This story by Eleanor Catton is the third of four exclusive extracts for the Weekend Herald from Lost in Translation (Vintage, $34.99), a collection of New Zealand short stories edited by Marco Sonzogni, which goes on sale on February 5.
By 1860 the fever had swept across the Tasman to kiss the throat and stir the blood of even the least wistful of men. Victoria was not a place of scramble mines and gravel pits, the newspapers said, but fields, where lumps of colour sat plain on the earth and caught the red wink of the sun. The names Ballarat and Bendigo and Beechworth were on every boy's lips, and everyone spoke of the Welcome Nugget which was big as a baby and heavy as ten.
Victoria - the word alone was a promise, exultant, queenly, and wrapped around that triumphant syllable - ore.
The keening lads (highland boys, farmers of the matagouri grassland, squatters in the scrub) did not yet know the pale glimmer in the iris that showed a fever had taken hold. They had not yet seen how a man's vision could be clouded by a golden cataract of lust and wanting. They only knew the gilded breathy stories that were carried by the steamships from the west, telling of the thousands who had made a fortune with a sluice box and a single day.
New Zealand shallowed in the continental lee until the muddy winter of 61, when there came a wildfire shriek from a lonely gully in the middle south. Ngai Tahu men had known for years that there was colour in the Otago hills, but gold was not their treasure, and it was a white man - Gabriel Read - who was the herald of the rush. Read was a veteran prospector, California, Victoria, and the kind of man for whom the fever burned as an ember of a coal. He travelled to Southland on the strength of an inkling, and walked alone into the hills. Some few miles north of his last shave, Gabriel Read slung down his pack-roll, stepped on his spade, excavated two feet of gravel from a shallow bar, and saw, in the pooling grit beneath the square blade of his shovel, his fortune. The news licked up the coast like a flame. There were swarming flakes, cried Gabriel Read, whole chips that sank beneath the fine dust of the riverbeds, nuggets like sovereign coins among the stones. Auriferous waters, he cried, and he made the boys shiver from the hiss of the word.
News of the strike would soon glut the icy mouth of Port Chalmers with ships from Melbourne and beyond. The boys left behind their patched acres of scrub and ran to buy flat-bottomed dishes and swags. Each lad stowed a paper sack of salt in his pocket, to cure the eels that he would later catch with his hands and eat alone at a creek side, staring out across the black water and praying he was not downriver from a lucky man. In a matter of months Gabriels Gully would become a rooted swamp of tailing mounds and empty cradles. The raw muck of the gully would creep up the legs of the boys like a syphilitic vine.
By '64 they were nearly all dead, or poorer. Their gums had grown pale and soft and their teeth rattled. Many had drowned in the floods. Like Victoria, the diggings in Otago had rapidly given over to company mining, and now every acre was a scaffold or a scar. The richest claims in the highland had been bought by partners with dredges and batteries and races, who offered the miners work for a wage. A wage was not a fortune, and so in '65, when a new breeze swept over the raked and goldless gorges of the Dunstan Valley in the far south, the boys lifted their yellow eyes, and stood. A virgin strike, richer, more glorious, west of the mountains, untouched land. The boys rolled their tents and left before the dawn.
There was only one overland route to that narrow howling corridor between the quick of the jungle and the fume of the sea: over the Hurunui Saddle and out down the Taramakau. The boys walked. They seamed their chapped boots with tar. They ate pigeons and gulls. They drank slow water and squatted for days over yellow shit.
The world beyond the saddle was utterly unlike the rutted grasses of central Otago, where the miners built huts of schist and sacking and lived on the high plains up against the sky. The coast was luscious, tangled, green. Cloud hung in every valley.
Everything was wet. The Taramakau was swift and bronze and fatty seeming, and it moved under a puckered sheen like a skin on hot milk. When a cloud passed over the water the colours changed from brown to navy. The ground was littered with the massive husks of nikau fronds, twinned and cusping like the flukes of whales. The boys trod them into a floury fibrous paste and smelled the sweet damp of the rot.
