Frank had not answered, had only wished he had followed his first impulse to skin out without saying goodbye to anybody. “I’ll come back once I strike it,” he had lied. Had he known he was lying?
“No you won’t.” Effie had been wise beyond her years. “You’ll chase off and have a high old time and after a while I’ll find me another feller and when you get around to comin’ home there won’t be nothin’ to come back for.”
Effie had been right except for one thing: Frank had never come back. He sighed and from the deerskin at the foot of the bed Shep replied in kind. No use feeling sorry for himself now. Frank had lived the life he wanted. Man lives alone, he might as well expect to die alone. Come to think of it, didn’t everybody?
But maybe in the morning his eyes would be better. Maybe the winter-long lump in his jaw would turn out to be only a tooth after all. Anybody could have an off day. Even if he was going woodsy, Frank suspected he wasn’t as woodsy as the stranger—as Fred. Finally he slept.
There was a skim of ice on the bucket when he woke up, but it wasn’t frozen solid like a month ago. He boiled up oatmeal mush and shared it with Shep, who liked his half with a little more sugar. Breakfast finished, he headed back up to bring the elk home one piece at a time—if a wolverine or a lynx hadn’t beaten him to it. They were still a quarter mile below the lick when Shep reminded him about Fred and his dog. Frank squinted. His eyes seemed better this morning. He saw something blurry uphill and then the blur became Fred and his dog.
Man and dog waited as motionless as yesterday. Frank felt a tiny prickle of sweat that was not all due to climbing a hillside in a mackinaw during a thaw. He kept squinting, trying to see what Fred really looked like. Each time the blurry figures at the lick drifted into focus they seemed slightly different. He glanced down at Shep. “We all got to go,” he muttered, but the dog’s hackles were up as he approached the other dog.
Finally they faced one another again. “Howdy,” Fred said in that rusty-gate voice. Frank was relieved to discover that the other man was not really his mirror image, that there was only a superficial resemblance. Back before the Indians had all started dying off from measles he had an elderly friend who had confessed he couldn’t tell one white man from another. Maybe Frank had been here so long his own people were starting to blur together.
“Knocked over some meat yesterday,” he said. “Could you use a quarter?”
The stranger nodded and they began walking up toward the kill, dogs observing a canine protocol and keeping a careful distance. “Nice country,” the stranger finally said. His voice sounded better today. Frank guessed he had been practicing.
“There.” Frank pointed where he had hung the quartered elk. There were fox tracks in the snow where blood had dripped but nothing had gotten to the carefully hung meat. “Take your pick,” he said. When the stranger pointed at a hind quarter he wondered if the man was ignorant. The tasty parts were all up front and closer to the bone. Hindquarter meat was for dogs or for jerking. But maybe Fred was just being polite. Frank concealed a shrug and moved on to the next tree where he had hung a forequarter. He got packstraps around it while Shep worried away at a piece of gut the foxes hadn’t managed to finish. Fred’s dog remained aloof.
Frank slipped his arms into the packstraps and got the tumpline over his forehead. He turned to see if Fred was ready. Fred was. He stood waiting. On the mushy snow before him were a thigh and shinbone and the outer hoof shells the old Indians used for rattles. The bones were white and dry as if they had been boiled clean in a glue factory.
Frank blinked. Abruptly he remembered that Fred had brought neither meat sack nor packstraps. To conceal his confusion he looked away. Shep still played with a length of gut, tossing it and growling. The other dog sat and watched. “Got to get me some specs,” Frank muttered. But when he turned back the other man had knapsack straps biting heavily into the shoulders of his mackinaw and there was no hint of leached-out bone. They walked back to the lick in silence. “Come on down and have some soup?” Frank asked.
Fred shook his head. “Got to start jerkin’ this,” he explained.
Frank was relieved. With the way his jaw was pounding he had had all the company he needed for a few days.
