He was fighting the wheel all the time, his lips drawn back in a grimace of concentration. ‘Soon we get to the Squaw. Once we are back on the north side of the creek, then you see how bad a track can get without any maintenance.’
We had reached the bottom and we were in mud, the track deep-rutted. He picked a patch of hard standing and stopped. ‘Guess it’s time we went into four-wheel drive. Anyway I need a leak.’ It was an old Ford and to put it into four-wheel drive necessitated his getting out and turning the hubs on the front wheels with a special spanner. He had switched the engine off and in the silence I could hear the faint murmur of water pouring through the gorge. We were in thick bush now, nothing visible except the green and black of balsam, aspen and spruce, the gleam of mud and water.
Less than a mile after we started again the gold of the frosted aspen leaves began to shimmer and shake to a wind we could not hear above the solid grinding noise of the engine. Suddenly there was water glimmering beyond them, a miasma of brightness. The trees fell back. We were driving along the creekside then, water rushing past, and ahead the country opened out, the creek widening till we were onto the bed of it, growling our way over rock ledges and boulders to the far side where the track was again the bed of a torrent as it climbed steeply up a shoulder of the mountain.
The crest, when we reached it, came very suddenly, the ground falling abruptly away from the reared-up bonnet of the truck, and there, across frost-sered miles of aspen and balsam, with glimpses of water in the swampland meadows, was a great gleaming barricade of high mountains. ‘There you are — the Noisy Range.’
I reckoned, if the Front Ranges were 8000 feet, this mountain range that blocked the whole view to the west must be at least 16,000. From foot to summit, along the whole great massive bulwark, it was a wall of brand new, whiter-than-white snow — a fairy range of infinite beauty in the hard brightness of the sunlight and against the blue of the sky.
‘Summer time it goes growling and banging away any hour of the day or night.’ He had stopped to lift the gear lever into normal drive. ‘Now it’s going silent again as the ice gets hold.’ He nodded away to the left where the rounded shape of another of the Front Range mountains showed a white crest fanged with the grey-black stumps of ice-split rocks. ‘We go round that till we get the other side, then through a bit of a gut and we’re at the headwaters of Ice Cold Creek. So this is about the nearest we get to the Noisy.’
‘Where does Ice Cold join the Squaw?’ I asked.
He leaned forward, pointing across my left shoulder. ‘Right down there, about a coupla miles above where we’ve just forded it.’ He let in the clutch and we began slithering and sliding on a track that would have been good going but for the fact that we were above the treeline, nothing but small shrubs, a sort of arctic maquis, and the sun shining full on the track had melted the surface to form a viscous film of mud. ‘We’re swinging southerly now. Then we start climbing again and another ten minutes we’ll be round that mountain and way above the timber line.’
I asked what height we would be then, but he didn’t know. ‘Four thousand, maybe five. We’ll be into BC then and none of the Park or Reserve laws apply. You can hunt, mine, do pretty near any dam’ thing. Indian country.’ He laughed, his eyes gleaming as he glanced at me speculatively. ‘I wouldn’t mind a claim in BC.’ And he added, ‘You really are Tom Halliday’s lawyer, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Mrs Halliday’s too?’
I nodded. He suddenly stopped the truck, leaning on the steering wheel, staring at me. ‘And they’re short of money, right?’
I didn’t say anything. Here it was, the proposition I had been expecting, the reason doubtless that he’d offered to drive me up here. ‘Okay, so what are you going to do about the Gully? It isn’t worth a lot — I mean is very speculative. You talked to Jonny, did you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And if you’re thinking of bidding for the Stone Slide Gully claim, then I must warn you he’s interested in it, too.’
‘Sure.’ He nodded, still bent close over the steering wheel. ‘Jonny would like to mine the Gully. But he’s got no money. I have.’ His teeth showed white in a quick grin. ‘There’s nobody else up here fool enough …’ He let it go at that, waiting for me to react.
‘Did you know Tom well?’ I asked him.
‘Not really. I don’t think anyone could know him well.’
‘Did he ever talk to you about his father?’
He looked at me hard. ‘So — you know, do you?’ And he rammed the truck into gear, hands clenched on the wheel as we slithered on the thawed-frost surface towards a hundred-foot drop to a little ravine where the rocks in shadow showed patches of virgin snow.
‘I know he was the cause of Carlos Despera’s death,’ I said.
