Wildside

by Steven Gould

  Marie said, “Things are fine, apparently. We talked to him right before we took off. He’s bored.”

  Joey looked around. “Well, is there any gold?”

  I smiled. “Show him, Clara.”

  She held out a small Ziploc plastic bag and let it dangle. Its contents flashed in the sun. “I got this with the plastic gold pan this morning—in about twenty minutes right by our campsite while Charlie slept.”

  Joey hefted it. “Half an ounce, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What was gold going for when we left?”

  I’d been following the prices ever since we started the project. “The New York price was $392.50 a troy ounce.”

  “Oh,” said Joey. “We’ll have to get a lot more.”

  “We will,” I said.

  Even disassembled, it took all four of us to move the mechanical prospector to the stream’s edge. We finished assembling it by one. “Who wants to get wet?” I asked.

  “I’ll start,” said Joey. He put on the chest-high fishing waders we’d brought to work the water without freezing. While he did that, I fired up the gasoline engine and made sure the prospector was pumping water.

  Joey picked up the six-foot length of PVC pipe clamped to the free end of the three-inch intake hose. “Where should I start?” he asked, shouting to be heard over the motor.

  I pointed at the near bank. It was the inside bank of a curve in the stream, where slow water would drop gold dust.

  Joey dragged the pipe over and thrust it down into the shallow water. The pump strained and there was a gush of clear water over the shaker trays, followed immediately by dark brown silty water laden with gravel. The water ran out of the discharge spout, splashed onto the rocks at the stream’s edge, and then into the water. The silt immediately clouded the clear crystal water and moved downstream in a widening plume.

  I shut the motor off.

  Everyone looked at me, surprised.

  “We need to move the prospector.”

  “Why?” asked Marie.

  “We’re dumping silt into the creek.”

  “Yeah. So?” said Joey.

  Clara understood. “The trout, Joey. Remember the trout I told you about?”

  “I don’t understand. Every time it rains here, the runoff washes dirt into the stream—far more in minutes than we could do in days,” Marie said.

  “I don’t know about that. We’re going to be concentrating a lot of dirt on a little stretch of stream. Maybe it won’t affect the fish at all. But we’ve got enough hose to go twice across this stream—let’s just move this back far enough that the discharge runs through this gravel and rock before it hits the stream. To let the worst of it settle out.”

  Joey grumbled, but they helped me drag the prospector back twenty feet. Before we turned the motor back on, we examined the shaker trays. All of the rocks we were able to toss aside immediately, but there was a small nugget of gold about the size of a kernel of corn in the next tray and there was gold dust collecting in the fine pan, a thin scattering of tiny flakes.

  “Hot damn!” said Joey, and plunged back into the water.

  We rotated—one of us working the hose along the bed, another working the shaker pans, discarding the rocks and gravel that wouldn’t wash out on their own. The other two rested and stood guard, though we hadn’t seen much in the way of wildlife—and the motor probably scared away the rest. Every twenty minutes or so, we’d shut down the motor, remove the accumulated dust, and swap places.

  We worked the deposit until four o’clock. When we’d finished drying and weighing our take that evening, we had thirty-three and a half troy ounces triple-bagged in heavy-duty Ziploc freezer bags.

  “Not too bad,” said Joey. “Not too bad.”

  We weren’t able to reach Rick on the shortwave during the day, but after sunset, when we switched to our nighttime frequency, we were able to reach him with interference. He was glad to hear about the gold but mostly just glad the mountain landing had gone safely.

  We had fish again for supper. Joey and Marie zipped their sleeping bags together at the back of the cave. Clara and I left ours where they were, near the fire, head to head with a small gap. After eating we sat there, Joey and Marie on Clara’s bag, Clara and I on mine.

  “How long are we going to push it?” Clara asked.

  I shrugged. “Let’s stick to the plan.”

  “The ‘plan’? I thought the plan was ‘let’s play it by ear,’” Clara said.

