The sun was low in the sky as we crossed the Saddle and saw the bowl of the Kingdom at our feet. There was little snow now. It was green; a lovely, fresh emerald green, and through it water ran in silver threads. I could see Campbell’s ranch-house away to the right, and towards the dam, two trucks stood motionless, connected to the ranch-house by the tracks their tyres had made through the new grasses. I was tired and exhausted, but a great peace seemed to have descended upon me. I was back in the Kingdom, clear of cities and the threat of a hospital. I was back in God’s own air, in the cool beauty of the mountains. I turned to Max. ‘We can find our way down from here,’ I said. I held out my hand to him. Thank you for bringing us.’
He didn’t move. He sat motionless, staring down into the bowl of the Kingdom. ‘You rebuild the house,’ he said.
I nodded.
He looked at the peak rising above us. ‘Perhaps they are together—my father and Campbell.’ He turned to me. ‘You think there is some place we go when we die?’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Heaven and hell, huh?’ He gave a derisive laugh. ‘The world is full of devils, and so is the other place. How then can there be a God? There is only this.’ He waved his hand towards the mountains and the sky.
‘Somebody made it, Max.’
‘Ja, somebody make it. He make animals, too. Then somebody else make men. Tell Campbell I have done what you ask.’ He clapped his heels to his horse’s flanks and turned back the way he had come.
‘What about the horses?’ I called to him.
‘Keep them till you return to Come Lucky,’ he shouted back. ‘The grass is good for them now.’
‘Queer fellow,’ Winnick said. ‘What did he mean about tell Campbell I have done what you ask?’
I shrugged my shoulders and started my horse down the slope. I couldn’t tell him Max was a soul in torment, that he was a mixture of Celt and Teuton and that circumstances and the mixture of his blood had torn him apart from the day he was born.
The mountain crests were flushed with the sunset as we rode into Campbell’s Kingdom and from the end of the wheel tracks where the trucks were parked came the sharp crack of an explosion as Boy fired another shot and recorded the sound waves on his geophones. The echo of that shot ran like a salvo of welcome through the mountains as we slid from our saddles by the door of the partly-burned barn. I stood there, hanging on to the leather of my stirrup, staring out across the new grass of the Kingdom. Early crocuses were springing up in the carpet of green. The air was still and clear and cold, and the shadow of the mountains crept across us as the sun went down. I was too weak with exhaustion to stand on my own and yet I was strangely content. Winnick helped me into the house and I sank down on to the bed that my grandfather had used for so many years. Lying there, staring at the rafters that he had hewn from the timbered slopes above us, the world of men and cities seemed remote and rather unreal. And as I slid into a half-coma of sleep I knew that I wouldn’t be going back, that this was my kingdom now.
I slept right through to the following morning and woke to sunshine and the clatter of tin plates. They were having breakfast as I went out into the living-room of the ranch-house. Sleeping bags lay in a half circle round the ember glow of the wood ash in the grate and the place was littered with kit and equipment. Boy jumped to his feet and gripped hold of my hand. He was seething with excitement like a volcano about to erupt. ‘Are you all right, Bruce? Did you have a good night?’ He didn’t wait for me to reply. ‘Louis has been up all night, computing the results. We’ve all been up most of the night. He wouldn’t let us wake you. I knew it was an anticline. I did my own computing and allowing for weathering I was certain we were all right. And I’m right, Bruce. That shot we fired just as you got in was the last of five on the cross traverse. It’s a perfect formation. Ask Louis. It’s a honey. We’re straddled right across the dome of it. Now all we’ve got to prove is that it extends across the Kingdom and beyond.’
I looked across at Winnick. ‘Is this definite?’
He nodded. ‘It’s an anticline all right. But it doesn’t prove there’s oil up here. You realise that?’ The precise, meticulous tone of his voice brought an air of reality to the thing.
‘Then how did Campbell see an oil seep at the foot of the slope if it isn’t oil bearing?’ Boy demanded.
