by Will Hobbs
It was the twenty-third of September as he started north on the great river. The sky above was filled with vees of noisy geese and swans and cranes fleeing the country where he was headed. The aspens and birches on the hillsides were at their peak of yellow and red, while the brush on the top glowed a deep crimson purple. Along the river itself, the dense cottonwoods and willows flamed bright gold.
The middle of the day was so warm he had to peel off his wool shirt and paddle in his flannel undershirt. He grinned, remembering Jack in his red underwear climbing the Chilkoot.
Two, three weeks at most, he’d rendezvous with his brothers in the Golden City, then stake his claim. Within a month, he’d be shoveling gold.
FIFTEEN
The next morning, Indian summer was only a memory. A gale from the north had blown all night and sent the golds and reds to the ground. Entire stands of aspen and birch stood gray against an ashen sky.
As Jason paddled on, he listened carefully for the sound of fast water. DANGEROUS RAPIDS, the map said. The last thing he wanted to do was paddle into the white water of Miles Canyon by accident.
As he rounded a high prominent bluff, he spied a piece of red calico tied on a willow along the bank. A warning?
Yes. The box canyon loomed downriver, its dark walls of basalt a hundred feet high. The narrowed river as it passed inside looked barely wider than fifty. Dozens of boats were tied to the shore in an eddy that pooled above the entrance to the canyon. Klondikers were portaging their outfits on their backs along a trail that led above the cliffs. Here began the most difficult five miles of the Yukon, the part Jamie Dunavant had said a beginner couldn’t manage in a canoe. Had Jamie and her father dared to run it?
With great difficulty, the Klondikers were skidding their heavy skiffs along the portage trail over logs placed across the path. “Let’s go take a look,” Jason suggested to the husky. “Find out what we’re in for.”
They walked along the very edge of the cliffs, looking down into the violent chute of foaming waves. After a quarter of a mile the gorge ended, but almost immediately a second one began. In between, as the river rushed out of the first gorge, it was consumed by surging boils and a monstrous whirlpool on a scale that reminded him of the boat-eating Charybdis of mythology.
On both sides of the whirlpool, eddies raced violently upstream against the cliffs. He could understand why everyone was portaging.
The second box canyon was a near duplicate of the first, only narrower. Together they totaled a mile. At the end of the mile, Jason could see boats down below putting back onto the river at the head of Squaw Rapids. He listened to the talk on the bluffs as Klondikers nervously discussed the water downstream. After Squaw Rapids, he learned, came even bigger waves in the White Horse Rapids, said to resemble a parade of white horses standing on their hind legs.
It was the narrow canyons that were the chief hazard—having your boat bashed against the walls, or spilling in the whirlpool in between the two canyons. Squaw and White Horse Rapids could be run, they said.
Not by canoe, Jason thought. Not by me.
Jason knew he’d have to portage the canyons, but if he took the time to portage Squaw and White Horse Rapids as well, he’d lose his race with winter for certain.
Jason’s eyes were drawn back to the head of Squaw Rapids. He saw his answer. Several parties, unwilling to risk running the white water, were roping their boats down the edge of the rapids from the shore. That’s what he would do, walk the canoe down on a short leash. But first he had to portage around the canyons.
Returning to his canoe at the head of Miles Canyon, Jason faced a thorny problem. There were a hundred men on this trail, yet he couldn’t beg for help. Every one of them was in a desperate race against the ice. How was he to portage his canoe single-handed?
King was anxious to start down the trail. Would he pull? The madman on the Dead Horse Trail had said he wouldn’t.
But if King would…
Jason brought out the husky’s harness. King leaped in the air at the sight of it, nosed it, leaped again.
Won’t pull, eh?
Jason attached the harness, then fifteen feet of rope running back from it to the canoe. With King out in front pulling, and him horsing the canoe as needs be over the skids…
It was worth a try.
Jason placed some logs across the path, pulled the canoe into position on top of them, found a few more logs to place across the trail ahead.
