‘But you brought Mrs Halliday up here,’ I reminded him.
He shook his head. ‘Not up here. They wouldn’t let me come up here. Mac met me with the little tractor shovel down at the ford and she went up on that. The best way. There’d been heavy rain and the track was bad.’
‘How long was she up here?’ I asked.
‘Four hours maybe. No, less. She couldn’t have had more than two and a half hours actually up here because I picked her up at the ford again about four in the afternoon.’
‘And she was going down to Vancouver?’
‘That’s what she said. Back to Whitehorse to see Jonny, then down on the train to Skagway. She was taking the ferry.’ ‘Did she say why she was going to Vancouver?’ ‘No. Why should she?’ And he turned away, his eyes on the great V of the Gully etched black against the sun on the far side of the streambed.
‘After she had seen the mine,’ I said, ‘was there any difference in her mood? When you picked her up again down there at the ford …’
‘I don’t know.’ He was looking up at the rock fall now, his mind on something else. ‘I didn’t notice,’ he said and moved out onto the rubble that blocked our way. And when I pressed him, asking what she had talked about, he answered quickly, ‘I don’t remember — not very much, I think. She was a little cold, a little tired, I guess. She don’t talk hardly at all the whole way back to the Lodge.’ Then he turned away again, bending down and looking at the track marks across the fall. ‘Always was trouble here,’ he said over his shoulder. And then quickly, as though to block any more questions from me: ‘They sure had problems here when they started getting in the new machinery. The plant itself, just the screening plant, cost over half a million dollars. You’ll understand why when you see it. It’s big, and it’s heavy, a lot of steel. Two months, that’s what it took them to drag it up here — up this track.’ He looked back at me, emphasizing his point with an emphatic nod — ‘That’s right. Two solid months to drag it up, piece by piece, from the highway to Ice Cold. That’s when they blasted this section of the track. They had to, it wasn’t wide enough. They got the heaviest parts as far as that turning or loading bay we passed a couple of hundred metres back, then they stuck; they couldn’t get it round the shoulder of the mountain here, so they blasted a new road, and right after that they got a scree slide from up the top — ’ He nodded to the scree and rubble half choking the streambed below us. ‘Two weeks it took to clear it and there’s been trouble here ever since, always something falling from above when the frost cracks the rocks and a thaw sets in. It’s hellish cold up here in winter.’
He was bending down, examining the sharp edge of the rock that was almost against the front guard of the truck. ‘Is newly split, this big ‘un.’ He shook his head, running his hand over the exposed side of it. ‘Never known anything as big as this come from the top. Is like I say, the frost cracks it up, so it’s mostly small stuff that blocks the road here, rubble that’s half a day’s work with a ‘dozer to clear. This lot would take a week or more, and some of it’s big, like this feller.’ He straightened up, gazing across to the Gully again, not saying anything more, just standing there, drinking it in. And the sun was almost warm, though the breeze from the west had a bite to it, a damp bite, and there was a suggestion of haze building up, for this was a Pacific airstream that had come over mountains and glaciers that were almost 20,000 feet high.
‘Guess you’ll have to walk in from here.’ He got my haversack from the cab and dumped it at my feet. ‘You got some food in it?’
I nodded.
‘Good. ‘Cos I got things to do, back at my place on the Squaw. I’ll be a little while. Okay?’
I hadn’t expected this, I don’t know why. I suppose I hadn’t.stopped to think that he wouldn’t come all this way into the mountains just to give me a lift. Obviously the trip had to answer a purpose. ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.
‘Grizzlies is all you got to worry about, but they won’t bother you, not in the daytime — so long as you make plenty of noise. Just don’t go wandering down the Ice Cold into the bush below the timber line. It’s pretty dense down there.’ He was climbing into the driving seat and I asked him when he’d be back to pick me up. He glanced at the dashboard clock. ‘Meet me here, say about three-thirty. It won’t be earlier than that. I’ve got to drive back down, ford the Squaw, and my place is ten miles after that. Altogether about forty miles there and back, all slow going, and I got to load up and have some food the other end. Make it four o’clock, then if I’m early and you’re not here I can put my feet up for a moment and have a rest.’ His lips flickered in a smile, but it was a nervous smile, his eyes on the Gully, watchful now as though expecting the ghost of some long-dead miner to materialize out of the rocks. Abruptly he turned the ignition key and started the engine. ‘Okay,’ he said, and managed a wave of his hand and a cheerful grin as he slipped the gear lever into reverse.
But then, as the truck began to move back from the slide, he jammed his foot on the brake and leaned out of the window, looking down at me. ‘A word of warning,’ he said, his voice on a high note. ‘There’s hunters around, remember. And in Canada it’s not just the deer that need to watch out for hunters. It’s humans, too. Hunters get a good bag of humans by the end of the season, and there’s no licence required for shooting your own kind!’ He laughed and the echo of it sounded hollow among the rocks. Then he put his hand on the horn, a long blast that went reeling across the streambed and into the Gully, to come beating back at us when he stopped. He did that three times, then nodded at me. ‘That should warn anyone there’s somebody here. Okay. Be seeing you.’
He turned his head then and began backing the truck down the track, while I stood there watching its battered, mud-stained snout slowly disappear round the bend. Then suddenly it was gone and I was left with nothing but the sound of the engine, which rose and fell as he manoeuvred in the turning bay, then gradually faded until I couldn’t hear it any more.
That was when I became conscious of the silence. It was suddenly intensely silent, only the murmur of water in the rocks below and the breeze flapping the collar of my anorak. God! It was quiet. Twenty miles down to Dalton’s Post, and all around me nothing but mountains, and the ghosts of men who had worked up here at Ice Cold Creek since the turn of the century. I felt suddenly chill and very small, alone there in the vastness of the border mountains between BC and the Yukon. I shook myself, taking a grip. Don’t think about the loneliness, or what happens if Tony’s truck breaks down and he doesn’t come back. Concentrate on assessing the potential of the mine, the value of the equipment, and on the fact that for almost a hundred years now men have been living and working up here throughout the summer months. And anyway, there was always the track out. A walk of twenty-odd miles back to the highway would do me more good than being bounced around in the cab of a truck, so what the hell did it matter if Tarasconi was late, or even if he failed to come back for me at all?
It must have been shortly after midday that I scrambled across the rock fall to the track on the far side and began following it round the mountain, climbing all the time, more and more of the Ice Cold mine coming gradually into view. The camp showed up first, being further ahead and higher up the mountain, two or three buildings clinging to the edge of a snow-covered bench at the head of a valley that narrowed to a ravine. To my right Stone Slide Gully was no longer a clearly etched V. Indeed, it was almost behind me now, the cleft visible only as an ugly spill of torrent-scattered boulders coming out of the cliffside, the grey of it shot through with fast-moving runnels of white water, and a rough track hugging the cliff and turning into the Gully.