BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  On impulse, I lift the pistol from my lap and lay it flat on the table, fingers over the trigger and the barrel toward Zimmerman.

  "Any chance you're carrying a knife?"

  Wincing as if I'd kicked him, he reaches into the breast pocket of his vest and pulls out a folding stag-handled knife that he lays on the table with a sigh.

  "My daddy gave me this knife the day I turned eighteen," he says. "Got my initials engraved on the blade."

  "Open it up."

  He squints at me and releases the catch; the gleaming blade snaps open. It's long and looks well tended. I slide the gun out of the way and gesture toward the pockmarked table surface between us.

  "Go ahead," I say. "Carve the river."

  His eyes light up and he almost laughs but nods instead. I keep my hand on the grip but ease the pistol back to my lap as Zimmerman inverts the knife above the table. He slowly advances it toward me, checks my countenance to make sure I'm not reacting poorly, and then drives the knife point firmly into the wood where my side of the table meets the wall.

  He pulls the upright blade toward himself at a forty-five degree angle, then reflects it back when he's halfway across so it finishes where his side of the table meets the wall. He waves the blade dismissively toward the symmetric triangle defined by his etched line.

  "Gulf of Alaska."

  With more enthusiasm, he retraces the side of the triangle nearest him.

  "Aleutian Islands."

  He taps the knife point into the middle of the side nearest me.

  "Coast Range. Mountains and glaciers coming right down to the water, and reaching up to the clouds. But Wilson got across them, and his book said how to do it. You needed grub, a tent, stove, furs, and a sled if the lakes on the far side was still frozen. Wood and tools to build a boat if the ice was out. But the best place to get your outfit together was where they already knowed what it took to get Inside.

  "That's where Gig went and told me to go as soon as I could follow." He stabs the etched line on my side with something like affection, a few inches from its juncture with the wall. "Juneau."

  Chapter 12

  The orange coals in the stove show no signs of cooling, and Zimmerman undoes his collar button, acknowledging the growing warmth in the cabin.

  "Juneau," I say, plucking the knife from its target and laying it at arm's length on the scarred table. "That's not exactly a day's ride from Colorado on the train."

  "No it ain't. But it's an easy steamboat trip, if you can get to San Francisco. Maybe four days from there to Port Townsend, where you catch the boat out of Seattle. Then three more days to Juneau. It cost about fifty dollars before the stampede, so Gig could manage it. He caught a train west and was on the San Francisco docks by the end of January '95. Made it to Juneau a few weeks later.

  "Treadwell was the biggest gold mining operation in the world back then. On Douglas Island, just across the channel from Juneau. Four wide tunnels went hundreds of feet below the water, fed ore to stamp mills running day and night. But before Treadwell sunk his shafts, Joe Juneau found gold at Silver Bow Basin, a thousand feet up the mountainside. Placer mining at Silver Bow is what got that town built, and they was still working the creeks and gulches in the mid-nineties.

  "Wilson's book said the Juneau outfitters knowed what it took to reach the Yukon camps, so Gig went to visit a couple, and all he heared was that he needed an outfit for a full year. That's a thousand pounds of grub – flour, bacon, beans, oats, sugar, dried fruit – and a thousand pounds of gear. Stove, tent, mining tools... down to pitch and nails for building a boat. Maybe he had a couple hundred dollars left, and it was going to cost three times that much. And that don't count what you pay the Indians at Dyea to pack your outfit – which you got to do unless you want to make forty trips over Chilkoot Pass and down to the lakes yourself.

  "So Gig knowed he needed a bigger grubstake, and the best way to get it was dealing cards. Straight if he had to, crooked if he got a chance. To see which way the wind was blowing, he played a hand or two of faro at the biggest dance halls and taverns, then decided to set up shop at the Magnet Saloon. The owner was an accountant from Kansas named Pratt who got in hot water before he left the states, and somehow Gig must of realized he liked to slant the numbers. Maybe he heared it at one of the other saloons. Gig introduced himself and made his pitch in Pratt's office. Showed him how he could deal blackjack straight, then start pushing cards when the time was right. Or let a mark win a few hands – even double his money with a round or two of monte. Then lose it all at once.