The Klondikers skidding the skiff ahead of them paused to study the arrangement, all grins.
“Pull, King!” Jason called.
In reply, the big husky simply wagged his tail.
The Klondikers laughed and went back to work.
Jason went to the husky, talked to him, took his harness in hand above his shoulder blades, and pulled. “Pull,” Jason repeated. The canoe rolled forward a few inches. He repeated the demonstration again and again, then walked up the trail twenty feet ahead, turned around, and chanted, “Pull, King! Pull! Pull for me!”
And King pulled. Tentatively at first, but with encouragement, more and more, until the husky was pulling with all his might. Jason raced back to the rear of the canoe, picked up a log, and shuttled it to the front. “Pull!” Jason yelled, yanking with all his strength on the gunwales.
With the two of them working, the canoe moved along the trail much faster than he’d guessed it would. They were having an easier time of it, in fact, than the Klondikers in front of them, who were floundering with their big skiff.
At the break between canyons, Jason rested opposite the whirlpool. At the sound of men running on the trail behind him, he turned around and spied none other than Jack London pounding down the trail with the wiry Merritt Sloper close behind.
“Jason Hawthorn!” London cried. “You, ahead of me? What in the world? How did you manage it? And here I’d been picturing you stuck back at Lindeman. Now, here’s a dog team worthy of legend, a one-dog team—the mighty King!”
Jason pulled the canoe out of the trail, and they swapped stories. Jack’s party had been one of those he’d passed along Marsh Lake in the night.
London and Sloper studied the whirlpool, then trotted down the path to take a look at the second gorge. Jason and King had gone back to work and had advanced the canoe by fits and starts halfway along the trail above the second canyon when London and Sloper returned panting up the trail. They were joined by Thompson, Goodman, and Tarwater from upriver.
“Want to portage the canyon, Jack?” called orange-whiskered Fred Thompson. “Like everyone else?”
“Nothing doing, says my vote,” Jack replied. “I’ve seen nothing we can’t manage.”
“Sure it can be done, eh, captain?” asked Big Jim Goodman.
London’s eyes were blazing. “Two minutes saves us two days, maybe three.”
“It might make the difference where we winter,” put in Sloper.
The grizzled Tarwater had the last word. When Jack asked his opinion, he replied, “Been ponderin’ so hard I ain’t had time to think. But I’m game for the ride if you’re the one drivin’.”
They took their vote: unanimous in favor of the two-minute route. They were going to run Miles Canyon.
As his party started up the trail, Jack lingered for a moment. “Jason, it seems like we’re always saying hello or good-bye.”
“I’ll see you in the Golden City; I’m sure of it.”
“You’ve heard about Lake Laberge up ahead? The Yukon pools up there, for some inconvenient reason—the lake is thirty miles long, and they say it can ice over the last week in September.”
“Any day now.”
“Exactly. Don’t lose any strokes with that paddle of yours until you get past Laberge. I’m counting on you to come up big.”
“I will. Good luck to you in the canyon!”
“Got to keep those Seven Seas dry!”
With a wave, Jack took off running.
Jason had to see this. He positioned himself at the po
int of maximum drama: on the cliff toward the end of the first gorge, where he had an unobstructed view of the white water in the canyon and the whirlpool below.
The word had gone up and down the portage trail that a party was going to try the canyon. Everyone along the trail pressed to the edge of the cliff to see what would happen.
A shout came down from above: “They’re on their way!”
Here came the Yukon Belle down the chute between the dark, narrow walls. Wiry Merritt Sloper, at the bow, was digging with a paddle. Fred Thompson and Jim Goodman sat side by side, each working an oar, while Jack stood at the stern, steering with the huge sweep. As the skiff raced through a succession of waves, Sloper’s paddle often grabbed nothing but air as the bow was pitched high again and again. At a command from London, the two amidships suddenly pulled in their oars, and just in time—the skiff went flying downstream at breakneck speed, at one point no more than six feet from the wall.
