An experienced woodsman would have noticed something wrong. Gary McRae was more than that, so he thought for a moment that he found pay rock. That hope dissipated as he looked closer; not only was there no pay rock, there was no rock to speak of. Something else commanded attention.
He was several kilometres away from the highway, along a stretch of it where no-one stopped. There wasn’t even any particularly scenic beauty to capture the eye. Only someone like he, interested in what was underneath in the rocks, would take an interest in scanning the trees standing idiosyncratically together, interspaced by rock outcrops rising above the detritus-brushed soil.
Gary was most-way to a large outcropping that appeared to hold promise from the maps he had studied. He wasn’t often right – no-one in his field was – but he had a talent, no doubt about it. When he was a teenager, still ploughing along in the high school of the mining town he grew up in and still called home, he had found a large outcrop that looked like it had gold underneath. The area had been under claim; Gary had found the plates marking it off. That had been one of the first things his dad taught him after basic woods skills. A McRae wasn’t a claim jumper, not even accidentally.
Having gotten the number, he had told his best friend Jack about it. An aspiring geologist, now a real one, Jack Elliott had looked up the claim numbers and found that indeed there had been drilling on the property. Gary had found a real anomaly. Only one hole had been sunk, as there had been only a small stretch of underground rock with a little gold in it, but finding a promising area at all was a major kudo for a budding prospector. After the story spread around, his course was set.
It was the same sensitivity, well-honed by experience, which had enabled him to sell a property he had staked to a junior explorer company. He had received some cash and lots of shares as a kind of ten-year gift. That had been four years ago; now, he had fourteen years’ experience under his belt. He had made other sales of properties, but not like this one. Now sporting a resource that a preliminary economic assessment said was minable, Gary’s shares were enough to finally make him a man of means. Rather than diverting him to sit on his laurels, it had encouraged him. His luck fell to baseline, but he was still known. Give it three more years, he was sure, and he would be one of the near-legendary prospectors to have found an all-out gold mine. A man who had found gold.
In this stretch of wood, mostly on the way to his destination, he had found something else. A closer look revealed an old cabin.
It presented a mystery. This was raw land, the kind which Gary could argue he had been the first human to put down a foot on. No logging company had ever taken an interest in the trees around here. There might have been other prospectors around, but no claims of any sort showed up on the maps Gary had surveyed. He was on a long-shot trip, but he could afford it. His big score had been a long-shotter too.
Yet, here was hard evidence that someone had been here before. The cabin appeared to be a two-room, built rectangular with a gently rising roof. A now-rusty capped chimney poked up from the roof, but not by much. It was covered by plywood that was seriously aged. No real evidence of clearing was around; it was hidden in the woods. Gary put a question mark on the hermitic part when he stumbled upon a pile of mostly rotted cut logs about fifty metres away from the place. The trees adjoining the cabin looked normally sized, though.
Near the logs, his woods radar alerted him to something funny – a pile of earth that shouldn’t have been there. Dusting it off, he found something that made his eyes lock in their sockets and his mouth curl downwards. The soil had yielded its secret: a skeleton, with rags clinging to its forlorn body.
Out of respect for the builder and owner, Gary had been prepared to look but not touch. With the corpse revealed, that respect was trumped. The owner was long dead, and custom demanded of Gary to find out who that poor fellow was. So, in he went. The creaky hinges started but didn’t deter the prospector.
Whoever he had been, the owner had been thoughtful enough to install a now-filthy window in the direction where the sun shone in. The interior was murky but not dark. Without recourse to a flashlight, Gary saw a desk underneath the window on the far side of the door and a bed nearby. The room he was in made up about two-thirds of the cabin. The wood stove was where it should have been given the chimney; sensibly, not that far from (but not too close to) the bed. On the near wall, opposite to the window, was a couch. Whoever that fellow had been, he had gotten some serviceable furniture several kilometres from the highway. Something didn’t make sense.