Winter hung on longer than he had expected and for the next couple of weeks Frank sawed and split wood until finally one morning the wind reversed and the chinook turned every creek into a river, every low spot into a lake. The spring thaw was always the worst time of year. Frank stuck pretty much to the cabin waiting for the mud to dry, knowing that as soon as the worst of the runoff was over the whole country would be alive with mosquitoes, no-see-ums and the deerflies whose bite felt like the stab of a red hot knitting needle.
But he had no whiskey, and the only way he could stop thinking about the constant throbbing ache of his swollen jaw was to stay busy. He surveyed the gamy interior of his cabin—the natural consequence of a man living alone without running water. Finally he put on his gum boots and trudged down to the creek with a pair of buckets. When he got there the creek was filled with the fine white glacial milk that a later generation would liken to first rinse out of a cement mixer.
Now what? Frank had seen plenty of glacial milk in the larger streams. Usually they didn’t run clear until late summer just before the salmon run. But this was the first time the stream below his cabin had ever been filled with the stuff. He brought the buckets of white water back up to the cabin and put them to settle—which would take all day. And while the water was settling he fried a bannock for lunch, stuffed it in the pocket of his mackinaw and started upstream. He hadn’t gone more than three miles before he saw what was stirring things up.
It was the dangdest looking sluice box Frank had ever seen. Seemed to be made out of cardboard or waxed paper or something like the celluloid collar he had once worn for an evening of salooning back when he was younger. But it seemed to work all right. He couldn’t get it through his head how anything that thin and flimsy could stand up to the full flow of the creek and the pounding abrasion of constant shovelsful of rocks and gravel. Not a seam in it. Now how could anybody pack in a forty-foot-long sluice box all in one piece? Anyhow, somebody had done it and that somebody had to be Fred.
Frank was studying the flimsy-looking sluice box when Shep’s ears abruptly lay back. He turned and there was Fred with his dog.
“Howdy,” Fred said.
“Finding any?” Frank asked.
The stranger shook his head.
“Never saw one like that before,” Frank said. He went to the bottom of the sluice where there was carpetlike material apparently glued to the bottom of the flume to catch whatever fines got past the riffles. “How often do you clean it?” he asked.
“Two or three times a day.”
Frank pointed at the matting which was so incrusted with flour gold that it was actually yellow. “Must be six ounces there,” he said.
“Oh, that.” The stranger dismissed the yellow metal.
For an instant Frank felt cupidity. There had been a time in his life when gold had been very important but that had been before he had learned that a greater quantity of the stuff seemed only to equal a bigger headache and the rest of the year went along pretty much the same whether he took out barely enough for flour and bacon or . . . how many pairs of boots could a man wear in a year? He stared at the gold matted carpet. Enough to do him for years. He sighed. “Hope you ain’t gonna take it all down into town at once.”
Fred looked at him and for an instant Frank’s vision shimmered and he thought he was seeing something else. Then the stranger came back into focus. “Why not?” Fred asked.
“Nice country up here. People down in town get wind of that and you’ll have so danged many shysters, whores, claim jumpers . . .”
“Oh!” From his horrified expression Frank guessed Fred couldn’t have experienced many gold rushes. “But—” Fred hesitated. “Do they come for this—for gold?”
It was Frank’s turn
to stare.
“Want it?” Fred asked.
“Want what?”
“The gold.”
Frank sighed. Not just his eyes . . . Now he was hearing things. He squinted Fred back into focus and tried to hold him there. “You offerin’ to give me the gold?”
“I could give you more only I’ve been throwing it away.”
Frank was tempted to pinch himself but he didn’t want to seem simple in front of a stranger. “If you ain’t lookin’ for gold with this outfit, then what in thunder are you lookin’ for?”
Fred shifted on his feet and Shep growled. Frank glanced down and for an instant the other man’s dog was no dog at all. He glanced at Shep who remained totally canine. Fred was struggling and Frank remembered how woodsy the man had been the first time they had met. “Can’t find the word.”
There was a silence. “I’m not from around here,” Fred finally added.
“Didn’t figure you was an Injun.”
“I mean your language. I don’t speak English good.”
“Seems like you talk it near’s good as I do.”
“Just so, and ary a word better. If you knew the name of what I’m looking for then I’d know it.”
