A Rock Fell on the Moon Read online

  A month after the mysterious nighttime sightings, two off-duty miners were heading home from an early morning hunting venture when they came upon Bobcik and another man in the midst of moving ten heavy burlap sacks. The encounter took place on a lonely part of Duncan Creek Road. The second man immediately dashed off into the bush while Bobcik coolly got into his truck and drove away.

  The Law of the North dictates that season and weather determine people’s outdoor plans. Getting the ore out of the Bonanza Stope had been a relatively risk-free if exhausting accomplishment. Adding to the challenge was the fact that Bobcik and his partner had to work their own shifts either before or after their nighttime exploits. But now what? Although they’d managed to stash a tiny portion of their massive haul in an out-of-the-way spot in the bush, could they safely relocate the rest? Left languishing in a hidden nook in the mine, the sacks might as well be packed with cardboard. During the light-enhanced nights of July and August, the duo had no chance to move the ore without risk of being caught, as the scare with the hunters had proved. And winter months, which began in October, when back roads became impassable and fresh snowfall exposed tire tracks, were precarious too. After much thought, Bobcik and his partner chose to leave the bulk of their sacked booty in the mine drift, near the entrance of the abandoned 200-foot portal.

  Hours and hours of hard labour lay ahead. The bags, numbering around 660, still had to be dragged out of their shady niche; placed on railcars and pushed to the road; then lifted into a pickup truck—at best a two-ton, four-by-four; and cached somewhere safe, somewhere hidden, somewhere no one would go. They’d hit on the right time to scoop the ore from the stope; now, during the winter of 1961, they’d have to find the right place outside the mine. Any spot they picked had to be relatively near the mine as the ore had to be re-bagged in new sacks that didn’t bear UKHM’s brand, and they certainly didn’t want to be seen before that happened. But once that was done there was an even more challenging aspect. Somehow, they’d have to find a way to pass themselves off as the legitimate owners of the ore.

  Chapter 7

  Buying the Moon

  There’s a race of men who don’t fit in,A race that won’t stay still,So they break the hearts of kith and kin,And roam the world at will.

  A blue-purple haze engulfed the poorly ventilated room along with smells of sulphur and smouldering metal, and although this hellish state was normal and indeed expected, workers took it as a smoke signal to get out. There was nothing to do but amble to the Elsa Coffee Shop for an extended cigarette and coffee break, and wait for the noxious cloud to dissipate. Such was the art of assaying in the 1960s, and such was the workday of Dad, UKHM’s chief assayer.

  Assaying is to hardrock mining as laboratory testing is to medicine. Both analyze tiny portions of larger samples to obtain critical information that would otherwise remain invisible. In both cases, the results can be disastrous: a patient’s lab results may signal imminent death, and an ore assay may scuttle a prospector’s dreams. But while medical tests often bring good news—confirmation of a pregnancy or a patient’s receptivity to treatment—it is rare for an ore assay to point to an Eldorado.

  Once someone finds a good mineral deposit and a mine begins operations, assays are done continuously to calculate the content of the ore so that management knows the exact value of what is pulled from the earth each day and will later leave the mine property for processing elsewhere.

  During the thirteen years that Dad was UKHM’s chief assayer, he and his crew worked out of a four-room, wood-frame white tar-paper building in the middle of the camp, next door to the mill where the ore was crushed, and a two-minute saunter from the multipurpose Panabode building housing the Elsa Coffee Shop, the barber shop, the beer parlour and the library.

  Dad found his chosen vocation mind-numbingly mundane but that didn’t stop him from being good at it. He was known for his precise and exacting assays. But as talented a technician as he was, he found time for other, more personal pursuits. “A man’s home is his castle,” he liked to boast, but his office was his true citadel. And in a musty shed behind the office, my Dad set up a suspended wooden barrel strung between ropes and when he had a few free moments, would straddle and hone his equestrian skills. He frequently brought Caesar to work too—especially in the summer, when our shepherd chased and killed rats and mice.

