Chapter 1

Tom had spent the first two weeks after being dropped off getting used to his mules and his camping gear, but intentionally leaving a false trail just in case he was still being followed. Then he spent a day in a tiny town, restocking his supplies, but while he was there, he wrote letters to both his family and Dave’s family, letting everyone know he was okay and telling them he’d be out of touch for a while. Previously, he’d circled and wandered around to lay a false trail, but now he set out toward the area he was really interested in searching. As an experienced camper, he wasn’t in a great rush, but he didn’t want anyone knowing exactly where he was going either. In fact, for the first two weeks, he’d been acting as if he was on a camping holiday, and during that time, he hadn’t panned a single handful of sand. That changed when he got into the mountainous area he was interested in exploring, though. For the next two weeks, he checked every stream he came across, no matter how small, but although he found black sand in some of the creeks and streams, he found no gold.

Then one morning, his luck changed.

He didn’t find gold that day; instead, he happened upon a small village with several old ramshackle buildings as he led his mules along a dirt road that followed the steep banks of a long lake. He wasn’t really interested in going into the little hamlet, but the terrain of the narrow valley was so steep that he really had no other choice. Near the center of the sparse settlement, Tom saw the old store with walls built of logs that were so weatherbeaten they were silver with age. That old store had a slightly less weatherbeaten sign, advertising the place as ‘Bowman’s Trading Post,’ and Tom paused, then grinned as he tied his mules to the railing on the front porch of the store.

A bell rang as he opened the door, and a young woman behind the counter set aside the book she’d been reading, slipping off the stool to stand behind the counter at the old cash register. She was obviously part Native, but just as obviously part white, and she was quite attractive, with a very pretty smile.

“Hi, can I help you?”

“Probably. I will need a few things,” Tom smiled back at her. “I didn’t expect to find a store here, and I stocked up recently, so I don’t need many supplies, but what I definitely do need is some information. I’m heading up the valley, planning to do a survey of the minerals in the upper area at the end of the lake, and I’m using mules for pack animals. I was wondering how much difficulty I’m going to have getting to the upper valley, past the end of the lake. That upper watershed is the area I plan to survey, since it doesn’t seem it’s ever been done properly.”

“Oh my!” the girl rolled her eyes. “I guess you’ve gotta have your mules up there, huh? If you didn’t need them, I could run you up the lake with my brother’s outboard, but there ain’t no way we can load your mules on a boat. There is a horse trail that runs along the lake for about ten miles, but it turns off and heads up a little river that comes in from the mountain valleys and a couple of farms off to the east of here. Past that turnoff, the cliffs beside the lake get real steep, and since you don’t know the area, all you’d find is a few game trails that the deer and mountain sheep use. There are some guys that could guide you in, but this time of the year, they’re all working out of town. You might have to go back out and come in the other way, past Misery Flats, but to get there, you gotta come in from the Fraser River side, so it’s a long trip, and even that’s a rough trail. Usually, the only way we go up to the far end of the Mirror is by boat, ‘cept in the winter when we use a snowmobile.”

“The Mirror?” Tom frowned.

“Yeah, that’s our name for the lake. We’re less than halfway along it, and the only place on the lake that sells supplies, but mostly we sell to the local tribe and a few farmers. My great-great-grandpa built the first trading post here in 1836 to buy furs, and our family has been here ever since. In fact, the whole town’s called Bowman’s Bluff, and the government calls the lake Bowman Lake, but we don’t. Like I said, it’s the Mirror.”

“I’ll bet your great-great-grandpa spelled his name B-E-A-U-M-A-I-N, didn’t he?” Tom asked with a grin.

“Yep, how’d you know that?” she looked puzzled.

“Oh, I took high school French, and I took a guess,” Tom shrugged his shoulders, unwilling to tell her about the clue left by the dying prospector - after all, ‘Beau Main’ didn’t really translate into ‘clean hands,’ but it was close.

“Well, when Great-Grandma was alive, there was a Yankee who came here, and he painted the sign for the trading post in trade for a grubstake. He and a buddy were interested in going up past the head of the lake too, but they used canoes and backpacked in from the far shore. They were around every once in a while for a year or so, traded off some furs, a couple of nuggets, and a bit of gold dust, then they just disappeared and never showed up again. All of that’s written down in the family book, and I often wondered what happened to them.”

“So your family keeps a record of what happens in the area, do they?”

“Well, sort of,” she giggled. “Mum’ll probably write something down about you tonight when I tell her about having a visitor, but only because we keep track of things that are unusual. You’re unusual because you want to take mules up past the Mirror, and besides, you’re a friendly stranger. Most people who come driving in here are American tourists, and they all seem to get out of shape because the road doesn’t go no further,” she grinned and winked. “Those Yanks are funny folks, half of them can’t read a map for beans, and they get real rowdy and argue like mad when you tell them they are wrong.”

