Vermilion Drift

  Her eyes dropped briefly to her ruined leg. “Guys here want a girl who can dance at the wedding.”

  Cork’s cell phone rang. He pulled it from the belt holster and checked the display to see who was calling. It was Lou Haddad.

  “Gotta go, Ophelia,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”

  “If I get into trouble, Mr. O.C., there will be hell to pay.” She shook her finger at him playfully, waved good-bye, and closed the gate behind him.

  Cork took the call on the way to his Land Rover.

  “I’ve had a chance to look at the old schematics,” Haddad said. “I’ve found something.”

  “What?”

  “Can you meet me at the Vermilion One Mine in an hour?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  It was two o’clock when Cork drove through Gresham again, and the sky overhead had cleared. The clouds had drifted east toward the Sawbill Mountains, beyond which lay the vast, icy blue of Lake Superior. A few chairs had been placed on the sidewalk outside Lucy’s. They were all occupied by folks drinking coffee or Cokes in the shade of a green awning. A couple of protest placards leaned against the wall, and Cork recognized a few of the faces from the gathering outside Vermilion One that morning. As he passed, several pairs of eyes turned his way, and he felt the hostility directed at him as solidly as if they’d thrown rocks.

  He knew the sentiments of the residents of Gresham, knew that, despite the money that might come their way from a new mine enterprise, the townspeople were no more eager than the Iron Lake Ojibwe or anyone else in Tamarack County to have a nuclear waste dump in their backyard.

  When he approached Vermilion One, he saw that Isaiah Broom and most of the other protesters were still there, but Hattie Stillday had gone. Tommy Martelli logged him in, and Cork headed to the office building. Haddad’s Explorer wasn’t in the lot. Cork walked inside, gave Margie Renn at the reception desk a brief wave in passing, and went immediately to the conference room, which was empty.

  In a corner near one of the windows sat a small easy chair, an end table, and a standing lamp. On the table lay a large book titled Vermilion One: The Rise of Iron on the Range, written by a man named Darius Holmes. Cork sat in the chair and took up the book. A good deal of text filled the pages, the history of Vermilion One and of mining on the Range in general, but Holmes had included a lot of photographs. Cork knew roughly the history and geology of the area. It was taught proudly to every kid in school in Minnesota. Although a large stretch of the North Country was referred to as the Iron Range, there were, as Haddad had pointed out earlier that day, three ranges: the Vermilion, the Mesabi, and the Cuyuna. Aurora lay hard against the Vermilion, the easternmost of the ranges, where the earliest mining had taken place.

  In the book, the photographs of the early years showed tough little men in shirts and overalls caked with mud, wearing leather mining caps, pushing ore cars. These, Cork knew, were muckers, the unskilled workers. They were Welsh or Slavic or Irish or Finn or Swede or German and came, many of them, directly from their homelands to work the mines. Others had come earlier, lured by the wealth of timber in the great north wilderness, and, as the forests retreated, had turned to mining. The towns they built—Chisholm, Hibbing, Eveleth, Coleraine, Winton, Kinney, Crosby, Mountain Iron, Bovey—were a patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods: Swedes on one side of the street, Finns on the other, Italians a block to the south, Welsh a block to the north. They were friendly in their work together, but in their neighborhoods, in their marriages, in their religions, they clung to the language and traditions of their own homelands and were suspicious of the others.

  The mines grew in number and wealth, and the towns grew with them. Ore from the Range was carried by rail to harbors on Lake Superior and shipped all over the world. The Range became famous, the greatest supplier of iron ore on earth. The money from the mines built excellent hospitals in the communities and fine civic structures, and the Iron Range was known to have some of the best school systems in the nation.

