Venerable Lapdog

Down All the Days By Jay Bates
The mist hung over the hills, wafting in the cold wind blowing down the Diablo Range. We four humble beings hunkered around our screens washing the dirt from tailings, looking for the mythical gemstone Benitoite.
Some weeks before we had been there on a warm summer day basking in the sunny warmth and the aroma of the incense cedars searching for little electric blue crystals. It seemed much easier then to find the little rare blue gems to our mutual delight.
Now it seems they had all disappeared. Still we soldiered on for we knew not when we may return to these usually dusty hills in search of the stone for which we feared now could not be found.
The wash water ran out. So I put a hitch on the back of my battered Jeep and trailed the water tank trailer down to the dry river bottom to pump it full from an underground tank placed there to collect the oncoming rains. I crept up the hill , sliding on the muddy track in four-wheel drive. All for a tiny blue speck that resembled broken glass, not worth picking up off the ground.
Maybe Big Ernie was going to be kind after all, as a glint of sunlight pierced the mist. no, it wasn’t going to be, as again the mist closed in and we returned to our dreary screens. Slowly moving buckets of tailings from our coyote hole uphill to our screens and discarded screenings mound.
Dump, wash, swirl with numb fingers, and now squint with a hopeful eye for that electric blue vision. No none there, keep moving. Maybe the next bucketful will reward our flagging hope. All for naught on a cold misty drizzly slope.
These hills, wrought from the earth on sliding tectonic plates have always been the realm of the desperado, the wild beast; and a man there is always alone. Once it was where bears the size of today,s Kodiak bears roamed. It is still the home of the condor, wild boar, and mountain lions; and a man there is always alone.
But there still are a few of us who find solitude in the elfin forest, serpentine barrens, and the hot dry slopes of pines and cedars. Maybe with a little luck, on some future warm sunny day, we can find a glint of electric blue. But not today, you poor fools!