The Mine Lord: A Dwarven Survival Base-Builder

They ate every fish that Savvyarm had caught, with some snared rabbit mixed in. The fifth dwarf was Warmcoat, whose apprenticeship as a miner had overlapped with both Hobblefoot and Sledgefist. All of the dwarves in the claim, including Yorvig, had finished apprenticeships as miners. Yorvig was the youngest, and he had only finished his apprenticeship in the spring, a year after the others had decided to depart to stake their own claim. Sledgefist and the others had finished their apprenticeships sixteen years before. The idea to venture off and start their own claim had been led by Hobblefoot and Sledgefist together, cousins and friends.

Warmcoat was the quietest of the group, and while he had greeted Yorvig with honest welcome, he ate in silence as the others told stories of their year at the new claim. There was relatively little to tell that Yorvig couldn't have figured out, but they did their best. Hobblefoot went into great detail—interesting enough for dwarf miners—in the decision on just how to grade the adit entrance in relation to the plans for sluices. Yorvig’s brother Sledgefist spent most of his words telling of the selection of the particular claim itself.

“And if it doesn’t pay out?” Yorvig asked.

“It will pay out.”

“But how long if it doesn’t?”

“We have to give it three or five years, at least,” Sledgefist said. "There are intersecting seams of quartz, and we’ve already gotten half an ounce of gold from crushing and sluicing. I swear there will be plenty of iron. There’s pyrite in some of the upper seams.”

Iron was fine and good, but it wasn't scarce enough to be valuable in trade to other dwarves.

“Any beryl?” The whole range was known for beryl.

“Not yet, but there were whole banks of the stuff in the creek below, as well as gold in the pan, serpentine and even jade cobbles, lapis lazuli in traces. It had to all come from this rockface somewhere.”

"Or further up the ridge," Hobblefoot said. "Maybe carried down that vernal spring, if it isn't here."

Staking a claim there had given them, by dwarvish custom, ownership of the descending ridges and valleys below the nearest peak on the ridge above them, a gnarled thing of weathered granite. When dwarves searched for a claim, they looked at a number of signs. One was trace minerals in creeks and rivers. Simple panning along a waterway could indicate what minerals were weathering out of nearby rock, and how much. Rains and melts carried the minerals down from the ridges, and it was in that hard rock that the true lodes hid. Properly gauging the location of the source was tricky at best. So dwarves followed streams, swishing water and dirty gravel in wide shallow pans at regular intervals, looking for indicator minerals, and hoping to zone in on a valuable lode.

Dwarves knew that aeons before, the great cataclysm had fractured the surface of the land, raising up hills, shattering rock like a hammer to ice, sending vents of molten stone and gases surging upward. Some places had been touched by greater force than others, and it was signs of such activity that dwarves especially sought. Veins, seams, lodes, old vents and caverns. In those places the conditions were right for mineralizations and wealth.

And the dell had obvious indications of significant activity in the cataclysm. The rock was fractured, almost rent in places, letting water and dissolved minerals seep in to form crystals or other precious stones. The cliff face itself showed that the mountain had been sheared. No doubt they would find ancient vents full of igneous rock. Once, this has been a place of heat and power beyond comprehending. Now, it was frozen in place, awaiting their arrival. Millenia of rain and snow and wind had smoothed and contoured the dell, but the keen observation of the dwarves looked at the rock and saw deep history.

It was a smart claim.

“I’m surprised that you came alone,” Sledgefist said, circling back again. “It was a damn foolish thing. We saw wolves on our way, though they stayed clear of us. And a mountain lion.”

“I’m here,” Yorvig said.

“You’re lucky, is what I’m saying.”

Yorvig knew that the journey would be dangerous, but he had decided to take his chances rather than be left behind in the worked-out mines of Deep Cut, waiting to hear something from the prospectors who had left him to finish his apprenticeship. He was supposed to join with the Hardfell brothers on the journey. Yorvig was only forty years old, and he knew that folks would say he was just acting out of the impetuosity of youth. Maybe he was.