  “Weather permitting,” I said. “That’s the killer, isn’t it?”

  “Literally,” said Marie.

  We couldn’t fly out of here in bad weather. Not only could adverse winds take us into the mountains, but at this altitude the chance of icing up the wings was high. The problem was, if we had bad weather, did we try and get out ahead of it or wait it out? It was close enough to winter that a snowstorm might stick us here until spring—which meant death. If we tried to leave just before the bad weather reached us, there was the danger it would catch us in the air. If we left now, we wouldn’t be able to touch the gold deposits again until late spring, by which time we might not control the gate anymore.

  “Who checked the barometer last?”

  “I did,” said Joey. “It rose two millibars. High pressure. I’d say tomorrow will be fine.”

  “Let’s see what it says in the morning,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” asked Clara.

  “We’ll play it by ear.”

  The next afternoon, Clara was in the water, thigh deep, working a pocket on the inside of the bend, where the slower waters tended to drop gold out. The bend was up against low cedars, bushy and thick, on the side of the stream up against the cliff. On the other side, Joey was working the trays, discarding smaller rocks that weren’t automatically washed over the side. Marie and I were seated on the bank, me facing Clara and Marie watching the trees behind Joey.

  The mountain lion dropped off the cliff face almost directly above Clara, landing in the cedars and springing out right at her back.

  I shouted and brought the shotgun up, but Clara didn’t hear me over the prospector’s gasoline engine and she was in my line of fire. Then, miraculously, Clara slipped and stumbled, bending down to steady herself on a rock. The front claws and teeth of the lion missed her neck and shoulders but the torso and back legs of the cat slammed into her side and they both went over, into the deeper water of midstream.

  I was running sideways, then, upstream, trying to get an angle on the lion. The lion exploded out of the water, roaring, standing on its back legs and trying to get its footing. Clara’s waders filled with water and she was having trouble keeping her head out of the water. The lion lunged toward her and I fired my first round, buckshot.

  It was low, into the water, but a pellet or two ricocheted off the surface of the water and hit the cat and it twisted in mid-lunge, snarling.

  Clara’s head went completely underwater.

  I chambered as fast as I could and took more time with the next shot—rifled slug. Red blossomed on the lion’s shoulder and it snarled again, a scream like tearing metal.

  Clara’s hands were clawing at the surface of the stream and her face broke the surface again, to take a deep breath, then she sank again, just as the mountain lion’s claws cut the air next to her face.

  I fired again, buckshot again, and more red spotted the ribs of the lion, but it was still moving fast. Then Marie fired, behind me, a charge of buckshot that knocked the lion off-balance, to splash sideways. It came up again and lunged, at us, putting most of the stream’s width behind it in two splashing leaps.

  I fired again and Marie’s shot, like a close echo, followed. One rifled slug hit its chest and the other its neck. The cat dropped into the shallows and didn’t move.

  I dropped the gun and plunged into the water, but halfway across the stream, Clara stood, shoulder deep in the water, coughing but clearly on her feet. I helped her across the stream and up onto the ba
nk, unhooking the suspenders on the waders in the shallows to dump the collected water. Both of us were shivering hard.

  Joey, who’d shut the mechanical prospector down at the first shot, ran back to camp for sleeping bags.

  Clara sat in the sun and coughed more water out of her lungs. I took off my shoes and socks.

  The mountain lion lay in the shallow, its muzzle underwater; bright red streams of blood flowed across the rocks with the current. After a few more minutes, when it was clear it wasn’t breathing, I grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and dragged it up onto the dry rocks of the bank.

  Clara, still shivering violently, said, “Th-th-thanks, Cha-Ch-Charlie.”

  My teeth were chattering, too. “A-are you o-ka-ka-kay?”

  She blinked and said, “My b-back hurts.”

  I walked behind her. A spreading stain of blood darkened the light gray flannel shirt she was wearing halfway down her back, next to her spine. “Hold still,” I said.