When they came at last to the Tasman beaches (they were knotted now, with beards, and mouths that twisted) they ran to where the river cut across the sand, thinning to a rusted vein, to meet the sea. The sand was coarse, more like crystals than dust.
The surf threw up such a roaring mist that the coastline faded into whiteness where it curved away southward, down towards the Grey River, the newborn town of Hokitika, and the gold.
The findings. Whole towns had risen up from the earth like a vast rack of needles pushed through a bolt of cloth. Already there were mapped streets, and hotels, and plans for a port beyond the treacherous sand of the Hokitika Bar. Already there were banks, and a gaol with shackles to secure the chest of bullion when the union van was late. This was a land which, less than a year before, had been impassable and unexplored, dimly known even by Maori, who journeyed here only to remove pounamu from the rivers and carry it away to Nelson and beyond. When the boys at last staggered down the coast to the Hokitika township, fever struck, starving, and reeking from the months of unrelenting damp, they were met by a swarming marvel of temporary fortune, and a promise that their luck would be restored.
The Tuapeka goldfields had thinned them, shrunk them, whittled them down. Otago had served the veterans, hardened miners who sought the metal like a scent, and the Chinese, squatters who turned over the tailing mounds and the slurry pits, growing rich off colour that had been overlooked by hastier men. The boys were bitter about Otago. They were bitter about Gabriel Read, who had not become fat or sotted, who had not squandered his thousands on tailors and whores, but who remained judicious and principled even through the glorious haze of his wealth. It was unfair. Otago had failed them. Hokitika would not.
They pegged their yards and slung their canvas tents in the mud and then they washed, and washed, and washed each pebbled handful, turning every river over, burning for that single mighty nugget that was big enough to send them home. The birds screamed in the night. Black sand at Okarito, deep seams at Charleston, tunnels in the bedrock at Ross. Every month there was a new terrace - a new gully, a new claim - to pull in prospectors and siphon the luck of the boys. The rain came down. They lived on damper and dusty tea and rotgut from the shanties, and sometimes one of them would kill a bush pig and sell it to the others, piece by piece. A woman - Christ, a woman - was a creature so unlikely that she shrank to a polar nothing, mother and whore.
The boys - those few boys still living, the undrowned - turned pay dirt every day with their slender flakes knotted tight in calico like a pouch of spice. By now they were all utterly blind. Their fever would pit them for ever, like a smallpox scar. They saw only that which glistered. They would never return to their scrubland, or their farms. They cried in their tents and kissed the wet grit of their dishes before they slept.
In the first days of spring in 1866, a miner entered the Hokitika township from the eastern road that ran up the side of the gorge.
He was short and swarthy and his beard was shaped like a spade.
He had a musket slung across his back, wrapped in moleskin, and a pair of billies clanking from the bed-roll on his swag. His tongue was tucked between his lower lip and his teeth. He did not look about him as he walked, and he held his chin rigid and his jaw thrust out.
He moved swiftly. When he reached the main street he strode up the timber steps to the Grey and Buller Bank, tapped his toes against his heels to shift the mud, removed his hat, and stepped inside.
The room was clapboard, unremarkable, lit by a pair of gaslights and the smear of a single mullioned window beside the door. The walls had been papered with pages of the Otago Witness and the Melbourne shipping news, and the patch of wall behind the woodstove had turned a glossy orange from the heat. The dirty smell of coffee hung above rotting timber and coastal damp.
The banking agent looked up from his ledger.
'Gold?' he said.
'No,' said the miner. From his pocket he produced a wadded handkerchief and unwrapped it carefully. Nested inside the kerchief was a silver pocket watch with a diamond inlay. The miner tipped the watch on to the Libra scales and the tray rattled down with a clank.
'Found this in the gorge and thought it might be worth something,' he said. 'Them jewels. Got some rich lady's name on the inside.'
