“Oh, they’ve disappeared,” Wood said. “They’re gone! You could be the municipal government of Dawson, the way you handle your accounts.”

He looked happy to be arguing with his wife.

“Aye, she’s asking me how many jugs of gas I’m going to use for the boat when I’m here trying to figure out how many thousands of dollars we’re going to make,” he said.

Things often got to this point.

“What is wrong with you?” Wood would ask him. “Did you not get enough puzzles to solve as a child?”

But here was the real problem: How was he to profit when the puzzle was solved? He had already found miraculous amounts of gold, but that didn’t mean he had won the game. Mushrooms and gold were strangely similar when it came to getting paid. A mushroom is the most perishable commodity, gold is the least, but the value of both is subject to uncertainty. The price you got for your mushrooms depended on the mood of the buyer under his tarp at the end of a dirt road and on the orders he got from his boss in Vancouver and on economic conditions in France. And as for gold; well, his claims so far had been good enough only for penny-stock operators like Donald Gee. Ryan was a hard man to depress, but that spring he had doubts. Were the gifts of nature real or were they speculators’ props? Wood knew his scheme to turn line cutters into mushroom pickers was economically unsound. Still, she understood the need it served. Ryan wanted to live like a frontier hero; drying thousands of pounds of morels and carrying them down to Dawson in his boat was a raw, old-fashioned triumph. But Wood had another thought. Maybe some of the key pieces to their puzzle weren’t in the Yukon at all.

Prospectors. They come into your office with the shiniest rock they can put their hands on and crow they’ve struck gold. Rob McLeod would laugh if it weren’t so sad. But when McLeod, who ran a junior in Vancouver called Full Metal Minerals, took a call from a woman in Dawson City who wanted to set up a meeting, he knew quickly she wasn’t true to type. Wood told him she had multiple claim blocks in the region, each with an extensive packet of geological data, and she wanted him to meet her husband. Every winter there is a giant mining convention in Toronto. There, in a quiet room away from the frenzied exhibit floor, the drunken parties and the aggressive lying, McLeod looked over the soil-sampling data from the White. The data was thorough and precise. It amazed him to see it just sitting there, as it had for a century: 5 miles by 2 miles of anomalous minerals, surrounded by creeks that had been full of placer gold. There was no way to be sure without further exploration, but McLeod wanted those claims.

“No,” Wood said when they spoke by phone. “I’m looking for a tighter shell.” For two years she had been training herself in the complexities of the junior market; buying and selling penny stocks, reading up on directors and executives; analyzing capital structures. Seeing beneath the surface of the exploration industry, with its deceptive brochures and corrupt stock analysts, became her job. She knew she didn’t want another partner like Donald Gee. Madalena Ventures had owned the right to all the gold on Ryan’s claims on the White, but Gee let it slip from his hands when he reorganized the company, let go of the claims and moved on. (Gee did not respond to questions.)

Wood told McLeod that she wanted to work with a new junior, one that hadn’t yet made any other investments and was therefore exclusively devoted to Ryan’s new discoveries. Did he know of anybody else who might be interested? He did: an Australian geologist named Adrian Fleming had just started Underworld Resources on the TSX Venture Exchange. McLeod was a director. Their plan was to pursue mineral exploration in New Zealand and Australia, but when Fleming saw the White, he changed his mind. Wood obtained a high price: in the first year of the deal, she took 500,000 shares of Underworld’s stock, a 4 percent royalty and 150,000 Canadian dollars as a cash advance. In 2008, they started to drill. At the first site they were disappointed. They moved the drill and tried again. The hollow steel tube, whose cutting edge was lined with diamond teeth, chewed through the earth. When it came up, the rocks in the tube were specked with gold. They drilled 21 holes that year and a hundred in 2009, trying to pin down exactly how big the strike was. Rumors of what was happening up north started to bounce around certain online bulletin boards, where penny-stock gamblers noticed that new companies were staking claims all around the Underworld discovery, hoping to capitalize on the excitement.