The Lost Valley, page 1
THE LOST VALLEY
William Meikle
www.severedpress.com
Copyright 2019 by William Meikle
- Danny -
Danny Swaitek and Gus Jacobs stood on the porch of the high shack waiting for the struggling quartet below to reach them. Gus had already had time for two smokes and was working on a third while the city folks making their way up the deer track through the trees still had some way to climb. It was getting late in the day, the low sun already casting long shadows, spreading Danny and Gus out like giants down the slope at their feet.
“You ever brought anybody up here who wasn’t another hunter?” Danny asked.
“Fuck, no,” Gus answered and spat on the ground beyond the porch. “Who the hell else would want to be this far out apart from a hunter? The walk is easier, and the views are better across the valley on the eastern side. Ain’t nothing up on these tops but old bears and cold rock.”
“So why this lot?” Danny said, looking down the slope. The first of the straggling group, the woman, was making her way confidently enough through the knee-high vegetation, but the other three seemed to struggle with every step. Even at this distance, Danny saw the small bleeding cuts that marked their faces and hands where they’d allowed branches and twigs to lash against them in the climb from where they’d left the cars.
“This sorry bunch of fucks are paying us two thousand bucks for a few days up on the tops,” Gus said. “Eight hundred of that is yours, as I said before. Although given how they’re struggling already, I don’t think we’re going to need to get anywhere near the tops before they give up and go home.”
Seeing the struggling attempts of the stragglers to even get through the scant vegetation on the slope, Danny could only agree
“So what are they after if it’s not the view or a trophy for their dining room walls?”
“Fuck knows,” Gus replied. “And I don’t really care. They’ve already paid, and I don’t do refunds. Maybe they’ll let us in on what’s so secret once we get them settled for the night in the shack here. Get a pot of coffee brewing, will you, lad? They look like they’re going to need it.”
They’d left Jasper in a convoy of three trucks, Gus and Danny leading in Gus’ ancient pickup, that July morning. The others were in smart, rented SUVs that looked like they’d never gone off-road. Gus tested them out, leading them north and east, first on the public road then always upward through twists and turns along logging roads, rutted tracks, and trails no wider than the trucks themselves. Danny watched in the mirror while branches whipped scratches all along the side of the shiny, rented vehicles.
“Somebody’s going to lose their deposit.”
Gus laughed.
“I’m willing to bet our fee that at least one of them’s already lost their breakfast.”
Just after noon, they’d parked when the trail finally ran out in a north-facing clearing at five thousand feet. Between now and then had been five hours of solid climbing up a trail through the pines that was punctuated every ten yards or so with deer droppings but no other sign that anything had been this way in years. Gus had seemed to know where he was headed though. Danny hadn’t been surprised to look up when they reached the upper limit of the forest to see a shack perched on a ledge of rock in the liminal zone between the green of the forest and the steel-blue and white of the high tops.
The sky hung like an opaque blue dome overhead. Off to the north, the Rockies marched in a line above the forest, the tops still mostly white after a hard winter and late spring. Danny looked down to see that the stragglers were finally approaching the last stretch of climb up a scree track to the shack.
Time for coffee.
He turned reluctantly from the view and headed inside. The building was little more than four rickety walls and a flat roof, with an ancient iron stove in the center of the space, some chopped-down logs for seating around it, and rudimentary cot beds lining the walls. The coffee pot and accompanying tin cups looked to be old as the stove. Danny had a newer, better set in his rucksack, along with a gallon of filtered water, but didn’t see the sense of unpacking more than he needed to. He filled the pot from a water tub at the rear of the shack that collected rainwater off the roof and loaded the stove from a small pile of wood beside the water butt. He got it going with the help of half a dozen of the scud-mags that lay in a pile in a corner of the shack—the magazines were all dated in the early eighties.
I wonder how long it’s been since Gus was up here?
They’d brought their own coffee—two tubs of continental dark roast Danny had also gladly lugged up the trail in his backpack. He dumped a large handful of grounds into the pot and the aroma quickly filled the room. The smell reminded him of meeting Gus three days ago in Tim Hortons in Jasper.
Gus was a big bear of a mountain man, two hundred and forty pounds of mostly muscle, although his beer gut was threatening to overtake that sometime in the future. He was well-known throughout the area as the man to see if you wanted to organize a trip in the Canadian Rockies. Danny had known him for several years, since his own arrival in the town from Edmonton looking for an escape from the city. Gus had provided him with his first experiences in the high hills, and since then, Danny had never been able to get enough. When Gus asked for a meeting, he was only too happy to oblige.
The big man’s belly and beard had preceded him into the diner and the seat squeaked in protest as he lowered his weight onto it. Danny slid over a mug of coffee—tall Americano—and two chocolate muffins, a typical breakfast for both of them.
“I’ve got a job for you, if you’re free and want some easy cash?” the older man had said after he made the muffins disappear. “I’m taking four people up to the tops, and I’d like somebody I can trust along in case they need babysitting and as backup against unforeseen accidents.”
