The atmosphere when we came down into the Kingdom was one of tense excitement. The whole bunch came out to meet us. The rig had stopped drilling three days back for lack of fuel and Jean told me afterwards that if I hadn’t turned up when I did Garry would have asked Trevedian to hoist the rig down. Time was running out for him. But just before we arrived an Imperial Oil scout had ridden in. This recognition from the outside world had lifted their spirits slightly and with the arrival of the fuel and the starting up of the rig again enthusiasm was suddenly unbounded.
Two days later the four of us brought a second 500 gallons up. We now had enough fuel to drill to nearly six thousand feet at the present rate. At the time they started the rig again they were at four thousand six hundred and making over twelve feet an hour through softish rock. By the time we packed in the second load of fuel they were past the five thousand mark and going strong.
I remember Johnnie standing in front of the rig the day he and his two Americans took the pack animals down. ‘I’d sure like to stay on up here, Bruce,’ he said. He, too, had been caught by the mood of excitement. Boy had arrived that morning and with him was a reporter from the Calgary Tribune. Five thousand five hundred feet was the level at which they expected to reach the anticline and hanging over me all the time was the knowledge that it wasn’t oil we were going to strike there, but the sill of igneous rock that had stopped Campbell Number One. I couldn’t tell anybody this. I just had to brace myself to combat the sense of defeat when it came.
‘Oil isn’t much in your line, is it, Johnnie?’ Jean said.
He grinned. ‘I guess not. But I’ll need to know what we’re to put on old Campbell’s tombstone.’
‘Just quote him as saying, “There’s oil in the Rocky Mountains,” Garry said. ‘That’ll be enough.’
Everybody laughed. It was a thin, feverish sound against the racket of the drill and I thought of the grave I had found behind the ranch-house and how they were all up here because of him. They were pretty keyed up now, and their optimism had a feverish undercurrent that wasn’t healthy.
As the days went by the suspense became almost unbearable. At first there were anxious inquiries as each shift came off duty, but as we approached the end of July the mood changed and we’d just glance at the shift coming off, unwilling to voice our interest, one look at their faces being sufficient to tell us that there were no new developments. The waiting was intolerable and a mood of depression gradually settled on the camp. We were drilling through quartzite and making slower progress than we had hoped. Time was against us. With each day’s drilling our fuel reserves were dwindling. And meanwhile the dam was moving steadily towards completion. Sometimes on an evening Jean and I would ride up to the rock buttress and look at the work. Already by the first week in August there was only a small section to be completed and engineers were working on the installation of the sluices and pens. From higher up the mountainside we could see that work on the power station beside the slide had also started. Some of the drilling crew were in touch with men working on the dam from whom they were able to purchase cigarettes at an inflated price, and from them they learned that the completion date was fixed for August 20th. Worse still, the Larsen Company planned to begin flooding immediately in order to build up a sufficient head of water to run a pilot plant during the winter.
At the beginning of August we were approaching five thousand five hundred and Garry was getting restive. So were his crew. They had been up in the Kingdom for almost two months. The cuttings, screened from the mud as it flowed back into the sump pit, showed us still in the metamorphic rock. No jokes were cracked on the site now. Nobody spoke much. Four of the boys had started a poker school. I tried to break it up, but there was nothing else for them to do. They’d no liquor and no women and they were fed up.
The inevitable happened. There was a fight and one of them, a fellow called Weary Dodds, got a finger smashed in the draw works. He was lucky not to have had his arm ripped off for he was flung right against the steel hawser that was lifting the travelling block. Jean patched it up as best she could, but she couldn’t patch up the atmosphere of the camp — it was very tense.
Just after nine on the morning of August 5th they pulled pipe for what they all hoped might be the last time. The depth was five thousand four hundred and ninety feet. They were all down on the rig, waiting. They waited there all morning, watching the grief stem inching down through the turntable and I stood there with them feeling sick with apprehension. They pulled pipe again at two-fifteen. Another sixty-foot length of pipe was run on and down went the drill again, section by section. The depth was now five thousand five hundred and fifty feet. Those not on shift drifted back to the ranch-house. We had some food and a tense silence brooded over the meal.
At length I could stand the suspense no longer. I drew Garry on one side. ‘Suppose we don’t strike the anticline exactly where we expect to,’ I said. ‘What depth are you willing to drill to?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The boys are getting restive.’
‘Will you give it a margin of two thousand feet?’
‘Two thousand!’ He stared at me as though I were crazy. That’s nearly a fortnight’s drilling. It’d take us right up to the date of completion of the dam. Anyway, we haven’t the fuel.’
‘I can pack some more up.’
He looked at me, his eyes narrowed. ‘There’s something on your mind. What is it?’
‘I just want to know the margin of error you’re willing to give it.’
He hesitated and then said, ‘All right, I’ll tell you. I’ll drill till we’ve exhausted the fuel that’s already up here. That’s four days more. That’ll take us over six thousand.’
‘You’ve got to give a bigger margin than that,’ I said.
He caught hold of my arm then. ‘See here, Bruce. The boys wouldn’t stand for it.’
‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘You’ve been drilling up here now for two months. Are you going to throw all that effort away for the sake of another fortnight?’
‘And risk losing my rig when they flood the place? Good Christ, man, you don’t seem to realise that we’ve all had about as much as we can take. I’ve lost two trucks; neither the rig nor any of the boys are earning their keep. If we don’t bring in a well-’
He stopped then for the door burst open and Clif Lindy, the driller on shift, came in. There was a wild look in his eyes. ‘What is it, Clif?’ Garry asked.
‘We’re in new country,’ he said.
‘The anticline?’
But I knew it wasn’t the anticline. His face, his whole manner told me that this was the moment I had dreaded. They had reached the sill.
‘We’re down to rock as hard as granite and we’ve worn a bit out in an hour’s drilling.’ He caught hold of Garry’s arm. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘let’s get the hell out of here before we’re all of us broke.’
‘How much have you made in the last hour?’ Garry asked.
‘Two feet. The boys want to know shall we stop drilling?’
Garry didn’t say anything. He just stood there, looking at me, waiting to see what I was going to say.
‘You’re just throwing away good bits and wearing out your rig for nothing,’ Clif said excitedly.
‘What do you say, Bruce?’ Garry asked.
‘It’s the same formation that stopped Campbell’s cable-tool rig. If you get through this-’
‘At two feet an hour,’ Clif said with a laugh that trembled slightly. ‘We could be a month drilling through this.’ He turned to Garry. ‘The boys won’t stand for it, not any more. Nor will I, Garry. I don’t mind risking a couple of months for the chance of making big dough. But we know damn well now that we’re not going to bring in a-’