‘Okay, so you know. But it didn’t make any difference. It didn’t affect Tom and me. He was not a very nice man, Lucky Carlos Despera. And by all accounts it was his own fault.’
‘You never felt any resentment?’
‘About the mine?’
I nodded.
‘The luck of the game, isn’t it? Lucky Carlos sold Tom’s father a claim he figured was a dud. Too bad! He was wrong. The fact that he drank and gambled away the cash was all a part of the man. He salted the mine. He admitted it. That’s what my mama told me - admitted it in one of his fits of drunkenness. She was only seven and her own mother dying. That’s why she remembered it.’
‘And Josh Halliday looked after her from then on?’
He nodded. ‘Until she married my father, who was the son of one of the cable drillers that followed the line of the CPR when it was building. They were drilling for water. At Medicine Hat they found oil, not water -‘ His teeth flashed. ‘Daft, isn’t it, but who wanted oil when the engines were fired with coal and needed water to keep the steam up? Drilling and plumbing, not much difference, eh? So he picks a settler’s daughter, marries her and settles down to look after pipes and drains, what they now call infrastructure.’
I asked him again how well he’d known Tom Halliday and he glanced at me, a quick sideways glance, trying to guess from my expression what would serve his interests best. It was an oddly sly glance, as though suddenly he were a different person — or rather I was seeing the obverse of his personality. ‘Did I know Tom well?’ he repeated to himself. He was silent for a moment, thinking about it. ‘Depends what you call well, don’t it? I mean, how well does one ever know somebody else?’ He paused, his grip on the wheel tightening. ‘Is hard enough to know oneself, right? He was good company, I know that.’ And after a moment he went on, ‘Often he’d spend the day fishing the Squaw, then he’d drive up to my camp, and if he’d caught some trout, or a salmon, then we’d cook it while we had a drink. He always had beer in his truck. And after the meal we’d sing. He hadn’t a bad voice.
That’s how much I knew him. We’d drink and sing together. But he’d never talk, not about anything serious - he was a sort of lep… what’s the word for somebody you can never reach?’
‘Leprechaun?’
That’s it - leprechaun. He was like a leprechaun. So, no, I never knew him well.’ He was silent then, the mountain ahead growing larger, the track a raw line running up the shoulder of it and swinging out of sight on the skyline so that the nick made by the bulldozer blade showed sharp against the blue of the sky. He began humming to himself, a sort of protection, I thought, against further questioning. A few minutes and we were climbing again, the track worsening, a nasty drop to the right. We reached the point where it began to curve round the mountain. It was here that stone had been quarried to pave the track in the days when it had been properly maintained.
He pulled up. ‘Don’t know about you, but I need another leak. I guess it’s the cold. Coffee and cold don’t go together.’ He grinned, jumping out and standing close beside the cab. ‘We could turn here,’ he said to me, looking hopefully over his shoulder. ‘You agree to my trying my luck in the Gully ‘ and we coul
d turn right round and be in Whitehorse tonight. There’s a lawyer there — Williams. Tomorrow it could all be signed and sealed — lease or purchase, whatever you like.’
He zipped himself up, leaning in at the open door, his eyes pleading. ‘I want to try and do what old Josh Halliday did, take a no-good claim, a mine that’s washed out, and before I’m too old …’ He smiled and shrugged, his eyes very bright, a gleam of tense excitement. ‘Maybe there’s nothing there, but it’s worth a try. And that’s my dream. That’s always been my dream. To strike it lucky.’ He waited then for me to say something, and when I didn’t he climbed slowly in. ‘Well, what do you say? I got money saved. It’s as good an offer as you’ll get. Jonny’s about broke and his wife’s sick. He can’t buy it. And nobody else is looking for a washed-out claim. You’ll soon discover that. Well?’
‘We’ll talk about it,’ I said, ‘after I’ve seen the mine. Maybe in a day or two, after I’ve talked to Epinard again.’
That’ll be too late.’ He said it quickly, then pressed the starter. Tomorrow evening I go to Haines, catch the boat. Back to the plumbing business.’ He paused there, staring at me, the pleading look back in his eyes. ‘Well?’
‘How far to the mine?’ I asked.
‘Some way yet.’ He was still staring at me as though trying to make up his mind about something. ‘Okay then.’ He slammed the truck into gear. ‘You look at the Gully, then make up your mind.’
