Of all the river's tributaries, the North Fork is coldest, a cold canyon in a cold-wintered land, pouring the ice of its heart into the main fork between steep, dark ridges. The North Fork comes clean down the pale washed stones of its bed, too chill to support many trout. Even on a summer day, the sunlight falls on the water of the North Fork for only a few brief hours before mountain shadow displaces it to the tops of the aspens, then to the spearheads of Douglas-fir climbing up the east ridge.

As a young girl, I knew North Fork Canyon because my father had a mine there. The mine was old, patented. Father had not made the tunnels. They were fifty years old at least when he came by the place. The upper tunnel was hardrock and dry, but branching into two at once, so you were afraid to creep in very far; the green, fir-soft oval of the entrance shifted and winked out as soon as you chose the left or the right branch.

The lower tunnel was more inviting, being situated as it was hard by the dynamite shed and framed by graceful young firs curving away from the entrance timbers, which had been there first. No hardrock here, not for more than a hundred feet in. The earth around the timbers was padded with cabochons of bright moss, emerald and topaz and peridot and garnet, and between the ore-cart rails, water flowed like ankle-deep ice pitted by droplets falling from the sodden timbers.

Fath hadn't made the tunnels, but he shored them up, repaired the rails, beat out the dents in the old ore cart, got himself a headlamp, and mined. Or more properly, he explored, for the North Fork claim never paid off.

Fath was wise to ore. He could read silver into the way things folded and cracked. I felt that he could smell the now-barren paths where gold had withdrawn from empty veins and could follow it to where it had loded up in some fat stope. He could, too, and proved it later, buying and selling old mines such as this one until he was able to retire early. But North Fork was the first, his teacher, great cracked shade-mountain with miles of tunnels and shafts unaccountably opening here and there on slopes where there were no roads or even paths, here drowned in water, there laced with the bright desirable sparkle of galena ore. Father would spend his week nights and days off down in the mine, and I would go with him and wander about the canyon alone, for it was considered too dangerous for me to go into the tunnels.

To other canyons where he took me, I might bring toys--my bears or the little plastic horses. But I never brought toys to North Fork. There I mined solitude and piled up loneliness. Fath caught trout in the main river and brought them in buckets to the mine-swamp's sterile ponds. I caught my first fish there. I found salamanders in the dim, moss-cushioned mouth of the lower tunnel, themselves living veins of gold seeming to be born of the mine, for I found them nowhere else. The swamp bred grasshoppers unlike any I saw at home eight miles away. North Fork had none of the common brown fliers. These were small cone-headed jumpers striped green and cream and maroon. Even the butterflies were different, all shade-colored, brown and rust like fallen fir-needles, dappled silver like ore from the mine.

And I was different. The chill of the canyon wrapped about my shoulders and followed me to school. How could I explain salamanders to children who had never seen one and didn't care, who looked at me and thought, "You have been to a nowhere place." How explain the ruby moss, the carnelian eyes of the butterflies, the great draught and drain of cold air sluicing and singing down the riverbed when the sun caught in the ridgetop firs and set like death in a livid sky? These were, then, my secrets. The canyon made me private as I grew and learned.

After a few years, Fath found other mines and let North Fork go; but, older, I could come back alone, on horseback, no longer dependent upon Father for the times when I could visit the canyon. North Fork was eight miles from home, too long a walk for a child to go and return in the same day, but my horse could do it with hours to spare.

I brought my dreams to North Fork, said them out, riding up the road in the sage flat, clopping across the bridges, sitting on the folded moss-edge of the swamp, watching the trickles of black water taking them out into the trembling bog where I dared not walk after them. I told out my dreams very carefully in the pallid sun, alone.

It came to me that I feared the canyon. I felt dogged by an invisible rider. I'd gallop down the road, wheel my horse aside in the shade of an old cabin, and peer around a corner back down the road. I'd step, breathing hard, behind a fat aspen in the upper beaver swamp and listen for the suck of a foot pulling up or a little splash made by someone just out of sight behind the willows. I brought my rifle and fired a dozen shots into the bare hillside. Still that feeling--someone follows.

