Breakfast was a meal that apparently went on from dawn till lunchtime. About ten I left my postcards at the counter and picked up the lunch I had ordered. Eddie produced a knapsack for me. ‘When you’ve eaten your lunch you can stuff your parka in it. Could be quite warm by then.’ He offered me the loan of a pair of boots, but his feet were a lot bigger than mine and anyway I had had the sense to wear a stout pair of walking shoes when joining the plane at Gatwick.
It was just after ten-fifteen when I left my cabin and walked on to the highway, turning right and heading towards Haines. I had my camera with me and if McKie wanted to know where I had been I could always say I had hitched a ride and walked the Dalton Trail as far as the old Post. It was the obvious thing for a visitor to do, for Dalton had established his trail as early as 1898 and the previous evening McKie had told me the Post had bunkhouse and stabling, even a two-holer toilet, all built of logs ‘and still in good condition, like the old staging post of Silver City at Lake Kluane’.
A car slowed, going towards Haines, but I waved it on, happy in the freedom of walking the hard dirt of the highway, enjoying the bite in the air, the warmth of the sun. Within the space of five minutes two more vehicles had stopped to offer me a lift, and when I looked round again at the sound of an engine, expecting it to be Tony and once again finding a stranger slowing to pick me up, I thought, What the hell! If he were delayed, or McKie stopped him, I would still have time to walk the twenty-odd miles to Ice Cold and back.
The vehicle was one of those big American campers about the size of a Greyhound bus, a craggy Californian driving it, his wife in the galley brewing coffee, the smell of it filling the cab. ‘Where yah going?’ When I said Dalton’s Post, he nodded. ‘We bin in one of the camping lots close by Silver City looking for Dall sheep on the mountain there. Got some good pictures. Guess we seen quite a bit of that old Trail.’ He relit the thin cigar he was chewing and started the big machine rolling again. ‘You’re from England, are you? Then you probably wouldn’t have driven one of these — ‘ He patted the steering wheel. ‘First time May and I have — great way to see the country. Only way, I guess. You know if the Million Dollar Fall campground is still open? That’s at Mile 102.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s all new to me.’
‘You just visiting then?’ He nodded, slowing for a bend as we began a steady downhill run, his voice droning on, telling me about his family, his house, the car he had just bought and his business, which was electronics.
They were kindly people, but it was a relief when we came to the sign for Dalton’s Post and I was on my own again, the sun warm on my back. I crossed the road to the well-worn dirt track leading to the mountains and in minutes the highway was gone, the bush closing in, no sound of vehicles, just complete and utter silence except for the faint murmur of water far away and the rustle of a small breeze shaking the leaves of the aspens.
The water, when I came to it, was immensely wide for something that was called a creek; more like a river, its bed full of low banks of stone and boulder. A track had been worn to the bank, dipping down into the water, tyre marks visible on the first grey bank of shingle and coarse sand. This was the first ford and no way I could cross it without getting soaked. Ahead of me the Dalton Trail track finished in a clearing of flat grassland where the scattered remains of log huts still stood, sod-roofed and the window openings without glass. The creek swung in to run quite fast along the bank where more tyre marks led down into the water. Standing in the long grass at the edge of the swirling water I tried to visualize the Post as it had been when it was full of men and horses and wagons, and the hot fever of the gold rush. Clouds hung over the mountains ahead, but here the sun was still bright, its warmth cooled by a small breeze coming down the creek.
A horn blared and I turned to find a truck almost upon me, the sound of its engine overlaid by the murmur of the water at my feet. ‘Hi!’ It drew up beside me, Tony Tarasconi leaning out of the cab window. ‘Somebody gave you a ride, eh? I got held up. Didn’t reckon you’d have got this far.’
I took a picture of Dalton’s Post, another of the fording place, then climbed into the truck. ‘That’s our road, over there.’ Tarasconi nodded to the further bank, swinging round and heading back to where the first set of tyre marks led down to the water. He rammed the gear lever into first as the yellow snout of the truck with its radiator guard dipped down into the creek and we began crunching our way across from one grey shingle bank to another until at last we came out on the far side dripping water, the track ahead climbing steadily. ‘It’s all right here. To my claim is only about ten miles, pretty good going all the way. But the claim …’ He shrugged. ‘My claim not so good, lot of work, not much gold. Is placer mining, of course. (He pronounced it ‘plasser’.) Reckon the boys who worked it before got the best of it. Anyway, I pay too much royalty. Thirty per cent is too much.’ He grinned at me, his teeth showing white under the hooked nose. ‘Higher up is different. Up above the timber line they got a real “plasser” mine, the benches clearly defined, like raised beaches, a good yield of pay dirt, and down near the bedrock gold that you can see.’
We were doing a steady 30 kph on the clock, the truck bucking and rearing as we climbed towards a hump of land that was like a small pass. ‘Why do you do it if it doesn’t pay?’ I asked, and he laughed: ‘Is a good question. Why do I do it, eh? You ever been a plumber?’ He saw the look on my face and laughed again, beating the side of his door with his hand. ‘Six months’ plumbing, flushing out other people’s shit — you need a breath of clean fresh air then, so six months’ mining. You know Medicine Hat? No? It’s down in the prairie country, Alberta, an old CPR town. Plumbing six months in Medicine Hat is enough. Okay? So now you know why I come here. Some day — ’ his eyes were shining again — ‘some day I strike it rich. Not on the claim I work now, but somewhere… Stone Slide maybe — ‘ He gave me a quick, sidelong glance, and then we were over the hump and dropping sharply. The gorge is down there.’ He jerked his head to the right and a moment later he was thrusting the truck round a bend, slithering on the slime of frozen mud just surface-thawed by the sun. A side track dropped away to the right and he swung onto it, and in an instant we were bumping our way down a steep hill that looked as though in heavy rain, or when the snows melted, it became the bed of a torrent. ‘Now you see the difference,’ he yelled at me. ‘We’re on the Ice Cold track. Is bad, this one. Nobody do nothing to it for many years now. No gold, no money — that’s the way it is in this goddamned country.’
He was fighting the wheel all the time, his lips drawn back in a grimace of concentration. ‘Soon we get to the Squaw. Once we are back on the north side of the creek, then you see how bad a track can get without any maintenance.’