He was bending down, examining the sharp edge of the rock that was almost against the front guard of the truck. ‘Is newly split, this big ‘un.’ He shook his head, running his hand over the exposed side of it. ‘Never known anything as big as this come from the top. Is like I say, the frost cracks it up, so it’s mostly small stuff that blocks the road here, rubble that’s half a day’s work with a ‘dozer to clear. This lot would take a week or more, and some of it’s big, like this feller.’ He straightened up, gazing across to the Gully again, not saying anything more, just standing there, drinking it in. And the sun was almost warm, though the breeze from the west had a bite to it, a damp bite, and there was a suggestion of haze building up, for this was a Pacific airstream that had come over mountains and glaciers that were almost 20,000 feet high.
‘Guess you’ll have to walk in from here.’ He got my haversack from the cab and dumped it at my feet. ‘You got some food in it?’
I nodded.
‘Good. ‘Cos I got things to do, back at my place on the Squaw. I’ll be a little while. Okay?’
I hadn’t expected this, I don’t know why. I suppose I hadn’t .stopped to think that he wouldn’t come all this way into the mountains just to give me a lift. Obviously the trip had to answer a purpose. ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.
‘Grizzlies is all you got to worry about, but they won’t bother you, not in the daytime - so long as you make plenty of noise. Just don’t go wandering down the Ice Cold into the bush below the timber line. It’s pretty dense down there.’ He was climbing into the driving seat and I asked him when he’d be back to pick me up. He glanced at the dashboard clock. ‘Meet me here, say about three-thirty. It won’t be earlier than that. I’ve got to drive back down, ford the Squaw, and my place is ten miles after that. Altogether about forty miles there and back, all slow going, and I got to load up and have some food the other end. Make it four o’clock, then if I’m early and you’re not here I can put my feet up for a moment and have a rest.’ His lips flickered in a smile, but it was a nervous smile, his eyes on the Gully, watchful now as though expecting the ghost of some long-dead miner to materialize out of the rocks. Abruptly he turned the ignition key and started the engine. ‘Okay,’ he said, and managed a wave of his hand and a cheerful grin as he slipped the gear lever into reverse.
But then, as the truck began to move back from the slide, he jammed his foot on the brake and leaned out of the window, looking down at me. ‘A word of warning,’ he said, his voice on a high note. ‘There’s hunters around, remember. And in Canada it’s not just the deer that need to watch out for hunters. It’s humans, too. Hunters get a good bag of humans by the end of the season, and there’s no licence required for shooting your own kind!’ He laughed and the echo of it sounded hollow among the rocks. Then he put his hand on the horn, a long blast that went reeling across the streambed and into the Gully, to come beating back at us when he stopped. He did that three times, then nodded at me. ‘That should warn anyone there’s somebody here. Okay. Be seeing you.’
He turned his head then and began backing the truck down the track, while I stood there watching its battered, mud-stained snout slowly disappear round the bend. Then suddenly it was gone and I was left with nothing but the sound of the engine, which rose and fell as he manoeuvred in the turning bay, then gradually faded until I couldn’t hear it any more.
That was when I became conscious of the silence. It was suddenly intensely silent, only the murmur of water in the rocks below and the breeze flapping the collar of my anorak. God! It was quiet. Twenty miles down to Dalton’s Post, and all around me nothing but mountains, and the ghosts of men who had worked up here at Ice Cold Creek since the turn of the century. I felt suddenly chill and very small, alone there in the vastness of the border mountains between BC and the Yukon. I shook myself, taking a grip. Don’t think about the loneliness, or what happens if Tony’s truck breaks down and he doesn’t come back. Concentrate on assessing the potential of the mine, the value of the equipment, and on the fact that for almost a hundred years now men have been living and working up here throughout the summer months. And anyway, there was always the track out. A walk of twenty-odd miles back to the highway would do me more good than being bounced around in the cab of a truck, so what the hell did it matter if Tarasconi was late, or even if he failed to come back for me at all?
It must have been shortly after midday that I scrambled across the rock fall to the track on the far side and began following it round the mountain, climbing all the time, more and more of the Ice Cold mine coming gradually into view. The camp showed up first, being further ahead and higher up the mountain, two or three buildings clinging to the edge of a snow-covered bench at the head of a valley that narrowed to a ravine. To my right Stone Slide Gully was no longer a clearly etched V. Indeed, it was almost behind me now, the cleft visible only as an ugly spill of torrent-scattered boulders coming out of the cliffside, the grey of it shot through with fast-moving runnels of white water, and a rough track hugging the cliff and turning into the Gully.
That track merged with the streambed below me, climbing steadily until it joined the main track on which I was walking. At this point the valley opened out into a bare plateau of grey silt and rubble with here and there the remains of old tailing dumps scattered like the tumuli of some Stone Age mountain tribe. The going was easier when I had reached the first dump, the surface of the track packed tight and smooth with small stones and silt, everything very grey and the barren moonscape sloping gradually downwards.