Nothing ever surfaced; no one appeared. I never saw so much as a shadow. But I spread out my dreams like bright quilts along the road, and when I bent to roll them up and take them home, they had changed. Yellow turned to fire, a gray patch darkened to black, clean white was cast across with blue shadows, leaves sang, trees breathed, flowers fell like rain into the swamp, and the butterflies were still strange. My dreams were alien like them, brittle dreams of frost and flame and night. They were beautiful. But none of them ever came true. For a while.

The summer I was fifteen, years past the age when I had acted out my dreams, at the age when I dreamed them nonstop, desperately, I began riding with Lettie. I'd known her for years, isolated little tomboy who lived eight miles north of the rest of us, and less than half a mile from the mouth of North Fork Canyon. I had never played much with Lettie when we were small; her father never let her sleep over in town. But the summer we were fifteen I could stay with her, in her little room above the house's front door where I could look north in the morning, over the green gas pumps and across the highway, up into the blue mouth of North Fork Canyon where we would ride and sometimes spend the night.

Her horse, a bay, was Fork; my gray was Tony. Lettie was Jesse James. I was supposed to be Cole Younger, and we were on the run, galloping up the canyon to find a place to hole up with our loot and lose the posse. "I'm too old for this," I thought. "I'm fifteen. This would be great if we were ten," and I tried to laugh. But Lettie would have none of it. She reined in and turned her blunt face toward me, preparing to be hurt, but obstinate, wanting to pretend, needing to.

"Well, who's up here to see us?" I thought suddenly. Cole Younger I tried to be, and we rode at a gallop as the side canyons flashed by in dust. Murdock Creek, Sawtooth Camp, Cougar Camp. Tony was only a four-year-old, but he began to sweat. His shoulders darkened and foam flew back from the bit. He was used to exercise, but a three-mile race up a canyon at hard gallop was more than I had asked of him. But Lettie would not stop. She turned off the road, clattered through the creek, and kept at a gallop for another mile, dodging and twisting through the lodgepole pines. She clung to the saddle like a brown Indian, and I was hard pressed to match her skill.

Finally she said, "We'll get off and walk the horses for a while. The posse will have some trouble tracking us through the water, especially if it gets dark before they come to where we left the road."

A little farther on, she knelt by a muddy spring and showed me the pug marks of a mountain lion with only three toes on one foot. "That's Old Slewfoot, Cole," she said. "The sheepmen have been after him for two years. Come on. If he's close, we've got to get the horses out of here."

Something shivered down the wind of the canyon and I was Cole. I looked back at Tony and saw him shudder and roll an eye. He blew down his nostrils and sidestepped the puma tracks, and leading him I was listening again, listening for the posse this time, though the familiar unseen stranger might be there, too.

At last Jesse climbed up a stony bank and put us back on the road. She vaulted into the saddle, spurred Fork, and became a rhythm of hooves somewhere ahead.

It was fully dark, and I followed. Fork was invisible but for the sparks, like great copper flowers, struck from his shoes by the stones in the road. They died like flames under Tony's feet.

Finally we made it to Mormon Camp, a huddle of gray decrepit cabins once used as a church camp but many years abandoned. Jesse watered and picketed the horses in a nearby grassy ravine. I found an open door, collected wood, and built a fire in a cabin's stone fireplace.

We ate beans from a can, sitting on the floor leaning against our warm saddles. Neither of us spoke of the posse, but we kept watch all night, taking two-hour turns with rifle across knees, shivering in the downcanyon airs that crept in through chinks between the shrunken logs of the cabin walls. North Fork watched with us, oppressive, dark, an outlaw presence. We kept watch, but we did not expect the posse to come. We had been too clever, and North Fork was there, sentinel against the world outside, the world of reality as well as the world of dreams. The posse never came up North Fork, but often in years to come I found myself listening for it.