  To every blessing there was, Cork supposed, a dark side. The mine pits ate at the earth, ugly as cancers, and the tailings rose in red mountains that sullied the rivers and streams. And in the end, the demand for ore declined and the mines began to close one by one, leaving a population without recourse. The men were miners, bred from generations of miners, and the work they’d prepared for all their lives had vanished, with nothing at all promising on the horizon. A lot of people simply left, and life went out of the towns. Aurora had gone through this. When Cork was a teenager, after the Vermilion One closed, the town struggled to redefine itself. Iron Lake and the proximity of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness helped. The town began to court and to cater to the tourist trade and slowly reshaped itself around the heart of that new economy. Other towns didn’t fare as well and stood nearly deserted in the shadow of the great red mountains of ore tailings.

  Cork closed the book and stared out the window. He could see the rugged, forested hills of the North Country stretching away like a beautiful, turbulent sea. With all his heart, he loved that place, which had been his home for most of his life. Although he couldn’t see the protesters beyond the trees that walled off the Vermilion One complex, his heart was with them. He told himself that what he was doing wasn’t about helping the mine become a nuclear waste dump. It was about ensuring the safety of the people who worked there, people he knew, and so was a different issue. Still, a part of him felt like a traitor.

  He heard footfalls in the hallway, and Lou Haddad walked in, carrying a briefcase, which he set on the conference table and opened. He slid from it a single schematic, very old looking, drawn on material that had the feel of canvas.

  “What did you find?” Cork asked, joining him.

  Haddad said, “This is a map for Level One. This”—he put his finger on a tunnel outlined on the page—“is the Vermilion Drift, the first of the excavations dug when the mine went underground, in 1900. Everything looks normal until you get here.” His finger followed the lines of the tunnel drawing until it came to a place where the solid lines ended and were replaced with dotted lines.

  “Why the change in how the lines are drawn?”

  “Officially, the Vermilion Drift was closed back in the early part of the last century. A cave-in. The dotted lines show where the tunnel used to run.”

  “So the tunnel’s blocked?”

  “That’s what the map says, but I’ve been thinking about that. Some of the underground mines had real problems with cave-ins, but not Vermilion One. The rock here is simply too stable, one of the reasons for the DOE’s interest. And something else isn’t right, this drift beyond the cave-in. According to the schematic, it takes a sharp turn and heads east.”

  “So?”

  “The ore deposit runs the other way.”

  “So the drift goes away from the iron?”

  “That’s what the map shows.”

  “You don’t buy it?”

  “Not for a minute. Take a look at this, right here.” Haddad tapped the paper at a point a short distance beyond where the tunnel veered east. “That’s where the Iron Lake Reservation begins. The ore deposit runs directly under reservation land, I’d stake my reputation on it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think that, in those early years, they mined ore that didn’t belong to them.”

  “How could they get away with it?”

  “Probably just went about it quietly.”

  “And when they were finished, they sealed the tunnel to hide what they’d done, claimed there’d been a cave-in, and altered the maps?”

  “That’s my speculation.”

  “This extension doesn’t appear on any of the more recent schematics?”

  Haddad shook his head. “When the last survey was done, just before the mine shut down, the tunnel had been sealed for years.”

  “Sealed how?” Cork asked.

  “Timbered off. Which would explain why the newer maps simply show the tunne
l ending. As far as anyone knew, it did.”

  “But maybe it doesn’t?”

  Haddad straightened up. “Let’s go see.”

  On his way to Vermilion One, Cork had stopped at his house and picked up a sweater to wear in the mine, a cardigan his kids had given him for Christmas six or seven years earlier. It was red, with a white reindeer embroidered on the left side. He put it on in the cage as they descended. When Haddad saw it, he laughed and said, “Ho, ho, ho.” He wore a fleece-lined windbreaker. They both wore hard hats, each with a light mounted in front. For backup, Cork had brought the Maglite he kept in his Land Rover. Plott, the security guard on duty in the Rescue Room next to the framehead, had given Haddad a Coleman electric lantern.

  It took no time at all to reach Level One. They stepped into the cage station area, which was only dimly lit. Haddad indicated the dark tunnel directly ahead. “The Vermilion Drift,” he said.

