deposits didn’t flow in neat fingers. Sometimes there were offshoots, and crosscuts were used to get to them. Here, let me show you something.”
Haddad turned off the Vermilion Drift into the crosscut tunnel. Near the end of the crosscut, which was only a dozen yards long, he stopped and shined a light toward the ceiling, illuminating a wide hole there.
“This is a raise,” he told Cork. “In the mining here, they used a technique called undercutting. They tunneled beneath the deposits and blasted raises, these short upward accesses into the ore itself. They’d mine the ore, creating rooms called stopes, and send the ore down the raises into cars waiting on the rails below here in the drift. The cars would take the ore back to the main shaft, where it was lifted up to the framehead and dumped for crushing.”
Cork looked down at the bare rock under his feet. “What happened to the rails?”
“Recycled,” Haddad said. “Whenever they finished mining a drift, they pulled up the rails and used them somewhere else.” He stared upward into the raise above his head, and, when he spoke, his voice was full of admiration. “The men in charge of a crew, they were called captains. These were guys who’d spent their lives in mines in Wales and Slovakia and Germany. They were tough cusses, proud men. They knew rock and how to mine it.”
“What did your father do?”
“He started out as a mucker, worked his way up until he had his own crew. Damn near broke his heart when they closed the mine.”
Cork knew that afterward Haddad’s father had gone to work in the family grocery store, but his heart was never in it.
“I don’t know,” Lou said. “Maybe it was a good thing, having to leave the mine. A lot of miners at the end were suffering. Arthritis, lung problems. Hell, in the old days, because of the ungodly noise in the stopes, most of the miners were hard of hearing.”
Cork remembered something his own father used to tell him: You always knew when you were passing the house of a guy who’d worked the Vermilion One. You could hear his radio or television blasting all the way out to the street.
They returned to the main drift and kept going.
A few minutes later, their headlamps illuminated a sudden wall ahead, the official end of the tunnel, a construct of dark timbers that completely blocked the passage.
“Do all tunnels end this way?” Cork asked.
“Normally they just end in rock. This is unusual.”
“Has Genie Kufus finished her survey of Level One?”
“Yes.”
“She say anything about this to you?”
“She hasn’t shared any of her thoughts yet. She probably won’t until she’s completed the survey of the entire mine.”
They stood before the wall, which had been constructed of six-by-six timbers laid horizontally, one atop the other. They’d been secured to the wall of the tunnel with bolted metal L plates. The wood had fared well in the dry cool of the mine. Then Cork noticed something.
“Look here.” He knelt and ran his hand along a seam cut into several of the timbers a couple of feet from the right side of the wall. There was another seam cut two feet nearer the center. “These are fresh.”
“Yeah,” Haddad agreed. He knelt beside Cork and gave the top cut section a push. It yielded and fell back into the dark on the other side of the timbers. He reached in and pulled the next section toward him, and, when it was out, Cork saw that an eyebolt had been screwed into the backside, which would allow it to be removed easily from the other side of the wall. One by one, Haddad cleared the next four sections of cut timber, which created an opening two feet high and two feet wide, large enough for a man to crawl through.
Cork shot the beam of his Maglite into the dark on the other side, revealing a continuation of the Vermilion Drift. He saw no indication of a cave-in. He looked at Haddad. “You were right. Somebody lied in that official report a long time ago.”
“Somebody who didn’t want it known that ore belonging to the Ojibwe had been taken.”
“You game?”
“Are you kidding?” Haddad crawled ahead through the gap.
Cork followed and almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The air on the other side reeked of animal decay. He stood up and shot his light into the darkness ahead. “Something died in here, Lou. And not long ago.”
“Probably some animal came in and couldn’t find its way out. Which means you’re right. There’s another entrance. And do you feel that?”
“What?” Cork said.
“The temperature. It’s much warmer here than on the other side of that timbered wall. There’s air coming in from somewhere up ahead.”
Haddad went forward with the Coleman lantern. They had to walk carefully because on this side of the wall the tunnel floor was littered with blocks of stone big as an ice chest.
Cork glanced uneasily at the ceiling above him. “Any chance of a cave-in?”
“I wouldn’t worry.”
“What about all these rocks on the floor?”
Haddad shook his head. “Should have been cleared during the mining. Poor workmanship.”
They seemed to have walked forever in the dark, and Cork was uncomfortably aware how far behind them was the way out. He’d never been claustrophobic before, but now he felt as if the walls were closing in on him. Maybe it was just the utter black around them and the fact that he didn’t really know where they were headed. The foulness of the air he breathed might also have had something to do with it.
Haddad stopped suddenly, and Cork nearly ran into him. Haddad turned off his Coleman. “Kill your light,” he said.
“Are you kidding?”
“No. Turn it off, Cork. And your headlamp, too.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Just do it.”
Cork didn’t like the idea. But when the lights were off, he understood what Haddad was getting at. It was pitch dark around them but not absolute, as it should have been. Far ahead, the dark was broken by a diffuse paleness.
Haddad switched his lantern on again, and for a moment the light was a knife in Cork’s eyes. “Come on,” Haddad said and started ahead, this time walking much faster despite the great stones littering the way.
Before Cork could follow, he heard something scurry to his right. He swung the beam of his Maglite in that direction, but whatever critter had been there had vanished. It gave him the creeps knowing that there were living things that could see him but that he could not see.
The tunnel ahead grew brighter, though still dark enough that artificial light was needed to navigate. At last they came to a jumble of what looked to Cork to be dynamite-blasted rock. There was a ragged passage into the tumble of debris where light came through. Haddad put down the lantern, knelt, and crawled into the opening.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
“What is this?”
“My guess would be a bit of wildcat mining. It happened in the early days on the Range, when no one was paying enough attention to property and mineral rights. The problem with open pits in this particular area was that the loose glacial deposits on the surface kept collapsing into the pit. That’s one of the reasons mining went underground on this part of the Range. I’d bet whoever blasted this sink finally said to hell with it. But I’d also bet that the guys in charge of the Vermilion One back then knew exactly where the ore was that the wildcatters were trying to get at and ran the Vermilion Drift all the way to the pit. Then maybe they had another landslide, or maybe they even blasted the side of the pit themselves to try to hide what they’d done. But they didn’t quite succeed. Come on, let’s see what’s up top.”
He didn’t wait for Cork to weigh in on the plan’s advisability but quickly disappeared into the mouth of the passage, which angled upward and was easily wide enough for his body to squeeze into. Cork didn’t follow right away, thinking it prudent to wait a bit to be sure they both didn’t get stuck somewhere they couldn’t get out