“Well, I’ve never had that problem, but then there aren’t any tourists around any of the places where I usually spend my time. By the way, you can tell your mom that I just graduated from university and this trip is a holiday of sorts,” Tom used a cover story he’d thought up as he travelled. “I’ve spent years out in the bush with my family, but as a sort of initiation into adulthood, I’m supposed to find my way into a relatively unexplored area and report on it.”

“You’ve gotta prove yer manhood, huh?” she nodded with a grin.

“I guess you could say that,” Tom winked and shrugged his shoulders. “Now I’m curious, why is the lake called the Mirror?”

“Oh, that’s easy. Almost every day at dawn and dusk, the winds die out and the lake goes dead calm, then you can see the far end with all the shoreline and the mountains behind reflected in the smooth water, just like a mirror,” she smiled slightly, then she frowned and got really serious. “The only time that doesn’t happen is during a storm. That’s when the lake gets really rough if the wind is blowing, especially since the winds are usually coming from one end of the lake or the other, which is most of the time. You don’t want to be on the lake then. My uncle and two cousins were out fishing and too far from shore a couple of years back. Even though they had floatation vests on, they were killed, probably from exposure, not drowning because their bodies were floating when they were found.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Not anybody’s fault, excepting my dumb uncle’s,” she shrugged. “He must have taken his stupid pills that day because the weather forecast was for a storm and he knew better than being out that far from shore. I don’t think God cares much for damn fools.”

She sighed heavily then. “You can probably tell that I ain’t missing my dumb uncle none, but I wish he hadn’t gotten his kids killed. Little Johnny was seven and his brother Willy was only about five, so they didn’t know no better than to be out there.”

Tom didn’t know what to say or do, so he changed the subject, deciding to replenish what supplies he had used. After all, this might be his last chance in a while. Besides, it gave the young gal something to do and got her mind off her grief and anger. While the two of them were busy selecting and measuring out supplies, her mother appeared. After finding out what he wanted, she decided Tom should speak to her father, the young gal’s grandfather. However, since the old man was an invalid, Tom would have to go to their house to meet him, so they hung a sign in the window to let customers know they’d be back in an hour and headed for their house. First, though, they pointed out a grassy patch where Tom could leave his mules hobbled to graze. Then, all three of them went off to meet the old man.

It turned out the old guy had been a roving hunter in the past, and he’d actually been to the area Tom wanted to check out. He was quite willing to draw Tom a map of the trails he recalled using, but he shook his head and advised Tom not to bother looking the area over.

“At one time, it was a really great place, but it’s hell to get there, then too - oh, about thirty, maybe thirty-five years ago, there was a big forest fire up at the top end. I suppose the bush might have grown back some now, only just getting to the decent part is more trouble than it’s worth. There ain’t nothin’ special up there neither, just rocks and trees, probably a whole bunch of animals. Nothing much else, though there’s a mighty nice-looking waterfall on the way. Whatcha want to do up there anyway?”

So Tom repeated the story of just graduating and this trip being an initiation of sorts.

“Yer folks are damn fools, ‘cause they could get a guy killed that way. I’ll draw ya a map that’ll get ya to the head of the Mirror though, if things ain’t changed a bunch, but I’ll warn ya that a mile or so after that I’d be lost now. Y’see there’s a cliff and a waterfall there that ain’t comin’ down over good solid rock. I was there five, maybe six times and every time I got up to that cliff it was changed. Unless yer mules ha’ got wings or they is half mountain goat I dunno how ye’ll get ‘em up to the top end. I s’pose there might be a way ‘round that climb, but I ain’t never found one.

“Ya see there are three lil rivers come together and feed into the Mirror, sorta like a letter ‘Y’ with an extra point in the middle at the top, but figgerin’ the lake as the bottom leg. The water in them rivers comes from up top and is runnin’ on real hard rock up there, but the rock closer this way is sorta crumbly, so there are drops and waterfalls and rapids on all three rivers. Dangerous as Billy be dang. Besides that the bottom stuff has all been worn away into steep sided valleys with walls what ain’t safe t’ climb. Best thing t’ do would be t’ climb halfway up the mountain and cross one of them lil side rivers up top where it ain’t cut down into the soft crap, specially if yer takin’ in mules. Comin’ back would be easier, cause yer headin’ down grade, but agin, t’ain’t easy t’ get past that mess with yer mules.”

It took the old guy about an hour to draw out a rough map and when he was finished Tom had recognised some of the geological features that he would run into on the way. In the first place the cliff that old Mr Bowman had mentioned was obviously an old fault line that had been displaced vertically. The old guy had even included a rough sketch of the layout of streams and slopes above that fault line, including a small lake not far upstream from the waterfall on the little river or big stream or whatever it was.

“There’s half a dozen little creeks or small rivers running into that little lake and then coming down that waterfall as one big flow,” the old guy sighed softly. “I recall it being right pretty, until that dang forest fire came through and killed off most of the trees up there. We were lucky the fire didn’t come this direction or none of this town’d be here and a lotta us mighta been dead too. As ‘twas it sure ruined the fishing in the lake for a couple of years, cuz lotsa ashes, cinders, dead trees, and other junk came down from up top.”