Power in the Blood (42 page)

“Shiny beautiful …” murmured Omie.

Zoe knew the men were looking at her, waiting for an explanation. Chadbourne and Lewis had approached them.

“She sometimes gets very excited by things,” offered Zoe, “… anything unusual.”

“An elk,” Leo pronounced. “If it was bigger than a deer, it was an elk.”

“They don’t shine, though,” suggested Sell Yost.

“Perhaps the firelight made it seem so,” said Zoe.

“It was golden …” Omie said, her words barely audible.

“Well, then,” said Yost, “it must have been an omen of good fortune. Golden elk, you don’t see them every day.”

The men were laughing among themselves. Chadbourne said, “Ask her to guess its troy weight,” and the laughter increased.

Zoe shook Omie gently by the shoulder. “Omie?”

“Yes, Mama?”

“Do you still see it?” asked Zoe.

Omie turned to face her. “See what?”

“The golden elk.”

“What’s one of those?”

“Like a deer,” said Leo, “but bigger.”

“Where?” asked Omie, turning to the darkness in sudden excitement. Zoe saw the men exchanging glances.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s gone, and you and I must go to bed.”

“Where dreams are supposed to happen”—Lewis laughed—“but not before you get there.”

Zoe saw he was trying to ease the awkwardness Omie’s unusual behavior had caused. She guided Omie to the tent Leo indicated was theirs. For some minutes afterward, she heard through the canvas a whispered conversation concerning Omie, in which the word “touched” was given prominence. If only you knew, she thought wryly, and prepared herself for sleep beside her daughter.

The El Dorado Engineers filed claim and began to dig, erecting a sizable A-frame above their shaft, building a mule-driven whim and sheave wheel to haul the buckets to the surface as they drove deeper into the earth. Zoe seldom visited the site, since the men returned to camp for their midday meal, begrimed but optimistic, their enthusiasm for the task infectious. “Any sign?” Zoe would ask, and be told, “Not yet, but we can almost smell it,” or, “Any minute now, just you wait.”

Two things concerned Zoe more than the likelihood of the Engineers striking gold; the first was the weather, daily becoming colder, and the second was Omie, who began spending longer and longer periods of time away from the immediate vicinity of the tents, where Zoe could see her. On those occasions when Omie returned, Zoe would ask her, “Where have you been? Didn’t you hear me calling?” To which Omie would reply with a disingenuous “No, Mama.”

“You need to dress more warmly, with a shawl.”

“I’m warm enough, Mama.”

“I saw your footprints in the frost first thing this morning. Don’t you dare wander barefoot on ground so cold. You put your shoes on first thing when you get up. You put them on before you go outside, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mama. Mama?”

“Well?”

“He hides, but not so I can’t see him.”

“Who does?”

“The gold elk. He’s a stag, Mama, because of the big horns. That’s the man elk, isn’t it?”

“Antlers, not horns. Yes, that’s a male, but Omie, there are no such things as golden elk. Elk are darker in coloring than deer, and even deer are nothing like golden to look at, beautiful though they are.”

“But he is, Mama, he’s shiny and golden, especially when the sun shines on him. He owns a special place.”

“What place?”

“It’s his, all for himself. He stands there and turns into a statue so lovely to look at, Mama.”

“Does he have one blue eye and one brown eye?”

Omie considered the question. “No,” she responded, “His eyes are both yellow, like the rest of him, goldy yellow. I can show you the place. He stands so still and proud-looking, I’m sure he’d let you sneak up and see him there.”

“Very well, show me where.”

Omie led her far from the camp, far from the stream and its persistent din of humanity, up the valley wall. Soon Zoe was panting from the climb’s exertions, despite the chill morning air. “How much further?”

“It’s near. He’s there now, I think!”

Zoe struggled higher, following Omie’s darting skirts up and up, deeper among the pines swaying and whispering in a wind from the north, which bore the promise of snow.

“Almost there, Mama!”

Breathing hoarsely, her face glistening with sweat, Zoe caught up with Omie halfway to what appeared from that angle to be the summit of the world. Omie stood at the bottom end of a small mountain meadow invisible from below, an area perhaps twenty yards across, a ragged oval hemmed in by a dark wall of trees thrashing their needles in a continuous sigh. Three deer occupied its center, each with its head to the ground, unaware they were observed. They seemed to be eating, but there was no grass at the spot where they stood. Omie was casting her eyes about for the golden stag, distress clouding her face.

