Quicksilver (reissue) Read online

  “He read the report. Didn’t seem to rattle him. Remember, he spends his life in the wild. Hey, we Shelburnes are hunters. Dad was a hunter. Dad died as he lived, hunting the new gold rush. And he was hunted, in death.” Shelburne put his hand to his neck, as if there were a tie to adjust. “Admittedly, that’s all too wild-kingdom for me.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Walter had moved to sample upstream of the gravel bar when he shouted, “Oh dear.”

  CHAPTER 19

  I sprinted across the bar to the rocky bank.

  Shelburne was already sprinting along the bank.

  We joined Walter and looked where he was looking. Into the river.

  The water was clearer here than at the gravel bar. It ran over bedrock and it ran fast and everything on the river bed was glaringly visible. A metal bottle lay on the bottom. It was cylindrical with a screw-cap top lying alongside. It was open. It was rusted. It was about the size of an extra-large water bottle but you wouldn’t want to drink from it. A word came to mind. Flask. In my reading during the drive across the Sierra, I’d come across that word. Heavy iron flasks were needed to hold heavy liquid mercury. Seventy-six pounds of quicksilver per flask.

  A few of those pounds were scattered downstream from the flask, like breadcrumbs. Carried by the fast-moving flow.

  It didn’t take much of a leap to assume that some of the silvery stuff had been carried still farther, until it hit the catch-basin. Until some of it found its way to the hidden ledge, where droplets liked to coalesce.

  I wondered how much of the silver heart was thanks to Mother Nature and how much was thanks to Henry Shelburne. I guessed it didn’t matter.

  Robert Shelburne muttered, “Christ, Henry.”

  Walter spoke. “I suppose one could find flasks abandoned in old mines.”

  I went cold. “You’re saying Henry found a stash?”

  Walter turned to Shelburne. “Is that likely? And if so, how would he transport it? The weight.”

  “Likely, sure. Transport... Rent a horse? Or could’ve lashed it to his backpack. Heavy load but I guess it’s doable.”

  I said, “Why here? It can’t be coincidental that he leaves it here, where your father died.”

  “That’s my brother. Some kind of bizarre memorial.”

  “Is that what you think it is?”

  Shelburne gave a tight smile. “I think it’s preferable to what I thought you’d found, when you shouted.”

  “What did you think I’d found?”

  “My father’s heart.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Gail Hawkins strained to see what they had found.

  It was a challenge finding viewpoints along the canyon that rimmed the river.

  They had kept moving.

  She had kept moving, trying to keep them in sight.

  They were following the river now and that made it easier for her, but the terrain was rugged and that made it harder for her.

  Ever since she had allowed them to leave the great pit up above, she had a new need to watch. Were they on track? Was Robert crazy?

  When they reached the river, she had relaxed a little bit.

  This made sense. Following the river.

  But then came this new craziness. These new shouts. Not shouts for Henry. Something else.

  Fear in their voices.

  Cassie found something in the river that scared her.

  Walter found something in the river that scared him.

  Gail desperately wanted to know what they found.

  She had a good view of the water, by the gravel bar, where Cassie had found something and shouted.

  But it was under the water.

  Gail couldn't see it.

  And then Walter moved upriver a little way and found whatever he found only Gail had no view at all of that part. Trees and brush ruined her view.

  Damn them.

  She needed to know.

  Was it gold?

  Had they found gold?

  Her tongue quilted with the taste.

  But no. If they found gold down there it wouldn't be a hard-rock vein—the source of the ore. It would be placer gold, flakes and grains weathered out of rock and carried by the water.

  She knew exactly how to find placer gold in a river.

  She didn't scorn it. Placer was her first great discovery. Placer had made her mother's necklace and ring look like trinkets.

  Placer could not be faked, like the gold-plated copper necklace. That bitter betrayal.

  Placer had set her on the true hunt.