It could be the furniture style. The only comparables Gary had seen were in the houses of old retired miners. Puzzling over it, he decided that the agedness wasn’t the oddity.
Pulling out his LED-bulb flashlight, he went into the other room. The main one was about seven by seven metres; a good size. There was more than two metres between floor and roof. The other had to be about seven long and more than three wide. The door opened, also creakily, and Gary gazed in at what was obviously a storeroom.
Some of the stuff, he recognized. Tucked in the far right corner was a tent, with other stuff underneath it. Beside that pile were three gas cans; beside them, moving towards the centre of the wall, were propane canisters. That camper’s pile only made up a small part of the junk in the room, though.
Most of it, Gary discovered after a closer inspection, were food containers. Whoever this fellow was, he had been planning to hunker down for years. Opening a nearly cardboard box, which required little more than a touch before it fell apart, Gary saw cans fall forth. All of them had rust spots.
After going through the camper’s pile, and closely surveying the area around, Gary had a hypothesis. A ruined outhouse about ten metres away provided no clue. A few hundred metres away, though, he had found an antique snowmobile and trailer – both badly rusted. They had been tucked way in a copse within the forest, probably hid. Beside them was some rusted ski contraption that reminded him of a large dolly-wheel platform. The tent in the storeroom had been all-season. A Coleman stove, heater, and light had been among the junk. All the propane cans had been full, and the gas cans had been partly full. A quick smell and look showed ruined gas, paraffined. He hadn’t found an all-season sleeping bag, but he was sure it was either on or under the bed.
Whoever this fellow was, he had been ballsy enough to ship in his building materials in winter.
Like everyone in the gold-mining field, Gary had heard about survivalists preparing for the end of the world. Almost obviously, the deceased was one. He had been a slick son-of-a-gun, too. Put the lumber in a van, load it up on the ski-dolly, put a sign on the van saying “Gone Ski-Doo’ing,” and haul the stuff out for the spring build. Rinse and repeat, until the stuff was all transferred. Do the same for the furniture, with everything wrapped in plastic tarps or sheeting until needed. Hunker down in the winter tent until the snow went, using the Coleman equipment and some of the stored food, and then build where no-one could find you. Slick.
The only flaw in the scenario was the long beam that spanned the length of the roof. Gary saw how by examining it; it has been assembled from smaller boards. It must have taken some skilled sawing to get the notched edges right so they fit tightly together. Gary hadn’t found any tools, but the storeroom had been full enough of food that he had a good idea where they had been secreted. The guy had been so good, he probably used hand tools. This isolated cabin had been built be a real craftsman.
The mystery solved, Gary turned to the desk. Not being on the payroll anymore had given him the freedom to get to the bottom of this place.
“If you’re a cutter, you end up being a cutter” his dad had told him. Meaning: if you cut class, you ended up a line-cutter or something similar. Line-cutters, cutting trails for samplers in the bush, were well-needed but were unskilled, low-paid and intermittently employed. So, Gary had paid enough attention in his class to get through all right. Although he had paid the most attention to geography and geology, mostly on the side.
Going through the small desk, he had another reason to be glad of his education. In the first drawer, he found several oddly-designed pens: the shafts were hexagonal cylinders instead of regular ones. Beside them was a lightly-weathered diary, which Gary pulled out and began reading.
“To the future – where there’s sober prosperity and men are no longer chained to the government – to a time when the different are not chained to the sheep and we can do what we must without asking official permissions:
“From the age of inflation, from the age of bureaucracy, from the age of politics, from the age of the mass man – Greetings!
“ - March 13, 1977.”
The words tugged at Gary’s brain for some time, until he recalled the reference. One of the books from English class, written by a fellow named George Orwell. The doublethink book…that was it. 1984. Whoever this guy had been, he must have loved that book. Gary imagined him in his tent, scrawling away with a pen heated by the propane heater, just to get those words down. It must have been difficult, because the next entry was from late spring.
