Free The Spawning Grounds by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page B

and their stench carried on the river breeze. They wore the same long underwear, the same wool pants and shirts, day in and day out, sleeping and eating in their clothes. They smelled of pork and the pissy scent of ground coffee, of unwashed skin, of armpit stink and of the semen crusted on their underclothes. They dumped bucketfuls of rocks, sand, mud, and the red eggs of the sockeye into the screen at the top of the box, then rocked and rocked the contraption by its broomstick handle, sifting the mess into the stepped riffles below so that only the larger rocks remained on the screen. Then the minerspicked through the rocks, hunting for gold. Hundreds, thousands of white men, running from the Pacific up the rivers into the interior and then to this river, like the sockeye.

    “No, not like the salmon,” Alex told Hannah. “Like an army, or like a sickness, a plague. They did carry a plague.”
    Hannah waved a hand in impatience. “You were going to tell me what’s going on with Bran.”
    “I am,” said Alex.

    Libby stood as her son called her name a second time. “Mama!” This girl who wasn’t yet twenty, wearing the string of trade beads her mother had given her. She had embroidered the bodice of her dress herself, using thread Eugene had brought her from the Kamloops trading post as a Christmas gift.
    Samuel offered her the shining stone he had found. “What do you have here?” she asked in the secret language they spoke when Eugene wasn’t around. Libby turned the rock over in the palm of her hand. She glanced upriver and then down, to the white men sullying the river in their hunt for gold. “Do you know what this is?” she asked her son. “Your father came here to find this. These other men have come from great distances to find this. They are churning up the rivers and killing our fish to find this.”
    “What is it?” Samuel asked.
    “The English call it
gold
,” she said. “We won’t tell anyone—especially your father—you found it.”
    “Why?”
    “This gold makes some men foolish,” she said. “Your father is foolish enough as it is. So, no telling, all right?”
    “All right.”
    “In any case, it belongs in the river. Shall we send it back?”
    Samuel nodded.
    “The rock will try to escape by running across the water,” she said, “but the river will swallow it.” Libby skipped the nugget across the shallows, hitting one, two, three, four, five, six times and then the river swallowed the rock, just as she said it would.

    “She threw it back?” Hannah asked Alex. “But you said Samuel was buried with that nugget.”
    “Libby talked big,” Alex said. He grinned. “But even she couldn’t resist that gold. She went back later and searched the river until she found it.”

    In the moment she skipped the gold across the river, she was content to let it go in the way she had once released a bobcat from one of Eugene’s snares. Libby turned back to her washing, but Samuel patted her breast. “Mama,” he said.Libby wiped her hands on her skirt and, glancing at the men busy on the river, opened her blouse and sat on Eugene’s Rock. Samuel stood beside her and suckled, kneading her breast, and they both closed their eyes as they were enveloped in the sweet scent of her milk letting down.
    “What are you doing?” Eugene cried.
    Libby startled to find her husband standing on the riverbank beside her. Samuel detached from her breast to look up at him, exposing her nipple. Libby quickly covered herself as the miners were all now watching.
    “For god’s sake, Libby. The boy is nearly four years old.”
    Libby buttoned her bodice. “A child knows what he needs,” she told Eugene, in English.
    “How in hell will you conceive another child if you’re still suckling him? Don’t you want more children?”
    She squatted to wash Eugene’s shirt, her back to him. “How will I conceive another child if you never touch me?” she said.
    Libby felt the waiting in the air, like the