Bearstone

by Will Hobbs

  The man with the beard pulled Cloyd’s wet clothes off. The boy looked curiously at his own body. It didn’t seem to belong to him. He noticed he wasn’t shaking anymore. He didn’t even feel cold. Then the man was dressing him in different clothes. It took a long time. His elbows kept poking the tent. Everything was orange, orange all around.

  The bearded man stuffed Cloyd into a sleeping bag and asked if he felt warmer. He couldn’t even answer. Then he was alone. The man had left. The cold and the quiet crept into one another comfortably. The world went dark; he felt himself falling asleep. He drifted deeper and deeper into the dark, like a leaf settling into the bottom of a deep pool. It was almost perfectly peaceful. He was so close to that perfect sleep when something intruded, one faraway nagging detail. He couldn’t even tell what it was. After a while it was some kind of noise, very far away. A magpie or a raven squawking, or possibly even his sister come looking for him in the canyons and calling again and again. Yes, it was a human voice after all, nagging, calling, insisting, shouting, but it wasn’t his sister. Gradually, light seeped into his eyes, and he saw a man with glasses and a black beard. Who was he?

  The world was moving. No, he was moving, being dragged outside the orange tent into the dark trees, sleeping bag and all.

  The man’s glasses were fogged up. The man lay alongside him on his elbows blowing on the wet wood, making smoke. Some coals were glowing. The man kept wheezing on them. Finally they burst into a flame and the man placed a little stick across the flame and left again.

  Branches were breaking somewhere, The tiny flame was gone. The man was back with his arms full of wood, and then he was on his elbows again, blowing until his face turned purple. The flame came back. The wood started to catch. The man left; branches were breaking. After a time he was back piling branches over the fire and blowing it into stronger and stronger flames. The flames grew brighter, bigger, stronger than the rain dripping from the trees.

  The bearded man with fogged-up glasses was pulling him from the sleeping bag, standing him up close to the fire, arms locked around his chest. He could begin to feel the fire spreading warmth into his body. “You’re going to be all right,” the man was saying. Cloyd struggled to get free of the sleeping bag. The man unzipped it, let it fall, and gained a new hold on him. Cloyd struggled again. “Hang on there,” the man cautioned, “you’re still medium rare. I’m gonna cook you until you’re charbroiled.”

  Finally Cloyd’s eyes cleared, and the man turned him loose. He could stand by the fire on his own. The man went for more wood. After many trips he’d built a bonfire. At its edge he boiled water in an aluminum pan and made coffee. When Cloyd drank it, he warmed from the inside out and at last became as warm as he could want to be.

  “Think I’ll clean your fish, if you don’t mind,” the man said. “They’d make a great hot meal for you, better than my freeze-dried stuff. You just stay by the fire there and make some more coffee if you like.”

  Cloyd nodded. The man went away through the trees to clean the fish at the stream. After he’d been gone some time, Walter rode into camp in his yellow rainslicker, leading the roan.

  “Thank goodness you’re okay, Cloyd,” he said softly.

  Walter’s eyes took in the oversized clothes that weren’t the boy’s, a bruise below the right eye, a long scratch on his neck, the jeans and T-shirt drying by the fire. “I’ve been everywhere. I was afraid I wouldn’t find you.”

  “I caught seven fish,” Cloyd said.

  The stranger came back with the fish cleaned and neatly arranged on the willow-branch stringer. Walter drank coffee with him and pieced together what had happened. Cloyd tended the frying trout.

  The young man gave Cloyd a poke. “You must crave the taste of trout, the way you hung onto ’em.”

  A shy smile brightened the boy’s face. “I guess so,” he said.

  Nothing ever tasted so warm or so good, Cloyd thought, as the three of them shared the fish. Except maybe new-made frybread.

  Cloyd saw the worry finally leaving the old man’s face. It seemed like the time to explain how he could have been so stupid. “I could have found a dry place in the trees, but I was running and fell into a hole.”

  The old man winked at the stranger and chuckled. “From the looks of it, the ground flew up and hit you in the face.”

