Bo at Ballard Creek

by Kirkpatrick Hill

  Bo looked for Jack. She was suddenly afraid he’d missed the airplane, missed it all.

  The pilot and the other man waded to the bank, shaking hands all the way, and there were Lester and all the other men from the mine, crowding around as well. But she didn’t see Jack anywhere.

  Then she saw him, tall as a tree, standing by the roadhouse. Nakuchluk and her old husband, Unakserak, were hiding, peeking out from behind him.

  “Papa,” she screamed. “Did you see it? Did you see it?”

  Jack waved to her. He put his arms around Nakuchluk’s and Unakserak’s shoulders and encouraged them along with him to the riverbank. They still looked scared. Jack looked up at Bo on Arvid’s shoulders.

  “I was wondering where you was in all the hoorah,” Jack said. “Wonder you kids wasn’t run over, with all the carrying on.”

  The fliers couldn’t stay long; they had to get right back to Nome while the weather was good. So after coffee and sandwiches at the roadhouse, they took off again.

  They dragged the airplane down to the end of the sandbar, and then they started the noisy engine, climbed in, and pulled their goggles back over their eyes.

  And there it was, the black plane hurtling down the sandbar—rackety, rackety. They all watched and listened while it turned into a bird again, and then a dragonfly and then they couldn’t hear it anymore.

  That night there was a dance and a big party, noisier than the Fourth of July, more joyful than Christmas.

  It seemed to Bo that no one in Ballard Creek would ever be able to go back to their ordinary life again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SLUICING AND CLEANUP

  IN JUNE, WILD ROSES and bluebells crowded together under the birch trees lining the banks of the creek. Bluebells and roses always grew together, as if they were best friends, Bo thought. And as if they knew how pretty they looked together, pink and blue.

  The first mosquitoes were gone, the lazy, slow-moving, long-legged ones that hid all winter under the spruce bark. Now the summer mosquitoes had hatched, much smaller and more ornery. Some years the mosquitoes weren’t so bad. Not this year, though. Mosquitoes were everywhere Bo looked, and swarms of them rose up in the air when she ran through the tall grass. Their thin, tinny whining against the mosquito screen by Bo’s bed was so loud that sometimes she had to close her ears with her fingers before she could fall asleep.

  Jack kept a smudgepot smoldering outside the cookshack door to keep the mosquitoes out, but still they got in through the thin smoke and fell into the oatmeal and got baked into the cookies.

  Mosquito time was cleanup time. Cleanup was when the miners found out how much gold they had in the pay dirt they’d been piling up all winter.

  They had to shovel all that pay dirt into the long wooden sluice boxes and wash it to get the gold out. The boxes were called sluice boxes because sluicing meant “washing,” Arvid told her.

  And it was called pay dirt because when all the gold was taken out of it, they could sell the gold and get paid.

  Bo nodded her head to show she understood all that. “But what I don’t see is where the gold comes from,” she said.

  “Better ask Peter,” said Arvid. “He’ll explain it better than me.”

  So when Peter was leaving the cookshack after breakfast, Bo pulled his sleeve. “About the gold,” she said. “How did it get into the pay dirt?”

  “Now, that’s an amazing thing,” Peter said, smiling. He liked to explain about rocks to Bo.

  Peter sat down next to her on the bench at the long table and peered earnestly into her face, like he always did when he was explaining something.

  “Millions and millions of years ago,” he said, “the gold in our pay dirt formed in some rocks. Happens all the time. Different rocks, different things form in them when they cool down or get squeezed. Like that mica you see shining in rocks. And those little red garnets I showed you in the schist, that stripey rock.”

  Bo nodded to show she was listening hard.

  “Now remember I told you how rocks change? All the mountains that ever were get turned into sand someday.”

  “I remember,” said Bo. “But it never seems true.”

  “I know,” said Peter. “People just can’t imagine it. Hard for me, too.” He lit his pipe and puffed on it to make a little flame spurt up.