  When she was ten she went on a school trip to Sutter Creek, where gold was first found in California. A legendary place. There was a sluice where the kids could pan for gold. It was all a setup. There was a 'miner' dressed in old time clothes and he salted gold flakes into the watery sand in the trough. It didn't matter how fake it was. The gold flakes were real. Scooping sand out of the water and swishing it around in her pan was real. She was a natural. She quickly got the hang of swishing out the sand she didn't care about, leaving behind the tiny golden specks. Her heart had thumped so hard she thought it would explode. All the sounds around her went away—the other kids' chatter, the miner talking and talking, the chaperones asking where to get lunch. All she could hear was her heartbeat. All she could see was the gold. She put a finger into the pan and a tiny flake stuck to her fingertip. She put her fingertip onto her tongue. She tasted the color.

  The kid beside her at the sluice looked at her like she was crazy.

  The flake on her tongue tasted different than the necklace and the ring. It tasted like gold.

  She swallowed it.

  She burned.

  After that, she never had the need to hunt jewelry again.

  She made her parents take her to real rivers to do real gold panning.

  When she was old enough to go on her own, she backpacked for weeks, deep into the flanks of the gold country. She found the gold that was put there by the water, waiting for her.

  It was everything.

  And then it was not enough.

  She needed to find the source.

  She needed to find the gold in the rock in the ground.

  She changed her hunt. She studied and she learned. She roamed the mountains. She went to old mines. She followed the legends. Once she found a chunk of ore the size of her fist with a fingernail of gold in its heart. It lay in a streambed. She tried for years to find the source. She failed, but that only fed the need. She studied more and found the forum. She lurked. She joined. She became an admin. She profiled every member and she studied every post, hunting.

  And then Robert Shelburne sent a private message to Walter the geologist.

  And her hunger surged.

  And now she was so close.

  Waiting for Robert and Walter and Cassie to move, to continue the hunt.

  Worrying.

  Whatever they'd found down there in the water wasn't gold. If it was, they would have shouted in joy.

  But they shouted in fear.

  They were moving now, heading back to where they had left their packs. She started to move, too. She could not allow them out of her sight.

  She was watching them so hard, her heartbeat loud in her ears, that she almost missed the sound behind her, the shuffling sound like a bear pushing through the bushes, a heavy-footed predator sound, not worrying about being heard, and she was just turning to face the bear—no time to get her rifle, she would have use her fist to hit the bear across the nose—but she never got the chance to see it.

  It got her across the back of the head.

  As she went down in searing pain she thought, it didn't feel like a bear after all.

  It felt heavy and metallic and sharp.

  ~ ~ ~

  When she came to her senses, lying in the dirt on the canyon slope above the Yuba River, she nearly howled in agony.

  The gash on the back of her head was bleeding.

  The inside of her head was drumming.

  The dayligh
t hurt her eyes.

  When she was able, she got to her knees. And then she threw up.

  She lay back down and waited until she could get in charge of the pain. When she rose again, she was steadier. She got her water bottle and drank. She held the bottle over her head and drizzled water onto the gash. She cried at the pain. Real tears. When she was ready for more, she opened her pack and got the first aid kit and smeared ointment on the gash. She drew her Buck knife from its sheath and sliced off a long ribbon of gauze and a tongue of tape. She bandaged her head, round and round with the gauze and the tape, tears running, tears of pain and rage. She swallowed three ibuprofen pills. She vomited them up.

  She lay back down for another twenty minutes, licking her wounds.

  Not really, of course.

  No wounded lioness could actually lick a wound on the back of her head.

  Gail licked her wounded pride. She had been caught blind.

  Somebody had hunted her.

  Henry. Who else?

  Henry didn't want her on the hunt, didn't want her to follow Robert and Walter and Cassie, didn't want her to find the gold.

  Henry should not have attacked her.

  Henry was going to lose.

  When she was able she put away the first aid kit and zipped the pack and reached for the Weatherby.

  Her rifle was gone.

