Mountain Rampage

by Graham, Scott

  “That’s because you’re from a small town, too, bro.”

  “He’s watched a few too many cop shows on TV, that’s all.”

  “Maybe,” Clarence said. He shot Chuck a look. “Or maybe he knows something you and I don’t.”

  FOUR

  The sun was well up and the day quickly warming by the time Chuck gathered the students before him at the mine site.

  Cordero Mine sat on a flat triangle of open, rock-strewn ground well above tree line on the east flank of Mount Landen, a mile around the peak from Trail Ridge Road. Ore cart tracks, bent and rusted with age, ran a hundred feet from the mouth of the long-abandoned mine’s single underground tunnel to where the mountainside fell away to the east. A dark tongue of dumped tailings extended down the steep slope from the end of the tracks. The site was devoid of structures, save for a collapsed log cabin at the lip of the embankment that had housed miners a century ago.

  The field school students stood in a half-circle in front of Chuck, their hardhats tucked beneath their arms. Several of the students cast tired looks at Chuck. Sheila, usually the liveliest of the group, appeared particularly wiped out.

  Chuck lifted a consoling hand to the students. “I know you didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. But we only have three days to go, and Professor Sartore wants to make sure you get your money’s worth.”

  Sheila opened her mouth in an exaggerated yawn. “All I want to do is take a nap. I couldn’t even make it for my spirit time today.”

  Sheila took a few minutes to herself each morning after breakfast, wandering up the slope into the forest behind the dormitories. She was a short, stocky Navajo steeped in spirituality and mysticism. Her cheeks were round and merry, her chestnut eyes generally filled with mirth. All summer, she’d rebelled—good-naturedly—against the field school, claiming her participation was due only to the fact that completing the course was required for her to graduate.

  “I’m an anthropology major,” she explained. “I just want to study my Diné people. But they say I have to do some field work if I want my degree, so here I am.”

  She had predicted the students’ presence at the abandoned mine site would stir up ghosts—known on the Navajo reservation as skinwalkers. The male members of Team Nugget had declared their readiness to take on any and all angry spirits that dared haunt them.

  Chuck lowered his hand. “The sooner we meet today’s work goal, the sooner we can leave. We’re almost there—today and tomorrow here at the mine, Thursday at Raven House finishing up the last of the logbooks, and Friday we are—” he held his hardhat in one hand and drummed it with the other “—outta here.” He looked around the group. “Okay. Team Nugget in the tunnel, Team Paydirt’s got the cabin.”

  The six young men of Team Nugget groaned in unison.

  Acting on a suggestion from Professor Sartore, Chuck had selected the mine tunnel along with the collapsed miners’ cabin for excavation during the final four weeks of the eight-week field school, following the students’ survey and assessment of the entire mine site. The intrigue of working underground made the mine tunnel the students’ preferred work assignment—at first. However, the reality of spending long hours in the cold, dark tunnel soon set in.

  “We got the shaft three days last week,” whined Jeremy, Team Nugget’s chief complainer. “The girls were only in there for two.”

  Jeremy was thin and pale, with bony arms, angular cheekbones, dark brown hair slicked back from a high forehead, and eyes so large they shoved his eyelids out of place in their sockets. His pronounced Adam’s apple rode up and down the front of his long neck whenever he spoke.

  “You know the schedule,” Chuck said. “Every other day. Paydirt was in there yesterday. You’re on for today.”

  The mine tunnel, six feet wide by seven feet high, extended two hundred feet into the side of Mount Landen. A floor of heavy planks topped by the ore cart tracks ran the length of the tunnel. At the start of the summer, Chuck had placed pin flags to divide the tunnel floor into four equal sections. The students had dismantled, examined, and reassembled the floorboards and tracks of one flagged section each week for the past three weeks. The last week of the field school called for studying the final, deepest fifty feet of the tunnel.

