That track merged with the streambed below me, climbing steadily until it joined the main track on which I was walking. At this point the valley opened out into a bare plateau of grey silt and rubble with here and there the remains of old tailing dumps scattered like the tumuli of some Stone Age mountain tribe. The going was easier when I had reached the first dump, the surface of the track packed tight and smooth with small stones and silt, everything very grey and the barren moonscape sloping gradually downwards.
I could see the screening plant then, about half a mile ahead and slightly below me, a black skeleton of steel, like some prehistoric monster all rimed in snow, a heavy tracked bulldozer parked beside it, and everywhere banks and piled-up dumps of stone, the tailings much higher down there and the thin waters of Ice Cold Creek running through them, threads of silver flickering in sunlight. That was when I stopped and took my first picture, then looked at my watch.
The time was 12.23, and the thing that struck me most forcibly was how abandoned it all looked, everything so silent and still, nobody about, nothing moving, the whole scene one of frozen immobility, with the camp in the background and the Ice Cold Creek cutting down from the mountain top in a broadening ravine.
I think it was then that the first chill ran through me, the first sense of unease. It seemed unnatural, the mountains round watchful and white, an alien world from which all life had been expunged by the onset of winter. The sun had a faint halo round it, the air getting colder, and I started walking fast, up over the divide separating the Stone Slide waters from Ice Cold, the track no longer curving but running direct to the screening plant, and on the mountainside to my left occasional stunted bushes clinging precariously to life. The track reached down to the bed of the creek, the surface of it becoming very rocky, trickles of water moving frostily and the skeleton shape of the plant getting bigger until, breathless, I stood within a few metres of it and could see how the paint had peeled, the steel rusting with age. But the working parts were all right. They had been heavily greased.
It was the same with the bulldozer, the hydraulically operated pistons for raising and lowering the blade carefully protected with a dirty yellow coating of grease. Sheets of tin lay rotting on a dump of stone and nearby was a bucket and dredge attachment for the bulldozer. A little higher up the creek a crawler tractor lay abandoned and rotting, flaked holes of rust appearing in the metalwork of the cab. More machinery, cogs and wheels, a long, twisted snake of wire hawser, all dumped there and disintegrating in the cold and the wind and the snow. The whole scene was one of desolation, a shocking picture of dereliction in that lost amphitheatre in the mountains, nothing but snow-whitened rock and rusting machinery.
Obviously I had no way of checking whether the mine was really worked out or not, but I took some pictures of it just in case, and some close-ups of the screening plant, which should be worth something if it could be dismantled and got down to the Haines Highway. Then I went on up the track to where the pale wood of the pre-fabs with their tin roofs stood in silhouette above me, the track climbing very steeply here and the buildings seemingly poised on the edge of what was becoming a very steep-sided valley, poised like that teetering hut in the Chaplin Gold Rush film. There were five buildings in all, plus a little box of a one-holer loo. The first of the buildings was quite large, surrounded by a dump of old spare parts, bits of an engine, cooking pots, the remains of an old fridge that had virtually disintegrated, a cooking stove that looked as though it was a woodburner. The hut was locked, of course, but through the fly-blown window I could see a big engine that looked like a generator, and there was a table, sloping and ridged, with a layer of fine silt at the lower end. A panning dish lay on the table, and there was also a bucket half full of sludge. There was a small engine with a belt-drive to the table so that it looked as though this was where the final gold-sifting process had been carried out.
The rest of the buildings were about fifty metres away, all on the edge of the ravine looking down towards the screening plant. There was a cookhouse with a table and two benches, a stove, shelves and a sink that emptied straight out into a small stone channel running over the ravine edge. Close by was a caravan, chocked up with its wheels rusting off and holes in its side. Presumably it had been an early accommodation unit brought in to replace the original log cabins. I had passed the remains of three of these coming up from the rockspill. Finally there were two pre-fab accommodation units, one much older than the other, and the loo. The older of the two bunkhouses was not locked, nor was the toilet, which I was glad to see had a half-used roll of toilet paper hanging damply on the door. It was by the loo that I found the clear imprint of boots.
I don’t know why it came as a shock to me when I had already been told there was an Indian still up here looking after things. I suppose it was because all the machinery, everything about the mine, cried aloud the fact that it had been abandoned. There was new snow, fallen within the last twenty-four hours, so the imprints of those boots had been made as recently as that morning, the snow round the bunk-house all scuffed up where the sun had turned it to slush. There was a yellow mark where somebody had urinated, and a path had been trampled to the cookhouse door.
All my senses were suddenly alert as I searched the camp area, looking for tracks heading up to the mountain above or even some indication of the direction from which the owner of the boots had come. But all I could find was the marks where something big and heavy had gone down to the streambed in great leaps and bounds to be lost in the first thin trickle of water running down the valley.
The older bunkhouse had been slept in. I could smell it as soon as I pushed open the door, a hastiness lingering in the damp air. The windows had been boarded up, but the light from the open door was sufficient to show that one of the bunks had been occupied. Presumably this was where Jack McDonald slept and the other, newer accommodation unit, which was locked, had been occupied by the mine manager. There was, of course, another possibility, particularly since Epinard hadn’t been paid for several months. The camp could have been hired out to a succession of hunting parties, the whole thing organized by Kevin McKie down at Lakeside. It would explain McKie’s behaviour and Epinard’s nervousness, and it wasn’t unreasonable since it would bring in a little money and at the same time mean that the mine wasn’t left entirely deserted. It would also explain Tony Tarasconi’s initial reluctance to drive me up here and his warning about hunters, the three blasts on the horn. It would all be so simple for McKie to organize, an added attraction for a party visiting his lodge at Dezadeash, all those involved making a few dollars on the side.
I had my lunch sitting in the sunshine at the open bunkhouse doorway with a view straight down the boulder-strewn valley to the mammoth skeleton of the screening plant and the distant view of mountain ranges white against a milky blue sky. When I had finished I lit my pipe, the first smoke I had had since breakfast, time slipping by as I roughed in the layout of the mine in the back of my diary, the sun quite warm where I sat sheltered from the breeze. And the view was magnificent, for I was looking back into the Yukon, and across the tops of the Front Ranges it was all white, a vista of sparkling peaks and distant snowfields.
It was just after two that I took one final picture of the mine and started back down the track, headed now for Stone Slide Gully. This meant that, after crossing the divide, I had to diverge onto the track that followed the course of the little stream that flowed away from the Ice Cold watercourse. The odd thing was, I had some difficulty in finding it, so that for the first part I was literally walking the streambed, water over my shoes at times, my feet soaked. The ravine steepened, dropping sharply as it curved round the shoulder of the mountain. At last I could see the rock slide spilling out of the cliff ahead and the track clearly visible where it hugged the overhang and turned into the Gully.