by Will Hobbs
“Yes, sir. We’ll split everything down the middle. Fifty-fifty.”
Back on the river, Jason yelled, “Watch our smoke!” at the top of his lungs, then paddled down the rightmost of the Five Fingers. He felt the sudden acceleration as the canoe dropped swiftly toward a train of foaming waves. The trick was to stay dead center and not let the swirling eddies on either side grab him.
The bow met the first wave head-on and rose high as it sliced cleanly through. Jason paddled hard, careful not to lose momentum, as the canoe dropped into a trough. It rose with ice cakes on both sides onto a wave that broke over the bow and drenched him, all the way back at the stern, with icy spray. Steady!
Two more waves and they’d shot through. The rapids of the upper Yukon were all behind them. Jamie and her father came to mind; they’d paddled their canoe through this same rapid. Had they picked the same channel? Were they already working their claim, filling gunnysacks with nuggets?
Below Five Fingers the country opened up again, and the river meandered among dozens of islands, some half a mile or more in length. He stayed in the channel with the most current and the least ice. The bare bushes along the eastern shore were flecked with red.
Wild roses, he realized. Those red specks must be rose hips, the fruit Jamie had told him about, which would prevent scurvy. He knew a little about scurvy—the scourge of sailors, on account of their diet. It could make your teeth fall out. Scurvy could cripple you; it could even kill you.
Jason landed and went to take a look, then got a sack and started picking. He’d better take the time, he thought. Tomatoes and limes and such might not be available in Dawson City. A present for Abe and Ethan; he’d make tea drinkers of them.
He filled a sack, returned to the canoe and stowed it, then started on a second. This time he worked his way farther downstream and away from the river. He was finding rose hips almost half an inch in diameter. King was keeping an eye on him from a sunny clearing by the shore. It was a crisp day and the sky was a hard blue. Jason’s breath made a cloud of frost every time he breathed out.
Suddenly he became aware of splashes of crimson in the snow ahead. A few more steps, and he realized he was looking at a blood trail…and moose tracks. The blood looked fresh. Was it from a bull gored in a mating battle?
Here was a chance to present his brothers with a substantial amount of meat. With the rapids behind him, his canoe could float at least a hindquarter.
Jason quickly returned to the canoe for the rifle. “King,” he called, and the husky ran to join him. At the moose trail, the husky’s nose caught the scent of blood and the fur along his spine stood straight up.
The trail led no farther than a hundred yards, in and out of the alders and the willows. Suddenly, there was the moose, not forty feet in front of him, standing broadside in a small clearing, now turning its head to look at him. Six feet tall at the shoulders, no doubt, this bull was even more massive than the ones he’d seen earlier. The moose was bleeding from wounds on both sides of its neck and one behind the front shoulder.
Those were bullet holes, he realized, not antler wounds. Someone must be tracking the moose. An Indian? A Klondiker?
Jason turned around, saw no one. When he looked back, the moose was gone.
He followed the blood trail through the trees, more cautiously now, rifle at the ready. If he were to finish the moose, it would be a kindness to the animal and helpful to the hunter who was tracking it.
When he glimpsed the moose a few minutes later, it lay fallen in the snow, inert as stone. He wasn’t going to have to shoot it after all.
Jason set the rifle against a tree and walked close. The antlers were so broad, he might not be able to touch from one side to the other with arms outspread.
Suddenly the moose blinked, and a hind leg twitched. It was still alive! Before Jason had time for a second thought, the moose was on its feet and charging.
No time to reach the rifle. Time only to run. He saw King look over his shoulder at the monster, saw the husky running too.
Jason tripped and went down hard. Instantly he was back up, but just then the bull rammed him from behind, its antlers like the cowcatcher on a locomotive. All at once the moose threw its rack up and back, and Jason went with the antlers high into the air and above the animal.
