Jones, for once, looked a bit sheepish. “They should probably change the name. It’s not just about that. I only went there to learn how to blow things up. I don’t know squat about mines really.”
“All of this wood was some kind of structure that they built aboveground, obviously. For what purpose I don’t know. But it runs up and down the slope for quite a distance. It’s got to be some kind of mineral separation technique that uses gravity. Maybe they sluiced water down through it, or something. In some places, it’s just these big chutes.” Zula pointed to the wreckage of one such in the background of a photograph of Uncle Richard. Then she shuffled papers around until she found a photo of something that looked like a very old house pushed askew by a shock wave. “Other places you’ll see a platform with a shack, or even something the size of this, built on it. But they are mostly just flattened, as you can see.”
“Well, whatever this thing is, it’s eight point four kilometers from the Schloss, and almost exactly the same elevation,” Jones said.
“Because of the railway,” Zula said.
He looked interested. “What railway?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t exist anymore. But there used to be a narrow-gauge railway that ran from Elphinstone south into this valley. Closest to town was the Schloss, which was the baron’s residence and the headquarters of the whole empire. Farther back up the valley were the mines he made his money from…”
“And this is one of those,” Jones said, flicking his eyes down at the photos they’d been looking at. “But why did you say because of the railway?”
“The elevation,” Zula said. “You noticed that there’s very little difference in altitude. That’s because—”
“Trains aren’t very good at going up and down hills,” Jones completed the sentence for her, nodding.
“Yeah. Neither are bicyclists and cross-country skiers. So—”
“Ah, yes, now I understand. The trail up the valley, so proudly described on the Schloss’s website.”
Zula nodded. “That trail is just the right-of-way of the old narrow-gauge mining railway, paved over.”
“Yes.” Jones considered it for a bit, paying more attention to the convolutions of the terrain shown on the map. “How does one connect with that trail, I wonder?”
Zula propped herself up on her elbows, leaned over the table, tried to focus on the map for a while. Then she shook her head. “This is too much information,” she said. “It’s not that hard.” She flipped one of the photographs over to expose its blank back. Then she swiped the fat carpenter’s pencil that Jones had picked up at Walmart. She slashed a horizontal line across the page. “The border,” she said. Then a vertical line crossing the border at right angles. “The Selkirks.” Another, parallel to it, farther east. “The Purcells. Between them, Kootenay Lake.” She drew a long north-south oval, north of the border. “Highway 3 tries to run parallel to the border, but it has to zig and zag because of obstructions.” She drew a wandering line across the Selkirks and the Purcells. In some places it nearly grazed the border, in others it veered considerably to the north. At one such location, south of the big lake, she penciled in a fat X, bestriding the highway. “Elphinstone,” she said. “Snowboarders and sushi bars.” Because of the highway’s northward bulge, a considerable bight of land was here trapped between it and the U.S. border. Into the middle of it she slashed a line that first headed southwest out of town but then curved around until it was directed southeast: a big C with its northern end anchored at Elphinstone and its southern end trailing off as it approached the United States. Then she sketched in a series of cross-hatches across this arc, cartographic shorthand marking it as a railway line.
Finally, somewhere down south of the border, below the hook-shaped railway, she made another X and told him that it was Bourne’s Ford, Idaho. “My uncle is quite the expert on the history of this railway,” she said. “He could explain it better.”
“I’ll ask him when I see him,” Jones said.
This hit her like a baseball bat to the bridge of the nose. It took her a few moments to get going again. “Bourne’s Ford is in a river valley,” she said.
“Most fords are,” Jones pointed out dryly.
“Right. Anyway, it’s well served by rail and river transport. So it was thought for a while that the way to make the baron’s mine profitable was to run the line over the border and connect with other mining railways that had been run up into the mountains on the U.S. side.” She sketched in a few lines radiating up toward Canada from Bourne’s Ford. “Abandon,” she muttered.
“Abandoned mines?”
“Abandon Mountain,” she said. “It’s up here somewhere.” She made a vague circle between Bourne’s Ford and the border.
“Nice name.”
“They had a talent for these things. Anyway, so there was this competition as to whether all the ore was going to end up going south to Bourne’s Ford and Sandpoint, which would have turned this whole region into a dependency of the United States, or whether they were going to tie it into the Canadian transport network instead. It led to sort of a railway-building contest. The baron was smart enough to play both sides against each other. Americans were trying to punch a line up from the south, and he was at least pretending to run his narrow-gauge line down to the border to connect up with it.” She tapped the lower arc of the C. Then she moved the pencil up and scratched at its northern end. “At the same time the Canadians were desperately trying to build the last set of tunnels needed to connect Elphinstone with the rest of the country. The Canadians won. So the baron connected his line at the northern end, and Elphinstone developed into a prosperous town. The southern extension of the line—which was probably just a feint anyway, to make the Canadians dig those tunnels faster—was abandoned.”