Mesa Trail ch. 14
Draft 2

"It's hard to say, but as the night wore on, more and more and more would gather through the hours. A conflagration, a congregation, a jubilation of stingrays! Come to lay their eggs in the light of July's blue moon. Mermaid's purses." – Appelt, From Keeper









The morning of the day that would become to be known as 'Mother Lode Day' from that point forward, Hannah had packed her back pack with her art supplies and took the same route along Mesa Trail to Bear Creek.  Full circle now, the trail had become so familiar to her since that first night, alone, no light, when every little scruffle of the underbrush must have been a rattler, every black boulder a bear in waiting, and every clump of leaves left in the limbs a mountain lion ready to pounce.

This time there was easy conversation with the chipmunks who would scuttle across the face of the landborn boulders and became little silhouttes against the faint light of the rising sun in front of them.  The sapsuckers stirred in ritual, flitting about, waking up and so she asked them what it was they might wish for today although she knew the answer.  Biggalow would no doubt already be there waiting at the site and Diver, bless him, what courage, what endurance, would swim back upstream because of course she did not want to miss a single thing. That was how these things went, Hannah, remarked to herself, as she pulled out her sketch pad and black pen.  There was a sense of things to come.  The sluice box was gathering in production.  They were getting good at filtering through the granules.  They all felt for weeks that anyday it could come, the great rushing river of gold and they would be there, hands and pans and buckets ready to haul. She could see the face of the teller at the bank when they brought it all and all the assistants in complete disbelief when they said they had a list of places all the proceeds would go: the school absolutely needed new cafeteria chairs and at least two tables; Ms. Sanders, the Queen of Pearl Street, had lost a wheel last week on her motorized bag cart...well, not for long. Trail funding, rust on the kiddie pool at the city park, native american research center and, quietly, Hannah held out the prospect for a down payment on what had now become her kid-run cafe, not bistro, Element 79.  She sat along the bank of Bear Canyon and quickly sketched out the valley below in black pen, not thinking much for detail.  Great swipes of the pen became the swirls of the creek and those lines connected with the hillocks east where the research center sat now under warming sun which she then connected to the sky and the piney tops of the trees, her hand never raising up once, but connected it all in one continuous flow and pattern.  As she began to color the creek gold, she looked behind at the towering mountains that created a kind of hood and could hear the beginning soft trickle of rain drops slap off the canopy of the trees.