Mesa Trail ch. 19
Draft 2

It was that morning that Hannah could see the dazzling glimmer shine from the bottom of that ancient sluice box the day after the great 3-day rain that would change the fate of the city for some time to come.  It is said so often that really, truly, one person cannot make a difference, and in some ways, of course, it never is one person, but it might be one that the embers of the dream of the future burns more brightly and helps to carry the others forward.  Hannah would stand back from the great operation she had, months later, established, and could feel the pulse of her own great grandfather's dream in her blood, in her dreams.

For the 59'ers of old, the good men that is, the men who wanted to stake a claim and find independence and who desired to build something for the good, it was all difficulty and struggle.  She always suspected that she had a mind for time and could look back over the years and understand what it meant to leave everything for something, to leave homeland behind, a house, familiarity, for the sake of something that might not take physical form, was total risk and total dream. It was that morning as she descended down to her mining sight that she understood that it was dreams themselves, their love, their life, their passion, their color, that had not changed from then until this moment.

Inuna had showed up that very morning.  "It was the turtle that found the earth again and brought it back up to the surface of the world for the first Man to plant and spread to the winds." Inuna did not always talk like this, with such language and with such a far-off look in her eyes.  Inuna herself was quite the jokester in school, playing off skits in the hallway, giggling at the small happenings of the girls in the class.  That morning, however, she had with her Diver, the turtle, in her hands. "When Diver found me at the base of the trail below, he told me of his travels down the creek.  He knew that the great rain was coming and he swam for shore, but after long hours the shore kept getting smaller and smaller, so he rose to higher and higher ground.  He moved into a crease underneath rock and gravel and waited for the fire bolts in the sky to pass.  As the earth began to move around him, so too did other parts of the rocks. At first he thought that the fire bolts had turned the water and the gravel their color, a shiny yellow...a gold...and he stored some of these new rocks into his shell because he knew that these were what you were looking for, then boldly dove back into the rushing of the stream.  He closed his eyes and witnessed turtle dreams, of ancient spirit ancestors and could see their lives as they too once had rushed through the great waters of the earth.  The next thing he knew, he saw my face and was inside my hands."

Inuna had given Hannah quite a smile.  She looked up into the sunlight that had then reached a deep angle in the afternoon.  "I will gather all the others." Behind her a small troup of turtles, most certainly Diver's clan, waddled up from the bank and released their own hidden treasures.  Kitie and Josh had by then come to the sight and mechanically, as if by sheer habit, began to pan the small loose lines of gold.  Kitie would sift a handfull into her palm, quite cold, and rub it between the pads of her fingers. Josh barked out "Kitie wants to make jewelry from her piles, she told me so!" Who wouldn't?