When a sudden wave swept the big skiff sideways, London leaned on the sweep oar with all his might and pointed the bow downstream just in time to meet a huge curling wave that would surely have tipped them over. Sloper’s paddle snapped in two under the force.
Once through that last wave of the first canyon, the Yukon Belle was shot headlong into the whirlpool. Once again, London braced the entire skiff against the violent water with his sweep and called for oars. Thompson and Goodman, facing the stern, had little idea where they were going, but the strength of their oars pulled the boat out of the whirlpool and headlong into the second canyon.
Cheers echoed all along the tops of the cliffs. “That man reads the water like a book,” someone shouted.
Jack London had come up big.
SIXTEEN
With Miles Canyon and the White Horse Rapids behind him, Jason paddled furiously north down the Yukon. The sun had lost its power, its arc now ominously low in the sky. No more calls from geese or swans, only from ravens, and the word they were croaking was winter.
It was do or die.
His canoe was fast, but he still had fifty miles of river before Lake Laberge, where the current would die on him for thirty miles.
“Pull!” he yelled. “Pull!”
Confused, the husky turned around in the bow of the canoe, seeming to ask what he wanted.
“Sorry, King! I meant me, not you!”
Suddenly King pricked up his wolflike ears and studied the shore. Jason stopped paddling, then heard a chirrup repeated several times.
There on the left, in the willows, was a cow moose, the first moose he’d ever seen.
From the shore downstream came deep grunts. A bull moose was attacking a small spruce tree and utterly demolishing it with its massive antlers. Suddenly the bull left off the attack, flared his nostrils, and proceeded upriver toward the female.
A second bull, hidden in the willows near the cow, charged out onto the river gravel to challenge the intruder. The bulls paused twenty feet from each other and lowered their antlers, pawing the ground and grunting battle cries. The giants were equally matched, and it was apparent there was going to be a fight. The current took the canoe around the bend before the bulls charged, but a moment later Jason heard the ringing collision of bone on bone.
The pale green Yukon was joined by the Takhini from the west, which briefly clouded it with silt. The valley opened up, and the cut banks disappeared as he entered a slow and swampy alder flat. Then, at the end of his second day below White Horse Rapids, the current died out altogether as he paddled into the head of windblown Lake Laberge.
The wind blew so fiercely that night, it seemed the spruces in his camp would surely snap. At last the gale died out in the hours before dawn. Jason woke to a sheet of ice stretching all the way to the barren highlands across the lake, and the fearful realization that he was trapped.
At dawn the trees were bending again, and, to his amazement, the ice broke into panes of glass that drifted and shattered before the wind. He didn’t dare to take the time to warm himself with a fire, or to cook. The wind was blowing hard out of the northwest, and he had to get through this dead water and into the current before the ice returned to lock up the lake for good.
Jason hugged the west shore and paddled north, bundled like a polar bear from fur hat to sealskin mukluks, but without the clumsy mittens. His fingers felt like frozen claws. The windlashed surface of the lake was wild with waves and whitecaps, but as long as he hugged the shore, he could keep the canoe under control. Even so, the spray turned to ice in midair and fell tinkling into the canoe.
On his second day on the lake there were skiffs coming on from behind. On his third day, still hugging the shore, he couldn’t see the skiffs over his shoulder anymore. He could guess the reason. With all their surface for the wind to catch, those boats would be kites; they’d end up wrecked on the far shore of the lake. All those people behind him were trapped in camp.
With each dawn the ice covering the lake was thicker than before, and each day it took longer for the wind to shatter and disperse it.
His fourth day on the lake, the squalls became so severe that he couldn’t make any progress and had to go to shore. He was in a quandary. If he couldn’t get off this lake, there would come the day, and very soon, when the morning ice covering Lake Laberge wouldn’t break up at all. That would be the day that spelled disaster.