  Bright sun, blue sky, green trees, sweet air, abundant life—all this was only a hundred feet above his head—but the solidness of the chill rock around him made Cork feel completely cut off from the world he knew. As he stood facing the dark throat of the Vermilion Drift, everything human in him cried out to back away, to return to the light, and for a moment he couldn’t make himself go forward.

  “Claustrophobic?” Haddad asked with real concern.

  “No,” Cork said. “It’s not that.”

  “Alien, isn’t it?”

  “Like I’m on another planet.”

  “Imagine spending your whole life in a place like this, Cork. A lot of men did, my old man among them.”

  In that moment, Cork felt a greater respect for Lou’s father and the men like him than he ever had before.

  “You okay going on?” Haddad asked.

  “Yeah. I’m right behind you.”

  They walked slowly into a dark that, if their lights failed, would swallow them completely. The floor was flat, the tunnel itself a ten-by-ten-foot bore whose walls showed every scar of its creation. Cork had expected the rock to be red here, but it was dull gray-green.

  “Ely greenstone,” Haddad explained. “Waste rock. They had to get through this to reach the ore. That’s what this drift is for. And see that?” Haddad pointed toward a short tunnel that cut off to their right. “A crosscut. The ore deposits didn’t flow in neat fingers. Sometimes there were offshoots, and crosscuts were used to get to them. Here, let me show you something.”

  Haddad turned off the Vermilion Drift into the crosscut tunnel. Near the end of the crosscut, which was only a dozen yards long, he stopped and shined a light toward the ceiling, illuminating a wide hole there.

  “This is a raise,” he told Cork. “In the mining here, they used a technique called undercutting. They tunneled beneath the deposits and blasted raises, these short upward accesses into the ore itself. They’d mine the ore, creating rooms called stopes, and send the ore down the raises into cars waiting on the rails below here in the drift. The cars would take the ore back to the main shaft, where it was lifted up to the framehead and dumped for crushing.”

  Cork looked down at the bare rock under his feet. “What happened to the rails?”

  “Recycled,” Haddad said. “Whenever they finished mining a drift, they pulled up the rails and used them somewhere else.” He stared upward into the raise above his head, and, when he spoke, his voice was full of admiration. “The men in charge of a crew, they were called captains. These were guys who’d spent their lives in mines in Wales and Slovakia and Germany. They were tough cusses, proud men. They knew rock and how to mine it.”

  “What did your father do?”

  “He started out as a mucker, worked his way up until he had his own crew. Damn near broke his heart when they closed the mine.”

  Cork knew that afterward Haddad’s father had gone to work in the family grocery store, but his heart was never in it.

  “I don’t know,” Lou said. “Maybe it was a good thing, having to leave the mine. A lot of miners at the end were suffering. Arthritis, lung problems. Hell, in the old days, because of the ungodly noise in the stopes, most of the miners were hard of hearing.”

  Cork remembered something his own father used to tell him: You always knew when you were passing the house of a guy who’d worked the Vermilion One. You could hear his radio or television blasting all the way out to the street.

  They returned to the main drift and kept going.

  A few minutes later, their headlamps illuminated a sudden wall ahead, the official end of the tunnel, a construct of dark timbers that completely blocked the passage.

  “Do all tunnels end this way?” Cork asked.

  “Normally they just end in rock. This is unusual.”

  “Has Genie Kufus finished her survey of Level One?”

  “Yes.”

  “She say anything about this to you?”

  “She hasn’t shared any of her thoughts yet. She probably won’t until she’s completed the survey of the entire mine.”

  They stood before the wall, which had been constructed of six-by-six timbers laid horizontally, one atop the other. They’d been secured to the wall of the tunnel with bolted metal L plates. The wood had fared well in the dry cool of the mine. Then Cork noticed something.

  “Look here.” He knelt and ran his hand along a seam cut into several of the timbers a couple of feet from the right side of the wall. There was another seam cut two feet nearer the center. “These are fresh.”

