by Thomas Page
On the mountain’s base at the edge of town was a large black cross symbolizing an old mine.
A gold mine! In more ways than one.
The key fell from Jason’s fingers to the carpet.
8
Guests at Colby Lodge were discouraged from going to Oharaville. The mine area was thin earth pocked with sinkholes. People had fallen into the ground at Oharaville and vanished. Children had been trapped there with broken limbs. The Forest Service would run you out if they caught you there.
The road around the north face had been built when muscle and dynamite smoothed the earth and transportation was by horsedrawn buckboard. It followed a rusted railroad line used for transferring ore from the Limerick mine to the town of Garrison.
Oharaville lay at the terminal of a creaky railroad trestle spanning a gully full of old tin cans, newspapers, broken beams, and bald tires. The town was laid out on a slope running upward away from Mount Colby’s north face. Basically, it was a single rutted road called Bullion Avenue, which originated at a huge hole blasted out of Colby’s side, from which a collection of rotted, decrepit buildings seemed to spill out. All the windows in the ghost town had been boarded up. The most distinctive edifice was an old wooden church with a leaning steeple at the end of Bullion Avenue, almost in the trees.
When Jason pulled into the town, he was twenty-five hundred feet above sea level. He wondered if that were some kind of record for a mine. He parked the car on Bullion Avenue.
A faint wind blew down the street, creaking a hanging sign with the faded word SADDLERY on it. Of the two dozen or so structures, half were little houses around which long-dead housewives had tried to grow gardens which were now thickets of fungi and tight grass, enclosed by rotting fences.
Jason looked into the saloon. Shelves and counters with dusty glass jars lined the walls. The floor was full of jagged holes. Jason envisioned a winter in the Cascades when miners huddled blind drunk under a swaying lantern in here. The wind would sweep like a flash flood down Bullion Avenue as if draining into the mine shaft, rattling doors and shutters back and forth and tilting the church steeple. Up here skies were always gray and mountain peaks crowded your horizons.
Before the gaping hole of the mine was a string of twisted rail and some overturned ore cars. The mine supervisors’ hut was a long-gone jumble of wood. Metal barrels were strewn about, and piles of earth were stacked against the cliff. These were tailings, heaps of dirt through which scavenger prospectors picked for small hunks of silver ore.
Jason opened the glove compartment and took out a brand new .38-caliber revolver, a heavy flashlight, and a ball of twine on a rotating spool. With his pocket knife he carved a notch into each of the soft-nosed lead bullets, then loaded them into the pistol.
As he walked toward the mine he searched the ground for any depressions or other weakness. He flashed the light inside the entrance. Water dripped. A small avalanche of wet gravel hissed down the wall.
He tied the twine to a wooden beam and spun it out as he continued downward. The blackness was almost liquid in its density. His light beam was a white bar gliding fish-like over shaley walls which were soft and cheesy, apt to crumble under his touch. His major worry was the beams. Some were just stacked railroad ties. All were at least thirty years old, and each step caused them to vibrate.
The tunnel junctioned, one trail leading to the right, the other to the left. Jason paused, remembering the old Robert Frost poem about roads diverging in the woods. The old pioneer method of choice was spitting into one’s hand, slapping a fist into the spittle, and following wherever the largest gob went. Jason flipped a coin, thinking of Martha, and it came up tails. He went to the right.
The tunnel led straight down. Dust congealed into mud from overloaded ore cars parked on either side of the tracks. None of it had been disturbed, by either feet or rockfalls. There was no sign of recent activity.
Unless they walked on the ceiling, too.
The shaft curved again. This time Jason smelled something. An incongruous crowd of odors crushed together by the still, dank air tumbled over in a riot, as if to see which could reach his nose first. They were fresh and alive, more appropriate to spring sunlight and open ground.
