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Pool
PROLOGUE
The Kuluzo Mountains in eastern Alaska have always been a dangerous place, but the low buckle of rock the white men called Mount Isaac was more dangerous, not because of the ice which cloaked its more impressive brothers in the Kuluzos, or the quakes that rocked so many of the mountains in that land, but because it was also a bad place. The Naiaksit Indians who made their homes in the dry forests at its feet called it “Chuatok”—the Hunger—and told tales of the restless and angry spirits who roamed there, of Wendigo whose wild song could make a man desire to feed on the flesh of other men, of the monstrous sons of Trickster who knew no welcome in heaven or on Earth. The whites came in their quest for gold, penetrating the wild places by the thousands in a mere handspan of years. They left a grave behind at the end of every day, but still they came and it was said of them by more than one mouth that no place was so haunted that the white men would not try to cut a pass through it or set a town atop it…but no pass was ever made across relatively small Mount Isaac, where no Indian guide of any tribe would go and no white scout ever returned. Chuatok hungered. Chuatok fed.
Nevertheless, in 1897, gold was found in that same Alaskan wilderness where Wendigo howled, and from that day, the white man inevitably came. Towns grew up fast even in dangerous places, around Mount Isaac at first, and finally, tentatively, atop it. Men vanished, but then, in such places when keeping only the untamed company of other impoverished and desperate fools, men will. Their lives were unremarkable. Their deaths were quiet.
Until Hodel in the summer of 1898.
The Hodel Mining Company boasted a great profit in that largely luckless year of the Klondike Rush, but then, the Hodel Mining Company did not dig for gold. Oh, they took it where they found it, and they did find it now and then, but the company’s interest lay in other minerals—“Industry minerals,” as the mine’s founder was so oft to say, with great emphasis and satisfaction on the first word—and, of course, in acquiring its discouraged and impoverished labor force as cheaply as possible. In the eight months since the mine’s opening, great quantities of lead and zinc had been pulled from the deep rock and shipped away down the rough road on the three-week trek to the railroad, as well as a few modest tons of silver and several crates of ci
It began slowly, a mere trickle before the flood. Lone-wolf miners who had for years come in as regular as the rains to trade a tobacco-pouch of gold dust for a bath, a bottle, a box of bullets and one of Handsome Jack’s two-pe
A lot of men left then, and one of them was Handsome Jack Hodel, son and scion of Richard Hodel, founder of the Hodel Mining Company and owner of the Hodel Mine, the Hodel General Store, the Hodel Claim Registry, and the Hodel Traveller’s Rest (who proudly advertised beds, baths, and spirits, but not the women that brought in most of their trade). He left after listening to his father rant at his foremen for three and one-half hours about how there was nothing in those tu
Richard Hodel, a man who had never been accused of an overabundance of fatherly feeling, would almost certainly have hunted down his son and heir (and strung him up from the nearest tree, after putting a few holes in his gullet and a few boots to his bones, like as not), but he never had the chance. Every man who had not crept quietly away from Hodel before sundown that night (well before Handsome Jack’s escape had been noticed) was dead before sunup the next day. The work of claim-jumpers, said some, seeing overturned chairs, bloodsign, and the pitably light scores of human fingernails scratching across the hotel’s wooden floors. Bears, said others, because for all of that, there were no bodies to be found and buried. The Indians said nothing at all, but thought, perhaps, of restless spirits, Wendigo, and Trickster’s half-born abominations.
Either way, it was over and done, and so after the investigation (and the emptying of the mineral shed where everything Handsome Jack had not taken lay untouched by the murderous, claim-jumping bears of Alaska), all shafts leading into the mines were boarded over (the cage shafts, anyway, and whatever vent shafts the investigators stumbled across in their investigations), and Hodel was abandoned until the company decided what it wanted to do with the land. There was not much room for mystery as long as there was still gold in the mountains, but there was no gold on Mount Isaac and so the men were content to bury the truth of the Disaster with the mine and move on.
The Disaster had nothing to do with bears or monsters. In truth, it could not be said to have much to do with men either, as men reckon themselves.
But they were men once. Not a hundred years ago, or even a thousand, but at the very roots of mankind’s emergence. They were men when men lived in caves, made fire with stones, and still lived in fear of the world they would one day subjugate and master. They were men then, but the men came out of the caves. These went deeper inside. Both changed. And in 1898, when they met again, Hodel’s mining camp vanished. But it could be said that the people of Hodel remained, the new people, content to stay in their new home once the threat of other, of not-same, had been overcome and peace returned to their simple lives.
For they were peaceful, really. Not in the same way as humans now reckon peace, no more than they could be reckoned men, but in their own way, and it was peaceful enough. Men disappeared on the mountain from time to time—men who had no business being up there in the first place, men who were not much mourned or long missed—but there were no more Hodel Disasters. Gradually, some very ordinary murders and vanishings took its place. The gold gave out in the mountains. The mining companies collapsed and the towns built on their names were forgotten. If Handsome Jack had waited another hour and fifteen minutes before sneaking away on his father’s horse, or if he’d just left the deed behind and stolen one more bag of silver instead, Hodel might have been just another ghost town haunting the high unknown wilds of the Cascades, and things would have been different. Or if Jack had not been quite so quick to settle down with the first rich widow taken in by his good looks and frontier charm, or if a thousand things, culminating in if the wooden barrier capping the old Number Two pipe-shaft had never collapsed.
It had been a hundred and twenty years, almost to the very day, but the high, dry climate of the eastern face of Mount Isaac had preserved much. Quite a lot of debris had fallen in over that cap over the years, and countless animals had crossed over it without worry, but upon that unremembered a
His name was Pool, a name which was meant to evoke the dark, deep waters that seemed so still but which teemed with unseen life. They were calling him Pool even when he was still a child and it was not an endearing name, for he’d had those dark, ungraspable thoughts even then and it u
He had become leader, although no one could say exactly when or how. He had begun easing into the role even before the old leader’s death, so that when Bent Thumb did finally go to the Pit, no one questioned Pool’s right to take him there, not even Edges, who, as the biggest and strongest of them, would surely have been the one to assume leadership if Pool and his strange way of thinking had never come along.