"We put Tim ashore along with a single load of bags for the four of us and tied down everything in the boat. Orrie and me took the midship oars and Rafferty worked the stern. After we run through, we was going to stroll back for them last bags. By Whitehorse we already been a week on the lakes, so we figured we ate our way through sixty pounds of grub, and Abigail seemed like she was riding high and ready for spirited water.
"Of course we found out them rapids look a lot different when you're in the middle of 'em. It felt like we was throwed from the top of that first wave down to the bottom of the river, and all we could see and hear was water crashing down from all sides. The second wave broke over the bow and the third washed over the boat, so we was half sunk, even though we was still flying downriver. Boat got spun sideways through a drop and then crashed into a rock that tore off the starboard oar. We slipped around that, spun some more, and then I lost track and just knowed that we was part of the current. We come down the last drop backward, all three of us hanging onto the gunwales, and I was sure we'd be sucked under the falls and flip, but the water bubbled under us and spat us into an eddy. Some of the bags was loose and floating. We had one oar left and the boat was like a tub full of freezing water, so we was lucky to get her ashore before she rolled."
Zimmerman says their bags weren't completely water-tight, and they lost two fifty-pound bags of sugar and the outermost layer of flour in several bags. They spent a couple of days repacking their gear, patching their boat, and sawing new oars, and they counted themselves lucky so little was ruined.
Past Whitehorse, only the thirty-mile length of Lake Laberge separated Abigail from the headwater tributaries of the Yukon.
"We was almost halfway down the lake, running with the swells when the wind backed off and clouds started filling in from the north," Zimmerman says. "That was the first day we seen that kind of weather. Then the wind dies and the swells fall apart and turn to chop. The sky goes gray and pretty soon there's snowflakes. Up ahead the clouds is dark and low, so you can't see more than a couple miles down the valley. We knowed it was time to get off the lake, so Rafferty points to a strip of rocky beach on the western shore where there's washed up logs and driftwood. Orrie and me took the oars and we started rowing over there.
"When we got closer there was a couple of dogs running up and down the beach, and then a man comes out from the trees and starts waving his arms and calling out to us. He's speaking English, but we can't make out what he's saying until we tie the boat up tight along the shore. Talking face to face we figure out he's Russian with a heavy accent. Got a thick brown beard with gray streaks and says his name is Volkov. His boat swamped in the waves two days ago and his partner drownded. It don't take long in that cold water.
"Volkov points to a green canoe that's tipped over near the tree-line and says he was paddling close to the shore, hunting ducks and tracking his boat down the lake. Then a squall come up and the swells got big right away, and he couldn't get back out to the boat. It blowed through in twenty minutes, but it took him an hour to find the wreck, and no sign of his partner or their two dogs. He salvaged what was floating and brought it to the beach, made a shelter out of the canoe, and the next day the dogs come running up to him out of the woods. Volkov said when his stuff dried out he was going to paddle down to the foot of the lake and try to find what was left of his boat. He shot three ducks and ate one with his dogs, but he only got a week's worth of grub left from his outfit.
"While we was talking the wind come up again, and it clocked around to the north for the first time. The snow picked up and was blowing sideways. We got our tent up quick and burned driftwood in the stove. Made room for Volkov and let his dogs have the canoe. There was no use thinking about boating into the wind, so we settled in, and the snow come and gone but that northerly kept blowing for three days.
"We ate what was left of Volkov's ducks and gave him a dozen cans of tinned meat and some dried salmon for the dogs. That's how most fellers on the Yukon Trail done it when they found folks down on their luck. Give what you can spare to get 'em through the next few days. Volkov wasn't ready to walk away from his wreck, and we couldn't take him anyway, but there was other boats coming behind us, and maybe one of 'em could."
Zimmerman says that the fourth morning was clear and calm, so they broke camp and said goodbye to Volkov, who hoisted his dogs and bags into his canoe and paddled down the western shore with his bird gun propped beside him. Out in the heart of the lake, the prevailing wind came up, and Abigail made it to the debris-strewn foot of Lake Laberge by the end of the day.
