Quicksilver (reissue) Read online

  Contract or no contract, I didn’t see a moral path to walk away from this. But I had a feeling as strong as I have ever had that we would be walking into something we weren’t prepared for. I said, “Okay but we go on alert.”

  “Indeed.”

  Once decided, we hurried—wrangling into clothing, layering starting with a thermal layer, then pulling on socks and boots. We decided to carry day packs for faster travel. We packed parkas, ponchos, headlamps, first aid kit, trail mix, water, field knives. A geologist should never be without a field knife.

  We headed out of Shoo Fly Tunnel.

  If we'd had cell service I would have checked the forecast. Since we didn't, I relied on the sky, gray fog rather than dark clouds, the kind of foggy drippy aftermath of rainstorms in the Sierra that often say, all done for now.

  For the briefest moment we paused. Which way had they gone? Upcanyon, or downcanyon? The most reasonable assumption was that they were heading for the hornfels site and that—judging by the float we’d been following—was upcanyon.

  We did as we were trained to do: follow the geology.

  CHAPTER 25

  We headed upcanyon.

  We traveled like thieves in the night, mindful of every truck-sized boulder that could hide a man. We scanned the cliff tops. We saw fog-wrapped trees that looked more human than arboreal.

  It was not easy hiking.

  We followed the creek, on the lookout for scat that would promise a deer trail or bear trail up ahead, but as with yesterday’s hike up Shoo Fly, there was no trail, no path, just the boulders and gravel and the odd patch of fog-slicked clay soil.

  Walter slipped on a wet rock, and cursed.

  “You okay?”

  “Could be worse.”

  All right then. We had a name for this trek. It Could Be Worse.

  At a promising riffle in the creek, we stopped to sample. I ventured out on a wedge of slick boulders, courting balance, and was rewarded with two pieces of chiastolite hornfels float. A mineral pledge that we were on the right track.

  Getting better.

  The way grew rockier, spinier, and I jammed my right boot into a crevice and ignited the talus-bruise from yesterday’s hike. Weeks ago, it felt like. The top of my foot throbbed.

  But it could be very much worse.

  Farther along we came to an incursion into the northeast wall of Shoo Fly Canyon. It was a skinny side canyon, feeding a skinny creek down into our creek. We sampled another few dozen yards up Shoo Fly Creek and determined that the now-familiar hornfels float was no longer to be found. We retreated to the confluence with the side canyon and sampled up that way and we found our float again, same old same old salt-and-pepper diorite and cross-studded hornfels. We were too skittish to say much in the way of woo-hoo.

  We simply nodded at one another and started the hike up Skinny Canyon.

  Scanning the cliff tops. Gingerly navigating the rocky banks of the creek. Walking on Shoo Fly eggs.

  Same old same old.

  Farther up Skinny Creek the float was more abundant, the edges of the hornfels sharper—barely rounded by transport. Not transported far, at all, from the source.

  And then the canyon made a little bend and precipitously narrowed, a dozen yards ahead where the rock walls closed in and formed a V-notch.

  My heartbeat ramped up. Up there was something new.

  A thumb of rock stood at the notch, webbed to the right-hand wall.

  We crept forward carefully, quietly, thieves in the night.

  We halted at the thumb. Waiting, listening. Straining to hear what, if anything, was occurring beyond that notch. Nothing, it seemed.

  We had all the time in the world to take out our hand lenses and glass the thumb to identify the white and black minerals as the constituents of diorite. We turned our attention to the wall and took note that the familiar bands of cherts and metasandstones and gray-green slates had a new member, a lens of darker-gray slate flecked with black spots like an Appaloosa horse.

  I considered the rocks.

  If I were a young intrusive diorite dike and heated my way into the old Shoo Fly Formation, this is what I would look like. If I wanted to cook up some hornfels, this would be my neighborhood. If I wished to include Maltese crosses in my hornfels, I’d roast those carbonaceous spots in the slate.

