8

Dalziel knelt andstrapped on his snowshoes. He could hear laughter off to his right, someone coming out of the Hudson’s Bay store maybe, or Northern Traders, or Whittington’s hotel, café and bar farther down the road. The government compound—which included RCMP headquarters, the hospital, the wireless station, the experimental farm and the Indian office—looked over the rest of the town, which occupied most of a small island in the Mackenzie River. The only thing above the compound was Truesdell’s house. The road ran from there south, past the Anglican and Catholic churches and the store, the Commercial Bank and Whittington’s, and then down to the Indian treaty area at the island’s southern tip. There, a dozen large tents and a few shacks sat on 20 acres that sloped down to the shallow channel of the river between Fort Simpson and the mainland.

Dalziel headed northeast, on a path that ran around Truesdell’s house, over the island’s hump and past Albert Faille’s cabin to the river. As he walked he could look over the line of stunted spruce and willow along the shore, and see the vast expanse of the Mackenzie River, distinguishable from the land only because of its flatness. The opposite shore was a good mile away, imperceptible in the blowing snow.

The trail came to a steep bank, dropping 50 feet to the river, and then turned and meandered through the bush along the edge of the bank. In an open space, Dalziel stood for a moment in the wind. He was thinking about Truesdell and his little local enterprises. The doctor had a market garden that produced vegetables for missions along the Mackenzie River up to Aklavik, and some pastures along the shore where he grew oats and hay for local livestock. He also filled firewood contracts for the government buildings and riverboats, a conflict of interest if there ever was one, since Truesdell also did the purchasing. He was not a popular employer; the people he hired got less than they expected and waited too long for their pay. They groused in the café or hotel but were too intimidated to complain. Who wants to cross the magistrate and doctor?

Dalziel resumed walking. Soon he arrived at a tent suburb. The tents were the residences of white trappers and prospectors who came to town on business and spent their summers there, and of new arrivals who’d be out now looking for work. In winter, the trappers of Simpson, white and Indian, drove dogs or snowshoed along the Liard and Mackenzie between their lines and town. New tents were going up all the time and the trails on the rivers were packed from continual use, because the country was filling up with men from the south, driven off their farms by drought and the Depression.

Word had got out about the money in fur. Rich people in the south were richer now, if only because the poor were poorer and charging less for their services. Dalziel was aware of that equation and not interested in being on the wrong side of it.

And even more attractive than trapping, which was hard work, was the promise of gold, though so far none had been found. Gold prices had reached an all-time high, and legends had grown about the Nahanni region, about a lost mine discovered by three brothers, Willie, Frank and Charlie McLeod, the half-breed sons of the Hudson’s Bay Company factor at Fort Liard.

The McLeods, the story went, had long heard from the Indians about a gold find along the Flat River near the Yukon border, and in the winter of 1904 they hit the trail to check out the rumours. They started, God knows why, in Vancouver, and went by steamer up the Inside Passage to Wrangell in the Alaska Panhandle, by dog team up the frozen Stikine River to Telegraph Creek, Dease Lake and the Liard River, then farther north up the Hyland River—fighting spring blizzards (the story usually went), so it was 1905 now—and over the divide into the headwaters of the Flat River. Not far down the Flat they found some Indians who were sluicing on a creek and getting coarse gold. The McLeods joined them, filled a medicine bottle with gold, converted a couple of whip-sawed sluice boxes into a scow and headed for home down the Flat River. The scow broke up in the Flat River Canyon and the medicine bottle was lost, but the brothers salvaged the planks, built a new scow and continued on down the Flat into the South Nahanni and out onto the Liard, arriving home with nothing to show for their adventures but a damned good story about a gold strike.

A year later, Willie and Frank went back up the Nahanni to refind the mine, taking a Scotsman (in one version of the story he was also a mining engineer) named Weir with them. A year went by with no word, so Charlie set out, in the summer of 1907, to track the little party. It hadn’t gone far. He found his brothers in what came to be known as Deadmen Valley, between First and Second Canyon of the Nahanni. He recognized the skeletons from their gear. In various stories they were tied to trees and headless, or merely headless, or headless and just out of their eiderdowns and reaching for their rifles. In all versions there was a message scrawled in charcoal on a tree blaze: “We have found a fine prospect.”

Another year later, another headless body was found by Indians, upstream from the McLeods’ last camp. It was assumed by police to be Weir, but Charlie believed Weir had actually murdered his brothers and departed the country with their gold and the secret of its source. Charlie started looking for Weir.

This story meshed with, or was dreamed up with an eye to, an earlier story told by Indians to the early explorers and subsequently much embellished by those explorers, about headhunting (or cannibalistic) Indians living above the falls in a tropical valley. These Indians were supposed to be exceedingly possessive of their turf; they killed any and all intruders.

But that didn’t stop anyone. Dalziel broke into an abrupt laugh. Hell, that was an attraction. If you couldn’t make a living you could at least have an adventure. The wilder the stories got, the more the southern newspapers retold them, adding their own elaborations, and the more men turned up to check things out. Their attitude seemed to be that if you didn’t have an adventure, exactly, you’d certainly have the material for making one up.

A couple of Dalziel’s customers, Harry Vandaele and Milt Campbell, were looking for the lost mine right now, having gone home to their families for Christmas and returned earlier than usual to work their hole on McLeod Creek. Gus Kraus and Bill Clark had been at it for three years, on McLeod, Borden and Bennet creeks. Albert Faille had started his search a decade ago—going above the falls year after year and coming out with his head in place, though Dalziel was starting to wonder about that. Almost certainly they were all wasting their time.

Truesdell spent some of his well-paid working hours firing letters off to the Edmonton Journal, trying to stop all those “damn fool articles,” as he called them, and stem the tide of whites. Not a chance. The articles sold thousands of papers. It was all straight out of H. Ryder Haggard, Dalziel’s father’s favourite author and, for a time, his own: Zulu ghosts, now Indian ghosts and guardian spirits, and jungle valleys heated here by hotsprings.

Mad trappers, a truly local embellishment.

Mad flying trappers. Dal’s operation, the first of its kind, had attracted the attention of the newspaper in Edmonton, where he lived. He’d even made it into the New York Times.

The men he flew in always asked, “Did you go looking for the mine? Is there gold in this Nahanni country?”

All except Wade, the latest, whom he’d planted at Glacier Lake in November last year, the farthest in he’d ever taken anyone. Wade hadn’t asked a thing, hadn’t said a thing.

Which, Dalziel recalled, he’d deeply appreciated at the time, his mind on an offer of $500 each for live, healthy marten for breeding. Catching the marten was as hard as teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs, but he finally did it, on a lake just north of where he’d dropped Wade. Caught them without hurting them, caged them and flew them 300 miles. Only to have Corporal Newton turn up, while he and Vera Turner were figuring out how to feed them, with the news that Truesdell had objections.

A month of careful work gone for nothing.