  They all laughed. Cloyd pulled on his T-shirt and jeans. Not only dry, they were almost too hot for comfort. Walter went to his mare and pulled Cloyd’s denim jacket from his saddlebags. Cloyd dismantled the fishing rod, then stood by the fire, turning his hands over even though they were warm already. He wanted to say something to the young man. He wouldn’t have a chance to show it like with Walter. “Thank you,” he said. Their eyes met for a moment. “You didn’t have to … you didn’t even know me, and you—”

  “No big deal,” the stranger said quickly. “You’d have done the same for me.”

  For two days they rested in their campsite by the meadow. When Cloyd recovered his strength, they set out for the mine. Past the upper meadow where Cloyd had been caught by the cloudburst, Walter reined in his mare and motioned the boy and his string of pack-horses alongside. “That canyon there,” he pointed, indicating a steep-sided cleft in the mountains across the river, “that’s Snowslide. The Pride of the West is on up it a ways. Won’t be long now.”

  They forded the river and angled away from it up Snowslide Creek. Cloyd took a last look up the Pine River and knew at once he’d found what he’d been looking for. A single peak rising alone and high above the others had just come into view, a sharp peak riding alone in the turquoise sky. “What’s that?” he called to the old man. “That mountain over there.”

  “That one yonder? Why, that’s the Rio Grande Pyramid. Looks like one, don’t it? That’s where the Rio Grande River gets started—flows off the other side. That’s quite a mountain, all right. Supposed to have been a grizzly and two cubs sighted on it about ten years ago.”

  “Grizzly bears?”

  “That’s right. Used to be plenty in this country, but that was some years ago. Of course we still have black bears.”

  “But this man saw three grizzly bears?”

  “Says they was huntin’ marmots just above the tree line. Most folks think he saw a big cinnamon, which is a black bear when he’s brown. The last grizzly bear proven in the state of Colorado—or south of Wyoming, for that matter—was killed near here in 1954. It’s on display in a museum up in Denver.”

  Cloyd fingered the smooth bearstone in his pocket. He wondered if it might really represent a grizzly, as Walter had suggested. He remembered that the old Utes especially honored grizzlies. “Do you think there’s any more grizzly bears?” he asked.

  “Don’t know—most likely not. It’s been a bunch of years since that fellow saw ’em, if that’s what they were. But if he was right, and nobody’s killed ’em since, the cubs’d be in their prime now.”

  “Do you think somebody probably killed them?”

  “Not that anybody’s heard about. But if a fellow was to kill one, he might not let on since they’re protected now.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘protected’?”

  “On account of being endangered. That means there’s so few of ’em that if anybody kills one, there might be none left, so it’s against the law.”

  For several hours they rode up Snowslide Canyon, crossing many of the wide, grassy paths among the sun-whitened hulks of spruces ripped from the edges of the slides high above. At the bottom of one of the avalanche chutes, the old man and the boy found a big log and set out biscuits and canned pork for their midday meal. Walter pointed out the knee-high trees dotting the grassy route of the slide. “When they get just a bit bigger, the slide’ll knock ’em down. They never quit trying, though. It’s like building your house on a railroad track.”

  Scanning the skyline, the old man looked upstream. A smile crossed his face as he pointed up the canyon. “That peak with the ledge around the top like a crown si
ts directly above the mine. My tunnel’s aimin’ for the contact in the solid-gold heart of the mountain. The Pride of the West.”

  Cloyd thought about a heart made out of solid gold. It sounded like an awful cold heart. He didn’t say so. “What’s the contact?” he asked.

  “A fissure vein of ore is what it is. Ore’s the rock the gold is in. You see, gold is usually mixed with other minerals in veins that run through the mountain. If you find a good fissure vein, it’ll never give out on you like a fault will. A fault leaves little pockets of ore called stringers. You find one of ’em, dig it out, and that’s the end of it. But with a good fissure vein, you always have something to follow. Sometimes it’ll narrow on you, maybe to inches, but then it’ll widen out to eight feet or more.”

