Time Travel Omnibus, page 622
MARATHON PHOTOGRAPH
Clifford D. Simak
There is no point in putting this account on paper. For me, a stolid professor of geology, it is an exercise in futility, eating up time that would be better spent in working on my long-projected, oft-delayed text on the Precambrian, for the purpose of which I still am on a two-quarter leave of absence, which my bank account can ill afford. If I were a writer of fiction I could make a story out of it, representing it as no more than a tale of the imagination, but at least with some chance of placing it before the public. If I were anything other than a dry-as-dust college professor, I could write it as a factual account (which, of course, it would be) and submit it to one of the so-called fact magazines that deal in raw sensationalism, with content on such things as treasure hunts, flying saucers, and the underground—and again with the good chance that it might see the light of print, with at least some of the more moronic readers according it some credence. But a college professor is not supposed to write for such media and most assuredly would feel the full weight of academic censure should he do so. There always is, of course,’ the subterfuge of writing under an assumed name and changing the names of those who appear in the text, but even should I not shrink from this (which I do) it would offer only poor protection, since at least part of the story is known to many others and, accordingly, I could be identified quite easily.
Yet, in spite of all these arguments, I find that I must write down what happened. White paper covered with the squiggles of my penmanship may, after a fashion, serve the function of the confessional, lifting from my soul and mind the burden of a lonely knowledge. Or it may be that subconsciously I hope, by putting it down in a somewhat orderly fashion, to uncover some new understanding or some justification for my action which had escaped me heretofore. Anyone reading this—although I am rather certain no one ever will—must at once perceive that I have little understanding of those psychological factors that drive me to what must seem a rather silly task. Yet, if the book on the Precambrian is ever to be finished, it seems, this account must be finished first. The ghost of the future must be laid to rest before I venture into the past.
I find some trouble in determining where to start. My writing for academic journals, I realize, cannot serve as a model for this effort. But it does seem to me that the approach in any writing chore must be logical to some degree at least, and that the content must be organized in some orderly fashion. So it appears that a good place to start might be with the bears.
It had been a bad summer for the bears. The berry crop had failed and the acorns would not ripen until fall. The bears dug for roots, ripped open rotten logs to get at grubs and ants and other insects that might be hidden there, labored long and furiously to dig out mice and gophers, or tried, with minimal success, to scoop trout from the streams. Some of them, driven by their hunger, drifted out of the hills to nearby tiny towns or lurked in the vicinity of resorts, coming out at night from their hiding places to carry out raids upon garbage cans. These activities created a great furor, with the nightly locking and barring of doors and windows and an industrious oiling of guns. There was some shooting, with one scrawny bruin, a wandering dog, and a cow falling victims to the hunters. The Division of Wildlife of the State Conservation Department issued the kind of weighty, rather pompous warning that is characteristic of entrenched bureaucracy, recommending that bears be left alone; they were a hungry tribe, consequently out of temper, and could be dangerous.
The accuracy of the warning was borne out in a day or two by the death of Stefan, the caretaker at the Lodge back in the hills, only a half mile or less from the cabin that Neville Piper and I had built a dozen years or more ago, driving up from the university and working on it of weekends. It had taken, for all its modest proportions, a couple of years to build.
I realize that if I were a really skillful writer I’d go on with the story and in the course of telling it weave in all the background information. But I know that if I try it, I will be awkward at it; the writing of geological papers intended for scientific journals is not the kind of thing that trains one for that kind of writing craftsmanship. So, rather than attempt it and get all tangled up, it might be a good idea to stop right here and write what I knew at that time about the Lodge.
Actually, I didn’t know too much about it, nor did anyone. Dora, who ran the Trading Post, a fanciful name for an old-fashioned general store that stood all by itself where the road into the hills branched off from the valley road, for years had carried deep resentment against the people who occasionally came to the Lodge because she had been able to learn almost nothing of them. About all that she knew was that they came from Chicago, although, when pressed upon the point, she wasn’t even sure of that. Dora knew almost all the summer visitors in the hills. I think that over the years she had come to think of them as family. She knew them by their first names and where they lived and how they made a living, plus any other information of interest that might be attached to them. She knew, for example, how for years I had been trying to write my book, and she was quite aware that not only was Neville a famous Greek historian, but that he also was widely known as a photographer of wildlife and nature. She had managed to get hold of three or four of those coffee-table books that had used some of Neville’s work and showed them to all comers. She knew all about the honors that had been conferred upon him for his photographic study of asters. She knew about his divorce and his remarriage and how that hadn’t worked out, either. And while her accounts of the subject may have been somewhat short of accuracy, they did not lack in detail. She knew I’d never married, and alternately she was enraged at me for my attitude, then sympathetic toward my plight. I never could decide whether it was her rage or her pity that incensed me most. After all, it was none of her damn business, but she made everything her business.
