‘I see.’
There was nothing new in this. He was only saying what Jean had said, what I knew in my heart was inevitable. And yet hearing it from him, coldly and clearly stated, forced me to face up to the situation. I watched him ride out across the Kingdom and then I brought a chair out into the sunshine and most of the day I lay there, relaxed in the warmth, trying to work it out.
That night I wrote to Keogh telling him the result of the survey to date and instructing him to talk to no one and to come up on his own in three days’ time. Drive through from 150 Mile House without stopping, arriving at the entrance to Thunder Creek at 2 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday. We’ll meet you there with horses. I underlined this and gave Winnick the letter to take down with him.
Winnick left next day. I was feeling so much better that I rode with him up to the top of the Saddle. High up above the Kingdom I said good-bye to him and thanked him for all he’d done.
I sat there watching his small figure jogging slowly down the mountain slope till it was lost to view behind an outcrop. Then I turned my horse and slithered down through the snow back into the bowl of the Kingdom. As I came out below the timber I saw the drilling truck like a small rectangular box away to the right close beside the stream that was the source of Thunder Creek. They were drilling a new shot hole as I rode up, the three of them working on the drill which was turning with a steady rattle as it drove into the rock below. Boy pointed towards the dam. They’ve started,’ he shouted to me above the din.
I turned and looked back at the dam. Men were moving about the concrete housing of the hoist and there were more men at the base of the dam, stacking cement bags that were being lowered to them from the cable that stretched across the top of the structure. My eye was caught by a solitary figure standing on the buttress of rock above the cable terminal. There was a glint of glass in the sunlight, a flicker like two small heliographs. ‘Have you got a pair of binoculars?’ I shouted to Boy.
He nodded and got them from the cab of the drilling truck. Through them every detail became clear. There was no doubt about the solitary figure on the buttress. It was Trevedian and he was watching us through glasses of his own. ‘Did you have to start at this end of the Kingdom?’ I shouted to Boy.
He turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘Got to start somewhere,’ he said. ‘They were bound to find out what we were up to.’
That was true enough. I swung the glasses towards the dam. The cage was just coming in with another load, two tip trucks this time and a pile of rails. More cement was being slung along the top of the dam. And then in the foreground, halfway between us and the dam I noticed a big rusty cog wheel and some rotten baulks of timber bolted together in an upright position. There was the remains of an old boiler and a shapeless mass of machinery. I called to Boy. ‘What’s that pile of junk there?’ I asked him.
‘Don’t you know?’ He seemed surprised. ‘That’s Campbell Number One.’
‘How far did they get down?’
‘Don’t know. Something over four thousand, I guess.’
I rode over and had a look at it. The metal was rotten with age. The teeth of the big cog wheel disintegrated into a brown powder at the touch of my fingers. The wooden baulks that had formed the base of the rig were so rotten I could put my fist through them. There was the remains of a hole with a dirty scum of water in it. I called to Boy. ‘Where’s the top of the anticline?’
‘We’re on it now,’ he shouted back.
I stared at the rusty monument to my grandfather’s one and only attempt to drill and wondered how he’d felt when they’d had to give up. A whole lifetime lost for the sake of a thousand odd feet of drilling. I turned and rode slowly back to the ranch-house.
After that first day I took over the commissariat and the cooking, so relieving the survey team to some extent. The weather became unsettled. Sometimes it snowed, sometimes it blew. The change from sunshine to almost blizzard conditions could be astonishingly rapid.
Shortly after midday on the Monday Boy left Bill and Don drilling the second shot hole in the longitudinal traverse and we saddled our horses and started out for the Saddle and the pony trail down to Thunder Creek. It was blowing half a gale and mare’s tails of snow were streaming in a white drift from the crests of the mountains. It had snowed during the night and part of the morning and the Kingdom lay under a white drift. The two trucks were black specks about a mile from the ranch-house. We could see the drill working, but the sound of it was lost in the wind.
As we neared the crest of the Saddle wind-blown drifts of snow stung our faces. The going became treacherous and we had to lead the horses, Boy leading the spare as well as his own. On the crest we met the full force of the wind. It stung the eyes and drove the breath down into our throats. ‘Sure you’re okay?’ Boy shouted. ‘I can manage if you feel-’
‘I’m fine,’ I shouted back.
He looked at me for a moment, his eyes slitted against the thrust of wind and powdered snow. Then he nodded and we went on down the other side on a long diagonal for the line of the timber.
As we dropped down from the crests the snow worried us less. Through blurred eyes I got occasional glimpses of the road snaking up the valley from the lake. Sometimes there was movement on the road, a truck grinding up towards the hoist. And as we neared the shelter of the timber the great fault opened out to the left and we could see the slide and men moving around the little square box that was the concrete housing of the hoist.
The going was easier once we reached the timber though we were hampered by soft drifts of deep snow. I tried to memorise the trail, but it was almost impossible coming into it from above for the timber was pretty open and the pattern of drifts swirling round solitary firs or groups of firs repeated itself over and over again, all seemingly alike. We came across the track of a moose; big, splay-footed tracks that seemed to be able to cross the softest drift without sinking very deep.
Gradually the timber became denser and the trail clearer. Sheer slopes patterned by gnarled roots and deadfalls gave place to lightly timbered glades, crisscrossed with game tracks, and at one point we ploughed through almost half a mile of beaver dams. The lower we went the more game we encountered; mule-deer, moose, porcupines and an occasional coyote.
I asked Boy about bears, but he said they were still in hibernation and wouldn’t be out for another month at least. He was full of information about the wildlife of the mountains. It was part of his heritage, and when I was getting tired his stories of his encounters with animals kept me going.
It was dark when we swam the ford of Thunder Creek and dismounted close by the road in the glade where Winnick had parked his car. We had some food sitting on a fallen tree. Once in a while headlights cut a swathe through the night and a truck went rumbling up the road to the hoist. We had a cigarette and then rolled ourselves in our blankets on a groundsheet. The horses were hobbled and I could hear their rhythmic munching and the queer jerking sound they made as they reared both front legs together to move forward. It was bitterly cold, but I must have slept for suddenly Boy was shaking me. ‘It’s nearly two,’ he said.
We went out then to the edge of the road, standing in the screen of a little plantation of cottonwood. Headlights blazed and we heard the roar of a diesel. The heavy truck lumbered past, lighting the curving line of the road. We watched the timber close behind its red tail-light. Darkness closed in round us again and we listened as the sound of the truck’s engine slowly died away up the valley. Then all was still, only the murmur of the wind in the trees and the unchanging sound of water pouring over rocks. Somewhere far above us the cry of a coyote split the night like a bloodcurdling scream. An owl flapped from a tree.