Australians have told me that emus, being very curious, will pick up and swallow anything shiny or unusual. They say aborigines will kick and pick apart any emu poop they see to check them out for nuggets.

Sure enough, after hiking a couple miles uphill and hacking through some brush, we found the place just as he had described it.

The sound got quiet when the fuse burned down into the clay. I waited, and waited…

We all love to see that first glimmer of gold when it peeks out from under the black sand in our pan, or feel the weight of a nugget in our scoop when we dig a good target. But sometimes things don’t go quite so smoothly.

It all occurred when Gus and I returned to a remote placer gold area where we had previously found really good gold. The problem was that it would take about an hour to walk through the desert to get to it.

Gold probably is one of the easiest things in the world to cheat an absentee owner out of. He would generally have no way of really knowing if a guy had found 3 nuggets or 30 nuggets on his claim.

I have a slight mental disorder. It causes frequent lapses in common sense, good judgment and bouts of high fever—gold fever.