He has no wood, but then he sees clearly. The sled is made of wood; there are papers from the mine office in his leather satchel. And he’s got matches. But with gloved hands he can’t even get the box out of his pocket.
He risks pulling off one glove with his teeth and fishes the box from inside his fur-lined parka, but it’s bad now, his body is shuddering with great convulsions, as the ice forming on his legs and feet greedily sucks away his body heat. He drops the matchbox in the snow and, kneeling down, it takes many attempts just to get his fingers, already numb, to close around it.
At last, at last, he holds it fast, then realizes he should have got the papers and broken up the sled first. He wants to cry, but he can’t. He can’t even think straight. He pulls at his satchel with his gloved left hand, but even that is hard because he can no longer control the muscles in his arms.
Knowing his chances are slipping away, he pushes the matchbox open, but then he shivers and pushes too far. Box and tray separate and all the tiny wooden lifelines spill into the inch of snow on the frozen lake.
Sig sees it all, just as if he’d been there. He knows he’ll never forget it to the end of his own days. He wonders what it’s like to die. To die alone.
Now, Einar knows he’s dead. He can’t pick the matches up with his bulky, shaking gloved hand, and he can’t pick them up with his free hand because it has frozen into an unworking claw. Frantically he tries to push the heads of the matches against the striking paper on the side of the box. He tries to use his lips to pick them up, but it’s no good; he’s lost all feeling in his face.
Finally, with a hideous irony, his fumblings against the box randomly strike head against paper, and a small chemical miracle invented by some Swedes, involving among other things glass, phosphorous, sulphur, and potassium, occurs out there on the frozen lake in the middle of a Northern nowhere. A single splutter of flame catches as the match head ignites, lying on the ice. It burns halfway down the wooden stalk of the match, and all Einar can do is watch it burn for a second, and then die.
An hour later, and he’s dead too.
4
Sun Day, early morning
“Have faith. Be brave, Sig,” Anna had said, and they’d gone, leaving him with Einar. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, then stopped himself, remembering it was a gesture of his father’s.
Sig had heard stories that when you freeze to death, the last thing you feel is a wonderful warmth spread through your whole body, filling you with joy. He hoped it was like that for his father, but a bit of him, in the corner of his mind, wondered how anyone actually knows. Again he was reminded of his father, who would always say, “Know what you can. Know everything you can know.”
All Sig knew as he knelt by his father was that suddenly there had been the sound of skis shushing up behind him, and Anna and Nadya were there.
He remembered little of the hurried plans. Anna and Nadya had come fully dressed for the snow; they’d seen Sig on the ice and had rushed out to intercept him. The snow sifted down at them insistently, and hesitantly they managed to lift Einar onto the sled, trying to suppress their panic, pushing aside the shock of seeing Einar dead. The ice had complained and whined, yet none of them spoke of the sudden frozen end that could take them at any moment. With Einar on the sled, they made it to the cabin, running onto the land before the creaking and cracking could shatter their nerve entirely.
There had been a short, silent standoff as they wondered who should go and who should stay, and in the end, Sig, seeing the discomfort on his sister’s face, had said, “You two go. I’ll wait.”
Nadya squeezed his hand.
“Bravely done,” she whispered.
Then the two women had gone to town for help.
“Be brave,” Anna had said. She was trying not to cry. Nadya had said nothing. There was an empty look in her eyes as if the cold landscape had taken possession of them. They’d set off with the dogs once again, Anna driving the team, standing on the runners, Nadya sitting where Einar had lain. Sig watched them vanish, and between the smoky trees and the gray snow in the dusk, they vanished very quickly indeed. He headed back to the cabin.
He’d closed the fire down a little before going to bed, now that it was full of food and eating slowly but happily. He looked at the narrow bed where Einar and Nadya slept, and at the bench where Anna put her mattress every night. He had a choice of beds now.
Then he looked at his father on the table, and he opted for his sacks of flour in the freezing larder, leaving the warmth of the cabin to the corpse.
In the pale morning, rubbing his arms to get the blood moving, Sig stumbled into the light.
His father had moved. He looked as though he were sleeping, turned on one side with his arms and legs now gently folded beside him.
Sig rushed over to the table, a stupid hope rising to his lips, and then he saw his father’s face, and he knew he hadn’t come back to life. His body had simply thawed and relaxed, the rigor mortis passing too, but there was no life in his eyes, nor breath in his mouth, already starting to pinch into a death mask.
Sig collapsed back onto the chair behind him and stifled the tears that began to burn in his eyes, because he understood it would not help to cry.
Then there was a knock at the door.
It wasn’t God or the Declaration of Independence that made all men equal. It was Samuel Colt.
ANON
1899 Nome
66 LATITUDE NORTH
5
Frontier
A greed brought them, and now it seemed as if that greed would kill them. Ice-bitten and hunger-eyed, Einar Andersson stood on the beach, very near the creek that had started the whole damn thing, and wept. It had been his greed, his weakness, and it was his guilt that he fought to ignore now.
Tears froze to his eyelashes and his cheeks, and he rubbed them away with a sealskin-gloved hand before they could frostbite him.