  “Yeah,” Haddad agreed. He knelt beside Cork and gave the top cut section a push. It yielded and fell back into the dark on the other side of the timbers. He reached in and pulled the next section toward him, and, when it was out, Cork saw that an eyebolt had been screwed into the backside, which would allow it to be removed easily from the other side of the wall. One by one, Haddad cleared the next four sections of cut timber, which created an opening two feet high and two feet wide, large enough for a man to crawl through.

  Cork shot the beam of his Maglite into the dark on the other side, revealing a continuation of the Vermilion Drift. He saw no indication of a cave-in. He looked at Haddad. “You were right. Somebody lied in that official report a long time ago.”

  “Somebody who didn’t want it known that ore belonging to the Ojibwe had been taken.”

  “You game?”

  “Are you kidding?” Haddad crawled ahead through the gap.

  Cork followed and almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The air on the other side reeked of animal decay. He stood up and shot his light into the darkness ahead. “Something died in here, Lou. And not long ago.”

  “Probably some animal came in and couldn’t find its way out. Which means you’re right. There’s another entrance. And do you feel that?”

  “What?” Cork said.

  “The temperature. It’s much warmer here than on the other side of that timbered wall. There’s air coming in from somewhere up ahead.”

  Haddad went forward with the Coleman lantern. They had to walk carefully because on this side of the wall the tunnel floor was littered with blocks of stone big as an ice chest.

  Cork glanced uneasily at the ceiling above him. “Any chance of a cave-in?”

  “I wouldn’t worry.”

  “What about all these rocks on the floor?”

  Haddad shook his head. “Should have been cleared during the mining. Poor workmanship.”

  They seemed to have walked forever in the dark, and Cork was uncomfortably aware how far behind them was the way out. He’d never been claustrophobic before, but now he felt as if the walls were closing in on him. Maybe it was just the utter black around them and the fact that he didn’t really know where they were headed. The foulness of the air he breathed might also have had something to do with it.

  Haddad stopped suddenly, and Cork nearly ran into him. Haddad turned off his Coleman. “Kill your light,” he said.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. Turn it off, Cork. And your headlamp, too.”


  “I don’t think so.”

  “Just do it.”

  Cork didn’t like the idea. But when the lights were off, he understood what Haddad was getting at. It was pitch dark around them but not absolute, as it should have been. Far ahead, the dark was broken by a diffuse paleness.

  Haddad switched his lantern on again, and for a moment the light was a knife in Cork’s eyes. “Come on,” Haddad said and started ahead, this time walking much faster despite the great stones littering the way.

  Before Cork could follow, he heard something scurry to his right. He swung the beam of his Maglite in that direction, but whatever critter had been there had vanished. It gave him the creeps knowing that there were living things that could see him but that he could not see.

  The tunnel ahead grew brighter, though still dark enough that artificial light was needed to navigate. At last they came to a jumble of what looked to Cork to be dynamite-blasted rock. There was a ragged passage into the tumble of debris where light came through. Haddad put down the lantern, knelt, and crawled into the opening.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “What is this?”

  “My guess would be a bit of wildcat mining. It happened in the early days on the Range, when no one was paying enough attention to property and mineral rights. The problem with open pits in this particular area was that the loose glacial deposits on the surface kept collapsing into the pit. That’s one of the reasons mining went underground on this part of the Range. I’d bet whoever blasted this sink finally said to hell with it. But I’d also bet that the guys in charge of the Vermilion One back then knew exactly where the ore was that the wildcatters were trying to get at and ran the Vermilion Drift all the way to the pit. Then maybe they had another landslide, or maybe they even blasted the side of the pit themselves to try to hide what they’d done. But they didn’t quite succeed. Come on, let’s see what’s up top.”

  He didn’t wait for Cork to weigh in on the plan’s advisability but quickly disappeared into the mouth of the passage, which angled upward and was easily wide enough for his body to squeeze into. Cork didn’t follow right away, thinking it prudent to wait a bit to be sure they both didn’t get stuck somewhere they couldn’t get out of.