“Did you see any sign of goblins, or. . . ” he asked. The dwarvish word for goblin was ürsi. Yorvig wasn’t even willing to mention the fouler creatures said to sometimes prod into the Red Ridges hunting game. There had been no such in the country when Tourmaline and Salt had led the dwarves into the Waste, but the humans kept expanding and pushing the foul creatures into the empty spaces between their lands, just like they’d pushed the dwarves.

“No,” Sledgefist said, chewing on a last piece of fish and wiping his greasy fingers on his blond beard. “Thankfully, no ürsi." Yorvig saw that a year in a wilderness had done nothing for any of their hygiene. What was more, they were all far leaner than Yorvig had remembered. His brother, always one with a big appetite, looked practically gaunt.

“What did you bring with you?” Shineboot asked. He was bald, but his beard made up for the lack of hair on his head. His beard was so thick it jutted out in front, and he was a bit vain of it. It was the only beard present still oiled, though how he had kept enough beard oil about for a year in the wilderness, Yorvig didn’t know. Unless he was making it. Yorvig consulted his dwarvish nose, and he did detect an unusual amount of a pine scent.

“Besides Mine Runners,” Hobblefoot added, smirking and gently booting a kitten away from the fire.

“I brought five pounds of salt,” Yorvig said. “My tools—” The others knew exactly what tools a dwarf brought into the wilds to prospect; they consisted of a rock pick, a shovel, a woodaxe with a secondary pick on the reverse, a wide pan, a hammer, a case of chisels, a crow bar, and sharpening stones. And a coil of rope. One never ventured into the wilderness without rope. The weight was significant, but dwarven shoulders were broad and thick, especially after ten years of mining in the granite seams of Deep Cut. “I tried to bring Miner’s Eye, but it didn’t make it.” The luminescent fungi was notoriously hard to transport.

“Don’t worry, one of ours made it," Sledgefist said. "There’s a colony starting to take root in a cut we made for it.—"

"We hope," Warmcoat mumbled.

"Let’s just hope it spores.”

“I also brought hand-grinders in case we had specimens," Yorvig continued. "That was all I could carry besides my food.” And he had reached the tail end of his food. Even so, the load had amounted to over two-hundred pounds spread over his body, all he could manage. The burden had slowed him.

“Good!” Sledgefist said. “Grinders we could use when we strike.” The others nodded. Warmcoat nodded, too, but it was in a drowse, drifting to sleep.

“Are our folk well?” Shineboot asked.

“Your sister and mother and father are well,” Yorvig said. “All are well, and in truth little enough happened. Old Crageye went to his fathers.”

No one said anything at that news. It was hardly surprising. After a moment, Yorvig added:

“And Scuttle’s daughter is accepting offers,” he said. “This spring.” That caused all eyes but the sleeping Warmcoat’s to rise and gleam in the light of the foul-smelling oil lamp.

“Ah,” Hobblefoot said, shaking his head. “I wish we’d struck already.”

Yorvig slept in the storeroom that night. Striper jumped up on his chest, kneading and purring before she nestled down in his beard. Her kittens, now nearing half-grown, nestled against his legs. He would carve a sleeping alcove next to the other’s starting in the morning, he told himself. The five dwarves who had come to the claim first had decided that each week one of them would be responsible for hunting, trapping, and fishing. Judging from the flesh missing from their bones, it was not enough. Besides the forager, another one would be responsible for breaking rock and sluicing it, and the others would mine. In some ways, Yorvig was impressed with how much they had accomplished in the ten months or so since they'd arrived at the claim, but in other ways, he felt for the first time the weight of how much they had yet to do if they wanted to make this work.

