Zimmerman cracks a smile. "Progress," he says. "Them that sees it coming can make a living off of them that don't. By the end of July, I had a pack team that was healthy and knowed the trail, and to the Siwashes they was worth fifty dollars a head. Maybe there was a cable that was starting to run buckets from the canyon up to the pass, but that didn't signify with them. They been packing gear up from the beach for white men for twenty years, and they was sure there was another twenty years coming. So they always had an eye for horses."
"I packed my own outfit up to Canyon City, then cached it there and took the team back down to Dyea. Sold 'em to the Siwashes for two hundred dollars. Then I found the man running Wallace's cable and offered him all two hundred to send my outfit up to the pass. That's ten cents a pound, and that's about what the packers was getting. The engine was shut down when I got there, but he said they was going to start moving loads again later that day. There was bags and boxes stacked everywhere in rows. He said they was backed up but he'd take my money if I could wait three days.
"So I paid him and took my chances. Stacked my outfit in the line, strapped fifty pounds of gear and grub on my back, and started up the trail. It was two years and two months since I left home, and even though I just bet everything I had on strangers behind me and ahead of me, that was the first day I felt sure I was going make it to the Yukon."
Chapter 35
Zimmerman says he spent two nights at Sheep Camp, then went up to Chilkoot Pass to wait for his outfit and found it was already there, a nondescript pile of forty canvas bags set off by a few feet from the towers of bags and crates and lumber that flanked both sides of the trail across the pass.
"There was a couple of Mounties up there and two customs agents checking outfits and taking fees. A Mountie gives you a five-minute lecture about the dangers up ahead, and if you bought all your grub and gear in Victoria and you got unbroken seals, he says god-speed and waves you on.
"But whatever you got that ain't Canadian gets taxed, and then you wait for the customs agent. I think I paid a hundred and sixty dollars, which was most of what I had left. Took half a day to do it, since there was ten groups waiting and the agents wasn't in much of a rush. When one of 'em finally got to me, I asked him what day it was, and he said August first.
"It made me feel low thinking I took over a year to cross the border after stepping foot in Dyea, and some of the stampeders that come after me got to Dawson before the river iced over last fall. All I could do was keep moving forward and hope the gold fields wasn't picked clean by the time I got to the Klondike. I started packing my gear down to Crater Lake, two bags at a time, figuring the Raffertys and Orrie was a couple days ahead of me and might gain a couple more between the pass and Bennett Lake."
Zimmerman gives a spare description of his journey down from Chilkoot Pass and across the staircase of valleys below it. His traverse seems less memorable than the one Garrett and Nokes and the Swedes undertook in the winter of '96. Maybe because by the summer of '98 there were multiple boatmen willing to ferry outfits across the upper lakes.
"Crater Lake is five hundred feet down from the pass," Zimmerman says, "and it sits like a dead possum in a big bowl of granite and scree. It's over a mile from one end to the other, and the trail goes up and down around the sides, so them boatmen had plenty of customers, even though they was charging one cent a pound. It's windy and cold and wet up there even in the summer, and I didn't want to spend three days scuffling on that trail. So I carried a hundred pounds around the lake and paid twenty dollars to have the rest of my outfit rowed across.
"From the foot of the lake it's four miles following the outlet creek down a rocky valley to Long Lake, and I can still see that trail with my eyes closed. There was dozens of fellers humping outfits, but I felt like I was moving the pyramids by myself. Took five days to haul my gear them four miles. Would of been more, but I hired a feller with two burros to help me on the last day."
Zimmerman says on the way to Lindeman he kept trading his dwindling funds for time.
"It was a penny a pound for the boatman at Long Lake, and by then twenty dollars was sounding reasonable for two miles of water. The wind was fierce, so you could sail to the foot in half an hour. Then a short walk to the head of Deep Lake and a one-mile ferry to the other end. From there it's one more hill and down to Lindeman, and that's as pretty a lake as you'll ever see. The wind dies down and it feels warmer, and you got a five-mile finger of blue water, with granite slopes rising up on either side. Wide meadow and a hundred tents at the head of the lake.