  “Well, for millions of years, those rocks with gold in them were parts of a mountain. And those mountains were getting worn down to boulders and rocks. And the rocks with gold in them got tumbled down the creeks, down the rivers. Got all smashed and pounded into gravel and sand. You know gold is very heavy—heavier than water, heavier than gravel and sand,” Peter said. “So the gold that was in the sand and gravel sank straight down to the bottom of the creeks and rivers. Then after more millions of years, the creeks were buried and buried again. And again.

  “Now, the gold’s deep down in the gravel and dirt in the cracks of the bedrock. Underground. It couldn’t go any deeper because the bedrock is like a solid floor underground, not broken into bits like rocks on the top of the earth.” Peter leaned back and put his hands on his thighs.

  “And that’s why we dug the shaft down to bedrock. That’s where the gold ended up after all those millions of years. Bedrock’s where we have to dig the pay dirt out.”

  * * *

  ALL WINTER long, the boys had been underground in the cold dark. They had carbide lamps on their hats, and their pockets were full of candles that they’d put in the holders in the walls of the tunnels.

  But still it was dark down there.

  Before they could dig out any pay dirt, they had to thaw the frozen ground with steam. The steam came from the boiler through long rubber pipes to the steam probes. One man would hold the probe while the other hammered it into the ground.

  They’d leave the probes overnight, and in the morning, they would shovel the thawed ground, which had turned to boiling hot muck, into their wheelbarrows.

  They’d push the wheelbarrows to the square bucket that was sitting at the bottom of the shaft. It was a big bucket, and it could hold three wheelbarrow loads. Sometimes the bucket had to carry a man up to the top, like last year when Alex had taken sick down there and couldn’t go up the ladder.

  Then the steam winch hauled the bucket up out of the shaft and took it zinging along the cable across the diggings to the gin pole, and the bucket tripped there so that the load would dump on the pile of pay dirt.

  Bo was not allowed near the diggings when the winch was working. Everyone had seen what could happen when the cable snapped. Phillipe had two fingers missing that a cable had whipped off.

  She wasn’t allowed in the boiler house, either. That was where Dan kept the big fire roaring and snapping under the boiler. He fed that fire with cords and cords of wood. And he had to keep the boiler filled with water, too. Bo thought Danny had the hardest job of all.

  When they weren’t using the steam for the probes, the boiler made steam for the winch and the buzz saw.

  Boilers were dangerous. The boys all knew stories about boilers blowing up, sending scalding steam and pieces of the red-hot iron over everyone.

  There were a lot of bad accidents at mining camps.

  After the snow was almost gone, the boys couldn’t go underground anymore. It wasn’t safe. In the winter, the ground around the shaft stayed frozen, and the sides of the tunnels were frozen. But in the summer the sides of the tunnels might begin to slough off. And sometimes there was too much bad gas underground when the weather got warm.

  So they’d stopped digging and had started all the work that must be done before sluicing. They’d been getting ready for weeks, stacking up cords and cords of wood by the boiler house to run the steam pump and the winches and the buzz saw.

  They’d repaired the sluice boxes and made new ones with boards they sawed at the saw pit.

  The sluice boxes had to be perfectly smooth inside so that no gold would catch on the splinters. Bo sat with Johnny and Karl while they pl
aned and sanded those boards. They gave her all the curls of yellow wood to play with.

  “Feel that,” Karl said, showing her the board he’d finished. “Smooth as a baby’s bottom!” Bo didn’t know what a baby’s bottom would feel like, but the board was smooth. Just like the satin band on her favorite blanket.

  “The boards have to fit together perfectly so there won’t be any cracks for the tiny bits of gold to hide in,” Johnny said. So Johnny and Karl fitted and sanded and planed and fitted some more until there wasn’t even a tiny space between the boards to trap flakes of gold.

  Then the boys put together all the sluice boxes so that they made one long wooden trough slanting down from the pile of pay dirt to the bank of the creek. The pump was tested and primed, the canvas hose was checked for holes, and at last they were ready.

  Now they needed water to wash the gold out of the pay dirt. The water in Ballard Creek was low and sluggish after the long winter, and if there was not enough water, there would be no sluicing, and there would be no gold. Not enough water was the worst thing that could happen to a mining camp.

