“There was a man with blood coming out of his neck, but I only saw him for just a little bit. Who was he, Mama?”
“A bad man. You don’t need to know more. What else does Leo think about us?”
“Nothing else. He thinks about his cousin a lot. Lewis is not very well. Leo didn’t want him to come, but he wanted to, so Leo let him.”
Zoe had noticed that Lewis often became red-faced and short of breath on the trail to Glory Hole. “Will he be all right?” she asked.
“Oh, no, he’s going to die very soon. It’s a shame, Mama. Leo is very fond of him.”
“You must say nothing of this to anyone.”
“I know.”
The Engineers returned at dusk, talking excitedly among themselves. Their conversation halted as soon as they were enclosed by the firelight. Zoe was irritated by their clumsy secretiveness. “Well, gentlemen,” she said, in a manner so pointed it could not be ignored, “were you successful?”
“We believe so,” said Lewis, after hasty glances at his partners. “There’s a spot not far from here no one has thought to claim, despite its attractions.”
“We’ll do so tomorrow,” added Leo.
“So kindly be quiet about it till it’s all signed and legal,” said Chadbourne.
“Who would I tell?” asked Zoe. “The chipmunks?”
“Just in case someone comes snooping around, that’s all.”
“As you wish,” Zoe told him, looking Chadbourne so fiercely in the eye he was obliged to look away from her.
Sell Yost said, “We all know what to do, even Omie.”
“I’m just making sure, that’s all,” Chadbourne insisted. “Something as important as this can be said twice, can’t it?”
“Enough, John,” said Leo. “Mrs. Dugan … Zoe … knows full well what we’re about. Her discretion may be relied upon.”
“So you say, but I can spell it out again for the lady and the girl, no harm done.”
“Mr. Chadbourne,” said Zoe, “I am not a fool. I wish you every advantage, even if it means avoiding the truth.”
“Good,” he said. “Now we want to eat.”
Zoe waited for one of the men to comment on this particular rudeness of Chadbourne’s, but no one did. She realized then that she had come to expect a modicum of chivalry from Leo; she should have known better than to expect anything resembling consistent behavior from any man. She was a paid servant among these prospectors, and her only friend was Omie. It was disappointing to have to remind herself of this, but then, Zoe was more or less accustomed to disappointment as the prime ingredient to the living of her life. What was, was. She could do little to change anything to suit her own sense of justice. The men had all turned from her and gone about their business, real or pretended, to avoid the look on her face. Only Omie was looking directly at her mother. Zoe smiled at her.
When the meal was done with, and Zoe cleaning the dishes at the stream some hundred yards from the tents, she was approached by Leo. His embarrassment was obvious despite the darkness.
“John expresses himself bluntly. I apologize.”
“None is necessary, and if it were, Mr. Chadbourne could surely deliver it himself.”
“We’ve come a considerable distance, Mrs. Dugan, to chance everything we have. Every dollar we own has been invested in this enterprise. You can see why good manners are sometimes left by the wayside under circumstances such as these.”
“No, I cannot see. I have also invested all of myself in this venture, and am capable anyway of civility, even to such a one as Mr. Chadbourne. I expect there will be other incidents similar to this, unless you become millionaires overnight.”
He laughed. “Little chance of that. In any case, I ask for your indulgence.”
“You have it. Will you help carry dishes for me?”
“If so instructed.” He began picking up the tin plates. “One of the tents is at the disposal of yourself and Omie.”
“Thank you. Who will have the other?”
“John and Lewis. Sell and I are hardened outdoorsmen.”
“Good. Your cousin requires comfort.”
“Canvas over his head is scarcely that.”
“You must take care of him. I believe he is not at all well.”
They began walking back to the camp. Leo said, “Lewis becomes short of breath at this altitude, nothing more.”
“But you are aware that he has difficulties.”
“I am, and I don’t make light of it. Lewis is my cousin, and I care a great deal for him.”
Sell Yost appeared before them. “The little girl,” he said, “she’s behaving … strange.”
Zoe hurried ahead. As she reached the firelight she could see Omie at its furthest edge, staring fixedly into the pine-scented darkness. Zoe went directly to her side.
“Omie? Omie!”
Omie opened and closed her mouth several times.
“What is it?”
“A deer,” said Omie, “only bigger …”
“Bigger?”
“Than a deer …”
Leo and Yost had caught up with her. “What does she say?”
“A deer,” said Zoe. “She saw a deer, that’s all.”
“Plenty of them around,” said Yost. “They’re almost tame.”
“Bigger …” intoned Omie.
“She may mean an elk,” suggested Leo. “We saw one ourselves this afternoon, further up the mountainside.”
“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 Om
ie 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 do
esn’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.