  Cloyd realized he would actually be mining soon, inside a mountain in the dark. Up to now he’d thought about it hardly at all. At White Mesa most people thought of mining as a bad thing, though many of the men worked off and on in the mines or at the ore-shipping depot. The uranium made you get sick and die early, his grandmother said. She never said if gold made you sick. But then he remembered what she had said about gold. It made people crazy and dishonest. First the white men promised the Utes they could keep the mountains forever, but that was before gold was discovered and the miners came pouring in. The white men forgot all about their promise. The Utes were told to stay out of the mountains. They couldn’t roam around anymore and live in the old way. They were given tiny reservations in the low country and told to stay there and grow corn.

  “You really think there’s gold in your mine?” he asked skeptically.

  “Why, I know there is! I crossed a vein of silver already, but I didn’t even bother to follow it, ’cause in those days silver wasn’t worth much unless it was real high-grade ore. I got a three-hundred-foot tunnel in already, an’ I figure from the geology there can’t be more’n a few more to the contact. I ain’t really gambling, Cloyd. Why, I already found the contact, you see, where the vein breaks the surface way up the mountain. It’s tilted at a pretty good angle, and the idea of the tunnel is to reach it inside the mountain and then stope up to the surface.”

  “How come you didn’t dig where you found it?”

  “Sure wish I could have. But it’s better mining sense to work upwards and let gravity move your rock for you—down ore chutes. It’s too hard to move any quantity of rock uphill unless you’ve got heavy machinery.”

  The dubious cast to Cloyd’s face told Walter he’d given the boy no feel for the joy of working in hard rock, the thrill of blasting and then returning to the drift always expecting to see a vein of high-grade ore laid open. “There’s fabulous wealth in these mountains, Cloyd,” he whispered reverentially. “And most of it hasn’t been discovered yet. Let me tell you about the Cresson Mine up in the Cripple Creek District right here in Colorado. They were blastin’ the face of the tunnel, following a fissure vein, and broke into a natural room forty feet long by twenty feet wide and fifteen feet high. A vug is what it was, like a geode—ever see a rock that’s hollow in the middle with crystals all around? Well, this big room they found was a giant geode with the crystals sticking out the floor, the walls, the ceiling—everything was solid gold!”

  It seemed from Walter’s eyes that he was even now peering into the gold cave he’d described. Cloyd could see how much it meant to the old man. He would do his best for Walter, even though it sounded dark and cold and dangerous, and then he would climb the Rio Grande Pyramid for himself. “How much gold did they get from in there?” he asked politely, as the old man came out of his reverie.

  “I recollect it was two and one-half million. At today’s price—four hundred fifty dollars an ounce—that’s be … thirty-some million dollars from that one room!”

  They continued up the canyon until Walter stopped at a bend in the trail and stared across the creek where a great pile of tailings jutted from the mountainside. “The Pride of the West,” Walter whispered. “It took me nearly forty years to get back, but I finally made it. And my goodness, it doesn’t look a bit different. Mountains don’t get old very fast, Cloyd. This mountain, it’s like it blinked while I went off a young man, looks again and sees me ridin’ back plumb aged.”

  Walter and Cloyd set up the big sheepherder tent by the stream under a tall cluster of spruce. Once they had unpacked all the horses, they hobbled them in the grass across the creek where only a few rotted logs remained of the old man’s corral. Then they climbed up the side of the ore dump and gained the landing on top, only to discover raw earth where the mine entrance should have been.

  “Well, she’s caved in, and not so long ago,” Walter said, disappointed yet calm. “Just the portal, Cloyd. The topsoil slipped, is all. Inside it’ll be fine, once we move this dirt out of the way. It’s all hard rock once you’re inside—we’ll be in there drillin’ in a few days.”

  “Drilling?” Cloyd asked vacantly. For a moment he’d hoped Walter would give it all up.

  “Makin’ holes in the rock—pretty deep—so we can slip the dynamite in and blast. We’re going to have to do our drillin’ the old way, with one of us holding the bit and the other pounding the sledgehammer. Slow going, but it works. They quit drilling by hand in the 1870s, way before my time. After that, double-jackin’—that’s two men working like I said—was only for drilling contests or for fellows like me that didn’t know any better mining back in the hills where you couldn’t use machine drills. Drillin’s hard work—can be dangerous, too.”

