Down the Yukon

by Will Hobbs

  “Sure, I told ’em. I told ’em you go up the Kaltag River as far as you can go, cross over near Old Woman Mountain, then you go down Unalakleet River on the other side.”

  “Is it steep, the crossing between the two rivers?”

  “Not steep. Swampy, lots of bugs. They tried to pay me twenty dollars to come with ’em. I just laugh. Too many bugs, an’ I’m going to fish camp anyway.”

  “Will anyone be at Kaltag?” I asked. “In case we need more directions?”

  “Maybe not. Everybody at fish camp this time of year.”

  “You’ve helped us,” Jamie said. “Is there anything we can give you?”

  He pointed toward Burnt Paw and chuckled. “Maybe dat big sled dog.”

  “You’d have to catch half the salmon in this river to feed him,” I said in the same spirit. “He’s got a pretty big appetite.”

  “Maybe not, then.”

  We paddled up the greenish Kaltag River accompanied by hundreds of salmon swimming in the same direction a fathom or two below. Beneath them the gray bottom was paved with the half-skeletal, half-decaying remains of their predecessors who’d washed down from upstream.

  After several miles the Kaltag River resembled a creek, narrow in spots and rushing between banks covered with alders. We had to get out and walk. I pulled the canoe forward with a length of rope while Jamie nudged it around rocks and downed logs. The water poured in over the tops of our gum boots. It had been so long since our socks were dry that we took no notice.

  The stench of decaying salmon was thick and oppressive. We took our time moving forward, calling out as we approached every bend so as not to surprise a bear. Their enormous tracks were everywhere in the mud. These were grizzlies. Our shotgun shells would be of no use against them. Our birdshot might not even penetrate their skin.

  Burnt Paw stood at the bow of the canoe surveying the salmon. His head jerked comically from one side to the other as the big fish made furious runs upstream through the shallows. The salmon were greenish, with upright purple bars decorating their sides. They were in so little water at times that their dorsal fins sliced the air. Their violent movements and the closeness of them aroused the predator in Burnt Paw. Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer—he leapt from the canoe and chased after them.

  After half a dozen chases, he caught one. The fish was as long as my forearm, already disintegrating from the tail up, but full of fight. The salmon thrashed in his jaws as the mutt held it up, the motion tossing his head back and forth. Burnt Paw was proud but at a loss what to do next.

  “I don’t want it,” I told him.

  “That’s a dog salmon you have there,” Jamie told him. “The kind the Indians feed their dogs. Not considered the best eating by humans. It’s all yours.”

  Exhausted by his catch or discouraged, perhaps, by Jamie’s low opinion of it, Burnt Paw released the salmon on the cobbles. It was a hook-jawed male, and there appeared to be a sort of fungus growing over its fins and eyes. In all likelihood the fish was blind.

  The creek was getting shallower all the time. Before long, I knew, I’d have to carry the canoe over my head.

  Affected no doubt by all the dead and dying salmon, my thoughts turned gloomy. The portage might be too difficult. We might not find the river down to the sea.

  “Hello, bear,” Jamie kept calling. “Don’t want to surprise you, bear.”

  Around a bend my eyes fell on two sets of gum boot tracks in the mud. “Look here,” I said. “I’m afraid we know who made these.”

  Jamie’s eyes went from the tracks to the ominously thick alders lining the route ahead. Burnt Paw perked up his ears. We listened.

  All we could hear was the wind in the trees, the water rushing over the cobbles, and the buzzing of mosquitoes.

  Now we really had something to be worried about.

  NINETEEN

  When at last we couldn’t rope the canoe through the shallows any longer, we had to climb out of the creek banks and look for the portage trail.

  We couldn’t find one.

  On both sides of the creek we found mossy bear trails with deep, alternating foot wells the size of dinner plates. Jamie and I looked at each other with eyes wide. “I’ve never seen the like,” she said. “In the interior the bears don’t get this big. The salmon must be the difference.”

  There was no apparent man trail. We remembered the warning that this was a winter route, and reasoned that winter passage here by sleds and dogs had left no mark on the land.