  "Pratt agreed to stake Gig for a trial run and pay him a third of the house take. Told Gig if he took too many chances he'd be cut loose and end up in jail. Pratt would claim he knowed nothing about it. So Gig had to go slow and be careful. Still, with miners leaving Treadwell and Silver Bow on their way back to California, and others getting outfitted in Juneau and heading for the Yukon camps, there was plenty of men with full pockets looking for a little entertainment.

  "Gig was making it pay off from the start. In his first week at the Magnet, he took a month's wages from a Treadwell miner who was trying to get back to Montana. Poor feller needed to save enough money so his girl would marry him, and maybe he thought gambling was a shortcut.

  "Pratt kept an eye on Gig and liked the way things was going. He was a decent judge of human weakness, so he started bringing prospects to Gig's table. Some of 'em was worn-out men just looking for relief from a winter of hard-rock mining underground. Others was in town for grub after a couple months back on the creeks above Silver Bow, and happy to spread some dust around. Maybe one or two had struck rich ground and was ready for a spree. For different reasons, they was all willing to lighten their pokes, and Gig and Pratt helped 'em do it.

  "After a month or so, Gig found the right mix of faro, blackjack, and monte, and Pratt knowed when to wash away the taste of losing with a free round of whiskey for the table. Gig doubled his worth, saved another two or three hundred dollars. He was still thinking about getting to Circle City, but was tempted to see how long he could keep things afloat at the Magnet Saloon before some posse of upright citizens decided they seen enough and ran him out. And there was a chance Pratt would turn on him if he thought the game was getting risky.

  "Those ideas was in the back of his head one night when Pratt brought a couple of Swedish miners to Gig's table. I never met 'em but Gig told me what they was like. Arnold Ruud was over six feet tall, thick in every direction and as friendly as he was big. He had a full beard and golden hair like a bear. Ruud was the only miner I ever heared about who could climb Chilkoot Pass with a hundred and fifty pounds on his back, like the Indian packers done.

  "Erik Lindfors was tall and pulled tight like a hawk, with straight dark hair and no whiskers. Winters in Alaska, your breath froze and turned your beard into a cake of ice, so most fellers kept their faces clean, even the Swedes. But Gig said Lindfors always looked more like a Russian. He didn't talk much, but he did enough thinking for both of 'em, and he had his sights set on the Yukon.

  "Them two Swedes had been hydraulic mining at Silver Bow during the summer, then went down to California when things iced up. Now they was headed Inside, with an outfit they bought in Seattle and was going to top off in Juneau.

  "They walked into the Magnet with a few hundred dollars, and Pratt found 'em seats at the table where Gig was dealing faro. Straight game with three or four other fellers, and the house wasn't taking much. But standing nearby and watching was one of Gig's monte shills named the Molasses Kid, and the Kid could read the table as well as Gig.

  "When Lindfors recognized Joe Ellis at the bar and headed over to talk to him, the Molasses Kid took the chair as soon as Lindfors got up. Lindfors knowed that Ellis been prospecting that summer along the Stewart River in the upper Yukon, and he wanted to learn whatever Ellis would tell him about it.

  "Gig got to the end of the faro deck and the Kid started hounding him about a hand of monte between games. For s
ome reason the game was new to Ruud. Maybe the Swedes hadn't spent time in the Colorado camps or met any con men yet. Ruud was smart enough to understand three-card monte right off, but not smart enough to wonder why the Kid kept losing track of the red queen when Ruud knowed exactly where it was.

  "The Kid won ten dollars then lost it, won it back and lost it again, before Gig asked if anyone else wanted to play. Ruud was on it like a grizzly on a hive. He won twenty dollars, then forty, then eighty, then doubled again and lost. Got over his shock, pulled out another twenty, and lost again. By the time Lindfors come back to the table, Ruud was down a hundred, red-faced and sweating like he got stung by every bee in that hive. Lindfors cussed him out in Swedish and dragged him from the table.

  "That was the last time Gig saw them Swedes get near a card game, but just the start of his times with them. Later that night he took a break from dealing and found a barstool next to Ellis, who was still drinking off a choppy day on the boat from Dyea. Gig was wondering how he rated Circle City against Forty Mile and the other Yukon mining camps, and Ellis mentioned that the dark-haired Swede been asking him a lot of the same questions. Said they was already outfitted and heading to Dyea with a miner who spent three seasons Inside. A no-nonsense oldtimer named Sam Nokes, who'd drifted up to Alaska and down onto the Yukon after some years prospecting in Colorado around Leadville and Creede.

