BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  "Them Siwashes was jabbering Injun and trying to sell Gig and Nokes pelt bags and antler whistles and anything they couldn't use, but Nokes knowed exactly what he wanted, and it took the whole day to get it. Whiskey was a weakness for that Tagish chief, and Gig and Nokes showed him enough firewater to keep him glowing for months. The tobacco was worth almost as much. And while they was negotiating, Gig was toting a loaded shotgun.

  "By late afternoon, they was heading back to camp with fifty pounds of dried salmon, which Indians will eat every day, same as their dogs do. The Siwashes took all the whiskey and tobacco. Nokes traded 'em the shotgun and shells too. That didn't make much sense to Gig, but Nokes told him it was no use trying to shoot ducks bobbing on the water when you was drifting in a boat. Hunting birds took time, and the Indians had more of that. If they saw game, that was different, and they still had the rifle. But mostly the game was miles back into the hills.

  "They gave the Indians all four sleds too, but they got four wood paddles for 'em, and what made it all work – two patched-up birch-bark canoes. They loaded the salmon and paddles in the canoes and pulled 'em back to camp across the wet snow.

  "That was how Nokes planned to get down the Yukon – load the outfit on a raft and paddle canoes alongside. They could tow the raft away from boulders and sandbars or drag it ashore when they made camp. Take turns cooking and sleeping on the raft, 'cause by mid-May it don't get dark, and when you come off the river in June the mosquitoes cover you like blankets.

  "It took a couple days to chop logs to the right lengths and drag 'em all to camp, and Nokes wanted 'em lashed together into pontoons, with smaller logs cross-wise on top. They laid a floor with branches for the outfit and made a platform for the stove so someone could cook while they was afloat. Built it all on the bank of the Lewes and then shoved it in and moored it. With the bags loaded on, the deck was still clear of the river. You could sit on the bags and watch the scenery drift by. When the water was shallow you could stand on a corner and pole.

  "They let the raft go and pushed off in the canoes, Gig and Nokes in one and the Swedes in the other. You're still on the Lewes, but now you got every reason to call it the Yukon. A couple hundred yards across, drifting maybe five miles an hour, never straight for long. Ice floes from Laberge is running with you the first few days. Got stands of spruce on the inside of the curves and steep slopes of gravel on the outside, with downed trees mixed in. The river is always cutting into the hills and bringing 'em down to the water. Every stream and river that come into the Yukon from the west is carrying sand and dirt with it. And flour gold mixed in."

  About thirty miles downriver, Zimmerman says, you reach the first big tributary. The Hootalinqua River run back over a hundred miles to Teslin Lake, which lies east in a parallel valley and is as long as Marsh, Tagish and Bennett put together.

  "Past the Hootalinqua you swing s-curves for forty miles, then the Big Salmon river come in from the east. That's a clear stream with good fishing for the Indians. The hills get bigger downstream from there, with trees thick to the tops, not just spruce but cottonwood and birch. Then the bends flatten out and you float thirty miles to the Little Salmon, and below that you got another Indian village on the east bank.

  "Like always, the Siwashes start hollering and waving when white men come by, so Nokes told the Swedes to drift along with the raft, then he and Gig paddled their canoe over to the bank, where the Injuns got a landing rigged up with logs. Nokes wasn't looking to sell or trade, but they did have some money left and maybe the Siwashes had some smoked moose or caribou.

  "It's into May and the water's still cold, but there's nothing left of winter in the air, so Gig and Nokes was just wearing undershirts and thin wool, and Gig still had the necklace with the wolf tooth and the sewed-up rabbit ear hanging against his chest. They pulled up to the landing and the Siwashes gather round to see what's in the canoe, waving their hands and babbling about guns and nails and whiskey and dollars... which is about the only English words most of 'em know. They look the white men up and down and then back away and start talking to themselves, and to Gig they don't sound happy. He's thinking that the Indians seen the raft with all the bags and was expecting the white men would be coming to trade something they could use.

  "Nokes found an older boy who spoke good English and talked to him alone for a minute, then Nokes come back to the landing and told Gig the Siwashes got no decent food they wanted to sell.