"I humped my first load down there and dropped the bags in the meadow, with sore shoulders and aching feet. It was late afternoon and I couldn't stomach walking back for another load right away, so I just stretched out on the grass, caught my breath, and watched the clouds go by for an hour. Then I left my bags where they was and walked around to explore. With all the fire rings and trampled grass and trash, you could tell a few thousand people already come and gone. Nothing nearby you could point to in the way of trees, but I seen men whipsawing logs in half a dozen saw-pits, and twice that many boats was getting built."
I ask Zimmerman what a saw-pit is and he says it's a rectangular scaffold of logs raised ten feet off the ground, supported by braced logs or sawed-off tree trunks that act as posts.
"That's the only way you can saw logs into planks," he says. "Cut down a spruce tree, strip the branches and take off the top, down to where the trunk is ten inches. Then the bottom might be twelve or fifteen across. Roll that log on skids up to the frame and wedge it so it don't turn on you. Lay your chalk lines down on the top and bottom for one-inch planks. Then one feller stands up on the frame and straddles the log and the other stands underneath it on the ground.
"The whipsaw's just a skinny eight-foot blade with ripping teeth. No frame, but wooden handles on each end. Line it into the log, and the man on top pulls his handle from his knees to his shoulders. The feller on the bottom pulls from overhead down to his waist. That's the cutting stroke, and if the blade don't stick he gets a face-full of sawdust. Pull it straight for fifty or sixty strokes and that's a ten-foot plank." Zimmerman smirks as he swirls his whiskey and drinks. "Sounds easy 'til you try it."
Zimmerman says he still wasn't ready to walk back to Deep Lake for another load, so he kept moving clockwise along the lake shore, and found that the village of tents ended where a shallow river flowed into the head of the lake.
"A couple women was washing pots in the river and a man was drawing water, and a few stripped spruce trees was pushed up against the bank in an eddy. And I couldn't of been happier to see three fellers sitting on a big rock near the logs. Rafferty and Tim and the schoolteacher Orrie. I guess I was hoping they might be camped at Lindeman, 'cause I was bone tired from trying to catch up to 'em.
"Tim breaks out a grin when he sees me and Rafferty shakes my hand, but Orrie is a queer bird and he just nods and says 'how long you been here?' Rafferty says the Siwashes dropped their outfits at Lindeman and said they wanted five cents more a pound to keep going to Bennett. Rafferty didn't want to spend more money, but he already paid 'em what they was owed, so he didn't think they had a choice.
"Then a gold-haired boy caulking his boat told him there was a good stand of trees in a valley five miles up the river, and you could tie 'em together and float 'em most of the way to Lindeman. So that's what they was doing. They told the Siwashes no and pitched their tent two days ago. Rafferty and Orrie went up the river today and brung down four logs, and they left Tim at Lindeman to watch for me coming through. Now all four of us could go upriver tomorrow and strip down eight or ten."
Zimmerman says felling and stripping four suitable trees and then dragging them to the river took a whole morning, and guiding them down the shallow river consumed the rest of the day, even with the trunks tied together and hauled by ropes.
"Sometimes all four of us was in the river to our waists, dragging them logs off the rocks, and even in August that water f
eels like ice. By the time we got back down to the lake I was chilled and scraped and sore. But we only got four logs that first day, so we went back up the next morning and done it again. Hauled our dozen logs to a saw-pit that some other fellers was finished with, and I figured we seen the worst part of building a boat. At least all the sawing and hammering was on dry ground.
"Rafferty said we was building a scow, and I seen plenty of them on the canal. Flat bottom, six foot beam, tapered to a broad point at the bow and squared off a pinch narrower at the stern. The gunwales had a decent curve so we was mounting oar-locks at the widest beam, one port and one starboard. Rafferty brung hardware for three, and the third was going on the transom so you could use an oar to steer.
"Two of our logs was cottonwood, and Rafferty wanted one for the ribs and thwarts. Them pieces is pretty simple on a scow. He cut the gunwales out of a scrawny pine and gave Tim the second cottonwood, told him to shape the oars. So that put Orrie and me in the saw-pit, whipsawing spruce for the planks."
