by Will Hobbs
A few minutes later we were back in our canoe and paddling a wide arc around the little sternwheeler and the Moonlight Hotel. To my dismay, Donner and Brackett were outside the hotel now, by the front door. And they were staring at us.
We didn’t say a word, just kept paddling.
They didn’t call, they didn’t wave, they just stood there like granite.
Jamie and I didn’t speak until we’d slipped into the labyrinth of sloughs and channels of the island-studded Yukon Flats. “They don’t seem to be following,” I whispered. Sound, I knew, carries uncannily far over water.
“Do they suspect we overheard them?” Jamie fretted.
“They might. Donner must suspect his own shadow.”
“We have to be watchful. We have to stay out of their way.”
“Agreed,” I said, swatting at a sudden swarm of mosquitoes. They had descended on us with a vengeance.
Now that the Yukon was fingering its way among a welter of islands, we couldn’t paddle to the center of the river to get away from them. Quick as we might, we pulled on our head nets and reached for our gloves.
Safe despite the whine and the buzz, I started to talk faster than I could think. “A fire in Omaha—a business he owned—a man died. Donner—or whatever his name really is—was the co-owner of the Bodega Saloon in Dawson, Jamie, along with the man who died in the fire. Watson, his name was. When Watson died, Donner became the sole owner. The great fire this April started upstairs in the Bodega Saloon!”
“How?”
“They thought it was an accident. The bartender carried Watson upstairs, dead drunk, and put him in his bed. The Mounties concluded that Watson must have roused himself enough to light a candle in a block of wood, then fell unconscious again.”
“You don’t suppose Donner was in the saloon when his partner was carried upstairs….”
“I know he was. I was on the street outside when Donner came out yelling ‘Fire!’ When the bartender returned downstairs, Donner must have slipped upstairs and lit the candle, knowing what would happen. First he lit the fire, then he announced it!”
“You know what, I’ll bet anything it was a partner of Donner’s who died in the fire in Omaha. The detective will discover the pattern. That’s why Donner can’t go back to Dawson. I wonder if he was seen going upstairs…. I bet he had the Bodega Saloon insured.”
“He did. He rebuilt it.”
“The detective will find out that Cornelius Donner hasn’t been seen in Dawson since—”
“Since the day that the race started! And the names of Donner and Brackett will appear on the Alaska Commercial Company’s records. That bloodhound Donner is worried about will turn around and track him downriver.”
“The question is, By the time the detective figures all this out, can he get to Nome before Donner does? He might have to track him to Australia.”
“Here’s another question, Jamie. Did you hear Donner mention a shortcut? If he really knows one, how is anyone—including us—going to get to Nome before he does? Where could that shortcut be?”
“Around the mouth of the Yukon? Close to the ocean, the river splits into so many channels, maybe the fastest route can be navigated only by canoe. Maybe you can only reach it by carrying the canoe on a portage path. I only wish I knew!”
The river continued to unravel within the vast swamp called the Flats. It was impossible to tell side channels from the main channel because there was no main channel. Our map was useless. We were definitely not making eight miles an hour anymore—far from it. The Flats were an immensely complicated web of moving water, sloughs, ponds, and islands, all teeming with life. We saw moose browsing belly-deep for greenery growing from the bottom and black bears swimming the river. A humpbacked grizzly rose from the blueberries, stood, and squinted at us as we passed silently by. Tens of thousands of geese, ducks, and cranes were on the water and in the sky.
Untold billions of mosquitoes tempered our enjoyment of this wild pageant. They rose from the muskeg swamps and swarmed upon us like a biblical plague.
I would have expected little current in a section of the river called the Flats, but the current was relentless, furious at times. The whirlpools that formed where channels converged, sometimes three channels at once, would have tipped us over if we hadn’t braced and paddled our way carefully through them.