Involuntarily, his arms shot out to break his twisting fall and he grabbed hold of two antler tips. He’d landed belly-down in the broad, flat palms of the antlers. At once, the moose was trying to shake him off, and might have. He wrapped his legs around the moose’s long, tapering head and clung with all his strength.
Hang on, he told himself. If he shakes me loose, then gores me or kicks me, I’m dead.
He could hear King barking. He could see the blur of the husky darting in and out.
The moose started ramming its head into the ground, trying to smash Jason into the ground. He held on. Suddenly the beast buckled underneath him, and Jason’s knees hit the earth. His legs had lost their hold; all he had now was the grip of his hands on the antler tines. He dared not let go.
King rushed in and tried to get under the animal’s throat. The moose stood up suddenly, kicking at the husky with its front hooves. King backed away, and the moose tried to shake Jason loose with wild gyrations of its head, and then to crush him into the ground.
Jason felt his legs taking a beating. The strength had gone out of his arms; he doubted he could hold on any longer. He slipped, and found himself looking directly into the animal’s eyes. The smell of musk and blood was bestial. The monster was making an incongruous cooing sound.
The moose buckled to its knees once again, ramming Jason back to the earth. The animal was utterly exhausted, and so was he.
As the moose’s front legs kicked forward in yet another attempt to stand. Jason felt a hoof pin one of his boots to the ground. The weight on his foot and the sudden pulling back of the monster’s antlers finally ripped his hands from their grip, and he was knocked loose.
Quicker than thought, he saw the enormous forelegs raining down, and shielded his face. His arms and chest took a terrible trampling from the front hooves.
Though the wind was knocked out of him, he managed to roll over as the moose momentarily turned to face King, who was barking in a frenzy. Then he was being trampled again, this time all over his back and legs.
Jason looked over his shoulder. The moose had its head down, about to gore him with those sharp tines, when the husky came flying. The moose turned its antlers toward the dog instead, and flung King aside like a rag doll.
A moment later the hooves rained down again, a shot rang out, and then all was darkness.
SEVENTEEN
When Jason came to, he knew only pain. At first he was aware of a sharp stab in his chest with the intake of even the slightest breath, but then he felt pain from head to toe and deep inside.
He opened his eyes. Everything was dim and murky. The only light was coming from a crude window made from pieces of bottles stuck in hardened mud. He was in a cabin, he realized. Outside, it was snowing.
He could hear a fire crackling in a stove, but he couldn’t turn his head to see the stove. The pain from throughout his body seemed to rush all at once to the back of his head. Suddenly he remembered the moose, and then he remembered the dog flung through the air off its enormous antlers. Was King alive?
Jason lapsed into darkness again, and when he woke, it was to the husky’s face only inches from his. “King,” he said, “King.”
The husky nuzzled his cheek.
“You’re still alive.” He reached to stroke the husky’s head, but the movement hurt too much and he had to pull back. The dog, satisfied that Jason was alive, lay down by the stove with a series of yelps.
Both were hurt bad, but both were alive. Where was this cabin? Who had brought him here?
Jason slept.
The next time he woke, it was to candlelight and the shadow of a man moving in the room. The shadow came and went during the hazy, sl
ow passage of time. The specter was tall and lean, with piercing dark eyes under knitted brows and a wide-brimmed prospector’s hat. His face was gaunt, brooding, chiseled from solid granite, it seemed.
“Where am I?” Jason managed. “Dawson City?”
“Hardly,” the man grunted. “You’re a couple of miles below Five Fingers. Dawson is two hundred and fifty miles downriver.”
Jason tried to think, to remember. “I have to get going,” he said. “I have to get to Dawson City before the river freezes up.” With the breath it took to speak, his ribs felt like a knife was twisting in them.
The man shook his head doubtfully. “The year before last, I fell onto a broken-off tree branch. It went through my leg like a spear. I had to be somewhere too, but I couldn’t even stand up for two weeks. So don’t tell me you have to get to Dawson City. Winter’s going to have the last word on that. Are you by yourself?”
