Alone Against the North by Adam Shoalts Read Free Book Online

and we thanked him profusely.
    â€œYou got to ride in the back,” he smiled sheepishly and gestured to the box. “I’ve got a little too much stuff in here.”
    â€œSure,” I replied happily, though I sensed the real reason was because the trapper believed that two men who appeared out of nowhere around these wild parts might not be people you wanted in your truck.
    Wes and I, having left our backpacks, gear, and the canoe concealed in the forest, jumped into the back of the pickup, only to quickly regret it. The driver put his pedal to the metal and we were soon flying along at over a hundred kilometres per hour down a wet gravel road in fading light. Terry, the old-timer who shuttled our vehicle back to Cochrane, was adamant that he wouldn’t drive this road after dark or even at dusk because of the bears and moose (“swamp donkeys,” as he called them) that frequently cross it—a deadly hazard for drivers. A collision with a moose has about the same effect as a collision with a backhoe. Even in daylight, Terry sternly complained when I was driving if he noticed the speedometer creep above sixty. Wes and I held on for dear life in the truck, flying up in the air with every bump on the gravel road and holding on as best as we could when we took turns at terrifying speeds.
    â€œIs this guy trying to kill us?” Wes shouted in my ear as the trees swirled passed us in a blur of dark green.
    â€œI think so,” I said, pressing myself down in the truck. We were quite literally in greater danger now than at any time on our expedition—though Wes had stepped on a nail at the old cabin and busted his middle finger on a bad fall while wading in the treacherous, slippery rocks of Hopper Creek. After a wild fifteen-minute ride in the fading light, the driver suddenly slowed down. An oncoming transport truck was returning from the gold mine. Our driver motioned the trucker to stop.
    The trucker peered down suspiciously from his cab at the three of us. Our driver spoke, “These guys here are looking for a ride into Cochrane. Can you take ’em?”
    The trucker boasted an Abraham Lincoln–like beard and shoulder-length hair tucked under a grimy old ball cap. After a pause, he said gruffly, “I only got room for one in my truck.”
    This was a little bewildering—Wes and I thought both of us could fit in the truck. But the trucker insisted there was only room for one of us. I was curious to see the gold mine, so I suggested to Wes that he take the ride—he could drive back to the mine and get me once he had retrieved our vehicle from town. So I remained in the back of the pickup while Wes climbed up into the rig.
    While he rode into town along the winding road that sliced through the vast forest, I was heading in the opposite direction toward the mine.
    It took three hours to reach Cochrane, where Wes retrieved our pickup truck from the train station, refuelled it, and then prepared to drive another three hours to meet me back at the mine.
    At the gold mine, flood lights illuminated the haul trucks, hydraulic shovels, and grey construction trailers that littered the landscape. Exploratory work was being conducted in the area to see if it was profitable to re-open the mine, as it had lain abandoned for decades. The high price of gold made the prospect of mining here potentially feasible once again.
    Beside the construction camp, what greeted my eyes was a deeply unsettling sight: where once had been verdant forests was now a barren moonscape, devastated by strip-mining. It was a bleak, apocalyptic-looking place destroyed by machines and riddled with dark chasms that led deep into the earth. It filled me with dismay that society could permit the wanton destruction of wilderness—earth’s true gem—in the pursuit of shiny stones. But my opinions reflect a life spent seeking untouched, hidden-away places.
    The workers were gathered in the common room