Down the Yukon

by Will Hobbs

  “What would that be?”

  “Flapjacks and bacon.”

  “In that case, I can take care of you right here at Jason’s Café.”

  As soon as we’d eaten, Jamie wanted to inspect the canoe. We tipped it upright, and she pronounced it in perfect condition. Seating herself in the stern, Jamie closed her eyes and began to stroke with an imaginary paddle.

  When she opened her eyes, she said, “Your Peterborough is like an old friend.”

  We walked around the side of the cabin for another look at the crowded banks of the Yukon. Jamie shaded her eyes and gave the fleet a long, careful appraisal. “They’re all scows or rowed boats,” she said finally. “I don’t see any canoes. But then, that shouldn’t be surprising. I wonder what became of mine and Father’s after he sold it.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I saw a canoe. They always were a rarity.”

  “When it comes to the race,” Jamie said, “no one could match your canoe in a sprint, but fifteen hundred miles down the Yukon is no sprint. I woke up thinking that if we go to shore to sleep, and surely we’ll need to sleep…”

  “That whole navy will pass us by. I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  “On a scow,” Jamie said tentatively, “we could set up a tent for sleeping. For cooking, we could make a mud hearth or even set up a Yukon stove. There’s no doubt we could float twenty-four hours a day, but of course a scow is nothing but a floating platform and we couldn’t go any faster than the current.”

  Jamie fell to scratching Burnt Paw behind his ear while her eyes drifted down the river in a thoughtful trance.

  I was pondering, too. A nice, sleek skiff was what we really needed. The only problem was, rowed boats of any description had become more and more valuable with half of Dawson, it seemed, rushing to Nome. Even before the race was announced, skiffs were selling for hundreds of dollars.

  A skiff today might cost five hundred or more. It seemed lunacy to suggest spending such an amount on a simple wooden boat, but our chances might depend on it.

  “What about a skiff?” I suggested, thinking Jamie had arrived with a large sum of money.

  Jamie brightened. “We’d pass the scows by like they were fastened to the bottom! We could carry a world of gear and grub, with room to stretch out and sleep. Not only that, a sturdy skiff might be able to handle the Norton Sound between St. Michael and Nome. There must be a hundred and fifty of them down there. Maybe someone would sell.”

  Our eyes were asking each other the identical question, but Jamie spoke first. “Can you afford a rowed boat, Jason?”

  “No,” I answered, and I realized that this was the time to tell her of the calamity that had befallen me and my brothers. I told it all, from the moment that the Sydney Mauler was about to boot Burnt Paw into the street that day in March, to Ethan’s rise and fall, to the fire and the loss of the mill. In distress, Jamie listened intently. At last I said, “All this to explain that I can’t afford a rowboat. After the supplies I’ve bought in the last week, I have twenty dollars to my name. Jamie, I’m back in poverty’s basement.”

  She heaved a sigh. “We’ve landed there together then—add my wealth to yours and we have sixty dollars.”

  It was my turn to be surprised and dismayed. “There’s no money to be made on the stage?”

  “That’s not it—I was one of the lucky few. We were making so much money it seemed like water out of a faucet, but Father kept spending like there was no tomorrow. After his life in the bush, mostly trading for whatever he needed, spending was a novelty he couldn’t resist. When he died I had little more than enough to get back to the North. It cost fifteen hundred dollars to get here from Philadelphia!”

  I told her of my vow to buy the mill back from Cornelius Donner, that I’d thought I could accomplish it by staking a claim in Nome.

  “You might get there in time to stake a worthwhile claim—it depends on the extent of those golden beaches. But there must be several thousand people already there, with more on the way.”

  “I know—I’m ill thinking about it.”

  “I’d almost prefer our chances of winning the race, even if we can’t afford a skiff. Your canoe—as far as it would take us—will be our good luck charm.”

  “I always fancied you were born with a paddle in your hands.”

  “Funny you said that—Father always said so. He would like our chances as far as the river will take us. I believe we could arrange the gear in such a way that one of us could sleep on it while the other paddled. We could be hundreds of miles ahead when we reach the sea.”