I could see the screening plant then, about half a mile ahead and slightly below me, a black skeleton of steel, like some prehistoric monster all rimed in snow, a heavy tracked bulldozer parked beside it, and everywhere banks and piled-up dumps of stone, the tailings much higher down there and the thin waters of Ice Cold Creek running through them, threads of silver flickering in sunlight. That was when I stopped and took my first picture, then looked at my watch.
The time was 12.23, and the thing that struck me most forcibly was how abandoned it all looked, everything so silent and still, nobody about, nothing moving, the whole scene one of frozen immobility, with the camp in the background and the Ice Cold Creek cutting down from the mountain top in a broadening ravine.
I think it was then that the first chill ran through me, the first sense of unease. It seemed unnatural, the mountains round watchful and white, an alien world from which all life had been expunged by the onset of winter. The sun had a faint halo round it, the air getting colder, and I started walking fast, up over the divide separating the Stone Slide waters from Ice Cold, the track no longer curving but running direct to the screening plant, and on the mountainside to my left occasional stunted bushes clinging precariously to life. The track reached down to the bed of the creek, the surface of it becoming very rocky, trickles of water moving frostily and the skeleton shape of the plant getting bigger until, breathless, I stood within a few metres of it and could see how the paint had peeled, the steel rusting with age. But the working parts were all right. They had been heavily greased.
It was the same with the bulldozer, the hydraulically operated pistons for raising and lowering the blade carefully protected with a dirty yellow coating of grease. Sheets of tin lay rotting on a dump of stone and nearby was a bucket and dredge attachment for the bulldozer. A little higher up the creek a crawler tractor lay abandoned and rotting, flaked holes of rust appearing in the metalwork of the cab. More machinery, cogs and wheels, a long, twisted snake of wire hawser, all dumped there and disintegrating in the cold and the wind and the snow. The whole scene was one of desolation, a shocking picture of dereliction in that lost amphitheatre in the mountains, nothing but snow-whitened rock and rusting machinery.
Obviously I had no way of checking whether the mine was really worked out or not, but I took some pictures of it just in case, and some close-ups of the screening plant, which should be worth something if it could be dismantled and got down to the Haines Highway.
Then I went on up the track to where the pale wood of the pre-fabs with their tin roofs stood in silhouette above me, the track climbing very steeply here and the buildings seemingly poised on the edge of what was becoming a very steep-sided valley, poised like that teetering hut in the Chaplin Gold Rush film. There were five buildings in all, plus a little box of a one-holer loo. The first of the buildings was quite large, surrounded by a dump of old spare parts, bits of an engine, cooking pots, the remains of an old fridge that had virtually disintegrated, a cooking stove that looked as though it was a woodburner. The hut was locked, of course, but through the fly-blown window I could see a big engine that looked like a generator, and there was a table, sloping and ridged, with a layer of fine silt at the lower end. A panning dish lay on the table, and there was also a bucket half full of sludge. There was a small engine with a belt-drive to the table so that it looked as though this was where the final gold-sifting process had been carried out.
The rest of the buildings were about fifty metres away, all on the edge of the ravine looking down towards the screening plant. There was a cookhouse with a table and two benches, a stove, shelves and a sink that emptied straight out into a small stone channel running over the ravine edge. Close by was a caravan, chocked up with its wheels rusting off and holes in its side. Presumably it had been an early accommodation unit brought in to replace the original log cabins. I had passed the remains of three of these coming up from the rockspill. Finally there were two pre-fab accommodation units, one much older than the other, and the loo. The older of the two bunkhouses was not locked, nor was the toilet, which I was glad to see had a half-used roll of toilet paper hanging damply on the door. It was by the loo that I found the clear imprint of boots.
I don’t know why it came as a shock to me when I had already been told there was an Indian still up here looking after things. I suppose it was because all the machinery, everything about the mine, cried aloud the fact that it had been abandoned. There was new snow, fallen within the last twenty-four hours, so the imprints of those boots had been made as recently as that morning, the snow round the bunk-house all scuffed up where the sun had turned it to slush. There was a yellow mark where somebody had urinated, and a path had been trampled to the cookhouse door.
All my senses were suddenly alert as I searched the camp area, looking for tracks heading up to the mountain above or even some indication of the direction from which the owner of the boots had come. But all I could find was the marks where something big and heavy had gone down to the streambed in great leaps and bounds to be lost in the first thin trickle of water running down the valley.
The older bunkhouse had been slept in. I could smell it as soon as I pushed open the door, a hastiness lingering in the damp air. The windows had been boarded up, but the light from the open door was sufficient to show that one of the bunks had been occupied. Presumably this was where Jack McDonald slept and the other, newer accommodation unit, which was locked, had been occupied by the mine manager. There was, of course, another possibility, particularly since Epinard hadn’t been paid for several months. The camp could have been hired out to a succession of hunting parties, the whole thing organized by Kevin McKie down at Lakeside. It would explain McKie’s behaviour and Epinard’s nervousness, and it wasn’t unreasonable since it would bring in a little money and at the same time mean that the mine wasn’t left entirely deserted. It would also explain Tony Tarasconi’s initial reluctance to drive me up here and his warning about hunters, the three blasts on the horn. It would all be so simple for McKie to organize, an added attraction for a party visiting his lodge at Dezadeash, all those involved making a few dollars on the side.
