Campbell's Kingdom (7 page)

The train puffed laboriously into a world of virgin white. Our only contact with the outside world was the twin black threads of the line reaching back towards the prairies. The mountains closed in around us, monstrous white shapes scarred here and there by black outcrops of wind-torn rock.

The train threaded its way inexorably southwards, through Thunder River, Redsand, Blue River and Angushorn. At Cottonwood Flats it began to rain and as dusk fell we drew in to Birch Island and I saw for the first time a stretch of road clear of snow.

We reached Ashcroft just before midnight. It was still raining. The darkness was full of the sound of water and great heaps of dirty snow filled the yard with gurgling rivulets. When I asked at the hotel about the roads they told me they had been open for the last two days. I felt my luck was in then and that nothing could stop me. Next morning I bought a pair of good water-proof boots and tramped the round of the local garages. My luck held. At one of them I found a mud-bespattered Ford filling up with gas, a logger bound for Prince George. He gave me a ride as far as 150-Mile House. The country poured water from its every crevice, the creeks were roaring torrents and we ground our way through falls of rock and minor avalanches. It took us most of the day to do the hundred odd miles to 150-Mile House.

I spent the night there and in the morning got a lift as far as Hydraulic. By then the rain had turned to a wet snow. I was getting back into the high mountains. After a wait of two or three hours and some lunch, a farm truck took me on to Keithley Creek. It was dark when I arrived. The country was deep in snow and it was freezing hard. I crawled into bed feeling dead to the world and for the first time in months slept like a log.

I slept right through to eleven o'clock and was woken with the news that the packer was in from Come Lucky and would be leaving after lunch. It was blowing half a gale and snowing hard. They served me a steak and two fried eggs and when I'd packed and paid my bill I was taken out and introduced to a great ox of a man who was loading groceries into an ex-army fifteen hundredweight.

We pulled out of Keithley just after two, the rattle of the chains deadened by the soft snow. Visibility was very poor, the snow driving up behind us and flying past the windows as we ground slowly along the uneven track. I glanced at my companion. He was wrapped in a huge bearskin coat and he had a fur cap with ear flaps and big skin gloves. His face was the colour of mahogany. He had thick, loose lips and he kept licking at a trickle of saliva that ran out of the corners of his mouth. His nose was broad and flat and his little eyes peered into the murk from below a wide forehead that receded quickly to the protection of his Russian-looking cap. His huge hands gripped the steering wheel as though he had to fight the truck every yard of the way. ‘Do you live at Come Lucky?' I asked him.

He grunted without shifting his eyes from the track.

‘I suppose there's a hotel there?'

A nod accompanied the grunt this time. I let it go at that and relaxed drowsily in the engine-heated noise of the cab.

For a long time we ran through a world of virgin white, between heaped-up banks of snow where the road had been cleared of drifts, only the occasional black line of a stream to relieve the monotony. Then we were climbing and gradually the timber closed in around us. The snow no longer drove past the cab windows. The trees were still and black. I wondered vaguely why the trail to Come Lucky had been cleared of snow, but I was too drowsy to question the driver. It was open and that was all I cared about. I was on the last stage of my journey.

I tried to imagine what it had been like up here less than a hundred years ago when the Cariboo gold rush had been on and these creek beds had been crowded with men from all parts of the world. But it didn't seem possible. It was just a wilderness of snow and mountain and timber.

After half an hour the snow eased off. We were climbing steadily beside the black waters of the Little River. Timbered mountain slopes rose steeply above me and I got a momentary glimpse of a shaggy head of rock high above us and half veiled in cloud. I glanced at my companion and suddenly it occurred to me that this might be the packer that Johnnie Carstairs had talked about. ‘Is your name Max Trevedian?' I asked him.

He turned his head slowly and looked at me. ‘
Ja
, that is my name.' He seemed to consider for a moment how I knew it and then he turned his attention back to the track.

So this was the man who could take me up to Campbell's Kingdom before the snows melted. ‘Do you know Campbell's Kingdom?' I asked him.

‘Campbell's Kingdom!' His voice had a sudden violence of interest. ‘Why do you ask about Campbell's Kingdom?'

‘I want to go up there.'

‘Why?'