  "They had a fourth feller from Seattle named Rasmussen who was going with 'em, but he took sick with pneumonia after two months at the Treadwell mines. Now that the Swedes was almost done outfitting, they didn't want to wait and decided to go without him.

  "Gig saw his chance right off and tracked down Ruud and Lindfors at the docks the next day. Juneau was less than a thousand people and twenty saloons back then, so it wasn't hard to find someone who knowed the Swedes. Ruud got red when he recognized Gig and remembered his troubles with monte, but Gig made his pitch to Lindfors. Told him he was looking to join a party heading Inside and heared they was down a man. Said he hadn't bought an outfit yet but had the money to do it, and he knowed his way around horses and boats from his canal days. If they let him come along, he could buy whatever they still needed, then help with packing gear over the pass or building a boat and steering it downriver.

  "Lindfors told him to go talk to Nokes. The Swedes had worked it out with him: they and Rasmussen would buy six months worth of grub for four men and Nokes would come up with the rest of the gear. Two tents you could rig end to end, a stove and pots for cooking. Saws, nails, and pitch to build a boat. Every man would buy his own parka and wool clothes, boots and mittens. If it took four months to reach Circle City, they should get there in time to order more grub for the winter. The steamers coming upriver from the Bering Sea to stock the camps usually made their last run around the end of September. Nokes knowed how long it took to move up and down the Yukon, so he was making the decisions."

  Zimmerman pauses for breath and another sip of whiskey and I use the moment to stand and stretch my limbs, laying the pistol beyond his reach on my side of the table.

  "Nokes," I say. "You ever meet him?"

  He squints and takes a hissing breath through his yellowed teeth. "I met him. Bow-legged guy with a bare scalp and hands like a blacksmith. One of them sourdoughs that was sure he knowed everything, even while the greenhorns all around him was getting rich."

  It strikes me as near miraculous that Zimmerman can effortlessly summon names from three decades ago like Lindfors and Ruud, Ellis, Rasmussen, and Nokes. Especially when these were the men Garrett met on his way to the Yukon, not the ones Zimmerman encountered on his own trip. Though Zimmerman has just said he met Nokes himself, and he certainly had enough time Inside with Garrett for the two of them to stew in the stories of their respective journeys. Maybe he often thinks about those days.

  Zimmerman leans back against the wall and lifts a leg clad in faded black trousers onto the edge of the table, worn heel not far from the knife. I sit down and return the pistol to my lap as he resumes his narrative.

  "After he talked to Lindfors, Gig went to see Nokes, who had his tent and stove in a spruce grove tucked against the base of the mountain. Nokes didn't give him an answer right away. Said they already figured how much grub they needed without Rasmussen, then told Gig to come back the next day.

  "The next morning Gig stopped by and Nokes told him he could come along. It was getting toward the middle of March, and Nokes said if they sailed up to Dyea and got onto the Chilkoot Trail before the month was out, they could make it over the pass and down through the lakes while they was still frozen. He told Gig which outfitter would sell him a sled. Said to buy winter clothes, keep a hundred dollars, and spend the rest on a hunting rifle, a shotgun, cartridges, whiskey, and tobacco, then pack his outfit in canvas bags.

  "Nokes had a new plan, and they wasn't going to have to whipsaw green timber for a boat. They was going to save time and trade with the Indians."

  Chapter 13

  Ten dollars, Zimmerman tells me, was the fare for steamboat passage from Juneau to Dyea for one man and his outfit. And in March of 1895, Dyea was a Chilkoot Indian village a hundred and ten miles north of Juneau at the apex of the Lynn Canal, a long inlet that brought steamboats closer to the mountainous divide than any other bay on the Alaska panhandle. Flanked by steep mountains, the Lynn Canal resembles a windswept fresh-water lake. At its head, where the Dyea River deposits glacial melt after crossing an alluvial plain, Garrett, Lindfors, Ruud, and Nokes were ferried ashore along with over two tons of gear.

