Quicksilver

13

We headed upcanyon.

We traveled like thieves in the night, mindful of every truck-sized boulder that could hide a man. We scanned the cliff tops. We saw fog-wrapped trees that looked more human than arboreal.

It was not easy hiking.

We followed the creek, on the lookout for scat that would promise a deer trail or bear trail up ahead, but as with yesterday’s hike there was no trail, no path, just the boulders and gravel and the odd patch of fog-slicked clay soil.

Walter slipped on a wet rock, and cursed.

“You okay?”

“Could be worse.”

All right then. We had a name for this trek. It Could Be Worse.

At a promising riffle in the creek, we stopped to sample. I ventured out on a wedge of slick boulders, courting balance, and was rewarded with two pieces of chiastolite hornfels float. A mineral pledge that we were on the right track.

Getting better.

The way grew rockier, spinier, and I jammed my right boot into a crevice and ignited the talus-bruise from yesterday’s hike. Weeks ago, it felt like. The top of my foot throbbed.

But it could be very much worse.

Farther along we came to an incursion into the northeast wall of Shoo Fly Canyon. It was a skinny side canyon, feeding a skinny creek down into our creek. We sampled another few dozen yards up Shoo Fly Creek and determined that the now-familiar hornfels float was no longer to be found. We retreated to the confluence with the side canyon and sampled up that way, and we found our float again, same old same old salt-and-pepper diorite and cross-studded hornfels. We were too skittish to say much in the way of woo-hoo.

We simply nodded at one another and started the hike up Skinny Canyon.

Scanning the cliff tops. Gingerly navigating the rocky banks of the creek. Walking on Shoo Fly eggs.

Same old same old.

Farther up Skinny Creek the float was more abundant, the edges of the hornfels sharper — barely rounded by transport. Not transported far, at all, from the source.

And then the canyon made a little bend and precipitously narrowed, a dozen yards ahead where the rock walls closed in and formed a V-notch.

My heartbeat ramped up. Up there was something new.

A thumb of rock stood at the notch, webbed to the right-hand wall.

We crept forward carefully, quietly, thieves in the night.

We halted at the thumb. Waiting, listening. Straining to hear what, if anything, was occurring beyond that notch. Nothing, it seemed.

We had all the time in the world to take out our hand lenses and glass the thumb to identify the white and black minerals as the constituents of diorite. We turned our attention to the wall and took note that the familiar bands of cherts and metasandstones and gray-green slates had a new member, a lens of darker-gray slate flecked with black spots like an Appaloosa horse.

I considered the rocks. If I were a young intrusive diorite dike and heated my way into the old Shoo Fly Formation, this is what I would look like. If I wanted to cook up some hornfels, this would be my neighborhood. If I wished to include Maltese crosses in my hornfels, I’d roast those carbonaceous spots in the slate.

If I were Henry hunting the family legend, this is what I would see.

Walter grunted. “We’re in fat city.”

“Nearly.”

We’d found the general contact zone but not the hornfels itself. Fat city, perhaps, was on the other side of the notch.

“Then shall we?” Walter moved.

I said, “Wait.”

He stopped.

“Do you smell something?”

It was a faint odor, drifting through the fog, drifting our way, so faint that it took Walter a full minute to acknowledge it.

“Mountain misery,” he finally said.

“And smoke.”

We looked at one another.

I said, “Do you want to continue?”

“Let’s just nip through the notch and see what we can see. And then we can figure out what to do next.”

A sketchy plan. But I did not have a better one.

I followed Walter through the notch.