  If I were Henry hunting the family legend, this is what I would see.

  Walter grunted. “We’re closing in on fat city.”

  We’d found the general contact zone but not the hornfels itself. Fat city, perhaps, was on the other side of the notch.

  “Shall we?” Walter moved.

  I said, “Wait.”

  He stopped.

  “Do you smell something?”

  It was a faint odor, drifting through the fog, drifting our way, so faint that it took Walter a full minute to acknowledge it.

  “Mountain misery,” he finally said.

  “And smoke.”

  We looked at one another.

  I said, “Do you want to continue?”

  “Let’s just nip through the notch and see what we can see. And then we can figure out what to do next.”

  A sketchy plan. But I did not have a better one.

  I followed Walter through the notch.

  CHAPTER 26

  Gail Hawkins woke inside her tent, startled.

  Her head throbbed.

  Where was she?

  It was daylight. The light on the roof of the tent turned the brown to gold. She put up a hand and wiped the dew from the ceiling, and then licked the dew off her palm. She was thirsty.

  She was dying of thirst.

  She sat up slowly, her head throbbing so hard that it was hard to think.

  She found her water bottle and drank it dry.

  She knew where she was. She knew how she got here. She knew where her water came from.

  Yesterday, on the Yuba, tracking her targets, she had come to the place where they had stopped to fill their water bottles. She had found the butt-end bottle impressions in the damp sand near the river. She had taken the time to fill her own bottles, adding iodine tablets to kill the bugs.

  She had even taken the time to feed, eating three energy bars.

  That was the last thing she'd eaten yesterday because it was getting late and the sky was darkening, and her thoughts had darkened.

  She'd wanted to go hunt Henry.

  Tear her Weatherby out of his hands. Tear him.

  But she had no track to follow Henry. All she had was the trail that Robert and Walter and Cassie took. So she'd shoved Henry out of her thoughts and hunted them. When it got dark, she put on her headlamp. She had to set it at an awkward angle so the strap would not touch her wound. When it started to rain, she put on her poncho and pulled up the hood.

  And then there was thunder and lightning and she was glad not to be hunting on the cliff tops.

  In time she had come to the place where a side canyon intersected the main canyon, where the bootprints got very confused. She'd studied them. The rain was softening the prints. It didn't matter. She could read them. She read them by lightning flashes. Robert and Walter and Cassie had stopped here. They hadn't been sure which way to go. They had done a little exploring, and then they had decided to go up the side canyon.

  Her heart had beat faster, at that. Her mouth went dry.

  The only reason to abandon one canyon for another was because they were following the ore, and they figured that the source of the ore was up the chosen canyon.

  And then she had shut her eyes and tasted the color on her tongue.

  When she opened her eyes, she noticed that the lightning was making the walls of the side canyon burn bright. She didn't believe in magic but she did believe in her skills and instincts leading the right way, and she accepted the lightning show as her due.

  The bootprints going up the side canyon were harder to find. Here and there.

  But she'd found them. She could track anything.

  She c
ould have tracked the prints all the way to the boots, to the owners, but all of sudden her wound had started to leak. She felt the blood running under the poncho hood, which was soft with rain and sticking to her head. Pain flared. She felt dizzy.

  She had to stop and lick her wounds.

  She stopped and made camp.

  And woke up this morning startled.

  She had slept too long.

  Now, she hurried. Re-dressing the wound, dressing herself, hydrating, feeding, breaking camp, hitting the trail up the side canyon.

  Except there was no trail.

  There were no bootprints.

  The rain had claimed them.

  It didn't matter.

  There was only one way to go.

  Up.

  In time she found the bootprints again.

  New. Fresh. Not pocked by raindrops.

  This morning's prints.

  So they had taken shelter around here. And then they had started fresh this morning.

  She saw no tent-disturbed ground and so she hunted around and found the mouth of a mine tunnel, and inside she found their nest. At first it made no sense to her. Why had they left everything behind? Had something spooked them?