"It was late September when we rowed into the head of the Lewes River, and the nights was getting longer than the days. With a couple inches of snow on the ground and ice creeping in from the banks, we knowed we was racing the ice, but getting out of them swells done us a world of good. We got most of the cracks patched better, so we wasn't bailing as much, and we could lay off the oars and watch the hills drift by."
And Zimmerman's story flows faster now with the current.
"Even in the fall the Lewes runs strong, and you wind through the bends and row yourself clear of the islands. Rivers come in from the east – Hootalinqua, Big Salmon, Little Salmon – and creeks come in on both sides. We passed boats tied up where fellers was prospecting up the creeks. Sometimes we seen a tent with no boat around, but smoke from a campfire tells you someone's there. Other times it's a tent and no smoke, and you don't know what you'll find if you stop, but we wasn't stopping until it was too dark to keep running safe, and sometimes we was breaking thin ice to get ashore. Then you just want to get a fire going, eat a meal, and get warm enough to sleep."
Zimmerman says that almost every mile along the Yukon they saw evidence of the stampeders that preceded them – discarded crates, empty tins, a lost gum boot, torn fishing nets, remnants of broken boats.
"We stopped at Fort Selkirk, where the ACC got a trading post. Wasn't much there, even though steamers made it upriver that summer, but we bought some dried bear meat the Indians brung in. That's at the mouth of the Pelly River, and we met three fellers that was going twenty miles up the Pelly to work their claims on Nickel Creek. Said they was getting a dollar fifty to the pan from the creek bed, and they just been down to the Stewart district to register. They was expecting a stampede from Dawson once the word got out.
"I wasn't sold, but my partners wanted to prospect it, and I wouldn't of made it that far without their boat, so that's what we done. Tied Abigail up, packed a shovel, pans, and a week's worth of grub, and tramped up to Nickel Creek. Three days on that creek and her pups and we never washed out more than wages. At least Rafferty and Orrie learned what colors looked like and how to work a pan. But we lost a week, and when we got back to Fort Selkirk we was chipping Abigail out of the shore ice.
"Where the Pelly run into the Lewes is the start of the Yukon, and from there it's a hundred and seventy miles to Dawson. A month earlier we could of put our feet up and drifted there in four long days. But we was into the middle of October, with short days and ice creeping out from the islands, floes in the channels. That first night out of Fort Selkirk we made camp on a bench under some leaning spruce and Orrie's thermometer read zero degrees. For hours we heared floes grinding the shore ice, and that night I wasn't sure we was going to make it to the Klondike after all."
Chapter 37
Zimmerman says they woke up to three inches of new snow.
"You could shake it right off the branches, but on the roof of the tent it was froze to the ice that come from our breath, and down on the riverbank it was crusted from the fog. That week we spent our first hour of daylight chipping ice off the hull and oars. There was floes clogging most of the river, but we pushed off anyway and picked our way through. Even with mittens, your hands go numb working them frozen oars, but you can't just bury 'em in your armpits and let the ice steer your boat.
"There was two things we always worried about. First was getting our hull crushed between two floes.
Second was getting pushed into a sweeper or a strainer."
I ask Zimmerman what that means, and he says it's a tree near the bank that has been undercut by high water and fallen into the river. The tree's upturned roots anchor its base onshore while the river flows under its trunk and through its submerged branches.
"A hull with low draw and gunwales might scrape by under the trunk, but anything above the deck gets swept into the river. And if the trunk is at the waterline or the branches is strong, that's a strainer, not a sweeper. It'll hold your boat like a fly in a web until the current flips it or breaks it apart.
"Steer your boat into a strainer and you're racing time to cut it free. If it's a sweeper, you drop below the gunwales or climb over the trunk when it reaches you. Move too slow and the boat leaves you behind.
