The Lost Valley, page 2
“The tiger got Franks last night, even though Jeffries was on guard with him and they kept a fire well lit. The beast seems to have no fear, either of us or our fire, and it plucked poor Franks off and away into the night before Jeffries even knew it was there. We all heard Franks’ screams well enough though, for they echoed loud in the night, filling the whole valley with his terror, which was thankfully short.”
“Mountain lion, it had to be,” Noble had said. “They got themselves spooked up there in the dark, that’s all.”
Noble had refused to read the wilder parts, refused even to have them discussed, but when he wasn’t around Jess, Mike and Erik had pored over them avidly, trying to glean meaning from what, to their eyes, looked to be fantastical ravings. Only the fact that Mike could pinpoint the valley’s position on a map and that the early parts of the journal were coherent kept Jess’ confidence high.
But the worries were always there to be picked at, fragments of scattered words and images that had been scrawled across the last pages the man had written.
“Johnson wouldn’t leave the cave. Gold fever mostly, but also terror at what waits for us in the valley. But we must leave him. We are not wanted here.”
“They ate Williamson. He was still alive when they took out his liver and I didn’t help him. I ran. God help me, I ran.”
“The tiger has found my scent. I hear it, padding along behind me. I have smeared myself in the shit of the tusked things to try to mask my smell. Dear God, it is rank.”
“There is nothing I can do but climb and hide, climb and hide, but it is too cold now and the eagles are watching. At least the other beasts haven’t followed me. Not yet…I left them enough meat to be going on with. God help me, I left them.”
- Then –
I can scarcely believe we have come so high on little more than a legend and a whim, but Johnson is adamant that the Indian had to have come by his story via a measure of truth at some point. So here we are, far off any beaten track or trail, more than a mile high with higher still to climb on the morrow and at the mercy of an aged Indian guide who may not be in possession of all his faculties.
That being said, he may be old, but he outstripped all of us younger men on the climb today, and kept up a pace that I was sorely pressed to emulate. After today’s efforts, I am not sure my legs will walk another step any time soon, but a night’s rest in the tent here and a bellyful of baloney and beans might sort that problem out. We have a fire in the center of our tented circle, and the air is not as chill as I had feared. The fur-lined jacket I procured in Banff is serving me well, although I could wish for another pair of socks, for my feet feel like cold stone.
But we are all in the same boat, so there is no sense in being a moaning misery. Besides, we are all excited to be here and there is a mutual camaraderie and joy in the chase that ensures that the will to succeed continues to burn brightly despite our little aches and pains.
The old Indian guide has us to this first staging post with us and we are grateful that he has led us this far, but he insists that he will go no farther. He is adamant that The Dreaming Valley is a place of his gods and for him to disturb it would be to jeopardize his own position in the hunting grounds beyond. Superstitious claptrap of course, but Johnson’s offers of more, frankly quite ridiculous amounts of money have not reversed his decision. Tomorrow, we shall go on alone.
It is of no matter though, for the old guide has given us detailed instructions and a crude map that should lead us directly to our goal.
I write this sitting at the mouth of the biggest tent where we shall bed down for the night, squeezed tightly together to preserve heat. Behind me, Williamson is already lost to sleep and the others have made inroads into our liquor and will join him soon. For myself, I will stay awake a while longer and take in the view under the stars.
I find that I am quite content for the first time in months, since the start of our planning of this expedition. There is a serenity to be found in these high places that speaks directly to my soul. If the gold is indeed there and I am able to procure my share of the spoils, I do believe I would like to spend my days in a place like this, seeking solitude in the majestic splendor of mountains. It is a dream I have.
And now that we are here, almost within reach, the dream seems closer than ever before.
Of course, we are not the first to bet our all on a chance of riches that may or may not be locked in rock in inaccessible places, and I doubt we will be the last. But, by God, we will try and be the most successful.
My soul needs it.
- Danny -
Danny had seen the certainty in Noble’s eyes when he talked about the gold. But he’d also seen the looks the other three of the group gave to each other. They were keeping something to themselves and Danny knew fear well enough to see it flickering in the man Erik’s eyes. Sure, they were after gold…fool’s gold if Gus was to be believed. Something else was bothering them, but Danny never got to find out that first night.
They’d all bedded down for the night without any further talk on the matter after a rudimentary cold wash and brushing of teeth using more rainwater from the barrel out back. They all slept fully clothed, although the shack was quite warm after having run the stove for a few hours.
Any heat had long gone by the morning, and Danny knew it was his duty to do something about it. He rose quietly and set about getting the stove lit before heading outside where he relieved himself over the edge of the porch in full view of the majesty of the Canadian Rockies and one curious squirrel.
By the time the others woke and rose, groaning at their various aches and pains, Danny had the first brew of the day already made. There wasn’t much time for conversation between more coffee and preparations for the day’s climb. He met Jess out on the porch and helped adjust her rucksack straps. He noted again that the rucksack had clearly seen a lot of use in the past.
