Bo at Ballard Creek Page 7

  When all the boys on the day shift had eaten and Bo was helping Gitnoo with the dishes, there was a sudden silence. The pump had stopped.

  “Time to clean out the box,” Gitnoo said.

  Every few hours, the boys would stop shoveling pay dirt. They’d shut the water off and then they’d take up the riffles. Carefully they’d sweep all the gold and sand out of the sluice boxes into a gold pan, and carefully they’d wash the riffles. They’d clean all the cracks with a little brush, ever so slowly, ever so thoroughly. Every bit of gold had to be removed. It was very painstaking, finicky work, but they’d do it many times until all the pay dirt had been sluiced.

  Bo and Gitnoo went to watch them for a while, but it wasn’t really very interesting, so they didn’t stay long.

  In two days, they’d sluiced all the pay dirt, and after they’d all had a good night’s sleep, it was time to finish cleaning the gold.

  After breakfast, Arvid brought one of Gitnoo’s small washtubs into the cookshack and set it on the table. Bo climbed on the bench and looked into the tub. The gold was dirty, mixed with black sand and fine gravel. And it didn’t even fill half the tub.

  Here was all the gold they’d cleaned out of the sluice boxes so very carefully. Here was all the gold they’d dug in the long winter. That big mountain of pay dirt had been hiding just half a washtub of gold.

  * * *

  NOW THEY MUST clean the gold again, so thoroughly that there was no dirt or sand in with it at all. Jack brought in the big galvanized tub, which Jack used for Bo’s bath, and Bo helped him fill it with water from the rain barrel.

  They must first pan the gold to wash away all the sand and dirt. Sandor and Peter were the best at panning, and they weren’t at all modest about being the best. “This here is an art,” Sandor told Bo. “Takes years to learn the right technique.”

  Gold pans were shallow, with sloping sides and a flat bottom. They came in all sizes, and there were dozens of them around the mine. They were very useful. Bo used one for all her crayons, and Jack used the biggest one for putting sliced bread or maybe cinnamon buns on the table. And the boys used one out on the porch for shaving.

  But today they’d use the gold pans for gold. Sandor and Peter filled their pans with some of the dirty gold from the washtub. Then, quickly and skillfully, they twisted and swirled the pans in the water so that the sand and dirt floated away and the gold stayed at the bottom of the pan.

  Sandor filled a pan and held it out to Bo. “Try it.” Bo had been wishing she could, but the pan was so big and heavy when it was filled that she couldn’t make circles with it the way Sandor and Peter did. Sandor came behind her and held her hands on the pan, and together they washed all the little pebbles and dirt away. There at the bottom of the pan were nuggets of gold, glowing clean and beautiful in the sunlight slanting through the cookshack windows.

  When Sandor and Peter finished the panning, they put all the clean gold in a dishpan. Then they put the dishpan on the warm stove so the gold would dry.

  All of this took a long time. The boys who were working outside, taking apart the sluice boxes and putting away the canvas hoses, came in from time to time to look at the gold and eat and smoke a pipe. Jack had sandwiches and soup and a big caribou roast and four pies and three cakes laid out on the table for anyone who was hungry. They’d be in and out of the cookshack all day, not eating regular meals, until the job was all finished.

  When the gold in the dish pan was dry, the boss and Arvid and Peter put the gold through screens to sort it into different sizes. Bo liked the biggest nuggets the best, because they were funny shapes and all different. She crowded between Pete and Arvid to see all the big ones.

  “Look!” Bo pointed to a long, flattish nugget. “That one looks like a weasel!” Arvid raised his eyebrows at Peter and laughed. Jack stopped wiping the stew pan and bent over Bo to look.

  “See?” she told him. “You know how they run, all humpety. It looks like a weasel running.”

  Jack nodded. “I believe it does,” he said, and Bo smiled up at him.

  “Just think,” said Peter, “how long it took to make those nuggets, how many millions of years. And now they’re up here on top of the earth, all cleaned up and shining. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  The finest gold was the hardest to clean. The boss put it in a special copper pan and passed a magnet over it to pull out the black sand. Black sand, Peter told Bo, was ground down from magnetic rocks. When he had finished with the magnet, Peter shook the pan and blew on the gold to get the finest sand off, the sand that wasn’t magnetic.

