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leads and followed Goodman, with Sloper beside him and the horses behind. “I mean to survive this adventure, Merritt. Survive, and go back to California with a mighty pile. You visit an inhospitable land, you have to rely on the wisdom of the people who make it their home. Besides, can’t you feel it? The wind makes my teeth rattle.”
    Sloper nodded at this, and when the trail widened a bit, the three men walked abreast. They spoke of home and of their dreams, of books and adventure. Jack entertained them with stories of his time as an oyster pirate, and of riding the rails with hoboes and brawling on the docks. He chose not to mention his thirty days in prison.
    His two companions managed to surprise him, however, when he discovered that neither was much older than Jack himself. Sloper, a stonemason, was twenty-five, a decade younger than Jack had presumed, while Goodman—who actually was a schoolteacher—had recently celebrated histwenty-second birthday. The two men hailed from Illinois, not far from Chicago, and had become acquainted due to a long friendship between their families. While their personalities could not have been more different, Sloper and Goodman had the rapport of lifelong friends, yet they easily and willingly incorporated Jack into their dynamic.
    They camped that night in the shelter of a copse of trees, stacking their belongings around three sides to try to protect themselves from the worst of the wind. After tending to his horses first, Jack sat with his two new friends around the campfire. They shared coffee and dried fruit, cooking a weak stew that tasted better than it had any right to taste, and then Jack felt exhaustion overtaking him. He fell asleep blinking up at the stars, imagining the time to come when he would spend his days panning for gold.
    At some point this daydreaming slipped away, and he was adrift in his own subconscious. The relative peace with which he imagined the prospecting passed away also; men were killed for the best claims, and wild creatures came from the forests to snatch away the unwary, leaving behind only bloody red smears in the snow. But such a mundane dream death did not stalk Jack.
    There was something else.
    He dreamed himself working upriver from the main strike in Rabbit Creek, existing on his own with little morethan a campfire and a torn, tattered tent. He panned by day and read by firelight at night, and all the time something lurked at the edges of the flickering illumination of the campfire, watching. It followed him across the landscape, one day observing from the heights of a great mountain, the next day spying on him from the darkness beneath the trees. He could never make out what it was, but the sense of foreboding was terrible.
    And it was only at night that he saw it. Eyes like fallen stars stared at him from the shadows, waiting for the opportunity to pounce.
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    In the late morning of September 8, the three men came at last to the shore of Lake Lindeman. Goodman’s horse had collapsed the night before, and it was Sloper who put the animal out of its misery. With the echo of the gunshot ringing out along the trail and across the green-black mountain slopes, Merritt Sloper finally lost his smile.
    Nor did it return the next morning when they came in sight of the lake. The scene ought to have been beautiful. Lake Lindeman sat nestled in a basin surrounded by white-capped mountains whose foothills were thick with dark pines and powdered with a light snow. Around the lake grew scrub grass, and at other times animals must have come to the water to drink and nibble at what littlevegetation grew there.
    But a vast swath had been cut out of the pine woods around the shore of the lake. Stampeders worked like an ant colony, cutting trees and sawing timber. Men unwilling to go farther had set up a nice business for themselves building boats and rafts and selling them at outrageous prices.
    â€œWe’ll be flat broke before we even