Quicksilver (The Forensic Geology Series, Prequel)

by Toni Dwiggins

  “Sadly, no.”

  “What if Henry finds the source of that rock? And there is gold.”

  “My interest lies in saving Henry.”

  And Henry’s interest? I studied the talus spilling across the ledge. It told me nothing. Talus won’t hold a footprint. There was no way to tell what, or who, had kicked those rock fragments over the edge.

  Easy to do, though.

  I said, “So if it was him up here, what was that about?”

  “Make sure I’m coming.”

  “Not just you,” I said. “Us. He expects you but you show up with hiking buddies. What does he think about that?”

  “If he thinks it through he’ll understand that I had to get some help. He left me half the rock. He knows geology is not in my skill set. So I suppose he’d figure it out.”

  “And rain rocks down upon us.”

  Shelburne rose. He walked over to the talus pile and picked up a nasty-edged rock fragment. He angled his wrist and flung it, like you’d skip a rock. It sailed out from the ridge, a good distance, and then arced down. He said, “No, I don’t think Henry was throwing rocks at us. Wrong angle.” He found another spot, standing now within the talus field. He stood rigid and then suddenly he jerked, like he’d been stung by wasp. His foot jerked out, dislodging a small pile of rotten rock. The stuff skittered, some of it skittering over the edge. It did not arc.

  He turned to us. “Henry occasionally has mini-seizures. In consequence, you understand.”

  I understood.

  It was entirely possible.

  I’ve done it myself, dislodging loose rock, sending it over the edge of a trail.

  “We good?” Shelburne asked.

  Walter and I exchanged a look. A nod.

  Good enough.

  6

  We busied ourselves closing up packs, shouldering them, fastening hip belts.

  Shelburne set off in the lead.

  We fell in.

  We followed our ledge to the far end of the bedrock and then plunged into ponderosa pines and oaks and red-limbed madrone. A boy could play hide and seek in those woods. I wondered if Henry Shelburne had ever played such innocent games.

  As we hiked, Robert Shelburne surveyed the woods, shouting his brother’s name once or twice, but there was nobody playing hide and seek.

  Our wooded trail climbed gently, in a wide arc, eventually giving out onto the true ridge, a broad forested crest.

  Here, we intersected a marked trail, the Ridge Trail. We’d studied and inked the map of this territory back in the lab.

  Out in the field, I got my bearings.

  This was the divide between the canyons of the Middle and the South Yuba Rivers, muscular waterways flowing east-west, coming down from the High Sierra. The rivers were transected by north-south metamorphic belts shot through, here and there, with igneous dikes.

  Shelburne said, “We used to call this the Trail of Trial and Error.”

  We were in the twenty-square-mile neighborhood that the Shelburne family had marked, by trial and error, one generation after the other.

  We were following the path of a huge Tertiary channel cut by the ancestral Yuba River.

  The deep blue lead.

  Now deeply buried, for the most part.

  I tried to see it through Henry’s eyes, the amateur geologist, the squint-eyed teenager in the tricked-up Old West Photo, and before that the kid fed legends with his breakfast cereal.

  So how did Dad Shelburne tell the tale?

  I gave it a shot.

  Once upon a time, Henry, a great river came from a distant land, carrying a peculiar quartz that it ripped from bedrock veins along its journey, veins gorged with gold—and here, I figured, Henry can’t contain himself and interrupts to say nuggets? And Dad Shelburne says shut up kid and listen—at least that’s the way my dad would have told it, if my Henry had interrupted. And Henry shuts up and Dad continues. The long-ago quartz-carrying river was so strong and mighty that it carved a deep channel and laid down its load. And then volcanoes erupted—boom boom boom—sound effects, Henry, keep your attention on what comes next—and the lava buried the ancient river. Oh no, Henry says, the river is gone, all that gold gone. Dad snorts. Be a little man, kid, the gold’s not gone. Listen up: a new age comes and the land rises up like a trapdoor opening and lifts the old river channel up high. And Henry lifts his chin and looks up. No no, Dad says, you can’t see it yet, not until new rivers are born. Here’s where it cuts to the chase: the new rivers cut deep new canyons in the lost land, down through the lava deposits, and they slice open parts of the old river channel and lay bare the auriferous gravels. How about that, kid? Auriferous means gold-bearing, a little prospecting lesson for you, wouldn’t hurt you to start learning this stuff if you want in on the family legend. Now finish your damn cereal before the school bus comes.

