The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

The Call I Did Not Make

I know what some of you are thinking. Call the Mounties. Get a lawyer. Sue him.

I thought about all of it, sitting in that truck. Then I thought about how it would actually go.

Gold does not carry a name. Two hundred and twelve ounces in a buyer’s safe is just gold.

Rand would say it came off Hunker, I would say it came off Bonanza, and the police would have to sort out whose gold it was with paperwork and samples and statements and months of waiting.

The Mounties in Dawson are good men, but they are not gold men. It would take a year, maybe more.

And the wash plant note was due in less than four weeks. By the time anybody decided anything, the bank would own our plant and Eli would be working for someone else.

But there was one man in that town who could tell in an afternoon whose gold it was. And he was the man Rand had sold it to.

Duncan Ferrie was sixty-eight. He had bought gold in Dawson for forty years, first out of a back room and then out of the low steel building with the big yard where the miners lined up their trucks in September.

People said he could look at a pan and tell you which creek it came off, which bench, sometimes which family.

It was not magic. Every creek’s gold has its own face. The grain shape, how worn it is, how much silver is in it.

Duncan ran fineness on everything that came through his door. Gold off Hunker tended to run around eight hundred to eight hundred and thirty fine, he used to tell people, meaning that many parts gold in a thousand, the rest mostly silver.

Our little tributary ran lower, closer to seven sixty, and it came out flat and rusty-stained with bits of white quartz still stuck to the coarse pieces.

Clay used to say you could pick our gold out of a pile in the dark.

But I had nothing to show Duncan. Every ounce we had cleaned up that season was in his safe under Rand’s name.

If I walked in empty handed and said it was mine, it would be my word against a man’s whose family had been on the creek for sixty years.

I needed a pan of our own gold. Fresh, off the same ground, cleaned up in front of witnesses if I could manage it.

And there was only one place left to get it. The cut Clay had opened in July, the last ground he ever dug.