High Stand

2

Because a lawyer spends so much of his time dealing with the vagaries of human nature, I suppose the suspicious element that is in all of us becomes highly developed. It is an exaggeration, of course, to say that McKie’s reception of me was hostile, but that is how I felt about it at the time. I had the impression he was trying to conceal something from me, and if I could only get hold of a vehicle I would find no slide and the road to the mine open.

I didn’t have a chance to think about it then. Jean Edmund-son stayed to lunch and throughout the meal her chatter was a distraction, which, oddly enough, I missed as soon as she had gone, for she had talked about ordinary things and her vitality had been infectious. I felt suddenly at a loss then, for I was on my own with no vehicle, and in the Yukon without a vehicle is about the same as being a knight without a horse.

I walked down to the lake where planks led out to a little boat stage. A heron rose, evacuating a white jet as it struggled to gam height. The sun was warm, the ground still frosted in the shadows. Back at the Lodge I wandered round the sheds at the side. There was a truck there with a jack under the back wheel, but nobody working on it. In the generator housing I found a blond-bearded giant of a man in an elaborate Indian jacket pumping diesel fuel from a drum into a tank. I asked him about the truck, but all he said was, ‘Kevin’s the mechanic. Better talk to him about it. I’m just barman and general handyman around here.’ His name was Eddie and when I started questioning him about the track up to the mine, he shook his head. ‘Sorry, feller, I don’t belong here. I only took this job a couple of weeks back.’

I went to my cabin then, which was last in the line. They were all built of wood with shingle roofs and antlers on the gable ends above a verandah. I lay on my bed and tried to think, haunted by that postcard from Miriam — Will write you again when I get back to Whitehorse. Why the hell hadn’t she? And why had she been able to get up to the mine and not me? I felt confined and frustrated, too restless to stay in the cabin. My time here was precious and I knew I ought to be doing something. But what?

In the end I went out again, taking an old sailing anorak I had with me and the Breton cap I had bought in France. The sun was dropping now towards the mountains, the shadows lengthening as I took a track up the valley behind the Lodge, walking fast. It ran through thickets of aspen and balsam poplar and was signposted to Alder Creek and Mush Lake. I made it to the creek before turning back, and quite why I went that far I don’t know, except that walking helped me to think and I had an instinctive urge to acclimatize myself to the country.

Long before I got back the sun had dropped below the ranges, the track darkening in the shadow of the trees. I heard the generator before I came in sight of the Lodge. The lights were on, several trucks now parked outside the cabins. One of them I recognized, though the dead deer was no longer roped to the mudguard. The Alaskan registration and the ski-doo in the back indicated that they were not locals; they were definitely the same two hunters and it looked as though they would be with me for the evening meal.

They were seated at one of the windows, the big man bent over his plate, his baldish head gleaming in the lamplight, the jaws moving. His eyes lifted at my entrance and he said something, his companion turning on the instant, so that I was conscious of the two of them watching as I crossed to an empty table. By the time I was seated they were bent in silent concentration over their food again, both of them dressed in the clothes they had worn the night before, but now their calf-length boots were muddied to the tucked-in denim of their jeans. The only sounds were the murmur of the generator and the strum of a guitar from a back room. The hunters didn’t talk even over their coffee, the smaller one facing me and smoking a cheroot in complete silence. They left before I had finished the main course, which was venison pie.

It was after the meal that I met Tony Tarasconi, in the back room. It had a bar counter and a big log fire; McKie and several others were sitting at a table drinking. The Italian, wearing a bearskin poncho, was balanced on the wooden back of a chair, a guitar slung around his neck. He was drinking beer from a can while he strummed, his feet beating out the time in a worn pair of carpet slippers. At the mention of my name he stopped, his dark eyes staring, the glow of the fire reflected in his glasses. ‘You the guy wanting a lift up to Ice Cold?’ His voice was a little slurred, the perspiration beading his high-boned features.

‘You keep out of it, Tony.’ McKie’s voice was quiet, but firm. ‘Your claim is down on the Squaw.’

‘Okay, okay, but if he’s Tom’s lawyer …’

‘Just get on with the music, Maestro, and stop worrying about the Gully.’ McKie said it jokingly, but I caught an undercurrent of command in his voice. And when I told the Italian I’d been given to understand it was all fixed for him to take me in, he shook his head. ‘I don’t go up there. Not any more.’

I asked him why, but he didn’t answer, his eyes on McKie. ‘You took Mrs Halliday,’ I said.

There was a long silence. That was quite a while back. Nice lady.’

‘Was Epinard there?’

‘Jonny? No, he wasn’t there.’

‘You mean it was deserted?’

‘Except for Jack-Mac.’

‘Who?’

‘Mac. The Indian who helps Jonny.’

‘Do you remember what they talked about?’

‘Course not. I had things to do, didn’t I? I just left her there with him, then came back for her later.’

‘How much later? How long was she up there?’

‘Couple of hours. Three maybe. Hell!’ he said. ‘You want to know what she had for lunch, why she came visiting, where she was going next? I can tell you that. She was going back to Whitehorse to see Jonny, then taking the ferry out to Vancouver.’ And he added, ‘What’s a bloody lawyer doing up here, anyway? You going to sell the claims?’ His eyes were suddenly bright like a bird’s. ‘Is that it?’

I didn’t answer that, but I did indicate that I was trying to find out what value should be put on the mine.

‘Jonny is the man to tell you that,’ McKie said quickly. And he made the point once again that the mine hadn’t produced anything much in the way of gold for a long time. ‘Jonny ran it at a loss. Ask anybody here.’ He looked round at the others, most of them local men with woollen shirts and muddied boots. They nodded, and one of them said that whether Tom Halliday was alive or dead didn’t make any difference to the mine because it wasn’t worth a cent anyway. ‘The claim’s worked out, and Jonny knows it, poor bastard.’

A hand touched my shoulder. Eddie had come from behind the bar. ‘On the house,’ he said, thrusting a drink into my hand. It was a large Scotch and I looked across at McKie, who nodded and raised his glass. The log fire, a moose head above it with a huge spread of plate-like antlers, the weathered faces and the outlandish clothes — I was very much the stranger from outer space. And Tony Tarasconi, a bright red scarf tied in a knot round his neck, his hair very black, not straight like an Indian’s, but running back across his narrow head in waves, his eyes bright, his appearance birdlike. He began playing again, softly now and crooning to himself. Several times he glanced at me curiously as though trying to make up his mind about something. I had the feeling he would have talked if we had been on our own.

I bought a round of drinks and shortly afterwards I went to bed. Half dozing I heard voices, the slam of car doors, then the sound of engines fading into the night. The murmur of the generator ceased abruptly and the verandah lights went out. A moment later there was a knock at my door, and when I opened it I found Tony Tarasconi standing there. He was swaying slightly, a dim shadow only recognizable because of the guitar still slung from his neck.

‘You still want to go to Ice Cold Creek?’ His voice was little more than a whisper. ‘I’m going back in to my claim tomorrow. I can take you up — if you like.’ He sounded uncertain.

It was freezing cold standing there in my pyjamas, but he wouldn’t come in, his eyes on the restaurant entrance. ‘What time?’ I asked.

Ten, or a little later perhaps.’

‘What about the slide?’

‘I don’t know. You may have to walk a bit. We’ll see. But you be ready by ten, okay?’ He wanted me to set off walking towards Haines and he’d pick me up. ‘That way Kevin won’t know I’m giving you a lift, see. Nobody will know.’

I asked him why it had to be done so secretly, but he shook his head, giving me a perfunctory goodnight and staggering off to his cabin.

I was shivering with cold by then so I didn’t try to stop him. I was now so convinced that it was the Gully and the gold that might lie hidden in the ground there that motivated them all that I hardly gave it another thought. Tomorrow I would take a look at Stone Slide Gully and the Italian would doubtless make some sort of offer that would trigger off a bid from McKie and the others. Perhaps I wouldn’t need to do anything about the trees Tom’s father had planted. A few moments and I was asleep, and when I woke the sun was coming up over the lake in a great red ball of fire that had the whole vast expanse of water lying like molten lava against the black outline of the distant mountains over towards Whitehorse.

I dressed quickly and went out. The sky was clear, the sun bright and my breath smoking in air that had a tang of frost in it, not a breath of wind. A few hours now and I should know why they didn’t want me to go up to the mine. Was there gold there that Tom hadn’t known about? A workable mine? But then Miriam would have written. And if there was nothing — nothing of value… but the question seemed burned into my mind — why hadn’t she written? It rankled. I suppose that was it. A blow to my manhood, though God knows the frosty air hadn’t done it any good either, and the chill remoteness of that flat calm lake had the effect of making me seem very small, the long high rampart of the Front Ranges stretching into the distance, the autumn colours flaring lemon in the sun, and along the tops the new snow shining crystal white. It was a fairy scene, so brilliant and so beautiful that on the instant I knew why sensible urban businessmen would give up commuting for the hard life of a northern settler. I reached the lake, the heron watching me from a bed of reeds, still as a sentinel expecting snipers.

When I got back to the lodge Tony and another man were unloading a mud-spattered pick-up truck. He glanced in my direction, then deliberately turned away. The hunters’ truck had gone. I went into the restaurant. No sign of McKie, but Eddie was there, and a girl who mixed cleaning with serving. I bought a couple of postcards of Dezadeash Lake and wrote them while waiting for my coffee and a great plateful of bacon and egg and sausage. The postcards, the brightness of the day, the prospect of a drive deep into the Ranges under whose shadow I seemed to have been for so long gave me the feeling of being on holiday. I sent one postcard to my mother, the other to that tiresome little bitch I had taken with me to Brittany — why I can’t think, except as a sort of flourish, like sticking a pin in the North Pole and saying That’s where I am now, aren’t you impressed? God, how simple, how obvious the needs of one’s psyche!