  That’s the way I imagined Henry learned it.

  Who says there’s no romance in my soul?

  The story of the ancient rivers played out up and down the Mother Lode, producing many gold-bearing channels, but this channel of the ancient Yuba was the biggest, the richest, the most legendary.

  Once upon a time.

  I’d been doing quite a bit of reading.

  Now, all that remained visible of this ancient channel and its tributaries were interrupted fragments that cropped out here and there, most of them already found and laid bare by the miners. Still, the blue lead was said to crop out in all kinds of unthought-of places, on the ridge tops or the gouged flanks that ran down to the river bottoms.

  Back in the lab at the map table Robert Shelburne had shown us the tributary his grandfather explored, the Shelburne family’s own deep blue lead.

  We’d drawn bullseyes on the map, targets along the Shelburne blue lead where the geology indicated a possible contact zone between the slate and the diorite. It was a coin toss where to begin on the route because there were targets at either end and in between. It was a coin toss where Henry, this time, would have begun.

  The Trail of Trial and Error, certainly, for us.

  Out here, in the field, we were following the Shelburne offshoot that intersected the main channel and then went its own way.

  Once upon a time, Henry my little crusader, your grandfather found a gold-specked chunk of ore with black carbon crosses in its heart.

  Somewhere along this route.

  We traveled more slowly now, eyeing the geology.

  The chill breeze accompanied us, bringing the ozone odor of impending rain.

  The ground underfoot was hard andesite breccia, the cemented remains of the lava flows that had buried the ancient rivers. We found a hard spine of oxide-stained quartz blading out of the ground, sign of an ancient channel buried somewhere nearby.

  We picked up pieces of diorite float, rock fragments that had weathered off their parent and traveled by water or wind or gravity.

  We followed the float to a place where a stream had cut back and exposed layers of weathered slate. We found a hornfels zone but the hornfels was innocent of Maltese crosses.

  We looked for signs of Henry.

  Listening.

  The breeze fingered through the pines and oaks that cloaked the trail, ruffling, whispering. Nothing more.

  We marked off the target on our map and continued the hunt.

  The trail dipped down a little gully, an eroded funnel of decomposed rock. Down at the bottom, vegetation overtook us. Thickets of sugar and digger pine, tangles of manzanita and toyon and other bushes I could not identify.

  And, again, there was that odd scent.

  There was a rustling sound.

  I nearly called out Henry’s name. A ground squirrel appeared, and disappeared. I was glad to have held my tongue. I didn’t even try to silence the voice in my head. Come out come out wherever you are. I’d played hide and seek with my Henry, usually bored out of my mind because I considered myself too old for such games, and because Henry was too young to hide well. And because my mo
m and dad and my older brother and I all told Henry at least once a day to be careful, and so I always mixed worry in with the boredom. Usually, I’d pretend not to be able to find him. I’d finally yell, come out come out wherever you are. And you’d think he’d won the lottery.

  Our trail wound back up the contour and we achieved a higher ridge top without incident.

  Still wooded up here, hardly a view worth achieving, but then again my mountains of choice were the abrupt eastern Sierras where a summit was not easily achieved but once achieved would slay you with the view.

  We paused. We’d reached a fork in our trail. The Shelburne family offshoot tangled with other offshoots of the main blue lead and there were two paths to take us where we needed to go.

  Walter said, “Which way?”

  “The fastest way,” Shelburne said, taking the high path.

  I fell in.

  Walter, behind me, muttered something.

  Wanted to avoid this, I thought he’d said.

  I turned.

  He waved me onward.