  I let Zimmerman continue the story without rushing him forward to Dawson, both because I hope he'll provide a detail that gives me perspective and because he's describing a journey into the Yukon before the stampede. Or maybe it's just because the whiskey is making me open-minded.

  "Tides are so big at Dyea they had to hump their outfits a mile back from the beach before putting up their tent. The Indians come at you like flies, soon as they seen someone carrying packages and bags. It's maybe eighteen miles from the Dyea trailhead up to the pass and eight more down to Lindeman Lake, and the Chilkoots was packing outfits to the lake for seventeen cents a pound. Least that's what they told you.

  "But sometimes they drop your load halfway up the mountain and go home if you don't pay twenty-five. Sometimes they go back to the beach to meet another steamer. Or maybe it starts raining and don't stop for a week, and they prop your bags against a big rock and go down to the village to smoke their pipes. They sure ain't going home to bathe, which is something I never seen a Siwash do.

  "It's a different story in the summer, but in winter it ain't a bad idea to pay the Chilkoots, because the trail run up the valley and they got sleds and dogs. First part of it you're on the frozen river, walking between boulders big as houses. Then two miles in a slippery canyon that's just fifty feet wide, cliffs on both sides and water running too fast to freeze. So you can pull your sled on the ice in some places, but you carry it across the rocks in others.

  "Past the canyon the climb opens up again and you get to Sheep Camp at timberline. That's the last level place and there's always groups camped there, sometimes for weeks. Good water, enough spruce for firewood and shelter, some grazing. You gone eleven miles and you're still only five hundred feet above the beach. In the last four miles to the pass, you climb three thousand.

  "Gig and the Swedes and Nokes loaded the guns and whiskey and some coffee and bacon and beans and pulled their sleds up to Sheep Camp in two days, then waited for the Indians to get there with the rest of their outfit."

  While they waited, Zimmerman says, it started snowing, and the snow fell at varying rates for almost a week. Past Sheep Camp the trail rose into a valley framed by walls shrouded in clouds and fog. The Indians refused to climb to the summit until the weather cleared, so they stacked the bags and cases against a flat-sided boulder near Nokes' tent, then retreated down the trail to Dyea. There were another dozen parties headed to the pass on their way Inside, but no one exchanged
words, since all were huddled under blankets in their tents.

  When the clouds finally dissolved, there was over a foot of new snow at Sheep Camp and the ridges and peaks above them were shining white. Nokes said that they couldn't be sure when the Indian packers would return to the job. It might be today or it might be a few days from now. They had over two tons of grub and supplies to carry up to the pass, and at seventeen cents a pound it made sense for them to start moving loads up the trail themselves. Ruud could go uphill with three fifty-pound canvas bags strapped to his back, but the others struggled with two.

  "Above Sheep Camp, you couldn't haul a sled," Zimmerman says, angling his hand at about fifteen degrees. "About this steep for the first two miles, past the hanging glacier and up to the Stone House, which is just a huge slab rock that's fell on two other big boulders, so you can sit under it for shelter. That's the last place you'll even see dead wood.

  "You been following what's left of the river up the valley, and in the next mile the trail swings right and gets steeper." He angles his hand at twenty-five degrees. "Rock slides on the walls and boulders as big as this room along the trail. When Gig's group was going up, everything was covered with snow. Then the valley ends and you got walls on three sides. They call that place The Scales, 'cause there used to be a balance scale for packers to weigh their loads before the last pitch.

  "It's seven hundred feet." He tilts his hand toward forty-five degrees. "From the bottom it looks straight up, but there's a few benches between the steep spots. In summer you grab onto rocks with your hands as you climb. In winter you follow in the footsteps of the man in front, until the trail is like stairs made of ice. If your foot slips, you fall thirty or forty feet in the snow, maybe back the way you come or maybe sideways into a crevice. Either way, it takes the spirit out of you just to climb back to where you was.

  "Drop your load at the pass, then you're walking light, and I heared that some fellers would sit down at the top, point their legs up, and ride the snow straight back down the last pitch to The Scales. You might not be wearing your Indian parka when you was climbing, but you still had extra canvas sewn on your trouser seat, so that way always made sense to me. Took less than a minute to come down what took an hour to go up.