  But in a few days, the snow in the hills melted, and the nearly empty creek was suddenly filled with rushing, icy water. It tumbled the rocks on the bottom of the creek, making a lovely clattery sound. Bo wanted to wade into that rushing creek and feel the water pull hard at her boots.

  When Arvid saw her staring at the creek from the cookshack window, he knew what she was thinking. He scowled fiercely at Bo. “You stay out of there. No playing in the creek when it’s this high and this fast.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Bo said in an insulted way, as if she’d never thought of such a thing.

  * * *

  THE BOYS quickly made a dam for the creek so the water would fill the sluicing pond, and they were ready to go. The pump would be sunk into the sluicing pond, and the big hose would be attached to the pump. When they turned the pump on, the powerful surge of water from the hose would wash the pay dirt down the sluice boxes.

  At lunchtime, the boss said, “Tomorrow we’ll start double shifts.” That meant some of the men would work in the day, and when they were finished, the rest of the boys would work all night. Bo remembered double shifts last year, when she’d had to be extra quiet all day because some of the boys were in the bunkhouse sleeping.

  Now that there was water for sluicing, everyone had to work very, very fast without stopping, around the clock, because you never knew when the water would dry up.

  Even Jack would leave the kitchen and work at sluicing. The boss couldn’t waste a big, strong man like Jack in the kitchen when it was cleanup time.

  But Bo didn’t really like it when things were so mixed up and the papas weren’t where they were supposed to be.

  * * *

  GITNOO CAME EARLY to cook the breakfast in Jack’s place. She shook Bo awake, which she’d never done before. Bo sat up in bed and stared at Gitnoo.

  “Tell everyone grizzly tracks down by the spring,” Gitnoo told Bo. Bo knew why Gitnoo was excited. A grizzly was not something you wanted to have hanging around.

  Jack had been on the porch, washing up. He came inside, toweling his hair, his eyebrows raised in a question. “What’s Gitnoo all bothered about?”

  Gitnoo made a bear’s toe-in walk with her hands to show Jack.

  “Grizzly tracks,” Bo said. “Down by the spring.”

  “Hmm,” Jack said. “Good thing you’re staying home today to help with sluicing.” He took the rifle down from its peg over the door and checked to see that it was loaded. Then he hung it back up and said, “Probably that bear’s just moving cross-country, but we’ll keep our eyes open.”

  “I’m going to sleep now,” Jack told her. “In the bunkhouse. I can’t sleep in here worrying about what Gitnoo is doing.” Jack stretched, his huge arms about bursting his shirtsleeves. “Help Gitnoo all you can.” He bent to kiss the top of her head and went out the door.

  Jack had mixed the batter for the hotcakes the night before, so the boys had a good breakfast, though they didn’t like the way Gitnoo fried their hotcakes. She left them on the griddle too long, so they got tough.

  “Shoe leathers,” the boys called the hotcakes Gitnoo made. Bo didn’t like them that way either, but as long as you could put syrup on them, you could eat them. There were no biscuits or bacon or sausage, but there was oatmeal. Not a breakfast that Jack would have given them, but they didn’t complain. They just teased Gitnoo as usual and pulled Bo’s braids when they left.

  The boys were interested in what Gitnoo had to say about the grizzly. No chance that any bear would come near the diggings with the noise from the pump and boiler and all, but they warned Bo about going near the spring.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NOT ENOUGH

  IT WAS VERY HOT the first day of sluicing, but the boys couldn’t take off their heavy shirts or their hot leather gloves because of the mosquitoes. Most of the boys even wore their long underwear all summer for protection from the mosquitoes. The keening mosquitoes would cover their shirts and pants, but their stingers couldn’t reach skin through the layers of wool.

  The only way they could protect their faces was with a head-net and hat, but the boys were like Bo and didn’t like to look through the net. Except Guillaume. He wore his head-net all day.

  “I can’t stand them pests. Drives me crazy,” he said when they teased him. “What I really can’t stand,” he said, “is when they brush against my lips. I hate that feeling.”