There was movement on the Highway now, several trucks headed for Haines, a car in for gas, another spilling an American family homeward bound and wanting breakfast, some foresters. I sat over my coffee, watching them all, relaxed and enjoying the strangeness of it. A truck with two Indians, then more Americans, elderly and in a tetchy mood, taking their mobile home down to catch the ferry to Prince Rupert. ‘There’s a ride back to Whitehorse if you want it.’ Kevin McKie was at my elbow, nodding towards a big estate car crowded with children that was just pulling in from the gas pumps. They say one more won’t make any difference.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s too lovely a day,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a walk and stretch my legs.’

‘Okay. But I warn you, there’s not too much going to Whitehorse. The visitors are pulling out of the Yukon, so most of the traffic is going the other way.’ He hesitated, looking down at me. ‘And don’t think you can just head into the Kluane on your own. The law says you got to notify the Park authorities.’

‘Ice Cold is not in the Kluane National Park,’ I said.

His eyes narrowed, his voice hardening. ‘Sure it isn’t, but it’s damn close and you could easily get lost or snowed in or treed by a grizzly, and there’s hunters around, too. We don’t like being called out in the middle of the night to go looking for people.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ I told him.

He nodded. ‘Okay, but you remember, we’re on the edge of a lot of mountain and ice here, on the brink of winter, too. The weather can change very fast.’ One of the foresters called to him, a big barrel-bellied man, braces over bright red bush shirt and a hat with a feather in it rammed tight on a round bullet head. ‘Be with you in a moment, Rod.’ His hand gripped my shoulder. ‘If you got some idea of walking in to the mine, forget it. It’s twenty-two miles down to the turn-off to Dalton’s Post, and when you reach the Post it’s another twenty-odd to the mine. There’s two fords to cross, several thousand feet to climb and that’s hard going even for a fit man. And I don’t have room for you after tonight. It’s the start of the weekend and we’re fully booked.’

I thought for a moment he was going to press me to change my mind about the lift, but instead he smiled as he let go of my shoulder. ‘If the worst comes to the worst I guess I can always ring Jean. Haines Junction you’d be all right. Have a nice day,’ he added as he walked away. ‘And if you want a packed lunch tell Eddie or Sue, whoever’s around.’

Through the window I watched Tony Tarasconi and his partner finish the off-loading of their four-by-four truck. When it was empty, and everything neatly stacked with a tarpaulin roped over it, they came in for breakfast, Tony glancing up at me as he passed beneath the window and nodding in the direction of the Highway. Considering the amount he must have drunk the night before, that he had been playing his guitar for at least three hours and had just unloaded a full truck, he looked almost effervescent with health and vigour as he came hurrying in like a bantam cock half-hidden under his poncho. ‘Morning all. Is-a good morning, no?’ He was grinning, teeth showing white in his wind-brown face, the exaggeration of his Italian accent, his bubbling good humour giving an instant lift to the faces around the room. ‘Fame fame — lo bloody hungry. Sue! Mia amorata — the girl virtually fell into his arms as he embraced her. ‘Mia amorata, eh? Due breakfasts gigantico. Subito, subito. That means bloody quick and lots of it.’ He and his partner pulled up chairs to join the foresters, the noise of their talk rising perceptibly.

Breakfast was a meal that apparently went on from dawn till lunchtime. About ten I left my postcards at the counter and picked up the lunch I had ordered. Eddie produced a knapsack for me. ‘When you’ve eaten your lunch you can stuff your parka in it. Could be quite warm by then.’ He offered me the loan of a pair of boots, but his feet were a lot bigger than mine and anyway I had had the sense to wear a stout pair of walking shoes when joining the plane at Gatwick.

It was just after ten-fifteen when I left my cabin and walked on to the highway, turning right and heading towards Haines. I had my camera with me and if McKie wanted to know where I had been I could always say I had hitched a ride and walked the Dalton Trail as far as the old Post. It was the obvious thing for a visitor to do, for Dalton had established his trail as early as 1898 and the previous evening McKie had told me the Post had bunkhouse and stabling, even a two-holer toilet, all built of logs ‘and still in good condition, like the old staging post of Silver City at Lake Kluane’.

A car slowed, going towards Haines, but I waved it on, happy in the freedom of walking the hard dirt of the highway, enjoying the bite in the air, the warmth of the sun. Within the space of five minutes two more vehicles had stopped to offer me a lift, and when I looked round again at the sound of an engine, expecting it to be Tony and once again finding a stranger slowing to pick me up, I thought, What the hell! If he were delayed, or McKie stopped him, I would still have time to walk the twenty-odd miles to Ice Cold and back.

The vehicle was one of those big American campers about the size of a Greyhound bus, a craggy Californian driving it, his wife in the galley brewing coffee, the smell of it filling the cab. ‘Where yah going?’ When I said Dalton’s Post, he nodded. ‘We bin in one of the camping lots close by Silver City looking for Dall sheep on the mountain there. Got some good pictures. Guess we seen quite a bit of that old Trail.’ He relit the thin cigar he was chewing and started the big machine rolling again. ‘You’re from England, are you? Then you probably wouldn’t have driven one of these — ‘ He patted the steering wheel. ‘First time May and I have — great way to see the country. Only way, I guess. You know if the Million Dollar Fall campground is still open? That’s at Mile 102.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s all new to me.’

‘You just visiting then?’ He nodded, slowing for a bend as we began a steady downhill run, his voice droning on, telling me about his family, his house, the car he had just bought and his business, which was electronics.

They were kindly people, but it was a relief when we came to the sign for Dalton’s Post and I was on my own again, the sun warm on my back. I crossed the road to the well-worn dirt track leading to the mountains and in minutes the highway was gone, the bush closing in, no sound of vehicles, just complete and utter silence except for the faint murmur of water far away and the rustle of a small breeze shaking the leaves of the aspens.

The water, when I came to it, was immensely wide for something that was called a creek; more like a river, its bed full of low banks of stone and boulder. A track had been worn to the bank, dipping down into the water, tyre marks visible on the first grey bank of shingle and coarse sand. This was the first ford and no way I could cross it without getting soaked. Ahead of me the Dalton Trail track finished in a clearing of flat grassland where the scattered remains of log huts still stood, sod-roofed and the window openings without glass. The creek swung in to run quite fast along the bank where more tyre marks led down into the water. Standing in the long grass at the edge of the swirling water I tried to visualize the Post as it had been when it was full of men and horses and wagons, and the hot fever of the gold rush. Clouds hung over the mountains ahead, but here the sun was still bright, its warmth cooled by a small breeze coming down the creek.

A horn blared and I turned to find a truck almost upon me, the sound of its engine overlaid by the murmur of the water at my feet. ‘Hi!’ It drew up beside me, Tony Tarasconi leaning out of the cab window. ‘Somebody gave you a ride, eh? I got held up. Didn’t reckon you’d have got this far.’

I took a picture of Dalton’s Post, another of the fording place, then climbed into the truck. ‘That’s our road, over there.’ Tarasconi nodded to the further bank, swinging round and heading back to where the first set of tyre marks led down to the water. He rammed the gear lever into first as the yellow snout of the truck with its radiator guard dipped down into the creek and we began crunching our way across from one grey shingle bank to another until at last we came out on the far side dripping water, the track ahead climbing steadily. ‘It’s all right here. To my claim is only about ten miles, pretty good going all the way. But the claim …’ He shrugged. ‘My claim not so good, lot of work, not much gold. Is placer mining, of course. (He pronounced it ‘plasser’.) Reckon the boys who worked it before got the best of it. Anyway, I pay too much royalty. Thirty per cent is too much.’ He grinned at me, his teeth showing white under the hooked nose. ‘Higher up is different. Up above the timber line they got a real “plasser” mine, the benches clearly defined, like raised beaches, a good yield of pay dirt, and down near the bedrock gold that you can see.’

We were doing a steady 30 kph on the clock, the truck bucking and rearing as we climbed towards a hump of land that was like a small pass. ‘Why do you do it if it doesn’t pay?’ I asked, and he laughed: ‘Is a good question. Why do I do it, eh? You ever been a plumber?’ He saw the look on my face and laughed again, beating the side of his door with his hand. ‘Six months’ plumbing, flushing out other people’s shit — you need a breath of clean fresh air then, so six months’ mining. You know Medicine Hat? No? It’s down in the prairie country, Alberta, an old CPR town. Plumbing six months in Medicine Hat is enough. Okay? So now you know why I come here. Some day — ’ his eyes were shining again — ‘some day I strike it rich. Not on the claim I work now, but somewhere… Stone Slide maybe — ‘ He gave me a quick, sidelong glance, and then we were over the hump and dropping sharply. The gorge is down there.’ He jerked his head to the right and a moment later he was thrusting the truck round a bend, slithering on the slime of frozen mud just surface-thawed by the sun. A side track dropped away to the right and he swung onto it, and in an instant we were bumping our way down a steep hill that looked as though in heavy rain, or when the snows melted, it became the bed of a torrent. ‘Now you see the difference,’ he yelled at me. ‘We’re on the Ice Cold track. Is bad, this one. Nobody do nothing to it for many years now. No gold, no money — that’s the way it is in this goddamned country.’