“Is this a hunting trip?” Danny had asked, for he’d been out with Gus on other expeditions after deer or even bear during the previous two summers. But Gus had shaken his head.
“Not this time. A bunch of city tourists who want to get up high, that’s all I know,” Gus replied. “They’ve got a specific place in mind, and I know a route that’ll get us there without anybody getting dead. But we’ll be the only ones carrying guns. I’m not taking greenhorns up there to wave rifles about and play at being John Rambo. They’re coming in from Toronto tomorrow and at least for the guy I talked to, it’s their first time in the mountains. As I said, babysitting. There’s eight hundred bucks in it for you.”
“Eight hundred bucks and a few days in the mountains? I’m in,” Danny had replied.
When they’d met the four ‘tourists’ from Toronto that morning in the Timmy’s car park, he could tell that Gus wasn’t impressed. The leader of the small group, Lodge, was a lanky, sour-faced man in his thirties who looked like he’d bought all his gear the day before, wearing the kind of clothing that a request like “Fit me out for a hike in the mountains,” would lead to. At least the woman seemed comfortable in worn in-hiking boots, heavy socks, loose clothing, and a rucksack that looked like it had seen use. But it only took Danny one look at the other two men to know that it was going to be slow going on any climb. They were pasty-white, soft-bellied, and looked to have come straight from a desk job. They struggled even to lift their laden packs and both wore new boots that were going to raise blisters in a matter of hours if not minutes.
Danny hadn’t said anything at the time—eight hundred bucks was most welcome this early in the season and jeopardizing it before leaving the car park would be the dumbest move in a history of dumb moves.
But he was proved right. The first thing the two men did on entering the cabin wasn’t to head for coffee but to sit on the logs around the stove and, gingerly, take off their boots. The shorter, plumper man—Mike, as he’d been introduced—had a left sock that was soaked with blood from a burst blister on his heel, and the other, Erik, had a ready-to-pop blister the size of a sparrow’s egg on the outside of the big toe of his right foot.
Gus threw them a packet of Band-Aids.
“Patch them up as best you can, lads,” he said. “We’ve got a long way up to go yet to get where you want to go. That was the easy bit. Tomorrow you’ll see some real hills.”
Both city men groaned in unison but didn’t utter any complaints while they set about their feet with the Band-Aids. Danny fetched everyone a cup of coffee and got a thin smile from the woman, Jess, as he handed hers over. He saw her eyeing the cots against the wall.
“Not much privacy I’m afraid,” he said. “We’ll be roughing it a bit tonight.”
“No problem,” she replied. “I’m not shy.”
She gave Danny another smile, a broader one this time, and when he went to the stove to pour a coffee for himself, he was beginning to think that this babysitting lark might not be too bad after all.
- Jess -
Jess took her coffee out to the shack’s porch for a look at the view. Noble was already there looking, not at the view over the northern range, but up the mountainside at the back of the shack, their route for the next day.
“How far do we still have to go?” she asked.
“As the crow flies, only about ten miles,” Noble answered. “But our guide tells me it is going to take us the best part of two days to get there. We’ll be camping somewhere up on the tops around this time tomorrow.”
“Have you told the big bear exactly where you want to go yet?”
“Not specifically—only that we want to see the Dreaming Indian valley.”
“And what did he say to that?”
“He laughed, told me it was a myth…just as we knew he would.”
“He still might be right,” Jess said.
“I might agree, if we didn’t have the journal and the directions it has given us.”
“We only have Mike’s guesswork for the second part of that,” she said.
“But you know Mike. His guesses are as close to fact as guesses ever get. It’s there. I feel it in my bones.”
“I hope so,” Jess replied. “Because when we get home with nothing and you submit your expenses for this jaunt, Hitchins will have your balls in a basket.”
“It’s there,” Noble said, little more than a whisper.
It had been Noble’s mantra for weeks now, ever since Mike brought them the journal and explained what he thought it was. Jess remember the day with perfect clarity, a turning point where hopes and dreams were born and with them a course of action that had led the four of them directly to this remote shack in the mountains.
“It’s a detailed journal of a mining expedition in the eighteen seventies,” Mike had said. The four of them had been sat around a coffee table in the company rec room and had the place to themselves. Mike had put a beat-up, leather-bound journal on the table in front of them.
“I was down in the company archives, doing some research on early searches for mineral deposits in the Rockies,” he said, “around Banff in particular. I found it stuffed in between two boxes of samples. It looks as if nobody has looked at either the boxes, or this journal, for a long, long time. I had to get the dust off it with a damp cloth.”
“So why are you so excited?” Noble replied. “It’s not as if it’s a fucking treasure map?”
The look Mike gave in reply got him all the silence he needed to continue.
“I think that’s exactly what it is. It’s a slog to get to the meat of it—it’s a man’s diary after all, and it’s full of inconsequential details—but I think I’ve picked out enough facts to be able to draw a map.”
“Good for you,” Noble said sarcastically. “Care to get to the bloody point? I’ve got a two-thirty with the boss.”
