“Move the train! Back it up!” shouts Van Horne. “Men, take cover! The snow sheds are your best bet!”
“This way!” Will’s father says, sprinting. Will knows the sheds are supposed to keep the snow off the track as the railroad skirts the mountain face, but are the sheds strong enough to withstand an avalanche?
The sound of thunder builds. He runs after his father and trips, sprawling hard on the tracks. His wretched bootlaces! He tries to stand, but the toe of his boot is jammed beneath one of the ties. Fire jolts up his ankle.
“Pa!”
His father turns and rushes back to him. “Is it broken?” he pants.
“Jammed.” He’s trying to pull it free, but each tug only gives him more pain.
The ground begins to tremble.
“Never mind, never mind! Just undo the laces and slip out.” Will sees his father glance up at the snow and then back to the boot, fingers clutching at the laces. “Almost there. . . . Ease your foot out now.”
With a grunt of pain Will pulls his foot from his boot, and his father hauls him up.
“Lean on me.”
Not far away Will glimpses a man bent over the track, trying to lever up a spike with a crowbar. Then Will looks up at the snow and knows they’re too late. His eyes meet his father’s.
“I’m sorry,” Will says as the ice-streaked wind hits them.
“Stay on top of it!” his father yells above the din. “Swim!”
His father disappears in the blizzard, and Will is running, the pain in his foot forgotten. He runs blindly. The ground is a white rug being pulled out from beneath him. He staggers, and knows that to fall is certain death. He throws his body forward and thrashes wildly, trying to stay atop the churning sea of snow. It pushes and pummels him with a terrifying weight. There is no time for fear, only a wild animal scrabbling as he tries to keep on top. He goes under, claws his way back up, gulping air, hurtled along by the avalanche’s mighty muscle.
Something long and narrow whips past, nearly taking off his head—and he realizes it’s a twisted measure of steel rail. Off to his right he catches the dim shadow of his father, swimming alongside him, before he vanishes once more. Some high branches of a buried tree jut out of the blizzard, and he makes a grab, but is swept past. He knows he is being washed down through the sparse woods that grow right to the edge of the gorge.
Another set of boughs looms up, directly in front of him, and he clutches at them and this time holds fast. His body is lashed about by the driving force of the snow, but he won’t release his grip, even as his head is covered and snow rammed up his nostrils. He gags, choking for breath.
Stillness then, and silence. He releases one hand from the branches and burrows it back to his body to clear space around his face. Then he thrusts his arm high, scooping wildly and breaking free. Packed snow melts inside his collar, slithering down his back and chest. He sees a flash of sky and fills his lungs hungrily. Slowly he hauls himself from the snow and into the arms of the tree.
Shivering, he beholds a landscape transformed. The snow must be piled twenty feet high amongst the trees, some of which have keeled over. Debris is scattered everywhere, branches, steel rails jutting up, wooden ties. He can’t see beyond the woods to the track or the snow sheds. Overhead the sun shines. Birds resume a cheery chorus. Will thinks of the sketchbook in his snow-sodden jacket, the pencil lines smearing on the wet paper.
From the trees comes a sound Will has never heard before, a series of gruff animal hoots that taper off into a kind of mournful sigh.
“Will, are you all right?”
Twenty yards to his left his father clings to a tree.
“I’m fine!”
“I’ll come to you!” his father calls.
At the same moment they see it. A little higher up the slope, jutting from the snow, is the gold spike.
A rustling draws Will’s attention. A snow-caked man clings to another nearby tree, a scarf tied around his face, revealing only his eyes.
“All right?” Will’s dad calls up to him.
The man says nothing, just lifts a hand. His eyes, Will can tell, are on the gold spike.
“Help!”
This cry is muffled and comes from down the slope, where, not forty feet from Will’s perch, the ground drops into the gorge and the rioting river. Will squints. On the very edge, clutching the branch of a spindly bent pine, his legs dangling over the edge, is Cornelius Van Horne.
“Hold tight, sir!” Will’s father calls out. “I’m coming!” He looks at the man with the scarf. “Help me!”
The other man makes no reply and stays put.
From the trees comes another series of gruff hoots.
“What is that?” Will asks, but instinctively he knows.
“The branch won’t hold long!” Van Horne calls out with amazing calm.
“Pa?” Will says, a terrible fear spreading through him like cold.
“Stay there, Will. It’ll be fine.”
Will watches as his father carefully paddles down over the snow toward the rail baron, digging in with his hands and feet to slow himself. Off to the right a heaping drift mutters and creaks and spills itself into the gorge. Will feels the vibration through his body. Everything piled up along the edge could give at any moment.
“You’ll be all right, sir,” Will’s father says as he reaches the spindly pine and wraps his legs around the trunk.
He reaches out toward Van Horne. “I’m going to take your wrist, sir, and you take mine.”
The rail baron is a large man, and Will hears his father grunt as he takes his weight. Bracing himself against the trunk, James Everett pulls.
Will’s heart is a small panicking animal against his ribs as he watches his father struggle on the precipice. Van Horne’s other hand stretches out and seizes a sturdy branch, and he pulls now too. After a minute, with both men straining, the rail baron reaches the trunk and holds tight. They lean their heads against the bark, catching their breath.
