Chapter Sixteen
On their return from the esquimaux village, John Shaw takes Hearn’s notebook and on a blank page draws an outline of the lake, then divides it into four quarters and numbers each one.
He calls Hearn and Walker across, shows them the diagram, and explains that they will divide each quarter into three separate sections, each a mile or so square with cairns to mark the boundary point.
Then each of them will search one section thoroughly for a week, and if nothing is discovered, they will move the whole camp farther around and start the process over again until they succeed.
When Hearn reminds him that there is still snow on the ground, so any gold-bearing rocks may well be covered over, Shaw insists that the snow is melting fast and if they have to go around twice, then so be it, but he can’t believe that will be necessary.
“If we keep our eyes peeled and our wits about us, we’ll find it,” he says.
“It might take us a month or two, perhaps, but no longer.”
The next morning after breakfast, they begin the task.
Hearn and Shaw go south a mile together before separating, and Abel Walker goes north alone.
Walker counts out eight hundred paces from the camp’s edge, as John Shaw told him he should, and builds the first small cairn, then another eight hundred and builds a second, larger one.
By the time he has successfully marked out the complete square mile, it is close to noon, so he stops a while to rest, eat dried meat, and drink some water from a stream.
As he looks back across the portioned area and thinks how many separate outcroppings or patches of bare rock it must contain, all of which he is now obliged to examine carefully for any indication, however small, of the gold, his heart sinks a little.
But when he remembers what Shaw told them just before they parted—that gold has a magic to it like nothing else on earth, and that if you only stay alert and don’t let disbelief or hesitation cloud your mind, then even a tiny speck of it will call out to you and catch the eye—his doubts recede and he begins to think of the glorious reward that is awaiting them and not of the slow labor required to reach it.
The first week is unsuccessful, despite their most strenuous efforts, so they move the camp farther around and begin again.
On the third day of the second week, they are all hard at work, each man attending as usual to his own separate parcel of land and therefore out of sight of the others, when Walker comes across two of the esquimaux band, a man and a boy, sitting beside a fast-moving stream cooking fish over a small, stuttering fire made of twigs and moss.
When they see him watching, the man stands up, calls out, and beckons him forward, and after hesitating for a moment Walker decides that, since he is alone, after all, and the fellow looks friendly enough, it can do no harm to accept their hospitality.
Once he is seated on the ground beside them, the esquimaux man, who is tall and thin and has a friendly aspect, puts his hand on his chest and says his name, Hekwaw, then points to the boy and says, “Yaha.”
“Abel,” Walker says. “My name is Abel.”
“Abel,” Hekwaw repeats with a smile, and Walker smiles back at him and nods.
In appearance, the Esquimaux seem much like the Northern Indians, he thinks, they have the same wide, flat faces and narrow eyes, although their clothing appears more ragged, and their hair not so carefully knotted or dressed.
Shaw says they are arrogant and stupid, but this one seems polite and sensible enough.
When the fish is crisp and ready to eat, they share it out between them, and then Walker takes some pieces of dried meat from his satchel and offers one piece to Hekwaw and another to the boy.
While they chew the meat, he notices a short, bone-tipped fishing spear lying on the ground and points to it.
“Is that what you use?” he says. “Not a hook or a net?”
Hekwaw picks up the spear and gives it to him and Walker feels its weight in his hands, then tests the sharpness of the twin prongs with his finger.
“A simple thing,” he says, “but it must take some special skill to use it.”
When he attempts to give the spear back, instead of accepting it, Hekwaw points to the hammer that is poking out of Walker’s satchel and nods and smiles.
Walker is puzzled at first, but when Hekwaw makes another remark in his own tongue, then points at the hammer again and back to the spear, he realizes what he means.
“No, I can’t trade with you,” he says. “A fishing spear’s no earthly use to me, but I use this hammer every day.”
He tries again to hand back the fishing spear, but Hekwaw shakes his head and continues pointing and talking, so Walker, remembering what Shaw said about the Esquimaux’s simplicity and stubbornness, lays the spear back on the ground where it was before, pushes the hammer inside the satchel, and gets back up onto his feet.
“I thank you for the meal,” he says. “It was a pleasure to meet you, but I’d best be going now.”
Hekwaw suddenly looks sad and gestures for him to sit down again, but Walker shakes his head and says he can’t waste the afternoon chattering because he has important work to do.