I had my lunch sitting in the sunshine at the open bunkhouse doorway with a view straight down the boulder-strewn valley to the mammoth skeleton of the screening plant and the distant view of mountain ranges white against a milky blue sky. When I had finished I lit my pipe, the first smoke I had had since breakfast, time slipping by as I roughed in the layout of the mine in the back of my diary, the sun quite warm where I sat sheltered from the breeze. And the view was magnificent, for I was looking back into the Yukon, and across the tops of the Front Ranges it was all white, a vista of sparkling peaks and distant snowfields.
It was just after two that I took one final picture of the mine and started back down the track, headed now for Stone Slide Gully. This meant that, after crossing the divide, I had to diverge onto the track that followed the course of the little stream that flowed away from the Ice Cold watercourse. The odd thing was, I had some difficulty in finding it, so that for the first part I was literally walking the streambed, water over my shoes at times, my feet soaked. The ravine steepened, dropping sharply as it curved round the shoulder of the mountain. At last I could see the rock slide spilling out of the cliff ahead and the track clearly visible where it hugged the overhang and turned into the Gully.
There was no way, of course, I could assess the mining potential of the Gully, but once I had seen it I should at least have a visual impression and some idea of the physical problem of dealing with what looked like a heavy overburden of fallen rock. This would enable me to handle my leasing negotiations with some degree of confidence. And if it came to that, then I hoped Miriam would also have had a look at it on her way up to visit Ice Cold. If she hadn’t, then I could produce some pictures to show her what the problems were.
There were problems, no doubt of that. Extraction for one. And the danger of working with the threat of another slide hanging over the place. I was under the overhang now, the cliffs bulging above the makeshift track, and all to the right of me, filling the whole cleft, a great mass of jagged rocks, some of them as big as the bunkhouse I had just left, and through the middle of it, already cutting and smoothing a way for itself, the white foaming waters of a small torrent that showed the cold green of melted snow where it lay calm in pools among the rocks. The noise of it, the dark cliffs looming — the place was so much starker than Ice Cold, the feeling of emptiness so much greater, the sun lost behind the mountains, everything in shadow, the endless rushing sound of water, a sound that seemed to grow in volume as I followed the track round into the Gully itself.
Once into this cavernous gut the full extent of the slide became apparent. The whole side of a mountain, benches and all, had fallen away, spilling over most of a great bowl that was like a crater with snow sloped all round it. Here the track cut diagonally across the body of the slide, the marks of the bulldozer blade quite clear in places. The sound of the torrent gradually lessened as I moved onto the floor of the bowl, fingers of water now coming in from all directions to meet in the centre, tumbling down through bare, ice-scarred rock to go rushing out through the rift of the Gully in one single stream.
The floor of the bowl was not flat, great outcrops of bare rock partitioning it off, the track weaving its way round massive rock features, some as big as a Norman castle. In this gloomy and sunless place there was an extraordinary sense of geological power.
After crossing one or two of the tributary streams coming down from the snow slopes above I was far enough into the centre of the bowl to take a picture looking back at the Gully, its V shape blackened by shadow, the problem of mineral extraction very obvious, all the foreground a wild jumble of rocks. Ahead of me now was the first of the big outcrops and as I picked my way towards it over the boulder-strewn surface of the track I stopped several times searching for a way to the top of it. But the rock was quite vertical and very smooth at the base, ice-worn probably; in the spring, when all the mountains round dripped melted snow, the volume of water rushing into the bowl and out through the Gully would be very considerable.
I don’t know when I heard it first, for the sound of it only gradually reached my consciousness. It was like the roar of a distant waterfall or another torrent beyond the second sprawling outcrop of rock that was just coming into view as I followed the track round the base of the first. I was on bare, ice-worn rock then, water flowing across it.
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Between that first outcrop and the next the water deepened in places. I splashed through it, having long since stopped worrying about getting my feet wet. Halfway between the two outcrops I stopped to take another picture; then I stood there for a moment looking around me. Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breathes, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things … Those lines of Milton flashed into my mind as I wondered how on earth Tony Tarasconi, or anybody else for that matter, thought he could mine for gold here in this desolation of rock and snow, the whole place frozen solid for six months of the year, a raging fury of ice-cold water for perhaps a third of the remainder. That would leave four months, just four months out of the twelve, and the track to be recreated annually. It was a hopeless proposition and my advice to Miriam would unquestionably be to lease it out to anyone fool enough to attempt the impossible, but on a sharing or royalty basis, so that if the lessee did uncover a pocket of nugget gold she would get a share of it.
High Stand Page 12