Beyond the Mirror
Copyright© 2012/2014
Chapter 2
Tom moved camp not long after Milly left to head home, crossing the river above the waterfall and moving to an area with plenty of grass for his mules. He didn’t set up a permanent camp, just a quick day camp. Then he began to look over the area and check the occasional pan of sand and other sediment from likely areas on the edge of the river. The next morning he moved on, and late in the day he crossed another large stream, then set up another temporary camp that evening. After a quick evening meal, he did check a few pans of sand, but all he found was black sand and one or two tiny flakes of gold, hardly worth the effort of collecting. The next day he moved on a half mile further upstream, where he found even more tiny bits of gold.
A day later, Tom paused on the edge of a nameless stream to pan a few handfuls of sand and found several flakes of gold dust in the bottom of his pan. A few yards upstream, sheltered in a pocket below a huge boulder, he found more gold flakes and even a tiny nugget, a very tiny nugget, only about the size of a grain of rice. Following the standard procedure of trying a sample pan every hundred yards or so, he’d gone on with his task, pan by pan, patiently hunting the source of the lode. He’d worked his way up the stream for over two miles, with each pan slightly richer than the one previous. Meanwhile, the tiny golden nuggets grew larger and more numerous as he moved upstream. Then suddenly, between one pan and the next, there had been no more gold showing in the pan. He backtracked to the last point where he’d found gold, then he gradually worked his way upstream following an even smaller stream, panning as he went until he reached a spot where he found no more gold in his pan. At that point, he went back to break camp and bring up his mules, then he headed up the grade toward a rock face well up-slope of the stream, crossing his fingers that those rocks were the source of the gold.
Just to be certain that his hunch was correct, he paused, scraped soil from near the base of a large rock, and ‘dry panned’ the fine dirt. Even as crude as that method was, he saw signs of gold flakes and fine dust when he gently shook and blew away the final bit of the dust in the bottom of the pan. Grinning as he turned to put the pan back on the closest mule’s pack, he paused, then chuckled as he looked back over the last mile or two of his trek.
“Even if I spend the summer just panning that last mile, I’ll bet I could pay for everything I’ve invested in this whole setup, including you and your buddy, old mule. So ‘Lucky Dunn’ has struck again. What do you think of that?” he asked as he tied the pan in place.
The mule just reached toward a clump of grass, so Tom let him grab another mouthful before leading him and his trail-mate further up the steep incline, telling the mules his thoughts, “Come on, you two, placer gold is great, but we’re on a hunt for the mother lode.”
As he crested the grade and stood on the edge of a small plateau, not much more than a few acres in extent, his powers of observation and his geological training kicked in. On the far side of that plateau was a cliff, quite obviously a millennia-old fault line which had probably been formed when the surrounding mountains had been forced upward. As he faced the cliff, the left side was lower than the right, but even that lower portion stood at least fifty feet above the gradually sloping area where he stood. What drew Tom’s attention most, though, was the fact that the far left end of the cliff he faced was laced with several pencil-thin veins of white quartz. To Tom, it was obvious after only a glance that those quartz veins must be the source of the golden prize he’d been tracing.
The shelf he stood on was approximately ten or twelve acres in extent and was relatively level, almost triangular in shape, but narrower on the left than the right. The cliff faded out on his far left, but continued off to his right, only to be broken by a small gorge and the gurgle of flowing water. Listening closely, he could hear the two mules munching on the rank grass on the small plateau, but from somewhere to his right and further away, he could hear the muted roar of a decent-sized waterfall. He glanced around, assessing the area. There was water, grass, and a wall of rock that showed signs of quartz intrusions - not only that, but only moments before, he’d dry-panned several flakes of gold out of a few handfuls of dry soil. The combination of facts convinced him that he should check the area, but he wanted a closer look at that cliff before making up his mind to spend much time on exploration.
He took the time to tie the mules to a section of log sticking out of a pile of rubble not far from the base of the cliff. Then he paused and looked at the old rotting log closely, realizing that the log had not only been trimmed with an axe, but the end showed signs of having been cut with a saw! Under this mess of soil, rocks, and scrub brush, there must be the remains of some sort of log structure, probably a cabin.
The only reason he could think of that anyone would build a log cabin or any other log building in this isolated area would be to mine gold. Damn! If the former prospector had abandoned it, this might be an old, worked-out claim. But wait a minute, why was the cabin crushed and buried under rocks and soil - had there been a cave-in or avalanche of some sort? He glanced up at the cliff and shook his head since the rock face looked relatively stable. Still, an avalanche was the only thing he could think of that might have brought down that amount of soil - unless a snow slide had done it. At the right time of the year, a snow slide could easily have scoured that much soil and rubble from the mountainside and carried it downhill.