  "They pushed off in the canoe and started paddling to catch up with the raft. Gig asked Nokes if the Indians was sore that they wasn't bringing whiskey, and Nokes said no. He pointed to Gig's necklace and said the Siwashes didn't want nothing to do with it. This tribe was Tagish, but they knowed that necklace come from the Stick Indians and it was a warning. When the Sticks give you a wolf tooth and a rabbit ear, it means you was being hunted."

  Chapter 18

  "Nokes said the Siwashes was always spooked about something, and Gig said he'd throw the necklace away the first time he seen a war party following 'em. They paddled until they caught up to the Swedes and the raft. The Yukon run northwest all the way to Circle, but you got to turn every point of the compass to get there and sometimes you spend a half hour drifting southeast. Don't matter which way you're heading, it's hills of sand and spruce, maybe some limestone. You pass huge rocks on the shore and some in the river, gulls and eagles nesting on the ledges.

  "George Carmack had a one-man trading post about fifty miles past the Little Salmon, and they tied up the boats to see if he had anything worth buying, but Carmack was downriver, fishing with the Indians. Everyone called him Lying George 'cause he made every prospect he ever worked – gold or coal or salmon – sound twice as good as it really was. But three months later Lying George made the discovery claim on Rabbit Creek, and that opened up the Klondike.

  "Fifteen miles past Carmack's come the Five Finger Rapids, which is spruce-covered bluffs spread out across the current. It's nothing like the Whitehorse, but you got to stay away from a whirlpool and some hidden rocks.

  "They tied down all the bags on the raft, towed it to the right channel and let it go, and the raft got washed over but come through it in one piece. Same story for the canoes – long as you paddle hard and keep the bow downstream, you take on water but you don't swamp. Out of Five Fingers you pick up speed for a few miles and then drop into Rink Rapids, but the water toward the right bank is deep and fast, so it ain't enough to worry you.

  "And then you're drifting on smooth current again. The river spreads out and you steer through a herd of little islands for fifty more miles to what was left of Fort Selkirk, after the Sticks burned it down seventy or eighty years ago. That's where the Pelly come in from the east, and you can finally say you reached the Yukon.

  "Arthur Harper had a trading post at Fort Selkirk and J.J. Healey wanted his company to trade there too, so both the ACC and NAT was running steamboats up to the Pelly from the mouth of the Yukon when the river was clear. Though by the time Gig and his men got there, Harper was an old man headed back Outside and his partner Jack McQuesten was getting ACC set up at Circle."

  "Wait," I tell Zimmerman. I flick open his folding knife and reference the triangle he's already carved, with the junction of the table and the wall as its base. "Aleutians," I say, pointing to the etched line that runs from his corner to the peak of the triangle between us. "Coast Range," I add, pointing to my side of the triangle. And then finding the divot a few inches from my corner, "Juneau." Switching the Colt to my right hand, I lay the open knife on the table. "You still haven't carved the river."

  He picks up the knife and holds its point down, maybe to reassure me. Then he studies the end of the table opposite the wall and carves a line a few inches from that edge. The line starts at my side and runs to his, smiling away from us to indicate it's a latitude line and the free end of the table is north. He stabs the table an inch south of the center of this arc.

  "Circle City," he says. Then he etches a curve fro
m Circle back toward his own abdomen. It's shaped a bit like a ladle, curling up as it approaches his edge of the table. At the lip of the ladle, he chips the table at the edge. "Port of St. Michael," he says, then gestures to the western void between himself and the table and says "Bering Sea."

  He returns the knife point to Circle, raises his washed-out eyes to mine, then traces a line all the way back to Juneau. The line undulates like a spent ribbon, but otherwise runs steadily southeast.

  "The Yukon ain't straight like that from mile to mile," he says, "or even day to day. But that's the lay of it."

  Then starting at Juneau, he brings the knife back toward Circle, tapping the table every few inches and calling out the places. Lynn Canal and Dyea. Chilkoot Pass. Lindeman Lake. Bennett, Tagish, Marsh. The rapids. Lake Laberge. He lets the knife point run a few inches, then etches a line from the Yukon due east toward my side of the table.

  "Pelly River," he says. An inch toward Circle, he carves a line from the Yukon that heads west and south, toward the wall. "White River."

  He proceeds and etches the Stewart River as an eastward flare parallel to the Pelly. Another inch and the Sixtymile River comes in from the west.

