Zachary's Gold

by Stan Krumm

  I don’t know whether proper etiquette actually forbids miming with one’s mouth full, but I found his manner rather irritating.

  “Enough of that,” I growled and pushed him towards the door. “You go get the rest of the gold, and leave the map work and the planning to me. I don’t know how things are done in whatever corner of the heathen world you come from, but in America the conscript does not offer advice to the captain. If God had wanted you to examine my decisions, he would have made you with eyes that were all the way open.”

  He grabbed the packboard and exited, still jabbering away, and I returned to my needlework. I had just cut a new length of gut and sat down when I heard a horrible shriek from outside. I leaped to my feet, startled, but stopped even before I made it to the door. I knew what had happened without looking.

  Rosh had found Ned.

  He had gained control over himself by the time I reached him, but he was still obviously shaken and distraught. I didn’t know why he had wandered over in that direction, but now that he had discovered my dangling accomplice, I thought I might as well explain as much as I could.

  “Good afternoon, Ned. You’re not looking any better today, I’d say, nor smelling much improved. You should be ashamed of yourself, you know, sneaking up on my new partner like that. You’ll have him scared to death before I can get him out to where he’s seriously risking his neck. You aren’t jealous, are you, old man?”

  It may not have been such a good idea to chat up the dead man like that in Rosh’s presence. I don’t know whether he was particularly superstitious or just thought that my friendliness with the corpse was in bad taste, but it didn’t improve his humour at all.

  I knew it would be no easy task to try to explain the intricacies of my situation or even the history of recent events, so I thought carefully and waited until we were back to the clearing beside the cabin before I began my presentation.

  Not only was it difficult to mime out my story, it was a bit embarrassing. I felt like a child playing a parlour game, but it was a charade with rather serious forfeits, for if my companion didn’t properly grasp our state of affairs, he might unwittingly betray us to the wrong person at the wrong time.

  He was not a stupid man. I knew that even from our short acquaintance, so I felt that if I could explain the rough background to our current predicament, he might well be able to appreciate the ultimate implications.

  Firstly, I had to introduce Ned. I acted out the scene where I came casually down the path, was ambushed by the evil man but, through heroic acrobatics and great marksmanship, defeated him. I allowed myself a generous and favourable amount of exaggeration, and it seemed to make the thing more enjoyable for Rosh, who was finally starting to relax.

  The cabin belonged to Ned, I signed. The gold belonged to Ned. Then Ned was dead. The cabin and gold belonged to me.

  I paused long enough for the story thus far to be secured in his thoughts, then added the next step.

  In the inside chest pocket of my jacket were three papers that I carried with me more or less continually: a Royal Geographical Survey map of the Cariboo, a certificate of American citizenship, and the deed to my claim on Binder Creek. I drew this last document out, folded it so as to display the colonial governor’s coat of arms and the gold commissioner’s signature on the bottom of the back page, and set it on a stump of wood in front of my Chinese friend. It was my hope that it would be enough to act as a symbol for the legal authorities.

  With slow histrionic motions, I put to him the all-important question: Should we take the gold and give it to the authorities?

  It was not a difficult decision for him. He laughed, shook his head, folded up my deed for me and gave it back. We were in complete agreement.

  As far as I could see, the matter should have been concluded, and I started back inside, but I was stopped for one more question. At least our method of dialogue was becoming more efficient. We now had several symbols to work with. A finger pointed in one direction signified the gold, another direction meant Ned, another still referred to our destination, and a tapping at the vest pocket area was the symbol for the forces of law and order.

  Was the law looking for Ned, he wanted to know.

  No, I replied. The law was looking for me. If the law saw me, they would hang me.

  As I choked myself and rolled my head back, Rosh’s eyes widened, and a confused look covered his features. He didn’t understand this at all—how I would be known and wanted by the authorities. Without a patient interpreter, I had no hope of relating the twisted trail of events that had brought this about.

  He accepted it all, though, checked the time by the blurred white disk of the sun, and started off into the bush for another load.