Later when he was alone Frank was to decide it was just plain cowardice that made him abruptly turn and head back to the cabin with a hasty, “Goldang it! Just remembered I left somethin’ on the stove.” Sitting on a peeled log in front of the cabin he studied Shep. “You think I’m crazy?” he asked. If the dog knew, he wasn’t committing himself. That left Frank back where he had started. He wished he knew the stranger better. Then he finally knew what it was he really wished—apart from his jaw to quit aching. “Funny,” he told Shep. “Always got along fine by myself. Now why would I go thinkin’ I need somebody else?”
He couldn’t confide in the stranger. The stranger—Fred, was woodsy. No telling how long he’d been out here alone putting up that funny sluice box and building fires on the creek bed to soften up gravel, shovel it into neat piles and get ready once the spring thaw made water available to wash his pay dirt through the sluice.
But the whole thing was impossible. In the years he had spent alone here Frank had dug that creek from end to end—had dug this whole country from the Caribou Trail to the Klondike. He had gotten placer gold, flour, an occasional nugget. But never had he struck anything like Fred was getting out of old, worked-over ground. And Fred wasn’t even hunting gold!
Frank knew there were more valuable things than gold. Diamonds, for instance. And platinum. But there were no diamonds in this country. Platinum? That was scarce, Frank didn’t even know how to recover it. Besides, no matter what he was looking for, what kind of fool would go throwing gold away?
“Crazy,” he muttered. “There ain’t no Fred. I been up here too long.”
And yet Frank didn’t think he was crazy. Man lives any time in this country, he gets plenty of chances to see men who’ve worked too hard, put up with too much misery and deprivation. They always turned suspicious—ended up killing their partners, their dogs, everything not a part of themselves. And not uncommonly, once they had killed off everyone else, those unhappy men would try to bite the muzzle off a shotgun. “Don’t want to kill nobody,” Frank muttered. “Went out of my way to be friendly, didn’t I?”
Shep thumped his tail against Frank’s shin.
Frank studied the ageing dog. “You’re supposed to know things like that,” he said. “Is Fred and his dog real—or am I just seein’ things?”
Shep stopped thumping his tail and turned to look into Frank’s eyes. Frank sat there a long time, then remembered the buckets of mud he had taken in to settle. They were reasonably clear now. He skimmed and poured carefully and then spent the rest of the day swamping out the accumulated grime in his cabin. But all day long he kept returning to the question, no more able to stop picking than he was to quit poking a tongue at his aching jaw. “Wish I had some whiskey.
But he didn’t and next morning the creek still ran milky and that, he realized, meant something. If he was seeing things it was a remarkably consistent hallucination that would send mud three miles downstream to foul his water supply—glacial milk that persisted whether or not he thought about Fred. He finished breakfast and tried to make up his mind. There was nothing to be gained by sticking around here chasing his tail and asking himself if he was cracked—broken like so many others by this country.
“But I like it here,” he muttered as Shep joined him for the walk upstream.
The sluice was still there, milk pouring from its lower end. At the top something like an endless chain dredge bucket was dumping gravel into the sluice. Then as his eyes cleared Frank saw it was not a machine: just Fred hunched over and tossing his shovel regularly.
Fred straightened up. “Howdy.”
This time Frank noted that his dog was not there. Still Shep regarded the stranger with stiffiegged wariness.
“Want gold?” Fred asked.
“You still givin’ it away?”
“I—” Fred shrugged and for an instant something in Frank’s eyes made him shimmer. “I’m lookin’ for another metal,” he explained as he settled back into reality. “Fact is, I’m havin’ such a hard time findin’ it, I wondered if maybe you’d like to trade.”
Frank studied him for a startled moment. “What can I trade you for gold?”
“Meat.”
“You ate up that whole quarter already?”
Fred started to nod, then changed his mind. “Still got plenty. But my dog eats a lot too and I got to tend this sluice while the water’s high and—”
It sounded reasonable—reasonable as anything he might expect from a man who threw away gold. “Reckon I could split anything I shoot,” Frank agreed. “Over there.”