  "Sixtymile got its name 'cause it's sixty miles upriver from Fort Reliance, where Harper and McQuesten built the first trading post on the Yukon."

  Then two parallel rivers, both entering the Yukon from the east. "Indian River and Klondike River," he says. Just north of the Klondike, Zimmerman stabs out Fort Reliance on the Yukon's east bank. Then he carves the Fortymile River as an arching scratch west, explaining that it's forty miles downriver from Fort Reliance.

  "The camp at Fortymile was for miners prospecting back in the hills on Miller Creek, and that was the biggest Yukon camp until Circle City come along." By now the knife point has covered three quarters of the distance from Juneau to Circle.

  With the Fortymile identified, Zimmerman seems finished carving tributaries for now. "So where did we leave Gig and Nokes?" I ask.

  "Fort Selkirk," he says. "Where the Pelly come in, and ACC built a trading post next to the ruins. They pulled ashore, but whoever Harper put in charge wasn't there, and on the shelves was just tea and furs, so they cooked a meal and spent a night in the log house. Then back on the river."

  "A hundred miles down from Fort Selkirk you got the White River, draining high mountains to the west. So much fast cloudy water you knowed it come from five hundred streams. But you couldn't pole a boat against the current, so miners left that country alone.

  "Ten miles down, the Stewart come in from the east, a big river of dark water running slow. The Stewart run back two hundred miles into the hills, and you could pole up the edges and work the bars, find flour gold or leaf gold almost anywhere you look. But you'd be lucky to pan out fifteen dollars a day, and most days you'd get half that or less. No one struck rich ground on that river, before or after the Klondike, but there was always someone looking for it.

  "When Gig and Nokes and the Swedes got to the Stewart, they saw the scow from Miles Canyon tied up near its mouth. Gig was sleeping on the raft, so Nokes kept floating downstream in one canoe while the Swedes paddled over to the scow in the other. One of the men on board seen the canoe and come over to the rail they talked for a while.

  "The Swedes paddled back to the raft and Lindfors told Gig and Nokes about it. He said them fellers on the scow spent two days poling up the Stewart and panning on the bars, and they was going to start prospecting on the creeks. They was still headed down the Yukon to Fortymile, but there was no hurry if they found good diggings on the Stewart.

  "Lindfors said one of the fellers, a man named Wylie, pitched his tent near the bank of the Stewart. The others was either sleeping on the scow or upstream panning the bars. In late spring, the sun only drops below the hills for a few hours a day, so it don't get dark and what time it is don't matter. You sleep when you get tired and every man keeps his own clock.

  "A dog come up to Wylie's tent and was nosing around outside. There's a Siwash village further up the Stewart, and them Injun dogs is born thieves. If you got food or leather in your cache and they can reach it, they'll steal and eat every ounce of it. In the summer the dogs got to carry packs when the village is moving, but when the Siwashes is camped they let 'em forage. So the dog sniffing around Wylie's tent was probably a malamute sled-dog.

  "Wylie woke up when he heared a noise outside, and then he seen a shadow moving on the wall of his tent. He reached for his rifle, propped himself up, and shot through the canvas. Hit the dog square in the chest. Wylie said afterward that he must of done it in his sleep... said he was dreaming a Siwash girl had come to kill him.

  "A miner on the scow come running when he heared the shot, and he finds Wylie outside the tent, standing over the dog, and the dog is bleeding from the chest and mouth. The dog takes another breath or two and dies. The other miners come over and they decide they seen enough of the Stewart. They need to take the scow back down to the Yukon right away. In a day or two, someone would come looking for that dog. Probably with other dogs that could find the dead dog's blood. A good sled-dog is worth about its weight in gold to a Siwash – the way they live depends on 'em.

  "After he told Lindfors that story, the miner on the scow said there probably wasn't no Indian girl after Wylie, but maybe her daddy will try to kill him now."

  Chapter 19

  "By the time you drifted to the Stewart River, the Yukon is most of a mile wide and you got bars and small islands everywhere you look. They had to keep two men on the raft to pole off the bars, with one canoe up front finding the channel and the other behind to offload weight if it got stuck. Twenty miles past the Stewart, the Sixtymile River come in from the west. That's where Joe Ladue built his trading post, after he gave up prospecting. Built a sawmill there too. Guess he figured that if he couldn't strike gold in the Yukon, he could sell sluice-box lumber to them that did. And there was always a few dozen miners camped around Ladue's post for the winter.

