Mesa Trail ch. 5
Draft 3

There it was, thank goodness, that wonderful comforting thing nobody else knew about except for Hannah, right down there at the bottom of her front pocket. She knew to wear her long jeans on hikes – as she found out the very first morning working as a trail hand, that poison ivy was all over the plains and rocks. She felt in her pocket her very very very lucky rock.  The lucky rock was the size of the end of a fifteen year old's thumb.  Sometimes when she had it in her hand, secretly when nobody else could see it, she scratched it with her fingernails. It was the large nugget of gold that her grandfather had given her when she was just a young girl. It was given him by his own father.  She found out the surface was soft enough to leave faint little lines.  Most every night, just before she went to bed, she still pulled her charm out of her pocket, set it onto her night stand and thought of one wish for the next day. She thought of one thing she should have done better for the day.

She had to admit to herself, though, it felt recently like some of the magic was slowly draining from the rock and it began to look like just that, a rock with cuts all over it.  Maybe she had held onto the magic a little too long, she asked herself at night, as she looked over to Kitey and had to wonder what the kids at school might think of Hannah Provo, the magic rock collector.  Usually at that same moment, holding that gold in her hand, and it shining underneath her night lamp, there was something that swept back over her, like a dream, an image of her great grandfather who she had never seen in person, only in pictures, that began to fill her mind and made her sleepy.  Without the magic of the rock, she came to understand, there was only the rock. The story of who gave it to her only a man who lived a strange but sometimes sad life.

It was her grandfather's father who had fished this out of the front range Rockies at the time of the famous Pike's Peak rush.  He had, as the family story goes, lived in the mountains for six years, rarely showing his face.  He became friendly with the local Arapaho Native Americans and asked for friendly permission among the tribespeople to bring his own hand-made equipment into the small rushing streams that littered the Flatirons.  "Your great grandfather didn't really have an official claim. I will tell you, he sure loved to pan, there was no doubt about that, but nobody knew that he was finding his veins of the good stuff up here because he never brought it into town.  As he would find his gold, there was no where for him to put it.  He would wrap up his findings in thin cloth, to let it breath as he would say it, then bury his findings in small wooden boxes." It was the next part that made woke Hannah at night with wild dreams.  It was the part that dragged her out on the trail this very night, like a lure, like a string and hook.  He made a list of directions to locate each of these boxes but he had always feared this list would get into the wrong hands, so he burned them. But not before he showed your grandfather the whereabouts of each one.  He also had two very special friends who lived with him, two Malamute dogs who would go panning with him everyday to keep watch.  It is said that it was the sensitive noses of Bernie and Jessie that were the living will and testament of all his hidden gold.  Whoever could find the dogs might be able to find the buried boxes." He handed Hannah the gold. "This will be your lucky rock, and you can remember that it was those two dogs that found it for you -- they helped me locate this particular box." Hannah had asked her grandfather on the spot how much was in the box and whatever happened to those dogs. She could barely remember the words, so young, so taken by the nugget. "I will tell you that someday you will find out because it will be yours. It will be up to you to find it."

Hannah quickly awoke from the brief day dream of the past and looked up to see that she was approaching the branch of the trail that lead to the caves. The trail rose directly up the side of the mountain and faded into an indescribably black umbrella of forest canopy.  She stayed on the Mesa Trail and then picked up the sound of the soft thumping of footsteps behind her closing in.