  I found a tear near the stain and ripped an opening about eight inches long. One deep cut, about an inch and a half long, was seeping blood. Next to it, with a regular spacing, were two shallow scratches.

  “It got a claw into you.” I took my bandanna out and pressed it against the cut.

  “Ow!” Clara jerked.

  “Hold still. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig. Not arterial, though, just a bad cut.”

  She twisted her head to see, but of course couldn’t. “How bad?”

  Joey arrived then, with the sleeping bags. We went back to camp, Marie walking with Clara to hold the pressure pad on her back while Clara held a sleeping bag draped around her. I wrapped a sleeping bag around myself, but I carried my gun, too. Joey walked point.

  Back at camp, Joey and I turned our backs while Marie helped Clara undress and climb into a dry sleeping bag. I was warming up—only my pants were wet—so I fetched the medical kit from the plane.

  Clara was lying facedown in the bag while Marie reached in to hold the pressure pad.

  “Are you warming up, Clara?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “We need to look at your back.”

  She flinched. “Okay. Got some aspirin?”

  “Aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or codeine.”

  “Uh, ibuprofen, I guess.”

  “Would you get it, Joey? And some water?”

  “Sure.”

  I pulled the sleeping bag gently back. “You can let go, Marie.”

  Marie pulled her hand back. “The bandanna’s stuck,” she said.

  “Leave it—we’ll wash it off.” I took a bottle of distilled water and squirted it under the edge of the bandanna, slowly working the bandanna free. Marie held a towel below the cut to catch the water and blood. The bandanna came free and I tossed it aside. The wound was seeping slightly, but the bleeding was greatly reduced.

  When he saw the wound, Joey said, “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary! That’s going to need stitches.”

  “Yeah. I’m afraid so. We’ll need to leave soon. I think the stitches have to be in place within eighteen hours—otherwise it calls for reopening.”

  Joey said, “What about one of us flying her out and coming back?”

  “What if the weather changes while you’re gone?” I said. “We’d be snowed in and you couldn’t get to us. Besides, after what happened to Clara, do you really want to try and do more mining with no guards?”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t we have a suturing pack in the kit, Charlie?” Clara asked.

  I swallowed. “Yeah. We do. A small surgical pack, but it’s a last resort thing—like bleeding arteries, sucking chest wounds, the really gross stuff. We don’t even have local anesthetics!”

  Clara raised up on her elbows, pulling the sleeping bag in to cover her breasts. “What’s the worst that can happen if we suture it now and wait?”

  “Infection. Septicemia,” I said. “I don’t have any idea what’s on a mountain lion’s claws.”

  “Don’t we have antibiotics?” she countered.

  I resisted. “Dammit, Clara. This isn’t Bryan. If something goes wrong, we can’t drive across town to St. Joseph’s!”

  “And if we evacuate now,” she said, her voice rising, “odds are we won’t be able to get back here before late spring.” Her voice dropped. “If I come down with an infection, we’ll evacuate, but let’s not jump the gun.” Her voice raised again. “Dammit, Charlie, I won’t be the cause of our quitting before we’re done!”

  I sighed, then turned and rummaged in the medical kit. “Here. Take two of these codeine and start on this Augmentin. We’ll sew you up when the codeine has taken hold.

  “Now let me get out of these wet pants.”

  Forty minutes later, Clara pronounced herself “woozy.”

  “Who wants to do it?” I asked.

  Joey turned green. “Not me.”

  I looked at Marie. “You sew, Marie.”

  She licked her lips. “Well, if I had my Singer here, I wouldn’t hesitate, but—”

  Clara interrupted. “You do it, Charlie. You’re the Eagle Scout.”

  “Who told you that!”

  “We helped you move, remember? Your uniform was in your hanging clothes. What’s wrong with being an Eagle Scout? Embarrassed?”

  I turned back to the medical kit and pulled out the surgical pack. “I hope these stitches hurt,” I muttered.

  Clara laughed.