  And that was the end of cleanup.

  All the piles of nuggets were carefully weighed on the little gold scale. Then they were packed into little canvas bags, each size in a different bag. The gold dust and even the black sand were packed up too. The boss would take it all to Fairbanks to sell and then the boys would get their pay for the year.

  * * *

  BO COULD SEE that the boys were disappointed, because they weren’t talking and joking as much as usual.

  She asked Arvid about it when he was tucking her into bed. “Wasn’t there enough?”

  “Could have been better,” he said. “Got to make some more tunnels, come fall, different direction.” He pulled her blanket up under her chin.

  “That’s mining,” he said. “Work the ground till you run out of ground, no more gold. Close up and go somewhere else.”

  “Well, we’ll never have to go somewhere else, will we?”

  Arvid stood up and turned to leave.

  “Gold don’t last forever,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  VISITING OLAF

  THE MIDDLE of the summer was a good time to be outdoors because it was nesting time for the hundreds of birds who’d come north in the spring. Bo hardly ever saw them, but they sang in the deep woods all day long.

  “Never heard such a loud bunch of birds,” Jack used to say.

  One morning in July, Bo asked the papas if she could visit Olaf. Olaf was one of the miners who lived out on the creeks north of Ballard Creek. Bo liked to visit Olaf because of his “children.” That’s what he called his pets. He had a ptarmigan, a weasel, a porcupine, a dog, and a raven. They all lived together happily and didn’t have fights. Bo always tried to get there at noon so she could help feed them.

  “Well, sure,” Arvid said. “If you can get someone to go with you.”

  Bo had to have a grown-up with her when she visited Olaf, because he lived two miles away and there might be bears or moose on the trail. So she had to go with someone who had a gun.

  “No one’s seen any sign of that grizzly,” Arvid said. “No one’s seen any black bears, for that matter. Probably all of them up in the hills looking for early berries.

  “Still,” he said. “Can’t go that far without a gun.” He thought for a minute. “Who could go with you? Town’s nearly cleared out,” he said. That was true. So many people were gone in the summer—the men and boys hunting caribou, the women and children down the river at fish camp.

  “Big Annie didn’t go anywhere,” said Bo. Big Annie was all alone because Charlie Sickik, her husband, was hunting caribou and the twins were gone.

  “Well, ask her, then,” said Jack.

  Arvid nodded. “Big Annie’s a good one.” He said that because Big Annie was a good shot with her .30-06. Sometimes on the Fourth of July, they’d have a shooting contest with targets. Big Annie always had her shot in the black center.

  Bo ran across the bridge to ask Annie, and Annie said she’d be glad to go with Bo—just give her half an hour, and she’d be ready.

  “I’ll wrap up some bread for Olaf,” Jack said when Bo came back.

  Big Annie wasn’t really big at all, but everyone called her that because one of her twins was named Annie. So everyone called them Big Annie and Little Annie. Betty was the other twin. They were eleven. Bo knew that twins were supposed to look alike, but Little Annie and Betty didn’t look a bit alik
e.

  The twins had gone with their grandmother Nakuchluk to visit in Kotzebue. All the Eskimos in Ballard Creek had relatives in Kotzebue. Every year they’d go there to get some seal or whale oil, which they couldn’t get in Ballard Creek because seals and whales lived in the ocean, and Ballard Creek was far away from the ocean.

  Seal oil was the Eskimos’ favorite food, and they put it on everything they ate: dried fish and caribou roasts and even blueberries. Almost everyone loved seal oil. But Bo didn’t, and Oscar didn’t either. He said it made him want to throw up.

  Big Annie and Bo walked along the trail to Preacher Creek, holding hands, both happy to be outdoors on such a beautiful day. As they walked along the trail, Bo would stop every now and again to listen to the trees. If you put your ear up to the trunk of a birch or aspen, you could hear the tree talking when it bent a little in the wind. Sometimes it sounded as if the tree was singing, and it was a different song every day.