The river swept us across sixty-six and one-half degrees, north latitude: the Arctic Circle. We knew it had happened when midnight next came. At midnight, the sun dipped near the horizon, danced along it, then rose. It never set, but instead continued on its great circle around the sky. We prayed for wind to drive the mosquitoes away, and our prayers were answered with booming thunder and a storm that had us donning all the wool we’d brought and our oilskin raincoats in addition.
The storm kept coming and we kept paddling. We were overtaking boats now, always with a glance over the shoulder for the other Peterborough which, gratefully, we never spied. We passed Fort Yukon, the biggest Indian village on the river and consequently the biggest trading post, without a stop. In a driving rain we could barely make out its cabins and the wide Porcupine River coming in from the northeast.
Sometimes the wind came in gusts and lifted sheets of water off the river and drove it in our faces. I’d bail with a coffee can, fast as I could, while Jamie at the stern kept paddling. Sometimes the water turned so violent we were in danger of swamping, and we had to go to shore and huddle under the stunted timber.
In between the squalls the weather improved, still cloudy but with a steady breeze that kept the mosquitoes at bay. We were desperate for a warm meal, and at the mouth of the Chandalar I shot a goose. To our great surprise Burnt Paw leapt from the canoe and proved himself a retriever of more than hats, no matter that the goose was bigger than he was. We took the time to make a fire and cook. We warmed ourselves with tea, picked blueberries, and made a bannock cake in the skillet. Nests were everywhere. We added fried eggs to our feast and hard-boiled dozens for later. Afterward we bathed separately at the bank, behind the willows.
The storm kept coming, yet we put back on the river. We had to stay especially vigilant on these floodwaters because there were not only sweepers clinging to the banks, but numbers of trees washing right down the river. Several times we witnessed the Yukon in the act of undermining its cutbanks and toppling tall cottonwoods.
In the midst of a downpour, Jamie told me, “I wouldn’t trade this adventure for all the gold in the Klondike and Nome put together.”
“What can the river throw at us that it hasn’t already?” I replied.
“Don’t ask!”
Since Fort Yukon, the river had been swinging to the southwest. When the storm cleared we found ourselves below the Arctic Circle once again. For half an hour around midnight the sun hid behind the horizon and a luminous arctic glow filled the sky. The same glow filled my heart. I loved that girl more than I could ever say. I’d never felt so alive.
It had been three or four days since Circle City—we’d lost track—and we knew we must be bound to leave the Flats soon. The river was still a maze of channels and islands, sloughs and sweepers. We were eager to have the Yukon come together again.
At one of the countless places where the waters branched, we could see, to our left a quarter mile or more away and off on a minor channel, a scow that had been beached on the upriver end of a gravel island by the receding water. We could make out a man and a woman knee-deep in the river and struggling with long poles to lever their scow free. On the scow, two small children stood by the entrance of the tent and watched.
Suddenly the man and the woman spied us. The man climbed onto the scow, snatched up a rifle, and began to fire shots into the air. Immediately, Jamie tried to swerve the canoe in the direction of the channel where they’d run aground, while I added sweeping stokes to try to make the turn. We kept struggling, but the current in our channel was overpowering and swept us past the entrance to theirs. We were swept around the right sid
e of a large island covered with cottonwoods that separated the two channels.
“Do you think we can get to them—give them a hand?” I yelled to Jamie, and she hollered back, “Let’s try.”
We paddled for shore and beached the canoe on the island, tied it securely, and scrambled for what might prove helpful: ax, saw, and our hundred-foot coil of spare rope.
Just as we were about to start into the woods, here came the green canoe shooting by, with the murderer in the bow, the boxer in the stern. The starch had gone out of the Mauler’s handlebar mustache.
Perhaps out of awkwardness, the fright that came with seeing them, I raised my hand and gave them a wave. With no wave in return, the two stared at us as they passed, then resumed paddling. They were soon out of sight.
We hesitated, knowing we could lose hours here. I was shaking with frustration. “There’s no justice if those two win,” I said, “but that family over there needs us.”
“Forget those scoundrels,” Jamie said. “We may not be able to get over to that scow once we cross this island, but we can try. We have to try.”
