BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  "Dominion was staked a couple months before Sulfur, when the first stampede went out to the Indian River. Just like with Bonanza in '96, you had some sourdoughs who panned, found nothing, and walked away. Others staked and swore Dominion was as good as the Klondike creeks. Most fellers wasn't sure but staked anyway.

  "Three fellers that was too late on Dominion started tramping west through the hills above the Indian River, heading back toward the Yukon. They come upon the middle part of Sulfur Creek in late June, washed out good colors, and decided to work the site. Only a few feet down they was getting five-dollar pans, so they staked and headed back to Dawson to record. They didn't tell no one, maybe 'cause they was waiting for friends to get there, but word leaked out in August, and that's when Gig and Wylie heared about it.

  "They throwed some grub and blankets and cheesecloth for the mosquitoes into their packs, strapped on pans and a shovel, and headed up toward the ridge. They was pretty close already, 'cause the top of Eldorado is only about twelve miles from the top of Sulfur. But there's slopes of loose rock on both sides of the divide and thick spruce in the gulches, so you ain't usually going in a straight line. Sometimes you got to pick your way down half a mile to get past a cliff, then climb back up to clear a ravine. In the woods you got deadfall trees crossing every which way, and it's like walking through a maze.

  "After they come over the divide and down a scree field, Gig and Wylie was following a pup stream into a shallow drainage. The pup runs southeast, and they figured that was the right direction to run into Sulfur Creek. Where the pup come into a bigger creek, they turned downstream, thinking they was heading toward the discovery claim. They followed that creek for a while and didn't see no other miners or claim-stakes, and then it started dropping faster. Gig and Wylie was still sticking close to the side, but now the banks was getting steeper and rockier, and up ahead the creek drops away, like it's coming into a gorge. When you hear the water roaring ahead of you, it makes you stop and think.

  "That's when they reckoned it wasn't Sulfur Creek. They was on Quartz Creek, and it got prospected and named a few weeks later by miners coming up from the Indian River. Quartz Creek turned out to be one of the best in the district. Gig and Wylie knowed they had to follow it back up to the pup, but the way this creek was crashing down made it look like a gold stream.

  "Wylie took off his pack and pointed to a shallow pool on the far side of the creek, on a bend below a waterfall. That's the kind of spot you look for, and Wylie said he was going to go pan for colors. There was a downed tree with its roots tipped up on their side of the creek, and the trunk was angling upstream and across. You could use it as a bridge but you had to be careful 'cause it was sloping uphill. Maybe three feet above the water on the near side and five or six feet up on the other side, where it landed on top of a boulder. And slippery, even when you can't see the moss.

  "Wylie takes his pan and starts walking across the log. He's about to step onto the boulder on the other side when a rotted part breaks off under his foot. He loses his balance and waves his arms and falls sideways into the pool. Only this part of the pool is deep, closer to the waterfall. Even in summer that water is freezing, and when your chest and face go under the shock drives the air right out of you. Wylie sinks in and his legs push out downstream and he's trying to get a hold with his feet or hands to stand or pull himself back up. And Gig is watching, but Wylie don't come up right away. Gig starts picking his way down to the bank, and it's hard to see Wylie 'cause the surface of the water is moving, but it looks like he's twisting around underwater like a snake.

  "By the time Gig gets both feet in the water and starts wading into the pool, Wylie has been under for maybe half a minute and his hat is floating in the shallows downstream. Then he gets his hands onto the rocks at the edge of the pool and pops his head and neck out, and he takes a breath you can hear over the noise of the water. His clothes and beard is streaming water, his hair is flat against his skull, and his eyes are bulging out of their sockets.

  "And Wylie is seeing ghosts again, 'cause he turns and yells as he climbs out onto the rocks. 'She tried to drown me!' he says. 'I felt her hands on my head! Holding me down, so I couldn't go deeper, couldn't get up to breathe!'

  "Wylie stands up and he's gasping and shivering, looks like a wet rat. 'She missed and got Timmons last time,' he says 'but I thought I was done for in this damn creek!'