Winnick shrugged his shoulders. ‘Campbell may have been mistaken. Anyway, I’ll ride over the ground today and do a quick check on the rock strata. It may tell me something.’
But however matter-of-fact Winnick might be there was no damping the air of excitement that hung over the breakfast table. It wasn’t only Boy. His two companions seemed just as thrilled. They were both of them youngsters. Bill Mannion was a university graduate from McGill who had recently abandoned Government survey work to become a geophysicist. He was the observer. Don Leggert, a younger man, was from Edmonton. He was the driller. These two men, with Boy, were mucking in and doing the work of a full seismographical team of ten or twelve men. I didn’t need their chatter of technicalities to tell me they were keen.
I stood in the sunshine and watched them walk out to the instrument truck. They walked with purpose and the loose spring of men who were physically fit. I envied them that as I watched them go. Winnick came out and joined me. He had a rucksack on his back and a geologist’s hammer tucked into his belt. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do now you know you’re on an anticline?’
‘Sit in the sun here and think,’ I said.
He nodded, his eyes peering up at me from behind his thick-lensed glasses. ‘Why not let me try and interest one of the big companies in this property?’
‘You honestly think you could persuade them to risk a wildcat right up here in the Rockies?’
‘I could try,’ he answered evasively.
I laughed. ‘There’s oil in the Rocky Mountains?’ His eyes avoided mine. ‘No,’ I said, staring out towards the ring of the mountains. ‘There isn’t a chance, and you know it. If it’s to be done at all, I’ll have to do it myself.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘But think it over. Now Roger Fergus is dead, his son controls a lot of finance. You’re a one-man show up against a big outfit. You’ll be running neck and neck with the construction of the dam and every dollar that’s sunk in that project will make it that much more vital to Fergus that you don’t bring in a well up here.’
‘How far do you think he’ll go to stop me?’ I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wouldn’t know. But that dam is going to cost money. Henry Fergus will go a long way to see that his money isn’t thrown away.’ His hand gripped my arm. ‘Don’t rush into this. Think it over. At best your contractor may lose his rig. At worst somebody may get hurt.’
‘I see.’
There was nothing new in this. He was only saying what Jean had said, what I knew in my heart was inevitable. And yet hearing it from him, coldly and clearly stated, forced me to face up to the situation. I watched him ride out across the Kingdom and then I brought a chair out into the sunshine and most of the day I lay there, relaxed in the warmth, trying to work it out.
That night I wrote to Keogh telling him the result of the survey to date and instructing him to talk to no one and to come up on his own in three days’ time.
Drive through from 150-Mile House without stopping, arriving at the entrance to Thunder Creek at 2 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday. We’ll meet you there with horses.
I underlined this and gave Winnick the letter to take down with him.
Winnick left next day. I was feeling so much better that I rode with him up to the top of the Saddle. High up above the Kingdom I said good-bye to him and thanked him for all he’d done.
I sat there watching his small figure jogging slowly down the mountain slope till it was lost to view behind an outcrop. Then I turned my horse and slithered down through the snow back into the bowl of the Kingdom. As I came out below the timber I saw the drilling truck like a s
mall rectangular box away to the right close beside the stream that was the source of Thunder Creek. They were drilling a new shot hole as I rode up, the three of them working on the drill which was turning with a steady rattle as it drove into the rock below. Boy pointed towards the dam. ‘They’ve started,’ he shouted to me above the din.
I turned and looked back at the dam. Men were moving about the concrete housing of the hoist and there were more men at the base of the dam, stacking cement bags that were being lowered to them from the cable that stretched across the top of the structure. My eye was caught by a solitary figure standing on the buttress of rock above the cable terminal. There was a glint of glass in the sunlight, a flicker like two small heliographs. ‘Have you got a pair of binoculars?’ I shouted to Boy.