  We were both quite tired by the end of the day and, after a meal of fried potatoes, carrots, and a heel of salt pork, we were content to sit quietly in the feeble light of the kerosene lantern and speculate on what the morrow might bring. I also did the last of the packing.

  The only things I took for myself from Ned’s cabin were the book of Lamb’s Tales and a new pocket watch—plain steel, this one, with no inscription. As a favour to Rosh, I picked out a watch for him as well—a gold one, with the name Ball on the dial.

  He took it from me gratefully, wound it, listened to it, and compared it favourably with the other three still remaining in the tray on the rabbit skins.

  I was pleased that he liked my choice, and a bit nonplussed a few moments later when, with a worried expression on his face, he put it back with the others. He couldn’t make himself completely understood, but he let me know that something about the fact that it had belonged to Ned disturbed him, and he no longer wanted the thing. I supposed he was superstitious, but his esoteric feelings evidently did not apply to the dead trapper’s pipe and tobacco, which he commandeered and took onto the porch for a smoke in the night air.

  Next morning, by the time it was light enough to see the ground at our feet, we had already watered and fed the mule, double-checked our supplies, and gulped down a breakfast of bannock, nuts, and tea.

  We carefully shut down the stove, brought axe and saw indoors, and barred the door before we finally took the first few steps of the six hundred miles to the sea. Then, at the creek, only a hundred yards from the cabin, I asked Rosh to wait, and turned back to attend to one more detail.

  I needed to say goodbye to Ned.

  Looking back from some distance in time and space, I must admit to the strangeness of this action, but at the time it seemed most natural, and indeed a case could be made for it being as normal as any other farewell, given a rather liberal attitude as to what constitutes friendship. One doesn’t leave a friend without saying goodbye.

  Granted—Ned and I had not had the smoothest sort of relationship. There were definite and obvious limits to our friendship, but I was not unaware of my imperfections, and I could see some things that we undeniably had in common. We were a matched pair of greedy, self-centred adventurers, and I could not quit the country in good conscience without looking in on the fellow one more time.

  “Well, Ned, this is it, I guess,” I began, sitting down on my usual stump. The faint breeze blew any unpleasant smell away from me. “It’s me and the gold and the Chinaman on our way, and I suppose its fairly obvious that you aren’t coming. I know what your advice would be, but I’m not going to treat him badly unless I have to. We’ve made a deal, you know. We’re partners, me and that Chinaman.”

  From the far side of the screen of trees, I could hear Rosh shouting, “Hello”—about the only word of English he seemed to know, although even there, the way he pronounced it made it sound Chinese. Suddenly I felt cold and irritable. My shoulder ached, and I was anxious to go.

  “Got to go, Ned. Wouldn’t want to hang around and let you be a bad influence, would I?”

  Rosh had an impatient look on his face when I reappeared. I gave him my best voyageur’s grin, pointed over the mountains to the southwest, and shouted, “the Fraser Riv
er and the Pacific Ocean.” He nodded, returned the smile, and said, “Ashcroft,” or “Asscroft,” really, which I took to be agreement in general.

  I shouldered my pack with a brief grimace of pain, took hold of the mule’s lead, and never looked back at the cabin.

  The sun rose, pale and cool, first on our right, then behind us as we turned west towards Summit Creek. It was a cool, windy morning with high, wispy clouds lightening the lively blue of the clear skies.

  Following the edge of the marshlands, we left Antler and took to the contours of Sliding Mountain around nine o’clock, by my watch. Since I had had no standard to initially set my timepiece by, this was a hypothetical hour, but when one travels through the wild country, the only times that have any real meaning are sunrise and sunset. I kept track only to satisfy my personal curiosity and sense of orderliness.

  As we crossed the same clearing on the hillside where I had originally spied Rosh’s campsite, we saw a thin column of smoke rising from that spot. My companion stopped and stared away in that direction for a moment, and I stopped as well, watching Rosh rather than the smoke. He had a distant, vacant expression, and when he heard the voice of one man shouting to another far below us, he winced, almost as if the sound was painful to his ear.