At least the plateau was a pleasant place to camp for a short time in the summer. Somewhat downslope and off to his left, he could see a mountain meadow on a much larger shelf, another small mountainside plateau. Those two plateaus could easily provide all the grass his mules would need, even if he remained there for months. Nearby, there was a level area for his tent; the pile of rubble would provide lots of fuel for evening campfires, and fresh water came cascading down only a few hundred feet away. He decided it would be worthwhile to stick around and have a look at what had been done on the site. Even if the mine had been mined out, he could look things over and see how someone else had developed their claim. He could definitely learn from it, and that alone was reason enough to spend a week or two camping on the mountainside.
By the time his camp was set up, he’d decided that the cabin had been built where it was to hide the entrance to a mine, so he started digging away the rock and rubble near the cliff face. After only a few hours’ work with a shovel and axe, he found that the pile of dirt, broken rock, and logs was blocking an adit, the entrance to a mine. He even found an old, rusted shovel leaning against the rock wall near the opening. Then, later that day, he found a second shovel just inside the tunnel; that second one had a handmade, old-style D-handle with a short shaft, obviously meant for working in tight quarters. Without a light, he could only see a short distance into the tunnel, but even that was enough to tell that the mine hadn’t been entered in years. However, after only a cursory glance at the sides of the tunnel, he could see that the drift had been following a larger vein of quartz than the other veins, which were exposed to view. He decided that he’d have to return with his coal oil lantern and see what was deeper inside the dark tunnel, but before he did that, he wanted to check something he’d thought of as he’d been working.
He had recalled that somewhere in the packs on his mules there was a paperback claims registry—a government pamphlet showing the registration data of all the gold claims ever staked in that part of the province. Using that, he might be able to learn the name of the miner who had staked out the claim and if that person had done well, or if the claim had been relatively worthless.
As he ate a light lunch, he checked the government booklet, but it showed no entry for a mineral claim anywhere near the upper end of Bowman Lake, which meant only one thing. The mine had never been registered! Since the adit was as deep as it was, he was certain that it must have been producing ore though. To Tom, that could only mean that the man who had been working this mine must have been planning to register a claim, but had never done it. Whoever had discovered and worked the mine might even have been caught in the avalanche or snowslide which had crushed the cabin. Or they could have died for some other reason, perhaps on their way out to get help after escaping the avalanche. It was even possible that this was the claim of the prospector that Tom had seen mentioned in the old records. If that was the case and there was no registered claim, Tom could work the abandoned mine with a clear conscience.
As he sat there, sipping a cup of tea, he almost convinced himself that this might be the lost claim he’d set out to find, at least it seemed to match most of the clues. He’d memorized the old guy’s supposed words, ‘a wall of gold - beyond the mirror and past the folks with clean hands.’ Well, if you weren’t too good at French, then ‘Beaumain’ might be translated as ‘clean hands’ and the local name for Bowman Lake was ‘The Mirror.’ As far as Tom could see, there was no wall of gold though, just a cliff riddled with veins of quartz. Unless ... perhaps the tunnel had been dug at the center of a series of gold-bearing quartz veins, so a large part of the ‘wall of gold’ might already have been mined away.
It wasn’t long before Tom was back at the mine, checking it further. Standing outside the tunnel, he lit his oil lantern and tried using the light to inspect the walls and roof for structural weaknesses before he dared risk entering and exploring further. Soon, he was smiling and nodding his head in satisfaction. The rock surrounding the tunnel appeared solid. The opening was only four feet high and three feet wide near the entrance of the adit, and no shoring had been used. There was a log framework around the entrance, but even that old timber frame seemed solid. The tunnel looked as if it had a slight uphill grade as it went deeper, which would mean it was dry - that was another point in the mine’s favour since it’d be very unlikely that the working face was flooded if that slope continued. Everything appeared stable and there were no whiffs of gas that Tom could detect, but he wasn’t completely satisfied that it was safe enough to risk entering that opening just yet.
There were a few signs that small animals had occupied the tunnel at some time in the past, but although he heard and saw nothing alive at the moment, that meant little. All in all, he felt it would be relatively safe to enter, though when he did he intended to carry a rifle with him, just in case. First though he wanted to be certain that it was truly safe to be in that confined space. The first worry of course in any old tunnel was varmints - even though he’d just dug out the entrance, there might be a second entrance or even an air shaft. In old mines you just didn’t know what had been done in the past, and people had died from trusting that others had used common sense.
