Short Stories by Crystal Scherer

Gold Rush with a Unicorn

Gold Rush with a Unicorn

My grandfather always loved gold rush novels. I always teased him I'd write something where the person has a unicorn instead of a horse "one day". That day has come.

*   *   *

I swirled water around the gold pan and carefully let the water trickle out. The first rinse left me with muddy pebbles and clumps of mud. The grains of black sand along one edge were promising.

A few swirls later, I picked out a pebble of shiny gold the size of a corn kernel. Dozens of similar stones lay on the bank behind me, but the fool's gold was worthless. It was how I'd gotten this land so cheap. The previous owner had gone bankrupt and agreed to sell it to the new guy in town who had just enough coin to get him out of debt.

Ever hopeful, I pressed the tip of a steel tack into my latest find and the tip sunk in. A grin broke out on my face. It was real gold.

This creek wasn't as worthless as everyone said—they just hadn't been looking in the right spots. In water this slow, the gold was moved when storm floods came through.

The faintest rustle of grass had me spinning around.

"Not this time, Sebastian," I told the unicorn who had been about to try and push me into the water again, a game he found endlessly amusing. I walked over and patted his shoulder. "Maybe next time, but I'd like to have dry clothes when we go into town."

The pristine white creature swished his tufted tail, its soft hair glimmering faintly in the afternoon sun as if he were as innocent as a butterfly. I snorted faintly. Bullocks. There was more mischief in the unicorn than in a dozen cats.

They weren't as rare as most folks thought. If you walked through the desert mist near a spring at the first light of morning, they were usually hidden in the vapors, keeping just out of sight and making the fog swirl in their wake.

This one's mother happened to fall afoul of a predator, and the mist dissipated before the foal wandered back to whatever land they came from.

Most people couldn't be bothered with the semi-rare critters because they were a finicky lot, but my father had brought the gangly youngster home for me to raise. That had been a learning curve.

As much as Sebastian looked like a fancy horse—if you ignored the horn, tufted tail, more graceful body shape, and cloven hooves that bore as much resemblance to a goat's feet as a lady's slipper—the headstrong stallion had his own set of rules.

Any attempt to put him into a corral or fence led to him leaping over it with the grace they were renowned for, and you didn't dare try and tie them because they reacted most negatively to a rope around their neck.

It was why I was out here on a huge section of worthless land with the loyal nuisance who kept returning to me. He could run loose, disappear into the mist for days or weeks at a time if he chose—which he occasionally did—but he always returned for some unknown reason. Possibly because he enjoyed the sweetness of the apples or hearing my yelps when he pushed me into the water.

After scratching around the base of his horn, I panned for gold a while longer. The small patch of dirt on the lee-side of a rock yielded a few more gold nuggets and a nice spattering of dust.

It was plenty to trade for some supplies I needed and get some apples for Sebastian. I washed up in the creek and dodged Sebastian's second attempt to "help" me.

I toweled my hair dry and walked over to a saddle stand, patting the saddle blanket. "What are the odds of you behaving long enough for us to take a trip into town?"