The Spirit

Oharaville lay at the terminal of a creaky railroad trestle spanning a gully full of old tin cans, newspapers, broken beams, and bald tires. The town was laid out on a slope running upward away from Mount Colby’s north face. Basically, it was a single rutted road called Bullion Avenue, which originated at a huge hole blasted out of Colby’s side, from which a collection of rotted, decrepit buildings seemed to spill out. All the windows in the ghost town had been boarded up. The most distinctive edifice was an old wooden church with a leaning steeple at the end of Bullion Avenue, almost in the trees.

When Jason pulled into the town, he was twenty-­five hundred feet above sea level. He wondered if that were some kind of record for a mine. He parked the car on Bullion Avenue.

A faint wind blew down the street, creaking a hanging sign with the faded word SADDLERY on it. Of the two dozen or so structures, half were little houses around which long-­dead housewives had tried to grow gardens which were now thickets of fungi and tight grass, enclosed by rotting fences.

Jason looked into the saloon. Shelves and counters with dusty glass jars lined the walls. The floor was full of jagged holes. Jason envisioned a winter in the Cascades when miners huddled blind drunk under a swaying lantern in here. The wind would sweep like a flash flood down Bullion Avenue as if draining into the mine shaft, rattling doors and shutters back and forth and tilting the church steeple. Up here skies were always gray and mountain peaks crowded your horizons.

Before the gaping hole of the mine was a string of twisted rail and some overturned ore cars. The mine supervisors’ hut was a long-­gone jumble of wood. Metal barrels were strewn about, and piles of earth were stacked against the cliff. These were tailings, heaps of dirt through which scavenger prospectors picked for small hunks of silver ore.

Jason opened the glove compartment and took out a brand new .38-­caliber revolver, a heavy flashlight, and a ball of twine on a rotating spool. With his pocket knife he carved a notch into each of the soft-­nosed lead bullets, then loaded them into the pistol.

As he walked toward the mine he searched the ground for any depressions or other weakness. He flashed the light inside the entrance. Water dripped. A small avalanche of wet gravel hissed down the wall.

He tied the twine to a wooden beam and spun it out as he continued downward. The blackness was almost liquid in its density. His light beam was a white bar gliding fish-like over shaley walls which were soft and cheesy, apt to crumble under his touch. His major worry was the beams. Some were just stacked railroad ties. All were at least thirty years old, and each step caused them to vibrate.

The tunnel junctioned, one trail leading to the right, the other to the left. Jason paused, remembering the old Robert Frost poem about roads diverging in the woods. The old pioneer method of choice was spitting into one’s hand, slapping a fist into the spittle, and following wherever the largest gob went. Jason flipped a coin, thinking of Martha, and it came up tails. He went to the right.

The tunnel led straight down. Dust congealed into mud from overloaded ore cars parked on either side of the tracks. None of it had been disturbed, by either feet or rockfalls. There was no sign of recent activity.

Unless they walked on the ceiling, too.

The shaft curved again. This time Jason smelled something. An incongruous crowd of odors crushed together by the still, dank air tumbled over in a riot, as if to see which could reach his nose first. They were fresh and alive, more appropriate to spring sunlight and open ground.

The shaft ended in a wall of greenery, piled, spilled, crammed, and packed wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling, in a tight jungle barricade. It rested on a bed of seeds of every kind: acorns, pine nuts, oak and spruce, even peanuts. Every type of vegetation imaginable was represented. Huge strips of bark in layers on top of layers of berries, on top of apples, all resting on a bed of spruce tips. Jason stooped down and picked up a red berry. He bit off half of it, chewed, and spat it out.

Piled into a hollow in the wall by the vegetation was a stack of yellowing bones. Like the vegetation, they were a selection of all the wildlife that roamed the countryside. Bear. Woodchuck. Beaver. A horse skull nestled against that of a dog. The meat had been stripped from them, and Jason could see notches in the calcified surfaces where they had been gnawed.

Pulverize them into powder and add to the diet for calcium and minerals. Pack the meat in a higher tunnel, where cold was a natural deep freeze.

Now Jason knew why he saw no prints. The vegetation was a plug many feet thick which blocked intruders coming in from the Oharaville side and them from going out that way.