Setting his lantern aside, he stood where he could see the entrance clearly, and with his rifle at hand, he threw a baseball-sized shard of rock as far inside the tunnel as he could. The instant the rock left his hand, he grabbed the rifle and whipped it to his shoulder, but no cougar rushed out to attack him. Tom grinned to himself, set the rifle down, and threw several more stones after the first. The last stone he threw resulted in a rattle, then an off-key metallic clang that brought a brief questioning frown to Tom’s face. But after a second or two, a satisfied smile took the frown’s place; he was certain that the sudden metallic sound would have chased out any animal that might have been hiding in the dark.
Since the cliff seemed to be made up of slate, shale, sandstone, and surprisingly, volcanic tuff, with intruding veins of quartz, there was one last worry - gas! Slate wasn’t usually known for gas buildup, but at times shale had entrapped oils, and if it did, methane and other gasses were often produced when it was exposed to open air. Since he didn’t have an electronic gas tester, he had to devise another testing method. He knew that most poisonous gasses were either extremely flammable or else incapable of sustaining a flame, so he decided that he could test the air by kindling a fire of some sort inside the tunnel. The problem he had was delivering a flame to the point where any possible accumulation of dangerous gases could have built up inside the tunnel.
That’s where some of his training in northern bush country helped him. He’d had a native friend who had taught him how to make a quick-and-dirty bow and arrow in case of emergencies. Tom went back to his camp and built a fire, then put water on to boil, and while it was heating, he wandered off to find the makings of a very simple bow and arrow. A willow bush provided a likely branch to make a crude bow, and several relatively straight willow twigs provided a few roughly true arrow shafts.
Then while his water boiled for tea and his supper cooked, he used his hatchet and hunting knife to fashion a very crude bow. A length of heavy cord became a crude bowstring, and a long, narrow leaf, tied into a split in the shaft, became the rough fletching for his arrow. A small piece of cloth took the place of the arrowhead, and after dipping it in coal-oil from his lantern, he moved to the top of the pile of rubble in front of the adit. Lying down, just in case there was an explosion from gas, he took a deep breath, lit the rag on fire, then drew back the string of his crude bow. The release of the arrow and its flight into the tunnel was rather anticlimactic; nothing happened except that the arrow flew deep into the mine and lay on the floor, still burning, casting weird shadows on the walls. He sighed softly as the flames flickered. There had been no explosion, and the dancing flames could only burn in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. That tiny fire proved that the air in the mine was relatively safe for a man to breathe.
It was late in the evening by then, and although he was anxious to inspect the mine, the can of stew he’d opened and set in the ashes of his campfire would be warm enough to enjoy. Besides, he was quite tired, and he knew it would be safer for him to enter the tunnel when he was fresh from a night’s sleep. He ate, then checked the hobbles on his mules, had a final cup of tea, and finally crawled into his sleeping bag. Surprisingly, even though he was quite excited, he fell asleep easily that night and slept very well.
However, he awakened before the sun had fully risen the next day and had to force himself to wait for more light before he began to explore his discovery. Finally, after eating a hearty breakfast, then checking his mules and taking the time to find a convenient fallen tree to use as a seat for his early morning necessities, he approached the mine with his lantern in his hand.
This time, as he entered the tunnel, he rechecked everything. He even used a rock hammer to be certain the ceiling was sound, tapping the rock and listening for a possible loose slab, but everything seemed fine. It bothered him to crawl on his hands and knees, but there was no way he could stand since the excavation was no more than four feet high. The further he explored, the more certain he became that the mine had been abandoned just after the slide had occurred. He had almost certain confirmation when he reached the working face of the mine, which was easily forty feet back from the cliff face. He had to bypass an old wooden wheelbarrow to reach the end of the tunnel, and beside it lay a blunt-ended pick, a well-worn rock hammer, and a rusty gold pan. At the face of the tunnel, scattered around the tunnel floor, was the evidence of a final blast which had never been gathered up from where it had fallen. There were quartz fragments laden with golden threads of ore amongst the broken rock on the floor of the mine. Most of that quartz lay in a rough pile at the foot of the cracked and crumbling face at the end of the tunnel. Raising his lantern so he could inspect that wall of stone, he saw more than one seam of quartz; the largest was easily wider than his hand. That large quartz seam was packed with several fine threads and one thin vein of raw gold. That vein was easily as long as his thumb, and at its widest, it was nearly a quarter as wide as his thumbnail.