Taken as a whole, it was a combination of life in the isolated woods interspaced with complaints about the inflation-ridden system. Some were a lot like the present-day goldbugs, but many were quaint. Some, particularly the descriptions of his new home, were eloquent.
The fellow hadn’t even left his name. The only name Gary saw, made him stop cold: this long-ago man had named a bear “Julia.” That solved the mystery of how he wound up dead. The bear had gotten him. Poor fellow probably had a gun, but didn’t have it on him when he had most needed it.
Gary went back inside and looked in the second drawer. What he saw got his eyes locked in their sockets again. This time, his mouth opened as he drank in what he saw.
Gold. Lots of it. There had to be at least ten one-ounce coins and more that double quarter-ounce coins. Carefully cleaning out the drawer, Gary pulled the treasure outside and examined it.
They weren’t Maple Leafs or gold Eagles. Instead, he saw a collection of Krugerrands. Six of them were dated 1976; three had 1975 and one was 1974. The smaller coins were sovereigns; Gary counted twenty-four of them. The dates were mixed, with most of the coins having George V on the back. They all were the same colour, the slightly brassy tone of 22 karat gold. Gary was holding sixteen ounces of gold stacked in his hand.
He didn’t even know who the former owner was. The second drawer hadn’t had any wallet; the diary had no identification. There was no reasonable way to find any next of kin.
So, after some wrestling with the question, Gary put the coins in his pocket. Squatter’s rights were the best guide.
Having done so, he began thinking about the former owner.
He couldn’t just walk away and leave, not with that man’s gold in his pocket. At the very least, he owed his benefactor a decent burial. But of what kind?
A few minutes, spent mostly ambling back to the corpse, gave him the idea. A plan for a proper burial. Gary had been so wrapped up in his golden duty, it hadn’t occurred to him to look around for a buried cache. He visualized the skeleton lying in bed as preparation for his first task.
“Were you in that area?” The concern came through in his friend’s voice.
“Yeah,” Gary replied, “but I wasn’t hurt. Didn’t even know there’d be a forest fire.”
Jack was set to tease his friend about it, but the oddness of the location was too much in front of his mind. “From what I found out, no-one was; it was that isolated. Damn funny place for a forest fire.”
“Maybe some terrorists,” Gary answered easily. “Couldn’t wait to meet the virgins.”
“Oh – is that what you did to get lucky?”
“Yeah, sure – only Allah’s a Buddhist, so he reincarnated me as myself. No better karma than that. Had a helluva time, though.”
When the conversation ended, Gary basked in the warmth of his triplex apartment but remembered he had one more thing to do. One of the biggest survivalist Websites had been thoughtful enough to include an address where he could send the diary to. He was hankering to make a trip to the big city anyway, although not with his new wherewithal. He had found gold, and he was keeping it; a vacation was rated. He could go back to the land when it had cooled.
He wrapped the diary in a single sheet of paper, with a printed note saying that the anonymous fellow had been a survivalist who had died accidentally but put to rest in a fitting manner. He then sealed it up in an envelope and carefully taped the package together. On the return address, he had simply put “Anonymous.” And then added, just below, “Survival’s Everyman.”
Oddly, he decided to send it by private courier once the all-night drive to the city was completed. It seemed fitting, just as the funeral-pyre burial had been. Even if he had been liquored up, he couldn’t have said from where he’d gotten the idea. All he knew was that it was fitting. The anonymity of the city fit the package; in the spirit of the occasion, he had used a fake name and address. Thankfully, the clerk didn’t check him out.
Part of the reason for his secretiveness was woodsman’s qualms about starting the fire, but he had buried the feeling. The situation had been an outlier; it would be easy to go back to the normal standard of care. The other part, although Gary didn’t stop to put teeth to it, was simple respect for the dead man he had sent away.
Two weeks later, when he was back in his two-bedroom digs, he got his reward at that same survival Site:
“A Survivor Thoreau – Diary Of A True Pioneer Ahead Of His Time.” It had enough comments to make it a featured link.
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