We had reached the bottom and we were in mud, the track deep-rutted. He picked a patch of hard standing and stopped. ‘Guess it’s time we went into four-wheel drive. Anyway I need a leak.’ It was an old Ford and to put it into four-wheel drive necessitated his getting out and turning the hubs on the front wheels with a special spanner. He had switched the engine off and in the silence I could hear the faint murmur of water pouring through the gorge. We were in thick bush now, nothing visible except the green and black of balsam, aspen and spruce, the gleam of mud and water.
Less than a mile after we started again the gold of the frosted aspen leaves began to shimmer and shake to a wind we could not hear above the solid grinding noise of the engine. Suddenly there was water glimmering beyond them, a miasma of brightness. The trees fell back. We were driving along the creekside then, water rushing past, and ahead the country opened out, the creek widening till we were onto the bed of it, growling our way over rock ledges and boulders to the far side where the track was again the bed of a torrent as it climbed steeply up a shoulder of the mountain.
The crest, when we reached it, came very suddenly, the ground falling abruptly away from the reared-up bonnet of the truck, and there, across frost-sered miles of aspen and balsam, with glimpses of water in the swampland meadows, was a great gleaming barricade of high mountains. ‘There you are — the Noisy Range.’
I reckoned, if the Front Ranges were 8000 feet, this mountain range that blocked the whole view to the west must be at least 16,000. From foot to summit, along the whole great massive bulwark, it was a wall of brand new, whiter-than-white snow — a fairy range of infinite beauty in the hard brightness of the sunlight and against the blue of the sky.
‘Summer time it goes growling and banging away any hour of the day or night.’ He had stopped to lift the gear lever into normal drive. ‘Now it’s going silent again as the ice gets hold.’ He nodded away to the left where the rounded shape of another of the Front Range mountains showed a white crest fanged with the grey-black stumps of ice-split rocks. ‘We go round that till we get the other side, then through a bit of a gut and we’re at the headwaters of Ice Cold Creek. So this is about the nearest we get to the Noisy.’
‘Where does Ice Cold join the Squaw?’ I asked.
He leaned forward, pointing across my left shoulder. ‘Right down there, about a coupla miles above where we’ve just forded it.’ He let in the clutch and we began slithering and sliding on a track that would have been good going but for the fact that we were above the treeline, nothing but small shrubs, a sort of arctic maquis, and the sun shining full on the track had melted the surface to form a viscous film of mud. ‘We’re swinging southerly now. Then we start climbing again and another ten minutes we’ll be round that mountain and way above the timber line.’
I asked what height we would be then, but he didn’t know. ‘Four thousand, maybe five. We’ll be into BC then and none of the Park or Reserve laws apply. You can hunt, mine, do pretty near any dam’ thing. Indian country.’ He laughed, his eyes gleaming as he glanced at me speculatively. ‘I wouldn’t mind a claim in BC.’ And he added, ‘You really are Tom Halliday’s lawyer, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Mrs Halliday’s too?’
I nodded. He suddenly stopped the truck, leaning on the steering wheel, staring at me. ‘And they’re short of money, right?’
I didn’t say anything. Here it was, the proposition I had been expecting, the reason doubtless that he’d offered to drive me up here. ‘Okay, so what are you going to do about the Gully? It isn’t worth a lot — I mean is very speculative. You talked to Jonny, did you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And if you’re thinking of bidding for the Stone Slide Gully claim, then I must warn you he’s interested in it, too.’
‘Sure.’ He nodded, still bent close over the steering wheel. ‘Jonny would like to mine the Gully. But he’s got no money. I have.’ His teeth showed white in a quick grin. ‘There’s nobody else up here fool enough …’ He let it go at that, waiting for me to react.
‘Did you know Tom well?’ I asked him.
‘Not really. I don’t think anyone could know him well.’
‘Did he ever talk to you about his father?’
He looked at me hard. ‘So — you know, do you?’ And he rammed the truck into gear, hands clenched on the wheel as we slithered on the thawed-frost surface towards a hundred-foot drop to a little ravine where the rocks in shadow showed patches of virgin snow.
‘I know he was the cause of Carlos Despera’s death,’ I said.
‘Okay, so you know. But it didn’t make any difference. It didn’t affect Tom and me. He was not a very nice man, Lucky Carlos Despera. And by all accounts it was his own fault.’
‘You never felt any resentment?’
‘About the mine?’
I nodded.
‘The luck of the game, isn’t it? Lucky Carlos sold Tom’s father a claim he figured was a dud. Too bad! He was wrong. The fact that he drank and gambled away the cash was all a part of the man. He salted the mine. He admitted it. That’s what my mama told me — admitted it in one of his fits of drunkenness. She was only seven and her own mother dying. That’s why she remembered it.’
‘And Josh Halliday looked after her from then on?’
He nodded. ‘Until she married my father, who was the son of one of the cable drillers that followed the line of the CPR when it was building. They were drilling for water. At Medicine Hat they found oil, not water — ‘ His teeth flashed. ‘Daft, isn’t it, but who wanted oil when the engines were fired with coal and needed water to keep the steam up? Drilling and plumbing, not much difference, eh? So he picks a settler’s daughter, marries her and settles down to look after pipes and drains, what they now call infrastructure.’
I asked him again how well he’d known Tom Halliday and he glanced at me, a quick sideways glance, trying to guess from my expression what would serve his interests best. It was an oddly sly glance, as though suddenly he were a different person — or rather I was seeing the obverse of his personality. ‘Did I know Tom well?’ he repeated to himself. He was silent for a moment, thinking about it. ‘Depends what you call well, don’t it? I mean, how well does one ever know somebody else?’ He paused, his grip on the wheel tightening. ‘Is hard enough to know oneself, right? He was good company, I know that.’ And after a moment he went on, ‘Often he’d spend the day fishing the Squaw, then he’d drive up to my camp, and if he’d caught some trout, or a salmon, then we’d cook it while we had a drink. He always had beer in his truck. And after the meal we’d sing. He hadn’t a bad voice.
That’s how much I knew him. We’d drink and sing together. But he’d never talk, not about anything serious — he was a sort of lep… what’s the word for somebody you can never reach?’
‘Leprechaun?’
That’s it — leprechaun. He was like a leprechaun. So, no, I never knew him well.’ He was silent then, the mountain ahead growing larger, the track a raw line running up the shoulder of it and swinging out of sight on the skyline so that the nick made by the bulldozer blade showed sharp against the blue of the sky. He began humming to himself, a sort of protection, I thought, against further questioning. A few minutes and we were climbing again, the track worsening, a nasty drop to the right. We reached the point where it began to curve round the mountain. It was here that stone had been quarried to pave the track in the days when it had been properly maintained.
He pulled up. ‘Don’t know about you, but I need another leak. I guess it’s the cold. Coffee and cold don’t go together.’ He grinned, jumping out and standing close beside the cab. ‘We could turn here,’ he said to me, looking hopefully over his shoulder. ‘You agree to my trying my luck in the Gully ‘ and we could turn right round and be in Whitehorse tonight. There’s a lawyer there — Williams. Tomorrow it could all be signed and sealed — lease or purchase, whatever you like.’