Now he was positive that the mine was totally abandoned and that no one would return to claim it. No miner would walk away leaving raw gold lying out in the open the way this mine had been left, not unless his life was in imminent danger. As well, whoever the miner was, if he had escaped and had lived, Tom was positive he would have managed to return. Even if the miner had been crippled for life, he would have found some way to have had someone else recover that gold. Tom was as certain of that as he was that the sun rose in the east.
That raw gold lying there was a conclusive argument that this claim had never been registered, and the mine hadn’t been reported. The miner or miners who had worked this claim must have died, perhaps in the original avalanche or since their cabin had been destroyed, they might have been injured and died in the aftermath. Or else the miners might have died as they tried to make their way to a place of safety in a futile search for help, but there was no help nearby. Even the closest native village was many miles away at Bowman’s Bluff, almost at the opposite end of Mirror Lake. All the clues seemed to point to the last scenario, and if that was true, Tom had probably found the answer to the mystery he’d been hunting.
Then it dawned on Tom: there might be someone buried in the wreckage of the log building he had been clambering over to get into the mine. That was a sobering thought. Although he had been considering heading out to civilization to register the claim, he knew he should investigate that wreckage first. He had an axe, a shovel, and two mules, as well as his own strength, so he’d be able to move those logs and boulders. Besides, he had enough supplies to last at least a month, and there was ample wild game in the area, which meant he wouldn’t starve. Someone had already mined several ounces of gold; the least he could do was to see if they had died on the site, and if they had, they deserved a decent burial. He had to check. That way, he could feel he’d earned a small pittance of the value that the gold would bring when he got back to civilization.
Before he knee-walked out of the mine itself, he checked every corner and hollow for any possible sign of bones, just in case someone had died in the mine itself. Then he collected all the gold he could find and placed it in the old gold pan, covering the whole thing with loose shale and placing it near the old blast face. For now, he planned to do his best to forget it was there, all the while remembering the old tales of men developing gold fever and working a rich claim until they starved to death in the midst of a fortune.
As he moved out into the late morning light, he felt slightly numb. Things had happened too fast in the last two days for him to absorb everything. Not only had he found gold, but he was almost certain that he’d found the original mine that had caused him to go off on this wild goose chase in the first place. For the rest of that day, he did little work; instead, he wandered around the area, finding several clues to prove that someone had lived on the plateau for at least a year or more.
Off to one side of the ruin, he found an old outhouse, hidden amongst a small stand of trees. Near that stood a slant-roofed, three-sided shed with rows of cut and split logs, ready to be used to heat the former cabin, all of it covered with years of drifted leaves and debris. On the other end of the plateau, near the cascading stream, he found the rusted remains of an old tin bucket hung on the limb of a tree. That metal bucket had hung on the limb for so long that the wood had grown around the wire handle, so rather than damage the limb to remove the rusted remains, he left it hanging there. That old bucket would serve to remind him that the works of man were fleeting, even at the best of times.
From the amount of work that had been done in the area, he realized that someone had lived there for at least two years, perhaps three. Either that or there had been more than one person working here just to accomplish the amount of work which had been done. One thing he couldn’t fathom was why they hadn’t registered the claim if they had been here for so long. The other thing worrying him was the ruined cabin itself. Someone had done a lot of work in the area, but they’d had their work and perhaps their lives snuffed out by a single avalanche. Naturally, he worried that the same thing might happen to him at some point.
The cabin had been crushed flat, and although there was some rock and rubble atop the wreckage, the debris was mostly small logs, stumps, and branches, all old and rotten. That alone convinced him that a snowslide had wiped out the cabin. There wasn’t enough debris in that pile, though, not when he considered the number of winters that must have passed since it must have happened, especially if that particular area was prone to snowslides. It had to have been a freak accident, a one-time thing, but even freak accidents have a way of repeating themselves. The very idea of being killed by an avalanche or snowslide terrified him, and he felt that he had to find what had caused it. He simply had to know if he was in danger of being killed by a snowslide or avalanche if he stayed and worked the mine over winter.
So the next morning, instead of going back into the mine or setting to work exploring the debris of the cabin, Tom climbed to the upper slope above the cliff. The first hundred yards above the cliff was mostly bare rock, but further back there were grasses, then shrubs, and finally a large stand of trees. Initially, as Tom surveyed the area, he couldn’t understand how a snowslide could have come down that slope, but as he walked forward into that stand of trees, the reason dawned on him. The trees he was looking at were second growth, and in amongst those younger trees, he found a multitude of stumps. In fact, from the sheer number of stumps he found on that slope, he assumed that the former miners had virtually denuded the slope directly above the cabin. The trees they had cut had probably become the logs used to build and heat the cabin. Only since the builder had stripped the trees from the slope had the avalanche crushed the cabin.