  How had she missed that? How had she lain here, tending to her wounds, and not seen the wound of the missing rifle?

  She went sick with the shame.

  And then she suddenly wondered why he didn't take her Buck knife, too. That didn't make any sense. If their places were switched, if she had ambushed Henry and left him lying in the dirt like a wounded pig, she would have taken all his weapons. What was the matter with him?

  And then she understood.

  What was the matter with her?

  Of course Henry hadn't taken her knife because he had sneaked up on her from behind and hit her and she had fallen forward. Her body had hidden the knife. It was so obvious. How had she not realized this right away?

  She knew why. She was hurt, dizzy, confused. Weak.

  Shamed.

  And now, she was furious.

  She shouldered her pack and set off, armed now only with her hunting knife. And fury. And need. Always the burning need.

  CHAPTER 21

  We packed up.

  There was no discussion about continuing, or not continuing. For all its ugliness, the information about Shelburne’s father was not, I had to admit, relevant. The fact that Shelburne’s father died water-sampling on the river where he used to hunt gold was correlative, not causative. The fact that Henry left a memorial or a message was perhaps pertinent, but it was aimed at Robert. Once we found Henry, it was going to become Robert’s business. He’d take it from there.

  We set off, following the narrow trail upriver to a place where the water ran free of catch-pools, and because we were low on potable water we decided to stop. We got out our bottles and filtering kits. Shelburne’s pricey model and our bargain squeeze-bag filter both did the job, straining out gut-sickening bugs like Giardia. Either model should in theory filter out microscopic mercury. I would have paid for a filter that put that in writing.

  Resupplied, we moved on.

  The trail again left the river and began to climb. As I plodded uphill I scanned the cliff tops, thinking that if I were Henry Shelburne and I’d been leaving messages for my brother I’d sure want to see his reaction. There were a hundred places to view that site from the cliff tops. But that would take time, to leave the message, to scout the viewpoints. To rent a horse, if he had rented a horse to transport the flask. And it was the question of time that bugged me. Robert Shelburne said his brother left yesterday. If we assumed that Henry was now shadowing us, an assumption that seemed creepily reasonable, then had he abandoned the search for the source of the rock? Or had he already found it? Amateur geologist—two days in the field if you leave aside travel time from the boarding house to the wild—bam bam bam and he goes straight to the source? I supposed that was possible. This was, after all, his territory.

  Or perhaps he was long gone from the South Yuba, leaving us to our own devices.

  The trail roughened and I abandoned timetables and paid attention to the ground beneath my feet.

  And then our route traversed a gashed canyon gully and we detoured down a spur trail to the river’s gravel bank in order to do some sampling. Small cobbles of quartz and chert chinked underfoot. Of more interest was the fractured bedrock near the river’s edge, which was emplaced with jade-green serpentine.

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  Walter pointed out the rock face. “That’s serpentine. Its soils are associated with gold.”

  Shelburne looked. “That green rock? Never knew I should care.”

  “Good heavens man, it’s the state rock of California.”

  “There’s a state rock?”

  I said, “The state mineral is gold. That make you happier?”

  Shelburne smiled.

  We moved on, up and over another spiny ridge. Then back down to the river bank, monitoring the cliff tops, watching the sky, checking the flood forecast. Below critical. At some point, though, it looked like we were going to get wet. How far could we get before we had to find a high spot to make camp, before the rain or the night came?

  The clouds answered, coalescing to form a seamless roof.

  Hurry up.

  And then, down another spur trail, at a little pool and riffle system, Walter picked up a large pebble and pursed his lips. He took out his magnifier. He studied the pebble under the twenty-power lens for a good minute, and then he passed the lens and the pebble to me. I had a look. It was black, fine-grained, with the luster of mica and a hackly fracture. It was hard, flinty. I went low-tech, took a steel nail from my kit and dragged it across the surface of the pebble. It did not scratch. Its shape was subangular, the edges fairly rounded by transport down the river.