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 could 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 screening 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.’

He was bending down, examining the sharp edge of the rock that was almost against the front guard of the truck. ‘Is newly split, this big ‘un.’ He shook his head, running his hand over the exposed side of it. ‘Never known anything as big as this come from the top. Is like I say, the frost cracks it up, so it’s mostly small stuff that blocks the road here, rubble that’s half a day’s work with a ‘dozer to clear. This lot would take a week or more, and some of it’s big, like this feller.’ He straightened up, gazing across to the Gully again, not saying anything more, just standing there, drinking it in. And the sun was almost warm, though the breeze from the west had a bite to it, a damp bite, and there was a suggestion of haze building up, for this was a Pacific airstream that had come over mountains and glaciers that were almost 20,000 feet high.

‘Guess you’ll have to walk in from here.’ He got my haversack from the cab and dumped it at my feet. ‘You got some food in it?’

I nodded.

‘Good. ‘Cos I got things to do, back at my place on the Squaw. I’ll be a little while. Okay?’

I hadn’t expected this, I don’t know why. I suppose I hadn’t.stopped to think that he wouldn’t come all this way into the mountains just to give me a lift. Obviously the trip had to answer a purpose. ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.

‘Grizzlies is all you got to worry about, but they won’t bother you, not in the daytime — so long as you make plenty of noise. Just don’t go wandering down the Ice Cold into the bush below the timber line. It’s pretty dense down there.’ He was climbing into the driving seat and I asked him when he’d be back to pick me up. He glanced at the dashboard clock. ‘Meet me here, say about three-thirty. It won’t be earlier than that. I’ve got to drive back down, ford the Squaw, and my place is ten miles after that. Altogether about forty miles there and back, all slow going, and I got to load up and have some food the other end. Make it four o’clock, then if I’m early and you’re not here I can put my feet up for a moment and have a rest.’ His lips flickered in a smile, but it was a nervous smile, his eyes on the Gully, watchful now as though expecting the ghost of some long-dead miner to materialize out of the rocks. Abruptly he turned the ignition key and started the engine. ‘Okay,’ he said, and managed a wave of his hand and a cheerful grin as he slipped the gear lever into reverse.

But then, as the truck began to move back from the slide, he jammed his foot on the brake and leaned out of the window, looking down at me. ‘A word of warning,’ he said, his voice on a high note. ‘There’s hunters around, remember. And in Canada it’s not just the deer that need to watch out for hunters. It’s humans, too. Hunters get a good bag of humans by the end of the season, and there’s no licence required for shooting your own kind!’ He laughed and the echo of it sounded hollow among the rocks. Then he put his hand on the horn, a long blast that went reeling across the streambed and into the Gully, to come beating back at us when he stopped. He did that three times, then nodded at me. ‘That should warn anyone there’s somebody here. Okay. Be seeing you.’

He turned his head then and began backing the truck down the track, while I stood there watching its battered, mud-stained snout slowly disappear round the bend. Then suddenly it was gone and I was left with nothing but the sound of the engine, which rose and fell as he manoeuvred in the turning bay, then gradually faded until I couldn’t hear it any more.

That was when I became conscious of the silence. It was suddenly intensely silent, only the murmur of water in the rocks below and the breeze flapping the collar of my anorak. God! It was quiet. Twenty miles down to Dalton’s Post, and all around me nothing but mountains, and the ghosts of men who had worked up here at Ice Cold Creek since the turn of the century. I felt suddenly chill and very small, alone there in the vastness of the border mountains between BC and the Yukon. I shook myself, taking a grip. Don’t think about the loneliness, or what happens if Tony’s truck breaks down and he doesn’t come back. Concentrate on assessing the potential of the mine, the value of the equipment, and on the fact that for almost a hundred years now men have been living and working up here throughout the summer months. And anyway, there was always the track out. A walk of twenty-odd miles back to the highway would do me more good than being bounced around in the cab of a truck, so what the hell did it matter if Tarasconi was late, or even if he failed to come back for me at all?

It must have been shortly after midday that I scrambled across the rock fall to the track on the far side and began following it round the mountain, climbing all the time, more and more of the Ice Cold mine coming gradually into view. The camp showed up first, being further ahead and higher up the mountain, two or three buildings clinging to the edge of a snow-covered bench at the head of a valley that narrowed to a ravine. To my right Stone Slide Gully was no longer a clearly etched V. Indeed, it was almost behind me now, the cleft visible only as an ugly spill of torrent-scattered boulders coming out of the cliffside, the grey of it shot through with fast-moving runnels of white water, and a rough track hugging the cliff and turning into the Gully.

That track merged with the streambed below me, climbing steadily until it joined the main track on which I was walking. At this point the valley opened out into a bare plateau of grey silt and rubble with here and there the remains of old tailing dumps scattered like the tumuli of some Stone Age mountain tribe. The going was easier when I had reached the first dump, the surface of the track packed tight and smooth with small stones and silt, everything very grey and the barren moonscape sloping gradually downwards.

I could see the screening plant then, about half a mile ahead and slightly below me, a black skeleton of steel, like some prehistoric monster all rimed in snow, a heavy tracked bulldozer parked beside it, and everywhere banks and piled-up dumps of stone, the tailings much higher down there and the thin waters of Ice Cold Creek running through them, threads of silver flickering in sunlight. That was when I stopped and took my first picture, then looked at my watch.

The time was 12.23, and the thing that struck me most forcibly was how abandoned it all looked, everything so silent and still, nobody about, nothing moving, the whole scene one of frozen immobility, with the camp in the background and the Ice Cold Creek cutting down from the mountain top in a broadening ravine.

I think it was then that the first chill ran through me, the first sense of unease. It seemed unnatural, the mountains round watchful and white, an alien world from which all life had been expunged by the onset of winter. The sun had a faint halo round it, the air getting colder, and I started walking fast, up over the divide separating the Stone Slide waters from Ice Cold, the track no longer curving but running direct to the screening plant, and on the mountainside to my left occasional stunted bushes clinging precariously to life. The track reached down to the bed of the creek, the surface of it becoming very rocky, trickles of water moving frostily and the skeleton shape of the plant getting bigger until, breathless, I stood within a few metres of it and could see how the paint had peeled, the steel rusting with age. But the working parts were all right. They had been heavily greased.

It was the same with the bulldozer, the hydraulically operated pistons for raising and lowering the blade carefully protected with a dirty yellow coating of grease. Sheets of tin lay rotting on a dump of stone and nearby was a bucket and dredge attachment for the bulldozer. A little higher up the creek a crawler tractor lay abandoned and rotting, flaked holes of rust appearing in the metalwork of the cab. More machinery, cogs and wheels, a long, twisted snake of wire hawser, all dumped there and disintegrating in the cold and the wind and the snow. The whole scene was one of desolation, a shocking picture of dereliction in that lost amphitheatre in the mountains, nothing but snow-whitened rock and rusting machinery.

Obviously I had no way of checking whether the mine was really worked out or not, but I took some pictures of it just in case, and some close-ups of the screening plant, which should be worth something if it could be dismantled and got down to the Haines Highway. Then I went on up the track to where the pale wood of the pre-fabs with their tin roofs stood in silhouette above me, the track climbing very steeply here and the buildings seemingly poised on the edge of what was becoming a very steep-sided valley, poised like that teetering hut in the Chaplin Gold Rush film. There were five buildings in all, plus a little box of a one-holer loo. The first of the buildings was quite large, surrounded by a dump of old spare parts, bits of an engine, cooking pots, the remains of an old fridge that had virtually disintegrated, a cooking stove that looked as though it was a woodburner. The hut was locked, of course, but through the fly-blown window I could see a big engine that looked like a generator, and there was a table, sloping and ridged, with a layer of fine silt at the lower end. A panning dish lay on the table, and there was also a bucket half full of sludge. There was a small engine with a belt-drive to the table so that it looked as though this was where the final gold-sifting process had been carried out.

The rest of the buildings were about fifty metres away, all on the edge of the ravine looking down towards the screening plant. There was a cookhouse with a table and two benches, a stove, shelves and a sink that emptied straight out into a small stone channel running over the ravine edge. Close by was a caravan, chocked up with its wheels rusting off and holes in its side. Presumably it had been an early accommodation unit brought in to replace the original log cabins. I had passed the remains of three of these coming up from the rockspill. Finally there were two pre-fab accommodation units, one much older than the other, and the loo. The older of the two bunkhouses was not locked, nor was the toilet, which I was glad to see had a half-used roll of toilet paper hanging damply on the door. It was by the loo that I found the clear imprint of boots.

I don’t know why it came as a shock to me when I had already been told there was an Indian still up here looking after things. I suppose it was because all the machinery, everything about the mine, cried aloud the fact that it had been abandoned. There was new snow, fallen within the last twenty-four hours, so the imprints of those boots had been made as recently as that morning, the snow round the bunk-house all scuffed up where the sun had turned it to slush. There was a yellow mark where somebody had urinated, and a path had been trampled to the cookhouse door.

All my senses were suddenly alert as I searched the camp area, looking for tracks heading up to the mountain above or even some indication of the direction from which the owner of the boots had come. But all I could find was the marks where something big and heavy had gone down to the streambed in great leaps and bounds to be lost in the first thin trickle of water running down the valley.