  George Duerksen, who worked twice for my Dad, once in 1952 and again in 1957, recalls a boss who was easy to work for, if a tad on the anti-social side. “I admired your Dad and enjoyed working for him. But he was shy—wouldn’t look my wife Margaret in the face,” Duerksen told me, adding that Dad once cautioned him about marrying beautiful women: “You have to be careful marrying a racehorse. It’s not like keeping an ordinary horse—you have to keep your eye on ’em, have to be protective.” Duerksen also recalls a man who had it made by mining world standards. “His job was as soft as they get.”

  But not all of Dad’s colleagues found him so pleasant. Bill Richter, who worked day shifts in the office for three years, described his boss as “moody, quiet and almost conceited,” adding, “His favourite subject was suicide. He was rather morbid and enjoyed talking to anybody about this.”

  By 1961, Dad had served ten years at UKHM. To mark his decade of service, the company presented him with a gold-plated Omega Seamaster watch engraved with his initials, G.H.P., and theirs, UKHM—an indication of how well the company was doing. I wear it now, my one inheritance from my father other than a pill-sized vial of gold dust. But after a decade’s indebtedness to The Man, did Dad eye his memento as a milestone or a millstone? As a child, I wanted for nothing. Still, money, or the lack of it, was a sensitive although infrequent late-night conversation topic between Mom and Dad. As a new bride, Mom had been promised “only one or two years” up north, “until we get some savings under our belts.” But as one year melted into the next and family savings added up to skimpy to nonexistent, she longed to live and raise her girls in the city. Omi couldn’t tolerate the isolation and extreme weather anymore, and told us with shiny eyes that after much prayer, she had decided to move back to Vancouver before the first snowfall. Besides, my mom would say, the Elsa school only went to grade seven, and Vona and I would soon have to leave for a larger centre. Many families sent their teenagers to the high school in Whitehorse, where they boarded with other families.

  In August 1961, a vacancy opened in the assay office where my dad supervised four employees. The job went to Anthony Bobcik. Poncho was quite literally moving up in the mining world, although he was taking a pay cut to do so. Freed from the hard underground labour of shoring up freshly blasted tunnels with heavy timbers, drilling rock walls and shovelling heavy loads of ore, Poncho would now spend his days above ground working as a bucker. As such he would crush up small baseball-sized chunks of rock delivered from the mine, which was the first step in the “dry” assaying process. “Wet” assays dealt only with crushed powder samples from the mill.

  By then, the bulk of the ore Poncho and his partner had stolen from the Bonanza Stope was tucked away in its temporary hiding place, not far from the 200-foot portal. The spot was well chosen, near a rock pile where an old tunnel and ceiling had caved in, blocking the passage. No one venturing into the mine’s back entrance was likely to follow a tunnel known to dead-end. A stand of rough-hewn timbers was also stored nearby, providing a further shield for the ore stuffed into hundreds of old UKHM-stamped burlap sacks.

  Poncho’s new job didn’t require any special skills. An ad in The Tramline noted that a high school education would suffice, and that “previous chemical experience” was an asset but not a prerequisite. He and another man performed dry assays, while Dad and an assistant did wet assays and a fifth employee (typically a woman) parlayed her household skills into cleaning the beakers, bottles, trays and other assay equipment. Poncho’s task was straightforward muscle work. In the furnace room, he pulverized rock chunks into par
ticles as fine as talcum powder using a hinged, tapered metal crusher. The other worker maintained the furnace at temperatures approaching 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. The rock powder was then placed in a clay pot along with a flux—a mixture of charcoal powder, cream of tartar, lime and other dry ingredients—and the whole mélange was cooked in the furnace. Metals such as silver, lead and zinc fused together, while rock minerals became cinder-like fragments known as scoria, from the Greek word for rust.

  But the process wasn’t finished yet. Poncho then chipped away a small piece of the cooled, hardened and fused ore and placed it in a shallow porous cup called a cupel. Cooked again, any remaining lead and zinc in that sample fused to the cupel’s surface, leaving behind a bead of pure silver. Flat on the bottom and rounded on the top, the bead resembled a pewter-coloured Smartie. Dad often brought handfuls of silver beads home to show us what he produced, and they would end up strewn about the house, on dressers, tables and windowsills. Back in the assay office, each bead was weighed and that figure, when compared to the weight of the original sample, determined the silver content of the larger volumes of ore.

