Mark and I were back on the road early on the following day for our last stop in our mining tour. This time, we were going to see a potential iron producing property and it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. The site was located about an hour north of Little Rock and three miles outside of a very small town called Hasting’s Summit.
Unlike the Arizona site, this one didn’t have a surveying crew. We were on our own. The survey crew had already been on site and had mostly completed their report. Mark had the draft version of it and was going to use it to review the site. I was going to do my thing and scan the land, section by section. I was really glad to see that mark had arranged for the survey crew to leave us a few ATV’s and some fuel.
While Mark set up our tiny base camp, I looked over my map and headed out to a corner of the property to begin my scans. After spending weeks travelling, I was anxious to finish the job and get back home. I missed dad and Uncle Magnum. I also missed Eva and James, but they wouldn’t have been at home anyways. I missed going to Kung Fu and making things in the forge. With the sudden feelings of homesickness, I decided to see if I could stand increasing the rectangular field to 100 meters. I knew that I could do it, but I didn’t know how exhausting it would be. I was hoping that the added strain would be compensated by the need for considerably fewer scans.
The new size was barely manageable, and I kept it up until lunchtime, when I joined Mark at our base camp. There was no cooking this time, just some store-bought sandwiches that we’d kept in a cooler.
“Find any dinosaurs so far?”, Mark asked me between mouthfuls of his turkey sandwich.
“Not a one. Just rocks and ore. How much longer do you need here? I can’t imagine there’s much for you to do without any equipment here.”
“I’m pretty much done. I’ve seen the site, read the report, and visually verified what I could. Based on the reports findings of where the pit will be, I’ve also created a rough map of where the ore processing buildings should go and where the tailings could be stored. I’m just guessing based on location to the pit. If we decided to open this location, we’ll have to explore further to make sure that we put the buildings on solid ground and that there are no underground steams that we might pollute with the tailings.”, Mark explained.
“Well, I’ll be done going over the property in a few hours. Give me your map and I’ll verify the areas under your planned building.”
“Abby, I know that your land sense is real, but what exactly are you sensing and how far does it go?”, Mark asked.
“Well, I’m not sure how far down I can sense things, I’ve never really tried to find my limit in that. The sensing takes a lot of strength to maintain and I’ve been focused on maintaining it as I ride the property. I want to have as complete a picture as I can get. Mostly, I’ve been stopping at a depth of 300-400 meters. If I sense ore in an area, I’ll go lower, until I have a better idea as to its shape.”
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Mark sat frozen for a few seconds and finally said, “When you said that you were going to negotiate with Grandpa Jake about more detailed information, I had no idea that you could get that level of detail or to that depth. That’s absolutely incredible. The savings in time and money are huge. You need to make sure that you squeeze as much of those savings from Grandpa Jake as you can.”
“I’m going to try my best. Please don’t tell Jake about this conversation though. I don’t want him to have time to prepare.”, I said.
“I promise that I won’t say a word to him it, but it won’t make any difference in the end. Grandpa will play fairly with you and not just because he likes you and because you saved me. He’ll do it because he’s going to want your services again and again. His biggest problem won’t be trying to negotiate your price down. His problem is going to be whether he can pay you enough to want to do work for him at all.” Mark shook his head in as if trying to deny his own conclusions.
“I don’t understand. Why would I turn down doing well paid work for Jake?”, I asked with some confusion.
“Because you don’t need the money. The gemstone that you found a few months ago can fund the Hannah Foundation for years and you just found a diamond that will probably match that at auction. Anytime you need money, you can just go to a public mine and find a gemstone that’s worth millions of dollars. Add in your dinosaur finds and you’ll never need to work unless you want to.” Mark seemed pretty sure of his reasoning, but he was making one wrong assumption. He assumed that the Hannah Foundation was just going stay a small local charitable organization. I had much bigger plans for it, but I kept those thoughts to myself.
After devouring my sandwiches, I went back to scanning, but Mark’s questions about how deep I could scan kept coming back to me. I know that in a few areas I’d gone to 800 meters and in one I’d passed the 1000-meter mark and I didn’t remember being overly exerted doing those scans. That meant that it was the size of the field itself that was a limiting factor and not the distance that I sent it Only I didn’t usually need to go to 1000 meter so that knowledge didn’t change anything, until I realized that distance wasn’t just about going down. I could send out the field away from me as well.
I sat down and experimented. I shaped a 100 by 100-meter field and then turned it on it’s side and send it down 50 meters into the earth. Once the field was in place, I send it out, moving horizontally across the property. I passed 2000 meters and I still had clear data. At 3000 meters, over a mile and a half away, I stopped. That was plenty far. I lowered the field down 100 more meters and brought it back.
With four scans back and forth, each one dropping by 100 meters, but going out 3000 meters, my horizontal scanning could drop the number of scans I needed by around 85%. Seven hours of work could be done in one hour. I’d need more time to make notes, but with fewer scans required, I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping up the scanning all day and I could probably afford to make the field even bigger. I planned on trying that with the surrounding areas, once I was done with the mine site.
The hardest part was coming up with a new way to make my notes quickly on the computer and making sure that I was putting in the data in the appropriate location on the map. I spent half and hour fiddling around with the computer until I was satisfied with my new notation technique and less than an hour later, I was finished scanning the site and moving on to the adjoining properties.
As tiring and boring as the work could get at times, these feelings were easily eclipsed by the high of finding an ore body of significant size. I loved it when my field ran up against a deposit, identifying and highlighting what it saw. It felt useful and productive and positive, unlike the all the negative and frankly murderous applications of my powers.