Zimmerman says that he started off on the raised scaffold, working the upper half of the saw, while Orrie worked the lower half.
"Orrie wore specs, so the sawdust didn't go straight into his eyes when he was trying to keep the blade on the chalk line. But he still seemed blind to me. Every time he pulled the handle down, I seen the blade swing wide of the line. One cut goes wide to the left and the next goes wide to the right, and I'm trying to move it back on line on the upswing. Wasn't long before I was cussing at him to stay on the mark, and pretty soon he was cussing right back. His hair was copper colored and his whiskers was thin, so there wasn't nothing to hide the color on his face, and everytime I looked down he was getting redder and redder.
"Dammit, Orrie," I says, "can't you saw a straight line? We ain't gone three feet before you turned this board to kindling."
"'Damn yourself, Henry!' he says, wiping the dust off his face. 'Every time I get it back on the chalk you jerk it sideways.'
"That spruce smelled good while we was cutting it, but it all ended up in the fire. And we got maybe one eight-foot plank out of the second log, even though the planks was only six inches wide and an inch thick. The wood was all sticky and full of knots. By the end of that first day, Orrie and me was both spitting mad and keeping our distance outside the saw-pit.
“The next morning I talked to some fellers who was finishing work on their boat and they just laughed. Said they wasted three logs and two days learning how to whipsaw, and after that the blade just started running straight on its own. And that's how it went with Orrie and me – we got the hang of it after three days. Went back up the river for a couple more logs, then another few days in the pit and we was done."
Zimmerman says it took about a week to finish the hull once all the planks were cut.
"Rafferty done a good job shaping the ribs and gunwales, so once we got the frame nailed tight, we knowed the rest would come together. But all that wood was green, so even if you nail your planks perfect across the ribs, the next day you got gaps where they shrunk. So then you're swapping some of 'em out and pushing oakum into gaps on the rest. Cover the cracks and the oakum with pitch, let it dry for a day, then spread on another layer, or as much as you got left. Every boat is still going to leak, but you got a platform built into the hull that your outfit rides on, so a couple inches of water don't matter, and when it gets deeper you use a tin can to bail.
"We was camped at Lindeman for three weeks," Zimmerman says, "and we must of launched three dozen boats. Everyone dropped what they was doing to help put a boat in the water, and even if your hands wasn't needed you stood and watched, maybe fired a couple rounds in the air to send 'em off.
"Summer was over, and you couldn't help noticing the days getting shorter. The clouds pushed lower and the wind come up, rattling hard through the night, always blowing down the lake. We nailed a step to the floor near the bow and rigged a simple mast for running downwind. Sail was tent canvas stretched between pine poles. When we got her in the water, we tied the mast to the gunwales and stacked bags around the base.
"Rafferty named the boat Abigail and she was snug – less than two foot of freeboard carrying three tons and four men. Where we launched it was just ripples, but a half-mile out was tailwind swells, so I knowed we could ship the port and starboard oars after we made a little distance downwind. Anyone that wasn't steering or watching the sail was going to bail all the way down the lake.
"They pushed us off and the sun went behind a cloud and the water turned dark, and you could tell cold days was coming. The wind kicked up a notch around our ears, and it blowed away the sound of the guns."
Chapter 36
Zimmerman glances at my eyes, maybe trying to read me, then lowers his gaze to the tin cup and swirls his whiskey, and I can sense the gears spinning again. I want to hear his whole story about the Yukon, but I'm also trying to wear him down. Decide whether he's intrinsically honest, or catch him in a contradiction or a lie that suggests his allegiance to Garrett remained intact – and that he never intended to help us on the night Drew and I set out for Garrett's cabin. In which case he's responsible for Drew's death, and I'm absolved.
But if Zimmerman is telling the truth, if Drew sent him from the cabin to find me, my brother's death lies at my feet, because my fear of the culvert sealed his fate. And in that case I see no escape from the path that led me here tonight.