The shaft ended in a wall of greenery, piled, spilled, crammed, and packed wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling, in a tight jungle barricade. It rested on a bed of seeds of every kind: acorns, pine nuts, oak and spruce, even peanuts. Every type of vegetation imaginable was represented. Huge strips of bark in layers on top of layers of berries, on top of apples, all resting on a bed of spruce tips. Jason stooped down and picked up a red berry. He bit off half of it, chewed, and spat it out.
Piled into a hollow in the wall by the vegetation was a stack of yellowing bones. Like the vegetation, they were a selection of all the wildlife that roamed the countryside. Bear. Woodchuck. Beaver. A horse skull nestled against that of a dog. The meat had been stripped from them, and Jason could see notches in the calcified surfaces where they had been gnawed.
Pulverize them into powder and add to the diet for calcium and minerals. Pack the meat in a higher tunnel, where cold was a natural deep freeze.
Now Jason knew why he saw no prints. The vegetation was a plug many feet thick which blocked intruders coming in from the Oharaville side and them from going out that way.
Most of the vegetation was seeds, which made sense, too. The gelada baboon lived at mountain altitudes where the only food at all was seeds. Seeds could be dug, plucked, and gathered all year round without being missed. Ounce for ounce, they were second only to meat in protein. Barricaded by tons of rock, the mine would be even in temperature all year round.
Jason played his light over the bones. Shadows crawled behind the eye sockets with the light’s passage, as though pupils were rolling. After a second, Jason decided that in the case of Jameson the plumber, ignorance was bliss.
After the mine’s darkness, the gray cloud-scudded daylight made Jason’s eyes water. A light drizzle drummed against the ore cars and dripped over the shingles and wood false fronts of Bullion Avenue.
A red Volkswagen with flowers pasted to the hood was parked beside his car. Behind the wheel was Martha Lucas, dozing in a maroon shawl. He rapped on her window, frightening her awake. “I saw you driving up here,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Really, Mr. Jason, this place isn’t safe for humans, living or otherwise.”
Jason sat down on the passenger seat next to her. He lit a cigarette.
“Moon’s spirit is a Bigfoot, isn’t it.” It was asked in a very matter-of-fact way. She might have been speaking about an interesting bird that had just flown by.
“Moon’s spirit is a type of man. Otherwise known as Bigfoot.”
“What does that mean?”
“Seeing as you’re an anthropologist, maybe you can tell me.” He told her about his fight in the river and what Kimberly had said about the chin. And his theory about Bigfoot’s resurfacing for food.
Normally she could believe the most peculiar things —disinfectant teas, the wonders of vegetarianism, probably even astrology. But face to face with Raymond Jason and his story, she faltered. “I don’t believe it. A man?”
“What’s more, that mine is packed with food for the winter.”
“And you’ve seen it?”
“Twice. I’ll never forget it. I figure Moon saw it in Montana and figured it was the Holy Grail. From Montana it moved to British Columbia and from there down to here.”
“Why was it moving around?”
Jason cracked the window to let the cigarette smoke out. “I had a hell of a time figuring that out. This mine is their home. Or it was until Jack Helder moved in and started dynamiting foundations, laying in pipe, and bringing all kinds of people up here. So one of them left to find a new home. Since there aren’t many isolated places left in the West, he had to run all over half the
country. He returned here only a couple of days ago.”
He had buried the hook in his words, but she caught it anyway. “One of them! There’s more than one?”
Jason took a suicidally deep inhalation of smoke that almost certainly shortened his life by hours and exhaled luxuriously. “There’s at least two. Not many more, I expect. Not any more. The whole county doesn’t have enough food to sustain a population. One stayed behind, holding down the fort, so to speak, while Moon’s spirit was wandering around. That’s the one that killed Jameson and tore up your phone lines.”
Martha seemed to become physically uncomfortable, as Jason had been with her the night she picked him up. She sat upright in the seat, then slumped down again, then rolled down her window and rested her elbow on it. Then she looked at Jason for a long time as if trying to divine his intentions. “You’ve sure got this all worked out in your head, Mr. Jason.”