The banker plucked the watch from the scales and weighed it in his hand. 'Nice wee piece,' he said. 'But it's the pawner where you should be at. We deal in titles and gold. Couldn't tell you the value, see - haven't got the eyes for it.'
'Yeah,' the miner said, but he didn't move.
The banker opened the watch and read, 'For Anna-Maria, my love and anchor. I'd call that a costly item.'
'Yeah,' the miner said. 'Some rich lady's name.'
'Like I say, take it to the pawn man.'
The miner squinted into the stove. He was hanging back. 'Naw,'
he said at last. 'Reckon I'll take it back with me. Pawn it over at Governor's Bay.'
'Can't trust Haig?' the banker said, meaning the pawn man.
'Wouldn't want to slight him,' the miner said. 'Just don't fancy his business.'
'You might take it in anyway, just to find out. What's your quarrel?'
'Wouldn't want to slight the man,' said the miner again. 'Wouldn't want to say. In any case, I'm bound east this afternoon.'
'On the Adelaide?'
'Yeah. Picking up a parcel I laid by in case my luck ran tight.
Then south to Port Chalmers and down the Pigroot. Try my luck in the south.'
The banker blinked. 'That's not the way to go,' he said. 'No, man. That land's been twice turned at least. Otago's done. Otago was done two years ago.'
'Was it?' the miner said. He shifted.
'Look here. I seen a nugget over this desk every week. I seen three homeward-bounders since I set up shop.'
The miner sucked on his lip. 'Yeah,' he said, 'but they ain't got my luck.'
'Nugget every week and that's no lie.'
'They ain't got my luck,' the miner said again. 'This damn watch, first damn thing that's shone for me all month. Thought it was a nugget. Gave a fucking holler.'
'I'm telling you,' said the banker, 'just keep on a while. You thinking Dunstan, Kawarau? There's nothing there. Everything's turned over.'
The miner rattled his pocket gloomily. 'You ever tried your hand?' he said.
'Not me,' said the banker. 'I'm a desk man. Clerked in Walhalla till the colour dried.'
'Well,' said the miner, 'here ain't there.'
'No it ain't,' said the banker. 'You too then, Victoria?'
'Never been. Last few years I been in Hobart. What a shithole.
Farmed for a spell, cows.'
'This your first taste of the rush, then.'
'Yeah,' the miner said. 'First taste of it.' He looked down at the watch in the banker's palm. 'You worked the banks down south?'
'Otago way? Not me.'
'So you might not know,' the miner said. He nodded at the watch.
'You might not know, is all.'
'Hear me,' said the banker. 'I know my business. Otago's dry.'
The miner shook his head and shrugged at the same time. His gaze swivelled back to the stove in the corner and his hands fussed with the buckle of his swag. 'You got a wife, come over with you?'
'No.'
'Got a girl waiting, then?'
'No.'
The miner exhaled through his teeth. 'Makes it easy,' he said at last.
There was a moment of quiet, and then the banker said, 'So you had a quarrel with Haig?'
'Weren't no quarrel,' said the miner. He held out his hand for the watch. 'Listen. I appreciate it.'
The banker poured the chain and the watch into the miner's palm. 'That's fine.'
'But I got my ticket. Got to use it.'
'Best of luck to you then.'
'My parcel I laid by.'
'Yeah,' said the banker. 'You got your parcel.'
'And a man's luck has got to turn, ain't that it?'
'That's it.'
'Some corner of the Pigroot,' the miner said. 'Some corner, is all I'm saying.' He nodded and turned to leave, but with his hand on the door he paused and said, 'You got a barber you can recommend?'
'Down on the corner, yellow sign,' the banker said, gesturing.
'Penny for a cold shave.'
The banker did not return to his ledger at once. The boys, he thought, the boys, the boys, and he drummed his fingers on the desk until the Libra scales rang out in sympathy, a kind of whine.
The boys. He saw them in plural, a host of the damned.
The banker was in fact married - he had lied - there was a woman in Liverpool, chosen for her silence and the shape of her hand.
