The dowser

There was a local promoter years ago in Nova Scotia who was obsessed with what he called his “mothers,” or motherlodes, on his gold property, which was in an old mining district famous for its gold deposits.

One day he called me up to see if the junior firm I was working for might be interested in making a deal for his property in order to find his “mothers.”

All I could get out of that chap was that he had trenched and found three “big” mothers and wanted to drill them off.

The next day I drove to the property and met the promoter, who was standing on the side of a long bulldozed trench. He introduced himself and said “watch this,” and pointed to a little old man slowly walking along the floor of the trench holding a strange-looking wire contraption. It was a sight to behold.

A cloud of blackflies hovered around the head of this odd-looking chap, who was decked out in a pair of overalls, high rubber boots and an old straw hat covering his head as he chewed a wad of tobacco.

He walked a few paces holding the wire gizmo and then hollered “I can’t hold it, I can’t hold it,” as his arms tilted downward. He spit out a stream of brown crud and pointed to the ground. “This is the place to drill, here’s the big motherlode,” he purported.

I was aghast. This was my first experience with a dowser, and I could not figure out, for the life of me, what was going on.

I got down into the trench, ignored what I thought to be a crazy man, and looked at the most barren-looking, thin quartz veins you could imagine. The old guy came over to greet me, and at once I noticed his wire thing was but a coat hanger without the hook or the bottom. It was a two-pronged device, painted bright yellow for good measure, and on the end someone had glued a chunk of quartz with two small sights of gold.

He showed it to me a proclaimed it was a “modern high-tech divining rod.” I didn’t say a word, but inside I was a having a good laugh.

I witnessed the same ritual in two other trenches, neither of which contained any promising veins. After these wacky episodes, the promoter ranted on about the mothers below the trenches and put the gears to me about the power of the divining rod, and the old dowser, and his ability to locate big gold zones. He tried to convince me to get the firms I was working for to drill the trenches. Then the old guy took over and started jawing at great length about how large the gold zones were and how far they extended at depth. I couldn’t get a word in.

The promoter then demanded that he would need a $10,000 payment before drilling could be carried out. That was it, I’d had enough.

Matter-of-factly, I told him what I thought of the project and then suggested they put larger pieces of gold on the quartz and that maybe they would get better results. I walked back to my car but I can not repeat here the names I was called by the two men.

A spell later, I received a call from a geologist in Montreal. “I did not know you were into dowsing,” he said.

He went on to explain that he had visited the same property and that the promoter had told him that I’d said his property was the best gold prospect I had seen but that the firm I worked for had run out of my money and could not option it. He further explained that my tip about making the divining rod more powerful was paying off handsomely.

I was floored. I could have shot that promoter.

— The author is the president of Ecum Secum Enterprises, based in Truro, N.S. The Northern Miner thanks him for his contributions over the years.