“You’ve done this kind of thing before,” he said. “You’re rigged for comfort.”
“Sadly not for speed. I’ve been up a few hills, yes. Never as high as we’re going today though,” she replied. “Lots of east coast walks and camping in and around New Brunswick, where I’m from. I’m a country girl at heart.”
“It shows,” Danny replied, then realized it might be taken the wrong way and started to bluster. “I didn’t mean…”
She laughed.
“I know you didn’t. Look, do me a favor and look after Mike and Erik today, would you? Noble’s a work-out junkie, keeps in shape and will get by on sheer bloody mindedness, but those other two don’t really have any idea what they’ve let themselves in for. I’m worried for them.”
“You and me both,” Danny replied. “But I’ll keep them on the straight and narrow, and Gus knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t take risks up here.”
That was his chance to spin the conversation out, to maybe get to the bottom of what was worrying them all, but Gus called for him just then, and the moment was gone.
“Danny, get your ass on the move; time’s a wasting and I want to get us all up on the tops before the light goes this evening.”
“Moving my ass, boss,” Danny shouted and got another smile from Jess before he turned away.
Five minutes later, they headed out onto the hill.
Gus took the lead with Noble and Jess right behind him. Mike and Erik were next, distracting themselves from their blisters by discussing the latest Star Wars movie. Danny brought up the rear.
After only ten minutes, he knew it was going to be a long day. Gus, Jess, and Noble were already over a hundred yards ahead up the hill track while Erik moaned constantly about the incline, the flies, the cold, and anything else he could think about. Danny hoped he might step foot first into a pile of elk dung, just to give him something to really moan about.
“Come on, lads,” he said, cajoling them along. “Gus is mad for his coffee. If I know him, there’ll be a stop and a rest before too long.”
He knew that was a lie. Gus could climb all morning, all afternoon too if they were on the trail of a bear.
But they don’t know that.
Over the next ten minutes, the three in the lead got ever farther ahead, and Danny sometimes lost sight of them around corners or over bluffs. He wasn’t worried. The trail, although narrow, was clear enough and, so far at least, safe enough, not exposing them to any drops on either side.
That’ll come later.
He didn’t speak that thought aloud; he already knew the real test of the two men’s resolve would come higher up, when they hit real weather, real cold, and real hills. He hoped neither of them suffered from vertigo, for if they did, they were never going to get within miles of where Noble wanted to get them.
Erik was still moaning, about the blister on his toe now. Danny tuned him out and tried to enjoy the view.
Now that they were well above the tree line, he was able to look north along the whole length of the range, the blue rock topped with white cones standing stark against a gray sky, high clouds masking the sun. The northeast-facing slope they were climbing would never see much sunshine anyway, not even in high summer. A chill rolled down from the higher peaks, reminding him of what was to come. The land was laid out like a map below them, wilderness almost as far as you could see, with only a straight line far to the east sowing where the railway line took its cargos through the mountain passes.
Jasper felt like a hundred, a million miles away. Danny was okay with that. It had been a shitty summer of shitty jobs so far; barman, traffic control, garbage collection, each job as low paid as the next, and each as mind-numbingly dull that he’d often felt like screaming. Being up here made all that fall away though, and he felt more alive than he had since….well, since his last time in the hills. He was wondering about what Noble said the night before, about lots of people coming through here who would need guides, and fantasizing about a steady job out in these trails, when he walked into Erik, who had come to a dead stop just ahead of him.
They’d been climbing for less than forty minutes; Danny could still see the shack well below them down the trail, but it appeared that the man had already reached the end of his tether.
“I can’t do this. This is fucking stupidity,” he said and sat down on the trail. The other man, Mike, looked like he might speak, but Danny preempted him.
“That’s fine by me,” Danny said. “I’m getting paid anyway. The shack’s back down there a ways. Off you go. There’s no food, no coffee, and not much water until it rains, so no lavatory either. But I’m sure you’ll be fine until we get back. Gus reckons it’ll be a couple of days. Just watch out for bears. There’s some big ones about up here at this time of year.”
He saw that the man had already gone white, so he kept pushing.
“Or you could keep going down, head on back to the trucks. You remember the way, don’t you?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just stepped past the sitting man. He took Mike by the elbow.
“Come on, it’s just you and me now, Mike. We should make better time without him anyway.”
He heard the shout as soon as he turned his back.
“Wait up, I just needed to catch my wind. I’ll be fine,” Erik said.
Danny saw Mike grin, and he dropped him a wink as Erik caught up with them and all three headed up again. They didn’t make much better time.
But at least the whining has stopped.
Half an hour later, they crested a ridge to find Gus and the others finishing off a pot of coffee and preparing to move out again.
“If you lose ten to fifteen minutes every hour on us, you’re going to be climbing in the dark by the time we reach the high camp I want to reach tonight,” Gus said, addressing Danny. “Best get a move on over the next stretch. And watch out for falling debris; it gets steeper and less secure underfoot, and we might inadvertently send some crap down to you.”
