4 THE EARTH PROVIDES

4

THE EARTH PROVIDES

Here where the trees relent, sun and shade contest throughout the day, and false Solomon's seal flourishes knee-high. Early sprays of white flowers, like clustered kernels of freshly popped corn, are bursting through densely layered light-green leaves. Vida negotiates this barrier at the point where she's always passed through before, tramping on only those plants that she crushed previously.

Beyond lies the six-foot-high bank that defined the river's edge when, decades earlier, the watercourse had been wider in this section than it is now. She descends a weedy incline to a bare alluvial field that varies between eighteen and twenty-two feet in width and extends three hundred yards. Along the far flank of this gently sloped expanse of sediment, tangerine-scented sweet flag brandishes tall, swordlike leaves in the breeze, and the land steps down to a new riverbank beyond which cold, rushing currents speak in a double tongue of spirited splashing and sinister susurration.

Like her uncle before her, Vida works the alluvial field as a placer mine. Rain and wind ceaselessly smooth away evidence of this labor so that it is necessary to mark the point where she stopped on her most recent expedition. This she has done with a two-foot-long circus-tent spike that, at the end of the day, she always pounds into the soft soil near the slope of the new riverbank.

The spike also serves as a belaying pin to which is tethered a canvas bag that contains waist-high wading boots, a folded length of heavy-gauge plastic sheeting, a mattock, a spade, a spare spike, a mallet, a seining pan, and a pair of work gloves. The bag is buried under a few inches of soil, so that it won't draw the attention of anyone passing this way. She retrieves it.

For ten years, since her uncle's death, Vida has labored in this remote field alone, without encountering another soul. Chances are small that anyone will find and steal her humble tools. Given the hard work required to exploit the deposits here, it's even less likely that anyone who discovers her at this task will want to stake a claim to part of the placer mine. However, because her uncle Ogden took precautions, so does Vida.

She locates a width of the current riverbank that is free of sweet flag. One side of the heavy-gauge plastic sheeting has been treated with a silicon spray to make it especially slippery. She unfurls it down the slope to the land near the water's edge, the lubricated side up. The corners at the top of this chute feature brass eyelets; using the mallet, she inserts the two spikes and pounds them deep into the earth to secure the plastic.

A very long time ago, the river had been not only wider here but also slower moving, because the gradient diminished to such an extent that the rushing water came almost to a stop, forming a small lake that appears to have been about fifty yards wide and three hundred yards long. The land dropped again beyond that point, and the flow gained momentum, hastening away. During the centuries that this condition existed, the quieted water dropped what sediment it carried out of the mountains before rushing onward, thus creating the field from which her uncle earned his living for decades.

Maybe a century or two ago, something changed the river's course, perhaps a seismic event, and the eastern side of the lake suffered a collapse. The water followed this sudden new declivity, draining the elevated portion of the lake, which Vida now exploits.

Many gemstones are hard, dense, impervious to the wear that Nature imposes on everything else. Released by weathering, they can be carried great distances by water and concentrated in riverbeds or deltas or the floors of oceans, in what are called "placer mines."

The alluvial soil is soft. For the most part, the spade is sufficient to the task, but once in a while she needs the mattock. She conveys shovelfuls of dirt to the silicon-treated plastic chute, until several cubic feet have mounded below, on the flat shelf at the edge of the river. Even on a cool day like this, the work raises a sweat, and she needs the bottled water that she brought with her.

The treasure she seeks is more often found in the first eight inches of soil, though the entirety of the dig must be panned, just in case. Neither she nor her uncle has scooped deeper than three feet, usually only two. Very likely, valuable stones can be found farther down, but to seek them, she needs noisy machinery and a long sluice box capable of handling an enormous quantity of soil, all of which would call unwanted attention to her operation.

This is federal land. Although Vida is committing no ecological damage and although the government will never exploit this placer mine, the bureaucracy, given the opportunity, will come down on her as though she's the greatest despoiler of Earth in the history of the planet, if only because they have nothing better with which to occupy their time. To escape their fury, she must remain a simple scavenger of gems, with limited ambition.

Now she takes off her gloves, puts on her hip boots, picks up the sluice pan, which has a fine-wire bottom, and descends to the river. She kneels in the shallows, next to the mound of soil that slid down the chute. She fills the pan with dirt. She lowers it into the cold current, gently shaking it, letting the river lap over the rim. The water dissolves the soil and carries it through the wire; nothing is left except two worthless gravelstones and a twist of fossilized root.

She repeats this process until the mound of soil is gone, and then she climbs the bank to feed more cubic feet into the chute. At the four-hour mark, she pauses to eat an energy bar. After finishing the confection of nuts and chocolate and berries and protein powder, after washing it down with bottled water, she continues the task at hand for another three hours.

As she labors, her mind drifts neither to the man in the woods, who will no doubt still be watching her house when she returns, nor to any calculation of the value of the gemstones she finds, but to Moby-Dick , which she has recently begun to read for the first time. She is just past the middle of the book, and the calm, good-humored Stubb has harpooned, chased, and killed a whale with no more evident doubt about his actions than he might show while smoking a pipeful and quaffing a mug of ale. The casual cruelty of those, like Stubb, who believe they are engaged in virtuous business for the benefit of everyone leads her inevitably to dwell upon the ten months that she and José Nochelobo had been lovers, before his caring nature had been the end of him at the hands of someone like Stubb.

Next to her uncle and her father, José was the best man she's ever known. Others as good no doubt exist, but she lacks evidence.