Probably not — but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth checking out the Heavener Runestone.

Five hundred years before Columbus made landfall on San Salvador, the Norseman Leif Erikson set foot in North America, becoming the first European to do so.

Erikson’s travels took him to the coast of what is now Canada in the far northwest Atlantic. Eventually, around 1000 a.d., Erikson’s band established a settlement in Newfoundland, at L’Anse aux Meadows, which survived perhaps a decade on the far side of the world from European civilization. They named it “Vindland” for the grape-bearing vines the Vikings saw growing wild and free on the island. It’s an incredible story, much of it retold in the two Norse Vinland Sagas: Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red.

In these Icelandic lays, the Norsemen made contact with — and fought with — the Skrælings, what they called the “barbarians” or “little men” they encountered.

“I have been wounded under my arm,” Thorvald, the brother of Leif, says in The Sagas. “An arrow flew between the edge of the ship and the shield into my armpit. Here is the arrow, and this wound will cause my death.”

Over the centuries, and for most of Europe, all knowledge of the Viking adventures across the seas was lost. There is, however, a tantalizing possibility that Christopher Columbus may have heard stories of the old Viking travels in some seaside tavern. As a young merchant sailor, Columbus traveled north to Ireland and England, and, perhaps, as some historians believe, as far as Iceland. Indeed, Columbus’s son, Ferdinand, reported the visit to Iceland in his biography of his famous father, though we have no other evidence for it.

But whatever word of the Viking legends that may have come down to the famous Genoan, we know the Vikings were in North America — which leads to the obvious questions: What were they up to? Where did they go, and how far west?

You see, while we may think of the Norsemen today primarily as pirates and raiders, they were also explorers, merchants, and pathfinders.

Over the long years of the Viking age, the boys from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark sailed their longboats up the shallow rivers of Europe deep into the heart of Russia. They sacked and conquered Sicily. They reached the Holy Land and northern Africa. They served as mercenaries in the Byzantine emperor’s army. They raided the Black Sea and sailed down the Volga to the Caspian Sea, which was the doorway to China.

Is it so hard to believe that these curious, warlike people, having established a base in Newfoundland, would not sail further west, and perhaps up the broad rivers of North America — the Saint Lawrence or the Hudson, maybe — deep into our continent?

For a long time, people have thought that a possibility. In 1898, Olof Ohman, a Swedish immigrant clearing land in Douglas County, Minn., claimed to have found a slab of greywacke sandstone covered in runes, the ancient Norse script.

The inscription, in a Swedish dialect of Norse, translated into English, reads:

We are 8 Goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland through the West. We had camp by a lake with 2 skerries [small rocky islands] one day’s journey north from this stone. We were out and fished one day. After we came home we found 10 of our men red with blood and dead. AVM [Ave Virgo Maria, or Hail, Virgin Mary] save us from evil. We have 10 of our party by the sea to look after our ships, 14 days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.

The so-called Kensington Runestone has been analyzed, debated, and picked apart by linguists, archaeologists, and historians. The controversy spawned books, reams of papers and research — and bitter feuds. Most specialists today think the Olaf Ohman’s runestone is a 19th-century forgery, though even now there are some who dissent or are unsure.

What all agree on is that in the decades after Ohman’s discovery, more and more runestones started appearing out of North American earth.

One notable cluster of runestones is centered, of all places, in eastern Oklahoma: There are the Pawnee, Shawnee, and Poteu runestones, all of which are almost certainly of modern provenance. And then there is the Heavener runestone.

In the rolling hills and wooded mountains of eastern Oklahoma’s LeFlore County, is a slab of sandstone, ten feet tall and twelve feet wide. The story goes that it was first noticed by a Choctaw hunting party in the 1830s. Later, in 1874, the slab was shown to white trappers. It became known as “Indian Rock” — because of the strange and mysterious carvings on its face.

But in 1928, Heavener’s Gloria Farley saw the stone and realized that the carvings looked like the characters of the Norse runic alphabet. Could the Vinland Vikings have traveled up the mouth of the Mississippi and explored the interior of this strange land via the Red River?

It’s almost too impossible to believe — which is why I’m taking my boys on a three-day camping trip to check it out. We’ll report back. As in The Saga of Grettir:

Jafnan er hálfsögð saga ef einn segir.

“A tale is but half told when only one person tells it.”