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Show 122 Caribou was looking through the pickle-bottle window, faraway. Tears began rolling down his white-scarred cheeks into his matted whiskers, "Who's Louise?" Tip asked in a forlorn voice, "Don't know," he said. He pulled out a red bandanna handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. I did not know a Louise, either. There was a calendar picture on our south wall of a beautiful girl with pink roses tumbling down her golden pompadour. Under her smiling face it said "Coca-Cola." I thought maybe she was Louise, After we had dug several feet into the earth we could no longer throw out the dirt. It was necessary to build a windlass. We shored up the sides of the shaft with timber, built a platform on the surface, and constructed a hand winch for pulling a bucket up and down. The hillsides were dotted with windlasses, creaking like old cold bones. In the evenings they gave off an eerie pink glow from the fires left to burn out during the night. Every few days we took a sample of dirt from our shaft into the cabin and washed it in our gold pan, hoping to find promise of "pay dirt" below. We worked breathlessly over the small trough of water, washing, shaking, and rotating the pan to separate the gravel and dirt from the heavy gold. |