Bitter Creek (15 page)

Chapter 29

DU PRÉ STOOD A HUNDRED
feet from the tents and pissed, and the cold air made it steam as he yawned.

The horses whuffled and stirred. They were shadows gaining mass as the sun rose in the east. There was a faint rim of pink on the land to the east.

He walked back to the camp.

Booger Tom was cooking eggs and sausage on a propane stove. He shoveled a mess of eggs and two patties of sausage on a steel plate and he handed it to Du Pré.

Du Pré buttered some toast kept warm in a small oven set over one of the burners on the stove.

They ate sitting at the folding camp table. The coffee was strong and thick.

Chappie came out of the wall tent yawning. He had a rifle in his hand. He moved off toward a high spot. As he got there, Patchen came in from a different direction.

“Plenty of food,” said Booger Tom, pointing to the stove. Patchen filled a plate, ate quickly, drank some coffee, went into the tent.

“We coulda helped 'em,” said Booger Tom.

“They sleep some today,” said Du Pré. “We are old and we may have long ride, you know.”

“I'm
old
,” said Booger Tom. “Yer in early middle age.”

… the old bastard must be eighty, Du Pré thought, looks sixty … think ill of the human race, makes you young …

“Ever' time I look at them two, missing parts on account of that farina-faced little moron we had in the White House, I get pissed off. …” said Booger Tom. “Best soldiers in the world and he makes 'em rubber ducks in a shootin' gallery.”

Du Pré nodded.

“Bart should be here any minute with that mackerel-snappin' fool,” said Booger Tom.

“He will come,” said Du Pré. “You have not converted yet.”

“Not likely,” said Booger Tom. “And he ain't never brought it up.”

“You are almost dead,” said Du Pré. “You could cover your bets.”

They heard a truck, saw headlights gleam on top of the hill. Two mule deer bounded through the beams of light.

The big SUV pulled into the camp.

A door opened and Father Van Den Heuvel fell out. He got up quickly, and he reached in for something. He pulled out a duffel bag. Walking over to Du Pré and Booger Tom, the priest dropped the bag and tripped over it.

“That does it,” said Booger Tom, “I am gonna shoot him. Now. It ain't
safe
. …”

Father Van Den Heuvel stood up, picked up the bag. “Watch your mouth,” he said. “I have powerful friends.”

Bart stuck his head out of the driver's window.

“Is it safe to get out yet?” he said. “Could you get him a chair and keep him there?”

Father Van Den Heuvel made an unpriestly gesture in the direction of everybody.

Bart got out and he approached cautiously.

“Oh, quit,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. “It's early and we've been surviving on bad coffee. I want good coffee. And sympathy. I think I sprained my ankle. I am in
pain.
…”

Booger Tom looked at Du Pré, his eyes narrowed. “Why we got this hopeless idiot here?” he said. “And we plan to put him on a horse? Let him go ridin'? With us? I'll spend the day ridin' after his horse and puttin' on splints and plasters. …”

Bart unfolded a camp chair. “Your friend is flying here,” he said to Du Pré, “in his own plane. He'll be here late this afternoon. …”

Du Pré nodded. He got up and so did Booger Tom and they went to the horses and slipped halters on three. Booger Tom led a fat old brown horse over to the box trailer, pulled out a saddle and tack and a blanket, and he put them on. He led the horse to Father Van Den Heuvel. Father Van Den Heuvel took the reins.

“Good morning, Duncan,” he said. He rubbed the horse's nose and he fished something out of his pocket and let the horse nibble it from his palm.

Du Pré and Booger Tom saddled the other two; Du Pré put bottles of water and some salami and cheese and bread in his saddlebags. The light was rising fast now.

Father Van Den Heuvel put on his wide-brimmed black hat. He lifted his left foot and stuck it at the stirrup.

He missed.

Du Pré sighed. He went to the horse and priest. He brought along a short stepladder.

With one hand on the saddle horn, standing precariously balanced on the top of the stepladder, Father Van Den Heuvel managed to get on.

Duncan stood, imperturbable.

“Horses usually try to kill me,” said the priest.

“We drugged him up good 'fore you got here,” said Booger Tom. He was sitting easy in the saddle, his horse dancing a little, eager to run.

Du Pré mounted his horse.

“All right,” said the big priest, pulling a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, “the mother rock here is limestone, but there was an igneous incursion thirty million years ago. …”

“It say that in the Bible?” said Booger Tom.

“The incursion went mainly up and under an area about ten miles away, but pipes of material splayed out from it. There is one six miles from here and from the contours on the map, that may be the place we are looking for,” said the priest. He folded the paper.