Jason nodded, struggling against his confusion. “I still don’t understand how I—why I’m not dead, and where you came from. Did you fire the shot?”
“I’d been trying to catch up with that moose all morning. I heard some commotion and was coming up real careful. As I caught sight of you, that bull was within an instant of punching you full of holes, but your dog came leaping in. In the time it took me to raise my rifle and shoot, the dog went flying and the moose had gone back to giving you the devil with his hooves. How did you let that happen? Set your rifle down and walked up on the animal, thinking it was dead?”
It was all coming back. Jason groaned in agreement.
“That’s enough talk. You’re in worse shape than you know. You’ve been out cold for twenty-four hours.”
The darkness swept back in on him, and he slept.
In the morning Jason was able to move enough to clean himself with a bucket of hot water the man had heated on the stove. His entire body was black-and-blue. Every movement brought a whirlwind of pain. The back of his head had a fist-sized lump that pounded relentlessly with every beat of his heart.
“Where’s it hurt worst?” came the man’s voice.
“Ribs. I think I have some cracked ribs.”
It kept snowing, and the sky stayed dark. Before the sun failed, Jason was able to go to the open door, though every step hurt, and look out. King got up, whimpering, and looked out with him. The cabin was situated at the mouth of a creek about fifty yards back from the Yukon. The Yukon’s opposite shore was dominated by a barren bluff, pure white with snow.
The shelves of ice along the banks had grown toward the center of the river, nearly closing the open channel. “I hope you’re heading to Dawson and can take me along,” Jason said over his shoulder.
“I’m heading the other direction, and I’m in a hurry. I’m aiming to trade my canoe for a sled at the village at the mouth of the Nordenskjold.”
“And get some dogs to pull your sled?”
“I pull my own sled.”
It made no sense that a prospector would be going away from Dawson City instead of toward it, but Jason wasn’t going to point that out. “I’m worried about my canoe,” he said.
“I pulled it onto high ground. All the grub from your outfit is up in the cache where the critters can’t get it, even your rose fruit. I brought enough grub inside, you won’t have to climb until you’re able—the ladder’s around back. You got nothing to worry about.”
Easy for you to say, Jason thought. He craned his neck out the door and spotted the cache high in the air on four stilts. Suddenly, it hurt too much to stand. He had to go lie down on the bunk.
King got up from beside the stove and lay down close to him. Jason dangled an arm over the side of the bunk and found the husky’s head. Momentarily, Jason was soothed. Everything would be all right. Still, he kept trying to picture what was going to come of his setback. He might be alive, but he was in bad trouble with ice growing on the river by the minute. What was he going to do?
The prospector went outside, then returned a few minutes later with a slab of meat. He fried some steaks, made bannock and coffee. His dark, full mustache turned down at the corners of his face, which was cheerless as the landscape outside. “Sure glad I was close to your cabin,” Jason said with forced enthusiasm as he chewed carefully. Even eating hurt.
The man gave a contemptuous glance around the room. “Ain’t my cabin. I wouldn’t have set foot in here if you hadn’t needed a place to get out of the weather.”
“Couldn’t I just drift down to Dawson City in my canoe?”
“You don’t understand. The river can freeze up uncannily sudden—slabs of ice tearing every which way. I’ve seen it bust a steamboat into matchsticks. You’ve got a cabin here with a stove in it. Count yourself lucky. A lot of cheechakos are going to die this winter. Hunker down, play it safe, ride out the winter. You have a rifle and ammunition. One moose and you’d be in good shape.”
“Stay here until breakup? Right here? You don’t understand…. I have two brothers in Dawson City.”
“Yeah, and I got a wife and three kids in Colorado. Try it if you dare; I’m not going to be here to stop you. There’s lots of ways to die in the North. Simply getting your feet wet when it’s cold can kill you. How long have your brothers been in Dawson?”
“Three weeks, maybe. They must’ve staked by now. I was hoping to stake before winter myself.”
“Dawson is a fool’s paradise,” the prospector said bitterly.
