Tribute to the neighbour who was a childhood hero
I grew up in a neighbourhood where a prospector lived. He was a bearlike old Englishman as hard and craggy as granite. He had a shabby look to him and a deep bellow of a voice that made our dog bark at him. He was the only person our dog ever barked at.
He had no patience with any kind of pretense, he cursed quite a lot, and he told stories of prospecting up north. Once or twice my dad took us over to play in his house, which had mineral samples all over the place. Best of all was his library, which was the den of a well-read self-taught book lover.
I have a memory, shared with my brother, that he had gold bricks on his shelves to function as book-ends. This is how we remember it, but to this day I’m not sure that this is true.
My brother Peter and I told stories about the old fellow because he seemed larger than life, and perhaps some of our wild stories later became part of our collective memory.
I wrote The Gold as a way of understanding what happened up around Yellowknife in the Dirty Thirties, and as a way of understanding how our legendary neighbour might have adapted from the gentle English countryside to the inhospitable Canadian North. He was our hero and this is my tribute to him.
His name was Tom Payne, and he struck it rich in the goldfields of Yellowknife, and later in the oilfields of Central Alberta. But my version of our revered neighbour is much closer to how my brother and I imagined him so long ago than to the man known as Tom Payne.
My protagonist is Joseph Burbidge, English immigrant and prospector. As he comes to discover, finding gold in Canada’s North is less than half the battle. He is blessed with resolve and with good partners to share the load. Stinky Riley is a wrangler and bush pilot who is Joe’s first mentor in prospecting. Isidore Chartrand is a hunter and trapper who accompanies Joe on his northernmost odyssey, and more than once he saves Joe’s life. Joe has to fight to protect his claim, and this conflict sets in motion a moral dilemma that will dog him for the rest of his life.
On the long trail from high adventure and romance to atonement, readers will meet some delightful, complex, and sometimes malicious characters. It’s a quest for more than one kind of gold.