  She went back outside and studied the prints and she cursed herself for not noticing the first time that there were four different sets.

  Robert and Walter and Cassie. And Henry.

  She wondered if Henry had pointed her rifle at them and taken them hostage, taken them to help him find the gold.

  One thing she didn't have to wonder about—all the bootprints went upcanyon. Everything she was hunting was upcanyon.

  She moved on.

  The canyon floor was rough with pebbles and rocks and boulders but she cat-footed it, finding the pockets of soil here and there where boots had left their mark.

  Even wounded, she tracked like a lioness.

  She had once tracked a wild pig shot in the shoulder—her bad shot, she'd been startled by another wild pig grunting nearby. She'd tracked the wounded pig and it was acting crazy, trying to escape and then stopping and turning and charging her.

  Now she knew how the pig felt.

  Pain. Fury.

  The difference was that she was not trying to escape.

  ~ ~ ~

  She fingered the knife in its sheath on her belt, there if she needed it.

  Her senses sharpened.

  Hungry again.

  CHAPTER 27

  Walter and I stepped through the notch in the Skinny Canyon walls, into a little valley that seemed lost in time.

  When I was a kid I saw an old movie called Lost Horizon, about a man lost in the Himalayas who stumbles through a notch in a mountain and finds an enchanted valley on the far side.

  This valley, displayed before us, could be considered lost—if you weren't looking for it.

  Pretty enough to called enchanted.

  The valley extended several dozen yards before narrowing at the far end and canyoning upward again. It was lush, thatched with brush and trees, bisected by a creek—our own Skinny Creek—and caged by high walls.

  And then I spotted the fire, and the enchantment evaporated.

  In a clearing in the middle of the valley was a rock ring holding timber tented over a brushy pile of kindling. The brush was brown, dried, but nevertheless I identified the crinkled ferny leaves as mountain misery. What else smelled like that?

  My nose stung.

  The timber smoked. The fire had almost gone out. Despite all logic, I ached to draw near. Add some of that dried kindling, help the fire along. Warm my feet.

  Walter whispered, “See anybody?”

  No. The fog was capricious, clearing the rock walls but lingering in the trees. I whispered, “I think that’s a tent back there in the trees.”

  We waited, watching.

  After a time Walter whispered, “Fat city, phooey.”

  I turned to him.

  He pointed. “It’s hard to see, what with the fog and the bend in the southern rock wall, but there’s a tunnel opening.”

  I turned. Peered. Saw it.

  “This place,” he said, “has already been mined.”

  Not lost, after all.

  I said, “You thinking what I'm thinking? Abandoned mercury flasks?”

  “It’s not out of the question.”

  Just great. I expelled a breath and refocused on the tunnel. “Perhaps they’re in the tunnel.”

  “Henry hates enclosed spaces,” Walter replied.

  “Maybe Robert’s in the tunnel. Maybe that’s why Henry brought him here.”

  We waited, watching for the Shelburne brothers.

  Still, while waiting, I looked over this valley with a treasure-hunter’s eye. I could not deny that this place was as good a candidate as we had yet seen. The diorite thumb was webbed, on this side of the notch, to a full diorite hand that slapped against the southern wall, a wall shot through with spotted slate. There was no visible outcrop of hornfels but it surely had to present a face to the elements to erode off pieces of float. It was perhaps camouflaged in the brush, in the trees.

  Equally to the point, these solid rock walls would hold an elevated ancient river channel intact for millenia. Indeed, I thought I could make out a high spur of gravel intersecting the rimrock of the southern wall.

  Buried in that hillside, perhaps, was a stretch of the deep blue lead.

  I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Had I caught the itch, from Walter? Enchantment, after all. I whispered, “What’d you put in the Chili Mac last night?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” I refocused. “Shall we take a closer look?”

  He nodded. We inched forward and achieved a small knob of bald bedrock and got a new angle on Enchantment Valley, as I decided to name it.

  Walter nudged my arm.

