Quicksilver

6

We busied ourselves closing up packs, shouldering them, fastening hip belts.

Shelburne set off in the lead.

We fell in.

We followed our ledge to the far end of the bedrock and then plunged into ponderosa pines and oaks and red-limbed madrone. A boy could play hide and seek in those woods. I wondered if Henry Shelburne had ever played such innocent games.

As we hiked, Robert Shelburne surveyed the woods, shouting his brother’s name once or twice, but there was nobody playing hide and seek.

Our wooded trail climbed gently, in a wide arc, eventually giving out onto the true ridge, a broad forested crest.

Here, we intersected a marked trail, the Ridge Trail. We’d studied and inked the map of this territory back in the lab.

Out in the field, I got my bearings.

This was the divide between the canyons of the Middle and the South Yuba Rivers, muscular waterways flowing east-west, coming down from the High Sierra. The rivers were transected by north-south metamorphic belts shot through, here and there, with igneous dikes.

Shelburne said, “We used to call this the Trail of Trial and Error.”

We were in the twenty-square-mile neighborhood that the Shelburne family had marked, by trial and error, one generation after the other.

We were following the path of a huge Tertiary channel cut by the ancestral Yuba River.

The deep blue lead.

Now deeply buried, for the most part.

I tried to see it through Henry’s eyes, the amateur geologist, the squint-eyed teenager in the tricked-up Old West Photo, and before that the kid fed legends with his breakfast cereal.

So how did Dad Shelburne tell the tale?

I gave it a shot.

Once upon a time, Henry, a great river came from a distant land, carrying a peculiar quartz that it ripped from bedrock veins along its journey, veins gorged with gold — and here, I figured, Henry can’t contain himself and interrupts to say nuggets? And Dad Shelburne says shut up kid and listen — at least that’s the way my dad would have told it, if my Henry had interrupted. And Henry shuts up and Dad continues. The long-ago quartz-carrying river was so strong and mighty that it carved a deep channel and laid down its load. And then volcanoes erupted — boom boom boom — sound effects, Henry, keep your attention on what comes next — and the lava buried the ancient river. Oh no, Henry says, the river is gone, all that gold gone. Dad snorts. Be a little man, kid, the gold’s not gone. Listen up: a new age comes and the land rises up like a trapdoor opening and lifts the old river channel up high. And Henry lifts his chin and looks up. No no, Dad says, you can’t see it yet, not until new rivers are born. Here’s where it cuts to the chase: the new rivers cut deep new canyons in the lost land, down through the lava deposits, and they slice open parts of the old river channel and lay bare the auriferous gravels. How about that, kid? Auriferous means gold-bearing, a little prospecting lesson for you, wouldn’t hurt you to start learning this stuff if you want in on the family legend. Now finish your damn cereal before the school bus comes.

That’s the way I imagined Henry learned it.

Who says there’s no romance in my soul?

The story of the ancient rivers played out up and down the Mother Lode, producing many gold-bearing channels, but this channel of the ancient Yuba was the biggest, the richest, the most legendary.

Once upon a time.

I’d been doing quite a bit of reading.

Now, all that remained visible of this ancient channel and its tributaries were interrupted fragments that cropped out here and there, most of them already found and laid bare by the miners. Still, the blue lead was said to crop out in all kinds of unthought-of places, on the ridge tops or the gouged flanks that ran down to the river bottoms.

Back in the lab at the map table Robert Shelburne had shown us the tributary his grandfather explored, the Shelburne family’s own deep blue lead.

We’d drawn bullseyes on the map, targets along the Shelburne blue lead where the geology indicated a possible contact zone between the slate and the diorite. It was a coin toss where to begin on the route because there were targets at either end and in between. It was a coin toss where Henry, this time, would have begun.

The Trail of Trial and Error, certainly, for us.

Out here, in the field, we were following the Shelburne offshoot that intersected the main channel and then went its own way.

Once upon a time, Henry my little crusader, your grandfather found a gold-specked chunk of ore with black carbon crosses in its heart.

Somewhere along this route.

We traveled more slowly now, eyeing the geology.

The chill breeze accompanied us, bringing the ozone odor of impending rain.

The ground underfoot was hard andesite breccia, the cemented remains of the lava flows that had buried the ancient rivers. We found a hard spine of oxide-stained quartz blading out of the ground, sign of an ancient channel buried somewhere nearby.

We picked up pieces of diorite float, rock fragments that had weathered off their parent and traveled by water or wind or gravity.

We followed the float to a place where a stream had cut back and exposed layers of weathered slate. We found a hornfels zone but the hornfels was innocent of Maltese crosses.

We looked for signs of Henry.

Listening.

The breeze fingered through the pines and oaks that cloaked the trail, ruffling, whispering. Nothing more.

We marked off the target on our map and continued the hunt.

The trail dipped down a little gully, an eroded funnel of decomposed rock. Down at the bottom, vegetation overtook us. Thickets of sugar and digger pine, tangles of manzanita and toyon and other bushes I could not identify.

And, again, there was that odd scent.

There was a rustling sound.

I nearly called out Henry’s name. A ground squirrel appeared, and disappeared. I was glad to have held my tongue. I didn’t even try to silence the voice in my head. Come out come out wherever you are. I’d played hide and seek with my Henry, usually bored out of my mind because I considered myself too old for such games, and because Henry was too young to hide well. And because my mom and dad and my older brother and I all told Henry at least once a day to be careful, and so I always mixed worry in with the boredom. Usually, I’d pretend not to be able to find him. I’d finally yell, come out come out wherever you are. And you’d think he’d won the lottery.

Our trail wound back up the contour and we achieved a higher ridge top without incident.

Still wooded up here, hardly a view worth achieving, but then again my mountains of choice were the abrupt eastern Sierras where a summit was not easily achieved but once achieved would slay you with the view.

We paused. We’d reached a fork in our trail. The Shelburne family offshoot tangled with other offshoots of the main blue lead and there were two paths to take us where we needed to go.

Walter said, “Which way?”

“The fastest way,” Shelburne said, taking the high path.

I fell in.

Walter, behind me, muttered something.

Wanted to avoid this, I thought he’d said.

I turned.

He waved me onward.

I figured I knew what lay ahead.

The trail began to descend and in another fifteen minutes we found ourselves funneled onto a narrow path that traversed a steep slope. We were yet again closed in by the woods. It was easy going, gentle hiking, but my antennae were now tuned to Walter and I was hiking brittle. We penetrated a scented grove of cedar and Doug fir and a thicket of manzanita, in which anyone might have hidden, and then we came upon a wide gully that exposed a pitch of cross-bedded gravelly sandstone, upon which my boots slipped, shotgunning gravel.

“Careful,” Shelburne called, ahead of me.

“Careful,” I called to Walter, behind me.

Henry hadn’t called careful when he’d accidentally kicked rocks off the ledge. If it had been Henry, and not a squirrel.

The trail twisted out of the woods.

The trail bent sharply and took us to a precipice that gave a view of what lay below.

I halted. Slayed.

I’d seen it mapped, on paper an elliptic of dotted pale pink against a field of green, but the map was utterly two-dimensional. Walter knew it by experience. He’d been here once before. Why hadn’t he warned me? Why hadn’t he said, you’re going to have to brace yourself?

Because a warning was not enough.

There were no words for what I saw down below. I simply had no words.