper-gum wrappers, it turns out. Juicy Fruit and Bazooka Bubble Gum, mostly. Each pieces is entirely flat, as though it’s been pressed or ironed, and they’re all laid out edge-to-edge so that there’s no floor visible between them.
• The bones were creepy, but in a way you could kinda predict. This is just plain eerie.
• Out of sort of morbid curiosity they sweep the whole cave-maybe a little longer than a school bus and twice as wide-with their flashlights, and the bubble gum wrapper board is perfect and goes the entire perimeter of the room. But there’s also an extra configuration at the far end, like some fancy mystical gate or something, though the wall appears to be the exact same composition as the rest of the cave. By the actual entrance, there’s nothing, meaning they can enter and walk around the room without having to step over a single gum wrapper.
• After James yells at him a couple times for trying to pick up various gum wrappers to study them more closely, George sits down in the middle of the floor and takes the rabbit out to let it drink some water and eat a bit of rabbit kibble. (James and Jane are a little impressed that he actually thought to bring supplies for the rabbit.)
• This is the first time the rabbit’s spot is remarked on; where it had been just a dot, the size of a thumbprint, now it seems to streak out in all directions, like an asterix: * When allowed to roam, it simply tries to exit the cave.
• The whole thing leaves Jane feeling very uneasy about not being able to block off the cave in some way. “I know it’s just gum wrappers,” she says. “But what if it’s magic gum wrappers? Things are getting kind of weird down here.”
• James is uneasy for different reasons. “What if whoever put the gum wrappers down is still here somewhere? That is pretty definitely not the product of a sane mind.”
• George just blithely says that none of the gum wrappers he looked at match anything he’s seen in stores or on collector websites. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything other than the person who hauled so many gum wrappers down into a cave system came from a different region/did so years and years ago, but it still has Jane and James exchanging an uneasy glance.
• The responsible part of James’s brain is saying they should hightail it out of there now, and forget about the whole thing, but the rest of him is 15 and curiosity wins out over the paranoia. They do kind of hightail it out of that particular cave, though, and resume the main path.
• According to the timer, it’s roughly 11 AM, so Jane insists on elvenesies. James can’t come up with any good reasons why they shouldn’t, so they scrunch down along the wall of a wider section of passageway, and eat some breakfast bars and fruit leather. George had already eaten some in the previous room, so he distracts himself by putting the bunny down and then poking around carefully in the area adjacent to their camping lantern’s radius. Mostly it’s just a little bit of silt and loose stones of various sizes, but he does find half-a-dozen ball bearings, just like in the music room. There’s no footprints or any other signs of life near them.
• There is a long and somewhat bitter argument over whether it’s safe for George to take them home. James capitulates when he realizes George will just bring them home anyway, even if James says not to.
• They would go further, but they reach a drop-off that James isn’t sure he can climb back up unassisted, so they head back with the plan to return with rope, with Jane attempting to calculate distances based on strides + time.