As he climbed higher, he found that the slope above the cliff stretched all the way to a small cirque on the side of the mountain facing the valley. From the cirque, there was an obvious declivity that led almost directly toward the area above the mine. However, there was a rather large rock outcropping above the area containing the stumps, and that rock would deflect the path of any snowslide to some extent. Only now there was a curving stand of second-growth trees growing downslope from that huge rock. That must act as a partial barrier, possibly redirecting snowslides to one side, or perhaps it worked something like a snow fence, building up deep snow amongst the trees, then anchoring the snow well enough to steer the slides aside. Tom couldn’t rebuild that barrier easily, but nature seemed to be doing that already.
He did notice that over half of the cliff face was already well protected simply because of the nature of the slope and the huge rock outcrops that stood in the way of any slide. Perversely, the portion of the cliff which had protection was the portion which showed no signs of quartz intrusions, and yet the former miners had built their cabin near their mine. He was certain that if they had used the higher side of the cliff as protection and had built a cabin a couple of hundred feet away from the mine opening, the cabin would still have been standing. As proof of that theory, the remains of the outhouse and woodshed were still there.
Over the next few weeks, he cleared away most of the smashed logs and rubble from the crushed log cabin, salvaging the few dry logs that weren’t rotten to use as firewood. As he dug down, he was surprised to find that he was able to recover several workable tools from the ruin. He found several useful items: axe and hammer heads, several rock drills, an iron wheelbarrow wheel, and even an old-style chain lift—which surprisingly wasn’t rusted solid. Perhaps the most useful item he had found, though, was a small, cast-iron, pot-belly stove that he might be able to use to heat a cabin of his own. He might even be able to use it as a cook stove, providing he only cooked in one pot at a time since the cooking surface was round and only about a foot in diameter. It was only then that he realized he was contemplating building a cabin and perhaps staying in the area longer than he’d originally planned.
Once he’d admitted to himself that he was considering building a cabin, he began to salvage some of the foundation stones from the old cabin and move them to a site he’d chosen. When he salvaged the large piece of slate the stove had been resting on, he discovered a surprise - in a hole beneath it was a heavily rusted coffee can that still held several pounds of raw gold. He had no way to accurately measure the weight of the tin, but to him it felt as if it weighed almost as much as his five-pound hand-sledge. At thirteen Troy ounces to the pound and at least five-hundred dollars to the ounce, that meant he had just found about thirty-thousand dollars worth of gold. Just having that much gold around weighed heavily on his mind though, so he decided it had to be hidden just in case someone else wandered into his camp. Using the rock drills that he’d salvaged, he cut a hole into the soft volcanic tuff of the cliff face near the site he’d chosen for his future cabin, tucked the old can in the hole, then piled rocks in front of the opening.
After a week of rain, he spent another two weeks building a very small cabin in a small copse of mature fir trees, but close to the section of the rock cliff protected by a solid barrier to snowslides. He’d gone up slope even further than the former logger to fell most of the logs he’d used for his cabin, even though that meant he had to use his mules to get them to his building site. He chose to cut the trees so the opening might help to divert the heavier slides away from the area that had wiped out the original building. In fact, he hoped that the new opening would carry the slides further away from his cabin and the mine, not toward them.
By midsummer, he was doing some mining, and his cabin was almost finished, but his food supplies were running low, and he knew he’d have to hike out with his mules to get more. He checked his maps and notes one evening, trying to work out a trail to a city or town where he could buy supplies and, if possible, register his claim. He definitely wasn’t happy with what he found.
According to his topographical map, he was almost fenced in by mountains on all sides, and there were relatively few passes into his area. Bowman’s Bluff, to the south and slightly east of him, was the closest town, but it was at least twenty-five miles away and near the other end of Mirror Lake. He remembered that trail and those sheer cliffs and wasn’t enthusiastic about tackling that trip again, certainly not on his own. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any other trail leading to Bowman’s Bluff, and since he didn’t have a boat or a canoe, he couldn’t use the lake as a highway. Besides, Bowman’s Bluff was little more than a village and didn’t have a bank, let alone a magistrate or a government office where he could register his claim.
The next closest town was Misery Flats, which was off to the west and somewhat north of his claim, and although there seemed to be a relatively passable trail leading toward it, it was at least ten miles further away. Besides that, his notes showed that the town didn’t have a magistrate or a bank, and he really wanted to head for a town that had both. According to his notes, there was a store there, though, so he probably could buy supplies, but he didn’t want to leave his claim unregistered any longer than absolutely necessary.
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