  With the canoe over my head, the middle thwart biting into my shoulders and the weight of my packsack in addition, it was easy to see why neither the Indians from the Yukon nor the Eskimos from the coast were fond of this route in summer.

  Unable to free a hand to swat the mosquitoes swarming my face, and with the ground softening by the minute, I understood better and better.

  We found our head nets, but I lacked the strength or the will to shoulder the canoe again. I looked at Jamie, saw utter exhaustion in her face. Her packsack was heavier than mine; I could see her staring at it on the ground. The limit to her endurance was bound to be close if I’d nearly reached mine.

  “I’m done in,” I said.

  “We’ve gone far enough,” she agreed. “The sun will set in an hour. I can’t even remember when we slept last. We can only do so much.”

  We backed into the spruce forest where the mosquitoes were fewer and built a smoky fire to keep them at bay. We brewed tea and we ate dried salmon and bannock cakes. With our strength revived a little, we took the saw, made poles, and erected the tent. We draped our big piece of netting over the entire tent. As we got into our bedrolls I mumbled a worry about our dried salmon and the bears. With a yawn Jamie said, “The bears have plenty of fresh salmon; they won’t care for dried.”

  “I’m happy to hear that,” I said.

  We were facing each other, and our lips were only inches apart. Her eyes were closed. I touched my lips to hers. After a moment, she kissed me back, lightly. I freed a hand and stroked her hair. She opened her eyes and found mine.

  “Dawson City seems so far away, Jason.”

  “I know. We’re a whole lot closer to Nome than Dawson. But honestly, today I had my doubts.”

  She put her hand to my cheek. “I have a feeling it’s going to get harder. But we can’t give up. We’ve come too far.”

  “You’re still undaunted.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the women I met climbing the Chilkoot Pass with loads on their backs. Even when it was straight up at the last and too difficult to be believed, I never saw one give up.”

  “Me neither, and I spent a lot of time on the Chilkoot.”

  “All the same, I feel like I’ve been beat with a stick over every inch of my body. Jason, we have to reduce the weight. What can we get rid of?”

  “Any number of things, I hope. Wait a minute, I’m still carrying Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root.”

  “You actually have that? What is it?”

  “A liquid, I can tell you that much. A fellow back in Dawson threw it into my outfit for free.”

  “Don’t dump it in a stream. It might kill all the salmon.”

  Chuckling at the thought, I whispered, “I’m drawing strength from you, Jamie.”

  “And I from you. Keep remembering about getting the mill back, Jason. No matter what, we can’t let that murderer get his hands on our twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars,” I whispered, and then I slept like the dead.

  We woke to birds squawking and Burnt Paw growling. A pair of ravens had landed on our packsacks and were tearing at the heavy canvas with their powerful black beaks. Burnt Paw surprised one of them with a coiled leap and came back to earth with tail feathers in his mouth. The ravens flew to a nearby tree and squawked what I presumed to be profanities at him until we were under way again. The sun was far above the horizon. By Jamie’s watch it was seven in the morning.

  Ten miles off, perhaps, a lone
mountain rose in the distance. Old Woman Mountain, we figured. By a stretch of the imagination we could even make out head and feet.

  The tracks of our enemies in the soft ground began to aim to the right, to pass the mountain on the north.

  Having no desire to run into them, we aimed to the left, to clear the mountain on the south.

  Jamie walked in front with the heavy packsack, the shotgun tied on the back with slipknots.

  The bow of the canoe blocked my view. Mostly I kept my eyes on the ground, careful to choose the best footing to support the weight I was carrying. I had a close view of the fine spruce-root cordage that fastened the gunwales, and my nostrils were full of the scent of spruce pitch from all the caulking that waterproofed the canoe. I tried to think about how light this canoe was compared to the Peterborough. Birchbark, thin slats of birchwood, rootlets, pitch, that’s all it was.

  That’s all.

  Why did it bite so fiercely into my shoulders, and why did the back of my neck feel as if it had been gored by a bull?