Gus had already packed up his stove and gear so Danny had to spend time getting coffee together for the three of them from his own kit. He tried to hurry Mike and Erik along; Gus and the other two were already little more than black dots higher up the hill.
“You heard what the man said. Let’s have our coffee on the move; we don’t want to be out on the hill in the dark. Trust me on this.”
He expected rebellion but it looked like both of them were already too tired to do much else but comply, and they moved out again without complaint as soon as Danny got the coffee brewed and his stove and pot packed away.
Danny spent the rest of the day cajoling first one then the other of the men to take just one more step, to keep the upward momentum going. The trail wound close to long drops in some places, but by then, the only thing Mike and Erik could see was the short part of the path immediately in front of their feet, all their concentration on that next step.
At lunchtime, they caught up with the others and again were just in time to see them preparing to head up. Danny heated up a tin of stew that the other two ate without tasting, and then bullied them to their feet and back to the hill.
By late afternoon, the light was already starting to go. Danny looked up. They were approaching the snow line now, and the cold was starting to bite harder. He saw a flutter of green high above where rock met snow and realized that Gus was already making camp up there. Judging the climb, he thought it would take them another hour to reach it.
In the end, it took nearly two. They arrived at a high ledge in almost full dark. It had been Mike, not Erik, that slowed them the most, his blistered heel having turned to an open wound. No number of Band-Aids could stop it bleeding into his sock. Finally, Danny had them stop so that he could apply a field dressing from the small kit he always carried in the hills, and Mike moved better for a bit after that, but all too soon he was hobbling. Danny and Erik had ended up half-carrying him up the last slope and were happy to be able to dump him unceremoniously on the ledge.
“Nice of you to drop by,” Noble said, and Mike showed him the finger, although it looked like it took him an effort to just raise his arm.
Danny’s legs and back ached, but he still wasn’t done; he had a tent to put up, for neither Mike nor Erik was in a fit state to help with it. Gus only laughed when Danny gave him a pleading look, and Noble pointedly ignored him, but Jess rose to help when he unfurled the material.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem. Thanks for looking after my two lost lambs.”
By the time they were done, four small tents filled most of the space on the ledge. Danny would be sharing with Gus, Noble and Jess were both on their own, and the two other men would share the other.
Mike and Erik both looked ready to lie down and sleep for a week, despite it being only just after seven o’clock, and they crawled off to their sleeping bags straight after more stew and coffee. The remaining four sat huddled around a camp stove, there being no wood to burn this far above the tree line.
“This is as high as I’ve ever been,” Gus said. “My old man brought me up to this very spot thirty years ago. As far as I know, nobody’s been here since. Certainly nobody’s been higher.”
“Not for a hundred and fifty years anyway,” Noble replied. “How tough is it going to be tomorrow?”
“Tougher than today,” Gus replied, and Danny was glad that the other two had gone to bed and were dead to the world. He was going to have enough trouble getting them moving in the morning as it was.
Both Noble and Jess departed early for bed.
“They climbed well,” Gus said, somewhat grudgingly, “especially her. No complaints either, not like your pair.”
“Yeah, thanks for sticking me with them,” Danny replied as Gus reached into his rucksack and came out with a bottle of rum. “I don’t know how much farther either of them can go.”
“We’ve come too far,” Gus said, unscrewing the bottle and pouring them both a large measure into their coffee. “They can’t go back on their own, and they can’t stay here. Too risky. So they come.”
Danny knew better than to argue, so he contended himself with getting as much coffee and rum inside him as he could manage. They sat in silence for a while as a carpet of stars filled the sky and the range on the other side of the valley danced under scudding cloud and a three-quarter moon.
Danny reached over to accept another slug of rum, and at the same moment, the silence was broken by a high screech that echoed and rang around the mountainside.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, not noticing that the rum was going more over his hand than into the coffee.
“Eagle, it must be,” Gus replied, steadying both of their hands to pour.
“It sounded huge.”
Gus sipped from his cup and when Danny looked over, the man for once wasn’t smiling.
“It did, didn’t it?”
- Jess -
When they broke camp the next morning, Jess had to scrape ice crystals from where she’d been breathing against the sleeping cap. Sun bathed the valley below them, but none of it reached their position in the shadow of a tall spar of rock on the northeastern slope of the mountain. The high tops of the range across the other side of the valley glistened, almost golden in the morning rays, and the smell of fresh coffee wafted across the small campsite.
It beats Toronto in the rush hour into a cocked hat, that’s for sure.
Her good mood lasted long enough to reach the camp stove and find an argument going on around the coffee pot.
“I’m not going back just because you two are feeling tired,” Noble said, almost shouting.
“I’m not saying go back,” Mike said, but Noble interrupted him and pointed a finger, inches from Erik’s nose.
“He is. He just said it.”
Mike tried again.
“I’m just saying that we need a rest before going on.”