  Yesterday, under Kirina’s direction, the members of Team Paydirt had dismantled the iron tracks and floorboard planks to within fifteen feet of the gray granite wall at the end of the tunnel. Team Nugget was to disassemble the last of the tracks and floorboards today, leaving tomorrow to root through the stony debris beneath the floorboards by hand—traditional trowel excavation of the tunnel’s rocky base having proved impossible—and Thursday to reassemble the final stretch of floorboards and reattach the tracks.

  Kirina addressed the members of her team. “Let’s hit it, ladies.”

  Along with Chuck’s suggestion to hire Clarence for one of the field school’s two team-leader positions, Professor Sartore had suggested hiring Kirina, a graduate student from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, a few hours southwest of Durango. From day one, Kirina had impressed Chuck with her no-nonsense style. He’d learned over the course of the summer that her flat face, receding chin, and small, inset eyes hid a backbone of steel.

  At one point, Chuck had overheard Jeremy refer to Kirina as “Hatchet Face,” at another, he’d caught Jeremy referring to her derisively as “one of those square-faced dykes who swing both ways.” If Kirina had heard those or any other derogatory remarks about her over the summer, she hadn’t let on. She worked the students hard at the mine site, but always worked harder herself. Best of all, she did a far better job than Clarence of keeping an eye on the students during their off hours at Raven House, enabling Chuck to relax and enjoy his evenings and weekends with Janelle and the girls.

  Kirina was a semester away from completing her Ph.D. in archaeological anthropology at NAU. In her mid-twenties like Clarence, she’d worked a number of digs during her grad-school years, making it easy for Chuck to put her in charge.

  Chuck settled his hardhat on his head while Kirina led the members of Team Paydirt across the plateau to the site of the collapsed cabin. The students had numbered and stacked to the side the timbers from the collapsed cabin, and had staked and strung the cabin’s cleared floor area using long iron spikes and white nylon cord to form a rectangular grid five units long by four units wide. So far, the students had excavated seventeen of the meter-square units a foot or two deep, to where the rocky soil beneath the cabin gave way to bedrock. The final three units of the twenty-unit grid awaited excavation over the next two days. Thursday, the students would refill the excavated grid and replace the cabin logs where they’d lain after their collapse a century or more ago, returning the cabin site to its original condition as required by Professor Sartore’s contract with the National Park Service.

  Kirina popped the lid off a plastic equipment bin next to the excavation grid and distributed trowels to Team Paydirt. Chuck walked with Clarence and Team Nugget to the mouth of the tunnel, which extended underground where the triangle-shaped plateau narrowed to a point in a fold in the face of Mount Landen. A rusted iron door in a thick metal frame was bolted into the mountainside, covering the mouth of the tunnel. The bottom half of the heavy door was solid iron, the top half a lattice of inch-wide iron bands welded to form six-inch squares. Hanging from the frame were a heavy chain and keyed padlock that served to secure the door when the site was unoccupied.

  Chuck pulled the door open with a noisy creak and stepped aside, allowing Clarence to lead his team into the tunnel.

  The six teammates, close friends from their past three years at Fort Lewis, were among the annual wave of high-school graduates who found their way over the mountains to “the Fort,” as the college was known, from the cities and suburbs lining Colorado’s Front Range.

  Jeremy’s irascibility aside, Chuck liked the members of Team Nugget. Though they wore the air of easy privilege about them like cloaks, all six were willing enoug
h to put in the long hours and physical labor required of the field school despite the fact that only two were anthropology majors. The other four had signed up for the course simply as a way to spend the final summer of their college years together before going their separate ways after their upcoming senior year.

  The team members put on their hardhats and clicked on their headlamps as they followed Clarence through the door. Chuck turned on his headlamp and followed. A stream of outside air coursed past him, drawn into the tunnel.

  A mining engineer Chuck had hired at the beginning of the summer to assess the security of the mine tunnel had declared it safe from the risk of roof collapse, pointing out that no explosives, which might have damaged the tunnel’s structural integrity, had been used in its construction.

  “They did it the old-fashioned way,” the fire-hydrant-shaped engineer told Chuck, putting his finger to one of the countless indentations in the wall where miners had chipped away at the granite interior of the mountain, lengthening the tunnel pickaxe blow by pickaxe blow.

