Feet had worn a path in the rock to a viewpoint. When I reached it I could see the road stretching away to the southeast and in the distance the gleam of water. ‘That’s Dezadeash Lake,’ she said.
Less than an hour later we were at the Lodge and Kevin McKie was telling me there was no way I could get up to the mine. ‘There’s been a slide and the track’s impassable.’ He advised me to return with Jean Edmundson to Haines Junction and forget all about Ice Cold Creek. ‘It’s finished. Tom knew that, so what’s the point?’
‘I just wanted to be sure,’ I said, watching his hands. We were in the restaurant and they were gripped tight on the edge of the long counter.
‘It surely don’t need a lawyer visiting the mine to confirm the gold’s run out. How would you know anyway? Besides,’ he added, ‘everyone from here to Whitehorse, all the way down to Haines I guess, knows Jonny hasn’t been running anything but a token mine for years.’
‘Then I’ll stay and talk to some of them.’ He didn’t want me there, and I wondered why. ‘Jim Edmundson said he’d fixed a room for me.’ He couldn’t refuse, for he still had his Vacancy sign out on the edge of the highway. ‘And if somebody would lend me a pair of boots, then drive me as far as the slide, I could walk the rest.’
He shook his head. ‘Not on your own. Too risky. Suppose you met a moose or a grizzly… Anyway, my truck’s out of action.’ He said it was probably a half-shaft gone, but I didn’t believe him.
‘Then I’ll wait for Tony Tarasconi to come in.’
He didn’t like that. ‘He has his own axe to grind.’
‘I haven’t come all this way,’ I told him, ‘to be turned back now.’
He hesitated, then shrugged. ‘As you please.’ He signed me in then and the book showed that Tarasconi was already at the Lodge. He had cabin No. 3 and had presumably arrived that morning. Two other names had also been entered for the same date — Camargo and Lopez. ‘Spanish?’ I asked. ‘No, South American,’ he replied. ‘We have quite a number of South American gentlemen come to the Yukon for the hunting.’
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?’