Out of desperation, he tried to see if King could pull the canoe from shore. Where the shoreline would allow it, it worked. With the dog straining at his utmost and Jason paddling like a berserker, they were able to keep going.
The sixth day dawned a dead calm. The ice on Laberge was an inch thick. What now? Wait until the ice was thick enough to walk on, then drag the canoe the rest of the way?
If he waited that long, the Yukon River beyond the lake would itself freeze over, and he’d be stranded with three hundred miles remaining.
Checkmate?
His antagonist, the wind, finally came to his aid. Late in the morning it blew hard enough to create a channel of open water along the western shore, and then it died out as suddenly as it had begun.
Here was his chance. Jason put the husky back in the bow and paddled north with all the strength he could muster. By twilight he was entering the narrowing outlet of the lake, and he felt the revival of the current. Before long it was rushing beneath him like floodwaters. There was just enough daylight remaining to allow him to see the illusion of the boulder-strewn river bottom rising up beneath him as the canoe poured with the slush ice into the reborn Yukon.
On the left shore, people. Behind them, cabins with sod roofs. An Indian village. He paddled for shore, half-dead from cold.
Arms motioned him in. “Plenty muck-a-muck,” a man told him.
He was being invited to eat, he realized. All around the village, racks were full of drying salmon, but it was moose steaks they were roasting around their cook fires.
The Indians’ dogs, all tied, were in an uproar at the sight of King, but no one paid any attention to their barking and leaping. People let him know he was fortunate to escape the lake. “Tomolla, no.”
The next morning the Yukon narrowed into a winding, steep-walled canyon. He had to be careful not to hug the turns, where sweepers—trees undermined by the river but still clinging by their roots to the banks—sawed up and down in the current. In the tightest turn of all, he passed over an enormous submerged boulder that produced a vicious boil downstream. The boil caught the canoe, spun it suddenly, and King went flying into the river. It was all Jason could do to brace with his paddle and keep from capsizing.
“King!” he shouted, but the powerful husky was having no trouble keeping his head above the water. Jason made for a gravel beach as fast as he could, with King paddling close behind. The husky dragged himself on shore and shook himself out. They were back on the river minutes later.
It was a gray October day, with no help from the sun. The canoe passed the mouth of the Teslin River and a native village there. Now the Yukon was
nearly twice as big as before. It snowed that night, three inches of snow as fine and dry as sugar.
The next day he passed the mouth of the Big Salmon River and another village.
On all sides, ice cakes were hissing in the Yukon. Shelves of ice were forming along the shore, extending ten and twenty feet out. As freeze-up lowered the level of the river, the ice shelves cracked noisily under their own weight and splashed into the water, adding even more ice to the rest jostling downstream.
He passed two more villages the following day at the mouth of the Little Salmon and the mouth of the Nordenskjold. The drying racks were full of salmon.
From around a bend in the river came the roar of rapids. Jason pulled the canoe onto the beach and walked above the sheer bank on the right side to take a look at what was making all the noise. Four stony islands scattered in a row across the Yukon divided its flow into five rushing channels. This had to be the Five Fingers, which his map noted as LAST RAPID.
The big waves in the central slots would surely spill him, but he could picture himself paddling the raceway closest to the eastern bank, where he stood.
Before he got back into the canoe he calmed himself by sitting for a few minutes with his companion. The best friend I ever hope to have, he mused. With the husky’s winter coat fully grown out, including a creamy underfur, King looked more splendid and solid than ever.
“These Five Fingers can’t stop us,” Jason said to the husky. “Don’t let anything stump you, King. That’s what my father always said.”
The husky, with a quick dart of his tongue, licked Jason’s cheek.
“Five Fingers and an arm and a leg can’t keep us from our pot of gold now, partner. We’re a couple hundred miles—that’s all we are—from staking our claim. We’re going to be millionaires!”
Jason was sure he saw a grin on the husky’s beautiful face. King barked once, twice.