I was sixteen and it was summer--August, and so hot that even North Fork Canyon could forget the permafrost in its bones, although the fork itself, the creek, never forgot. It was the annual Old Timers' Barbecue and Picnic, and everyone who worked for the railroad brought family, dogs, neighbors, and friends for a day of eating and singing and running around in the bright aspen-cottonwood meadow just above the confluence of North Fork with the main river. The picnic ground was on the main stream, not in North Fork Canyon itself, but the canyon breathed upon it. When I remembered, moving about the picnic tables with their red paper cloths, I didn't turn my back to the canyon.

The young people paired off and slipped away into the trees. They slipped away from me. I was not one of them. I knew it and they knew it. Teenagers are not subtle. I could fish, and I could ride, and I could find windflowers in the snow, and I knew all the birdsongs and all the sonnets of Keats, but I didn't know what they knew: how to play the game. The mark of the canyon was on me, like the patterns on the wings of the strange butterflies. It chilled me and turned them away. Youth is a time for heat.

So I turned away from the clearing. I found a path through the trees north and stumbled along it. I said a litany, silly prayer that I needed to say, trying to make magic out of ordinary pain, to make it heal, to make it be all right. And with burning eyes I said, "If anyone will ever love me, let there be a sign to tell me, some sign that there will be a reason for me to go on." Idiotic, silly, necessary prayer. Then the path broke free from the trees into a tall meadow of wild rye, and a gold bird hung there on a dry stem of thistle, black and gold as a salamander from the mine, ready for the wind to blow him away. And I said, "If this is my sign, let me have that bird."

He came easily from the thistle to my finger, digging in with the dry-thorn points of his claws--not held, but holding on. The meadow opened wide, the sky arched up like a blue bowl, and he held on while I went back to the picnic clearing. Most dreams are evanescent, unable to bear the scrutiny of others. They are dreams.

But the goldfinch was real. Everyone saw him, though doubtless no one remembers it now but me. And he held to me for an hour, until I took him back to the tallgrass meadow. He launched himself at once, and flew straight as a die toward the twilight-blue mouth of North Fork Canyon, tiny promise summoned and gone.

It was years later, but it came true, and I found love and love found me, and I went up to North Fork mine and collected butterflies for him from the swamp. I pinned them and spread their tawny wings on the blocks and wrote in the North Fork Canyon label and gave them to him, and I felt free of the canyon, of its invisible ghosts, of the black song of the mine, of the posse and the stranger following.

In the years that followed, I went back occasionally, but North Fork was a Canyon. The shadows were shadows. The wind was the wind. The abandoned cabins greyed and leaned and moss outlined the rotting doors. Father's trout, starving and big-headed, bred in the clear pond of the mine. Nothing remained but what was there, that and the cold.

But North Fork does not let go, and its mark on flesh never fades. The gold bird had not promised that love would last. Promises from North Fork are meant to turn cold and drain away out of reach. I should have known that the posse would come for me in the end. Cole Younger was the only member of Jesse James' gang to die an old man, freed after decades in prison. But I was not Cole Younger. He got away.

After the first dream died, there was a place for me, I thought, where I could go, and it called cold, with the voice of a thousand trees, with the song of airs blown hollow through the deep, forgotten tunnels of a mine, with the cold of Pleistocene, a cold that time forgot and left there. I was marked with the dust of frost from the canyon, I knew, cold equivalent of silverdust on butterflies' wings, and I was called. "Let the bones of gray Tony rise from his weedy grave downriver and take me back," I thought, "back to North Fork forever." And I went to North Fork alone, and unaccountably, I was comforted.

North Fork is but a canyon, you say, and I am only a dreamer of old, cold dreams. That may be, but if you care to check the records of rare butterflies, of those collected in this state but once--rare, alien butterflies, with wings like dappled shadow on dead fir needles--you will find that some were netted in North Fork Canyon, and that they were collected by me after the gold bird brought summer to the place where the ice-ghosts change dreams.

Epilogue