Away, almost on the horizon now, was the boat.
He had pleaded with the captain, pleaded, begged, offered bribes he did not have, and all for nothing.
The captain was not a bad man. Einar knew that. But though the captain was not a bad man, he was a stubborn one, a quality perhaps a ship’s captain needs when sailing northern seas.
He’d given Einar the chance to speak, at least. Many would not even have bothered with that courtesy in this faith-deserted place, but the captain had stood on the beach beside the very last rowboat to put out to the ship.
“What would you have me do, Einar?”
The captain put a thick-gloved hand on Einar’s shoulder. Einar pushed it away.
“She’s dying. Don’t you understand? She’s dying.”
The captain looked at the ice-rimed stones on the beach, shaking his head. He turned and barked orders to his men, then spoke quietly to Einar.
“Then I am sorry, sir, but your wife is already dead. God be with you.”
He turned to go and Einar grabbed wildly at his arm.
“Wait!” he cried. “Please! A day or two and, God willing, she’ll be well enough to move.”
The captain tugged his arm free, scowling at Einar.
“What would you have me do?” he repeated, angrily this time. He jabbed his hand toward the sea horizon.
“The life of your wife against two hundred and fifty souls on that boat? Is it a gamble you want me to take?”
Einar opened his mouth but could not think what to say. He closed it again and watched as the captain stepped over the stern of the long rowboat even as his men shoved it into the near-freezing water, its motions already slowing in the plummeting cold. Very soon, the captain knew, and Einar knew, the water would slow to the point where it froze, froze solid in strange waves and ridges near the shore, smoothing to form an ice sheet that within a few weeks would reach clear across the Norton Sound and far out into the Bering Sea, to the Pribilov Islands, over five hundred miles away.
Now Einar watched the boat go.
; The last boat. There would not be another for seven months. Not until the ice melted in the late spring.
The boat dwindled, barely seeming to move yet getting smaller with every second. In the stillness of the late morning, the sounds carried across the sea with ease. He heard the tolling of the ship’s bell, and he remembered it was Sunday. In his mind he saw the pastor calling the faithful to a secluded corner of the deck for prayer, asking the Lord for safe passage to their destination, two thousand miles and more to the south.
Einar watched the boat go, as some stubbornness of his own told him that whatever might happen in the next seven months, he’d be standing on this beach when the first boats returned. He would nurse Maria to one ending or another, but whatever else, he would stand on that beach next May, as if he’d never moved from the spot.
Suddenly he realized the boat was no longer there to be seen.
So. He turned his back on the sea and looked at the Cape Nome Mining Camp. A few dozen tents. A handful of clapboard shacks formed what was optimistically being called Front Street, as if this place was a town.
Their home for the next seven months. At least one of the shacks was theirs. They might just make it. As for Maria, only God knew, but then with a surge of fear tightening his throat, he thought of the children.
Little Anna, only ten, and—heaven!—his boy, Sigfried, half that.
He put his head down and walked back up the beach, hearing a last toll of the ship’s bell as he went.
Greed had brought him; only Faith would save them.
Mobs and murderers appear to rule the hour. The revolver rules, the revolver is triumphant.
WALT WHITMAN. 1857
1910 Giron
68 LATITUDE NORTH
6
Sun Day, morning
“Son?”
It was a strange first word to utter, and it wasn’t meant as any name or manner of introduction. It was an interrogation, a question, and it meant, Are you the son of Einar Andersson?
Sig looked up into the face of the man who’d knocked on the door. This in itself was odd, since no one ever knocked on their door. Only once in their three years in Giron had anyone come calling—Per Bergman, the chattering owner of the mine, and he’d come by special arrangement to share lunch one Sun Day.
No one else came by, and otherwise Einar, Nadya, Anna, and Sig would announce their arrival by the stamp of their boots on the porch.
“The Andersson boy?”
Mute as a tomb, Sig stared at the man. He made to push past Sig, who for some reason found he’d wedged his foot against the inside of the door. The door shoved against it, but it resisted.
The man was a giant. Behind him in the yard between the cabin, the outhouse, and the dog huts, stood a giant horse, breathing great clouds of steam into the morning air. The frost crackled in the trees, and a crow cawed a harsh call across the frozen lake. The first crow of the year.
The man’s face was like nothing Sig had ever seen, even in their years of travels around the rim of the world. He’d seen the Esquimaux and the Athabaskans; he’d seen Samoyedes and Sami, but he’d never seen anyone look like the man at the door. His features were coarse, his eyes far apart, his nose broad, his mouth hidden by a rough beard of ginger and white. His head, when he removed his fur hat, was shaven to his scalp. His skull was a disturbing shape, flat at the back, his ears too small. It was not a face stroked into creation by God’s loving hand, but battered into shape by the Devil’s hammer.
He pulled off a glove and put a fist of meat against the edge of the door, and Sig knew he could pull it off its hinges if he wanted to. With a twitch of his lip, Sig noticed that the man was missing the thumb of his left hand.
“Who are you?” Sig said, dragging his eyes away from the deformity, breaking the silence. “Have you come to help?”