“Which way it might be I haven't the foggiest,” he added.

“South is that way,” said Booger Tom.

“If one has faith,” said Father Van Den Heuvel, “one has revelations. One hears voices. …”

“Is it south on the goddamned map?” said Booger Tom.

“Definitely,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. “Lead on. Do go out in front a few hundred feet. …”

“Christ,” said Booger Tom, riding past the priest and Du Pré.

The old cowboy's horse broke into a run for the hell of it and Booger Tom let him go.

He ran the horse in a wide circle, up a hill at speed and along the crest and then over it and out of sight.

“I am glad he didn't give me that horse,” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

Du Pré laughed.

He rode ahead and his horse danced a little, and Du Pré reined him toward the short drop at the far end of the flat. The horse stepped down into the floodplain and then he jumped the creek easily.

Old Duncan did the same, more slowly, and when he got to the creek he stepped across.

Du Pré took the trail that headed south.

Father Van Den Heuvel rode behind.

“Aha!” he said. “See that saddle over there … ?”

Du Pré turned.

“That would have had an ice dam across it,” said the priest. “I have been looking at this. This was a lake, and then there must have been another dam back that way, which held longer. That is the old river channel there. …” He pointed straight ahead.

“Yahoo!” yelled Booger Tom behind them.

He rode past.

His horse moved, Booger Tom did not. He was just sitting on the running animal, loose and easy.

“I wish I could do that,” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

“So do I,” said Du Pré.

“You ride well,” said the priest.

“I am OK,” said Du Pré, “but I am not like him. …”

They rode along in silence.

The rains had stopped for a time and the grass was brown and withered, save along the little watercourse. The banks were still green, but the water would sink deeper and those grasses would die too.

Booger Tom turned around and rode back, his horse calmer.

“We are gonna spend all day out here with this fool?” he said.

“Bless you, my son,” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

Du Pré handed a piece of paper to the priest.

The three stopped.

“That is what she painted, over and over,” said Du Pré, “that cabin, that little cleft canyon. …”

Father Van Den Heuvel nodded.

“The way it is eroded,” he said, “I suspect the incursion is the left side, the mother rock the right. It is much more worn down there. …”

“They could get a wagon to it,” said Du Pré.

… filled with the dead …

Booger Tom stood up in his stirrups.

He peered at the land ahead, cut and carved by water and ice and wind and time.

“So we are lookin' for an old wagon road,” he said.

“Yah,” said Du Pré.

He rode to the priest.

Father Van Den Heuvel handed him the sketch of the cabin and the canyon.

“Me and old Ranger here will go up on a look-see,” he said. “The danged horse is gettin' dancy again. …”

And he was gone.

Du Pré and Father Van Den Heuvel slowly plodded on.

Chapter 30

THEY ATE LUNCH IN THE
shade of a cliff, above a wide river channel that carried a great deal of water long ago and now carried only the wind.

They ate quickly and remounted.

Horseflies buzzed about, thwacked when they ran into men and horses.

“This could go on a ways,” said Booger Tom, “and so far you could get a wagon through it, had a four team on it, easy.”

“When you started out as a cowboy,” said Father Van Den Heuvel, “had the wheel been invented?”

“Saw the first one,” said Booger Tom. “Didn't think much of it, tell you the truth. Speeded things up. Most of our troubles today come of speedin' things up. …”

Du Pré laughed.

They went on.

The sun was very hot and a stiff wind was rising. It came from the east.

… be heavy rain before morning … be very wet …

“Gonna rain before mornin',” said Booger Tom, “and I don't want to be down in this when it does. …”

Du Pré laughed.

The trail left the riverbed and went through a cut in the rock, not deep, only ten feet or so to the top of the yellow-gray limestone.

Father Van Den Heuvel looked at the rock.

He pointed to a faint vertical line. “Drill hole,” he said. “They blew rock out of this, so this must be the trail.”

“Wide enough for a big freight wagon,” said Booger Tom.

They rode on.

They saw a small pile of boards weathered to gray, so sun eaten there were gaps an inch wide in some places.

“Old wagon box,” said Booger Tom. “Woulda taken the metal parts and the frame and wheels. …”

“Moving ore?” said Du Pré.

“Probably,” said Booger Tom. “Rough rock would eat the boxes pretty quick, all the heaving on this road. …”

“This,” said Father Van Den Heuvel, “is not a road.”

They went on.