  The mining expert led Chuck deep into the tunnel, walking on the floorboards between the ore cart tracks three-quarters of the way to the bare back wall of the mine before turning and declaring it safe.

  The engineer tapped the thick floorboard planks with the sole of his boot. “I like that they installed rails to cart out the tailings. And the quality of the floor, too. Shows they thought they were in it for the long haul.” He directed the beam of his headlamp at the wall of the tunnel. “It’s too bad, all this effort—pick-work, flooring, rails—and they just quit.” He turned to Chuck. “I’ve seen it before, though. Probably ran out of money. Happened all the time.”

  “At least they didn’t go too deep before they moved on,” Chuck said.

  The engineer faced the tiny rectangle of daylight that marked the doorway at the mouth of the mine one hundred fifty feet away. “They must’ve dug thousands of these things back then. Hell, tens of thousands.” He grunted. “Just another empty hole.”

  FIVE

  Chuck trailed Clarence and Team Nugget down the mine tunnel. The six students fell silent, subdued by the darkness and the tunnel’s chill. They positioned the solar-powered LED floodlights to illuminate the day’s work area and set about dismantling the final, fifteen-foot stretch of ore cart tracks and underlying floorboards. Each time they removed one of the planks, the young men crouched shoulder-to-shoulder around the newly uncovered rectangle of debris, looking for anything of interest.

  At the start of their work in the tunnel three weeks ago, the students of both teams had groused about the extent to which Chuck required them to sift through the layer of gravel that comprised the base of the tunnel.

  “We’re searching for a needle in a haystack,” Jeremy complained.

  “Which is exactly what you signed up for,” Chuck responded. “Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. August, 1951. Hundred and ten in the shade. Louis and Mary Leakey scraping away at the side of a hill blazing day after blazing day. And what is it they found?”

  “Frosty the Snowman,” joked lumpy, disheveled Carson.

  “Broken bits of stone tools,” Chuck corrected. “Tiny pieces of bone. Tooth fragments. It was years before they came across the skull that made them famous.”

  “Oh, my God!” Carson exclaimed with an exaggerated shiver of fear. “A skeleton!”

  “Everybody loves the mystique of archaeology’s biggest discoveries,” Chuck continued as Carson traded a fist bump with Jeremy. “Olduvai in Tanzania. The Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Machu Picchu, Peru. But the truths archaeologists work to uncover aren’t tied up all neat and tidy in ribbons and bows. They’re covered by jungle growth, buried in dirt and rubble, or—” he pointed at the base of the tunnel “—hidden beneath floorboards in an abandoned mine. Gravity is an archaeologist’s best friend. Stuff falls down, other stuff covers it up, and it all lies there, waiting to be dug up and studied.”

  Jeremy gave a dismissive sniff. “Nothing’s ever fallen in here.”

  “The laws of gravity aren’t suspended underground,” Chuck said. “Which is why each time we remove another board from the floor is so important.” He added a note of wonder to his voice. “Who knows what might lie below?”

  By now, Chuck knew the same thing the students knew: they wouldn’t find much, if anything, amid the broken rock and rubble, just as they and Team Paydirt had found little of note upon disassembling the rest of the tunnel’s floor over the last three weeks.

  That, in fact, was the point, as Professor Sartore had explained to Chuck when he’d suggested the students excavate the tunnel. While the excavation of the cabin site was sure to provide a trove of finds, the tunnel would provide the opportunity for the students to realistically judge whether they wanted to go into the field of archaeology after experiencing the tedious, day-in-and-day-out work and dearth of discoveries that, in truth, comprised the bulk of archaeological inquiry.

  Aside from a few rusted, Civil War-era peg nails dropped beneath the boards during the tunnel’s construction, the students had uncovered only three items of interest: a broken pickaxe tip, a soggy box of matches, and a brass lipstick container. Of the three items, only the pickaxe tip dated from the tunnel’s initial construction in the 1860s. The matches and lipstick container were from the 1950s, about the time park officials affixed the iron door to the mouth of the mine, putting an end to the increased exploration of the tunnel that had come with the completion and opening of Trail Ridge Road.