“He’s not here.…”

The deer lifted their heads as one, and bounded instantly away to the perimeter of the meadow, then stopped out of curiosity to watch as Zoe and Omie advanced to the place they had vacated. Zoe examined the patch of open ground, with its many imprints of deer hooves, and the larger impressions of what she presumed must be elk. Creatures clearly were attracted to the location, despite its apparent lack of sustenance, and when Zoe knelt and raised a pinch of the earth to her tongue, she understood why.

“It’s a deer lick,” she announced.

“A what, Mama?”

“The deer come and lick the ground to get natural salts in the soil. You can taste it.”

“No, it’s dirt!”

“It’s clean dirt. You can taste the salt. That’s what a deer lick is. Animals like salt, just the same as we do, so they gather in places where the soil holds it, and lick it up. I dare you to taste it. It isn’t awful, I promise.”

Omie scooped up a modest handful of earth and cautiously lowered the tip of her tongue into its moistness.

“Thhhhhppptthhh …! It’s horrible, Mama! You fibbed!”

“And didn’t you? Where’s your wonderful gold elk, might I ask?”

“He wouldn’t come on account of you—that’s why he isn’t here!”

“Are you sure he isn’t just a lovely thing to think of on a lonely day with nothing to do?”

“No! I
saw
him! I did!”

“Please don’t shout. I believe you.”

“He lives here. He stands looking that way.”

Omie gestured to the empty sky above the valley containing Glory Hole. The broad trough of dark green was bisected along its length by a winding line of silver. From the deer lick’s height the diggings were barely in evidence. The gash of mud and men and their auxiliaries was being gouged ever deeper, dwellings spreading up the slopes on either side. Here one could forget the ugliness and confusion below. Zoe supposed she would like to have gold, just as the men clawing for it did, for the avenues of choice and decision it would open for herself and Omie, but as she gazed across the valley to its far rim, the need for such stuff as gold seemed remote. Zoe felt stirrings of pity for Leo and his associates and their dream of riches, then caught herself in her superiority. Easy enough for the servant to despise the master, she thought, and gave her mouth a twist wry enough to suit her mood.

For five weeks the Engineers worked their claim, sinking a deep shaft without finding what they sought. Since they operated at such a distance from the other miners, there was curiosity in the camp over their choice of location. Questioned, they would laughingly insist they had thrown dice to determine where they should dig. The questioners, dissatisfied with that answer, would approach Zoe, who acquitted herself of the prearranged lie with considerable talent. “I suppose they’re hopeless,” she would say, “trying to accomplish anything that way, but it isn’t any of my business how my brother and his friends choose to waste their time and money.”

The alleged dice-throwers came up empty-handed, day after day, and jokes about them were passed around the camp. A spirit of despondency settled over the Engineers, in keeping with the grayer skies more frequently blanketing Glory Hole with darkness and rain. Each morning found the earth covered in frost, and everyone began to complain of the extreme cold at night, which prevented adequate sleep. It was decided that Sell Yost and Lewis would quit work on the shaft for as long as it took to build a cabin big enough to shelter them all, and a rude stable for the mules. This plan was pursued, but the cabin rose too slowly, and progress on the shaft was even less productive, so it was decided that all hands would work on the dwelling, snow having fallen that day. When it was completed five days later, a full complement of workers was able to resume digging.

In mid-October a blizzard struck Glory Hole, making outdoor work impossible. The men stayed huddled in the cabin for three days, debating the wisdom of sinking a second shaft in pursuit of a gold vein the first had not encountered. Tempers became short when Leo and Sell favored a new beginning, and John Chadbourne insisted the existing shaft should be given another chance. Lewis was unable to make up his mind; his health had become enfeebled by the coming of winter and the strenuous nature of the digging. Zoe was in no doubt they had all expected to strike at least a trace of gold much sooner, and she wondered if their much-vaunted learning in the geological and metallurgical sciences was truly advantageous to the enterprise, or if throwing dice would have been just as effective in producing nothing at all.