The older bunkhouse had been slept in. I could smell it as soon as I pushed open the door, a hastiness lingering in the damp air. The windows had been boarded up, but the light from the open door was sufficient to show that one of the bunks had been occupied. Presumably this was where Jack McDonald slept and the other, newer accommodation unit, which was locked, had been occupied by the mine manager. There was, of course, another possibility, particularly since Epinard hadn’t been paid for several months. The camp could have been hired out to a succession of hunting parties, the whole thing organized by Kevin McKie down at Lakeside. It would explain McKie’s behaviour and Epinard’s nervousness, and it wasn’t unreasonable since it would bring in a little money and at the same time mean that the mine wasn’t left entirely deserted. It would also explain Tony Tarasconi’s initial reluctance to drive me up here and his warning about hunters, the three blasts on the horn. It would all be so simple for McKie to organize, an added attraction for a party visiting his lodge at Dezadeash, all those involved making a few dollars on the side.

I had my lunch sitting in the sunshine at the open bunkhouse doorway with a view straight down the boulder-strewn valley to the mammoth skeleton of the screening plant and the distant view of mountain ranges white against a milky blue sky. When I had finished I lit my pipe, the first smoke I had had since breakfast, time slipping by as I roughed in the layout of the mine in the back of my diary, the sun quite warm where I sat sheltered from the breeze. And the view was magnificent, for I was looking back into the Yukon, and across the tops of the Front Ranges it was all white, a vista of sparkling peaks and distant snowfields.

It was just after two that I took one final picture of the mine and started back down the track, headed now for Stone Slide Gully. This meant that, after crossing the divide, I had to diverge onto the track that followed the course of the little stream that flowed away from the Ice Cold watercourse. The odd thing was, I had some difficulty in finding it, so that for the first part I was literally walking the streambed, water over my shoes at times, my feet soaked. The ravine steepened, dropping sharply as it curved round the shoulder of the mountain. At last I could see the rock slide spilling out of the cliff ahead and the track clearly visible where it hugged the overhang and turned into the Gully.

There was no way, of course, I could assess the mining potential of the Gully, but once I had seen it I should at least have a visual impression and some idea of the physical problem of dealing with what looked like a heavy overburden of fallen rock. This would enable me to handle my leasing negotiations with some degree of confidence. And if it came to that, then I hoped Miriam would also have had a look at it on her way up to visit Ice Cold. If she hadn’t, then I could produce some pictures to show her what the problems were.

There were problems, no doubt of that. Extraction for one. And the danger of working with the threat of another slide hanging over the place. I was under the overhang now, the cliffs bulging above the makeshift track, and all to the right of me, filling the whole cleft, a great mass of jagged rocks, some of them as big as the bunkhouse I had just left, and through the middle of it, already cutting and smoothing a way for itself, the white foaming waters of a small torrent that showed the cold green of melted snow where it lay calm in pools among the rocks. The noise of it, the dark cliffs looming — the place was so much starker than Ice Cold, the feeling of emptiness so much greater, the sun lost behind the mountains, everything in shadow, the endless rushing sound of water, a sound that seemed to grow in volume as I followed the track round into the Gully itself.

Once into this cavernous gut the full extent of the slide became apparent. The whole side of a mountain, benches and all, had fallen away, spilling over most of a great bowl that was like a crater with snow sloped all round it. Here the track cut diagonally across the body of the slide, the marks of the bulldozer blade quite clear in places. The sound of the torrent gradually lessened as I moved onto the floor of the bowl, fingers of water now coming in from all directions to meet in the centre, tumbling down through bare, ice-scarred rock to go rushing out through the rift of the Gully in one single stream.

The floor of the bowl was not flat, great outcrops of bare rock partitioning it off, the track weaving its way round massive rock features, some as big as a Norman castle. In this gloomy and sunless place there was an extraordinary sense of geological power.

After crossing one or two of the tributary streams coming down from the snow slopes above I was far enough into the centre of the bowl to take a picture looking back at the Gully, its V shape blackened by shadow, the problem of mineral extraction very obvious, all the foreground a wild jumble of rocks. Ahead of me now was the first of the big outcrops and as I picked my way towards it over the boulder-strewn surface of the track I stopped several times searching for a way to the top of it. But the rock was quite vertical and very smooth at the base, ice-worn probably; in the spring, when all the mountains round dripped melted snow, the volume of water rushing into the bowl and out through the Gully would be very considerable.

I don’t know when I heard it first, for the sound of it only gradually reached my consciousness. It was like the roar of a distant waterfall or another torrent beyond the second sprawling outcrop of rock that was just coming into view as I followed the track round the base of the first. I was on bare, ice-worn rock then, water flowing across it.

Between that first outcrop and the next the water deepened in places. I splashed through it, having long since stopped worrying about getting my feet wet. Halfway between the two outcrops I stopped to take another picture; then I stood there for a moment looking around me. Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breathes, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things … Those lines of Milton flashed into my mind as I wondered how on earth Tony Tarasconi, or anybody else for that matter, thought he could mine for gold here in this desolation of rock and snow, the whole place frozen solid for six months of the year, a raging fury of ice-cold water for perhaps a third of the remainder. That would leave four months, just four months out of the twelve, and the track to be recreated annually. It was a hopeless proposition and my advice to Miriam would unquestionably be to lease it out to anyone fool enough to attempt the impossible, but on a sharing or royalty basis, so that if the lessee did uncover a pocket of nugget gold she would get a share of it.

I would have turned back then, I think, but looking at the big outcrop ahead I thought I saw a way I could climb to the top of it. Its height wasn’t more than fifty feet or so, and it was flat-topped, so that the long run of it should enable me to get shots covering the whole basin. The roar of the water ahead seemed to have stopped now as though the source of it had been suddenly cut off. I guessed it was some trick of the topography, the sound blanketed by the massive extent of the outcrop I was approaching.

The way up looked quite easy, except for the first few feet. This again was vertical and smooth. I picked my way slowly along the length of it, searching for a foothold, and at the far end found a sloping fault with a crack for my fingers above. I was just hoisting myself up when I heard the clink of metal on metal, and a voice said, ‘Wot you do here, feller?’

I turned, my heart in my mouth. Where the outcrop ended a man stood, a rifle in his hand. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, his hair, black and straight, hanging almost to his neck, his face broad and flat, his eyes slitted and slightly puffed, the skin dark. ‘Wot you do?’ he repeated with a jerk of the rifle in my direction, all the fringes on his Indian jacket of soft skin dancing as he moved his hands. He was a short man, his denims tucked into calf-length leather boots stained with mud except where water had washed the uppers clean. All this I took in in a flash, his presence so unexpected I almost let go my hold on the rock. ‘You must be Jack McDonald,’ I said. He was obviously Indian.

‘Jack-Mac.’ He nodded. ‘Wot your name?’ And when I told him, he said, ‘You got business here?’

I dropped to the ground and tried to explain, but the business of a lawyer seemed beyond his comprehension. He stared at me woodenly, and continued to stare when I asked him what he was doing down here in the Gully. ‘Are you hunting?’ I asked.

He didn’t reply, his brown eyes fixed on mine, his broad forehead creased in concentration. The only sound in the cold shade of the amphitheatre was the murmur of water flowing endlessly down the sloping floor of rock and silt. ‘You remember Mrs Halliday visiting the mine?’ I asked. ‘About three weeks ago.’

‘Mrs Halliday. Yes.’ He nodded, his eyes watchful.

‘Did she come down here?’ And when he didn’t answer, I asked him who else had visited Ice Cold recently. ‘Tarasconi? McKie? Who?’

He shook his head, his face impassive, totally blank. I started to move round him, but he blocked my way, the gun pointing and his hand on the trigger. ‘You go back plees.’ And when I started to argue, he said, ‘Come. I show you Ice Cold mine. Here nothing. See nothing here.’ And he started to push me back the way I had come.

I think I would probably have done as he said, for I had been standing still now for several minutes and I was feeling cold, particularly my feet which were in a rivulet of water that was rimmed in ice, but at that moment I heard it again, the sound of water cascading down. Or was it? The sound had started so suddenly. The flow of a waterfall doesn’t stop and start, it goes on and on. And he had moved to block my way.

A machine! ‘You’re mining here,’ I said. ‘Somebody’s mining here.’ And I pushed past him, ignoring the gun, moving fast so that I was round the end of the rock outcrop before he caught up with me. He grabbed hold of my shoulder, but by then I had stopped of my own accord. Barely two hundred yards away, close against the mountainside, a small wheeled tractor with a shovel attached to the hydraulic lifting gear was digging down into an old streambed and dumping the rock and silt it scooped up into what looked like a line of wooden shuttering. The man driving it was hidden by the cab. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘Is it Mr Epinard?’

‘Jonny? No.’

The shuttering led from the base of a cascading torrent. I could see the water frothing in it as it rushed down the sloped wooden channel to spill out into a great box-like contraption that I recognized from old gold rush pictures I had seen. It was a sluice box, a large, old-fashioned working sluice box. No wonder they hadn’t wanted me to come up here. ‘Who’s doing this?’ I had rounded on the Indian angrily. ‘Come on, you tell me. You’re mining and I want to know who’s behind it.’

He shook his head slowly, his face still wooden, but a slightly bewildered look in his eyes.

‘Well, who?’ And once again I explained that I was a solicitor and acting for the owner.

