Gold, Gold, in Cariboo! A Story of Adventure in British Columbia

by Clive Phillipps-Wolley

"No, we cain't do that," replied Steve. "Poor beggar! I wouldn't be in his shoes for all the gold in the creek."

And as he stared in a brown study at the charred stumps and rough white woodwork in that gloomy canyon, at the broken rock and the dead fires, Chance began unconsciously to hum the air of "The Old Pack-mule."

"Confound you, Steve," cried Corbett angrily, "stop that! Isn't it bad enough to hear the winds crooning that air all night, and the waters of the creek keeping time to it? Shut up, for heaven's sake, and come along!" and without waiting for an answer Ned turned his back upon the gold camp and plunged boldly into the woods between it and the Frazer.

It had been arranged that Corbett should go ahead with the rifle, and that Chance should follow him with an axe. "Any fool can blaze a tree, but it takes a quick man to roll over a buck on the jump," had been Steve's verdict, and he had allotted to himself the humbler office.

From the moment they left camp until nightfall, it seemed to Steve that he and his companion did nothing but step over or crawl under logs of various sizes and different degrees of slipperiness. To follow the sinuous course of a mountain stream through a pine-forest may look easy enough from a distance, but in reality to do so at all closely is almost impossible.

As for Pete's Creek, it ran through a deep and narrow canyon, the walls of which were precipitous rocks, along which no man could climb. The bed of the creek for the most part was choked with great boulders, amongst which the water broke and foamed, rendering wading impossible; and along the edges of the canyon up at the top the pines grew so thick, or the dead-falls were so dense, that it was all Ned could do to keep within hearing of the creek.

The constant forking of the stream made careful blazing very necessary, and this took time, and the course of the stream was so tortuous that they had frequently to walk four miles to gain one in the direction in which they wanted to go, so that when at last they reached a bare knoll, from which they could look out over the forest, it seemed to Ned and Steve that the Frazer valley was no nearer, and the crawling folds of the great Chilcotin mountains no more distant than they had been at dawn.

But the folds of the mountains were already full of inky gloom, and it was evident that a stormy night was close at hand, so that whether they had made many miles or few upon their way, it was imperatively necessary to camp at once. Almost before the fire had been lighted night fell, a night of intense darkness and severe cold, a cold which seemed to be driven into the tired travellers by a shrill little wind, which got up and grew and grew until the great pines began to topple down by the dozen. From time to time one or other of the sleepers would wake with a shiver and collect fresh fuel for the dying fire, or rearrange the log which he had laid at his back to keep the wind off; but in spite of every effort the night was a weary and a sleepless one both for Ned and Steve, and in the morning, winter, the miner's deadliest foe, had come.

For a month or more yet there might not be any serious snowfall, but the first flakes of snow were melting upon Corbett's clothes when he got up for the last time that night and found that the dawn had come. Far away upon the distant crest of the black mountains at his back, Ned saw the delicate lace-work of the first snow-storm of the year like a mantilla upon the head of some stately Spanish beauty.