He looked past the man, hoping to see Anna and Nadya there, putting the dogs away, having brought help. But his sister and stepmother were nowhere in sight.
The man leaned forward, looking past Sig into the cabin. His heavy black-skin greatcoat swung aside like a theater curtain, ushering on stage a new character.
There, in the inky shadow at the man’s hip, sat the butt and grip of a revolver.
“Einar?” said the man. It was all he needed to say.
“No. No,” said Sig hurriedly, panic rising inside him. “No, he’s not here. He’ll be back.”
The man kept staring over his shoulder.
“When?”
Sig tried to place his accent but with so little to go on, it was hard to tell. He might have come from any country of the North; he might be American, maybe Dutch-American, maybe German. But the man was waiting for an answer, and the longer he left it, the more obvious Sig’s lies would seem.
“Don’t know. Later. Maybe.”
“I’ll wait.”
For a moment it seemed as if the man would barge past him into the cabin, but instead, he turned, slowly mounting his horse, flicking the beast to a walk. He was looking straight ahead, back at the path to town, but then his gaze shot to Sig, just as he was about to close the door.
“Alone?”
And for some reason, Sig could only tell the truth this time.
“Yes,” he said, though the word died in his throat.
The man nodded.
7
Sun Day, noon
You might never know what it was that killed you. You might not see it coming; it might strike like the proverbial lightning bolt from the blue.
Or you might have some inkling of your doom. You might suspect the cause; that it is your greed or your lust for revenge or your blind faith that is to be your undoing.
Or you might see it clearly, running over the horizon toward you. Death on a pale horse.
Sig spent all morning pounding the blade of the shovel through the snow to the icy ground beneath. The snow was cleared in moments, but after an hour of frantic attempts to dig a hole, the tongue of the shovel gave up and snapped, the old metal fatigued in the cold, the ground as hard as bitterness.
He’d been standing in the cabin, and more and more, had been unable to take his eyes off the corpse. Suddenly the vision from the day before returned, and he saw his father as the reindeer carcass, his ribs picked clean, and a deep cavity already hollowed out behind them by ravenous birds. He couldn’t bear it and had rushed out to find the shovel, intent on burying the thing that had been his father.
Now, exhausted, he collapsed sobbing in the snow, his hands scraping at the grave he’d tried to dig for Einar, a dozen inches across, and a few less deep. Angrily he threw the handle of the shovel away behind the dog huts. He picked up the blade to follow it, then felt the anger drop from him, and with it let the blade fall in the snow by his feet.
But what was he going to do with the body?
Surely Anna and Nadya should have returned by now? At least Anna should. And Nadya, too. Of course she would come back.
But into his mind came the sight and sounds of their jealous fights, tongues spiteful and eyes cruel, when he couldn’t believe he was seeing his singing sister before him. Sig, innocent and young, could never understand why they argued over Maria, so long gone. And the things Anna said about Nadya were harsh, and not true, not true, but where then, was she now?
He shook his head and stood, pushing the doubts away.
If Nadya had wanted to leave, she could have done so at any moment in the last couple of years, and she certainly hadn’t stayed for Einar’s wealth; they owned nothing, even the cabin they lived in, the tools they used, the food they ate, it all came from the mine, from the Company. The Company owned everything.
Any minute now, Sig told himself, both Anna and Nadya would appear around the track, bringing some company men to help them.
Sig staggered back into the cabin, shattered, dragging his boots off as he closed the inner door behind him. He tried not to look across at his father on the table, but he couldn’t help it. He had to do something. He pulled a
blanket from Einar and Nadya’s bed and threw it across the body, trying but failing to avoid his father’s eyes, which were still open, giving Sig the terrible feeling that Einar was watching him from beyond death.
With the body covered, he tried to roll it over to adopt a more natural position. Then he gently rearranged the blanket into a more fitting shroud.
With a moan in his heart he saw that the logs were almost eaten up, and turned to the door, when through the window he saw someone.
There, framed like an oil painting, sat the man on his horse. It was a pale horse.
The man stared right through the glass at Sig, then he swung his leg over the beast’s back and dismounted. Sig again caught a flash of the nickel backstrap.
The man walked steadily toward the cabin door.
These men are mad with lust for Gold. Conditions will be desperate unless a restraining influence can be exerted. You can hardly imagine to what depths a mining camp, shut away from civilization for eight months by a thousand miles of impassable ice, may descend.
GOVERNOR JOHN G. BRADY
GOVERNOR OF ALASKA,
1897 – 1906
1899 Nome
66 LATITUDE NORTH
8
Faith
“May God protect us now.”
Einar always remembered the first words Maria whispered when she learned that the boat had sailed without them.
He’d come for the gold, and he hadn’t meant to stay. These things never lasted long, Einar knew. Just like the Klondike, by the time the rest of the world got to know about the gold, it would be too late; all the best strikes found, the land claimed, the easy pickings gone. All that would be left would be the struggle to survive in a world of danger, both natural and man-made, with the occasional speck of gold dust coming his way. Just enough to keep that stupid dream of easy money alive, the dream of fantastic wealth, of ease and luxury and fine things for the rest of his days, but in reality not enough to live on for even a week.
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