  Bo knew just what Guillaume meant. She hated that feeling too.

  Arvid and Jack slathered citronella on Bo, every place her skin showed, but still she was bitten. The worst bites were over a bony place like her elbow or shins, or on her fingers. Bo scratched her mosquito bites until they bled, and that made them stop itching a little.

  Some of the boys rubbed mud on their faces when the mosquitoes were really mean, like right after a rain, and they tried lots of other things. Philipe and Fritz used bacon grease on their faces. They said the mosquitoes didn’t like to get their feet in it.

  But because they were wearing their shirts and woolen underwear and their hot, hot rubber boots, their faces were running sweat, and so the mud and bacon grease didn’t last very long when they were sluicing.

  * * *

  BO’S JOB was to bring the boys water. One of them pumped water from the creek to fill a barrel near the sluice boxes. Then Bo stood on a sawed-off log to fill her bucket half full. She could really carry more, but if the bucket was full, somehow she always sloshed it out on the way to the boys.

  It was very noisy at the sluice boxes. The pump in the pond loudly sucked the water up through the canvas hose, and the water shooting from the hose made a great racket. So nobody tried to talk, they just made talking faces and used their hands to explain things.

  Lester and Johnny were working at the first sluice box, shoveling the pay dirt into it very fast. Little Paddy stood at the front of the box, clutching the big canvas hose swollen fat with the water from the pond, guiding the nozzle. The churning water flowed down the sluice boxes, carrying off the light dirt and gravel, and the heavy gold sank right away to the bottom of the sluice boxes, where it was trapped by the riffles. Riffles were iron bars that slowed the water down enough so that the gold would sink and not be swept away.

  Arvid and Sandor and Andy were working the rest of the row of sluice boxes, snatching out all the big rocks that had been in the pay dirt. Rocks would block the flow of water, and gold could be lost if the water was spilling over the sides of the sluice box.

  Bo brought her first bucket to Lester. He dropped his shovel, grinned at her, and grabbed up the bucket. He drank deeply, his head thrown back, picked up his shovel and went back to work again.

  Then Bo trotted back to the barrel to get water for Johnny, and she went back and forth like that all morning, down one side of the sluice box and then up the other, then back to where Guillaume in his head-net and Fritz were tending to the hose.
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br />   Some of the boys drank the bucket dry. And the ones who didn’t poured the rest over themselves to cool off.

  Bo’s arms were sore from straining to keep the bucket from banging into her leg, her hands were numb from the icy creek water in the barrel, and she hated it when the water sloshed onto her overall legs. But she was proud to do her job.

  The rocks and gravel they threw out of the sluice boxes were called tailings. The tailing piles were what was left over after the sluicing was done. There were tailing piles all around the mining camp. They were very good places to play, because you could find interesting rocks. And it was always nice to be up higher than everyone else.

  But there were special spiders that lived in the tailing piles, really, really big spiders. When she was little, Bo used to scream every time she saw one. But Arvid said she was silly. The spiders liked little girls and just wanted to play. Bo could see that was true, but she still wasn’t so sure she liked them very much. She always got up and moved away when one came to play with her.

  Jack had told Bo she had to go back to the cookshack to help Gitnoo when it was almost noon. But Bo was not to ring the triangle at lunchtime because eight of the men were sleeping in the bunkhouse and it might wake them up.

  The boys didn’t come to eat all at once, but two at a time. Lester and Johnny were first. They didn’t bother to wash their sweaty faces or dirty hands, and they ate fast, hardly saying a word, because two more were waiting their turn to eat. Gitnoo had the big platter stacked high with caribou sandwiches, and Bo brought them each a bowl of the potato salad Jack had made last night.

  Gitnoo poured their coffee and put a huge piece of chocolate cake on each plate, and when they’d finished, they stood up, grabbed another sandwich, smiled at Bo and Gitnoo, and left in a rush. In just a few minutes, Fritz and Andy came banging into the cookshack and ate just as fast as Lester and Johnny had.