A journal of narrative writing.
North
Page 2

And him? He’d be nothing again. Worse than nothing. A man without a home or a wife, a man on the frayed edge of things with no plan except to live his life out any way he could.

No, he couldn’t allow that. What kind of man let himself be scared off so easily?

He sucked his saliva through his teeth and hawked it out. Around his neck his hat was hanging from its string, and the string was digging into the tender skin of his throat. He settled his hat on his head then smoothed his beard. He’d let himself get spooked. He’d heard how it could happen to a man not accustomed to so much light and so little sleep, to a man not used to being on his own. A man could start imagining things. That was understandable. But he’d only been out here a month. Setting off up the valley from the trading post, skirting around the occasional camps of other men, pushing himself on through the hills until days might pass when he thought himself alone out here, and then he’d found this creek. He’d done it all the hard way with everything strapped to his back, leaning forward against the weight of it as he followed the creek north, always north, setting up camp where the land looked promising and panning until his arms shook with exhaustion.

Then he’d found gold in the muck of his pan and, just as his cry of joy was fading, fear had closed in. What was that fear but the understanding that what a man has just found might be snatched away? Only, his worn-out mind had given it a nightmare shape and he’d run as though it meant to destroy him.

He shivered. The wind had picked up. His shirt was sticking to his back, and sweat prickled on his forehead. He shoved one hand into his pocket for his handkerchief, remembered—the nugget—just as his hand touched the lining. Empty. He wheeled around. He kicked at the leaves, searching for the spot of red that was his handkerchief but it wasn’t there, and before he knew it he had started back through the undergrowth.

* * *

When at last he spotted the handkerchief he was so close to camp that he was sweating again and his tongue was pressed hard against his teeth. At the smallest movement he started in alarm: at a leaf swept along by the breeze, at a bird dipping between the trees. It didn’t help to think that a man so easily scared didn’t deserve what fortune lay at his feet—there was his heart leaping against his ribs, and in his ears the rush of his blood. But he was almost there. The handkerchief lay a few paces away by the foot of the scarred birch, bright as a wound in a patch of sun. Another step and he was close enough to see its folds had come loose from where he’d balled it up. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. All about him the air hung silent and he listened, listened, for the thin whine of that nightmare thing, then he was stooping, and his hand was closing over the handkerchief. There was a heaviness to it, and when he opened it up, the sickly gleam of the nugget inside. He shoved the whole thing into his pocket and moved in a crouch to where his gun lay almost hidden amongst the dead leaves.

His hands were shaking and too much saliva was welling up beneath his tongue. How heavy the gun felt. He nearly dropped it, heard his own breath coming hard as he pulled the stock hard against his chest. His finger slid onto the trigger, never mind that a gun would be no good against that thing, and he let out a laugh because only a few minutes before he’d convinced himself that it had been nothing more than a horror his own mind had created, and now look at him.

He eased the barrel against the trunk of the scarred birch once more and straightened so slowly his legs burned with the effort of it. There was his fire gray with ash, the pot of beans over it, the white canvas of his tent. Of the thing there was no trace except, when he trod toward where he best remembered it as having risen up, there lingered a smell of rotting and the leaves were damp and pressed down. Though he scarcely let himself acknowledge it there was something else too, the air dense and slick, and as he went about scraping the burnt beans out of his pot, and easing his dry mouth with water from the creek, and unlacing his boots before lying flat out on his bedroll, his gun by his side and one hand on the pocket where his gold was tucked away, he wouldn’t let himself look toward where that thing had appeared, as if that would be tempting fate.

* * *

When he woke the air was cool as creek water and the sky had turned the color of old newspaper. Something had woken him. He sat up and listened. The suck of emptiness after a noise that has rent the air. In a moment it had gone and there was only the wind through the trees, the slip-slip-slip of water spilling over rocks. He touched his pocket and the bulge of the handkerchief, then he yawned and leaned forward to spit the taste of sleep from his mouth. He was weighed down by tiredness, though whether from sleeping too long or not sleeping long enough, he couldn’t say, for he’d forgotten to sharpen a stick and set a second in its shadow.

Then it came again: a gunshot that rang out over the hills. He hauled himself out of his tent, shoved his feet into his boots, stared through the trees as silence lapped back in. He knew other men were in this valley. How could he not know? He’d seen them at the trading post buying flour and beans, buying pans and shovels, and pots and mugs and sugar and coffee. He’d walked past their camps and felt the way they’d watched him until he was out of sight. But to hear a gunshot—a man only a mile or two away when he’d imagined he’d come so far—that tipped the world on its edge, for he had to hurry now.

He didn’t light his fire. He didn’t lower his bag of supplies and make himself coffee. Instead he dragged his gun out of his tent and carried it down to the creek where he ducked his face into the quick clear water then used his hat to douse his head once, twice, before sitting back on his heels and shivering.

He took his ax with him, his gun, and nothing more, off through the trees, the bulge of his handkerchief a comfort against his thigh, swatting at mosquitoes dancing in the shade, slowing where the land grew steep and the air warm. For the whole day he worked without pause, chopping down young trees, carving INGRAM into their pale flesh, measuring with his eye across the creek so that, when at last he made it back to camp, his shoulders sore, his face bitten and itchy, it was to his claim that he returned, his very own by the law of the land, and no man could take it from him.

* * *

He could have rested that evening. He could have sat by the creek and let the sun warm him. Instead he squinted through the light dazzling off the water then fetched his shovel and pan. The water cooled his sore hands but the heavy panfuls of dirt dragged at his shoulders. He worked on nonetheless, even when hunger squeezed his gut, for he’d had only a piece of hardtack all day, wouldn’t stop even when his eyes burned from searching the muck for a glitter that wasn’t sunlight on water, or the milky glint of quartz.

The sun was just losing its warmth, and besides had swung around the belly of the hill to send its shadow creeping towards Ingram, when he found more gold. A lump the size of a ripe blueberry, another big as the end of his little finger, and his throat tightened at the sight of them. They sat in the crease of his palm, uneven, brilliant things, wet with light. He carried them back to his camp, pulled out his handkerchief and spread it on the ground by the ashes of his fire and pushed the three nuggets together in its center. From his pack he took a small drawstring bag and, carefully, kneeling on the ground, he picked up each lump with the ends of his fingers and dropped it in before knotting the string tight.

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