  The divide that separated the Yukon from the Bering Sea was not a high one, thank God, with the exception of Old Woman Mountain, which we were skirting. The climbing was steady but never steep, through birch and aspen thickets and underneath the dark spruce forest. Our constant companions were ravens and gray jays. Burnt Paw chased red squirrels and nearly got himself a noseful of porcupine quills before I managed to call him back, just in time. Game trails were everywhere, with sign of moose and smaller droppings we guessed were left by caribou.

  In the forest we could no longer see Old Woman Mountain. I couldn’t tell west from east. Jamie had grown up nearly at this latitude and seemed to have a sense of direction from the position of the circling sun and the time of day. I was hopeful that our enemies were thoroughly lost.

  When at last we crested the hills, the vast land spreading before us and to both sides took us by surprise. It was treeless. We were looking at an immense expanse of tundra barrens dotted with ponds and lakes but lacking anything like a river canyon.

  Carefully, I lowered the canoe to one knee, then to the ground. “Where, in all that, might the Unalakleet River be hiding?”

  Jamie shook her head. “If we can’t find it, it’s going to be a long walk to the sea.”

  We made our way down out of the hills and onto the barrens, where the spongy mosses and white lichens gave with every step. We had to skirt the muskeg swamps, and the ponds grew in size and number. The mosquitoes were a maddening, droning horde and would have made short work of our sanity if not for the netting and our gloves. Midday, the wind came up in advance of ribbed clouds speeding inland and kept the mosquitoes at bay.

  We kept slogging, endlessly. At last the sky was a riot of reds and oranges. The sun was close to setting. I put the canoe down and threw myself next to it on my back.

  We hadn’t found a river.

  I doubted I could continue. Jamie must have felt the same. “My suggestion is,” she said wearily, “we give up for today and sleep.”

  There were bushes nearby with scraps of dead wood, but we were too exhausted to make a fire, even a small one for tea. There were no poles for pitching our tent. We sank the blades of our canoe paddles in the tundra and draped the tent over them as best we could.

  As we were about to crawl under the canvas we heard a gunshot, and then a second.

  We strained to see where the blasts had come from. We made out, across the undulations of the tundra, a mother bear and two small cubs running in our general direction, in all likelihood from the gunfire. They seemed to be fleeing an unnatural feature beyond them, a tiny patch of white—a tarp or tent. Now we made out the figures of two men over there.

  “No doubt it’s Donner and Brackett,” I whispered. “Let’s keep down. Maybe they won’t notice us way over here.”

  “Are the bears still coming our way?”

  “They’re down in a swale. They could’ve turned another direction. No way to tell which way they’re moving.”

  Burnt Paw hadn’t seen the threat, but the gunshots and the tone of our voices had him sheltering right between us where we lay.

  Bears move fast. It took little time to find out they’d kept running in our direction. A short while later, bounding out of the swale, here they came. They were startled to suddenly find us in front of them. All three of them, the mother and her little cubs, stood on hind legs and inspected us from no more than fifty feet.

  I knew black bears, and these weren’t black bears. They were brown bears, wide-faced, with humps on their backs and long claws on their front feet. Grizzlies.

  The cubs wheeled away to the side, but their mother didn’t. She woofed a couple of times, clacked her teeth, laid back her ears, then came charging right for us. We were still on our bellies, and I reached instinctively for the shotgun an arm’s length away. I came to my senses and let it be.

  No more than ten feet away, the mother grizzly rose to her full height and let out a horrible roar. The stench from her gut washed over us. One moment I felt Burnt Paw’s trembling body at my side, the next he let out a yelp and ran the opposite way.

  The grizzly swayed on her hind feet, watching Burnt Paw go, watching us. Now that she could see exactly what we were, she wheeled in the direction of her cubs.

  As soon as the grizzly had her cubs at her side, she stood up for another look at us, the cubs doing the same; then she woofed and laid her ears back again.

  “Oh, no,” I heard Jamie whisper, as here came the grizzly, charging fast and furious as before. Jamie’s hand found mine and we held on tight.