  They did. Marie held her hands and Joey tried to distract her with jokes. I thoroughly cleaned the wound with sterile saline, then snipped away the ragged skin with sterile scissors. Then I put in four stitches, individually knotted, of sterile nylon, tied with the needle and a hemostat, then a “mattress” stitch, going in one side, out the other, back in on that same side, and back out on the original side, tying the two ends together. Then four more stitches to the end.

  I put a light dressing over it and said, “Don’t sleep on your back.”

  “Or anybody else’s,” said Clara, and promptly blushed.

  We didn’t do any more mining that day.

  For the rest of the week, Clara took it easy, sitting or standing guard while the rest of us did anything that required lifting. We were a lot more vigilant when on guard and even when working the suction hose.

  Clara’s incision was red and tender the next day, but it improved steadily thereafter. I kept her on the oral Augmentin and checked the wound three times a day, a cheap thrill for me.

  The weather remained mostly clear for five days, during which we worked our way upstream with steadily increasing yields. The fifth day we took 175 pounds of gold out of a seventeen-foot-deep pocket where the gold had been collecting for centuries. Our take for the week was 5432 troy ounces.

  Around the fire we checked the figures again and again.

  “If the price is still the same—” said Joey.

  “It could be down,” said Clara.

  “It could be up,” said Marie.

  Joey took a deep breath, then said, “It comes to $2,148,464.64.”

  “Even if the price is down, we might be able to get more,” I pointed out. “Mineral collectors will pay better than weight value for good nuggets and we have some beauties.”

  The day was overcast and the barometer was down. There’d been a surprise snow shower at noon the day before, followed by clear skies and a sun bright enough to melt the snow from the floor of the canyon. Some of the snow lingered, though, on the heights, an ever-present warning.

  “We should break three million in another couple of days,” said Joey.

  “No. Let’s not get greedy. We leave in the morning, as soon as we have enough light.”

  “Weather permitting,” added Marie.

  “Yeah. Weather permitting.”

  We checked the barometer at every change of the watch. It, and the temperature, dropped steadily and, from what we could tell down in the canyon, the wind shifted to the north. For the first time in the mountains, we heard wolves howling, but
the sound was far away.

  None of us slept well. We were up when you could tell the sky from the ridges above, but in the bottom of the canyon it was still dark. There was frost on our equipment and the rocks at the edge of the stream were coated with ice.

  We packed the plane by flashlight and moved the equipment we were leaving into the back of the cave, up on a ledge that would hopefully be above the worst of the spring runoff. The plane would fly out light, which was good, but if we ran into any ice, it might not be enough.

  At nine, it began to snow, very lightly. The visibility was still over a mile and it looked clearer to the south.

  “Go or not?” asked Marie.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. The wrong decision would kill us either way. I looked back at the dark north. “It can only get worse. Let’s go.”

  We’d been doing the preflight over and over all morning, waiting for the light. I fired up the engine and taxied to the north end of the meadow. This was taking off with a tailwind, which was contrary to practice, but down at the bottom of the canyon it was only a slight wind, and it let us take off downhill and away from the incoming storm.

  We cleared the trees by thirty feet and I kept it low, in the canyon, until I had top airspeed. Then we climbed. It was very rough when we cleared the ridgeline, shaking us like a rattle, throwing us against our seat harnesses hard enough to bruise. I swore at the pain and concentrated on keeping the controls steady.

  We cleared ten thousand feet and went on oxygen. I stopped climbing at twelve, staying a couple of hundred feet below the cloud base, and ran for the eastern slope of the Rockies, fifty miles to the east. If at all possible, I wanted to go over those mountains under the cloud base, able to see them. There was always the danger of going up into the clouds and, while in or above them, having the visibility drop to nothing down below. So when you come back down, you fly blind all the way into the ground.

  On the wildside, there weren’t any radar-guided approaches to nice, wide, well lit runways.

  There were, instead, lots of trees, rocks, mountains, and no help for seven hundred miles.