‘Oh, he was real popular — everyone he met, they liked him.’
‘So if he’d come over here he would have been recognized instantly.’
He hesitated, the dark eyes suddenly wary. ‘Sure. If he’d flown in to Whitehorse, the buzz would have been half over town in no rime. Most of them up at the airport knew him.’
So he wasn’t here. I had vaguely hoped… but the RCMP would have known and they would have notified our local police. Perhaps his son was right and he was dead. ‘Has Brian Halliday been in touch with you?’ I asked, thinking that perhaps he hadn’t headed for the Cascades, but had come up here, as Miriam had done, to see the mine for himself.
‘No.’
‘He’s not in the Yukon?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘And he hasn’t written to you?’
‘No.’
All the time I had been talking to him, from the moment I had knocked on the door of his trailer, I had been conscious of a block, a lack of openness. He hadn’t volunteered anything. Maybe it was the north. I was used to a different kind of people. If he were part Indian, that might account for the secretiveness. But not the nervousness. Human nature couldn’t be all that different up here, even allowing for a racial mix. The man was on edge. And yet he had been perfectly open about the mine. He’d answered my questions about that quite freely, but he hadn’t wanted me to go there. Why? What had he got to hide? ‘You mentioned a gully,’ I said. ‘Stone Slide.’
He nodded.
‘You think there’s gold there?’
‘There’s traces. That’s all I know.’ And then his eyes suddenly brightened, his voice rising on a note of excitement as he said, ‘But there’s gold there, sure.’ And he went on to explain how the bed of Ice Cold Creek swung away into a narrow valley with benched sides, and at the point where it swung away an old stream bed came in from the right that was all boulders, the mountain beyond gashed by a slide that had opened up a gully big as Hastings Street in the middle of Vancouver… ‘I’ve panned there, in a silted pool after heavy rain brought water flooding through the gully. There’s gold there all right. Now, if you could persuade — ‘ He stopped there, a sudden wary look. That’s the way we should have gone. The mountain above is heavily benched, the slide cutting right across the benches. Seven, eight years ago, that’s when we reached the Stone Slide junction, but the consultant Tom called in said the prospect was too small. He advised continuing on up the main valley, so we kept to the Creek and in no time at all we were screening double the amount of rock and silt for the same yield.’ He hesitated, staring past me to the window. ‘We got most all of a million dollars’ worth of equipment up there, just rotting its guts out. Now if you were to talk somebody into moving the screening plant back down to the junction with Stone Slide — Mrs Halliday, whoever it is that’s got the necessary cash …’
He was still talking about his dream of taking a ‘flyer’, as he put it, at the gully area when Jim Edmundson came back for me. He didn’t get out of the cab, just wound down his window. ‘Hey, Jonny,’ he called, ‘you got a caretaker up at that mine of yours?’
‘Caretaker? How d’you mean?’ He looked startled. ‘Who says I got a caretaker up there?’
‘Matt Lloyd. He was down at Dezadeash a few days back.’
‘What for?’
‘Two men from across the border. They spent a night at Lakeside Lodge. Hunters, they said, but Kevin didn’t like the look of them, so he phoned the RCMP post at Haines Junction. Mart’s report says they had game licences and one of our people went up the Ice Cold and Squaw Creeks to check they hadn’t been hunting inside of Kluane National Park.’
‘Ice Cold is just outside the Kluane boundary.’
‘Sure. But he thought they might be shacked up there as a convenient stepping-off point for hunting expeditions into Park territory. In fact, as he drove past your screening plant he thought he saw somebody moving up by the hut where you have the table that does the final screening. Nobody answered his calls but there were fresh footprints in the mud by the latrine, and by the doorway of the bunk hut.’
‘The huts are all locked,’ Epinard said quickly.
‘Yes, they were locked.’
‘You say he thought he saw somebody. If he caught only a glimpse, then it could have been a trick of the light, a bird or a deer. We get deer up there.’
‘That doesn’t explain the footprints.’
‘Could have been those hunters.’
Edmundson nodded. ‘Could be.’ He turned to me. ‘You ready? As it is, it’ll be just about dark before we get in.’
I suggested to Epinard that he get the Italian to take me up to the mine. He said he’d try, but he didn’t sound very sure. ‘If not, I’ll drive in on my own,’ I told him as I climbed into the Parks truck.
He stepped out into the rain then. ‘I wouldn’t do that. The track will be thick with mud, very tricky. Some nasty drops, and after all this rain …’ His voice was lost in the roar of the engine. ‘I’ll be at the Lodge tomorrow night,’ I yelled to him as we pulled away, leaving him standing there in the rain, his eyes wide, his mouth open as though shouting something.
A few miles and we were at the junction of the Klondike Highway where it follows the Yukon River north to Dawson. We headed west past the tiny settlement of Takhini Crossing. We were on dirt then, the tyres thrumming on the hard, impacted surface, the windscreen wipers flicking back and forth. Ahead of us, the Alaska Highway ran like a great swordthrust, the spruce a black wall on either side, the occasional log cabin surrounded by wheel tracks in a muddy clearing, a horse or two grazing on the broad road verge, that was all, the telegraph poles either fallen or leaning drunkenly without wires, the glimpse of reflector dishes at intervals marking the microwave technology that had superseded them, and the rain incessant.
Hardly a vehicle passed us, the clouds low and driving curtains of cloud mist blotting everything out except the endless black of the spruce on either side. The truck’s cabinet was overheated and my eyes became heavy with staring into the void ahead, the white posts of the distance markers sliding past, the emptiness and the loneliness of the country taking hold. I began to have an odd feeling that Tom Halliday was with me, that we were in some way linked together. He would have come down this road, heading for Dezadeach and Dalton’s Post, going up to the mine to fish the Creek or stalk moose in the flats.
He may have been a bit of a playboy, but he was still a part of this country. Epinard had made that clear, so now did Jim Edmundson: ‘Most everybody around here knows about Josh Halliday and the Ice Cold mine.’ And he had told me something then that Tom had never mentioned. A few years after his father had struck gold at Ice Cold Creek he had started taking it out through Dawson instead of Haines. This was when Silver City, the trading post at the head of Lake Kluane, was booming on the back of the placer gold fields of the Kluane Lake district. ‘You can still see the log buildings,’ he said, ‘the old smithy, the lines of stabling, the roadhouse, and the barracks of the North West Mounted Police, which was what the Mounties were called then.’ It was just north of Silver City that he’d run across Lucky Carlos Despera again. There’d been a fight and he had left him lying unconscious where the trail ran close above the lake. Later he had gone back with some friends and found Despera’s body lying in the water.
‘Dead?’ I asked him.
‘Yup. And the story is Despera had a daughter, by some Indian woman he’d been going with. She was born after his death and Josh Halliday sent the two of them down to Vancouver.’ He looked at me then, a sideways glance — ‘She married an Italian.’ And he had added, very quickly, ‘We got an awful mixture of races out here. There’s Indians, of course, and Scots.’ He laughed. ‘BC was practically run by Scotsmen in the early days. When the Canadian Pacific and the National were pushed through the Rockies — Italians, Poles, Germans, Irish, all sorts of refugees helped to build those railways. Then the mines brought Cornishmen from England, Welsh miners, too.’