Will exhales and hears a rustling behind him. He turns to see the man easing himself down the slope toward the gold spike. He looks at Will and holds a swollen finger to his mouth.
“Shhhhh.”
He plucks the golden spike from the snow.
“You and me,” he whispers to Will, “got an understanding, ain’t we? You call out, I’ll find you and your pa and slit your throats. Got that?”
Terrified, Will just stares at the man’s obscured face, at the narrow band of skin around his chilly blue eyes.
I know you, Will thinks, but he says nothing.
The man called Brogan turns and begins churning his way back up the slope. He brushes a broken branch, and the end twitches and then clutches his ankle.
With a grunt Brogan tries to kick himself free, but the branch flexes and grows longer. Like some mutant tree unfolding itself from the earth, a long arm stretches out and sprouts a bony shoulder and narrow head, matted with snow. Brogan gives a cry of horror as he’s dragged back.
A skunky stench wafts across to Will as the sasquatch thrashes itself up from the snow. Will knows now why the Natives call them stick men, for their limbs are so thin yet powerful that they look like they’re made from the indestructible ingredients of mountain forest.
Will can see that it’s a young one, quite a bit smaller than him. Though its mouth is wide, teeth bared, Will isn’t sure if the beast is attacking or merely clambering atop Brogan like someone trying not to drown. Brogan beats at the sasquatch. From a pocket he pulls a long knife and stabs the creature in the shoulder. It crumples, sending up a terrible shriek.
For a moment Will thinks a treetop has snapped and fallen, for something thin and very tall hits the snow beside Brogan. But it’s no tree. It is seven feet of fury, jumping down from above to protect its child. Will’s insides feel liquid with fear. The creature’s a
rms are vast knotted branches, its clawed feet gnarled roots. The adult sasquatch reaches down and grabs Brogan by an arm and a leg and in one movement hurls him. The golden spike flies clear of his clothing and lands in the snow, not far from Will. Brogan himself sails through the air, skids across the snow with a squawk of terror, and disappears over the edge into the gorge.
Chest heaving, the sasquatch checks on its young, and then turns and looks straight at Will.
“Pa!” Will hollers.
“Stay still!” his father shouts. “Don’t turn your back! I’m coming!”
Gripping the tree, Will stares at the sasquatch as it shakes the snow from its furred body.
“She just wants her child, Will,” his father is calling. “Show her you’re no threat. Don’t look in her eyes.”
Will feels a tremor and sees the snow sliding slowly past his tree like a river toward the precipice. Great rafts of it pour over into the abyss. An ominous creak emanates from his father’s pine. It begins to tilt toward the gorge.
“It’s giving way!” Will cries, seeing the snow’s surface pucker all around.
“Swim!” Will’s father cries out to Van Horne, and the two begin thrashing their way uphill toward Will. The snow slips and shoves against them. To Will it looks like they’re scarcely moving, but they fight on against the tide.
When he turns back to the two sasquatch, they’re skidding straight toward him on the current of snow. Will clambers round to the far side of the trunk. Sliding with the snow comes the gold spike, and as it passes, Will seizes it.
“We’re coming, Will!” his father shouts behind him.
But the sasquatch are coming faster. He can’t help it—he looks into the creature’s face and sees eyes as old as the mountains and as merciless.
“Move back, Will!” he hears his father cry, and then there’s a sharp crack.
Will looks over his shoulder and sees Van Horne with a smoking pistol in his hand.
The mother sasquatch has collapsed in the snow, and her limp body is being carried by the current. The young one sets up a frenzied shrieking, its sharp mouth wide. It’s coming right for Will.
A huge net unfurls from the air and drops over the small sasquatch. The creature knocks against the tree, struggling and yelping. Will leans far out of its reach.
“Don’t shoot it!” calls a voice from the trees.
Mr. Dorian emerges on snowshoes, along with three other large men carrying thick measures of rope over their shoulders. The snow has finally stopped moving.
“We’ve got him, gentlemen. It’s quite all right,” calls Mr. Dorian. “Take our ropes!”
Ropes are thrown out for all of them, and Will grabs hold. Mr. Van Horne and Will’s father are pulled up alongside him.
“Will,” his father says. “You’re all right?”
Will nods, unable to speak.
“Well, Dorian,” puffs Van Horne, “you didn’t come just for my painting, did you?”
“I came for many reasons,” says Mr. Dorian. “To see the greatest railway in the world finished—and to find a sasquatch for the greatest show on earth.”
THE BOUNDLESS
* * *
THREE YEARS LATER
“How long is the train exactly?”
“How many people is she carrying?”
“Will she arrive on schedule for her maiden voyage?”
The reporters’ questions come in a barrage as Will and his father stand on the platform beside the massive locomotive. Despite the chill of the April day, Will can feel the heat from her mighty furnace.
“Well, gentlemen,” says Will’s father, smiling easily at the reporters, “quite simply the Boundless is the longest train in the world. When we’re finished coupling the last of her cars, she’ll be pulling nine hundred and eighty-seven.”