  “At the mouth of the Yukon, we trade for an oceangoing craft?”

  With a nod, Jamie said, “I can’t picture if the racers will attempt to cross the sound or will be forced to hug the coastline all the way to Nome. The latter, I would think. The only thing we know for sure is that there’s much more that we don’t know than what we do know.”

  I laughed. “That’s what will make it an adventure. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it—if only there were a bridge.”

  Jamie chuckled at my nonsense.

  “What will you do with your half of the prize money?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Aren’t you counting your chickens a little early?”

  “I’m just being optimistic. What do you say, then?”

  Her eyes were lit with competitive fire. “If we’re going to Nome anyway, to try our chances on those golden beaches, why not join the race? If we fail, and then we go bust prospecting, we’ll work our way back to Dawson by winter, chopping boiler wood for the riverboats if necessary. We can’t be much broker than we are now.”

  “We’re partners, then!”

  “Partners!”

  “Good. Splendid. I was afraid…”

  “Afraid of what, Jason?”

  “I was afraid that with it being just the two of us, you wouldn’t.”

  Her hazel eyes, dead serious, met mine. “I trust you, Jason. You’re a gentleman. I know you.”

  “Thank you,” I replied. “Yes, you’ll always be able to trust me.”

  “Let’s hurry, then! We have so much to do and so little time. My clothes will be useless on the river. I need to find trousers and shirts and such. Gum boots…a wide-brimmed prospector’s hat like yours.”

  “Men’s clothes, like you wore coming over the Chilkoot.”

  “Yes, or the country will eat me alive—especially the mosquitoes. I don’t suppose that any woman on the trail was less a woman for wearing practical clothes.”

  “I hope your hair isn’t an inconvenience.”

  “You like it long? It’s much longer than when you saw me last.”

  “I love it past your shoulders like that. It would be a great tragedy if you had to cut it.”

  I realized I was blushing.

  Jamie giggled and gave me a poke. “Then I won’t.”

  On the morning of June 15, race day, the riverbank was bedlam. With several hours left until the noon starting gun, 329 teams of two had already registered for the Great Race. Add to those 329 boats the eleven steamboats now docked in Dawson and the various and sundry craft not participating in the race, and it was only by luck that we found a sliver of water to float our canoe. With all the shouting and the comings and goings on all sides as the boats were being loaded, it was a scene of the utmost confusion.

  Abe and Ethan helped us load. They were nearly as excited as we. I should have known I could count on my brothers. They’d given us our fifty-dollar entry fee, which allowed us to complete our outfit with our funds. At the last, Jamie spent six dollars on a shotgun of the same make as her father’s, shells to go with it, and a canoe paddle for a spare. Five dollars was all we had left to spend downriver.

  It was ten minutes before noon when Jamie stowed the shotgun under the lashing that crisscrossed the oilskin tarp covering our gear. “All set,” she said, giving her wide-brimmed hat a good tug on her forehead. She’d braided her hair into a lively black
rope that swung back and forth as she worked.

  Abe and Ethan were watching, their eyes twinkling. The men on either side were equally entranced—we were wedged between two skiffs, each of which had two rowing stations. “What do you aim to do with that shotgun, miss?” a grizzled fellow asked her. “Blast your competitors?”

  “If we run out of grub,” Jamie told him good-naturedly.

  “Cannibals in the race, Harry. What is the world coming to?”

  “How do you aim to cross the Norton Sound in that wee bucket?” called an Irishman from the skiff on the opposite side.

  “We’ve got a balloon in our outfit,” I volunteered. “We aim to inflate it, tie on with the canoe, and fly to Nome. It’s legal, I hear. You watch for us—we’ll wave.”

  There was laughter all around.

  Jamie and I shook hands with my brothers. They wished us Godspeed. Burnt Paw seemed to know exactly what was going on, and was leaping around us like a jack-in-the-box. Anticipating the starting gun, I snatched up my paddle and made ready to board. Suddenly Burnt Paw launched himself into the canoe.

  “I’d say he wants to go with you,” Ethan observed.

  The men on either side were now seated in their rowing stations and poised for the gun. They barely cracked a grin at our foolishness.