There were other girls waiting too, in Walhalla and in Melbourne, most of them swollen or birthing or dead. Liverpool he had left without warning - oh, there was just nothing there, nothing - and for several years afterwards he had considered sending money, care of a discreet lawyer perhaps, or via some intermediary who could remove the Victorian postmark and divert the package somehow, but the idea exhausted him - and after all, it was kinder to let his family give him up for dead. He had signed on to a steamer, swung himself up, and left. It was easy. The colonies were clean to him, fresh-seeming. But for the boys.
He watched the prospector stamp down the street through the foreshortened blur of window, and pitied him. He pitied the fever.
He himself had never lost an hour, had never thrashed to a heated wetness on his bolster in the night; gold was just a lump to him, a kind of dust, a thing of ounces. The boys saddened him. The way the miner had wrapped the watch tight in his handkerchief saddened him. He was headed for a wasted goldfield and an empty claim. He might pawn the watch for a pound, or three, and then drink the coins to nothing at the shanties in the dark, and then he would be killed, by and by, over a handful of yellow in some lonely ditch. The banker shook his head. He could not imagine walking towards something, what that would feel like, what kind of pull. Freedom was walking away.
Barely fifteen minutes had passed before there came another knock at the banker's door and a grubby lad appeared, holding a satchel and a small stack of paper, tied with string. He wormed a page from the stack and handed it across the desk.
'For your notice, if you're willing,' he said, and made to leave.
The banker looked down at the paper. It was thin, printed with the furred black stamp of a newspaper press: l os t l a dy's wa t c h Costly precious grand it were a wedding gift return to owner jas. Marshall Corinthian Hotel reward £100 and gratitude 'Stay a moment,' he said to the boy. 'Do you come from Mr Marshall?'
'Ay,' said the boy. 'He's just now coming up the road from Ross.'
'He's not at the Corinthian then?'
'Will be tonight.'
'Hundred quid you reckon.'
'Dunno,' said the boy. He had a stupid look.
'For the watch.'
'Ay, his watch.'
'Worth a hundred quid you reckon.'
'Does it say?'
'It says a hundred.'
'Then yeah.'
'What's his business, Mr Marshall?'
'He's a surveyor,' said the boy. 'Only he owns a share of the Clutha dredges too.'
'Rich man, then.'
'His coats are fine,' the boy said. 'He's got a daughter at home and she's fine.'
He was lingering. The banker sighed and fished for a farthing.
'Take it, then,' he said. 'You tell Mr Marshall that a Mr Abernathy of the Grey and Buller Banking Company might be able to help.
All right?'
'Should I stop with the pamphlets? Only I got more.'
'You keep doing what Mr Marshall told you to,' said the banker.
'Say it back to me now.'
'Mr Abernathy at the bank.'
'The Grey and Buller Banking Company. On Revell Street, all right? Now hop it. Get along, go.'
The miner was untucking the barber's towel from his collar when the banker stepped through the door. He was clean-shaven now, and his hair had been clipped and slicked back with oil. The cut made him look hollow and ill. There was still a tidemark of yellow soap around his ears. He nodded and stepped aside so the banker could sit.
'No, no,' said the banker, 'I'm not here for a shave. I got some information for you. About that watch you found.'
'Yeah?'
'A Mr Marshall of the Corinthian Hotel,' said the banker. 'Offers a hundred quid for a safe return.'
'A what?'
'A hundred,' said the banker. 'It's a precious item, see. Wedding gift.'
'A hundred pound?'
'That's right.'
'For a watch?'
'His boy calls him a rich man.'
The miner thought for a moment. His eyes slid to the side of the room.
'Much obliged to you,' he said at last. He nodded to the barber, picked up his musket and his swag, and walked back into the street. The banker followed him. Once they were several yards clear of the barber's door the miner turned suddenly and rounded on the other man.
'Look here,' he said. 'What's all this?'
'What?'