  As before, the grizzly pulled up short, stood, roared, and roared again.

  Once again, it proved only a warning. She went to all fours, retreated slightly, glanced once over her shoulder at us, then bounded back to her cubs. This time she collected them and was gone.

  “I just died of fright,” Jamie told me.

  “You’re not the only one. Where’s Burnt Paw?”

  “He’ll come back. Poor fellow—he was so scared.”

  An hour later Burnt Paw wasn’t back, and an hour after that, with the sun rising again, he still hadn’t returned. “Maybe we should just go to sleep,” Jamie suggested. “He’ll come back.”

  “If he’s lost, should we take the time to search for him?”

  “You should decide that.”

  I thought hard. “I can’t leave him,” I said finally. “Darned dog.”

  I got in my bag. Before long I heard Jamie’s breathing start to come with a little whistle. I was about to let myself fall into exhaustion’s tomb as well, when my thoughts turned to Donner and Brackett. My breathing came fast; I was filled with dread. Without doubt they’d seen our tent. They’d know it was us. What would they do if they caught us unawares?

  They wouldn’t come after us, I realized, they’d come after the canoe—just like before. With birchbark it would take so little.

  I slipped out of my bedroll. Keeping low to the ground, I took the shotgun with me and hid behind the scrub willows at a spot that gave me a line of sight at the approach to our camp and our canoe.

  I waited.

  TWENTY

  It wasn’t an hour before a bit of motion between the scrub willows caught my eye. It was Donner, keeping low with an ax in one hand, a rifle in the other.

  I held my position and let him keep coming. Donner halted behind the last piece of scrub between him and the canoe, then peeked around the side of the willows at the canoe and the tent.

  Put the rifle down, I thought. To bash the canoe in, you need both hands on the ax.

  Donner put the rifle down on the ground, and then he put the ax down. Eyes constantly on the tent door, he touched his hand to the hilt of the sheath knife at his side.

  Donner started out across the clearing empty-handed, but now his hand was going to the knife again. I understood clear as day. He’d seen we had a birchbark canoe, not the Peterborough. The knife would be quieter.

  “Don’t,�
� I said in a low voice.

  Donner swiveled toward me as I rose to my knees, keeping the barrel aimed at his heart. His face was a sunburned mask of surprise, all welted above his beard from mosquito bites. He’d lost his hat and lacked mosquito netting, and I didn’t feel a bit sorry for him.

  “Touch that knife and I’ll blow you to kingdom come,” I told him.

  He must have thought I meant it. I wasn’t sure if I did or not. I only knew he might be able to throw that knife.

  Donner broke into a broad smile. “Hawthorn, it’s you!”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  He was using his phony voice on me, the soothing one. Watch it, I told myself. This is a murderer.

  “I aim to let Jamie sleep. She needs it. What are you doing here, Donner?”

  “Come to see if our neighbors were okay, of course. Put the shotgun down, Hawthorn, there’s no call for it.”

  “Why did you bring a rifle and an ax?”

  “It’s bear country, or haven’t you noticed? I came over to see if whoever was here was okay. We scared some grizzlies away from our camp. They ran this direction. You must have seen them.”

  “Oh, we saw them. Have you seen my dog?”

  “Scared off, was he? That’s too bad. We’ll sure keep our eyes open. For God’s sake put the shotgun aside, Hawthorn. What’s eating you?”

  “Don’t you remember our Peterborough?”

  “Of course—it was just like ours. I suppose you’ve traded it for a lighter one, same as us. What of it?”

  “You felled a tree on it back in the Flats.”

  Donner feigned surprise. “Surely you don’t think me capable of such an act.”

  “Oh, I do. Not only that, I think you came over here to find out if your neighbors—whoever they might be—had a canoe. From what happened to us back in the Flats, I’d say you take this race far too seriously.”

  He snorted. “We’ll complete it, for sport, but we’ve lost our chance of winning. We’ve been wandering around lost the last two days with no idea where to put our canoe in the water. The natives give such flimsy directions.”