  “Dangerous?”

  ‘One story I remember, there was these two men working high up on a scaffold in a big room inside a mine, and they were double-jackin’ into the face up there. Must’ve been twenty-five feet up they was standing. Of a sudden their scaffolding busts, and the one doing the sledgework, he crashes down with it. Now his partner turning the bit, he grabs hold of his steel as he’s falling, and it’s stuck good and stout in the hole, so there he is hanging from it pretty as you please. He starts hollerin’ for help of course, only his buddy’s got nothing to help him with, and there’s nobody else around. So after about five minutes, the fellow up above can’t hold on no longer, and he crashes down, too. His buddy says, ‘Dang—I knew you was slow, but I had no idea it’d take you five minutes to fall twenty-five feet!’”

  “Is that a true story?”

  “Yes sir, that’s a true story,” the old man said as he stroked the bristles on his chin. But quickly his ears turned red and his cheeks puffed in and out as he tried to hold his breath and keep from laughing.

  “True?” Cloyd repeated gravely.

  Walter’s cheeks collapsed and his breath exploded. “True … and then some,” he said, slapping his knees.

  Cloyd had to laugh, too. It was good to be laughing with the old man.

  It took three days of tedious handwork for them to clear the entrance. At last Cloyd’s shovel broke through into empty space. He knelt and looked through the small opening. He saw only blackness but felt a steady flow of cool air escaping the mine through the hole he’d made. “Where’s the air coming from?” he asked Walter.

  “Oh, that’s one of the lucky things about this mine—fresh air’s always moving through it. Comes down from the surface through cracks in the formations.”

  Once they’d completely cleared the portal, Walter showed Cloyd how to rig his headlamp and how to ignite the gas that came from the water dripping on the carbide. Then they started inside.

  As they ventured down the center of the narrow railway, the air felt pleasantly cool. Cloyd glanced constantly over his shoulder to the blinding white light of the portal; he banged his hard hat against a tooth of rock in the low ceiling. The cold surprised him, suddenly finding his bones. Next time he’d wear his sweatshirt and jacket. At the end of the tunnel, he was surprised by the ore car, big enough that both of them could have climbed in. “How’d you get this thing up here?” he asked.

  “Oh, I had to take it apart with the torch and what-not, m
achine new parts for bolting it back together, bring it in pieces up here on horseback, then reassemble it. The rails were somethin’ else again.”

  In the morning they entered the mine ready for work. Cloyd held tight to the heavy drill bits and the long copper spoons. The one thing he liked was the feel of the hard hat and the hiss of burning gas in his headlamp. Before long, he told himself, he’d be accustomed to the strangeness inside the mountain. Working with the old man he wouldn’t be so afraid of being trapped in the dark under the earth. At the end of the tunnel, Walter pointed out the vein of silver ore he’d been following many years before on his way to the gold contact. Cloyd was surprised to find it wasn’t silver-colored at all, but black, peppered here and there in the quartz.

  “Now set those spoons and drills down,” Walter said. “I’ll tell you how we’re going to start. We’ll drill seven lucky holes in a circle around this vein, then three in the center about two feet apart in a triangle, anglin’ ’em so they meet inside like the top of a pyramid.”

  “Then the dynamite?”

  “Not yet. We drill a reliever at the top of the face, edgers on both sides, and a lifter at the bottom. If we do it right, we time the charges so the center comes out first, making space so’s everything around it has somewhere to go when it’s blasted a hair later. The lifter going last kicks it all out where we can muck it into the ore car.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You’re my partner when we’re double-jackin’. That’s one man working the drill bit, the other the sledgehammer. We’ll stop every so often and fish out the dust with the spoons.”

  “How fast can we go?” Cloyd asked with little hope.

  “Not fast at all. But what’s time to a hog? I’ll tell you what a good pace would be, though, so you know what those old-timers could do. A good pair of double-jackers could drill two inches a minute if they were going all out. Over a longer run, like an hour, they’d go maybe thirty inches.”