'I see a hundred quid,' said the miner. 'I go and bust the man with the watch, beat him for it, give him ten quid for it, steal it, whatever, and then I take the cash and go. What's your game?'
'Doing a man a turn, is all,' said the banker. 'That's all.'
'And what?' said the miner, breathing hard.
'And nothing. Only I found out more. He's not here yet, Mr Marshall. I asked the boy. He's on his way up from Ross and don't arrive till the evening.'
'This some kind of con?'
'No, man,' said the banker. 'Look, I got the notice here and all.'
He handed the miner the paper and saw how the miner glanced at it sternly, proudly, with the unmoving look of a man who could not read. He handed it back and twitched his chin up and said, 'I see it.'
'Just doing a man a turn, is all,' said the banker. He held up his palms.
'It's a con,' said the miner. 'Only I don't know how you're doing it.'
'There's a boy,' said the banker. 'There's a boy who gave me this.
He's got a stack of them. Christ, man. Ask the boy.'
The miner's eyes were narrow. His hand had moved to his hip.
'We'll ask the boy,' he said at last. 'You come. I do the talking. If his story don't cut, I'll fight you.'
'All right,' the banker said. He had begun to sweat. 'I'm playing straight. Hear me. I'm just doing a man a turn.'
They found the boy outside the Corinthian Hotel. His parcel of papers was gone and he was sucking on a piece of jerky.
'That the boy?' said the miner. 'That him?'
'That's him,' said the banker.
'Don't you run away now,' said the miner, and he hoisted up his swag. He gave a holler as they crossed the street, and the boy looked up. He had a lazy squint and the jerky had spitted his lips and made them shine.
'You work for some rich man?' the miner called out. He stopped at a distance and planted his feet.
'Yes, sir,' said the boy.
'Care to tell me that gentleman's name?'
'Marshall his name,' said the boy. 'Hullo, Mr Abernathy.'
The banker inclined his head, and the miner scowled. 'You know him?' he said.
'Met him just now at the bank,' said the boy.
'What was you doing at the bank?'
'Putting up a notice.'
'On behalf?'
'Ay, his watch.'
'Marshall lost a watch?'
'Ay,' said the boy. 'His lady's.' He was shifting his gaze back and forth between the two men. 'What's this, then?' he said.
The miner did not answer immediately. His mouth was working.
'I got his lady's watch,' he said at last. 'I found his lady's watch in the gorge. I want that hundred.'
'Found it, you reckon?' said the boy.
'Ay,' said the miner. 'Found it laid out in the sunshine. Been dropped.'
The boy looked at him carefully. 'Maybe you stole it.'
'Holy Mother!' said the miner. 'I'm telling you I found it in the fucking gorge. Thought it was a nugget. Hollered loud enough to turn every head in the valley. Fifteen men must have seen me pick it up. Fifteen at least. You go down the gorge and ask.'
The boy shrugged and looked away.
'You tell Mr Marshall,' said the miner. 'Tell him I found his watch.'
'Fine,' said the boy, 'but I ain't running down the road to tell him.'
'He's on the road?'
'Be here sundown. What this for? I told all this just now to you,'
he said, peering at the banker. The banker blinked and stepped back a fraction, surprised to be addressed.
'Never mind it,' the miner said. 'We're done.' He turned away and caught the banker by the elbow. 'Come over here,' he said, and led the other man down the street until they were a good distance away from the boy.
'It's only I've been conned before,' he said.
'No matter,' said the banker. He mopped his forehead with his sleeve.
'Hundred quid, that threw me off.'
'Yeah.'
'Doesn't seem right, for a watch.'
'Yeah.'
'Too grand.'
'Rich is rich, I guess.'
'Well,' said the miner. 'Didn't mean to slight you.'
'All right,' said the banker. He looked down at the earth.
'Why didn't you try?' said the miner. 'I mean, try and do a con.'
The banker opened his mouth to reply, but then he hesitated.