  "The Sixtymile River come into the Yukon sixty miles above Fort Reliance, and the Fortymile River come in forty miles below, so the mouths is a hundred miles apart. But you can follow either river to the headwaters and end up in about the same place. And miners from Sixtymile and Fortymile was working side by side back in the hills on Miller Creek and Glacier Creek. Both creeks was just a few miles long, and already staked end to end by spring of '96. Along with Birch Creek at Circle, that was the richest ground in the Yukon before the Klondike opened up.

  "When they got to Sixtymile, Gig and Nokes and the Swedes tied up their boats and drank a pot of tea with Joe Ladue, a short, dark feller who looked like a French-Indian half-breed but was a born promoter. They asked him what he knowed about the diggings on Mosquito Creek in the Fortymile District, 'cause Nokes heared it might be as rich as Miller or Glacier.

  "Back on them creeks, the mosquitoes rise like a cloud from the moss on the banks. You got long sleeves and gloves and a buttoned collar, full beard and a hat, but you still need netting over your face and neck. Then so many will land that you can't see through the net, and the whine is so loud you can barely talk or think. Some men get too swelled up from bites to work, and some break down or go crazy. Nokes figured that whoever named it Mosquito Creek must of been honest, so maybe the prospects on that creek was honest too.

  "Ladue was always glad to see new men coming into the Yukon. He figured more prospectors meant more gold getting dug up. Then after the dust started changing hands, everyone with something to sell would get a bit of it. But he told Nokes that Mosquito Creek was already staked end to end, same as Miller and Glacier.

  "He said they should go up the Indian River, which come into the Yukon from the east, just a few hours drift downstream. Ladue told 'em that twenty men was prospecting bars and creeks on the Indian, and that Robbie Henderson found gold leaf at Australia Creek, which was a main fork of the Indian seventy-five miles back from the Yukon.

  "That's the same Robbie Henderson wh
o climbed into the hills a month later and crossed the divide between the Indian and the Klondike, then found ten cents to the pan at a little headwater up near Solomon's Dome. Ten cents is a strike, and when that creek started to look rich he named it Gold Bottom and went back to Ladue's post to get supplies and tell others about it. But that was in July or August of '96, and Gig and Nokes was already passing by in June.

  "Still, Ladue told 'em what he already told Henderson and the rest: there was good prospects on the Indian and nothing on the Klondike. Nokes only believed the last part. They spent two nights in Ladue's log house, and he sold 'em split logs and planks to fix up the raft. Then they bought some smoked caribou meat and pushed off downriver.

  "While they was drifting, Lindfors asked whether they should spend a few days prospecting on the Indian, but Nokes said no. Said he seen the Indian, seen the Klondike, and neither of them rivers looked right. Both was shallow and clear, and both come in from the east. Like all them Yukon oldtimers, he knowed rivers from the west carried more gold. They ran fast and cloudy, drained steeper mountains. West of the Yukon, pup streams and creeks was wearing out the rocks and grinding gold out of the veins.

  "Rivers like the Indian and Klondike drained the Mackenzie Mountains to the east. They was good for fishing and not much else. And their creeks wandered down through meadows of grass and willows and muck, which everyone knowed was only good for moose pasture. So Nokes said they wasn't stopping at the Indian, but if the Swedes was curious, they could prospect a little on the Klondike, which was four hours further downstream. They could follow one of its creeks until they got their fill of niggerhead swamps. While they was doing that, he and Gig would take the rifle and try to shoot a moose.

  "They tied up the raft on the Yukon bank just below the Klondike, where the Siwashes had rigged a shed for drying salmon out of canvas and poles. The salmon was still weeks downstream, so the Indians wasn't selling any fish. A couple of 'em repairing nets said they was working with George Carmack to get ready for the salmon run, but Lying George was spending a few days at their village twenty miles up the Klondike. His wife was a Tagish, and George spoke all the Injun tongues... talked to Chilkoots or Tagish or Sticks like a native. Almost looked like a Siwash himself. He could handle a shovel and a pan, but Carmack wasn't driven by gold like most of them oldtimers was. He thought there was better odds catching fish.