Mesa Trail ch. 4
Draft 3

The first night Hannah walked to Bear Creek alone it was midnight and the moon had shriveled under the western horizon to little more than a faint yellow glow behind the Indian Peaks.  The parts of the trail that her mini flashlight picked up were so small she thought that virtually everything was alive and jumping out her -- every fallen limb was most certainly a rattler, every boulder laying out there in the woods rising upward into the deeper unknowable black forest was a soon-to-be hibernating black bear who was not much in the mood for sleeping or for two two-laggers tramping around in the middle of the night on their turf.
Every tuft of fallen leaves stuck in the elbows of the limbs of the jack pines must have been mountain lions.

And yet it was all so silent except the squeaky footsteps made by the stiff soles of her new hiking boots.  "Wrong shoes," she said to herself outloud, shook her head, and purposefully continued the conversation with herself. The advice she had heard anyway was that when you are out in the woods alone you should wear a cowbell, which she did not have, or you should make noise so not startle anything bigger and meaner than her, which was everything except for the crickets exercising their legs underneath the dry brush along the trailside.

Sure she had made this route what seemed like a hundred times in order to help her mom on the trail in the mornings after Kitie and Josh had breakfast, but these long canyons, all crushed rock, rose up into dark creases and it felt like now, in the dark, there was nothing there but trouble.  "What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing?" she said out loud, feeling so nearly electric that her whole body through buzzed and tingled.

There had been a point, about halfway to bear creek, where she thought she could make out the famous old stone house nestled in among the fir trees, that she realized that it would be just as bad now turning around to head back home but in that case nothing would get accomplished.  Inside her back pack was a new rock filter screen, two small buckets, a small foldable shovel and little pic.  Over the last few weeks she had begun to assemble her sluicing kit from left over tools laid in the garage from the trail crew.  From all those mornings out on the trail under the sun she had overheard all she needed to know: first and most importantly, there was gold still trickling down that creek, they all knew it.  She knew how to handle rocks and had some understanding how the old sluice box that sat at the shore line of bear creeek might work.  She knew it would take patience.  She knew what she would do with the gold if she found it...

Up until this point in her life, let's face it, the courage to stake out in the night to do such a thing was beyond her, but here she was, and a surge of adrenalin rushed through her, her ears tuned like bat radar.  She might not have admitted or understood the second part, but let's face it, t's hard to do such things without a little help from the prospect of coming fame. She could see herself on postcards down at the Ranger Cottage smiling for the camera with a gold nuggest the size of cupcakes in her hand. "Gold mining extraordinaire Hannah Provo finds forgotten claim and strikes it rich!" What would the kids at school say about her then?  She bucked her pack up off her back to loosen the straps.  At the very instant that she had for even the briefest moment forgotten about the blackout that surrounded her, this time, she was sure, she heard the footsteps of some thing much more substantial than a cricket behind her coming up from the trail, thumpity thump thump, thumpity thump thump.