Ducks in iron suits

When I was a green geological sprout I got fouled up by some dastardly person who had salted a gold property.

I will always remember the feeling of great disappointment — followed by rage — when I learned of the salting job. To me, at the time, salting was just some reckless person throwing particles of gold into a bag containing a rock sample on its way to an assay lab. I soon learned otherwise.

In the mid-1960s, I found out about a high-grade gold zone in a nice-looking quartz-sulphide-sericite schist zone that had been trenched years before and assayed 0.42 oz. per ton gold over 15 ft., for a length of 100 ft. or so. The geology of the property looked favourable and the old assays seemed legit, so I told my employer, a small junior, to option the property.

After the option was signed, I went to the property to sample the gold zone in the trench and some large float boulders of identical mineralization in heavy bush surrounding the trenched area. I was one puzzled lad when the assays came back showing that the trench zone averaged more than 0.5 oz. gold per ton and that the nearby boulders of the same material didn’t show a trace of gold.

Sometime later, I took the now-famous prospector, Merton Stewart, to the property to start a prospecting and sampling program. I showed him the trench zone and the large boulders, and casually mentioned that the nil gold values in the boulders had bothered me. He responded flatly: “It would bother me too. There’s something wrong here!”

Mert went right to work and collected several bags full of dirt from the bottom and sloping sides of the trench. Next, he found a nearby stream and began to pan the samples. The stream flowed into the side of a tidal marsh that exhibited numerous, old duck blinds. He panned several samples in the brook and, every now and then, would pick out small objects from the pan and lay them on the cover of his field book. While panning away, I noticed that his gaze would often shift back and forth from the sky and the duck blinds.

After what seemed like a long time, I became impatient and asked, “Mert, what the hell is this panning exercise going to prove? Let’s get to prospecting the property.”

“Hold on to your horses and put out your hand,” he replied, and proceeded to dump numerous, flattened, lead bird-shot into my outstretched palm.

“If the trench was not salted by a shotgun, then the ducks around here are real tough ones,” he said. “Either that or they wear iron vests and pants.”

I figured the hot sun had addled his mind.

I didn’t have a clue what Stewart was driving at and could not see, for the life of me, what ducks, bird-shot and their flattened nature had to do with a salting job in the trench. He then went on to explain that someone had placed particles of gold in with bird-shot in shotgun shells and blasted the walls and bottom of the trench with a shotgun. This sort of activity was not uncommon, he added. I had never heard of such a nonsensical notion, and I immediately started to argue the point, but Stewart put up his hand and made a stopping motion.

“Listen,” he said, “if someone here was shooting at ducks flying in the sky, would the round shot fall flattened without hitting them and just drop in the trench?”

The salter, it would seem, had blasted the most obvious area, the trench zone, and never thought to blast at the boulders hidden in the woods. With a sinking feeling in my gut, I suddenly knew what Stewart was driving at.

I relayed his dire findings to the late Randy Mills and Harry Morgan, who ran the junior for which I was working. I shall never forget Harry’s comments: “Randy, it would be safer if Avard got the firm a copper or lead-zinc property in the Maritimes.” What Harry really meant was that it was safer because no one would ever salt a copper or lead zinc property. My pride had a large dent in it for a long time.

The moral of the tale is that only a damn fool or a greenhorn would ever recommend a gold property to a firm and then sample it after it was optioned. The guilt of my non-due-diligence has haunted me for years. My ire at the salter has never diminished, and if he’s up yonder, I hope Barbara, the patron saint of miners, has him cleaning out latrines. And if he is in the other place, I hope the devil is making him dig deep trenches in very hot places.

— The author is the president of Nova Scotia-based Ecum Secum Enterprises.