  "And Gig remembers how he seen Wylie for the first time at Miles Canyon, sitting on a boulder with his shirt off, curled up under a blanket in the sun after he got pulled out of the rapids. And Wylie wasn't yelling that time, just talking like you or me, even though he come through the worst of the Canyon hanging onto the hull of his boat after his partner drownded. He was telling Gig an Indian girl flipped the boat and was trying to kill him. The same girl that was glowing green and orange in his dream, when he's standing out on a finger of ice on the Yukon and the ice starts sinking into the river."

  "The same girl," I echo, "that he saw out on the Yukon ice when he and Gig were sledding up from Circle and making camp behind an island."

  Zimmerman nods. "And Gig told me he was thinking about what Wylie said when he took Gig's necklace with the wolf tooth and the folded-up rabbit's ear. And then he cut open the stitches and seen the two eyes painted on the flesh, with tears that looked like blood."

  "Tell me again what Wylie said."

  Zimmerman squints and cocks his head, as if the memory is painful. "He said it meant she was coming for him," he says.

  "It was Gig's necklace," I say. "So it meant she was coming for him, not Wylie."

  Zimmerman sinks back against the wall and seems refocused on the projector behind his eyes. He doesn't reply.

  Chapter 29

  Wylie's pan fell into a deep part of the pool, Zimmerman says, and he had little interest in trying to retrieve it. He waded back across the creek through shallow rapids and he and Gig climbed to flatter ground, where Wylie stripped off his wet clothes and they built a fire from fallen branches. Without having panned for prospects, they didn't bother to stake. Instead they hung their wet clothes, ate dried salmon and bread, and then started back uphill toward the head of the drainage. Wylie seemed spooked and wanted no part of the Indian River district. Even in August, twilight comes late, so they made it back to their tent on the Swedes' Eldorado claims by the end of a long day.

  "So they never staked an Indian River creek?"

  "Not on that stampede," Zimmerman says. "But Gig knowed that some of the fellers who staked on Sulfur or Dominion wouldn't get around to recording, 'cause they didn't want to pay the fee or they didn't think their ground was rich. Others would carve their names off the stakes when they found another creek they liked better. So when winter diggings got started, there was going to be chances to pick up an Indian River claim."

  Zimmerman says that the Yukon autumn starts in September and doesn't last long. "Back on the Klondike creeks you find ice in some of the eddies, where the water don't move. It's gone by noon, but you know there'll be more tomorrow. By the end of September you see it creeping out from the river banks, on both the Klondike and the Yukon. Then pieces will break off and float downstream.

  "The first of the stampeders from Outside started drifting into town with the ice. There was only a few hundred that made it to Dawson before the Yukon froze, and they was moving fast all the way from Dyea. Climb the pass, build a boat, sail the lakes, run the rapids, and paddle the river. The fastest did it in two months, got there in September '97. Probably left Seattle a few days after them Klondike Kings unloaded their gold. All the rest had to wait for spring. Some of 'em was stuck at the head of Lindeman or Bennett and some back on the coast, after the Mounties moved up to the passes and was stopping anyone without a full year's outfit.

  "The early stampeders was paddling canoes or bateaus, trolling fishing lines and coming in with nothing much to eat. Most of 'em had money and figured they could buy whatever they needed in Dawson. Some of 'em wasn't fix
ing to prospect, they was coming to do business, so they brung medicines or watches or knives. They didn't figure on a town where grub was scarce and gold was cheap. In Dawson it don't matter if you'll pay ten dollars for an onion or an egg, 'cause someone else will pay twenty.

  "Counting the fellers working back on the creeks, there was maybe four thousand in the Klondike district when the ice started coming in, and the last five steamboats of the season bringing supplies up to Dawson was all stuck on the Yukon flats, a hundred miles downstream from Circle City. The river gets low that time of year, and they couldn't get over the sandbars.

  "The men running the ACC and NAT warehouses was getting nervous even before the ice come in, and they told Inspector Constantine there wasn't enough grub for everyone to get through winter. Constantine told 'em to start cutting back and not sell anyone more than a few days worth of flour or beans.