  I figured I knew what lay ahead.

  The trail began to descend and in another fifteen minutes we found ourselves funneled onto a narrow path that traversed a steep slope. We were yet again closed in by the woods. It was easy going, gentle hiking, but my antennae were now tuned to Walter and I was hiking brittle. We penetrated a scented grove of cedar and Doug fir and a thicket of manzanita, in which anyone might have hidden, and then we came upon a wide gully that exposed a pitch of cross-bedded gravelly sandstone, upon which my boots slipped, shotgunning gravel.

  “Careful,” Shelburne called, ahead of me.

  “Careful,” I called to Walter, behind me.

  Henry hadn’t called careful when he’d accidentally kicked rocks off the ledge. If it had been Henry, and not a squirrel.

  The trail twisted out of the woods.

  The trail bent sharply and took us to a precipice that gave a view of what lay below.

  I halted. Slayed.

  I’d seen it mapped, on paper an elliptic of dotted pale pink against a field of green, but the map was utterly two-dimensional. Walter knew it by experience. He’d been here once before. Why hadn’t he warned me? Why hadn’t he said, you’re going to have to brace yourself?

  Because a warning was not enough.

  There were no words for what I saw down below. I simply had no words.

  7

  Finally, words did come to mind.

  Catastrophic event.

  Those are the words geologists use for earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, floods.

  There had freaking well been a catastrophic event here only you couldn’t lay it at the feet of Mother Nature.

  Walter asked Shelburne, “Is this the way your father took you?”

  “Yes. It’s in my grandfather’s letters. It’s a bloody monument. It’s mining on the grand scale. It’s what the great bullshitter called the void.”

  Walter grunted. “It’s what’s left after taking out a mountain.”

  I stared into the monumental hole. “How much did they take out?”

  “Four millions bucks in gold,” Shelburne said.

  “I meant, how much of the mountain?”

  “Forty million cubic yards.”

  Walter said, “You know your numbers.”

  Shelburne shrugged. “I’m a numbers guy.”

  I stared down into the great pit, trying to corral it with numbers. “How big is it?”

  “Mile long, half-mile wide,” he said. “I learned this shit in my teens. Hydraulic mining. How they did it. The dudes had to get down through six hundred feet of compacted gravel to reach the holy grail. Built forty miles of canals to bring enough water to feed the cannons. Eight cannons, twenty-four hours per day, firing sixteen thousand gallons of water per minute to ream out the mountain. Ridiculous name, though. I’d never green-light a project with that name. They called it the diggins. No third g. Just the folksy diggins.”

  Of course they did, I thought. They would not have called it a catastrophic event.

  Walter had picked up a chunk of andesite breccia and was examining it like it was the Rosetta Stone.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement on the cliff tops on the opposite rim. I turned to fully look. Nothing. Maybe a hiker, now absorbed by the trees.

  “In the end,” Walter said, “it was mined to extinction.” He tossed the chunk of andesite into the void.

  I watched the rock fall. Into the abyss where a mountain had been. The great pit was shadowed now, clouds moving overhead, shapes moving down below. The wind picked up. For a moment I thought I glimpsed something other than a shadow moving down there but maybe it was just the wind moving the vegetation. I caught that odd odor again, carried on the wind.

  Walter said, “What did Henry make of it?”

  “A big playground. Fantasyland.”

  Fantasyland. I could not stop looking. And what was empty, nothing—a void—became strangely beautiful. Where the mountain had been washed away, the ancient gravel beds were exposed in the cut cliff walls, layered like a summer cake in yellow and red and white and orange, eroded here and there into spires and fluted hoodoos. It had a fantastical monstrous beauty.

  Walter said, “So it’s likely Henry came this way, this time?”

  “Beyond likely.”

  “And from here...”

  Shelburne jerked a thumb. “Down there.”

  Shadows flickered, down there.

  I said, “Hey guys, I think there’s somebody down there right now.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “Henry!” Robert Shelburne’s shout echoed.