For some reason I didn't wish to tell him why. I stared out of my side window. We were running along the shores of a small lake now. It was all frozen over and the flat surface of the ice was covered with a dusting of snow.

‘Why do you wish to go there?' he asked again.

‘I've heard about it, that's all,' I replied vaguely, wondering why the mention of Campbell's Kingdom should so suddenly rouse him from his taciturn silence.

‘Why do you go to Come Lucky, huh? It is too soon for visitors. Are you an oil man?'

‘No,' I said.

‘Then why do you come?'

‘That's my business,' I answered, annoyed by his childlike persistence.

He grunted.

‘What made you ask if I was an oil man?'

‘Oil men come here last year. There is an old devil lived up in the mountains who thought there was oil there.' He suddenly began to laugh, a great, deep-throated sound. ‘Damned old fool! All they found were rocks. I could have told them there was no oil.'

‘How did you know?'

‘How did I know?' He stared at me angrily.

‘What made you so certain?'

‘Because he is a swindler,' he growled. ‘A dirty, lying, bastard old man who swindle everyone.' His voice had risen suddenly to a high pitch and his little eyes glared at me hotly. ‘You ask my brother.'

His words swept me back to my childhood, to the taunts and jeers I had suffered. ‘You're referring to Campbell, are you?'

‘Ar. Campbell.' There was an incredible vibrance of hatred in the way he spoke the name. ‘King Campbell! Is that why you come here—to see Campbell?' He laughed. ‘Because if you have, you will waste your time. He is dead.'

‘I know that.'

‘Then why do you come, huh?'

I was beginning to understand what Johnnie Carstairs had meant when he had said the man was an ornery crittur. I didn't answer him and I didn't ask any more questions. It was like travelling with an animal you're not quite sure of and we drove on in silence.

As dusk began to fall we came out on to the shores of a narrow lake. Come Lucky was at the head of it. My first sight of the place was as we slid out of the timber on to the lake shore. The town was half-buried in snow, a dark huddle of shacks clinging to the bare, snow-covered slopes of a mountain and leaning out towards the lake as though in the act of being swept into it by an avalanche. Beyond it a narrow gulch cut back into the mountains and lost itself in a grey veil of cloud. The road appeared to continue along the shore of the lake and into the gulch. We turned right, however, up to Come Lucky and stopped at a long, low shack, the log timbers of which had been patched with yellow boards of untreated pine. There was a notice on one of the doors—
Trevedian Transport Company: Office
. This was as far as the track into Come Lucky had been cleared. A drift of smoke streamered out from an iron chimney. A door slammed and a fat Chinaman waddled out to meet us. He and Max Trevedian disappeared into the back of the truck and began off-loading the stores. I stood around waiting and presently my two grips were dropped into the snow at my feet. The Chinaman poked his head out of the back of the truck. ‘You stay here?' he asked.

‘Is this the hotel?'

‘No. This is bunkhouse for men working on road up Thunder Creek.'

‘Where's the hotel?' I asked.

‘You mean Mr Mac's place—The Golden Calf?' He pointed up the snow-blocked street. ‘You find up there on the right side.'

I thanked him and trudged through the snow into the town of Come Lucky. It was a single street bounded on either side by weather-boarded shacks. Dotted amongst them were log cabins of stripped jack pine. The place seemed deserted. There wasn't a soul about and only in two instances did I see smoke coming from the ugly clutter of tin chimneys. The roofs of many of the shacks had fallen in. Some had their windows ripped out, frames and all. Doors stood rotting on their hinges. The untreated boards were grey with age and soggy with moisture. Scraps of paper clung forlornly to hoardings and the faint lettering above empty shops and saloons proclaimed the purpose for which the crumbling bundle of wood had originally been assembled. The King Harry Bar still carried the weathered portrait of an English King and next door there was a doctor's brass plate, now a green rectangle of decomposing metal. The wooden sidewalks stood up above the level of the snow, a crazy switch-back affair of haphazard design and doubtful safety. It seemed to be constructed on stilts. In fact the whole place was built on stilts and it leaned down the slope to the lake as though the thrust of the coast wind had pushed it outwards like a flimsy erection of cards. Here and there a shack was held together by pieces of packing cases and rough-cut planks; evidence of human existence. But in the main Come Lucky was a rotten clutter of empty shacks.