  “They’re looking for me,” he signed, and for a moment I thought he might want to go down and talk to whoever was at his old camp, but instead he turned and headed again in our original direction with quick, decisive strides.

  I felt relieved, as if we had passed an important test—a first trial in our odyssey. It would be disquieting, no doubt, for him to vanish before his friends’ eyes, as it were, and leave no explanation, but the fact that he was willing to do so and reasoned for himself the necessity of it encouraged me greatly.

  I could imagine the searchers behind us shouting for their friend, then looking for tracks, and examining his living area for any clue as to what might have become of him. They might wait for a day or two, then head into town to ask around, but they would never solve their mystery unless Rosh decided to return north after his trip with me. By that time, I wouldn’t care who knew about me, let alone a bunch of Chinamen.

  The Chinese in Barkerville were a large and very visible group—the most concentrated population of Orientals on the continent, apart from San Francisco, I would think—but they kept very much to themselves. They owned a good number of the local business and service establishments, and these catered to all segments of the populace, but when it came to private or social matters they remained politely aloof from the European community. They even had their own separate Masonic order, or so I was told.

  We of the white-skinned majority probably had an exaggerated estimation of how ingrown and loyal this group of people was, but it was a comforting thought to me that by the time Rosh’s brothers could mount an organized search for him, we would be far along the trail to anonymity.

  We followed Summit Creek, uphill this time, around big granite pillars, then down through sheltered ravines, where it was surprisingly cold. I felt half worn out and quite uncomfortable. My homemade pack was working reasonably well—spreading the weight of my share of the food and gold over my chest and one good shoulder—but my injury still gave me considerable discomfort

  Where the terrain opened out for a few hundred yards, and the sun reflected grey warmth off the rocks, I called a brief halt and we took some dry rations.

  The days were getting shorter. The nights were getting colder. The sunshine’s warmth was thinner and more restricted to the centre of the day. Oppressed by the shadows of the little canyon, I felt unreasonably chilled and tired, nearly unable to stand and lift my burden for the next stage of the journey, but I dismissed this as simply a poor attitude and forced myself to resume a brisk pace. The sun was past its zenith as we left Summit Creek and entered the alpine ravine of Downey Pass. I wanted to spend our first night on the far side of Beaver Pass, so whether I felt at my best or not, I had to keep going.

  Rosh was once again protesting my choice of our route. He waved his arms, pointed at the rocky hillsides ahead, and jabbered an ongoing stream of negative opinion that I was, fortunately, I thought, unable to understand and therefore not required to argue with. He seemed to know about a dozen words or phrases of English, and none of these were of much use in a logical disputation.

  The entrance to the pass was a sharply cut dry stream bed. Once past this, we found ourselves in a wide, shallow bowl covered with scrub pine and bordered by talus slopes and slate cliffs. We descended for a short distance, then came to an area of wet marshland—boggy moss between fairly deep pools of standing water, twenty to fifty feet across.

  As I stood on a raised clump of turf, trying to weigh our options, I became aware that the Chinaman was beside me performing a most amazing set of grotesque gyrations and bizarre faces, curling his lips back, grunting and gobbling with his back hunched over. After a minute, he pointed insistently down the length of the pass. Eventually I realized that he was play-acting as a beaver, and that he meant to tell me that a dam had been built farther along, creating this great swamp. I had already reached the same conclusion myself, but I was not about to turn back yet. I was at that stage possessed by an obstinacy born of great fatigue.

  I struck off to the left, ankle deep in cold water at times, hoping to find dry ground at the outskirts of the basin. Rosh followed with the mule, doing a good job, I must admit, of helping it to keep its composure. The animal was very unsettled by walking in water. I imagine its hooves cut right through the moss covering and sank into the slippery clay underneath, for it seemed nervous and most anxious to pull each successive foot up as soon as it was down. Eventually we reached one side of the marshy bowl, where three inches of stagnant water slopped against the edge of a large talus cone.