  Fortunately, the teams’ finds beneath the collapsed cabin numbered in the dozens—intact bottles, rusted tin cans, broken china and crockery and glass, and a few leather boot soles, dried and curled with age—precisely the type of items the National Park Service sought, by encouraging archaeological digs in its parks, for eventual display in park visitor centers and museums.

  Chuck shuttled back and forth between Team Nugget and Team Paydirt throughout the morning, assuring himself Rosie was on the mend and banishing any thoughts of how Janelle would receive him when he returned to the cabin at the end of the day. Not long before lunch, he stood with Clarence between the tripod-mounted floodlights illuminating the final stretch of the mine tunnel. They looked on as the team pried loose their sixth floorboard of the morning, this one little more than a body’s length from the end of the tunnel.

  For the past few days, in a welcome attempt at overcoming the monotony of dismantling the floor of the tunnel unrevelatory plank by unrevelatory plank, Team Nugget member Samuel had taken to injecting some showmanship into the lifting of each loosened floorboard.

  As his teammates prepared to remove the next plank, Samuel, green-eyed and sporting a prodigious, leprechaun-like red beard, stood beyond the other team members on the last of the intact flooring, his back to the chipped stone wall at the end of the tunnel. He spoke into his fist, assuming the role of a play-by-play announcer, his voice artificially deep.

  “All is hushed,” he intoned into his imaginary microphone.

  Samuel’s teammates crouched, unmoving, over the loosened plank.

  “The members of Team Nugget, acting as one, work their fingers under the floorboard,” Samuel continued.

  Chuck couldn’t help but smile as the five team members did as Samuel described, eliciting a quiet squeak from the loosened board as it moved in its place.

  Samuel pounded the intact floor at the end of the tunnel with his boots. “What might be hidden beneath one of the last boards to be lifted from the floor of the famed Cordero Mine?” he asked. His breath, lit by the floodlights, clouded in the moist air of the tunnel. “Could it be an ancient scroll? A map to hidden treasure? A key to a long-forgotten tomb?”

  He paused. The team remained still, allowing the tension to build. Chuck bit his lower lip, caught up in Samuel’s patter. It didn’t matter that five times already this morning the team members had found nothing beneath the planks they’d lifted; Samuel’s invented suspense was exhilarating nonetheless.

  Samuel drop
ped his voice to a whisper. “And now, the Nuggeteers remove the ancient hunk of wood and peer beneath it.”

  The students lifted the heavy, moisture-laden plank, holding the board level so the shadow cast by the floodlights and their headlamps hid the narrow rectangle of gravel beneath it until the last possible second.

  Samuel’s voice grew louder as the students edged the plank away. “We begin to see what’s underneath the floorboard,” he exclaimed. He drummed his boots, and, while still speaking into his fist, he waved his free hand like a gospel preacher. “Yes, yes, it’s…it’s…we can almost see it now. It’s a…I can’t believe my eyes. Something shimmering. Hold up. What’s that?”

  The students set the plank aside.

  “Diamonds,” Samuel crowed jubilantly. “Rubies. Sapphires.” He jumped into the air and landed with a resounding thump on the floorboards at the end of the tunnel. “A treasure like none other.”

  Samuel leapt again in feigned ecstasy. He landed on the floorboards with another loud thump while the five kneeling members of Team Nugget aimed their headlamps at the bare patch of ground formerly hidden beneath the plank.

  Chuck leaned forward until he caught sight over the students’ shoulders of what the team members were seeing—no rubies, no sapphires, just the rocky rubble spread by miners a century and a half ago beneath the paired timbers that ran the length of the tunnel, serving as a foundation for the floorboards.

  On the far side of the kneeling students, Samuel turned his face to the tunnel ceiling and cried out, “The Seven Cities of Gold, the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the Holy Grail—all pale in comparison to what has been discovered here today!”

  He jumped into the air, pressing his hands to the roof of the mine. “Incredible!” he shouted as he landed, his weight depressing the floorboards with a dull crunch before they gave way with a splintering crash and Samuel plunged, screaming, from view.