He had expected that there would be a working smithy, at least, but the dwarves had been sharpening and repairing their tools under an awning made of pine branches in the dell—they had no vents yet drilled into the mountain to allow for forge fires within. They had no vents drilled because they had no drills capable of the purpose. Carrying the long metal shafts used to drill vents was hardly feasible over such a distance from Deep Cut. They could not make a drill because they had no smelter for the ore, and any smelting would have to be done in a bloomery outside of the mountain. Why had the others built a working waterwheel before they even had machinery to drive or pumps to blow? Sledgefist was eager and headstrong, he knew, and Hobblefoot loved machines and moving parts, but it was premature, wasn't it? Why had they made such choices?

There was simply so much to do. Who was to say Yorvig knew better? He had only just arrived. He fell asleep thinking about it all.

The next morning, he found Savvy preparing to venture out on foraging duty. The dwarf was tying up his thick hobnailed boots with laces that had been broken, re-tied, and spliced many times. Savvy grinned up at Yorvig. Hobblefoot was already hauling sacks of crushed quartz to the sluices. No one had thought to assign Yorvig a job.

“Going to check the weirs?” Yorvig asked. He thought he might come and lend a hand.

“No weirs, just a pole and fly,” Savvy answered, standing up. The pale light of dawn was just brightening the entrance to the adit.

“Why haven't you made weirs on the river?”

“Well, we talked of it, but if the forager spends a whole week or more trying to build them, what will the others eat in the meantime? It’s hard enough to find food day by day.”

“Then more than one should forage or build it.”

“No one wants to stop mining. That’s why we came.”

“You can’t have a claim without food.” And Yorvig knew by observation that they had been using valuable animal fat to make oil so they could keep mining, rather than eating it to keep from slowly starving.

“We’ve got to tighten our belts until we can strike,” Savvyarm replied. “Then we can send back to Deep Cut.”

It was possible though far from ideal to travel the Red Ridges in the winter. It snowed at these elevations. Still, winter would make foraging many times harder, and if they didn’t strike before the weather turned, based on how the miners already looked, they would be skeletal come spring. Yorvig was a little disappointed to find the claim poorly organized, but he was not entirely surprised—he’d known his older brother and eldest cousin his whole life, after all. Those two avoided fighting by avoiding decisions whenever possible, choosing their areas of influence apart. It was true they were friends, but. . .

Both were granite-headed.

“I’ll work on weirs,” he said.

“Look, Chargrim, if it was easy, we’d have done it. But the river is in a cut and the current is rapid. It's no Kara-Indal.”

“We’re dwarves,” Yorvig said with a grin, trying to make light of the difficulty. “I’ll take a look anyway.”

Savvy walked with Yorvig along the path above the dried-up creekbed that led back to the river. The dwarves of Deep Cut had named the river Kithlug on maps, which just meant east because the maps of the area showed it turning to head east of the ridges another thirty miles below them. That wasn't true. The maps were less than reliable in this section of the Red Ridges. As far as they knew, there were no other claims this far. It was why Yorvig had grown more and more concerned during his weeks of following runes through passes and then along the river. Why so far? Enthusiasm, he now realized.

Savvy had told the truth about the river cut. Sheer weathered and cracked rock dropped down ten or fifteen feet to the rushing water, white foam flecking the jumbled boulders in the river course. The dried creekbed joined through a deep gouge out of the rock. But Yorvig could see upstream another hundred yards where the cut lessened to something more like five feet and the river widened. There were gaps where he knew he could make a way down to the water. With the current rushing through this cut, weirs just above these rapids should prove effective.

“Right there,” Yorvig said, pointing. Savvy shrugged. “I fish below the cut. There are pools there.” He nodded downstream. Yorvig nodded in return, but they parted ways, Savvy carrying his pole and buckets. Yorvig had brought his tools and rope with him, and he picked his way upstream instead. There wasn’t even much of a beaten path there, but it was not hard going between the pines that clustered along the river.

As he’d seen, the river widened and the banks became less a sheer drop and more a mass of boulders. There was even a game-trail leading down to the edge, and it only took half an hour to form rough steps and move some awkward stones to create a crude stairway to the water. Shoals of gravel lay beneath the water’s surface, and he saw the prints of deer, raccoons, weasels, and other creatures of the forest in the dried silt just above the waterline.