  I grabbed Burnt Paw and set him down on the bank. He immediately lifted the one paw up, with the wrist slack. “You be a good boy,” I said.

  He whined and he whimpered.

  “Take him with you for good luck,” Ethan insisted. “You never know when he might come in handy.”

  “One minute!” a voice from upriver boomed.

  I boarded and, keeping low, made for the bow. Standing in six inches of water in her gum boots, Jamie pushed off enough to float the canoe free. She stepped carefully into the stern; then we paddled a few strokes until we were abreast of the bows of the neighboring skiffs.

  Jamie took a look around. She gave me a smile more golden than the midnight sun. “Take a deep breath, Jason.”

  I heard Burnt Paw’s shrill bark. I heard my brothers calling “Good luck!” and “Ho for Nome!” The starting gun went off, loud as a cannon.

  Amid the shouts and the cheers and the splashing of oars, it was pandemonium.

  “Watch our smoke!” I yelled. “Nome or bust!”

  Jamie and I started paddling in earnest, and our canoe shot forward. With a glance over my shoulder toward my brothers, as I freed a hand to give them a last wave, I saw Burnt Paw in the river. Waterworthy as any muskrat, he was paddling after us with all his might.

  I stopped paddling, I was laughing so hard. “Jamie!” I cried. “Look behind us!”

  Here came that mongrel, with only his black-and-white face above water, his ears hinged forward with determination. The shore was slipping away; my brothers were bent over laughing. We were about to be swept into the boils at the edge of the main current.

  Jamie spun the canoe sideways so that Burnt Paw would have a wider target. I stowed my paddle and made the catch. “Down the Yukon!” Jamie shouted. “Three for Nome!”

  TWELVE

  Burnt Paw shook himself out, ran atop the gear to Jamie, then back to me in an instant, his bent tail wagging faster than I’d ever seen it. I lifted him high so my brothers could see he hadn’t drowned, then set him down and retrieved my paddle as they gave us a last wave.

  The lower end of Front Street was sliding by, and shortly we were under the landslide scar downstream of Dawson.

  A few minutes later, almost at the rear of the fleet, we entered the farewell bend. We stopped paddling and looked upstream over our shoulders. “There it goes,” Jamie said, and we watched the Golden City disappear as if, after all, it were only an illusion. There went its hotels and dance halls, its warehouses, all the houses and cabins dotting the hills.

  Suddenly there was only the wilderness, the bush, with no hint of civilization along the Yukon’s shores.

  Yet on all sides we were hemmed in by boats. “Let’s see if we can put some of them behind us!” Jamie called from the stern, and I replied joyously, “It will be my pleasure!”

  Stroke after stroke, I paddled hard, not so fast that I’d run short of breath or throw Jamie off behind me, but with all the controlled power I could muster.

  At the back of the canoe, Jamie was steering as well as paddling. She had an uncanny sense for where the current ran swiftest, and always kept us in the fastest water. With the last fraction of every stroke, she adjusted the canoe’s direction while staying in tandem with my paddle.

  We were flying. We were overtaking the scows that were nothing more than clumsy platforms of milled lumber, the crude log rafts that wallowed in the troughs between the swells, even the skiffs with two men rowing. Some of the oarsmen nearly burst their lungs trying to match us before they lay up, panting.

  Standing at the big sweep oars of the scows or straining at the oars of rowed boats, nearly everyone we passed put in their two cents’ worth: “What’s the hurry? You off to a fire?” “Did somebody tell you there’s a race going on?” “Criminy, we’re being passed by a girl.” “Haven’t you heard—Nome is upstream.” “I think I’ve seen that girl somewhere before.” “Is that yapper a dog or a water rat?” “Watch your talk, Clarence, that animal’s got a shotgun and he no doubt shoots straighter than you.”

  “Don’t worry, they’ll have to take that canoe ashore in order to sleep,” we heard more than a few times, but we were fairly certain our competition was underestimating our capacity for discomfort.

  All the while Burnt Paw ran back and forth on the gear, barking shrilly. We advised him to desist, but he had a mind of his own. Amid the confusion we just kept paddling, giving friendly waves when the faces were friendly. They almost always were.