  The streaks of sap running down the trunks of the spruce trees were soft, because it had been so hot. Big Annie stopped to peel some off to chew. She gave some to Bo, and Bo chewed it, but she made a face. Spruce pitch didn’t taste very good. It never did. Bo couldn’t see why Eskimos liked to chew spruce sap. But she kept trying it, hoping that it would taste better next time.

  * * *

  OLAF WAS HAPPY to see them, and so were the animals. First the raven hopped over and pecked at the beads on Bo’s moccasins. He had many colors in his glossy black feathers—blue and green and gold. He shimmered with colors.

  Dog pushed his head into their hands for a pet, wagged his thick, shaggy tail in slow circles, smiling with his kind eyes. Dog was raggedy, shedding his winter coat in big tufts that floated in the sunlight and caught on the rough boards of his doghouse.

  Dog couldn’t see very well, and he couldn’t really hear at all.

  “He don’t go far, now he can’t see good, but I worry about bears. Don’t think he can smell, either,” Olaf said in a sad way. “He wouldn’t know if a bear was walking by his side.”

  Bo walked around the yard, saying hello to each one of the animals.

  “Can we feed them now?”

  “In a bit,” Olaf said, laughing at her. “Come inside and rest a minute.”

  He took them inside his cabin and poured Big Annie a cup of coffee from the pot on the back of the stove.

  “You tell Jack I thank him for this bread,” he said. “Nobody makes bread like Jack.” Olaf made his own bread, too, of course, but Bo knew it was true about Jack’s bread.

  There was a picture of Olaf’s sister Birgit on the wall over the table. She still lived in Germany, where Olaf came from. Olaf said his sister was a little older now, same as him. Birgit was so pretty. She had her braids in a circle on top of her head like Arvid’s mother in the picture Arvid had. Bo knelt on the chair and reached up to touch her face. “Birgit,” she said. It always felt as if she was visiting Birgit, too.

  A suit of clean clothes—pants and jacket—hung on a nail. All the miners kept a suit of good clothes ready, in case something came up that they couldn’t wear their filthy mining clothes to. Going-to-town clothes they called them.

  There were two moosehide bags on the table. Olaf had finished his cleanup, and the next time he was in Ballard, he’d send his gold out to the mint with the scowman.

  “Got something to show you,” he said. He picked up one bag and poured the nuggets into a brass pan with a narrow end. He sorted through the nuggets with his scarred finger until he found the one he was looking for.

  “Look at this one,” he said. “Looks just like a bird.” And it did. It was perfectly shaped like a flying bird with its wings spread out. Bo pulled in her breath and touched the nugget bird with one finger. Big Annie bent over the little nugget and touched it too.

  “Pinnaknaktuk,” she said. Pretty.

  Olaf put the bird nugget into a white envelope, and he wrote on it with a little stub of a pencil. He showed Bo that he’d written her name on the envelope.

  “I’ll give your papas this one to make a little ring for you,” he said. Bo was too pleased to say anything. She just looked at Olaf with shining eyes. He picked out another nugget, a sort of squashed circle shape, and he handed that to Big Annie. “This one’s for you,” he said. Big Annie beamed at Olaf.

  There never was much gold on Olaf’s claim, but Olaf was sure that he would sometime find a big fat streak of gold and he’d be rich.

  But he hadn’t found it last winter.

  “It don’t bother me,” he said. “I’m happy with the little bit I found, enough to buy my grubstake for the winter, maybe a new pair of boots.”

  All the men out on the creeks did their mining by hand. They didn’t have the boiler house or the steam winch or the buzz saw or the steam pump like they had at the Ballard Creek mine. They just had a swede saw, a pick and shovel, an ax, and a winch they wound up by hand.

  They dug their shafts by thawing the frozen ground with a fire. When the fire burned out, they moved the charred wood aside and dug out the thawed dirt. Then they made another fire, in the hole, and they kept doing this until they reached bedrock.

  Olaf said he could dig one foot in one day. It had taken him twelve days to dig his shaft, so he knew it was twelve feet deep.