"We was able to keep the hull in one piece, but we knowed our luck wouldn't hold in the dark or the fog, so we was only boating eight hours, and it took four days to run a hundred miles. Just when we thought the ice was going to lock up for good, we got to the White River. That river come fast and cloudy from the west, and it don't freeze until the coldest part of winter. Then ten miles later you got the Stewart River pushing in from the east, and past that the Yukon seems twice as wide.
"We got there just when some warm air pushed the thermometer above freezing for the first time in a week. Don't know if it was the weather or them rivers coming in that cut the ice, but after the Stewart the channels opened up a little, and we made faster time down to Ogilvie, where the Sixtymile River come in from the west. From there it's less than forty miles to Dawson, but the first dozen is jammed with islands, and we didn't want to pick our way through ice shelves in the fading light, so we made camp on a big island near the head of that section.
"When we got our tent up, I went out looking for dry wood for a fire and I found two fellers that was building a raft near the tail end of the island. They almost looked like natives – dark faces wrinkled from the sun, red eyes, matted hair and beards a critter could nest in – and you might of thought they been five years in the wild, not just a couple of months. They was friendly, so I told 'em to come up to our campfire for a sip of whiskey when they was ready to call it a day.
"They said they been three days on that island, cutting down the biggest trees they could manage with a handsaw, then stripping 'em and sawing out logs. They left Bennett the same day we left Lindeman, and the boat they built got shoved into a strainer on the other side of the island. It had a v-shaped hull and the ice was pushing it from the side, so they worked fast to get most of their outfit unloaded onto the island. Before they finished, the ice flipped the boat and pushed it under the strainer, then carried it downriver.
"There was three of 'em, and they sent one feller down to Dawson the next day on a boat coming through. The other two was trying to build a raft and float their outfit the last forty miles before the river locked up. If they didn't make it, the third feller had all their money, and he was going to come back to get 'em with sleds and dogs.
"By that time we'd eaten our way through a few hundred pounds, but we couldn't carry both them fellers, never mind their outfit. Rafferty said we could take one of 'em down to Dawson, though we might get caught by the ice ourselves.
"I seen them two exchange a glance around the campfire, and I knowed they was as hungry to get to Dawson as we was. If one of 'em come with us, maybe the last one could get a ride with another boat, but then both of 'em would be heading into a Yukon winter with no grub and no gear. And no money, until they found their friend. If the feller left behind didn't catch a boat, he had no chance to finish that raft, load it up, and steer it down to Dawson through the ice by hisself.
"Even in the light of the fire, you could see they already figured all the angles. They knowed they had to finish building the raft, even though the odds was shifting against 'em every day. Rafferty gave 'em our whipsaw blade and thirty feet of rope, which was all we could spare, 'cause we might need it ourselves if we got trapped downriver.
"We pushed off at first light and made almost thirty miles, then tied up behind a point, up against the shelf ice. That last morning the sun come up on a white river, and you could almost walk across it on the floes. We chipped Abigail out and fought our way through until we seen log buildings and tents and boats pulled up against the snow on the eastern bank. We had to push hard with all three oars to get over to shore before being carried below the town.
"I split off after that first night in Dawson. The town was thousands of people by then, but I still run into Rafferty or Orrie once in a while over the next year. We might talk about prospects, or what we been doing, or our trip downriver. And someone always asked if anyone ever seen them fellers that was building a raft on the island below Ogilvie. And up until I left Dawson ten months later, we always said no, no one ever did."
Chapter 38
"We chopped off the shore ice below the town dock and used the oars to pole our way aground. There's no trees in Dawson and the mud flat was froze solid, so it ain't easy to tie up. We throwed all our bags onto the bank and dragged the boat up after 'em, slipping and sliding through ice water as we done it. That's a hard way to end a three-month trip, but no harder than any other day since Dyea. For me, the end of the trail felt strange. I left home for the Yukon in May of '96, and now it was the end of October '98 and there was no place I was trying to get to.