  "Constantine didn't want a famine on his watch, so he starts telling people they should leave Dawson if they ain't got a full winter's outfit. Head down past Circle City to Fort Yukon, where there's plenty of food. A couple hundred men did take their boats downriver before it froze, but it turned out the shelves was bare at Fort Yukon too, so most of 'em kept going and got iced in somewhere down the river. Traded with the Indians or starved or ate whatever they could shoot.

  "A couple of the steamers finally got over the flats before the ice come in, and they made it up to Dawson at the end of September. Turned out they was mostly carrying whiskey and shovels and nails, not much grub. Constantine says any man willing to steam down to Fort Yukon gets free passage and five days' supply of food, so another hundred men leave Dawson on the first of October.

  "But there's ice cakes ten feet high floating down the river by then, and the steamers are knocked off course right from the start. Both boats get damaged and then froze to the banks when they make repairs, then a south wind come up and clears the ice for ten hours, and they make another sixty miles downriver before the floes crowd into 'em again.

  "That's how the Yukon freezes. The ice on the banks pushes into the river and the squeezes the floating blocks together. The channels get narrow enough to stop a boat, and you got to pole your way through 'em and hope you don't get crushed. If the air turns warm, some of the ice near the banks will break off and the river might open up again. But after a week or so you got too much floating ice, and then the shore ice comes back for good. When it jams all the free ice together, there ain't nowhere for the water to go, and it starts gushing over and around the ice blocks, and for a few minutes it sounds like a hundred locomotives starting and stopping at once. All the blocks are grinding against each other and some get pushed under and others get tipped vertical, and then the whole river heaves upward and stops moving.

  "One in five boats might get lifted clear, but the rest end up as kindling or get shoved under the ice. Even if your boat ain't crushed, now you got to cross the ice on foot. That's what happened to one of them two steamers in the second week of October, after the river opened up for half a day and the captain tried to make Fort Yukon from Circle. He was lucky – got lifted clear out of the water and no one killed.

  "When it's full winter there's layers of snow built up on top of the ice, and after a few weeks of people tramping around you got the makings of a trail. So you stay mostly along the banks, and out on the river you follow the sled tracks between the humps of ice. But the day the river freezes there ain't no trail. Just ice cliffs and ramps forty feet high, and no snow covering the cracks and sharp edges.

  "That's a frozen hell, and when them steamboat passengers made it on foot to an island in the river, they was still sixty-five miles from Fort Yukon. Some men coming out of Circle and Dawson on smaller boats was stranded there too, and a hundred and fifty of 'em picked their way down to Fort Yukon, with almost nothing to eat and not enough blankets to stay warm."

  "What about Gig and Wylie and the Swedes? They're sitting happily up at Eldorado while people are risking their lives to flee Dawson?"

  Zimmerman snorts. "Grub was tight, but the only ones that panicked was the cheechakos. The ones that come into Dawson with nothing but gum boots, a fur hat, and a shovel. Sourdoughs like Gig and Wylie made it through the last winter and knowed what to expect. If the warehouses was going to ration flour and beans, they might get hungry but they wasn't going to starve. They had a couple months stocked in, and there was ways to get more. And the Swedes started laying in grub when Gig and Wylie was out at Quartz Creek."

  "Why were Swedes stockpiling food in August? I thought the cheechakos didn't start getting to Dawson until September."

  "Because that was when they decided to leave."

  This isn't the answer I expected, so I ask Zimmerman why the Swedes would walk away from their Eldorado claims after eighteen months of sacrifice brought them exactly what they'd sought. Staking a thousand feet of the richest ground ever prospected took effort and luck, and the Swedes had come up with both.

  The Swedes didn't walk away empty-handed, Zimmerman says. After they found the pay-streak on 48 Eldorado with their last winter shaft, they worked their summer cut across its sixty-foot width. When they finished sluicing and paid for their supplies and hired hands, they cleared eighteen thousand dollars. Then they sold that claim for thirty thousand, and 49 Eldorado for forty.

  "They knowed there was a lot more gold left in them claims," Zimmerman says. "But they was going to spend half the dust in their pokes and another year getting it out. Maybe two. And they was worried about a tough winter. When Alex McDonald offers you more gold than you ever seen, it's hard not to take it."