So far as technology is concerned, the hills are a backward place. There is no electricity, no gas, no mail service, no telephones. The Trading Post has a sub-post office and a telephone, and for this reason, as well as for the groceries and the other items carried on its shelves, it is a sort of central hub for the summer visitors. If you were going to stay for any length of time, you had your mail forwarded, and if you needed a telephone, the Trading Post had the nearest one. It was inconvenient, of course, but few of the visitors minded, for the greater part of them came into the hills to hide away momentarily from the outside world. Most of them came from only a few hundred miles away, but there were some who lived as far away as the East Coast. These visitors flew into Chicago, as a rule, and boarded the Galloping Goose to fly to Pine Bend, about thirty miles from the hills, renting cars to travel the rest of the way. The Galloping Goose was the Northlands Airline, a regional company that served the smaller cities in a four-state area. Despite its ancient equipment, it did a creditable job, usually getting in on time, and with one of the finest safety records of any airline in existence. There was one hazard; if the weather was bad at a certain landing field, the pilot didn’t even try to land, but skipped that particular stop. The fields had no lights and there were no towers, and when there was a storm or a field socked in by fog, the pilots took no chances—which may help to explain the excellent safety record. There were many friendly jokes attached to the Galloping Goose, most of them with no basis of truth whatever. For example, it was untrue that at Pine Bend someone had to go out and drive the deer off the runway before a plane could land. Personally, over the years, I developed a very friendly, almost possessive feeling toward the Galloping Goose—not because I used it, for I never did, but because its planes flew on their regular schedules over our cabin. Out fishing, I’d hear one of them approaching and I would stand and watch it pass over, and after a time I found myself sort of anticipating a flight—the way one would watch a clock.
I see that I am wandering. I really started out to tell about the Lodge.
The Lodge was called the Lodge because of all the summer places in the hills it was the largest and the only one that was pretentious in the least. Also, as it turned out, it had been the first. Humphrey High-more, not Dora, had been the one who told me the most about the Lodge. Humphrey was a ponderous old man who prided himself on being the unofficial historian of Woodman County. He scrabbled out a living of sorts by painting and hanging wallpaper, but he was first and foremost a historian. He pestered Neville every chance he got and was considerably put out because Neville never was able to generate much interest in purely local history.
The Lodge had been built, Humphrey told me, somewhat more than forty years before, long before anyone else had evinced an interest in the hills as a vacation area. All the old-time residents, at the time, ought that whoever was building it was out of his right mind. There was nothing back in those hills but a few trout streams and, in good years, some grouse shooting, although there were years when there weren’t many grouse. It was a long way from any proper place, and the land, of course, was worthless. It was too rough to farm, and the timber was so heavy it was no good for pasture, and the land was too rough to harvest timber. Most of it was tax-forfeited land.
And here came this madman, whoever he might be, and spent a lot of money not only to erect the Lodge, but to build five miles of road through the nightmare hills to reach it. Humphrey, who had told me the story on several occasions, always indicated at this point a further source of irritation that perhaps would have been felt most keenly by a devoted historian—no one had ever really learned who this madman was. So far as anyone knew, he had never appeared upon the scene during the time the Lodge and road were being built. All the work had been done by contractors, with the contracts let by letter through a legal firm. Humphrey thought the firm was based in Chicago, but he wasn’t sure. Whether the builder ever actually visited the Lodge after it was built was not known, either. People did come to stay in it occasionally, but no one ever saw them come or leave. They never came down to the Trading Post to make any purchases or to pick up mail or make a phone call. The buying that was done or other chores that needed to be performed were done by Stefan, who seemed to be the caretaker, although not even that was certain. Stefan, no last name. Stefan, period. “Like he was trying to hide something,” Humphrey told me. “He never talked, and if you asked him anything, he managed not to answer. You’d think a man would tell you his last name if you should ask him. But not Stefan.” On his infrequent trips out from the Lodge, Stefan always drove a Cadillac. Most men usually are willing to talk about their cars, said Humphrey, and a Cadillac was seen seldom enough in these parts that there were a lot of people who would have liked to talk about it, to ask questions about it. But Stefan wouldn’t talk about the Cadillac. To Dora and Humphrey he was an irritating man.
It had taken several months, Humphrey said, to get the road into the Lodge built. He explained that at the time he had been off in another part of the county and had not paid much attention to the Lodge, but in later years he had talked with the son of the man who had the contract to build the road. The road as it first was built was good enough for trucks to haul in the material to build the Lodge, but once it had been built the track was fairly well torn up by truck traffic, so there had been a second contract let to bring the road back to first-class condition. “I suppose a good road was needed for the Cadillac,” Humphrey said. “Even from the first it was a Cadillac. Not the same Cadillac, of course, although I’m not sure how many.”
Humphrey always had plenty of stories to tell; he bubbled with them. He had a pathological need to communicate, and he was not bothered too much by repetition. He had two favorite topics. One, of course, was the mystery of the Lodge—if it really was a mystery. Humphrey thought it was. His other favorite was the lost mine. If there was a lost mine, it would have had to have been a lead mine. There were lead deposits all through the area. Humphrey never admitted it was a lead mine; he made it sound as if it might be gold.