He nodded and got them from the cab of the drilling truck. Through them every detail became clear. There was no doubt about the solitary figure on the buttress. It was Trevedian and he was watching us through glasses of his own. ‘Did you have to start at this end of the Kingdom?’ I shouted to Boy.
He turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘Got to start somewhere,’ he said. ‘They were bound to find out what we were up to.’
That was true enough. I swung the glasses towards the dam. The cage was just coming in with another load, two tip trucks this time and a pile of rails. More cement was being slung along the top of the dam. And then in the foreground, halfway between us and the dam I noticed a big rusty cog wheel and some rotten baulks of timber bolted together in an upright position. There was the remains of an old boiler and a shapeless mass of machinery. I called to Boy. ‘What’s that pile of junk there?’ I asked him.
‘Don’t you know?’ He seemed surprised. ‘That’s Campbell Number One.’
‘How far did they get down?’
‘Don’t know. Something over four thousand, I guess.’
I rode over and had a look at it. The metal was rotten with age. The teeth of the big cog wheel disintegrated into a brown powder at the touch of my fingers. The wooden baulks that had formed the base of the rig were so rotten I could put my fist through them. There was the remains of a hole with a dirty scum of water in it. I called to Boy. ‘Where’s the top of the anticline?’
‘We’re on it now,’ he shouted back.
I stared at the rusty monument to my grandfather’s one and only attempt to drill and wondered how he’d felt when they’d had to give up. A whole lifetime lost for the sake of a thousand odd feet of drilling. I turned and rode slowly back to the ranch-house.
After that first day I took over the commissariat and the cooking, so relieving the survey team to some extent. The weather became unsettled. Sometimes it snowed, sometimes it blew. The change from sunshine to almost blizzard conditions could be astonishingly rapid.
Shortly after midday on the Monday Boy left Bill and Don drilling the second shot hole in the longitudinal traverse and we saddled our horses and started out for the Saddle and the pony trail down to Thunder Creek. It was blowing half a gale and mare’s tails of snow were streaming in a white drift from the crests of the mountains. It had snowed during the night and part of the morning and the Kingdom lay under a white drift. The two trucks were black specks about a mile from the ranch-house. We could see the drill working, but the sound of it was lost in the wind.
As we neared the crest of the Saddle wind-blown drifts of snow stung our faces. The going became treacherous and we had to lead the horses, Boy leading the spare as well as his own. On the crest we met the full force of the wind. It stung the eyes and drove the breath down into our throats. ‘Sure you’re okay?’ Boy shouted. ‘I can manage if you feel—’
‘I’m fine,’ I shouted back.
He looked at me for a moment, his eyes slitted against the thrust of wind and powdered snow. Then he nodded and we went on down the other side on a long diagonal for the line of the timber.
As we dropped down from the crests the snow worried us less. Through blurred eyes I got occasional glimpses of the road snaking up the valley from the lake. Sometimes there was movement on the road, a truck grinding up towards the hoist. And as we neared the shelter of the timber the great fault opened out to the left and we could see the slide and men moving around the little square box that was the concrete housing of the hoist.
The going was easier once we reached the timber though we were hampered by soft drifts of deep snow. I tried to memorise the trail, but it was almost impossible coming into it from above for the timber was pretty open and the pattern of drifts swirling round solitary firs or groups of firs repeated itself over and over again, all seemingly alike. We came across the track of a moose; big, splay-footed tracks that seemed to be able to cross the softest drift without sinking very deep.
Gradually the timber became denser and the trail clearer. Sheer slopes patterned by gnarled roots and deadfalls gave place to lightly timbered glades, criss-crossed with game tracks, and at one point we ploughed through almost half a mile of beaver dams. The lower we went the more game we encountered; mule-deer, moose, porcupines and an occasional coyote.
I asked Boy about bears, but he said they were still in hibernation and wouldn’t be out for another month at least. He was full of information about the wildlife of the mountains. It was part of his heritage, and when I was getting tired his stories of his encounters with animals kept me going.