He shook his head. I don’t think he understood about the legality of it any more than he knew about solicitors, but he had got the message that I was trouble, his eyes shifting to the distant tractor, then back to me as he said, ‘Okay. Stay here.’ His grip on my shoulder tightened and he spun me round, giving me a push that flung me against the rock of the outcrop. ‘You stay. Okay?’ He left me then and went loping across the wet grey detritus to where the tractor was still shovelling dirt. It stopped as he reached it, shovel poised, and a man’s head and shoulders leaned out of the cab. They talked for a moment, the tractor ticking over and the driver with his head twisted round so that he was looking back at me. Finally he nodded and withdrew, the tractor engine roaring again as he dumped its load, then backed it down to the sluice box, swinging it round and manoeuvring it close against the lower end.

McDonald had moved down with the tractor and now the two of them rigged a broad loop of belting from the tractor’s power drive to the big wheel on the side of the sluice. As soon as it was adjusted correctly and the power drive engaged, the sluice began to rock back and forth. Only then did the driver turn and begin walking towards me. There was something about the way he moved, the jerk of his head as he talked, but even then I didn’t guess. It was not, in fact, until he was within a few yards of me, was actually speaking to me, that I realized who he was.

Even then I could hardly believe it, he was so changed. For one thing he had lost a lot of weight. All the flab of good living had gone, his body so thin he looked like a famine relief figure. And his face was changed, too, much thinner and the bones of the skull showing through, so that he looked almost gaunt, his once-black hair turned grey and so long it covered his ears. But it was the moustache that changed him most. He had shaved it off and the absence of it seemed to alter his whole face.

For a moment I was so shocked I couldn’t say anything. He, too, seemed stunned. At the moment of recognition his mouth had opened, and then he just stood gaping at me, both of us standing there, saying nothing. At last he found his voice. ‘Kevin should have warned me,’ he murmured to himself. Then to me — ‘How did you get here? Who brought you up?’

Tarasconi,’ I said.

He nodded as though he had expected that. ‘So you’ve caught up with me. What now?’

I still found it difficult to believe it was true, and when I had recovered sufficiently to question him it was to ask him if he’d seen Miriam. ‘She wrote me she was going up to Ice Cold. Did you meet her, did you talk?’

‘What’s it to do with you?’

‘She said she’d write again. That’s three weeks ago and she hasn’t.’ There was sudden hostility in his eyes. ‘And you — disappearing like that. Why?’ I knew why, of course, but that’s how it came out. I was so shocked by his appearance, his face so gaunt, his eyes sunk in their sockets and his body thin as a rake as though he were suffering from some wasting disease. ‘You can’t hope to recover your fortunes slaving up here on your own.’

‘Why not?’ My words had got under his skin and he was suddenly bristling. ‘There’s gold up here. Why shouldn’t I strike lucky like my father did? He worked up here on his own.’

‘This isn’t the same as the Ice Cold Creek mine,’ I said.

‘Why not? What’s the difference?’

‘Just look at it.’ I made a vague, all-embracing gesture with my arm. ‘The situation, the logistics, everything — it’s all so much more difficult.’

‘Okay, but if there’s gold — ‘ His eyes had taken on that feverish glint that I had seen in Tarasconi’s. ‘And there is gold. Real good solid stuff. Nuggets. Look!’ And he pulled at a piece of orange agricultural twine round his neck, yanking out a small white cotton bag tied to the end of it. ‘Look at these!’ He squatted down on a boulder, his thighs pressed hard together to form a safety net as he emptied the contents out into the calloused palm of his hand. ‘Found these f-five days ago.’ That was when I first became conscious of the slight hesitation in his voice, the near stutter Miriam had referred to. He held out his hand. ‘They were all together, a little pocket in the bedrock.’ They were a darkish gold and there must have been more than a dozen of them, about the size of a pea, some a little bigger, some smaller. ‘And we’re getting dust, of course. We’re getting dust all the time.’ He put the nuggets back in the little cotton bag, slowly running them off his palm as though reluctant to see them pass out of his sight.

The bag back under his bush shirt, he got to his feet. ‘You haven’t told me why you’re here. Whitehorse isn’t exactly the centre of the universe and to get up here isn’t easy. You must have had a reason. And how did you know? — I suppose Miriam …’

‘So you saw Miriam?’

‘Oh, yes. But she swore she wouldn’t tell anyone, and I believed her.’ He said it resignedly. ‘I always believed whatever she told me. It was probably a mistake.’ He stared at me as though he hated my guts. That was when I realized he knew, had known all along, and I was sorry for him.

‘Where is she now?’ I asked.

‘Vancouver. She should be in Vancouver now, or back home.’ And he added with a wintry little glimmer of a smile, ‘So she didn’t write to you again.’

‘No.’

‘And you’ve come rushing out here to discover why? Oh, my dear fellow. This heart of mine bleeds for you.’ He tapped his chest, the smile broader now. ‘Come on.’ He got to his feet. ‘We’ll go up to Ice Cold and have a brew of tea. Not much sun gets into this place and it’s cold. Jack-Mac here doesn’t mind. None of the Indians worry much about the cold. But I do. Used not to, but now …’ He laughed, shrugging his shoulders as he added, ‘Getting old, I suppose.’ And we started back across the sloping floor of the amphitheatre, over the great rock slide and through the Gully with its beetling cliffs, and all the time he was talking, the words pouring out of him as though he couldn’t help himself. He was a gregarious man who had probably been very little on his own. Now, after a month or more up here, most of the time with only an Indian for company, it was hardly surprising he was desperate for somebody to talk to.

I didn’t really take in what he was saying, except that it was about the way he and Jonny and the Indian had set about trying to get at the gold they had convinced themselves lay under that massive overburden of rock in the Gully. It was talk for the sake of talking and I was only partly listening, my mind concentrated on trying to understand what was behind his extraordinary behaviour. To walk out without telling a soul… not even Miriam, or his son, though he was living in the house. ‘If only we’d drilled, test-drilled right here when I had the money.’ We were under the cliffs then, in the Gully itself. ‘If there’s a f-fortune, it’ll be right here, deep under the slide. As it is, all I can do with the puny implement I’ve got is dig away at the upper end. That’s the wrong end. Always work upwards, boy. That’s what my father told me. And it was he who told me he’d acquired the claims over the other side of the watershed so that there’d always be Stone Slide to fall back on.’ And he added slowly, his voice sounding weary, ‘He knew. He had a nose for gold. He was sure there was another fortune here in the Gully. But by then he was only interested in his trees. He’d got all the money he wanted and he didn’t care. And I go and listen to that fucking mine consultant.’ He snorted, a little neigh of a laugh. ‘And now, the best I can hope for is to do a little better than break even and pray to God I’ll uncover a real deep fault in the bedrock that’s jam-packed with nuggets.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Tony coming back for you?’

‘About four,’ I said.

‘Okay, you got just over an hour. He’ll wait, will he?’ And when I nodded, he said, ‘Good. But you’d better get down there in time. I don’t want him walking in looking for you. I don’t want to see the bastard.’

‘Because he brought Miriam in?’

‘That and other things. Bringing you.’

‘He knows you’re here, does he?’

‘I don’t think he knows. But Kevin says he suspects. He’s a scheming little shit, that man. You know he’s descended from Lucky Carlos Despera on his mother’s side.’

‘Yes.’

‘A chip off the old block.’ He laughed, but without humour. ‘He can’t forget that his grandfather had a fortune in his pocket and threw it away. He wants to get his hands on the Gully, and if he did Kevin says he’s got friends, South American he thinks, who’d give him the backing.’

‘They’d finance him?’ There was no doubt about it, they all believed there was gold there, but looking back at the sheer weight of rock that had been sliced off the mountain by that slide I thought financing it would be taking a hell of a chance. ‘It would cost a great deal,’ I murmured.

‘Sure. But in this sort of situation, the Gully being like the neck of a bottle, the rocks of the slide the cork…’ He paused, his voice almost choked. ‘It could be another B-Bonanza.’

‘It could equally be nothing at all,’ I said sharply, trying to bring him back to reality.

‘Oh, yes.’ He nodded. ‘Life’s like that, isn’t it? Everything a gamble. One man smokes and drinks all his life and lives to a hundred; another doesn’t smoke and gets cancer at fifty; or a fellow doesn’t drink and dies of a liver complaint. I was at school with a boy who died at sixteen. Just a gamble.’ He stopped then. Tike this thing was when Josh arrived and dam’ near killed himself trying to prove what everyone told him was impossible. When they told him that, he’d point to the benches that terrace so many of the mountain slopes here and get on with shovelling dirt. And he did it with pick and shovel and his own sweat, not like me, having it easy with a machine.’ We had reached the watershed then and were looking down towards Ice Cold and the skeletal shape of the screening plant.

I didn’t say anything and he added, pointing away to the right, towards the headwaters of the Ice Cold Creek, ‘All those benches you see up there above the camp on the shoulder of that mountain… There’s bigger benches on the mountain slopes that ring the basin inside the Gully and a hell of a lot of them came down in that slide. Christ! I’d like to wring that bloody little consultant’s neck. But I hadn’t read up on the geological background of placer gold deposits then. Hadn’t any need to.’ He laughed, that same mirthless, neighing laugh, and after that we walked on in silence until we came to the camp. ‘What’ll it be — tea? Or would you like something stronger? I’ve a bottle of malt I keep for special visitors.’ He smiled thinly.

‘Tea,’ I said. There was a cold wind blowing up here and it was such a comforting thought I could almost feel the warmth of it in my mouth.

