Reamde

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.”

“But it’s still there,” Jones said.

“It was surveyed all the way to the border,” Zula said. “They only graded it to within a few miles. At that point you run into the need for trestles and tunnels, and it starts getting really expensive to actually build it. So the bike-slash-ski trail goes up basically to the face of a cliff, five miles short of the border, and stops.”

“But there’s a way through.”

“Evidently,” Zula said. “When my uncle was carrying the bearskin south—”

“Bearskin?”

“Another story. Not in the Wikipedia entry. I’ll tell you some other time. The point is that he needed to walk into the U.S. but didn’t know how. He followed the old narrow-gauge railway line up out of Elphinstone, walking on the railroad ties.”

“A nice gentle climb.”

“Yes, for the reason mentioned. He got to the end. And then he found some way around, or through, the wall of rock that was blocking his path, and covered the last miles south across the border, and picked his way south—”

She sketched a faint, wavy, speculative line down through the circle she’d drawn earlier for Abandon Mountain, and thence down into Bourne’s Ford.

“He didn’t exactly pioneer it.” She glanced up to see Jones staring at her intently. “He was following traces left forty, fifty years earlier by whiskey smugglers during Prohibition.”