  All of a sudden thunder sounded, in the distance, but there was no other reply.

  “I just caught a glimpse,” I said. “Could have been a pack.”

  “Backpack?” Shelburne asked. “Day pack?”

  “I’d say day pack.”

  “Then he has made camp. Then he is tracking.”

  “If it was a pack,” I said. “It was moving in that willow jungle down there.”

  Walter asked, “Could it have been an animal?”

  “It was brown.” Brown deer, brown bear. Too big for a squirrel. “Could have been.”

  “Henry!” Shelburne shouted again.

  No answer. No discernible movement.

  Come out come out wherever you are.

  ~ ~ ~

  We started our descent into the pit on another of Robert Shelburne’s unmapped trails. Hardly a trail at all but it was the most direct way down.

  The soil was too sandy to hold footprints. If there were any recent scuff-marks, Shelburne, in front, was scuffing them into oblivion.

  We descended single-file, Shelburne then me then Walter.

  Now and then, when I could safely take my eyes off the treacherous trail, I scanned the landscape below. Nothing. The lower we got, the more limited the long view became.

  I shifted my focus to the near view, right under my nose. The trail was so narrow I kept brushing against cliff walls and acquired a coating of dirt. The walls told the story, without the romance. Volcanic andesite breccia capped layers of Eocene river gravels, which were interbedded with sand and clay.

  Shelburne said, over his shoulder, “My dad called these bastard gravels.”

  Walter, behind me, said, “All the way down. And then the good stuff’s buried.”

  Yeah, I got it. No holy grail awaiting us down there, because the basal blue lead, laid down upon bedrock, was now buried beneath the tailings and landslides in the bottom of the pit. Any blue gravel that happened to crop out would have been oxidized into reddish rusty rock.

  Would have been mined to extinction.

  The Shelburne family offshoot, according to the map, zigzagged through this neighborhood.

  What I did see, once again, was a flash of something brown, off in the far side of the pit. And then, deer-like, it bolted. And then Shelburne shouted Henry and a clap of thunder came in reply and the wind picked up and
a few fat raindrops fell.

  And then ceased.

  We continued down the trail.

  Alice hiking down into the rabbit hole.

  8

  Five hundred feet down, we bottomed out.

  If I had not known a mountain once stood here I would not have known this was a manufactured landscape.

  The hosed-out world of the pit was now jungly, bristling with pines and alders and willows and brush that criss-crossed in a maze that could screen an army of hikers.

  The soil was fine-grained colluvium eroded from above, with lenses of pebbly gravel and clay. I looked for, and did not see, footprints.

  We crossed a little stream—runoff, I presumed, from the upcanyon watershed. The stream wandered into a thicket of brush.

  I wondered if there was a trail down here. I had no idea which way to go.

  Shelburne did. As ever, he took the lead and we followed and damned if he didn’t discover a path.

  We passed through a tunnel of pines and emerged into a small clearing where old mining equipment was on display. My attention caught on the huge lengths of rusted pipe, jumbled like pick-up sticks. I stopped, stared. A man could hide inside that pipe.

  Shelburne saw me looking. “He hates enclosed spaces.”

  My Henry would have been in there.

  “Not hiding in the water cannon, either.”

  Beyond the pipes was a giant rusted cannon that looked like something out of a Civil War textbook. I still had to wrap my head around the idea that it had shot water, not iron.

  “Let’s go,” Shelburne said.

  Walter held up a hand. “A moment.” He took off his pack and rummaged for his parka.

  I looked at a long wooden open-top box set upon a frame.

  Shelburne saw me looking. “That, he liked. It’s a sluice box. Miners ran a slurry of water and gravel through it. The riffles trapped the heavy grains of gold. The lighter stuff, they trapped with mercury. The metals mix into an amalgam. Bonded like brothers—as my dad liked to say.” Shelburne snagged his water bottle. He toasted the sluice. “Dad let us play here. He brought vials of mercury and a baggie of gold dust. And a bottle of water. The gold was the prize. The mercury the waste.” Shelburne drank.