Zimmerman gestures toward the cabin door and says he needs to piss. I lift the Colt and wave him toward the orange coals in the stove. He laughs wheezily, then stretches to his feet and shuffles over, unbuttoning his fly. The glow dims as the coals roar and smoke fills the stove, but the stovepipe carries it away and spares us the smell. He snatches our cups and refills them halfway from the cask, then slumps back onto his stool. As he lifts his left hand to drink, my eyes lock onto his half-finger against the cup, and I visualize the four bloodied fingers lying severed on the floor of Garrett's burning cabin. Those left-hand digits helped identify the blackened corpse.
By the time we've both sipped, the coals are glowing orange again.
Zimmerman says he pushed off with the Raffertys and Orrie from the head of Lindeman Lake in the first week of September. Once the stampeders were afloat, both wind and current bore them north toward Dawson. While in '96 Garrett had followed the melting floes down the Yukon as spring turned to summer, in '98 Zimmerman sailed the lakes toward the river in a race against autumn and the oncoming ice.
"After Lindeman I knowed we had a solid boat," Zimmerman says. "She could run downwind in the swells, but now and then one of 'em would wash over the transom and set us scrambling to bail. And there was steady leaks from every quarter. We spent a day at the foot of the lake caulking the cracks and letting the pitch dry.
"Bennett was longer and rougher than Lindeman, and there was times I thought we'd swamp for sure. But halfway down we sailed in lee of a point and the swells dropped, and then the wind died down toward sunset. Two miles from the foot of the lake we was running easy when we come up on a wreck about thirty feet to starboard. The boat looked like one of them we launched a few days before. She was mostly underwater, port-side down with waves lapping over the top. You could see a few bags trapped and floating in the open hull, but we didn't see no sign of her crew, so we didn't try to steer closer. With the way we was rigged, we might of pushed our port rail under if we done that, so we just sailed by. A piece of canvas tied to a snapped mast was drifting a couple of lengths away.
"Then we come up on the bodies. First was a big feller, floating face down. The air was getting colder and the water was freezing, but he wasn't wearing nothing above the waist but a wool undershirt. We reckoned maybe he gave his coat to someone else, or took it off and tried to fill it up with air. He was three boat lengths off to starboard, so we didn't try to fetch him. The truth is we wanted to keep moving, not go looking for someone to notify.
"The next body was smaller and closer, maybe two lengths off. It was dressed in a ma
n's clothes and a coat that was too big, but you could tell from the dark floating hair it was a woman. She was face down too, and the sight of her made my head throb. I could hear Orrie muttering some kind of blessing as we sailed by.
"The third was the worst, and we almost run it over before we left it to port. It was a boy about the same age as Tim, gold-brown hair, too young for whiskers. He was floating on his back and I got a good look at his face as we passed by, just beyond arm's reach. His eyes was open wide like he was surprised, and you almost thought he would pop his head up and ask to climb aboard, until you seen his mouth was open too, with water washing over it.
"'Dear God,'" Rafferty says, and he turns away as if he knows the kid. "I was almost expecting him to hook the body with an oar and pull it onboard, but he just looked away until we left it astern. I guess when we didn't bring the big feller on board, we wasn't going to pick up the woman. And when we left the woman floating, we couldn't bring ourselves to gather up the boy. We was heading for the Klondike with blinders on, and after that I reckon we would of left a drownded baby bobbing in our wake."
Zimmerman pauses to squint at me, then relaxes his eyes and furrows his weathered brow. "That's how it was in the stampede," he says. "We seen different kinds of wrecks almost every day."
He says they almost suffered one themselves in the swift water.
"There was men you could pay to take your boat through Miles Canyon, and they knowed them rapids inside out, running 'em six or seven times a day. If you was riding too low they would make you unload half your gear and pack it around, which is what they done to us. So Abigail was down the canyon as soon as we lightened her load, and we spent a full day humping bags on the bypass trail.
"We wasn't looking to do that again, so when we got to Whitehorse we pulled ashore above the rapids and followed the trail around to scout. We watched one boat after another make it through, and some was manned by the fellers that owned 'em, not the men for hire. So we reckoned we could do the same and spare our legs and backs.
BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) Page 22