  Wet assays also gleaned information about the content of raw rock, but in another way. Fine rock particles were mixed in beakers with various liquid chemicals and heated to trigger chemical reactions that revealed lead or zinc. It was this fiery alchemy that regularly produced billows of blue stinky fumes, driving the staff to the Elsa Coffee Shop.

  A few years after Duerksen’s departure and a few months after Poncho’s arrival, there was a noticeable increase in the number of impressively large silver beads produced in the assay office. This marked the beginning of months of assays revealing off-the-chart silver concentrations—during which time the Bonanza Stope was mined.

  Almost from the moment he began working as an assistant assayer, Poncho enjoyed a special status. He was, as fellow assay office worker John Bourdeaux recalled, Dad’s “bosom pal” and would spend “considerable time up in the wet lab talking with Gerry. He did so little work that it became annoying to me and I started to keep my own record of his times.”

  In an office where the workload was already lighter than in other places, Poncho set a new slacker standard. But complaining did his workmates no good. It was the complainants Dad found fault with, not Poncho. And as Dad and Poncho conferred more frequently and for longer periods—on occasion their coffee and cigarette breaks stretched to two hours—the rest of the assay crew learned to keep their mouths shut.

  As a stellar Yukon fall yielded to a dark and increasingly frigid winter, Dad and Poncho concocted what they saw as a surefire solution to their predicament. Obviously, the ore inside the 200-foot drift couldn’t stay there. Moving it was the easy part. Harder by far was sneaking all that rock out of town from under the noses of UKHM bosses without raising a whisper of suspicion. And then hauling the load thousands of miles by truck, rail, ship and then rail again across the international border to the smelter in Montana, the same facility UKHM used. Yet getting it there would be for naught if they couldn’t convince the smelter that the large high-grade ore shipment was legit. The shipment would need some credible paperwork verifying its source and ownership.

  Who better to point them to a potential source of riches than the mine’s own chief geologist? Dad approached Archer, asking if he knew of any claims in the Keno area where quartzite rock occurred. There was not much to choose from, given UKHM’s practice of snapping up any excuse for a claim as soon as it became available, but Archer pointed him to the Moon claims.

  Archer made his suggestion after consulting an old geological report. While the report indicated there might be something of value on the Moon site, it was clearly not a property UKHM was interested in.

  The Moon claims had sparked interest from prospectors and miners since 1921 when a treasure tramp named Bjonnes staked them and named them Doris, perhaps in memory of a lost love. The Norwegian either found nothing or what he did find was long gone by the time the claims were re-staked thirty years later by a prospector named St. Louis. Almost a decade after that, prospector John Strebchuk staked the property again and christened them the Moon. His choice of moniker mirrored the Moon site’s location—in the outer limits of nowhere, far past Keno, beyond the old Wernecke townsite, near the bottom of Faro Gulch. The claims were most easily reached during winter when ice and snow solidified the McQuesten Valley’s bogs and creeks. But getting to the Moon in the summer meant trudging 8 miles northwest from Keno City on a tattered old mining road skirting the edge of a ridge and then clambering down a gully.

  Archer’s opinion that the Moon claims might hold promise was exactly what Dad and Poncho wanted to hear. Around the same time, as if destiny was in on the heist, Poncho, Dad and the third man were suddenly forced to move the bulk of the stolen ore in a hurry. Mine superintendent Bill Case notified the two shift bosses that the tunnel near where the stolen ore was cached would soon be re-timbered in preparation for new mining activities.

  It was about this time, March 1962, that Dad began going out late at night. Well, late for an eight-year-old. One mid-week night we’d eaten supper, helped dry the dishes, practised our piano and done our homework when he hurriedly kissed us goodnight and put on his heavy coat, boots, leather hat with woollen flaps and thick gloves.

