Mythological gold is as seductive as gold manifest. Midas asked Dionysus for the gift of turning everything to gold with his touch, only to discover a mixed blessing when gold food and drink proved to be indigestible. Jason‘s fleece, Kidd‘s treasure, Pizarro‘s El Dorado, Sutter‘s Mill, Siwash George‘s Rabbit Creek, Yamashita‘s Buddha—in any reality, in any century gold enthralls, enchants, intoxicates, and is the downfall of many an otherwise sensible man or woman who succumbs to its siren song.

Gold.

At last report, $940.48 per troy ounce on the world market. . . .

One

MEMORIAL DAY

Father Smith was the proud proprietor of a forty-acre homestead in the Park, along with a wife and seventeen children, all of whom still lived at home.

Not that he would ever have admitted it, even to himself, this registered as nothing compared to the fact that he was the sole owner of the subsurface mineral rights to his forty acres, and that said forty acres abutted Beaver Creek.

Beaver Creek hosted a very nice run of king salmon in the summer, its many small feeder creeks offering narrow, shallow gravel beds for the salmon to lay and fertilize their eggs. It also supported a healthy population of beaver. It was one of the Park‘s larger creeks, a fifteen-mile tributary of the Kanuyaq River that rose in the northernmost foothills of the Quilaks, drained south-southwest, and in high water was navigable to just above the Smith homestead. The creek formed the homestead‘s eastern lot line.

The homestead had been previously owned by an Alaskan old fart who had staked a gold claim on Beaver Creek and had proved up on the homestead by building a cabin there and living in it. Thirty years later, on the other side of a bad divorce, he‘d been in a hurry to vacate the premises before his ex-wife, also known as Rebecca the Raptor, nudged her lawyer into investigating the property title with a view toward adding it to her rapidly accumulating pile of marital assets. Father Smith had furnished the capital and Park rat Louis Deem the insider knowledge, and together they had gone equal partners on the purchase. Things became complicated when Louis was murdered, but now, at long last, Judge Singh in Ahtna had ruled on his petition and granted Father Smith clear title and sole ownership. Joint rights of survivorship was a fine, statutory phrase. Father Smith had Ahtna attorney Pete Wheeler draw up his own will immediately afterward. Seventeen heirs, eighteen if you counted Mother Smith, could prove troublesome to each other and to the courts, but that, Lord willing, was a long time off and not to be worried over at present. Man proposes, God disposes.

Judge Singh had arrived at her verdict despite a feeble and barely legal protest from Louis Deem‘s roommate, sycophant and de facto coheir Howie Katelnikof, and a more ably argued but equally futile complaint by the Parks Service. Father Smith did not consider Howie as a future problem. The Parks Service was another matter, their proprietrary regard for all lands within their boundaries well known to Park rats, whether the property had been grandfathered in or not. Father Smith had no doubt there were legal challenges from the Parks Service in the future. God tested the faithful in many ways.