  The Yukon in this first stretch was running narrow and swift at the bottom of a fjordlike defile. Six miles from Dawson, according to my map, here came Fort Reliance, an abandoned trading post. We quit paddling as we watched it glide by on the right. We drank from our water flasks. The wind had come up, and with all the lint blowing from the cottonwoods lining the river, we were in the midst of a sort of snowstorm. We could barely make out the leaders downriver; there weren’t very many of them. “We got here awful fast,” I observed.

  Jamie pulled from her pocket the gold watch that had been her father’s and opened it up. “Forty-five, maybe fifty minutes,” she reported.

  “So we’re going about eight miles an hour, right? Let’s figure out how many days it will take us to reach the mouth of the river.”

  “That would be…around eight days,” Jamie said, squinting her eyes as she calculated. “If we paddled at this rate every hour of every day.” Then she broke out laughing.

  “I guess you’re right. We can’t expect to be logging eight miles an hour all the way down the Yukon. But it gives us something to aim for.”

  “Look, another Peterborough!” Jamie exclaimed. She pointed downstream at a sliver of bright green barely visible for all the blowing seed. The other canoe rounded a bend and disappeared from sight.

  The wind died, and the Yukon wore a downy coat from bank to bank. Above the steep spruce-clad hills shooting out of the river, snow-streaked summits reared their bald heads.

  Some hours later we came up on the gold camp at Fortymile, so named because it was forty miles downstream from Fort Reliance. We’d succeeded in putting all our competition behind us except the canoe. Our only stop had been a brief one, on a willowy gravel bar midstream. I answered the call of nature on one side of the bar and Jamie on the other. We ate a few hard biscuits and some dried fruit, then jumped back into the canoe.

  We caught sight of the other Peterborough as it was making a stop on a tongue of land where the Yukon was joined by Fortymile Creek. A church steeple showed through the cottonwoods, as well as a Mountie post and a small cluster of log cabins. Nowadays it was a ghost town, but Fortymile had been a thriving gold camp three years before, when Dawson was nothing but an
unnamed mud flat.

  As the two men from the canoe were putting back in the river again, we floated up and paddled close for a friendly hello. Their canoe, I noticed, had a distinctive red arrow painted on the bow.

  I was shocked to recognize the tall man in the stern from his handlebar mustache and granite face. The Sydney Mauler didn’t recognize me. I wondered for a moment who his partner was. The man in the bow looked over his shoulder at me and grinned. I thought I might know him; I had to look twice. Though the roughhewn clothing wasn’t recognizable, the full beard and the sneer were. It was Cornelius Donner.

  Burnt Paw, growling suddenly, recognized him too.

  Donner said to his partner, “Sydney, I believe we’ve been overhauled by the Hawthorn pup and his vicious mastiff!”

  “Donner and Brackett,” I whispered to Jamie. “The two I told you about. Be on your guard.”

  “Hawthorn?” Brackett mumbled. “Any relation to Lucky Ethan Hawthorn?”

  “He’s the boxer’s kid brother,” Donner explained.

  “Boxer? Human punching bag if you ask me.”

  “His kid brother here is more of a wrestler.”

  Brackett squinted at me. “Wrestler, eh? Could’ve fooled me.”

  “The girl must provide the power,” Donner mocked. “How else could Hawthorn have caught us?”

  “He must have told her this would be a picnic, Cornelius.”

  “Who is your partner, Hawthorn?”

  “My name is Dunavant,” Jamie broke in. “Jamie Dunavant. Say what you please, we aim to win.”

  “In which case,” Donner snapped, “Hawthorn plans to give the prize money to me. Or hasn’t he told you?”

  “Why are you in the race?” I demanded of Donner. “Not for the money, certainly.”

  “For the glory of sport,” Brackett answered instead, as his eyes, with detectable trepidation, scanned our Peterborough. “You mark my words—I won’t be beat by a Hawthorn twice.”

  The canoes were starting to drift apart. I did nothing to lessen the gap.

  Donner said, “You must think I’m a prophet, Hawthorn.”