  I scrambled up the loose gravel slope until I could see over and beyond, and this new perspective finally made me revise my strategy. Ahead of us the pools became deeper and more continuous, the cliff faces steeper, and loose gravel slopes more daunting.

  Rosh was behind me, asking awkward questions I could understand even in a foreign language. It was a difficult moment for me. I was having a hard time seeing anything clearly—almost as if my eyes were not focusing properly. I thought perhaps a mist was rising off the swamp.

  I climbed down off the talus slope and signalled an about-face. Our return route to the mouth of the pass was a little drier, or perhaps my feet were simply numb, but we struggled back to solid ground with Rosh mumbling invective behind my back. Again, I could understand “I told you so,” even in Chinese.

  I was exhausted but possessed by a strange sort of determination. I knew that I had slowed the pace a certain amount and, granted, we were travelling by his directions, but I realized that it was vitally important that I should not let the Chinaman lead the way. I demanded that he walk behind with the mule.

  He was looking at me strangely—asking me questions I could not answer in a strange, piercing voice that hurt my head. More than before, I suspected that he was a dangerous, deceptive man. His language was changing, and now much of it was English, although I still could make no sense of it. Why had he pretended, thus far, to speak only Chinese?

  My shoulder was on fire. I took off my pack, flopped it on top of the mule’s bundles, and let Rosh figure out a way to keep it balanced there.

  I had the sensation that my ears were full of heavy liquid. I was very hot and sweated until my wet garments made me shiver with the cold. More than once I thought I saw furtive figures crouching at the edge of the forest shadows or scurrying along at the periphery of my vision. Not only was I unable to get a clear look at them, I could not precisely recall who they were, although I suspected that they were communicating with Rosh.

  I continued this way for quite some time before I admitted that I was sick. Even after I could no longer deny the fact that my body was nearing a stage of breakdown, I forced myself to keep walking, being obsessed for some reason with the th
ought that we must reach Beaver Pass before dark. My wicked companion suggested many times that we stop. I had no idea what he intended to do to me, should I agree. His coat looked unusually bulky, and I suspected he had a weapon hidden under it.

  With me so feeble of both mind and body, it was surprising that we got as far as we did. I continued to place one foot in front of the other until I had lost all track of time and no longer had any idea of where we were. After a while, I realized that Rosh had now taken the lead, but I no longer had the strength to resist.

  Even simple speech surpassed my abilities, but I felt that if the Chinaman was not totally devoid of merciful humanity, he must soon stop and allow me to rest, for the fire that had begun in my shoulder now raged across my back and licked down to the base of my spine.

  When we reached Cornish Lake and Rosh began to unpack the mule, I flopped to the ground in relief and joy, deluded for the moment into the belief that we had somehow reached the sea. I was bothered, however, by the fact that I could see all the way across to the other side. Somehow, Rosh had led us to a place where the ocean was narrow enough for us to raft across to China. The idea worried me for a moment, then it slipped away.

  I suppose I fainted, for I awoke to find my partner dragging me across the ground like a carcass. Miserably, I could do nothing much to help him or to defend myself from the horrible pain he caused me by grasping me under the arms. He pulled me over to a bed he had made against a rock under a big spruce and covered me with a blanket. He removed my boots, and the thought came to me that he was planning to abandon me and didn’t want me to be able to follow him. But if that were the case, I wondered, why was he making me such a wonderful bed?

  I slept for a time and awoke in full darkness, with a fire burning four or five feet from me. The Chinaman was watching me, and when he saw I was awake, he ladled a cup of water out of a pot and brought it to me. I wanted that water more than anything in the world, but I could not summon the strength to sit up for it—a fact that Rosh noticed easily enough. He placed his right hand under my bad shoulder and attempted to lift me. The scream of agony that followed startled him into spilling the water and eclipsed my own vision with showers of sparkling stars.