“I’d say there’s a mighty good chance. I’d look for an infill lake or some similar formation.” Rainwater steepled his fingers and eyed me over them. “You seem quite knowledgeable yourself.”

“No, sir. Not really. But there’s one other thing. I wonder if you can tell me how to research a claim.”

“A mineral claim?”

I must have looked confused.

“A mineral claim must be recorded with this office within sixty days of the date it was staked. To do that, a staker files paperwork and a sketch of the claim and pays his fees.”

“A mineral claim does what?”

“Gives the owner rights to the subsurface minerals for up to ten years if a specific amount of work is done on the claim each year.”

I could hear Rainwater retreating into robot mode.

“If the required amount of work is done on the claim, a person or company can apply to lease the claim anytime before the thirtieth day after the tenth anniversary date of the claim. A mineral lease is good for twenty-one years and may be extended for another twenty-one years if the rental payments are up-to-date and the renewal fees are paid. If a person or company is going to begin production—meaning construction, mining, milling, etc.—then the claim must be taken to lease.”

“Could we start with mineral claims?” I asked.

“You’d better pull up a chair.”

As I did that, Rainwater tapped the keyboard. A new page appeared. The header said Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in French and English. A red sidebar offered a choice of links.

“I’m going into the SID viewer.” Rainwater was entering a username and password. “SID contains a number of spatially integrated datasets.”

A map filled the screen. I recognized the NWT and Nunavut. Hudson Bay. The places I’d viewed on the inside cover of the mining book. Rivers appeared in deep blue, lakes in turquoise, boundary lines and community names in black.

“Got to zoom to a scale of under a thousand. Otherwise, the mineral claims data won’t appear on the table of contents. For now let’s stick to NWT.”

A red rectangle formed on the screen. Rainwater clicked an icon, and the area inside expanded.

A sidebar with choices ran vertically down the map’s right edge. Rainwater chose to display two layers by placing dots in the selection boxes beside the categories. Active mineral claims. Prospecting permits.

He refreshed the map, and gray, green, and chartreuse boxes appeared superimposed on the topography. Each box had a number. Rainwater chose an icon from a panel on the left, and a query box appeared at the bottom of the screen. On a scroll bar under “field,” he chose “C_Owners.owner_Nam1.” Under “operator,” he chose “=.”

His fingers paused at the “value” field. “Name?”

“McLeod,” I said.

He typed the letters, hit “add to query string,” then “enter.”

A pulsating silver bar said the system was searching.