  Zimmerman says the money was a home-stake for the Swedes, enough for them to buy land and houses in Vancouver. Ruud had a gal in Minnesota he wanted to marry and bring out west. Lindfors had left his wife behind and wanted to start over. If they sledded their gold Outside after the Yukon froze, they could be in Vancouver by January, take a year to get established, and then head back Inside in the spring of '99. By then there might be steamers running up to the foot of the White Horse Rapids and ferries on the lakes. They could bring in a full-year's outfit and afford to do things right.

  "The Swedes struck it on Eldorado," Zimmerman says. "But there's ten thousand creeks on the Yukon, and they was sure more Eldorados was waiting to be found."

  Chapter 30

  Zimmerman tells me the Swedes bought a sled and five dogs. They packed a tent, a stove, blankets, and a month's worth of food, and set out upriver in early November. But even though they were retracing their journey from Dyea, and even though Ruud had tramped to Dawson over the ice from Circle the previous winter, they didn't realize how hard the going would be. The Yukon had frozen and thawed and frozen again, leaving ten-foot-high cakes of ice piled and skewed in every direction. The trail was still rough-edged and bare in spots, so the dogs suffered lacerations on their feet, which froze after ice wedged into the cuts.

  Seeking level terrain, the trail wound back and forth through the piles of ice, and while the dogs could follow it, the sled frequently caught an edge and capsized, requiring the Swedes to stop the team and reload whatever had fallen off. And righting the sled reminded them that half of what it carried was food for the dogs.

  It took ten days to get to the Pelly River, Zimmerman says. I reach for the knife and size him up momentarily before offering him the handle. He stabs the tip into the table on my side, about a third of the way along the etched line from Dawson to Dyea.

  "On the way up to the Pelly they seen boats smashed by the ice and stampeders that got caught by winter. You pass a tent and stop to check on it, and inside there's a feller with frozen feet or a broke leg, or just too weak and hungry to go on. Sometimes it's a man and a woman. They're lying in blankets on the snow, and all they got is a hot stove and what's left of their grub. You might give 'em something to eat if you can spare it, but they's hoping someone will sled 'em down to Dawson. If you say people is leaving Dawson 'cause there ain't enough to eat, that just makes 'em
feel worse. Some that was in terrible shape got taken care of, and some died out on the ice."

  Above the Pelly, the Yukon is still the Lewes River, and it runs steeper and faster, so the ice jams are even more daunting than the ones downstream. Zimmerman uses his hands to describe their asymmetry: ramps angled downstream and cliffs against the current, which makes it easier for the Swedes than for anyone traveling downstream, even though it requires releasing the dogs and handing the sled and supplies down the faces of the cliffs.

  "Where the Big Salmon come into the Lewes, and then up toward Laberge where the Hootalinqua come in, the water's moving fast and the ice don't get thick. You got to keep your eyes open 'cause it can crack under your feet. Fall in and the river pushes you under the ice before you can yell for help. That happened to one feller while the Swedes was sledding out."

  Something about Zimmerman's narrative has been nagging me for a while, and now I realize what it is. "How do you know what happened to the Swedes on their trip Outside? Gig wasn't there. And in November '97, you were still stuck on the coast somewhere."

  Zimmerman inhales sharply through his teeth and doesn't answer right away.

  "I got over the pass that next summer," he finally says. "Down to Dawson just ahead of the ice. Then the Swedes come back Inside in the summer of '99, and I ran into 'em with Gig, before we took the steamboat out of Dawson. Drank whiskey with 'em and heared their story."

  "You didn't mention earlier that you met the Swedes. Only that you met Nokes in Dawson."

  Zimmerman withdraws and watches his internal projector. "That's right," he says, his face relaxing into something like a smile. "Nokes showed up in Dawson too, about the same time. He was one of the reasons we left."

  I've been wondering if and when Nokes would re-enter the story. But now Zimmerman says that was eighteen months later, in the summer of '99. Almost a year after he reached Dawson himself in the autumn of '98.