The tyke jabbered all the way out to the pit, a mile a minute. A lot was gibberish, but not all. He kept talking about the characters on Bonanza, and the Ponderosa, and outlaws, and the silver mines. Some cartoon show was on his mind, too. Motor Cops, I think it was. He showed me an act ion figure from the show, a lady with red hair and a blaster that he could take out of her holster and kind of stick in her hand. Also, he kept patting the ATV and calling it “the Justice Wagon”. Then Jack’d kind of puff up behind the wheel (he must have been driving all of ten miles an hour) and say, “Yeah, and I’m Colonel Henry. Warning, Force Corridor dead ahead!” And they’d all laugh. Me too, because by then I was as swept up in the excitement of it as the rest of them.
I was excited enough so that one of the things he was saying didn’t really hit home until later on. He kept talking about “the old mine”. If I thought anything about that, I guess I thought it was something out of some Bonanza show. It never crossed my mind to think he was talking about Rattlesnake Number One, because he couldn’t know about it! Even the people in Desperation didn’t know we’d uncovered it while blasting just the week before. Hell, that’s why I had so much paperwork to “rassle” with on a Sunday afternoon, writing a report to the home office about what we’d uncovered and listing different ideas on how to handle it.
When the idea that Seth Garin was talking about Rattlesnake Number One did occur to me, I remembered how he’d come running into the office trailer as if he’d been there a million times before. Right across to the photos on the bulletin board he went. That gave me a chill, but there was something else, something I saw after the Garin family had gone on its way to Carson, that gave me an even colder one. I’ll get to it in a bit.
When we got to the foot of the embankment, I swapped seats with Jack and drove us up the equipment road, which is all nicely graveled and wider than some interstates. We crossed the top and went down the far side. They all oohed and aahed, and I guess it is a little more than just a hole in the ground. The pit is almost a thousand feet at its deepest, and cuts through layers of rock that go back all the way to the Paleozoic Era, three hundred and twenty-five million years ago. Some layers of the porphyry are very beautiful, being crammed with sparkly purple and green crystals we call “skarn garnets”. From the top, the earth-moving equipment on the pit floor looks the size of toys. Mrs Garin made a joke about how she didn’t like heights and might have to throw up, but you know, it’s not such a joke at that. Some people do throw up when they come over the edge and see the drop inside!
Then the little girl (sorry, can’t remember her name, might have been Louise) pointed over across, down by the pit-floor, and said, “What’s that hole with all the yellow tapes around it? It looks like a big black eye.”
“That’s our find of the year,” I said. “Something so big it’s still a dead secret. I’ll tell you if you can keep it one a while longer. You will, won’t you? I might get in trouble with my company otherwise.”
They promised, and I thought telling them was safe enough, them being through-travellers and all. Also, I thought the little boy would like to hear about it, him being so crazy about Bonanza and all. And, as I said, it never crossed my mind until later to think he already knew about it. Why would it, for God’s sake?
“That’s the old Rattlesnake Number One,” I said. “At least, that’s what we think it is. We uncovered it while we were blasting. The front part of the Rattlesnake caved in back in 1858.”
Jack Garin wanted to know what was inside. I said we didn’t know, no one had been in there on account of the MSHA regulations. Mrs Garin (June) wanted to know if the company would be exploring it later, and I said maybe, if we could get the right permits. I didn’t tell them any lies, but I did skirt the truth a bit. We’d gotten up the keep-out tapes like MSHA says to do, all right, but that didn’t mean MSHA knew about our find. We uncovered it purely by accident-shot off a blast-pattern pretty much like any other and when the spill stopped rolling and the dust settled, there it was-but no one in the company was sure if it was the kind of accident we wanted to publicize.
There would have been some powerful interest if news of it got out, that’s for sure. According to the stories, forty or fifty Chinese were sealed up inside when the mine caved in, and if so, they’d still be there, preserved like mummies in an Egyptian pyramid. The history buffs would’ve had a field day with just their clothing and mining gear, let alone the bodies themselves. Most of us on-site were pretty interested, too, but we couldn’t do much exploring without wholehearted approval from the Deep Earth brass in Phoenix, and there wasn’t anyone I worked with who thought we’d get it. Deep Earth is not a non-profit organization, as I’m sure anyone reading this will understand, and mining, especially in this day and age, is a high-risk operation. China Pit had only been turning a profit since 1992 or so, and the people who work there never get up in the morning completely sure they’ll still have a job when they get to the work-site. Much is dependent on the per-pound price of copper (leachbed mining is not cheap), but even more has to do with the environmental issues. Things are a little better lately, the current crop of pols has at least some sense, but there are still something like a dozen “injunctive suits” pending in the county or Federal courts, filed by people (mostly the “greens”) who want to shut us down. There were a lot of people-including myself, I might as well say-who didn’t think the top execs would want to add to those problems by shouting to the world that we’d found an old mine site, probably of great historical interest. As Yvonne Bateman, an engineer pal of mine, said just after the round of blast-field shots uncovered the hole, “It would be just like the tree-huggers to try and get the whole pit designated a historical landmark, either by the Feds or by the Nevada Historical Commission. It might be the way to stop us for good that they are always looking for.” You can call that attitude paranoid if you want (plenty do), but when a fellow like me knows there are 90 or 100 men depending on the mine to keep their families fed, it changes your perspective and makes you cautious.
The daughter (Louise?) said it looked spooky to her, and I said it did to me, too. She asked if I’d go in it on a dare and I said no way. She asked if I was afraid of ghosts and I said no, of cave-ins. It’s amazing that any of the shaft was still up. They drove it straight into hornfels and crystal rhyolite-leftovers from the volcanic event that emptied the Great Basin-and that’s pretty shaky stuff even when you’re not shooting off ANFO charges all over the place. I told her I wouldn’t go in there even on a double dare unless and until it was shored up with concrete and steel every five feet. Never knowing I’d be in there so deep I couldn’t see the sun before the day was over!
I took them to the field office and got them hard-hats, then took them out and showed them all around-diggings, tailings, leachbeds, sorters, and heavy equipment. We had quit a field-trip for ourselves. Little Seth had pretty much quit talking then, but his eyes were as bright as the garnets we are always finding in the spoil-rock!.
All right, I’ve come to the “little scare” that has caused me so many doubts and bad dreams (not to mention a bad case of conscience, no joke for a Mormon who takes the religion stuff pretty seriously). And it didn’t seem so “little” to any of us at the time, and doesn’t to me now, if I’m to tell the truth. I have been over it and over it in my mind, and while I was in Peru (which is where I was, looking at bauxite deposits, when Audrey Wyler’s letter of enquiry came in to the Deep Earth post box in Desperation), I dreamed of it a dozen or more times. Because of the heat, maybe. It was hot inside the Rattlesnake Mine. I have been in a lot of shaft-mines in my time, and usually they are chilly or downright cold. I have read that some of the deep gold mines in