The tailings carpet had been ripped from the bottom of the sluice. The gold-incrusted fabric lay in jumbled yellow folds amid the bare bones of several kinds of animal. Fred must have a real craving for meat. “I’ll bring you whatever I can find,” Frank promised, and picked up the carpet, trying not to shake flour gold from its drying nap. Beneath the carpet was a pile of nuggets. The largest, the size of a quail’s egg was of such a blatant yellow that he thought it might be copper. He put his tongue on it and there was the dull, nothing taste of gold instead of the slight sharpness of a base metal.
“Appreciate it about the meat,” Fred said, and went back to shoveling. Frank got the carpet into his meat sack along with the nuggets and went back down to his cabin. Once there he stirred up the fire in his sheet iron stove. When it was going good he stuffed the carpet in and opened drafts and damper.
The stove began erupting, spouting thick greasy smoke at every crack. Then suddenly it was roaring and so red hot that Frank rushed down to the creek for buckets of muddy water lest he lose the cabin. When he returned the place was full of acrid smoke, but the stove and pipe were no longer so bright, red. But godamighty, what a stink!
He opened the tiny “window” in the opposite wall. It was not the burning-feathers stink of woolen carpeting. Nor was it the burning-grass stink of the coco matting sluice boxes usually had in place of Turkey carpet. Eyes streaming and lungs burning, Frank hastened outside to stand upwind waiting for the smoke to stop. When the carpet had finally burned out he went back into the cabin to make acrid comment on the way soot smuts had obliterated his spring housecleaning. “Next time he gives me a piece of matting, be danged if I don’t build a fire outside,” he promised.
The firebox of his sheetiron stove was incrusted with melted gobs of something like the glassy mess Frank remembered around the edges of the sugaring- off pans in his mapled boyhood. He resolved to ask Fred what the hell kind of a carpet that was. But meanwhile he shoveled the ashes carefully from the stove, took them down to the creek, and panned out danged near seven ounces.
“Better go shoot a moose,” he muttered as he spooned flour gold into a paper funnel and thence into an empty whiskey bottle. He would have felt quite cheerful
about all that much gold except the memory of sugaring-off brought another memory of Maw. The last time he had sugared-off Maw’s jaw had been swollen and lumpy too. “And they say it don’t run in families!” he growled as he went in to bed.
To Frank’s mild amazement he found not moose but more elk sign next morning and it turned out to be a fairly good day. His jaw didn’t ache quite so constantly; his eyesight had improved, and the elk promised to dress out well over four hundred. He made the kill well up the hillside where there was still a foot of rotten snow that made it easy to horse the whole carcass into a toboggan and drag it downhill to within a mile of Fred’s diggings. There, well away from the bloody remnants of butchering, he rigged tackle and hoisted the animal up a skinned pole pending its dismembering.
“No need to bother cutting it up,” Fred said when Frank came by with tongue and liver. “I’ll lug it down the rest of the way come nightfall. By the way, there’s some more gold.”
This time the patch of Turkey carpet was neatly wrapped in what Frank first thought was one of those pokes the Eskimos made of walrus gut. Then from the transparent regularity of the poke he knew it had to be something different. “Never had a piece of carpet stink like that stuff you give me t’other day,” he said.
“Stink?”
“When I burned it.”
“Oh. Should’ve warned you about that.”
“What kind of cloth is it?”
“I don’t know the word.” Where Fred came from it was something that started with ack—Frank couldn’t remember the rest of it.
“Ain’t seen your dog around.”
Fred pointed and Frank realized that Shep’s hackles were not rising against Fred. He was reacting to the other dog, which had been nowhere in sight an instant ago. Frank felt a sudden suspicion. “You—” He didn’t finish the question. Obviously, if Fred could stand out here all the equinoctial day long shoveling pay dirt he wasn’t afraid of sunlight. He thanked Fred for the gold and hastened back to the creek bank in front of his cabin where he built a fire and after the smoke died down he panned out the ashes for another three ounces.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 27