SIXTEEN
The island proved to be hundreds of yards wide. The crossing was painfully slow through a morass of driftpiles, muck, rock, forest, mosquitoes, and muskeg. At last we were on the far side. We walked up the shore until we were opposite the scow. The family on the other side of the swift-running channel was surprised to see us. It had been an hour since they’d fired the shots, and we’d passed from view. The woman had changed from her dress into shirt and trousers.
We were separated by seventy-five feet of rushing water, but it was no more than knee-deep from the look of it. Jamie and I clasped hands, and we started across.
“Ve tank you,” cried the man and the woman, with deep emotion, as we waded alongside their scow. Jamie had crossed with Burnt Paw in one arm. She set him down on the scow, much to the delight of two big-eyed children, a boy and a girl, three and five years old from appearances. Burnt Paw wagged his bent tail and let them very cautiously and delicately pet him.
Like their parents, the children were round-faced and blond. The little girl, like her mother, wore her hair in pigtails.
“Ve much tankful,” said the man, who wasn’t much older than Abe. “I make a bad judgment back der. Most of vater going right, but dis scow, she seemed to vant to go dis vay and I tought, ‘Let her go.’”
“Ve been here hours,” the woman explained. “Vait for vater to come back up—maybe it not gonna.”
“Are you from Germany?” Jamie asked.
“From Svee-den,” the woman replied.
“Are you in the race to Nome, like us?”
“Ve hear about race,” the man said, “from some a dese people ve see, but ve not race. Ve try to get up Koyukuk River before vinter.”
“Before fall, Johan,” his wife corrected him.
“Ve go five hunnert mile up Koyukuk River. Past Arctic Circle. Get some moose, make a cabin, let it snow!”
I asked, “Is there gold up there?”
“Not so much. Ve jes vant to go live der. Prettiest place in whole vorld—I been der, got to go back with Ingrid.”
Jamie’s hazel eyes were sparkling. “I think I remember seeing the Koyukuk where it comes into the Yukon. It runs clear, doesn’t it?”
The man beamed a golden smile. “Five hunnert mile, clear as glass. Birch, big spruce, pine, bootiful mountains…moose, vild sheep, caribou, salmon, garten in summer, mebbe a little gold to buy supplies, couple Indian villages. Everybody friendly, no matter vat kind of people dey are, valk a hunnert mile to help you even in vinter. Dat’s paradise on dis earth, up dat Koyukuk River.”
Jamie and I looked at each other. I know what I was thinking. Maybe we should be going up that Koyukuk River with these Swedes.
We shook their hands and introduced ourselves.
“Let’s see if we can help get you unstuck and on your way to your Koyukuk River,” Jamie offered.
The scow was weighed down by a family’s outfit for a year: tools and clothing, flour and sugar and dried grub of all descriptions. After cutting two more poles, we tried to lever the scow free, all four of us, but we couldn’t budge it.
The only thing to be done was to unweight the scow. We set to work wading the supplies a hundred feet to dry ground. It was going to take a long time.
Not long after we started the unloading, I thought I heard the sound of ax blows in the distance. Standing in loud rushing water, I couldn’t be sure. Some stampeder making firewood, I supposed, if it was anything at all. The sound came and went, and then it was gone altogether. I didn’t give it another thought.
At last everything had been removed from the Swedes’ scow except the family’s canvas wall tent and their Yukon stove. The kids and Burnt Paw watched as Jamie, Ingrid, and I bent our backs to the poles while Johan, roped to the scow and out in front, pulled like an ox toward open water.
We budged it, then we budged it half a dozen more times, and finally the big floating platform of logs decked over with milled lumber came free. Johan jumped on and manned the big sweep oar, keeping the scow out in the current as it bumped and scraped its way into deeper water. I snatched the tie rope, and the rest of us ran alongside in the shallows. Several hundred yards downriver we managed to beach the brute of a craft on a gravel spit that speared out into deep water.