He didn’t talk after that. It was as though the matter of the Gully loomed so large in his mind now that it was out in the open between us that he could think of nothing else. He was driving fast, leaning forward over the wheel, urging the truck up the track and fighting it through the thawed-frost patches where the fine dust of usage was coagulated into a mucilage that was as slippery as ice. Twice I tried to get him to talk about his mother. ‘At the time of his death,’ I said, ‘was Josh Halliday still supporting her?’
He shrugged and shook his head. ‘I wasn’t around then, was I?’
‘But you must have talked to her about it?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Was she married then?’
‘I don’t know. What’s it matter, anyway?’ And when I asked him when his mother and father had got married, he said, ‘It’s none of your business, is it?’
‘No. But if I’m going to advise the Hallidays to lease that claim to you I need to know a little more about you than I do at the moment.’
He thought this over for a moment, frowning in concentration. ‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘I suppose what you mean is, how much am I my father’s son, and how much have I inherited of my mother’s background.’ He glanced at me quickly out of the corners of his eyes, the front wheel sliding on surface slime. ‘Fair enough.’ He nodded. ‘But I’m not sure I know the answer. Sometimes I think I’m part Indian. Sometimes I find myself thinking like an Indian, or rather the way I imagine Indians think, since I can’t be certain, can I, how in any given situation my grandmother would have behaved. You know about that, eh?’ Again that quick sideways glance. ‘When Josh Halliday killed Lucky Carlos -‘ He must have seen the expression on my face, for he added quickly, ‘All right, caused Carlos to go off and get himself drowned … When he died, he had an Indian woman in tow. She was with him in Silver City, a young girl really, and pregnant. She was my grandmother. And when my mother was born Josh Halliday at least had the decency to send the two of them down to Vancouver, to a friend of his who worked on the CPR. They finished up at Nelson in the Rockies, my grandmother working for one of the regional track engineers. She died of TB, something that was very common amongst the Indians - the camp life, the crowded, unhygienic conditions. After that my mama went to work for a farmer’s family just outside Medicine Hat. It was the Depression then, and in 1932. she goes and marries an impecunious plumber’s mate.’
‘How old was she then?’
I thought he was going to tell me to mind my own business. We were crossing an old trestle bridge, a rock canyon below and the tyres thudding on heavy timbers that were loose and greasy with age. He concentrated on driving until we were across, then he said, ‘Twenty-three, maybe twenty-four.’
‘And you were born - when?’
‘Early days of the war.’
So he was older than he looked; too old, in fact, to go on playing at mining in the Yukon much longer, not if he were doing the labouring himself. ‘You’re married, I take it.’
‘Yup, married with two lovely girls — one’s twenty-two, she’s married to an insurance salesman and lives in Winnipeg, the other’s only just left school.’ We were climbing steeply and he suddenly pointed to a white-capped peak glimpsed through a gap in the mountains away to the right. ‘That’s when we know we’re across the border into BC. Soon as we get a view of Mount Armour.’
‘We’re in BC now?’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. The Yukon’s behind us. The no
Pacific’s straight ahead - that is if this old crate of mine had wings.’ And he suddenly began to sing something about the wings of a dove. ‘You like hymns, religious stuff?’
‘Some,’ I said.
‘Me, too. Like Jerusalem. But that ain’t really a hymn, is it?’
‘No, it’s a poem,’ I agreed.
He nodded and laughed. ‘Po’ms - that’s what I like, real po’try provided it’s got a swing to it.’ And suddenly he was singing Jerusalem at the top of his voice, banging his hand against his door panel to keep the rhythm — ‘Bring me my bow of burn-iing gold, Bring me my arrows of desire, Bring me my spear — He stopped there, his hand pointing. ‘The Gully. Stone Slide Gully.’ Then he slammed on the brakes so hard I almost hit the windshield.
We had been coming round a bend on the shoulder of the mountain, the side of the track dropping away to a rocky streambed on our right with the V of the Gully beyond, and rising almost sheer to our left where it had been blasted out of the rock. The sun was shining straight in our faces, and suddenly the track wasn’t there any more, the surface of it obliterated by a mass of stone.