  I nodded and passed it back to Walter because he carried the high-tech tool.

  He already had it out of his pack. The handheld XRF spectrometer looked like a hair dryer but shot like a gun, firing X-rays at the target, exciting the atoms to display their elemental ID. He laid the pebble on the ground. He put the snout of the XRF to the rock and read the results on the display screen. “Chemically speaking,” he said, “woo-hoo.”

  I said, to Shelburne, “He means that’s a probable match to our hornfels.”

  Shelburne picked up the pebble. Turned it over and over. “There’s no cross.”

  “Could be a question of random chiastolite distribution in the parent rock.”

  Walter said, “She means, we keep going.”

  Thunder sounded, echoing down the canyon.

  We pushed on. We did not have to go far. Ten minutes later, following the bouldery river bank, we hit the mother lode.

  The first angular black pebble I picked up was studded with tiny white crystals that were themselves intruded by black carbonaceous inclusions disposed in the form of a cross. My mouth went dry. Here it was. We’d seen its like in the lab, looking at the angular black chiastolite hornfels embedded in the ore sample. We’d done the geology. We’d set out to find its brother in the field. We’d hypothesized where to find it. And find it we did. Here it was, a little stone in the river. Better than gold.

  I passed it to Walter. He eyeballed it and his face creased into a smile and then he brought out the XRF to confirm. He said, “Woo-hoo, in spades.”

  I said, to Shelburne, “We’ve found the neighborhood.”

  “So where to now?” Shelburne asked. “Wild-ass guess time?”

  Walter turned from the river and looked up the offshoot side canyon.

  I followed suit. It was a narrow canyon showing abrupt walls polished to a glacial sheen, so steep as not to be haired over with vegetation. I moved to examine the near wall, a slab of inter-tonguing slates and cherts and metasandstones. Here was the r
ock formation we’d been aiming for, the Shoo Fly Formation. I did not know the provenance of that name. Rock units were usually named after a patch of the local geography and I guessed some hapless geographer had been swatting flies when he named this unit. I took a moment to celebrate the coolness of geological names, to ease the tensions of the hunt.

  A thin creek fed out of Shoo Fly Canyon—as I decided to name it—meeting the South Yuba River.

  A confluence of two waterways.

  We were in the neighborhood and now the question became, which way to go?

  The float could have come down the Yuba from a source farther up the main canyon, or it could have come down the thin creek from a source up Shoo Fly Canyon. Or perhaps—however unlikely and undesirable—it could have come from both waterways, in which case an onageristic estimate was not out of the question.

  Walter and I sampled a dozen yards farther up the South Yuba and then a dozen yards up Shoo Fly Creek. We struck out on the Yuba. We struck cross-studded float on the side canyon creek.

  Life just got simpler.

  We headed up Shoo Fly Canyon.

  We began to find a new and interesting addition to the float, salt-and-pepper colored diorite.

  Shelburne shouted “Henry!”

  I thought, he’s expecting a reply. I nearly did, myself. We were getting closer. We all sensed it. We were closing in on the contact zone between the slate and a diorite dike, birthplace of chiastolite hornfels. We were in range of the address and the question would then become, is Henry living there right now?

  We moved slowly because there was no trail, no path, just a rock-hopping contour up the creek. We stopped twice to sample because there were two skinnier side canyons that fed creeklets down into Shoo Fly creek and we did not want to miss a turnoff.

  More problematic, the slate-gray sky was darkening by the yard.

  And then it began to rain.

  We dug out ponchos and covered our heads and our packs with urethane-coated nylon. The clouds heaved and the rain hardened. We pussyfooted, now, slipping on wet rock and clay soil turned to slickenside. And then we were no longer searching for float, we were hunting a flat spot to anchor and wait out the rain. If need be, to set up tents. And then Shelburne said there’s old mining tunnels all the hell over the place, and within another five minutes we indeed came upon the black mouth of a tunnel.