“You have your chieftain,” he says, “and I have mine, and if my chieftain knew I was dawdling the day away, he wouldn’t be pleased.”
He smiles to show them he has just made a joke, then says goodbye again and turns to leave.
As he walks away, he hears Hekwaw calling out to him plaintively in a soft beseeching tone, and feels a measure of pity but also, irresistibly, of pride, since to possess an object like the hammer in a wild, uncultured place like this, he thinks, must be a sign not just of luck but also, somehow, of deserving.
Later that evening, when he tells John Shaw about the encounter, Shaw warns him to be more careful next time.
“There’s nothing useful to be gained from hobnobbing with the natives,” he says. “They’ve refused to help us, and according to Datsanthi they’re mostly brutes and liars anyway. So my advice is to keep a safe distance from now on and carry a musket just in case.”
“He seemed friendly enough,” Walker says. “Just a little too insistent when he saw the hammer.”
“That’s how it might start, wheedling and sorrowful, but things can soon turn nasty, you mark my words. All they have for tools is wood and bone, so the sight of so much iron will naturally make them jealous.”
“They got that good file and a knife from us already,” Walker remembers. “You’d think that would be enough to keep them satisfied.”
“They have the taste for it now, though,” Shaw says. “That’s the thing. In the primitive races, once a fresh appetite is provoked it can’t easily be sated, so we must all be on our guard.”
The next day, Walker returns to his allotted segment and continues searching in his usual manner: walking slowly up from the lakeshore checking to the left and the right all the time for any likely-looking rocks, then, when he reaches the boundary of the quadrant, turning about, like a plowman in a field, and returning along a parallel track.
Although the work is slow and monotonous, after an hour or two he settles into an easy, thoughtless rhythm, and his unoccupied mind drifts off to other scenes and situations.
He thinks about the fort in springtime and imagines what his uncle might be doing there in their absence, and then he plays out in his mind the scene of their triumphant return three or four months from now, tattered and weary from their long adventure but laden down with gold.
He pictures the proud and delighted look on his uncle’s face as he welcomes them home, hears his shouts of joy and laughter, and feels in his imagination the firm, affectionate hand on his shoulder and the strength and warmth of his uncle’s grateful and loving embrace.
Absorbed in this manner by a host of pleasant ruminations, he fails at first to notice that Hekwaw, unaccompanied this time, has returned and is striding toward him across the still half-frozen moor with a smile on his face and the same two-pronged fishing spear in his hand.
It is only when the Esquimaux calls out a greeting from twenty yards away that Walker is jolted from his reveries, looks up, and sees that he is no longer alone.
“What do you want with me now?” he asks impatiently. “I can’t make any trade, if that’s what you’re thinking. I told you that before.”
Hekwaw starts talking quickly and making gestures with his hands, but Walker has no idea what any of the words or signs might mean.
“I can’t understand what you’re saying. Is it more food you want? Is that it?”
He takes some dried meat from his satchel and holds it out, but Hekwaw waves it away and starts pointing instead at the hammer that Walker is still holding in his right hand.
“Not that again. I told you before, I can’t make a trade for this hammer. Even if I wanted to, I’m not allowed.”
Hekwaw reaches for the hammer as if to snatch it away, and Walker pulls his arm back.
The unloaded musket is propped nearby against one of the cairns and, remembering Shaw’s warning, he wonders for a moment if he should run over and retrieve it while he still can.
Then he sees that Hekwaw appears to have given up on the hammer already, and instead is holding what looks like a kidskin purse in his hand and offering it to him.
“What is it you have there now? Some piece of nonsense, I suppose. A lucky charm, is it, or a magic root?”
He takes the purse and opens it, peers inside, then pours the contents out into the palm of his hand and gazes down.
It just looks like salt, he thinks, like a little pile of salt, but out here so far from any sea it can’t be salt, so what can it be?
He looks at Hekwaw skeptically, then pushes the powder about with his fingertip and looks again.
And that is when he sees it, just as Shaw promised he would when the time was right: a scattering of fine golden specks catching and holding the morning’s brightness, glinting and burning inside the pennyweight of crushed and powdered quartz like some scouring or fragment of heaven broken off from its source and gifted unbidden to the world.
“By Christ,” he says when he understands, gasping now and trembling a little from the shock. “By Christ, I never thought. I never thought…but it is, it really is, it must be.”