"You could say Dawson was like Skagway, if you seen both towns – streets laid out on flat ground against the water, then built up as fast as you could haul logs down from the hills and saw 'em into lumber. Hotels and restaurants, post office, blacksmith, bakery, barber.
"But in Skagway, people come off the boat with clean clothes, quick eyes, and a lively step. The greenhorns wasn't worried about what they didn't know – they was just itching to get on the trail. And Skagway slapped 'em on the back, then knocked 'em out and picked their pockets. Pushed 'em back onto the boat or forward up the hill. If they made it to Lindeman, there was a tent city to greet 'em. And another at Bennett and Tagish and Whitehorse.
"Then in '98, that whole wave of tents and boats and men washed up at the mouth of the Klondike, with my crew on the tail end. And a lot of fellers didn't know what to do when they got there. Even that first day in Dawson, walking them mud streets filled with piles of lumber and half-loaded wagons and empty barrels and sleeping dogs, we seen men just sitting on the edge of the plank sidewalks, chewing tobacco and planting their heels in the dirt. They looked like they forgot why they was there, so now they was just watching other people come and go.
"There was still plenty of fellers on the streets, women too, heading from one place to another, most times with something to buy or sell. We talked to a dozen strangers who stopped to say hello while we was hauling our bags up to the meadow on the north end of town. Mostly they wondered where we was from and told us where to buy whiskey and bread. Orrie asked a feller with a droopy mustache and a silver tooth about prospects and the man laughed and said every creek out to fifty miles was staked.
"We set up our tent, and you could tell from all the open sites there wasn't as many camped in the meadow as there was before."
"How long before you went looking for Garrett?"
"The next morning," Zimmerman says. "I went down to the Commissioner's office to see if he had a claim in the Klondike district. Until I done that, I was just guessing he come up from Circle or wherever he was. Been close to three years since he wrote me, so I didn't know for sure he was even alive."
"You said Gig sold his claim on Skookum Gulch in the summer of '97, and now you're looking for him a year later. He must have staked somewhere else by then. Or was he still camped down in Lousetown with Wylie, stealing from the cheechakos?"
Zimmerman's eyes flash and the corners of his mouth tighten, as if he's tasting something sour. His expression foretells a rebuke, but instead he answers even more deliberately, as if he's critiquing each word internally before uttering it.
"There wasn't no claim listed for Gig in the Klondike," he says. "I checked top to bottom on every creek. Didn't look for Wylie, 'cause I hain't met him yet.
"When I didn't find nothing in the ledgers, I asked the clerk if he ever heared of Gig Garrett, and he said sure, every sporting man in town knowed Gig. Said Gig was dealing faro at the Palace last winter, pulling in cheechakos that made it downriver before the freeze. Some feller that just opened a pawn shop sat down at the table and decided Gig was dealing a crooked game. There was a big argument, but he lost his money and Gig lost his job. Then Gig moved over to the Fairview, the clerk says, and that's where you can find him now.
"So around noon I gone over to the Fairview, and that was one of the best hotels in Dawson, just open a few months. I went into the saloon and seen Gig standing behind the bar."
"Did you recognize him right away?"
"I did, but maybe only 'cause I knowed he was there. He disappeared when Jessie died, and that was four years before, when he was twenty. Now his face was darker and looser, with hollows and wrinkles like a grown man's face, and the whites of his eyes was stained with red. If he had a beard I might of passed him by in the street, but it was getting into winter so he shaved it off – just kept a full mustache curling down to the corners of his mouth.
"I come up to the bar for a whiskey and when he set the glass down I looked at the stubble on his chin, and on the left side I seen a little white scar he got from slipping on the boat as a kid.
"'I reckon a man don't have to come all the way to the Klondike to pour whiskey,' I says, spreading my fingers out on the bar. 'They got a tavern at the Cabin John Bridge Hotel, and you can pan five cents a day out of Rock Run.'
BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) Page 23