He took a bunch of keys from the pocket of his old corduroy trousers and opened the door of the cookhouse. It was well stocked, shelves full of canned food, a sink and draining board, a fridge, a stove with an oven below, and at the other end of it a bare spruce table and two benches. ‘Pretty basic,’ he said, ‘but once you get used to it…’ He filled the kettle from a tank clamped to the wall. ‘You’ve heard from Miriam, you say. When?’

‘About a month ago,’ I said. ‘A letter from the Sheffield House Hotel in Whitehorse, then a postcard from Lakeside Lodge.’

‘But nothing since.’

‘No.’

He sighed, striking a match. ‘For a moment — just for a moment I hoped …’ The stove, like the fridge, was run from a large butane gas cylinder, and when he’d lit it and put the kettle on, he nodded to the table. ‘Sit down. Since you’re here there’s some questions…’

I sat down, watching him as he got the tea things ready. It was extraordinary how changed he looked without the moustache, and the hair long and grey. I made some comment about it and he said, ‘You must have known I dyed my hair. If you’re married to a woman much younger than yourself, then you try to keep up appearances, don’t you?’ He said it sadly, fumbling in his pocket. ‘You got a cigarette?’

I reached for my haversack, found a packet and passed it to him. I also found my pipe and began to fill it. ‘You wouldn’t know about keeping up appearances — yet,’ he went on. ‘You’re young and you just move in, like a young stag when the rutting season’s on. I had a feeling — ’

‘It was only once,’ I said quickly.

He laughed, showing his teeth in what was almost a grimace. ‘But you’d made your mark, eh? She wrote to you.’ He was silent then, standing there staring at the flame under the kettle, his thoughts seeming to drift. ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Stop her?’ I repeated, wondering what he meant.

‘Yes,’ he said, quite angrily. ‘Stop her from coming out here. I’m in enough trouble — ’

‘Why should I?’

He cocked his head on one side, listening. ‘Did you hear anything?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I thought I heard something.’ He moved to the open door, leaning against the jamb of it, his body very still.

I couldn’t hear anything, only the gentle murmur of the stream below. ‘For God’s sake shut it,’ I said. The place was getting like an ice-house. ‘How did you leave England?’ I asked. ‘By boat?’

‘By boat, yes. The ferry from Felixstowe across to Rotterdam, then a flight to ‘For onto out of Schiphol.’ He held up his hand. ‘There! Did you hear it?’

‘What?’

‘The clink of a stone.’

‘It’s the stream,’ I said.

He listened a moment longer, then nodded. ‘Yes, the stream — you’re right. Living virtually alone in a place like this, it gets on your nerves in the end.’ He started to shut the door, but then he said, ‘I’m going to get myself a woolly.’ He was shivering with cold. ‘I build up quite a sweat operating that shovel. Do you want to borrow one?’

‘No, I’m all right.’

He went out, shutting the door behind him, and I sat there, wondering about him and about what advice I was going to give him now that I’d stumbled on his hideout. I had been cold standing in the Gully, but I had my anorak on and the walk up to the camp had warmed me. With the door shut the cookhouse was already beginning to get the chill off it as the gas flared under the kettle.

He was gone longer than I had expected and the kettle was just beginning to whistle when the door burst open and he came in, a paper in his hand, his face quite white, his eyes staring. ‘Did you leave this? I found it under the door. Did you slip it there?’

I stared at him, wondering what the hell he was talking about, why he was so upset. ‘Of course I didn’t.’

‘Who then? Tony? Where would he have got it?’

‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked.

‘Miriam.’ He slammed the door shut, coming across to the table, leaning over me. ‘You sure you didn’t s-slip it under the door?’ He held an envelope out to me. That’s her writing, isn’t it?’

It was addressed: Tom Halliday, Ice Cold Mine, via Haines Junction, Yukon, Canada. ‘You know her writing better than I do,’ I muttered, knowing it was hers and wondering how it had got there. Tony couldn’t have put it there,’ I said. ‘I’d have seen him.’ And I told him my movements.

‘Who then?’ His voice trembled, a note of panic almost.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

He hesitated. Then suddenly he thrust it at me. ‘They’ve got her, the bloody scheming bastards. They’ve got her hidden up somewhere, and now…’ His voice was breaking, his face screwed up, on the edge of tears. ‘Read it,’ he cried. ‘You read it. Then tell me what I ought to do. My God! I never thought …’ And he suddenly collapsed on to the bench beside me and buried his face in his hands.

The kettle had been whistling urgently and he got up again, slowly. ‘If it wasn’t you slipped it under the door, and it wasn’t Tony — who? Do you think that sound I heard…?’ But he shook his head. ‘I’d have seen anybody — anybody as close as that.’ I don’t think he expected me to answer; he was really asking himself the questions as he reached for the tea tin, turned off the gas and poured water into the pot, his movements those of a man in a daze. ‘Sugar?’

I shook my head, staring down at the envelope, the letter underneath it a scribbled scrawl in a neat sloped hand. It was Miriam’s writing all right:

Darling — I was picked up in Vancouver and brought here by boat almost a fortnight ago, just as I thought I had found you a backer for your Stone Slide project. Enclosed is my wedding ring as proof I am held here, surety apparently that you will carry out instructions already given you. ‘More personal reminders’ of my presence here could follow if they don’t hear from you soon. I don’t know who these people are or what their purpose is, but for God’s sake do what it is they want and get me out of here. You are mixed up in something you didn’t tell me about and I am very, very frightened. Love — M.

A steaming mug of tea had appeared at my elbow and I drank it gratefully, the scalding liquid almost burning my mouth as I read that wretched little note through again, still finding it almost unbelievable. And it didn’t sound like Miriam. ‘Where’s the ring? She says she enclosed a ring.’ He held it out to me, a platinum circle that gleamed dully in the light from the dirty window, the pattern so worn it was almost smooth. Probably it had been dictated to her, the last part anyway. ‘Is she right?’ I asked. ‘About you being mixed up in something? You said something about being in trouble.’

‘Did I?’ He had sat himself down beside me. ‘What do I do now? What the hell do I do?’ He was talking to himself again.

‘You’d better tell me what it’s all about,’ I said, still staring down at the letter, wondering how it had got here, where it had come from. Where had she written it? They’d taken her there by boat, she said. But almost anywhere on the Canadian coast could be a boat journey. And who were they? ‘Well?’ I asked.

He shook his head, not saying anything.

‘You’re in trouble and you don’t know what to do. How the hell can I help you if I don’t know what the trouble is?’ His hands were trembling, his eyes wide and staring blankly. He had put on a thick polo-necked sweater, but he was still shivering, his body seemingly stricken with ague, his mind gone into some sort of limbo of its own.

I put my hand on his arm, gripping it hard. ‘Somebody is holding your wife hostage — who? Do you know?’ I had to shout the question at him again before my words registered, and all he did was shake his head. ‘Why?’ I shouted at him. ‘What do they want you to do?’

He shook his head again, not answering.

‘You said you were in trouble — what trouble?’

He rounded on me then, his face distorted. ‘Shut up and let me think, can’t you? I got to think. I got to think — what to do.’ And suddenly he was crying, his nerves all gone to hell and his shoulders heaving to the sobs that shook his whole body.

I picked up the letter, thrusting it under his nose. ‘Read it,’ I said. ‘Read it again. It’s your wife, and she’s in danger. Have you got yourself mixed up in something political — extremists?’

‘Political extremists?’ He looked at me, staring wildly and neighing that silly laugh of his.

Terrorists then?’

He just stared at me. ‘You d-don’t understand,’ he breathed.

‘It’s you that don’t seem able to understand,’ I told him, waving the letter at him. ‘This is Miriam — your wife. She’s in danger, and she’s asking you for help.’

‘Later,’ he mumbled. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

‘I won’t be here later.’

‘Yes you will — I need you.’ He was still mumbling, but his voice had taken on a higher pitch. ‘And M-Miriam — she’ll be all right.’

‘Will she? How do you know?’ And once more I asked him what it was they wanted.

He shook his head, and when I tried to insist, he turned on me, his voice suddenly losing all control as he screamed, ‘You stupid little fornicating bastard, do you think I don’t care? I’m worried sick, so shut up. Shut up, d’you hear, and let me think. Miriam will be all right. I’ll see to that — somehow.’ He said that slowly, getting to his feet and pouring more tea.

I looked at my watch. It was almost three-thirty. But when I said it was time I started back, he insisted I stayed the night. ‘There’s spare bunks, plenty of food, and I need you, Philip.’ He was pleading now. ‘I really do. I need you. There’s legal matters …’ His voice trailed away as he finished his tea, gulping it down as though he was half dead of thirst. ‘It’s the Cascades, you see. The BC property. That’s what they want.’

‘Wolchak?’ I asked.

‘Wolchak?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know who it is.’

‘He mentioned a man named Mandola.’

‘You saw Wolchak, did you?’

I nodded.

‘And that’s how you know about Mandola?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mandola’s one of them — but whether he’s the boss man …’ He gave a little shrug. ‘More tea?’

I shook my head.

He got up, taking the mugs to the sink. ‘I’ll tell Mac to get across to the main track right away. Tony can let Kevin know you’ll be down tomorrow.’ He had reached up to a line of wall hooks hung with old anoraks and mud-stained overalls and oilskins, taking down a hand transmitter and moving to the door. ‘Won’t be long,’ he said. ‘Works better a few hundred yards away on the trail to the Squaw. We’re a bit blocked here for shortwave transmission into the Gully.’ He shut the door and I was left on my own, wondering whether to stay on with him or go down with Tarasconi. There was still time if I went now. I could be back at the Lodge and phoning the police by six at the latest.

