Part 3
Nathan looked at the frost on the boulders, then at Gordon.
“Running water. With it this cold.”
“Ground stays warmer down deep.”
“So it’s a spring?”
Gordon waited.
Nathan let out a breath. “Right. We haven’t seen a spring.”
They went only a little farther before turning downhill. On the return trip, Gordon kept the dogs close and skirted the places Highback had avoided. The sounds from the opening stayed with him, along with the trees and that delayed knock beneath the snow.
At the cabin, Nathan brushed frost from the snowmobile’s seat.
“Tomorrow, we can bring it up as far as the rocks.”
“Not decided.”
His nephew’s hand stopped on the handlebar.
“We’ve walked half the mountain. What else are we waiting for?”
“Tonight.”
Nathan looked ready to argue. Instead, he leaned against the sled and rubbed both hands over his face.
“I could eat a bowl of hot wheat cereal.”
Gordon turned toward him.
“Since when?”
“Grandma used to make it when I stayed over. House would smell like the stove before I got out of bed. She’d put plum preserves on top.”
“You dug the preserves out and left the rest.”
Nathan lowered his hands, smiling. “That’s the part I’m remembering.”
“Your grandmother noticed.”
“Never said anything.”
“She told me plenty.”
Nathan laughed and lifted his pack from the sled.
They spent the rest of the afternoon doing the work the cabin always required. Gordon filled the woodbox. Nathan knocked the ice out of the dogs’ water pans and checked the sled lashings. They ate beside the stove while snow ticked against the window.
Nathan set out his gear for morning as though the next day would be ordinary travel.
Gordon kept his boots close to the chair.
Around one, Minnow began to whine.
Highback stood at the far edge of the clearing when Gordon opened the door. Buck remained curled beside his kennel, watching without lifting his head.
Nathan came out behind his uncle, pulling on his coat.
“Always facing the same way.”
Gordon held a finger to his lips.
They waited. Nathan drew his shoulders up against the cold and stamped one foot very gently on the porch.
Highback’s head turned toward the north face. The movement was abrupt enough that Gordon tightened his grip on the doorframe.
Then the bear left.
He moved fast without running, crossed the mouth of the clearing, and disappeared behind the trees.
Nathan swept the flashlight after him.
“What now?”
The porch lifted beneath Gordon’s boots with a short, sickening tremor. Snow slid from the roof and struck the ground in a heavy sheet. From high in the basin came the grinding sound of stone against stone.
Nathan backed into the doorway.
“He moved before that.”
Gordon watched the place where the flashlight had lost the bear.
“I saw.”
This time, neither offered an explanation.
Before daylight, they shouldered their packs. Nathan glanced once at the snowmobile, then strapped on his snowshoes without another word about taking it onto the slope.
Highback’s new tracks crossed the route above the creek. Rather than descending toward the cabin again, he’d traversed the basin and climbed onto a ridge of exposed rock.
Nathan paused at the crossing.
“We going that way?”
Gordon opened the map against his forearm and found the faint end of the pencil mark.
“North face.”
“Away from him.”
“Yes.”
Nathan studied the little line.
Gordon folded the paper carefully.
“Nate. If I get stubborn about something stupid, say so.”
His nephew looked up.
“You’re giving me permission?”
“I’m asking.”
Nathan nodded once.
Gordon started walking, then added, “Doesn’t mean you have to enjoy it.”
“Too late.”
They climbed through the last of the timber and into a broken landscape of rock and wind-packed snow. By midday, the old route was little more than an occasional level place cut into the hillside.
They found a clearing filled with brush, a coil of rusted cable caught beneath a root, and a wooden survey post that crumbled when Nathan brushed it.
Gordon rested his hand on the post.
For an instant, he could smell cigarette smoke in summer air.
He’d been barely twenty-one when the survey crew occupied a trailer near the river. There was a narrow man named Orson who seemed always to have a cigarette burning between his fingers. Once, when Gordon had helped unload supplies, Orson had given him an unopened can of condensed milk. Gordon remembered the green on the label and the stickiness around the rim after he’d punctured it.
He hadn’t thought of that man in decades.
Nathan tapped the cable with his boot.
“Same survey people?”
Gordon took his hand off the post. “Yes. Worked this whole face.”
“Looking for ore?”
“Among other things.”
“Gold?”
“You ever think there’s anything else under a mountain?”
“Plenty. Gold’s just easier to get excited about.”
Gordon started to answer, but Minnow had moved away from the trail. The dog nosed along a bank of snow beside the rocks and stopped at a length of iron sticking out at an angle.
Nathan reached it first.
“There’s a plate on this.”
He took out his knife and began lifting the ice from the metal. Gordon steadied the post so it wouldn’t bend under the pressure.
“Easy. Might not be much left.”
Letters emerged beneath the ice and rust. Nathan scraped with the blunt back of the blade, wiped the plate with his mitten, and bent closer.
“Exploration adit,” he read. “Seven.”
Gordon’s hand tightened around the post.
Seven.
Orson’s trailer. Summer dust underfoot. Men standing near the hitch, discussing something Gordon hadn’t needed to understand.
He remembered a warning about a hard freeze. The rest would not come.
Nathan looked over his shoulder.
“You know this place?”
Behind them, Minnow growled.
The next concussion came from directly beneath the north face, close enough to shake rust from the plate onto Gordon’s glove…
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