“Is she strong enough?” cries out a reporter whose body is all angles.
Will’s father looks astonished. “Is she strong enough? Gentlemen, look at her!”
Will stares up too. The locomotive steams, her hot breath curling from the smokestacks atop the three-story boiler. He can feel the tremor of her expectant power through the station platform, through the very air. Massive and black, she’s like something forged with lightning and thunder. A steel galleon on nine sets of towering wheels. Behind the boiler jut metal scaffolds where soot-blackened men stand ready to shovel coal into the furnace and set the Boundless in motion.
“She’s the most powerful engine in the world,” Will’s father tells the reporters. “She’d pull the moon out of orbit if we could get a tether on it. As for her length, if you care to walk from locomotive to caboose, it’s more than seven miles. According to our manifest we have 6,495 souls aboard for the journey. And I think I’m all out of statistics, gentlemen!”
Applause and good-natured laughter erupt from the churning crowd. Will’s never seen the station so utterly crammed. Half of Halifax has turned out for the send-off.
Will looks at his father enviously. He would’ve been tongue-tied, and yet his father answers with such ease, in full sentences, without faltering. Will has grown used to seeing his father in fine suits and in the company of other important gentlemen. But even now he still feels a bit bewildered at how different his father is—and how much all their lives have changed in the last three years.
At the back of the crowd, several photographers are busy taking photos, their cameras perched high atop tripods. Will hopes the reporters are done with them—but it’s not to be just yet.
“Mr. Everett, is it true that just before his death Mr. Van Horne handpicked you to expand his empire across the Pacific? Even though his board recommended someone with more experience?”
Will notices his father’s nostrils narrow as he inhales.
“I’m very honored that Mr. Van Horne gave me such a position of trust,” he answers. “And it’s my ardent goal to make sure his steamships sail across the Pacific just as grandly as his trains steam across our nation.”
“There’s some talk that the Boundless is too big,” another reporter says.
Will’s father laughs. “How can she be too big?”
“Too long for the turns, too heavy for the bridges, too tall for the tunnels.”
Will catches the flash of indignation in his father’s expression. “Sir, when Cornelius Van Horne built this railway, his eye was always on the future. He was sketching designs for the Boundless long before the last spike. She is exactly the kind of train he imagined running on this track.”
Will remembers how Mr. Van Horne showed him his sketches in the company car and asked his opinion. Over the years the rail baron sat at their table often, and he always took time to talk to Will. There seemed nothing he wasn’t interested in. Insects, battles, gambling, famous artists . . .
“How safe is the route?” yet another reporter demands. “We hear those muskeg bogs can eat a train whole.”
“Not this train.”
“The mountains, then,” the reporter persists. “Avalanches. Sasquatch.”
“I wouldn’t recommend walking,” says Will’s father, “but stay inside the Boundless, and you’ll be absolutely fine. Now then, gentlemen—”
“Are you superstitious about carrying his funeral car on the maiden voyage?”
Will looks at his father, wondering how he’ll reply to this one. James Everett shakes his head.
“Not at all. It was Mr. Van Horne’s wish that, upon his death, his body be carried across the nation on the railway he built.”
“And where will his body finally rest?”
“It will not rest. Like the man himself, it will remain in motion, crossing and recrossing the country forever.”
A murmur of amazement wafts through the crowd, and Will sees some people exchange nervous looks. This is the first he’s heard of it too.
“If
you’re inclined to believe in ghosts,” Will’s father says, “I can assure you, we’ll have the most able-bodied and benevolent ghost looking over us. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Is it true his coffin carries the gold spike?”
“Thank you, gentlemen, and good day!”
“How’s your boy feel about being on the maiden voyage?”
Will feels like all the air in his lungs has been sucked out. The reporters stare at him, silent and expectant. For what feels like a long moment, his mind is blank. Then he takes a breath and tries to smile like his father.
“It’s going to be an adventure,” he says.
“All aboard, Ladies and Gentlemen!” his father says, guiding Will through the crowd.
His heart still racing, Will walks past the locomotive, and then the triple-decker tender, filled with the tons of coal and water.
“What’s this one?” he asks his father, pointing at the small carriage coupled behind the tender.
“A bunk car,” he replies. “For the engineers and firemen driving the locomotive.”
Will doesn’t need to ask what the next car is. There are so many people knotted around it, he can’t get close enough to read the inscriptions on its black steel side. A portly guard warns the spectators not to touch.
Will was at the funeral. His father was one of the pallbearers, carrying the enormous coffin down the aisle. In the vast cathedral Will felt small and insignificant amidst all the dignitaries, politicians, and magnates. He’d liked Mr. Van Horne an awful lot. Many fine speeches were made about him, but they were all about his achievements and service to the nation, and they didn’t seem to be about the person Will remembered.
“We’re up ahead, just a few more,” Will hears his father say as they pass several plain cars that Will guesses must be for crew and cargo.
And then suddenly the train carriages become altogether different. Gleaming shells of mahogany and brass and spotless glass, they rise gracefully two stories above the track.
The Boundless Page 3