  I nodded. I saw him, saw Henry over there in the trees. Not certain how I’d missed him before. Perhaps, three yards back, our field of view had been obscured. More likely it was due to the excellent nature of his camouflage.

  Brown cap, brown parka, jeans faded to the color of volcanic breccia. Sitting cross-legged, right hand clutching his thigh. His left hand was not visible.

  He was still as stone.

  As were we, abruptly fossilized in place.

  I thought he hadn’t seen us, which was why I jumped when he called my name.

  “Cassie.” His fragile voice carried well enough across the little valley.

  Walter whispered, “Answer him.”

  I called back, “Henry.”

  Like we were friends. He hadn’t called either of us by name, back at Shoo Fly Tunnel. And now he did. Using my first name, at that. Of course he knew our names—Walter had introduced us back at the tunnel—but the use of a name is a familiar thing. Like extending your hand for a shake. And I had now replied in kind. I watched. He did not extend his hand and I guessed that he couldn’t without releasing the tremors, but he could have nodded, cementing the Cassie-Henry relationship. He did nothing. He sat rigid as the trunk of the tree at his back. The harder I stared, the more he seemed to blend in, like a deer in the woods. I knew this game. Hide and seek. I’d played this game with my Henry and the trick was to look but not see, let the quarry reveal himself when he was ready.

  And then he replied. “I said don’t follow.” Voice now gone shrill.

  I had no idea how to pretend to make friends with this wounded soul.

  Walter called, “We’ll leave, Henry, once we’ve had the chance to talk to your brother. Where is he? In the tunnel?”

  Henry shifted. His left arm moved. Like he was reaching for something.

  “Back up,” Walter hissed, flinging an arm across my chest, and as I stumbled my way backward I swore I saw that something in Henry’s hand, flashing silver.

  We backed down off the knob and dropped to our knees.

  I waited for the sound of a gunshot.

  All I heard was the sound of blood pounding in my ears.

&n
bsp; Walter whispered, “We can dash back to the notch but I’m not sure how long we’ll be within his field of view. Crawl, perhaps.”

  I whispered, “I’m not crawling.”

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted.

  Well maybe.

  And well we might have but for a new voice sounding down there in Enchantment Valley.

  “Hey Bro,” Robert Shelburne’s voice rang clearly. “No go.”

  I relaxed an inch. Robert was now on the scene. Must have been in the tunnel. He sounded fine, cheerful even.

  Henry was speaking now, in reply to his brother, voice softened again. A murmur on the breeze.

  “I’m on board with you,” Robert said, “but I don’t know what I’m looking at in the tunnel. I’m not qualified. What I do is, I hire qualified people. In fact, I hired two of them. Look, I know you want to go it alone, just me and you, the family thing, but we’re failing here. Let’s get smart. Use our tools. We can go back and get them.”

  Henry spoke. Voice loud enough to carry now. “They’re here.”

  Silence, and then Robert’s cheerful voice. “No shit?”

  “Up there.”

  “Then invite them down.”

  “I will.”

  Robert went silent.

  Walter and I looked at one another. There was something off about Henry’s I will, something that silenced Robert and caused Walter to shake his head, something that put me on high alert.

  “Whoa,” Robert suddenly said.

  There came a sound, the sharp sound of cracking ice, a sound I once heard while skiing across a frozen lake, a sound that froze me now in place until another, closer sound caused me and Walter to wrap our arms over our heads.

  Something struck the bedrock beside my leg.

  I twisted and looked. It was a shard chipped off the bedrock knob.

  “Come down here,” Henry yelled and there was nothing fragile about it.

  He didn’t give us enough time to respond. He fired his gun again, the ice cracked again, and the bedrock knob chipped on the other side, on Walter’s side this time.

  My heart slammed. I whispered, “Were those good shots or bad shots?”

  “Good shots,” Walter said.

  Henry fired a third time and this time he chipped the center of the knob and I wanted to yell stop shooting up the geology but I was shaking too hard to get the words out.