But would that help Miriam? I picked up that note and read it again, seeing her shut up in some little hut somewhere on the coast of BC, or it could be in America, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the State of Washington. If only she had been able to tell us what sort of a boat, how long the passage. As it was, I had nothing to tell the police. Her note would merely alert them to Tom’s presence in the Yukon, and it wasn’t for me, his solicitor, to do that when I knew he was in trouble.

I got up and went to the door to knock out my pipe. The wind had dropped and it was less cold. I could see him standing in silhouette against a westering gleam of sun where a bench end slipped over the shoulder of the mountain, the walkie-talkie close against his face, the aerial antenna standing like a stalk growing out of his head.

I refilled my pipe, still uncertain what to do, knowing only that it was Miriam I had to consider, but quite unable to think of anything I could do, except contact the authorities. I saw Tom push the aerial down into the body of the transmitter and start back along the track towards me, and I think at that moment I had almost decided to keep my rendezvous with Tony and get back to the Lodge and a telephone as soon as possible. But then he reached me, his gaunt face drained of colour, a scared look in his eyes. ‘Two men,’ he said. ‘Both with rifles. Mac saw them going down the main track.’

Two! ‘What did they look like?’ I asked.

‘One big, one small. That’s what he said.’

‘But you can’t see the main track from your sluice box.’

‘He was in the mouth of the Gully checking on a small rock fall. Happens all the time. He saw them quite clearly.’

‘Did they see him?’

‘No, he’s quite sure they didn’t. They were in a hurry, walking fast.’

I told him then about the two hunters staying at Lakeside. But when I asked him whether the names Camargo and Lopez meant anything to him he shook his head. ‘Mac’s coming up here now, just as soon as he’s had a word with Tony.’ He said it slowly, almost hesitantly. ‘You can’t be sure,’ he murmured. ‘But if Tony brought them up here…’ And then suddenly he asked me the nationality of the two men staying at the Lodge.

‘South American,’ I said.

We were back in the relative warmth of the cookhouse then and he turned in the act of closing the door, staring at me. ‘How do you know?’ He put the question so reluctantly I had the impression a South American connection was something he didn’t wish to know about.

‘Kevin McKie,’ I said. And then I asked him where else he had been in South America besides Peru.

He shook his head, looking strangely bewildered, so that I had to repeat the question. ‘All over,’ he said. ‘Martina and I, after we were married… You know about Martina, do you?’

‘Miriam told me.’

He nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘She told me after you had disappeared,’ I said.

‘So the two of you — ’ he shrugged. ‘Oh well, I suppose it doesn’t matter now.’ He turned away, shaking his head and moving towards the table where the letter and its envelope still lay. ‘But to answer your question, we sort of did South America — Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, the old Guianas, Brazil and back through the Argentine, Chile and Bolivia. Quite a trip!’ He was standing there, talking to himself, his mind in a daze and trying to lose himself in the past. ‘She was a bitch, of course. Miriam will have told you that. But, oh boy!’ He gave that neighing laugh. ‘If the devil came to tempt me with a wish, that’s what I’d want — that trip all over again … riding, surfing, all those Indian ruins, up the Urubamba, and the hot nights… Jeez! That woman knew how to do it. But yes, she was a bitch, God rot her!’

I didn’t press the matter further, knowing I had all evening to question him. But when Mac arrived, and by his description confirmed the identity of the two men, I began to regret my decision to stay. It was too late then, of course. He had found Tony waiting in the quarry below the rock fall and had told him I wouldn’t be going back to Lakeside that night. He had also asked him whether he had seen the hunters or had seen any truck on his way up from the ford. Tony not liking my question, tell me bugger off. Then he drive away.’ All this said with a smile, though his face was otherwise without expression, the tone of his voice quite impassive.

I have tried several times, while writing this account of what is quite the strangest period of my life, to assess my reactions and behaviour. But all I can say is that it was like being dealt a hand of cards, never knowing what would turn up, only that the joker had to be Miriam. Without her involvement I am quite certain my own actions would have been simple and straightforward. As it was, they appear to have been about as unpredictable as Tom Halliday’s. A legal training had not equipped me to handle matters that did not have a precedent in law. Terrorism, or something akin to it, was quite outside my experience and beyond my ability to handle. I was over six thousand miles from my home base, in a strange country with no real knowledge of either gold or trees. The only thing I think I knew at the time was that Miriam meant more to me than anything else.

I can’t explain it. I was up there in the Yukon, on what for desolation might be described as the roof of the world, alone with her husband and a North American Indian. I hadn’t had an affair with her. Just that one brief sexual encounter, a few casual meetings, mainly social, a dinner party at their house, that interview in my office, then one letter and one postcard. And yet … all that evening I could see her as clearly as if she were sitting there with us, her glinting Titian hair, the wide eyes that were almost turquoise, the cheekbones and the nose, that mouth — lips that I could still feel.

And her husband moving constantly, unable to settle, his nerves taut, his face even more haggard and exhausted than when I had first seen him down there in that bowl beyond the Gully. He wouldn’t tell me what he’d got himself mixed up in. He wouldn’t talk about his troubles. He didn’t trust me. I think that was it. There were legal matters, connected he said with the BC property… He needed my advice, but he wouldn’t confide in me. And time was passing.

We had a meal — bacon, eggs, some tinned beans, a sort of bannock of flour and honey, more mugs of tea. It was after this, after he’d been across to the bunkhouse to ‘freshen up’, that his manner changed, the moroseness seeming to fall away from him. He suddenly became very talkative, his face slightly flushed, his eyes much brighter. I thought perhaps he was a secret drinker, but then he suddenly jumped to his feet, reached into the cupboard above the sink where Mac was doing the washing up and produced a bottle. ‘It’s malt. That’s all I got. I keep it for Kevin. He likes it. I hope you do.’

‘What about you?’ I asked.

‘Me?’ He smiled at me crookedly. ‘I have my own poison. Didn’t Miriam tell you?’ He picked up an undried mug from the draining board, slopped some whisky into it and handed it to me. ‘Glad you came. The girl’s in trouble — my fault. I gave her the names of a few people I know in Vancouver and Victoria, men with money I thought might like a bit of a gold gamble.’ His eyes gleamed almost wickedly. ‘That shock you? Women are sometimes better at that sort of thing… I’ve seen it so often, all over the world, even Muslim women.’ And he added, ‘They must have been keeping tabs on her.

On you, too. Wolchak probably. And when he told them you were on your way out here — a lawyer… Reckon that’s what got them worried.’

His words had been strangely disjointed. But not his thoughts. They were quite logical and clear, and they were centred on Tony Tarasconi. ‘I should have known what the little bastard was up to. But I didn’t, did I? I didn’t know he was mixed up in that sort of world, had contacts…’ His mouth clamped shut. ‘God! I’ve been so blind. But how could I guess? I don’t know the man really. He was half the year away in Medicine Hat or wherever, and I was only here occasionally. How would I know who his friends were? There’s South American finance here and there in mines all over the Yukon, Brazilian mainly. When Kevin told me he might have backing it never occurred to me …’

He sat down suddenly, facing me across the table, talking of an old trail that ran down the east side of Ice Cold to a ford across the Squaw just above the point where the two creeks met. Tarasconi’s claim was on the far side of the Squaw, a little downstream of the ford. If the two South Americans were at his camp, then we could question them there; otherwise we’d borrow Tarasconi’s pick-up and catch up with them at Lakeside. ‘Then we’ll drive over to White-horse — maybe Jonny will have heard something, otherwise we take the ferry south and fly into the Cascades.’ He had friends, he said, among the floatplane pilots. ‘I’ll scrounge a flight, and when we’ve talked to Thor Olsen … Well, we’ll see. He’s half Finn, half Lap. He looks after the logging camp, a sort of caretaker. His grandfather came over with the reindeer they drove up the Dalton Trail to Dawson in an effort to relieve the famine. That was the first year of the gold rush. He’ll know if anything odd has been happening down around the Halliday Arm. That’s the inlet leads up to the Cascades.’

By then he had convinced himself that Miriam was being held either at the logging camp or at one of the outlying float-houses. ‘They’re built on logs and towed around,’ he said. ‘Sort of water caravans, but all solid fir and cedar logs.’

He wouldn’t tell me why he thought she might be there. Every time I broached the subject he would fall silent, a sudden moroseness coming over him, as though a curtain had been clamped down blanking out his mind.

We turned in shortly after nine with an alarm clock set for three in the morning. He had produced an old sleeping bag for me, but I still kept my clothes on, for the blankets on the bunk opposite his were damp, the air in the accommodation unit little above freezing. But it wasn’t the bitter cold that kept me from sleeping. It was the knowledge that I was involved in something I didn’t understand and going along with a man who not only refused to take me into his confidence, but seemed frightened half out of his wits. I was thinking over the sequence of events since I had caught the CP Air flight to Whitehorse, that note from Miriam running round and round in my head, and then I was woken with the light of a torch in my face and his voice saying, ‘Wake up! The alarm’s just gone.’