It was dark when we swam the ford of Thunder Creek and dismounted close by the road in the glade where Winnick had parked his car. We had some food sitting on a fallen tree. Once in a while headlights cut a swathe through the night and a truck went rumbling up the road to the hoist. We had a cigarette and then rolled ourselves in our blankets on a groundsheet. The horses were hobbled and I could hear their rhythmic munching and the queer jerking sound they made as they reared both front legs together to move forward. It was bitterly cold, but I must have slept for suddenly Boy was shaking me. ‘It’s nearly two,’ he said.
We went out then to the edge of the road, standing in the screen of a little plantation of cottonwood. Headlights blazed and we heard the roar of a diesel. The heavy truck lumbered past, lighting the curving line of the road. We watched the timber close behind its red tail-light. Darkness closed in round us again and we listened as the sound of the truck’s engine slowly died away up the valley. Then all was still, only the murmur of the wind in the trees and the unchanging sound of water pouring over rocks. Somewhere far above us the cry of a coyote split the night like a bloodcurdling scream. An owl flapped from a tree.
It was nearly 3 a.m. when the darkness began to glow with light and we heard the sound of a car. Boy pushed forward to the edge of the road. The headlights brightened until the whole pattern of the brush around us stood in stark silhouette against two enormous eyes of light. It was a car all right and we flagged it down with our arms. It stopped and Garry Keogh got out, his thick body bulkier than ever in a sheepskin jacket. ‘Sorry I’m late. Had a flat. What in hell are we playing at, meeting like this in the middle of the night?’
Boy held up his hand, his head on one side. A faint murmur sounded above the noise of the creek. ‘Is there a truck behind you?’ Boy asked.
‘Yeah. Passed it about six miles back.’
‘Quick then.’ Boy jumped into the car with him and guided him off the road to the glade where our horses were. We sat in the car with the lights off watching the heavy truck trundle by.
‘What’s all the secrecy about?’ Garry asked.
I tried to explain, but I don’t think I really convinced him. If Trevedian had been in charge of a rival drilling outfit I think he’d have understood. But he just couldn’t take the construction of a dam seriously. ‘You boys are jittery, that’s all. Why don’t you do a deal with this guy Trevedian. You’ve got to use the hoist anyway to get a drilling rig up there. You’re not planning to take it up by pack pony, are you?’ And his great laugh went echoing around the silence of the glade.
I told him the whole story then, sitting there in the car w
ith the engine ticking over and the heater switched on. When I had finished he asked a few questions and then he was silent for a time. At length he said, ‘Well, how do we get the rig up there?’
I said, ‘We’ll talk about that later, shall we—when you’ve had a look at the place and decided whether you’re willing to take a chance on it.’
The lateness of the hour and the warmth of the heater was making us all drowsy. We settled down in the seats then and slept till the first grey light of day filtered through the glade. Then we covered the car with brushwood and started back up the trail to the Kingdom.
It was midday before we reached the top of the Saddle. It was snowing steadily and the wind was from the east. My heart was pumping erratically and I was so tired I found it difficult to stay in the saddle. When we got to the ranch-house I went straight to bed and stayed there till the following morning. Next morning my buttocks were sore and the muscles of my legs stiff with riding, but once I was up I felt fine. My heart seemed steadier and slower and I had recovered my energy. Garry Keogh spent the day out with Boy riding over the territory, planning his drilling site, working out in his own mind the chances of success. In the evening, after supper, we got down to business.
We had a roaring log fire going and hot coffee. Garry sat with his notes in his hand and a cigar clamped between his teeth, the bald dome of his head furrowed by a frown. ‘You think we’ll run into a sill of basalt at about four thousand?’ He looked across at Boy.
‘I think so,’ Boy answered. ‘That or something like it stopped Campbell Number One in 1913. They were drilling by cable-tool and they just couldn’t make any impression. With a rotary drill—’
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