I heard footsteps behind me and swung around. A man was close behind me.
«Angela,» he said to the woman, «you know you shouldn’t be out here. What’s the matter with you? Are you drunk again? You’ve been warned to leave the stuff alone.»
He said to me, «Sorry if she’s been bothering you.»
«Not at all,» I said. «We’ve been talking. It’s been most interesting.»
He was a bit shorter than I was, perhaps a little heavier, for he ran to chunkiness. His face ran to fullness and his hair was clipped short. He wore a checkered sports shirt and blue jeans, with heavy work shoes on his feet.
«We were talking about Stefan,» said the woman, and her voice carried the impression that she was embarrassing him and was glad of the chance to do so. «About Stefan and his silly hobby.»
«But you are not interested in any hobbies he might have had,» said checkered shirt to me.
«Certainly I am,» I told him. «I find it fascinating.»
«Come along,» he said to Angela. «Back to the house with you.»
She came down off the bridge and stood beside him. She looked at me.
«I’ll see you again,» she said.
«I hope so,» I told her. Before she had a chance to say any more he had taken her by the arm and turned her around and the two of them went marching down the road toward the Lodge. He didn’t even say good-bye.
He was a surly bastard.
There had been a lot going on between the two of them, I knew, that I had not understood. Most of it, I sensed, had to do with Stefan’s hobby, and I wondered if the cubic photograph could have been the hobby. Thinking of it, I was fairly sure that my suspicion was correct. Angela had called his hobby silly, though, and it seemed to me that taking a photograph of Marathon was anything but silly.
There were a lot of things, I realized, I would have liked to talk with them about. When and how they’d gotten word of Stefan’s death and when they’d gotten to the Lodge and how. Ordinarily when people came to the Lodge they flew into Pine Bend and Stefan took the Cadillac down to get them.
Probably, I told myself, they’d hired someone to drive them up; after all, it didn’t really matter. Come to think of it, no one really knew that Stefan had driven to Pine Bend to meet arrivals; we had just always assumed he had. I was a little disgusted with myself for wondering all those petty things; I was getting as nosy, I told myself, as Dora.
I lifted the rod out of the car and rigged it up, then got into my waders and went clumping down the embankment to the pool below the bridge.
I knew there were big trout in the pool, but I couldn’t really put my heart into fishing. All the time that I was working at it, I was thinking of Stefan’s body, stretched out on the bank across the stream. Every now and then I caught myself looking over my shoulder at the spot where he had been found. I got no strikes and no wonder, for I was too preoccupied with Stefan to pay attention to the fishing.
So I left the pool and went down the stream, walking in the shallow stretches, climbing out when I reached pools too deep for my waders. I left the scene of Stefan’s death behind me and settled down to business. I hooked and landed one fair brookie in a stretch of rapid water at the head of a small pool, failed to set the hook when a big one, probably a rainbow, made a vicious lunge as the fly floated down the smooth water of a pool, edging in toward a cutbank where the big trout waited. I hauled in the line and made another cast to let the fly float in the self-same pattern, but there was no second strike. The big fellow that had made the strike might have felt the hook and was having none of it. I fished the pool thoroughly, but without a further strike. Several hundred feet beyond the pool I netted another brookie, perhaps a little bigger than the first one.
I climbed out on the bank and sat down on a rotting log, debating whether I should go on or quit. My fishing had not been too successful, but I had two fish, enough for supper, and there was that book on the Precambrian waiting at the cabin. I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to keep on down the stream, not so much, perhaps, to keep on fishing as simply to stay out-of-doors, perhaps to stay away from the work that waited at the cabin. And, thinking that, I wondered rather seriously for the first time, I am sure, if I’d ever get the book done, whether I actually wanted to get it done. I had published little else and the department had excused the failure in light of knowing that I had the book, that I was working on it. I had been given the leave of absence to finish it, and I knew that I damn well better finish it.
And yet I sat there, miserable, wondering if I’d ever finish it, knowing that through all the summer I’d use every excuse I could find not to work on it.
I thought of Neville’s patch of lady’s slippers and wondered if I should take the time to go and look for them. There was no reason that I should, of course, but I told myself that if I didn’t see them now, in a few more days the blooms would be gone and I’d miss the seeing of them, for this year at least. But I made no move to go; I just stayed sitting there. I wasn’t absolutely sure where the lady’s slippers were, but from what Neville had said I didn’t think I’d have much trouble finding them. Still I kept on sitting.
I’ve often wondered since what it was that kept me sitting on that rotten log. I could have continued with my fishing, I could have gone back to the car, I could have gone in search of Neville’s lady’s slippers. But I did none of these. And because I didn’t, I now sit here writing this account when I should be working on my book.
Before I go any further, perhaps I should explain that Killdeer Creek lies deep in a wooded ravine between two steeply sloping hills. The bed of the creek lies in St. Peter sandstone, but a slight distance up either hillside there are outcroppings of the Platteville limestone, although in large part these outcroppings may go quite unnoticed because in most instances they are masked by trees.
On the slope across the stream from me something was rustling around in the underlay of last autumn’s leaves, and when I looked to see what was going on it took several seconds before I spotted the squirrel that was causing the commotion. He was nosing around, digging here and there, perhaps in hope of finding a nut left over from the autumn. He must somehow have sensed me watching, for suddenly he panicked and went scampering up the hillside. Veering to the right, he whipped into a small rock shelter. These tiny rock shelters are common in the hills, small areas of softer stone having eroded away and been capped by a layer of harder stone projecting out above them.
I sat quietly watching the shelter, and after a few minutes the squirrel came sneaking out. He sat upright and looked around, alert to any danger, then flashed up the hill again. A few yards above the rock shelter he crossed a small area of raw earth where the recent rains apparently had washed away loose ground cover and gouged into the underlying clay.
I followed his flight across the gouge and for a short distance up the hill, then my mind caught up with me and my eyes came back to focus on what they had seen, but which had been delayed in its registration on my brain.
Protruding from that area of raw earth were not one but two logs, or rather the ends of two logs. Above the topmost log the ground appeared to have caved in, leaving a small depression, and just above the depression was another limestone outcropping.
I sat frozen, and my startled mind said no, that it was all imagination. But hammering through my skull were the words that Humphrey Highmore had spoken to me only the day before: «They cut logs to conceal the cave mouth and shoveled dirt over the logs to conceal the mine.»
You’re stark, staring mad, I told myself; you’re as bad as Humphrey. But the idea still persisted, although I tried to fight it down. A man simply did not sit down on a rotting forest log and find a legendary mine.