When quarrels erupted between the men, Zoe retired behind the blanket curtain that screened off a section of the cabin’s interior for the exclusive use of herself and Omie. There was no avoiding the sounds of dissent, but being on the curtain’s far side was defense enough against the ugliness of their bickering. Omie often joined her there, or else was already shielding herself from the men when her mother lifted the curtain aside and eased herself into their shared seaman’s hammock. Leo had accepted five of these in exchange for two mules from a merchant newly arrived in Glory Hole, rather than waste more time constructing bedframes of pine and obliging Zoe to create mattresses. The trading of the mules for the hammocks, which were extremely comfortable once the trick of entering and exiting their capricious folds was mastered, enraged Chadbourne to the point where he threatened to knock Leo down.

“Why not get rid of her instead?” he said, pointing to Zoe. “She doesn’t do enough to warrant the money you pay her, and the other one does nothing but eat and stand around looking at nothing! Aren’t we capable of making the kind of grub that gets dished up? Where’s the need for her?”

“Zoe and Omie remain,” Leo stated, “and if you need to fight with me, man to man, I’ll oblige.” Chadbourne had backed down from actual fisticuffs, and later apologized to Zoe, but the harm had been done; the El Doradans were thereafter a sorry crew, kept from the physical labor that might have drained some of their frustration, jammed together in a space that would have been uncomfortable for half their number.

Omie began spending more time enclosed in her canvas cocoon in the corner than she did in the cabin at large. It was sometimes possible to forget she was there at all, and it was this invisibility by choice that fooled Zoe, one bleak afternoon, into believing her daughter was inside the cabin when she was in fact elsewhere. When Zoe went to the hammock herself to escape the usual wranglings of the men, she found it untenanted, and tried to think where Omie might be. Had she gone to the privy dug a short distance from the cabin? When time passed and Omie did not return, Zoe visited the unsavory pit herself to ensure that no mishap had occurred, but Omie was not there either.

Alarmed, Zoe hurried back and requested that the Engineers begin an immediate search for her. They seized upon this as reason enough to go alone into the afternoon for relief from one another’s company. The blizzard had passed, leaving everything under a deep layer of snow. Not one of the Engineers was equipped with snowshoes as they scoured Glory Hole, tramping through a ramshackle collection of shanties and cabins scattered among the claims, their frigid breath hanging in the air as they asked at each doorway if the occupants had seen the little girl from the upstream claim, the one with the blue mark on her cheek. No one had. Reporting back to Zoe, they shamefacedly admitted their failure, and Zoe felt herself beginning to panic. That was when the only answer to the mystery, albeit the least likely to be understood, came to her.

“Up there,” she said, turning to face the darkly wooded slope above them. “She went up there, I know it.”

“For what purpose?” asked Lewis.

“She has a favorite place. Help me find it, please.”

“Why would she go there in weather like this?” Leo asked as they prepared to leave.

“When she wants to, she goes,” snapped Zoe.

Lewis was obliged to abandon his place in the search party before long, breath whistling noisily through his lungs. The others pressed on, led by Zoe, who cast about for the telltale footprints that would confirm her hopes. She found them a third of the way up the slope, a meandering trough dragged through the deep snow by Omie, without a doubt. It angled up the valley wall in the general direction Zoe recalled.

The trees were heavily weighted with whiteness, and new snowfall began sifting from the sky as they climbed, a powder so light it appeared to hang in the air like mist before coating the eyelashes or beards of the searchers with tiny spicules of ice. Halfway to the sloping meadow, the air suddenly was filled with denser flakes, chunks that dropped with deceptive slowness onto a snowpack at least a foot higher than at the lower elevation. Zoe, throat rasping, sides awash with sweat despite the cold, forced herself to an even faster pace. Leo was fifty feet behind her, Chadbourne and Sell Yost even further back, lost to sight among the trees and swirling snow. Now Zoe’s breath was bursting from her in harsh sobbings. If Omie should die, there would be nothing left to live for, no part of herself in all the world she could be close to.

The meadow, when reached at last, was occupied only by a small herd of deer, noses down to the salty earth exposed by their hooves. Their heads were raised as one when Zoe blundered from the trees, and they turned tail to bound from her unwanted presence with the silent grace of birds in flight. There was no sign of Omie.