The narrow track went straight to the side of a huge butte that rose up sheer from the land. Father Van Den Heuvel stopped and he looked at the butte. He took out a pair of binoculars. He studied the rocks. Off to the right there was a reef of rock that was triangular, one broken end upthrust. “That is the incursion,” he said.

“Carries metals,” said Booger Tom. “Don't they, I mean … ?”

“Sometimes,” said Father Van Den Heuvel, “not always, but often enough so any miner would be encouraged.”

They rode on.

Du Pré unbuttoned his shirt. He was sweating and now the wind was hot too.

“Big rain tomorrow,” said Booger Tom. “Low pressure's enough to suck stuff up from Colorado, it's so danged low. …”

They went through another cut in the mother rock, and then the country opened up.

They rounded a knee thrust out from the reef.

A narrow little canyon had eroded into the rock, darker than the limestone mother rock, which had worn away on the right. Booger Tom trotted on ahead. He reined up.

“There's where the cabin was,” he said, pointing to the ground ahead.

Du Pré and Father Van Den Heuvel came to where the old cowboy was. “And there's the mine,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. He pointed to a flat place covered by a jumble of rocks, blocky and broken, about thirty feet deep at the top. The skirt reached out fifty feet from the rock wall.

Du Pré crossed himself. So did Father Van Den Heuvel. “You'd have to get heavy equipment in here, to move this,” said the priest. “This was deliberately blown down over the mine entrance.” Du Pré nodded.

“So,” said Father Van Den Heuvel, “you think those poor people were buried in the mine?”

Du Pré nodded.

The big priest got down and he walked to the first big rock. He knelt and he began to pray.

Booger Tom took off his hat.

So did Du Pré.

The priest finished and he stood up and put on his big black hat.

“What would they have been minin' here?” said Booger Tom.

Father Van Den Heuvel shrugged.

“They would have been looking for copper, silver, gold,” he said. “In mining, it has been said, you never know if you are ten feet from a million dollars or a million feet from ten dollars. Perhaps the veins were poor but got just a little richer. So they were encouraged. This was hard-rock mining. They had to blast and dig. …”

Du Pré looked up at the rock face.

“There would have been some fractures in the rock,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. “They could have packed one with powder and tamped that with mud. Enough powder, the face would have broken away. …”

Du Pré nodded.

“Look up there,” said Booger Tom, pointing. “You see them drill holes?”

Father Van Den Heuvel squinted.

The three of them clambered from rock to rock, up to a long ledge of dark gray stone that ran two hundred feet or so across.

Father Van Den Heuvel pulled a small magnifying glass from his pocket and he slid it from the leather case and he looked at the vertical drill holes. He looked at the top of the ledge. The light was strong and the vertical holes were hard to see.

“They would drill holes every so often,” said Father Van Den Heuvel, “and pack perhaps every fourth one with explosives. The holes would weaken the rock and the explosion would sheer the rock away.” Father Van Den Heuvel looked at the rock he stood on. He knelt and he peered down into a cleft between the stones. “If we could find a piece of rock that had a hole drilled in it,” he said, “I …”

Du Pré and Booger Tom looked round. The rocks were all huge.

“I think this was done much more recently than 1910,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. “This is competent rock.
Very
competent. The old mine probably went through a piece of the old mother rock caught in the incursion, where it was much softer. But to blast this down, you would need hydraulic drills, air drills, a lot of power. I doubt a few people using sledges and hand drills could do this. …”

Du Pré nodded.

“Somebody spent a lot of money to do this,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. They clambered back down and stood on the flat. “Damn big lot of work,” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

Du Pré nodded.

“What's around the other side, I wonder,” said the priest. They got back on their horses and they rode on and found that the track widened greatly and showed signs of trucks rather than wagons.

A road snaked across the land toward the south for a bit and then it headed west.

“This isn't on the map,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. He peered at the road. He urged his old horse forward. There was a small mound of square-shaped rocks set beside the road a hundred yards away. He rode to it, waved his hat.

Du Pré and Booger Tom looked at each other. They put their horses to a walk and came to the place the priest was standing. He nodded toward the stones.

A metal sign was fixed to one, corroded but still readable­. Much of the original black and yellow paint still stuck to the metal. A series of numbers was stamped in the metal at the bottom of the sign, most of which had been taken up by the symbol for radioactive material. The danger sign, the three-bladed fan.

“I'll be damned,” said Booger Tom. “They used that damned mine for one of them dumps …”

“So the blasting was done after the Second World War,” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

“I didn't know there was any of them out here,” said Booger Tom.

Du Pré laughed. “If that sign for real,” he said.