“Not all. I won’t have it all figured out till that thing is pinned down in a glass case with about fifty biologists looking it over. I wouldn’t throw a seven-foot-tall hairy man at you if Kimberly hadn’t thrown it at me.”
“Mr. Jason, the ski season is just beginning. They’ve killed people . . .” Her face suffused with panic.
“Yeah, I know, but don’t call out the Air Force just yet. They may very well be gone.”
Jason walked over to his car and came back with his own map, the one with the line tracing the thing’s travels. “Like I said, he was looking for a new home. If he found one, it seems to me, they’d want to get out of here before winter really comes down hard on them. If that’s true, I’ve lost him for good and Moon’s going to be very unhappy in spring.”
“Would they have left already? It isn’t very cold. They’ve got all that food.”
“He sprang one of my traps and injured himself. How badly I don’t know. It wasn’t fatal, since he made it from the Little Harrington. He might want to recuperate for a few days. Get himself back in walking shape, kiss the bats and neighbors good-bye and all that. Then again, he’s tough as leather, and may have split as soon as he could, food or not.”
“And what if he didn’t find a new home?”
Jason flicked his cigarette out the window and fanned away the smoke with his hand. “Then I’m still in luck. This mountain’s served them well for God knows how long, maybe they’ll just decide to stick to their side while Helder sticks to his. There’s a question of the territorial imperative here somewhere, too, but since we don’t know anything about them, we don’t know how strong it is.”
“Jack Helder won’t stick to his side if he hears there’s a Bigfoot nest in that mine. Nobody will, Mr. Jason. And Jack says he’s going to turn Oharaville into a Wild West town if it kills him.”
Jason folded up his map. “I guess it’s time we paid a call on Drake. But I’m going to ask a favor of you. Let me do all the talking, okay?”
She sat quietly as Jason told Drake about Canada, his trek down here, the Little Harrington, and the mine. Jason told him everything, that is, except about John Moon, and she knew he was dragging her into a lie against her will. She closed her clammy hands together and stared at the photo of the Secretary of the Interior behind Drake’s desk. Pray God please, Jason had a good reason.
When Jason finished, Drake stirred his bulk and spoke to Martha. “Honey, is this guy kidding me?”
“I don’t think so,” she said softly.
“You sure that snake poison didn’t get to your brain, Mr. Jason? Cause that’s the damned silliest thing I ever heard. And I’ve lived in this county for five years!”
“You’re welcome to go look in that mine if you don’t believe me.”
“And you telling me you fought this thing in the river.”
“Yes. It nearly killed me.”
Drake sucked on a tooth, his small eyes darting back and forth between Martha and Jason. “I never seen any Bigfeet or any signs of them up here, Mr. Jason.”
“How many wildcats have you seen? How many deer antlers, which are supposed to litter the woods every fall, Drake? Where do you think they’re hiding? Go look at that food.”
Instead of responding, Drake hauled himself from his chair and poked his head through the glass door to the other offices. “Jimmy? You there, Wallace. Go on over and see what kind of chart we have on the Limerick mine.” As he waited, Drake slipped his hands through the back of his belt and rotated his torso as if he had been sitting too long and had to work his spine around. A young man with a nametag reading WALLACE passed him two long rolls. Drake shut the door and spread the charts out on his desk. He sucked his teeth again and shook his head. “Spaghetti.”
Martha leaned over Jason’s shoulders. The charts were obviously based on old ones. The shafts were parallel lines with open corners. Some ended in dotted lines. “Those are dead holes,” said Drake. “Some of the tunnels just fade out. The companies that dug up the mountain didn’t give a shit about making good records of them a hundred years ago. If they smelled copper or iron, they went after it like moles.”
“Is this chart complete?” asked Jason.
“Hell no, I don’t think there’s a single complete chart anywhere. The government’s marked out every mine, but that don’t mean they have every tunnel. That’s a five-story mine, too. A real maze.” Drake put his finger on a shaft whose end was turned outward. “This would be where you went in, Mr. Jason. How long was your string?”
