16. The Mine
Later that morning, Doug and I descended into the pit with Roland.
The ten-foot ladder swayed uncertainly beneath my weight. About five feet down, I came to a join, where it was clear two smaller ladders had been cobbled together. For an instant, I wondered why Bill and Clarke hadn’t just built a single ladder—then realized how impractical that was. The shaft would get deeper by the day: fifteen feet, twenty feet, twenty-five. The longer we dug, the more unsteady the ladder would become.
The candle gripped in my hand illuminated the raw permafrost walls, a thick coat of rime covering them except where a careless movement had knocked it aside to reveal dark brown earth frozen to the consistency of iron.
At the bottom, my boots sank into a layer of charcoal and ash from the fire that had softened the ground overnight. A few coals still glowed a sullen red. The thick smell of smoke permeated the air, but beneath it I detected a trace of rotten eggs.
“Christ,” I muttered, looking around. The shaft had the dimensions of a grave; the thin sunlight above seemed impossibly far away.
And it was only going to get farther.
It took Roland twice as long to get to the bottom, gripping the ladder tight to use the strength of his arms to take some of his weight off his bad leg. Though healing, he kept it splinted tight for support. If it pained him, he refused to let it show, taking up his shovel as soon as he reached us.
“All right, lads, let’s get to it,” he said cheerfully, and drove his shovel into the ash.
We scooped up the remains of the fire, shuffling about to get the ashes we’d been standing on. Sixteen shovel-fulls, and Roland shouted up the shaft: “Bucket!”
Steve cranked the windlass at the top of the mine. The bucket ascended, swinging ponderously on its rope, occasionally banging into the ladder or the permafrost walls. We rested for the brief time it took Steve to toss its contents onto the dump pile, then started shoveling again as it returned.
Within minutes, we were below the ash and into the softened mud. The stink of rotten eggs took over, strangely underlain by petrichor. Sixteen shovel-fulls, a cry of “Bucket!” and the process repeated itself.
It didn’t take long for my back and arms to start aching from the unfamiliar exertion. The trapped heat from the fire and the thawed earth meant it was above freezing at the bottom of the pit, and sweat started to run down my spine and face. I paused to wipe away a trickle before it could reach my eyes, only to realize my hand was covered in brown sludge.
Nothing for it—there was no water down here to wash with, after all. I grimaced and resigned myself to a muddy face.
Hour after hour of monotonous work went by. My shovel bit into the mud, then emptied into the bucket, over and over. A brief pause while Steve worked the windlass, dumped out muck, then lowered the bucket back to us.
The smell of our sweat soon joined the sulfuric stink of the thawed earth. My mind, desperate for something besides the monotony of our work, grabbed at each discomfort, thus making me even more miserable.
Then, shortly before our lunch break, my shovel struck something that wasn’t mud.
Confused I set aside the shovel, took up my candle, and crouched down to see what it was. A pale streak of something smooth showed through the dirt of eons.
Bone?
“What’d’ye got?” Roland asked.
“I’m not sure.” I dug around it carefully, then popped it loose from the ground.
It emerged like an ancient god, antlers erupting from the earth, followed by its hollow-eyed skull. A caribou, dead and buried God only knew how many thousands of years, waiting in the darkness until I returned it to the light.
Doug and I both stared at it, almost mesmerized. Roland seemed to have no interest, though. “Just put it in the bucket, and Steve’ll add it to the bone pile,” he said. “You’ll probably find more of the beast as you dig.”
I positioned the skull carefully in the bucket, so the great branching antlers wouldn’t catch on the ladder on the way up. As it ascended, the light of our candles caught in its eye sockets, giving them an illusion of life and movement.
The sight sent an unexpected chill up my spine, and long after I’d returned to my work, I felt as though they watched me still.
* * *
After lunch, Steve suggested I take over the windlass for a while. I did so gratefully, my back still aching from the constant bend-and-straighten of shoveling.
Not that the work above was easy. In a way, it was even more monotonous than in the pit, as I didn’t have anyone to talk to up here. At the moment, the wind was only a mild breeze, but even so it stung exposed skin after a time. Then snow began to fall—just a flurry, thankfully, but a preview of what was no doubt to come.
I paced around to keep my blood warm, pausing when the call of “Bucket” echoed up to me. Hauling up a bucket filled with primordial muck was no easy task, and soon a new set of muscles in my arms began to complain. Once at the top, I tossed it onto the growing dump pile, occasionally fishing out a skull or larger piece of bone and throwing it on a separate pile. Once we hit paydirt, there would be yet another mound, which we’d send through the sluices in the spring.
After what seemed like an endless day, we called a halt. We’d dug through the thawed soil and hit rock-hard permafrost once again.
If that had been the end of our toil, I would have gladly staggered back to the cabin and collapsed. But we couldn’t quit until we’d built the fire to burn overnight.
We gathered dried logs for the base, then added a layer of green wood. Doug took the opportunity to pull out his Secrets of the Yukon guidebook. “Green wood burns slower, and thus will hold more heat in the pit and allow for more thorough thawing,” he read aloud. Steve rolled his eyes behind Doug’s back, and I suppressed a snicker.
“Let’s look for some color,” Roland suggested, using the Klondiker term for gold. “Steve, get a pan while we light the fire, would you?”
Steve did so, scraping some of the final bucket of muck into the pan. As the flames beneath the ground began to glow in the growing dark, we walked back to the cabin.
The smell of frying bacon greeted us, and my stomach cramped with hunger. I’d worked harder today than I’d ever done in my life, and I wanted nothing more to eat and fall into bed.
After seeing if we’d brought up any gold, of course.
A bucket of water sat near the stove, kept thawed by its heat. As Eleanor and Anna crowded around, Steve dipped the pan in, brought it up, swirled the contents around, then carefully tipped the pan while continuing to swirl. The lighter particles of dirt floated to the top and were poured off. He repeated the process again, leaving behind heavier and heavier grains. Gold, being heavier than soil, would remain in the pan until everything else washed away.
We watched avidly, desperate for a flash of color amidst the brown and black. None came, and Steve ended up with an empty pan.
Anna’s shoulders slumped and she turned away. Doug must have noticed because he said, “Not unexpected—we haven’t hit gravel yet, and the guidebook says that’s where we’ll find the gold. Just wait until we reach paydirt.”
His words both cheered and depressed me. No gold yet was to be expected from everything I’d heard. The gold Bill and Clarke had panned promised a rich streak of paydirt feeding into the creek. But to reach it, we had to burrow down through the tough permafrost until we hit bedrock. That could be another foot down—or another fifty.
We’d only just begun to dig.