As I gathered it, the lost-mine story had been floating around for a long time before Humphrey fastened hold of it. That there was such a story was no great surprise—there are few areas that do not possess at least one legendary lost mine or buried treasure. Such stories are harmless local myths and at times even pleasant ones, but at least subconsciously they are recognized for what they are, and it is seldom that anyone pays much attention to them. Humphrey did, however, pay attention to the story; he ran it down relentlessly, chasing after clues, reporting breathlessly to anyone who would listen to him his latest scrap of information or imagined information.
On that July morning when it all began I drove down to the Trading Post to buy some bacon and pick up our mail. Neville had planned to make the trip so that I could get started on the textbook project, but after several rainy days the sun had come out and during all the rainy spell he’d been praying for a few hours of sunlight to photograph a stand of pink lady’s slippers that were in bloom a short distance below the bridge just beyond the Lodge. He had been down there for several days in the rain, floundering around, getting soaked to the skin and taking pictures. The pictures had been fine, as his pictures always are. Still, he needed sunlight for the best result.
When I left, he’d had all his equipment spread out on the kitchen table, selecting what he’d need to take along. Neville is a fussy photographer—I guess most photographers are, the ones who are interested in their work. He had more gadgets than you can imagine, and each of those gadgets, as I understand it, is built for a specific task. It’s his fussiness, I suppose, and all those gadgets he has collected, that make him the outstanding photographer he is.
When I arrived at the Trading Post, Humphrey was there, sitting all by himself in one of the several chairs pulled up around the cold heating stove that stood in the center of the store. He had the look of someone who was waiting for a victim, and I didn’t have it in my heart to disappoint him. So after buying the bacon and picking up the mail, I went back to the stove and sat down in the chair next to him.
He didn’t waste any time in idle chatter; he got right down to business.
“I’ve told you, I think,” he said, “about the lost mine.”
“Yes,” I said. “We have discussed it several times.”
“You recall the main thrust of the story,” he said. “How it was supposed to have been discovered by two deserters from Fort Crawford who were hiding in the hills. That would have been back in the 1830’s or so. As the story went, the mine was discovered in a cave—that is, there was a cave, and cropping out in the cave was a drift of mineral, very rich, I understand.”
“What I’ve never been able to figure out about it,” I said, “is even if they found the mine, why they should have bothered to try to work it. It would have been lead, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Humphrey, somewhat reluctantly, “I suppose it would have been.”
“Think of the problem of getting it out,” I said. “I suppose they would have had to smelt the ore and cast it into pigs and then bring in pack animals to get out the pigs. And all the time with the Army with an eye out for them.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Humphrey, “but there’s magic in a mine. The very idea of finding riches in the earth is somehow exciting. Even if there’s no way to work it . . .”
“You’ve made your point,” I said. “I think I understand.”
“Well, in any case,” said Humphrey, “they never really worked it. They started to, but something happened and they pulled out. Left the country and were never seen again. They are supposed to have told someone that they cut logs to conceal the cave mouth and shoveled dirt over the logs. To hide the mine from anyone else, you understand. Figuring maybe some day they’d come back and work it. I’ve often wondered, if all this is true, why they never did come back. You know, Andrew, I think that now I have the answer. Not only the answer, but the first really solid evidence that the old story is not a myth. I think as well that I may be able to identify that hitherto unknown person who got the story started.”
“Some new evidence?” I asked.
“Yes, quite by chance,” he said. “Knowing I am interested in the history of this area, people often bring me things they find—old things, like letters or clippings from old newspapers. You know the kind of stuff.”
I said, indeed, I did. He had me interested, but even if I hadn’t been I’d let him get started on it and I had to hear him out.
“The other day,” he said, “a man from the eastern part of the county brought me a journal he’d found in an old box in the attic. The farmhouse had been built by his grandfather, say a hundred years or more ago, and the farm had stayed in the family ever since. The man who brought me the journal is the present owner of it. The journal apparently had been written by his great-grandfather, the father of the man who originally settled on the farm. This great-grandfather, for several years when he was a young man, had run a trading post up on the Kickapoo, trading with the Sauks and Foxes who still were in the area. Not much of a business, apparently, but he made a living out of it. Did some trapping on his own and that helped. The journal covers a period of about three years, from 1828 well into ’31. Entries for almost every day, sometimes only a single sentence, but entries. At other times several pages filled, summarizing events of the past few weeks, previously only mentioned sketchily or not at all . . .”
“There was mention of a mine?” I asked, getting a bit impatient. Left to himself, he could have rambled on for hours.
Toward the end of it,” he said. “August of ’31, I think. I can’t recall the date. Two men who I take to have been the deserters came to the post late one evening, seeking food and shelter. It had been some time since our journalist had seen another white man, and I would suspect they made a night of it, sitting up and drinking. They would not have told him what they did if they’d not had a few too many. They didn’t out and out say they were deserters, but he suspected it. The fort authorities had asked him some time before to be on the lookout for them. But it appears he had been having some trouble with the military and was not about to help the fort. So it would have been safe enough for the two to have told him they were deserters, although apparently they didn’t. They told him about the mine, however, and pinpointed it close enough so he could guess that it was somewhere in these hills. They told him the story that has come down to us, little changed. How they cut the logs to cover up the cave mouth before they left.
