Quicksilver

10

We packed up.

There was no discussion about continuing, or not continuing. For all its ugliness, the information about Shelburne’s father was not, I had to admit, relevant. The fact that Shelburne’s father died water-sampling on the river where he used to hunt gold was correlative, not causative. The fact that Henry left a memorial or a message was perhaps pertinent, but it was aimed at Robert. Once we found Henry, it was going to become Robert’s predicament. He’d take it from there.

We set off, following the narrow trail upriver to a place where the water ran free of catch-pools, and because we were low on potable water we decided to stop. We got out our bottles and filtering kits. Shelburne’s pricey model and our bargain squeeze-bag filter both did the job, straining out gut-sickening bugs like Giardia. Either model should in theory filter out microscopic mercury. I would have paid for a filter that put that in writing.

Resupplied, we moved on.

The trail again left the river and began to climb. As I plodded uphill I scanned the cliff tops, thinking that if I were Henry Shelburne and I’d been leaving messages for my brother I’d sure want to see his reaction. There were a hundred places to view that site from the cliff tops. But that would take time, to leave the message, to scout the viewpoints. To rent a horse, if he had rented a horse to transport the flask. And it was the question of time that bugged me. Robert Shelburne said his brother left three days ago. If we assumed that Henry was now shadowing us, an assumption that seemed creepily reasonable, then had he abandoned the hunt for the source of the rock? Or had he already found it? Amateur geologist — barely three days in the field if you leave aside travel time from the boarding house to the wild — bam bam bam and he goes straight to the source? I supposed that was possible. This was, after all, his territory.

Or perhaps he was long gone from the South Yuba, leaving us to our own devices.

The trail roughened and I abandoned timetables and paid attention to the ground beneath my feet.

And then our route traversed a gashed canyon gully and we detoured down a spur trail to the river’s gravel bank in order to do some sampling. Small cobbles of quartz and chert chinked underfoot. Of more interest was the fractured bedrock near the river’s edge, which was emplaced with jade-green serpentine.

Now we were getting somewhere.

Walter pointed out the rock face. “That’s serpentine. Its soils are associated with gold.”

Shelburne looked. “That green rock? Never knew I should care.”

“Good heavens man, it’s the state rock of California.”

“There’s a state rock?”

I said, “You’d think the state rock would be gold.”

Shelburne smiled, as if I’d spoken entirely in jest.

We moved on, up and over another spiny ridge. Then back down to the river bank, monitoring the cliff tops, watching the sky — how far will we get before we have to make camp, before the rain or the night comes?

The clouds answered, coalescing to form a seamless roof.

Hurry up.

And then, down another spur trail, at a little pool and riffle system, Walter picked up a large pebble and pursed his lips. He took out his magnifier. He studied the pebble under the twenty-power lens for a good minute, and then he passed the lens and the pebble to me. I had a look. It was black, fine-grained, with the luster of mica and a hackly fracture. It was hard, flinty. I went low-tech, took a steel nail from my pocket and dragged it across the surface. It did not scratch. Its shape was subangular, the edges fairly rounded by transport down the river.

I nodded and passed it back to Walter because he carried the high-tech tool.

He already had it out of his pack. The handheld XRF spectrometer looks like a hair dryer but shoots like a gun, firing X-rays at the target, exciting the atoms to display their elemental ID. He laid the pebble on the ground. He put the snout of the XRF to the rock and read the results on the display screen. “Chemically speaking,” he said, “woo-hoo.”

I said, to Shelburne, “He means that’s a probable match to our hornfels.”

Shelburne picked up the pebble. Turned it over and over. “There’s no cross.”

“Could be a question of random chiastolite distribution in the parent rock.”

Walter said, “She means, we keep going.”

Thunder sounded, echoing down the canyon.

We pushed on. We did not have to go far. Ten minutes later, following the bouldery river bank, we hit the mother lode.

The first angular black pebble I picked up was studded with tiny white crystals that were themselves intruded by black carbonaceous inclusions disposed in the form of a cross. My mouth went dry. Here it was. We’d seen its like in the lab, looking at the angular black chiastolite hornfels embedded in the ore sample. We’d done the geology. We’d set out to find its brother in the field. We’d hypothesized where to find it. And find it we did. Here it was, a little stone in the river. Better than gold.

I passed it to Walter. He eyeballed it and his face creased into a smile and then he brought out the XRF to confirm. He said, “Woo-hoo, in spades.”

I said, to Shelburne, “We’ve found the neighborhood.”

“So where to now?” Shelburne asked.

Walter turned from the river and looked up the offshoot side canyon.

I followed suit. It was a narrow canyon showing abrupt walls polished to a glacial sheen, so steep as not to be haired over with vegetation. I moved to examine the near wall, a slab of intertonguing slates and cherts and metasandstones. Here was the rock formation we’d been aiming for, the Shoo Fly Formation. I did not know the provenance of that name. Rock units are usually named after a patch of the local geography and I guessed some hapless geographer had been swatting flies when he named this unit. I took a moment to celebrate the coolness of geological names, to ease the tensions of the hunt.

A thin creek fed out of Shoo Fly Canyon — as I decided to name it — meeting the South Yuba River.

A confluence of two waterways.

We were in the neighborhood and now the question became, which way to go?

The float could have come down the Yuba from a source farther up the main canyon, or it could have come down the thin creek from a source up Shoo Fly Canyon. Or perhaps — however unlikely and undesirable — it could have come from both waterways.

Walter and I sampled a dozen yards farther up the South Yuba and then a dozen yards up Shoo Fly Creek. We struck out on the Yuba. We struck cross-studded float on the side canyon creek.

Life just got simpler.

We headed up Shoo Fly Canyon.

We began to find a new and interesting addition to the float, salt-and-pepper colored diorite.

Shelburne shouted “Henry!”

I thought, he’s expecting a reply. I nearly did, myself. We were getting closer. We all sensed it. We were closing in on the contact zone between the slate and a diorite dike, birthplace of chiastolite hornfels. We were in range of the address and the question would then become, is Henry living there right now?

We moved slowly because there was no trail, no path, just a rock-hopping contour up the creek. We stopped twice to sample because there were two skinnier side canyons that fed creeklets down into Shoo Fly creek and we did not want to miss a turnoff.

More problematic, the slate-gray sky was darkening by the yard.

And then it began to rain.

We dug out ponchos and covered our heads and our packs with urethane-coated nylon. The clouds heaved and the rain hardened. We pussyfooted, now, slipping on wet rock and clay soil turned to slickenside. And then we were no longer searching for float, we were hunting a flat spot to anchor and wait out the rain. If need be, to set up tents. And then Shelburne said there’s old mining tunnels all the hell over the place, and within another five minutes we indeed came upon the black mouth of a tunnel.

I looked at Shelburne.

He nodded. As he’d said.

This tunnel cut into a sturdy stretch of the rockwall and, peeking inside, we saw that it was a straight-shot gullet, empty and dry.

Walter retrieved the mini-G gas detector from my pack and went into the tunnel. He came out with an upraised thumb.

We moved in.

As we shucked our packs and dripping ponchos, I reflected on the fact that we’d taken shelter in a tunnel cut into the general neighborhood of the Shelburne family offshoot of the deep blue lead. If this were the Dogtown television show, we’d prospect the gullet and encounter the legendary blue.

Instead, we huddled near the mouth and watched the flux of rain and then, shit, sheet lightning smeared the rock of the gorge.

The Shoo Fly Formation lit up like Christmas.