And the MHK share price goes on and on up! But even with the...

And the MHK share price goes on and on up! But even with the inevitable start of the heritage survey approaching, I cannot bring myself to buy at these prices.

This is a very low cap, tightly held stock, rising strongly on very small volumes, and I am sure it will continue to rise on a) announcement of the start of the heritage survey, b) announcement of completion of the survey and receipt of the permitting report, and c) commencement of drilling.

But will that drilling find anything?

What worries me, and what keeps me ferreting through the available data and then stepping back from a 'Buy' order is this:

1. Many of the enthusiastic buyers in this thin market appear to be treating this as a dead-cert economic gold discovery, convinced that the sophisticated investors who backed it at 20c cannot possibly have got one wrong. But there is no such thing as a cert. And we all get things wrong.

2. These are JUST ROCK CHIP sampling results. Small point samples, which by their nature are incredibly selective: taken from the most prospective-looking iron oxide rich sections of some generally very barren-looking white bucky quartz veins, for the perfectly valid reason that the mapping geologist is looking for a reason to return to the area with a drilling rig, and trying to pinpoint the sections of the veins that are most likely to carry gold in fresh rock at depth. What these samples actually represent are very localised concentrations of secondary gold, concentrated in small patches of surface-enriched iron oxide, within generally rather hungry-looking white quartz veins that probably carry very much lower grade overall and contain very patchy gold. These are not continuous channel samples, taken from the walls of trenches that have been cut across the veins (which would tell you something about the potential grade and width in the surface oxide zone). They are just highly selective, scattered point samples. They do not tell you anything about width or continuity of grade.

3. I cannot believe that these veins have not been noticed and tested before, by the hundreds of gold prospectors who have combed the area for the past 120 years, busting samples off every sticking out quartz vein, crushing them up in a dolly pot, and panning off the fines to test that vein for gold grade.

And I also cannot believe that the guys with detectors out of Leonora, Leinster, etc., who have been working around every outcropping quartz vein in the district for the past 40 years, haven't already given these very obvious outcropping quartz veins a good go.

And yet none of the company's photographs show any prospecting pits dug on the outcropping veins, and I can see no sign of any pits or shafts on the aerial imagery (Google earth, etc.). So, whilst I am pretty sure these veins must have been tested by prospectors, none of them appear to have produced enough encouragement for them to go ahead and dig a few test pits.

4. And then when I scrutinise the aerial imagery in detail, and compare it to the company's various published magnetic images to locate the position of the Siberian Tiger and Thylacine prospects as accurately as possible on the ground, I can certainly see what appear to be the patches of white vein quartz 'float' shown in the company's photographs, but they are not as isolated and undiscovered as I had at first assumed. Not at Siberian Tiger at least. There are bulldozed vehicle tracks running down the outcropping stratigraphy only a couple of hundred metres west of the inferred position of the ST outcropping veins (which I may or may not have picked 100% accurately but have got pretty close). So, these veins are not that remote and previously undiscovered, and I am sure they will have been looked at before and tested by prospectors.



5. Then following these old exploration tracks 3km along strike to the southeast, I can see 6 or 7 bulldozed trenches cut across the stratigraphy, so exploration companies have been in and done some serious work here. The area is not unexplored.



So where does all this leave me as a potential investor in this potential new gold discovery?

Well, with a lot of doubt.

These veins are not as remote and off the beaten track / previously undiscovered as I had originally hoped/assumed. They are very obvious outcropping quartz veins, clearly visible on publicly available imagery, located very close to established access tracks. I would be extremely surprised if they have not been prospected, detected and tested before. And if that is the case, and nobody has seen fit to take things any further, then it is hard to imagine that there is a big new gold deposit sitting there at surface just waiting for someone to put a drillhole into it.

It is a very extensive outcropping quartz vein system, but the Archaean greenstones are full of these sort of quartz veins. I don't think I have ever seen a drillhole that hasn't got a few quartz veins in it. Every fault and every structurally controlled fracture has vein quartz. But most of these quartz veins are barren. There are always a few that carry a bit of gold: these structures reactivate at the right time the earth moves. But was the main vein phase accompanied by gold-bearing fluids, or was it barren, and does it just coincide with a few earlier/later minor veinlets that do carry a bit gold? It looks pretty white and barren to me.

Only one way to find out of course, and that is to drill it. Which Metal Hawk are very admirably setting out to do. That is the only way you will ever really know.

But what are their chances of finding a large, previously undiscovered gold deposit?

I don't think they are certain, by any means.

This whole area of Archean greenstone is shot through with millions of little gold-bearing quartz veins. Thousands of them have been tested by gold prospectors or drilled by exploration companies and found to contain a little gold.

And a few hundred have produced enough gold to justify digging a few pits or a small shaft, and to be given a name and added to the DMRS map (5,000oz total production is one criterion that has been used in the past).

And just seven of these on the map below have turned out to be significant commercial-scale, profitably mineable gold deposits.

So, what are the chances? And what have Metal Hawk actually got here?

Is this an eight one of those seven large, famous gold discoveries, that became a long-lived and highly profitable mine, as shown on the map below?

Or is it one of those little golden dots that produced enough small-scale gold to get a name and rate a mention as a gold show?

Or is it just another swarm of little gold bearing quartz veins that didn't justify a shaft or a prospecting pit and so never made the map?

I really don't know.

Only drilling will tell. And drilling may eventually come up with something, somewhere, at depth that nobody else has noticed yet.

But is it a dead cert? Nope.

And is there a big undiscovered gold deposit sitting there at the surface, just waiting for the first drill hole, ready to send the stock on a rocket to the stars? I doubt it.

I could be wrong. But I am not paying up. Because this is not a certainty, and it looks to me like there is too much risk.

But I would love to hear something more convincing from anyone that knows more than me.

Because it is a great story.