Then came the last of the ordeal. Piece by piece, we began to carry their outfit down the long cobbled beach. Ingrid and Johan begged us to rejoin our race, but they were in a race more urgent than ours—with winter—and we wanted to see them safely on their way. By now we’d learned that our friends, the Swensons, were hoping to catch a small steamboat that served the villages up the Koyukuk. The steamboat made the upriver run from the Yukon only once a summer, before the Koyukuk became too shallow for navigation, and that would be soon. If they missed the steamboat, their dream was at an end.
When we were done, Ingrid gave us a gunnysack of groceries, including several fresh bannock cakes baked with berries they’d picked. They made us promise to come find them up the Koyukuk one day so they could repay our kindness properly. I heard us both saying that we would.
At last we were able to push the Swensons off and wish them luck. We hadn’t realized it, but Burnt Paw was on the scow playing with the kids. Now that the scow was in motion, he raced back and forth across the deck, looking from the kids to us and back as if trying to make up his mind. I shouted, “It’s up to you, Burnt Paw!”
I’m not sure what it was that decided him. Maybe it was having heard how far north they were headed—his shorthaired coat was even less suited for the Koyukuk than it was for Dawson City. At any rate, Burnt Paw leapt into the shallow river and paddled his way to shore.
We felt awful good wading the channel, returning to the big island, and tramping back to the canoe. We were imagining what that upper Koyukuk River would look like. In my mind I was felling trees and building a log cabin.
When we cleared the cottonwoods and first caught sight of our canoe, it didn’t add up, what our eyes took in. It just couldn’t be.
Our hearts were in our throats. It just couldn’t be.
The canoe was under a tree, destroyed. The fallen trunk of a tall cottonwood had crushed it and cleaved it in two.
Our eyes went to the freshly hewn stump of the cottonwood. There were bright white chips all around its base and gum boot tracks everywhere in the mud.
“How could they have done this?” Jamie cried.
I was too stunned, too angry to speak. Two pairs of tracks along the shore led from downstream and returned in the same direction.
“They heard the gunshots,” Jamie said. “They saw the family in trouble, saw we’d stopped to help them.”
“And then they did this!” I stormed. Through tears of rage, I said, “Jamie, I don’t think we can salvage the canoe.”
“We can’t,” she agreed, unsuccessfully fighting back tears of her own.
We looked up and
down the river. We were utterly alone.
“It’s a matter of time before someone uses this channel,” I said. “Someone will come along. Donner and Brackett did.”
“They might have been following us down this channel. We haven’t been looking behind us.”
“No, we haven’t.”
“There are so many channels besides this one, we might be stuck here.” Jamie’s eyes fell on the broken canoe and our gear crushed under the trunk of the cottonwood. With a rueful laugh, she added, “Right now maybe I would trade this adventure for the combined gold of Nome and the Klondike.”
“We may be out of the race,” I said, “but we aren’t maimed or dead. That’s something, I suppose.”
A grim smile crossed her face. “I don’t know if it was a shred of decency, or if it was because they were in a hurry, but at least they didn’t take the time to destroy our gear. If this tree has broken any of our hard-boiled eggs I’m going to be really furious.”
Her smile forced one of my own. “Our canoe paddles are missing, but we’ve got all our tools—saw and ax, knives, rope, canvas, even some nails.” I was thinking hard, casting around for solutions. My eyes went upstream to a huge driftpile at the head of the island. I studied it closely—there were a number of splendid logs up there not that badly entangled.
Jamie’s eyes had followed mine. “A log raft?”
“We could make a couple of sweep oars and row standing up. For blades, we could saw a couple of three-foot sections from the canoe. Then we could nail and lash them to a couple of thin, stout poles—”
“There’ll be some alder or birch in that driftpile. You know, Jason, as long as we don’t ride on a boat with someone else, we’re still in the race. You never know what could happen. Maybe the opportunity will come along to exchange our raft for Father’s canoe. They think they’re so much faster than anyone else that they can afford to sleep on shore.”
“We’ll keep our eyes open. Wouldn’t that be something!”