“I’m getting to it,” Mike replied. “The expedition this journal details failed, badly, resulting in only the one survivor. But before that happened, before the man walked out of the hills, they found what they were after—a workable seam of gold in a high valley to the north and west of Jasper. And if this journal is right, there’s enough there to make us all very rich indeed.”
Noble’s irritability faded immediately, and they spent the next hour poring over both the journal and Mike’s notes from his reading of it. None of them could find any flaws in Mike’s reasoning, and Noble in particular was getting more excited by the minute.
What followed that fateful meeting was weeks of discussion, argument, then eventually planning. Noble managed to wangle the trip on expenses as a field mission in search of uranium ore, but that was just a cover.
If the gold was where Mike said it was, then they intended to find it, stake a claim, and make it theirs; fortune and glory stuff that had seemed just a dream back in Toronto seemed a whole lot closer out here in the mountains.
When Jess finished her coffee and returned to the cabin, the younger of their two guides, Danny, was busy at the stove, tipping tins of stew into a pot. She saw him look over expectantly.
I didn’t come all this way just to get roped into doling out the food.
She turned away to see that Mike was showing the older guide, Gus, the journal.
“I told your man Noble there, and I’m telling you,” the big man said. “I don’t care how many journals and old miners’ stories you’ve been able to dredge up. It’s a myth, a hunters’ tall tale told to scare them all shitless on cold nights on the tops. It’s right up there with Bigfoot when it comes to bullshit.”
Mike waved the journal in front of him.
“That’s what we thought…at first. But we’ve had this authenticated. The paper and ink date it to the right time; I found the man’s death record in Banff. There’s even a small piece in a local newspaper of the time that tells of him being found descending into a valley and being found by three hunters, near death and rambling.”
“Yep. And mad as a bag of gophers no doubt. The high tops can do strange things to a man; I’ve seen that for myself. But I’m telling you, there is no Dreaming Indian Valley. I know these hills.”
Noble took the journal from Mike and slid out the map the four of them had put together from a variety of fragments of documentation and the journal entries themselves.
“We’re about here, right?” Noble said, pointing to a spot on the western range.
Gus moved Noble’s finger about an inch to the left, then his eyes widened when he saw the route Noble went on to trace on the map.
“We need to go here,” Noble said, pointing.
“That’s too high,” the guide said. “I’ll be well above the snow line and probably impassible, even at this time of year. Nothing lives up there, so there’s no reason for any hunters to go to that altitude. I don’t know anybody that’s tried it—I doubt anybody has.”
Noble smiled and waved the journal under Gus’ nose.
“These guys did, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. With our equipment and your expertise in the hills, I’m sure we can do even better.”
“You never said anything about going that high,” Gus said. “I wouldn’t have brought you if I knew. It’s risky enough for us who know the hills. I can’t guarantee your safety on the tops up there.”
“I tell you what,” Noble said. “Get us to that valley and there’ll be a nice earner in it for you. If we find what we’re looking for, there’s going to be people up and down here in convoys for years to come…and they’re going to need a guide.”
Jess could almost hear the cash register ring up in the big man’s head; Noble wasn’t head of the sales department for nothing—he could talk the hind legs off a donkey…or convince a mountain guide to take risks he otherwise wouldn’t countenance.
“What do you say, Danny?” Gus asked. “You up for a Hail Mary expedition in return for a forty percent share of my profit?”
The younger guide smiled.
“More beer money is always good for me, boss.”
It looks like we’re going higher.
Later, after the stodgy stew and more coffee, the big guide, Gus, was obviously still mulling things over.
“Okay,” he said, “we go higher. But if I’m taking you, I need to know why. What’s so goddamned important up there? What’s in your Dreaming Indian Valley that’s got you city folks riled up enough for a jaunt in the wilds?”
Mike opened the journal and read from it, a passage Jess knew almost by heart.
“The seam is more than six feet wide where it shows near the mouth of the shaft and appears to be widening where it disappears into the rock. If we can but get the right tools and equipment up to this place, there is a fortune to be had, enough to make us all as rich as Croesus.”
Gus’ booming laugh echoed around the shack.
“And here I was worried that it was a Sasquatch you were after. So what is it, gold or silver? I’ve heard both stories. There are more lost mines in these hills than I’ve had hot breakfasts.” He patted his belly. “And I’m never short of breakfasts.”
“The journal’s authentic,” Noble said. “We’ve proved that to our satisfaction.”
Gus laughed again.
“You said that before. And maybe it is, but the man who wrote it might not have been right in the head. I’ve seen plenty of men lose track of themselves after time in these hills. Who knows whether he’s only writing about what he thought he saw rather than what was really there?”
“It is there,” Noble said.
Their leader was still full of his sense of purpose, the lure of the riches the only thought in his head. But Jess knew well enough that there were other passages in the journal that gave credence to Gus’ skepticism. Those parts were so wild that they too were stuck in a loop in her memory, a worry she couldn’t help picking at.