“Five hundred feet. I used up about four hundred and fifty feet of it. I remember going right.”
“Which would put you right here. The other branch is a dead end.” He laid the other roll over this one. “And as you can see, there’s a whole ’nother network above and below yours.” He tapped a fat sausage finger on the paper. “Did you know they used to have gun battles down there?”
“No.”
“It’s true. Claim jumpers and all that. There’s a lot of bones down there all right, and they don’t have anything to do with Bigfoot. You didn’t happen to see any dynamite, did you?”
“Jesus no,” Jason replied, involuntarily looking at Martha, who looked away.
Drake explained with relish, “The companies got careless sometimes and left whole boxes of equipment behind. Railings, pipes, pickaxes, lanterns, all that stuff. And sometimes dynamite, all packed up nice and neat. The old stuff is sawdust soaked in nitro. After a while the nitro leaks all over the floor. It’s still got a kick to it.”
“I think what you’re trying to tell me, Drake, is that you don’t intend to go in there.”
“I didn’t mean that, Mr. Jason. We’re going in to look at this food you told me about. Yessir, I wouldn’t miss that for anything. But I’m not about to tackle any of the real deep shafts till I get some better charts from the state bureau.” Drake’s voice hardened. “Until then, I don’t want anyone near that mine.”
“In other words,” said Martha, “don’t tell Jack Helder or he’ll blab it all over the place.”
“You got it, Miss Lucas. Right now every damned body with a gun is running through the woods looking for Bigfoot, ever since Lester got on the radio, and that I don’t like. Mr. Jason, is there anything else you want to tell me?”
Moon is wanted! The Canadian police! Concealing a fugitive! Martha wiped her hands on her dress as Jason made a great show of thinking.
“No. That’s about it. As you know, Mr. Drake, the lodge is on the east face of the mountain and the town’s on the north face. They’re just around the corner, so to speak.”
Drake reached into his drawer and clanked Jason’s traps onto the table. “I’m not about to forget that lodge. If this damn-fool story of yours gets out and I hear somebody’s fallen into a sinkhole and he’s carrying all sorts of guns and nets you hunt Bigfoot with, then somebody in this office right now is going into the slammer for setting traps without permission, smoking in the wood
s, malicious mischief, and packing a handgun without a license.” Gunmetal eyes speared through Jason.
“You don’t have to threaten me,” said Jason, blood filling his face. “I can keep my mouth shut. And I have a license.” He showed it to Drake.
“Issued in Kansas for a Colt Python. Is that a Colt Python on your hip, Mr. Jason? I know this isn’t Kansas.”
“It’s a thirty-eight, and it didn’t seem to bother the dealer this morning,” Jason replied tightly through clenched teeth. “And I carry it because these animals are dangerous.”
“I reckon he’s even more dangerous since you shot at him. I reckon that went for Jameson, too. We’d all be a lot better off if folks didn’t shoot at everything they saw.”
Jason made a little choking noise.
Drake suddenly smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “Now hows about a beer?”
Jason pushed open the glass door and stalked out of the office. Martha followed, leaving Drake with a flick of her shoulders and a grimace indicating that she thought Jason as peculiar as he did.
Jason paced around the car in an absolute fit of rage, kicking the tires, slamming his fist on the hood, and slugging the ventilator window so hard he dislodged it, jostling his wounded arm in the process.
“You sure get mad, Mr. Jason,” said Martha as his anger fragmented away kick by kick, leaving him weak and frustrated, leaning against the door. “I hope you never get mad at me.”
He pointed a finger at the Ranger station. Spittle was in the corners of his mouth. “That—that—talking to me like that!”
“Why shouldn’t he? He knew you were lying about something.”
“I did not lie to him!” Jason blazed.
“Of course you did. You didn’t mention Moon once.” She was sorry they had left her car at the lodge. She was not certain she wanted to ride with him. He exhaled and yanked the door open.
“I’m okay. Really I am. Get in.”