He set his tools down, took his axe, and walked a short distance into the forest. Pine was not ideal for a weir, but he found a few cedars and stripped the lower branches, cut the branches into lengths, and sharpened the ends for stakes. He carried a few bundles back to the waters edge. One branch he kept long as a staff, then he stripped naked.

Yorvig had never built a fish weir before. He, like the others, had apprenticed as a miner, starting in the coal mines of Deep Cut. Hobblefoot, the eldest by some ten years, had additional apprenticeship as a mine engineer, working with pumps and waterwheels and even steam. Despite never having built a weir before, Yorvig knew the basics. The young dwarves had interrogated every current or former prospector and hunter they could find, long before they’d made solid plans to come to the Red Ridges. Yorvig had perhaps been more enthusiastic about those interviews than the others, and he had continued when they lost interest.

Yorvig tied the rope about his waist and secured it to a tree, then took the staff and ventured into the frigid mountain waters. Swimming was not a particular gift of the dwarves; they tended to sink. He had to make sure to keep his feet under him. He used the staff to test the riverbed for holes. The current in the center was strong, but at that point the river was nearly forty yards wide, narrowing downstream to barely ten yards at the cut, rushing and noisy. Two-thirds across, the riverbottom sunk away into a deep, fast-flowing trench. He would only be able to make a weir on the near side.

After thoroughly exploring the riverbottom and tripping a few times, he climbed shivering back onto the near bank and let himself warm in the sun. It would be a cold day, surely.

The first step to building the weir was to drive a close line of stakes into the stoney riverbottom, forming a long U shape facing upstream, with the tops of the U curled inwards, leaving a relatively small entrance. The near side was comprised in part by the shore. Driving the stakes took him all morning. Even with his hammer it was difficult to drive the stakes deep enough to hold. He used longer branches intertwining between the stakes to hold them steadier. Always he kept the rope tied to himself, and often he had to climb from the water to warm up, even though dwarves do not easily grow cold or hot. The mountain water was frigid. Once the stakes were in place and secure, he began the true labor—stacking a barrier of rock to reinforce the stakes. Thankfully, there was no shortage of boulders and cobbles and all size of loose stone along the river.

It took him a week of days working alone. Dwarves are no swimmers, dense and prone to sinking as they are, and they do not love to be in the water. Yet Yorvig pushed himself until at last the weir was complete. Now, a fish seeking calm waters would swim inside the weir and yet find it more than difficult to find a means of escape. The weir would gather fish for them even when the dwarves were elsewhere. With only a net on a long pole, they could gather sustenance from the wilds. He hoped it worked. It was his first contribution to establishing the claim, an attempt to prove his value.

Though none had spoken to him about it, the other dwarves all knew that Yorvig was building a weir. They let him. Nor did they tell him what to do after he finished. He wasn’t sure if that was because he was the youngest and a latecomer or for some other reason, but they did not press him into the cycle of working that they had decided upon for themselves before the winter. Yorvig didn’t question it. He would have loved to swing the pick, but there were pressing matters. Starvation was not how he wanted to die.

He did let himself stand and stare at his finished work after he’d gotten dressed from the last wade. Even before it was fully finished, it had begun to trap fish, and that encouraged him. Now it was done. He saw the dark, lurking form of a rilleye beneath the surface. After wringing the water from his beard, Yorvig headed back to the mine. The tailings pond had backed up even further into the dell after the rain that had fallen the day before last. Pine trees rose from within the still water, their needles turning yellow as they drowned. The trees would die, and their wood would rot. They should have been cut before the dell was flooded. Now the pond would have to be drained in order to cut them. It was a waste of wood. His brother and the others had been too eager, too ahead of themselves. Gilke-wise, an old dwarf might have said. Gilke was the dwarvish word for a dwarf before their coming of age, or rhundal. Too eager. Too eager.