Thursday opened with rain, and more of it than had been ordered. Tony reckons the ground takes five days to dry out. Wednesday had been day one of the five, and Thursday was doing its level best to put the clock back to zero.
Terry wasn’t keen on going out in it, and I couldn’t fault him for that. He was going to leave it until later in the afternoon and see what the weather did. So I got in the car and went for a drive with no destination, which is what a man does when he has come a very long way and the sky has other plans.
Then the sun broke out.
I decided, on the spot, to go out onto the tenement on my own. Not to find gold. To prove I could find the place — drive out there, pick the right tracks, and know where the boundary was without anybody sitting beside me. That was the whole objective of the day, and I want to be straight about it, because it isn’t the sort of objective that makes a good headline.
I found it easily enough. And then, having got there, I put the awning out.
I had never set it up in the bush before. It went up without incident, which felt like more of an achievement than it probably was. Underneath it I made myself a bacon sandwich and had a beer, and sat there for a while with no pressure to do anything at all. Somewhere in the middle of it I messaged Terry to see if he was coming out after all. His car had broken down. So: no Terry.
Refreshed, I got the detector out and had a look round. A rusty nail and another small piece of metal. No gold.
Then I drove about looking at ground. This is the part of the day that mattered, though I didn’t know it yet. I found an area near some old workings that looked promising — and then had to be careful, because the old workings themselves sit on ground I’m not allowed to detect. Knowing exactly where that line runs is not optional. I checked it, marked the spot, and decided that was tomorrow’s problem.
Back at Hoover House the car was in a right state from the mud. I got the hose on it, and then on myself, and then drove into town.
I had a burger at the hotel in Leonora, sat in the restaurant part, where I was the only customer. Everybody else was packed into the bar, and the bar looked a bit full for me.
Going to pay, I stood waiting and a young barmaid walked past in the Skimpies outfit. My first thought — my actual, immediate, unedited first thought — was: oh, the poor girl, she must be cold.
Well. That’s old age for you.
Friday, and for once it hadn’t rained overnight.
I had a plan, which was a new experience. Drive out to the spot I’d marked, and work it. The drive out was pleasant and I found the place without any trouble. Setting up started to click, too — the detector, the harness, the gear. A bit more confidence. A bit more knowing where I was.
What I still didn’t have was any confidence at all in reading the ground. I stood there looking at it with no real idea what I was looking at. What I could see was this: we were working away from the old workings, there was a bit of a downhill slope, and there was a gully — an old creek that had run through at some point. My reasoning, such as it was, went gold is heavy, heavy things move downhill. So I’d start there. On the correct tenement, boundary checked.
I logged the car in Trilobite and let it follow my trail so I always knew the way back, and this time I remembered the snake kit. Small things. They’re the ones you notice when you’re out there alone.
And then the ground started talking back to me, and I couldn’t understand a word of it.
The dirt was still soaking. The detector would go off, and it would sound like a target, and I was fairly sure it was nothing but ground noise — but I could not reliably tell. That is a horrible feeling. You are standing on ground you chose, holding a machine you trust, and the one skill that matters is the one you haven’t got.
So I made a decision that Tony would not have approved of. On the field day he’d been clear: stay out of the gullies and the creeks, because they’re full of rubbish. He was right. That is exactly why I went down into it.
I didn’t want treasure. I wanted rubbish — a real, solid, definitely-there target, so I could hear the difference between something and nothing. If the creek was full of junk, then the creek was the classroom.
It worked. There were a couple of strong ones almost straight away, and I dug up some rusted old tin. I came up out of the creek and carried on, and got another: an old bullet. Neither of them worth anything. Both of them worth a great deal, because each time the sound went thing instead of maybe, my ear got a fraction better. Barely. But better.
Then I moved up onto rocky ground, and saw that somebody had been here before me. There were chain marks across the rock. Old ones.
And on that ground I got a target that was different.
Sharper. More defined. Not the mushy uncertain wail the wet dirt had been giving me all morning — a clean, tight sound I could actually pinpoint. I dug, and I got something into the scoop, and I was completely certain it would be another piece of junk.
Here is where I have to confess to a rookie error. I had taken my glasses off, and was enjoying not wearing them. So I’m peering into this scoop, and I keep catching something yellow, and each time it turns out to be a bit of stone. I’m hunting for the obvious piece of tin. I catch another flash of yellow, tip the rest of the scoop out to get a better look — and it’s another rock.
And whatever the target was, it is now somewhere on the floor.
Oh dear.
So I set about finding it again. Not because I thought it was gold — I did not think it was gold, I thought it was a black bit of junk — but because I wasn’t going to leave a target lying on the ground for the next bloke to come along and dig. It was a solid signal and it should not be there.
It took me an age. I kept sweeping it into the wrong place and shuffling it about, which regular readers will recognise as my signature technique. Eventually I got it into the scoop and made certain, this time, that I had the right thing.
It was gold.
A tiny little nugget, but definitely, unambiguously gold, and I was absolutely blown away.
So — I found it, pinpointed it, dug it, threw it away, and then had to earn it a second time without knowing what I was earning. I’m told this is not the standard procedure.
How do you celebrate your first piece of gold, alone, several hours from anyone? You have a drink of water.
Point one of a gram. You could lose it in a teaspoon. I have never been more pleased with anything I have dug out of the ground.
I went back out for another hour and the ground noise beat me again, comprehensively, for a whole hour of digging holes with nothing at the bottom of them. Then I packed up and drove home.
That photograph is the honest summary of the day, and of the trip so far. Two nails, a boot stud, a plate of rusted iron, an old bullet, some tin — and, off to one side, almost too small to photograph, the reason any of it was worth doing.
For four days I have been signing off these posts by pointing out that the gold has waited a few million years, so it can manage another afternoon.
On Friday, it stopped waiting.