  Normally, this was Mom and Dad’s time to listen to records or read a book to each other or take Caesar for a starlit stroll. Many nights we drifted off to the sounds of Patti Page’s “The Tennessee Waltz,” Harry Belafonte’s “Scarlet Ribbons” or the Norman Luboff Choir’s haunting western ballad “The Colorado Trail.” But no songs would be heard this particular night.

  “Where are you going, Pappy?”

  “I’m going to see a man about a dog,” Dad said with a small smile as he went out the door. We had a dog. Why was he talking about another? Caesar was all the dog we needed. As Dad was fond of saying, “Give your heart to a woman and you’ll get it back. Give your heart to a dog and he’ll take it with him to his grave.”

  The next night and the next he went out to see a man about a dog again. When we turned to Mom for an explanation, she said: “Your father is helping an old prospector named Charlie North, and it’s very good of him to do so. Now, you each choose a favourite story and I’ll read two tonight.”

  As his evening outings continued over the course of that strange week, I noticed how tired Dad was. Sometimes he nodded off right after supper, sitting in a chair. Sometimes he came home for lunch and slept for an hour. And on Saturday, he cut his workday short, returned to the house and crawled into bed for a long nap.

  Over the space of five cold nights, Dad helped that mysterious prospector move six hundred or so burlap sacks of ore, first by railcar to the mine entrance, then into Poncho’s Dodge Ram Power Wagon and finally off the truck again, before the bags were dragged and tucked securely into their new temporary home. The location was a short drive down Williams Creek Road, not far past the ballpark, to a hiding spot near Duncan Creek Road. A narrow moss-covered ditch ran back from the road and was completely concealed by bush and tangled willow scrub. The chance of anyone poking around there was next to nil, the area having long ago been rejected for any mineral potential, and the road nearby rarely used in any season. Once they had all of the ore at the new site, and with the winter moon as their witness, the three men cut open the bags and dumped the ore onto a growing pile, which was quickly covered by snow.

  Having laid down the rock, it was time to lay down a paper trail. Not a simple mission. Perhaps at this point, perhaps at another, the third man came down with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. He’d been a key player in the theft but for whatever reason he now wanted out. For a price, of course. Dad and Poncho, on the other hand, were gearing up to execute what they saw as the perfect theft. Back at the assay office, they fine-tuned the details of the final and most audacious stage of the plan.

  Meanwhile, at home, another more threat
ening drama was playing out. Mom was spending long periods in bed. When she attempted the slightest physical activity, such as walking up a gentle incline, she gasped for air. Once, while hanging laundry on the outdoor clothesline, she fainted. She tried to downplay our worry but I saw the fear on Dad’s face and prayed for God to heal her soon.

  My prayers were answered but not by any celestial powers. In late April 1962, Mom flew “outside” for her second heart operation at Vancouver General Hospital, under the care of cardiac surgeon Ross Robertson. Dr. Robertson knew her well, as he had performed her first operation. This second one was basically a repeat of the first: a “closed commissurotomy,” a blind procedure done prior to the invention of the heart-lung machine. The surgeon cut open her left lower chest, spread her ribs and made a tiny incision in an artery adjoining the left chamber of the heart. Inserting his index finger deep into the incision, the surgeon felt for the mitral valve and freed it of any built-up scar tissue. Her four subsequent heart surgeries would be open procedures, which was a great improvement, as surgeons could see what they were doing and where they were doing it.

  During Mom’s absence, Omi, who had moved into a Vancouver basement suite the previous fall, flew north to look after us. It was a cold May and snow still smothered the ground, but inside the house spring miracles burst forth: Mitzi, our tabby, crawled into a loose pocket under the couch and had her first and only litter of four kittens. We named them, checked their progress daily and wrote Mom about all the news each week. On more than one night I woke from a nightmare in which Mom had died, and at that point I wasn’t totally sold on the idea of heaven. But she came through the operation and was recuperating, first in hospital for two weeks and then another two weeks with Vancouver friends Angus and Carol MacDonald. Angus was a consulting geologist and had worked extensively in the Keno area, including for UKHM.