Tea and biscuits, and then we were off. It was cold and very still, the sky clear and the stars diamond bright, the trail quite visible as soon as our eyes became accustomed to the night. It followed the contour line of the mountain, running above the placer plant, then dipping quite sharply. Soon we were below the timber line, small sticks at first, but the scrub becoming gradually taller and thicker. Tom was leading, a rifle slung over his back. ‘Just in case we meet a grizzly.’ And he had grinned at me, his eyes gleaming and his teeth white in the starlight. Later, as the timber became taller and the vegetation more dense, we had to use our torches. He had said it was about six miles and shouldn’t take us more than two hours. In fact, we reached the Squaw just after five, the water quite shallow where we forded it, and ten minutes later we were approaching the Tarasconi claim along a well-developed track.

It was the fire we saw first. We turned a bend and the darkness ahead glowed with the orange flicker of flames. The camp was beside the grey shingle bed of a tributary stream. There was a battered-looking caravan jacked up on boulders, a log store shed, an old tent with a small bucket tractor close by, and two pick-up trucks side by side and facing downstream. The camp was virtually dismantled for the winter and they were sleeping in the open. We could see their figures, three of them rolled tight in their sleeping bags close beside the fire.

Tom stopped. ‘So he did bring them here.’ Again that hesitancy and his voice trembling. His hands searched his pocket. ‘You got any paper on you? A dollar note — anything?’ He had pulled me back into the shelter of some small spruce, his tone urgent.

I was shivering then, my feet wet from fording the Squaw and very cold. A niggling little breeze breathed icily from off the heights. I felt in my hip pocket and pulled out the wad of Canadian currency I had obtained in Vancouver, wondering what the hell he wanted money for. ‘How much?’ I held it out to him.

‘Anything — doesn’t matter.’ He seized a ten-dollar bill, his fingers trembling; then he was gone, into the bushes. I saw the flash of his torch, and after a while I heard him sniffing. It was more like a snort really, then silence. A moment later he emerged. He didn’t say anything, just handed the note back. It was curled up now as though it had been rolled into a tight tube.

It dawned on me then — ‘Cocaine?’ I asked him.

He gave what sounded like a giggle. ‘A three-and-three, that’s all, and it’s well cut. You want some? I’ve still got a little left.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, of course not.’

‘You missed something. Better than alcohol if you’re properly supplied and do it right.’ This in a low whisper, the words running together.

‘You trying to get high?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’ He gave that little giggle again. ‘What do you expect? Weeks of solitude, then you — and right on your heels those two bastards. And now … I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ I whispered. It had become slurred and very excited. ‘What haven’t you done before?’

‘Never mind. Just do as I say.’ His teeth showed and I sensed a wildness in him, his breath smoking in the raw air. ‘Come on now. Let’s get it over with.’ His hand had fastened on my arm, his grip convulsive as he dragged me forward.

‘What are you going to do?’ I was scared of him now.

Talk to them. I’ve got to talk to them.’ And suddenly he had moved out into the open, a crouched run that took him across the banked-up debris of the old streambed. He had almost reached the fire, and I was following him, when one of the recumbent figures stirred, sat up, then began struggling to free his arms from his sleeping bag. It was the smaller of the two South Americans, the man named Lopez, and he was reaching inside his anorak when Tom yelled, ‘Don’t move!’, repeating it in Spanish — ‘No se mueva!’ I stopped then, seeing the scene like a film in slow motion, the three figures lit by the red glow of the embers and all of them in movement, Lopez with his hand coming clear of his anorak, the dull gun metal glinting redly, the big man’s bald head like polished ivory as his hand closed on the rifle beside him, and Tony Tarasconi, his eyes wide and his mouth open. And then the sharp crack of a gun, the smack of a bullet striking sparks on a rock and the whine of its ricochet, all the figures suddenly frozen into stillness and Tom’s voice shouting wildly, ‘Drop it! Sueltelo!’ And then to me, sharply over his shoulder — ‘Get their guns. Quick. And don’t get in the way.’

He was round the fire then, and while I was retrieving the gun Lopez had dropped, he prodded the big man in the belly, demanding to know who had sent them. ‘Did you bring this?’ He pulled Miriam’s note from the pocket of his anorak, thrusting it under the man’s nose. ‘Well, did you? It was left at Ice Cold, pushed under the bunkhouse door some time yesterday.’

It was then that the little man jumped to his feet with the speed of a cat, hands clawing and gripping hold of my arm. The next thing I knew his shoulder thudded into my ribs and I was flung to the ground. I looked up and he was standing over me, reaching down for the gun I had dropped, the big man stepping back and Tom turning. I saw it all as an instant flash, the three of them all caught in violent motion, their faces lit by the fire. Tom let out a yell, something in Spanish, the barrel of his rifle slamming home, his knee coming up as the big man bent double with a gasp. There was a gurgling cry, the body writhing on the ground an arm’s length from me, the dark, bearded face contorted with pain, the bald head running with sweat. ‘Hold it! Don’t move!’ The rifle was pointed at the man’s belly, Tom’s hand on the trigger, and the man above me frozen into stillness as the words were repeated in Spanish. ‘Get his gun.’ And when I didn’t move, Tom yelled at me, ‘Get it, d’you hear!’

I scrambled to my feet then and grabbed at the man’s arm, wrenching it from his grasp, a nasty little black-metalled automatic. As I slipped it into my pocket Tom bent down, his rifle still jabbed into the big man’s belly; he zipped open the man’s parka, reaching down for the automatic in its armpit holder. I felt suddenly dazed, conscious of Tony Tarasconi, lit by a flicker of flame, standing frozen into stillness halfway to the trucks. And all the time Tom talking, questions in Spanish, the barrel of his rifle thrust into the body at his feet, the man mouthing replies.

Finally he stood back. ‘You know about knots. Tie them up,’ he told me and called to Tarasconi to get some rope. He hadn’t got the answers he wanted and he was high on coke, his mood dangerous. But there seemed no alternative so I did what he asked, Tony handing me the ropes, his hands trembling and his eyes so large with fear they seemed to be starting out of his head. As soon as they were roped, Tom turned the big man over on his side, and with that crumpled paper in his hand, began yanking on the rope linking wrists to ankles, repeating over and over again — ‘De donde lo consiguio usted? Quien les mando? Camargo — Digame donde — donde — quien les mando?’ Finally he turned his attention to the other man. ‘Your name Lopez?’

The little man nodded and began to squirm away.

‘Ese tnensaje. De donde lo consiguio? Quien les mando?’ He repeated the question several times. Then suddenly he went over to the fire, selected a half-burned length of wood and turned back to Lopez, who screamed, ‘No. No. No lo haga usted.’ ‘You can’t do it.’ My voice sounded hoarse.

He rounded on me then, his eyes blazing — ‘So her life doesn’t rate against this little rat. You don’t care — ‘ I started to protest, but he interrupted, speaking very quietly — ‘All right then. Let’s see you do it.’ And he held the glowing brand out to me. ‘Better still, pick the little shit up and dump him in the fire. Well?’ He laughed, watching me. ‘So you don’t care where she is. Well, I do — ‘ And he turned, thrusting the ember down towards the man’s face.

‘No lo se, no lo se.’ Lopez was suddenly pouring out an incomprehensible spate of words. He had rolled over and was facing Camargo. Tom joined in, a babble of voices, the three of them all talking at once, their faces lit by the glow of that ember, and I just stood there. I wasn’t thinking of the two men lying on the ground. I was thinking of Tom, what he had been through to bring him to this pitch of desperation… And Miriam. What the hell had he got himself mixed up in, that two gunmen had come north to the Yukon looking for him, bringing him that note from his wife. Bogota … There was Lopez mentioning it again, the big man answering him. Bogota was Colombia, and Colombia was the land of Raleigh’s Eldorado. ‘What are they saying? Where is she?’

Tom shook his head, turning away in disgust. ‘He doesn’t know.’ He tossed the ember back into the fire. ‘Neither of them know.’ His voice sounded bitter and despondent. ‘Let’s get going. You got the key of their truck?’

‘No.’

He bent over Camargo, searching his pockets. Tony began to slip away into the shadows, but he stopped him. The keys of your truck, too.’ He took them and stood for a moment staring down at the two Colombians. They were hired in Bogota and flew up to San Francisco. That’s where they were given Miriam’s note. In a bar down by Fisherman’s Wharf. A man they’d never seen before and he didn’t give his name. Handed them the note and gave them verbal instructions, details of an account they could draw on at the Bank of Canada office in Vancouver, and that’s about all they can tell us, except that they were to report my movements; yours, too, if you came up here.’ He turned to Tony. ‘You’re coming with us. A nice long walk, and while you’re walking, and those two hoodlums are chewing on their ropes, you can be thinking about the Gully and how it’s got you into dangerous company, eh?’ He was laughing.

‘Who do they report to?’ I asked.

‘Just a telephone number.’ He repeated it and I wrote it down, a Bella Coola number.

‘No name?’

‘No.’

‘And the people who hired them didn’t say why they were being sent up here?’

He shook his head. ‘They don’t know anything.’ He was standing there, looking dazed. And yet it seemed obvious. ‘It’s the Gully they want. Isn’t that right?’ I asked. ‘That second claim your father acquired.’ But it was beyond belief that he should have become mentally unbalanced and disappeared, all because the mine he’d lived on all his life had run out of gold, when he had a second mine still undeveloped.

‘Gold?’ He stared at me as though he couldn’t believe it. Then he was laughing again, quite uncontrollably, the sound of it echoing back from the rocks above, and his voice, half-merged with the murmur of water in the creek bed, saying, ‘So it’s true — Miriam didn’t write to you from Vancouver; you really don’t know.’