The truck stopped with its bonnet right against the first big segment of rock, raw-edged and clean-sided where it had broken away from the piled-up side of the mountain. So there was a spill across the track, and this was it. And at the head of the valley to our right, black against the blinding sunlight, the streambed narrowed to a huge rock V out of which the water had forced a spill of jumbled rock and boulder that reminded me of the rock glacier Jean Edmundson had shown me the previous day. ‘The Gully,’ he said again, sitting there, staring at it.
‘When did this happen?’ I asked, nodding to the massive pile of detritus that blocked the track.
‘Don’t know.’ He cut the engine and jumped out of the cab. I followed. ‘Kevin or Jonny, somebody’s hammered a vehicle over this lot.’ He was shading his eyes against the glare, pointing to the parallel line of tyre marks climbing in
across the rubble to where the track showed clear again on the far side. ‘Could be Jonny, or Mac maybe, that Indian of his, Jack McDonald. Looks like they been running their shovel over it. Can’t tell for sure. The tyre tracks have got widened out with all the toing and fro-ing. And they’ve been down into the Gully, too. Look at those track marks.’
He thought they’d probably been getting supplies and equipment out before the onset of winter. ‘First time I seen this rock fall.’ He turned his head, staring up at the sheer rock wall above us. Beyond it the shoulder of the mountain opened out into a son of amphitheatre with broad terraces faintly visible like the mealie patches of some ancient Indian civilization.
‘Is that the mine up there?’ I asked him. There was snow everywhere, blinding white, so that the shape of things was difficult to identify, but I could just make out what looked like the tin roof of a hut, and behind it a sort of watch tower, a gaunt skeleton of timber rimmed with frozen snow.
‘Yup. That’s the bunkhouse, and the spruce scaffold is where they hang their meat, up the top, clear of coyotes and bears. The mine itself, the screen
ing plant and all the rest of it, that’s just out of sight, right in the bed of the creek’s headwaters.’ He shook his head, his gaze swinging to the Gully, his eyes bright again, his hands literally trembling as though he were in a fever, which is exactly what I think it was - gold fever. He hadn’t been up here for a long while, he said.
‘But you brought Mrs Halliday up here,’ I reminded him.
He shook his head. ‘Not up here. They wouldn’t let me come up here. Mac met me with the little tractor shovel down at the ford and she went up on that. The best way. There’d been heavy rain and the track was bad.’
‘How long was she up here?’ I asked.
‘Four hours maybe. No, less. She couldn’t have had more than two and a half hours actually up here because I picked her up at the ford again about four in the afternoon.’
‘And she was going down to Vancouver?’
‘That’s what she said. Back to Whitehorse to see Jonny, then down on the train to Skagway. She was taking the ferry.’ ‘Did she say why she was going to Vancouver?’ ‘No. Why should she?’ And he turned away, his eyes on the great V of the Gully etched black against the sun on the far side of the streambed.
‘After she had seen the mine,’ I said, ‘was there any difference in her mood? When you picked her up again down there at the ford …’
‘I don’t know.’ He was looking up at the rock fall now, his mind on something else. ‘I didn’t notice,’ he said and moved out onto the rubble that blocked our way. And when I pressed him, asking what she had talked about, he answered quickly, ‘I don’t remember — not very much, I think. She was a little cold, a little tired, I guess. She don’t talk hardly at all the whole way back to the Lodge.’ Then he turned away again, bending down and looking at the track marks across the fall. ‘Always was trouble here,’ he said over his shoulder. And then quickly, as though to block any more questions from me: ‘They sure had problems here when they started getting in the new machinery. The plant itself, just the screening plant, cost over half a million dollars. You’ll understand why when you see it. It’s big, and it’s heavy, a lot of steel. Two months, that’s what it took them to drag it up here - up this track.’ He looked back at me, emphasizing his point with an emphatic nod — ‘That’s right. Two solid months to drag it up, piece by piece, from the highway to Ice Cold. That’s when they blasted this section of the track. They had to, it wasn’t wide enough. They got the heaviest parts as far as that turning or loading bay we passed a couple of hundred metres back, then they stuck; they couldn’t get it round the shoulder of the mountain here, so they blasted a new road, and right after that they got a scree slide from up the top —’ He nodded to the scree and rubble half choking the streambed below us. ‘Two weeks it took to clear it and there’s been trouble here ever since, always something falling from above when the frost cracks the rocks and a thaw sets in. It’s hellish cold up here in winter.’
High Stand Page 11
