Hammond Innes - High Stand

Hardly a vehicle passed us, the clouds low and driving curtains of cloud mist blotting everything out except the endless black of the spruce on either side. The truck’s cabinet was overheated and my eyes became heavy with staring into the void ahead, the white posts of the distance markers sliding past, the emptiness and the loneliness of the country taking hold. I began to have an odd feeling that Tom Halliday was with me, that we were in some way linked together. He would have come down this road, heading for Dezadeach and Dalton’s Post, going up to the mine to fish the Creek or stalk moose in the flats.

He may have been a bit of a playboy, but he was still a part of this country. Epinard had made that clear, so now did Jim Edmundson: ‘Most everybody around here knows about Josh Halliday and the Ice Cold mine.’ And he had told me something then that Tom had never mentioned. A few years after his father had struck gold at Ice Cold Creek he had started taking it out through Dawson instead of Haines. This was when Silver City, the trading post at the head of Lake Kluane, was booming on the back of the placer gold fields of the Kluane Lake district. ‘You can still see the log buildings,’ he said, ‘the old smithy, the lines of stabling, the roadhouse, and the barracks of the North West Mounted Police, which was what the Mounties were called then.’ It was just north of Silver City that he’d run across Lucky Carlos Despera again. There’d been a fight and he had left him lying unconscious where the trail ran close above the lake. Later he had gone back with some friends and found Despera’s body lying in the water.

‘Dead?’ I asked him.

‘Yup. And the story is Despera had a daughter, by some Indian woman he’d been going with. She was born after his death and Josh Halliday sent the two of them down to Vancouver.’ He looked at me then, a sideways glance — ‘She married an Italian.’ And he had added, very quickly, ‘We got an awful mixture of races out here. There’s Indians, of course, and Scots.’ He laughed. ‘BC was practically run by Scotsmen in the early days. When the Canadian Pacific and the National were pushed through the Rockies — Italians, Poles, Germans, Irish, all sorts of refugees helped to build those railways. Then the mines brought Cornishmen from England, Welsh miners, too.’

He had already told me that in the plane as we had been coming in to Whitehorse, but it hadn’t meant very much to me then, my mind concentrated on how I was going to handle the mine manager and where I would find him. But now it added to the picture I had of Tom Halliday’s father, so that Tom himself seemed to take on a new dimension.

I must have dozed off, for my eyes suddenly opened to the sound of Jim’s voice saying something about Champagne. ‘You want to stop for a beer or something? We’re about halfway.’

‘I don’t mind. It’s up to you,’ I said. ‘You’re doing the driving.’

He nodded. ‘Well, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather keep going. Be dark early tonight.’

Incredibly there really was a place called Champagne, a huddle of log huts corralled with some trucks in a sea of mud and entered by a timber archway with the name spelled out in large wooden letters. A generator must have been running for there were lights on in two of the huts. And then we were past it, the world empty again, and shortly after that the rain began to strike the windscreen in large blurred spots. It wasn’t sleet and it wasn’t snow, but the speed of our passage made the glass cold enough to freeze it for an instant.

A truck passed us going fast, four Indians in the back huddled under plastic bags. A sign with a camera design marked a bridge that was a viewpoint for visitors. The rain lifted for a moment, the shadowy shape of white-topped mountains away on either side, the highway running ahead into infinity, the black of the spruce and a solitary horse.

‘Another month and this’d be all snow.’

I nodded, seeing it in my mind, a wilderness of white. ‘Will it be snowing now up at the mine?’ I asked.

‘Could be. I don’t know what height it is, but it’s above the timber line, I know that.’

I tried to picture it deep in snow and myself handling a truck I’d never driven before. Was there really any point in my going up there? Just looking at the mine wouldn’t make any difference to the problems that faced me dealing with Halliday’s affairs.

‘That Italian who works a claim on the Squaw, his name’s Tony Tarasconi. Right?’

I nodded.

‘You’ll be going in with him, I gather.’

‘If Epinard can fix it.’

‘Something I learned in town this afternoon.’ He hesitated. ‘Maybe just coincidence, but Matt Lloyd thought there might be something in it. He’d been reading up an old police file.’ He glanced at me, then went on, ‘Remember I told you Lucky Carlos Despera’s daughter married an Italian? Well, his name was Tarasconi.’ And he added quickly, ‘Like I say, it may be just coincidence …’ He left it at that, and shortly afterwards we ran into Haines Junction. Seen in the ram and gathering dusk, with the lights glimmering on pools of water, it looked at first glance a dilapidated frontier settlement of wooden shacks and gas stations. But then we turned right, off the highway, and were into the Parks area, a neatly laid-out estate of residential and office buildings.

‘Won’t be a Jiffy,’ he said as he stopped at one of the houses and jumped out, leaving the engine running. Through the clicking wipers I could see the outline of Parks HQ, a very modern complex with an almost solid glass rotunda that had clearly been built to give a view of the mountain ranges fronting the Park. I wondered what it would look like in the morning, what the trail would be like up to the mine. I might be on my own then, the trail impassable … I suddenly felt very inadequate, sitting there in that warm cab staring out at the grey-black void that masked the mountain slopes. Time passed, the emptiness beyond the last gleam of light accentuated as the black of night descended on the land.

It was probably only about ten minutes before Jim came hurrying back through the ram, but it seemed longer. ‘Well, that’s all fixed,’ he said as he jumped in. ‘I’ll pick you up in the morning about nine. You can then have a look at the Park museum, see the film show — you ought to see that while you’re here, it’s something quite special — then about ten my wife will come for you and drive you to Lakeside.’ We were out on the Highway again, turning away from the Haines road and heading north. ‘The forecast’s good, by the way. At least for tomorrow.’ And he added, ‘I phoned the Lodge, but the Italian hasn’t been in for a couple of days. They expect him any time now, but if he doesn’t turn up they’ve got a four-by-four you can borrow, that’s if the mine road’s drive-able. Okay?’

I thanked him, still surprised that he should be taking so much trouble over a perfect stranger, and a moment later we swung right onto the gravel forecourt of a filling station, lights shining dimly on a ribbed and riveted battle-wagon of a coach nose-on to a wooden building that said it was a restaurant. ‘That’s the Greyhound bus in. This is their meal stop-over.’ He parked beside it and I saw the words Anchorage-Whitehorse.

The passengers were just starting to return to their seats as we pushed our way into the entrance, which was part shop selling souvenirs and paperbacks. They had a room spare and as soon as I was booked in Jim left me. He had two kids and he was in a hurry to get back to them. ‘See you in the morning,’ he called, and I stood there on the wooden steps, watching his tail lights disappear in the rain, American voices all around me, Anchorage just a bus ride away.