He zipped himself up, leaning in at the open door, his eyes pleading. ‘I want to try and do what old Josh Halliday did, take a no-good claim, a mine that’s washed out, and before I’m too old …’ He smiled and shrugged, his eyes very bright, a gleam of tense excitement. ‘Maybe there’s nothing there, but it’s worth a try. And that’s my dream. That’s always been my dream. To strike it lucky.’ He waited then for me to say something, and when I didn’t he climbed slowly in. ‘Well, what do you say? I got money saved. It’s as good an offer as you’ll get. Jonny’s about broke and his wife’s sick. He can’t buy it. And nobody else is looking for a washed-out claim. You’ll soon discover that. Well?’
‘We’ll talk about it,’ I said, ‘after I’ve seen the mine. Maybe in a day or two, after I’ve talked to Epinard again.’
That’ll be too late.’ He said it quickly, then pressed the starter. Tomorrow evening I go to Haines, catch the boat. Back to the plumbing business.’ He paused there, staring at me, the pleading look back in his eyes. ‘Well?’
‘How far to the mine?’ I asked.
‘Some way yet.’ He was still staring at me as though trying to make up his mind about something. ‘Okay then.’ He slammed the truck into gear. ‘You look at the Gully, then make up your mind.’
He didn’t talk after that. It was as though the matter of the Gully loomed so large in his mind now that it was out in the open between us that he could think of nothing else. He was driving fast, leaning forward over the wheel, urging the truck up the track and fighting it through the thawed-frost patches where the fine dust of usage was coagulated into a mucilage that was as slippery as ice. Twice I tried to get him to talk about his mother. ‘At the time of his death,’ I said, ‘was Josh Halliday still supporting her?’
He shrugged and shook his head. ‘I wasn’t around then, was I?’
‘But you must have talked to her about it?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Was she married then?’
‘I don’t know. What’s it matter, anyway?’ And when I asked him when his mother and father had got married, he said, ‘It’s none of your business, is it?’
‘No. But if I’m going to advise the Hallidays to lease that claim to you I need to know a little more about you than I do at the moment.’
He thought this over for a moment, frowning in concentration. ‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘I suppose what you mean is, how much am I my father’s son, and how much have I inherited of my mother’s background.’ He glanced at me quickly out of the corners of his eyes, the front wheel sliding on surface slime. ‘Fair enough.’ He nodded. ‘But I’m not sure I know the answer. Sometimes I think I’m part Indian. Sometimes I find myself thinking like an Indian, or rather the way I imagine Indians think, since I can’t be certain, can I, how in any given situation my grandmother would have behaved. You know about that, eh?’ Again that quick sideways glance. ‘When Josh Halliday killed Lucky Carlos — ‘ He must have seen the expression on my face, for he added quickly, ‘All right, caused Carlos to go off and get himself drowned … When he died, he had an Indian woman in tow. She was with him in Silver City, a young girl really, and pregnant. She was my grandmother. And when my mother was born Josh Halliday at least had the decency to send the two of them down to Vancouver, to a friend of his who worked on the CPR. They finished up at Nelson in the Rockies, my grandmother working for one of the regional track engineers. She died of TB, something that was very common amongst the Indians — the camp life, the crowded, unhygienic conditions. After that my mama went to work for a farmer’s family just outside Medicine Hat. It was the Depression then, and in 1932. she goes and marries an impecunious plumber’s mate.’
‘How old was she then?’
I thought he was going to tell me to mind my own business. We were crossing an old trestle bridge, a rock canyon below and the tyres thudding on heavy timbers that were loose and greasy with age. He concentrated on driving until we were across, then he said, ‘Twenty-three, maybe twenty-four.’
‘And you were born — when?’
‘Early days of the war.’
So he was older than he looked; too old, in fact, to go on playing at mining in the Yukon much longer, not if he were doing the labouring himself. ‘You’re married, I take it.’
‘Yup, married with two lovely girls — one’s twenty-two, she’s married to an insurance salesman and lives in Winnipeg, the other’s only just left school.’ We were climbing steeply and he suddenly pointed to a white-capped peak glimpsed through a gap in the mountains away to the right. ‘That’s when we know we’re across the border into BC. Soon as we get a view of Mount Armour.’
‘We’re in BC now?’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. The Yukon’s behind us. The no
Pacific’s straight ahead — that is if this old crate of mine had wings.’ And he suddenly began to sing something about the wings of a dove. ‘You like hymns, religious stuff?’
‘Some,’ I said.
‘Me, too. Like Jerusalem. But that ain’t really a hymn, is it?’
‘No, it’s a poem,’ I agreed.
He nodded and laughed. ‘Po’ms — that’s what I like, real po’try provided it’s got a swing to it.’ And suddenly he was singing Jerusalem at the top of his voice, banging his hand against his door panel to keep the rhythm — ‘Bring me my bow of burn-iing gold, Bring me my arrows of desire, Bring me my spear — He stopped there, his hand pointing. ‘The Gully. Stone Slide Gully.’ Then he slammed on the brakes so hard I almost hit the windshield.
We had been coming round a bend on the shoulder of the mountain, the side of the track dropping away to a rocky streambed on our right with the V of the Gully beyond, and rising almost sheer to our left where it had been blasted out of the rock. The sun was shining straight in our faces, and suddenly the track wasn’t there any more, the surface of it obliterated by a mass of stone.
The truck stopped with its bonnet right against the first big segment of rock, raw-edged and clean-sided where it had broken away from the piled-up side of the mountain. So there was a spill across the track, and this was it. And at the head of the valley to our right, black against the blinding sunlight, the streambed narrowed to a huge rock V out of which the water had forced a spill of jumbled rock and boulder that reminded me of the rock glacier Jean Edmundson had shown me the previous day. ‘The Gully,’ he said again, sitting there, staring at it.
‘When did this happen?’ I asked, nodding to the massive pile of detritus that blocked the track.
‘Don’t know.’ He cut the engine and jumped out of the cab. I followed. ‘Kevin or Jonny, somebody’s hammered a vehicle over this lot.’ He was shading his eyes against the glare, pointing to the parallel line of tyre marks climbing in
across the rubble to where the track showed clear again on the far side. ‘Could be Jonny, or Mac maybe, that Indian of his, Jack McDonald. Looks like they been running their shovel over it. Can’t tell for sure. The tyre tracks have got widened out with all the toing and fro-ing. And they’ve been down into the Gully, too. Look at those track marks.’
He thought they’d probably been getting supplies and equipment out before the onset of winter. ‘First time I seen this rock fall.’ He turned his head, staring up at the sheer rock wall above us. Beyond it the shoulder of the mountain opened out into a son of amphitheatre with broad terraces faintly visible like the mealie patches of some ancient Indian civilization.
‘Is that the mine up there?’ I asked him. There was snow everywhere, blinding white, so that the shape of things was difficult to identify, but I could just make out what looked like the tin roof of a hut, and behind it a sort of watch tower, a gaunt skeleton of timber rimmed with frozen snow.
‘Yup. That’s the bunkhouse, and the spruce scaffold is where they hang their meat, up the top, clear of coyotes and bears. The mine itself, the screening plant and all the rest of it, that’s just out of sight, right in the bed of the creek’s headwaters.’ He shook his head, his gaze swinging to the Gully, his eyes bright again, his hands literally trembling as though he were in a fever, which is exactly what I think it was — gold fever. He hadn’t been up here for a long while, he said.