Why had he not? Had the idea simply not occurred to him? That sounded shameful, and na ve. Really it was because he pitied the man, mourned for him, like he mourned for all the boys.
'There's no luck for you in Otago,' he said at last. 'That's why.'
The miner looked at him. 'I ain't going to change my ticket,' he said. 'I got that parcel I laid by. I got a lady waiting. Listen. What say I give you -' and he thrust the watch, wadded in its pocket handkerchief, at the banker.
'What?' said the banker. 'That's worth a hundred pound.'
'Yeah,' said the miner. 'So you give me fifty pound. How's that?
We split two ways. You done me a turn, now I do you one. Otherwise I got to miss my passage, see.'
The banker stepped back a little. The miner wasn't looking at him: he was watching a pair of horses stamp and murmur in front of the joss house. His eyes were in a squint and his mouth was turned. The banker felt a stirring. This was a tenderness, he thought, this slender thing. This was a relic of what the man had been, what the man might have been, before the fever came.
'All right,' he said after a long moment, 'I'll draw you fifty pound.'
The Adelaide sailed for Lyttelton that afternoon on the cusp of the tide. The banker did not see the high masts moving out of the dockyard and into the deep water beyond the bar. He was back at the bank, scratching in his ledger, with his left hand cupped around a pile of cold cloth that filled his palm.
For fifty pounds Mr Abernathy could sail anywhere in the world. The idea thrilled him. It was strange, to have the means to leave a place before he had a reason - there was no one to run from in Hokitika, no cloying girl to leave behind - but the strangeness was so joyful that the banker laughed, and gripped the watch tighter. He could go anywhere. He could dress like a rich man. He could buy a revolver - a stallion - a cane. He no longer felt pity for the miner headed south. There would be some corner of the Pigroot, he thought, some forgotten valley of the Tuapeka, some untapped seam. There would be something for him there.
The banker waited several hours after the sun went down before changing his shirt and walking to the Corinthian Hotel.
'Mr Marshall,' he said to the porter at the desk, but there was nothing. He showed the porter the piece of paper, twice folded now. The porter shrugged. But the road from Ross was rutted and stormy and always pitted with delay - no matter. The banker left and returned the next night, and the next. There was nothing.
He made enquiries. Nobody knew of a rich man riding from the diggings at Ross. Nobody knew the name - Marchbanks, they said, or Michaels? The banker sought the boy, but the boy was gone. On the third day, he took the pocket watch to the pawn broker to get a price. The pawn man laughed.
'That's not diamond,' he said. 'That there is glass.'
'You had any quarrel with a man, Haig?' said the banker.
'Not a quarrelling kind, sir.'
'You know any man who bears a quarrel for you?'
'No, sir,' said the pawn man. 'Folks and me always seem to get by.'
The banker pointed at the watch. 'Worth how much, you think?'
'I'd give you a pound,' said the pawn man, 'but that's because I know you're a good man, and honest. Price of six shillings for anyone less.'
It took the banker nearly two years to repay forty-nine pounds to the Grey and Buller Bank. During that time he saw six nuggets come across his desk. He fathered an Irish bastard and waited for his debt to clear. Every week a new hotel, a new shipload, a new strike. He weighed the gold and counted ounces. He poured rotgut and as he rolled the rim of the glass around and around on the table he tried to preserve the miner's face in his mind - his stance, the cut of his nose above his beard, his eyes - that brass.
If they ever met again, the banker thought, then he would kill him.
The boys were all dead by now - all but one. This last boy was crooked, and wasting, and his teeth were black or gone. He sat alone at a creek side some fifty miles south of the Hokitika Gorge and turned a runty pigeon over a matai fire. As he watched the skin of the bird turn from white to yellow he thought to himself that when he struck it lucky, the first thing he was going to do was disappear.
* The Weekend Herald and publishers Random House have 10 free copies of Lost in Translation to give away to readers. Email your name, address and phone number to newsdesk@nzherald.co.nz and put `Lost in Translation' in the subject line. Winners will be notified in the coming weeks.