It was my first sight of a ghost town.

The Golden Calf was about the biggest building in the place. Faded gilt lettering proclaimed its name and underneath I could just make out the words:
If it's the Gaiety of the City for You, This is the Best Spot in the whole of Cariboo
. And there was the picture of a calf, now grey with age. The sidewalk was solid here and roofed over to form a sort of street-side verandah.

The door of the hotel opened straight into an enormous bar room. The bar itself ran all along one side and behind it were empty shelves backed by blotchy mirrors. There were faded pictures of nude and near-nude women and yellowing bills advertising local events of years gone by. The few marble-topped tables and rickety chairs, the iron-framed piano and the drum stove which roared against the opposite wall took up little of the dirt-ingrained floor area. The room was warm, but it had a barrack-room emptiness about it that was only heightened by the marks of its one-time Edwardian elegance.

Two old men playing cards at a table near the stove turned to stare at me. Above them was the picture of a voluptuous young beauty of the can-can period. Pencil shading had been added in appropriate places and she had been given a moustache. The crudity of it, however, produced only speculation as to the circumstances in which the trimmings had been added. I put my bags down and drew up a chair to the stove. The warmth of the room was already melting the snow on my windbreaker. My trousers steamed. I took off my outer clothes and sat back, letting the warmth seep into my body. I felt deathly tired.

The two old men continued to stare at me. They looked sad and surprised. Their moustaches drooped. ‘Is the hotel open?' I asked them.

The shock of being asked a question was apparently too much for them. One of them blinked uncertainly, the other coughed. As though they understood each other's thoughts, they turned without a word and continued their game.

Beyond the stove there was a door and beside it a bell push. I pulled myself to my feet and rang. A buzzer sounded in the recesses of the building and slippers shuffled on the wooden floor of a corridor. The door opened slowly and an elderly Chinaman entered. He stopped in front of me and stared up at me impassively with a fixed smile that showed the brown of decaying teeth. He was a little wizened man with a monkey face. His clothes hung on him like a bundle of rags and he wore a shapeless cloth cap. On his feet were a pair of tattered carpet slippers. ‘You want something?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I'd like a room for the night.'

‘I fetch Mr Mac.' He shuffled off and I sat down again.

After a time the door was opened by a dour-faced man whose long body was stooped at the shoulders. He was bald except for a fringe of iron-grey hair. His eyelids and the corners of his mouth drooped. He had the appearance of a rather elderly heron and he looked me over with the disinterest of one who has seen many travellers and is surprised at nothing.

‘Are you Mr Mac?' I asked him.

He seemed to consider the question. ‘Me name's McClellan,' he said. ‘But most folk around here call me Mac. Ye're wanting a room Slippers tells me.' He sighed. ‘Och weel, I daresay we'll manage it. Ye're from the Old Country by the sound of your voice.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘My name's Bruce Wetheral. I've just arrived from England.'

‘Weel, it's a wee bit airly in the season for us, Mr Wetheral. We don't generally reckon on visitors till the fishermen come up from the coast around the end of June. But we've an engin
-
eer staying already, so one mair'll make little difference. Ye'll no mind feeding in the kitchen wi' the family?'

‘Of course not.'

The room he took me to was bare except for the essentials: an iron-framed bed, a wash basin, a chest of drawers and a chair. A text—
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples; for I am sick of love
—was the only adornment on the flaking paint of the wood-partitioned walls. But the room was clean and the bed looked comfortable.

They kept farmhouse hours at the hotel and I barely had time to wash and unpack my things before the old Chinaman called me for tea. By the time I got down the McClellan family was all assembled in the kitchen, a huge room designed to feed the seething population of Come Lucky in its hey-day. Besides the old man and his sister, Florence McClellan, there was his son, James, and his family—his wife, Pauline, and their two children, Jackie aged nine and Kitty aged six and a half. James McClellan was a small, wiry man. Keen blue eyes peered out from under his father's drooping lids and his nose was as sharply chiselled as the beak of a hawk. His expression was moody, almost sour, and when he spoke, which was seldom, there was the abruptness of a hot, violent-tempered man. Pauline was half French, raven-haired and buxom with an attractive accent and a wide mouth. She laughed a little too often, showing big, white teeth.