  “Two years ago Sven Anderson down by Bettles—” Olaf broke off to say to Annie, “You remember Sven,” and Annie nodded. “Sven dug all the way to bedrock one fall, but in the spring groundwater flooded in and filled up the shaft.” Olaf shook his head and poured himself some coffee. “All that work for nothing,” said Olaf. “But that’s the mining life. It’s still a good way to earn a living. Don’t hurt no one, don’t rob no one, just take the gold clean from nature.”

  Bo didn’t know anything about earning a living any other way, but Big Annie did.

  “Too much work, mining,” she said. “Better live like an Eskimo.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  OLAF’S FAMILY

  BIG ANNIE HAD never seen Olaf’s family, so while he puttered around the kitchen, Olaf told her how he got them all.

  First Olaf had Dog and then, a few years ago, Dog had sniffed out a whole batch of fluffy ptarmigan babies hiding in the tall grass by the trail. No mother or father anywhere.

  The babies had followed him right from the beginning. Some of them had flown away in the fall, but most of them came back from time to time to eat at the feedpan. At least Olaf thought they were his ptarmigan.

  “Maybe just a bunch of freeloaders,” Olaf said. “But Harvey, he never went anywhere. Been with me since he was a baby.”

  Olaf said he wasn’t even sure Harvey could fly. He just followed Olaf around, his little fat body waddling, making his crazy ratcheting sounds as he walked around the yard.

  Bo thought ptarmigans were the most beautiful birds that ever were in the winter, with their velvety white roundness and that little bit of black on the tail when they flew. But in the summer, ptarmigan feathers turned red-brown and black and scraggly-looking from molting. Even the feathers on their feet changed colors in the summer.

  The raven was named Shine. “That’s the best name for him,” Bo explained to Big Annie, “because look how ravens are, like they are oiled and polished, like Jack does my boots. All the black feathers shine and their long beaks, too. Even their eyes are shiny!”

  Bo thought a minute. “How do ravens get shiny like that?”

  But Olaf didn’t know.

  Olaf had found Shine with his wing torn half off. “Maybe a fox, maybe a hawk hurt him,” Olaf said. He didn’t know how old Shine was, but he thought he must be young because he had healed so easily. Olaf put ointment on what was left of the torn wing, and it healed into a sort of wing stump.

  Shine couldn’t fly anymore, but he could hop marvelously high, straight up. “Like he has springs in his legs,” Olaf said. He’d hop on the braces for the winch, peer into the shaft, and call out to Olaf when he was down there digging.

  �
�Ravens can nearly talk, you know,” Olaf said. “They have a lot of different calls. I never counted them properly, but I figure it’s about twenty different calls. This one now, Shine, he don’t use all of them, because he don’t have a normal raven life. Sometimes other ravens fly over, sit in the spruce trees there, and call out to him. Sometimes he answers and sometimes not.”

  “I like the sound they make that’s like knocking on wood,” said Bo. “The one that sounds like bonk, bonk, bonk. What does that one mean?”

  “I like that one too,” said Olaf. “But Shine doesn’t make it, and I never figured what it means. Someday I’m going to find me a book tells all about ravens.”

  “Don’t need a book,” said Big Annie. “You ask my father. He knows all the raven calls. The old Eskimos learned them good.”

  Olaf looked surprised at Annie.

  “Ravens talk to Unakserak,” she said.

  “By god, I’ll do that,” Olaf said in a thoughtful way. “I’ll ask Unakserak.”

  Oxadak, Oscar’s father, had brought the porcupine to Olaf. Oxadak had killed the porcupine’s mother for supper. Porcupine was good eating, everyone said. But Oxadak didn’t kill the porcupine baby. He put it in his hat and took it back to the house to show to Oscar. Oscar told his father they should take the baby to Olaf, and they did.

  “Oscar’s the one named him Fred,” said Olaf.

  The porcupine’s talk was a little high whistle. He didn’t open his mouth to make the sound; it came from inside his head somewhere. He waddled slowly, didn’t pay much attention to the other animals, and spent a lot of time in the trees.

  “The other animals, they know not to mess with a porcupine,” said Olaf. “I worried about Dog some. Dogs is notorious for bothering porcupines, get their faces stuck full of quills. Terrible mess. But I guess Dog is old enough to know better.”