“So where are you heading with your sled?”
“Upriver to the Little Salmon, then cross-country northeast to the headwaters of the Stewart.”
“Did you come over the Chilkoot?”
“About three years ago I did. Going to strike it rich, are you?”
“Aim to.”
“They say there’s quite a few coming over the Chilkoot, making ready to come downriver with the breakup next spring.”
“Thousands and thousands. I guess tens of thousands if you count everyone pouring into Dyea and Skagway…. My name’s Jason Hawthorn. I thank you for helping me out.”
The man shrugged. “The Golden Rule is the code of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, or at least it used to be. ‘Do unto others as you would be done by.’”
The bitterness in the man’s voice was unmistakable. Jason asked his name.
“Robert Henderson. Just call me Henderson. Heard my name before?”
Jason wagged his head. “Should I have?”
The man smiled sardonically. It was the first smile Jason had seen from him. “No, no…I’m a ghost. I’ve become a ghost.”
Jason was baffled, and a little unnerved. “This moose we’re eating…this must be the one I got tangled up with?”
“Must’ve weighed fifteen hundred pounds. All I brought back was a hindquarter. By the time I went for more, a bear had gotten to it—dragged the rest of the carcass a short ways, then covered it with duff and branches. Figured I’d leave it there, fouled as it was. No doubt that bear’s fixin’ to den and not much interested in eating. In the spring, though, when it comes out, it’ll remember where it cached the meat. The den is probably close by. Too bad I didn’t spot it.”
“Why is that?”
“For future reference. This was a black bear—I saw a print—and black bears are good eating. The Indians keep close track of den sites. In winter, they’ll hunt the bear in its den.”
“Really? In its den?”
“That shouldn’t sound so amazing. I mean, the bear is asleep.”
“Have you ever done that?”
“Never had the occasion.”
Though Henderson said he was going to go, and soon, Jason didn’t really believe it. How could Henderson leave him there, alone?
And yet, in the morning, Henderson did just that. Packed his things, said good-bye and good luck, and ghosted away. Jason fought the impulse to call him back, to cajole, to beg, but he kept his tongue as fear crept into him as tangibly as the cold. Henderson headed upriver, paddling and then poling.
Jason tr
ied to put the gaunt, tortured prospector out of his thoughts. He stared downriver at the bleak skeletal cottonwoods, his mind lurching to plot his escape. He’d come too far for this to happen to him.
Downstream, the Yukon broke into channels as it wound its way among numerous islands. Two hundred and fifty miles, no rapids. Henderson was wrong about having to stay here. Why couldn’t he just wrap himself in his blankets and float?
Because it wasn’t only the matter of not being able to paddle. He couldn’t make camp, split wood, make a fire, or cook.
In a few weeks’ time he would be able to do those things. The cabin was warm, and he needed to heal.
A few weeks would be too late.
How could Henderson have left him? He was only a cheechako. He might not even have the grub to get through the winter. People said breakup came at the end of May. That was seven months away!
At least Henderson had left him with a supply of split firewood, enough for a few weeks, it looked like. And as he looked around he realized that Henderson had left a small crosscut saw as well as a pair of snowshoes—five-foot long Indian-made snowshoes of birch frames and rawhide to keep him above the snow when he was out looking for that moose or getting firewood.
No, he had no bone to pick with Henderson. The man had saved his life.
What about Jack London? If Jack hadn’t given him the outfit, he would’ve stayed on the ocean side of the Chilkoot pass, maybe even gone home.
What about his brothers? They were sitting pretty in Dawson only because they’d taken his inheritance for packing money.
Then there was Jamie, that pretty girl, telling him to collect rose hips. He would never have run into that moose if it hadn’t been for her.
He laughed out loud, at himself. It was a bitter laugh born of desperation, and it hurt.
He had only himself to blame.
As the days passed, Jason fought the impulse to throw himself in the canoe and drift. A hundred times he told himself that Henderson was wrong. The moon was up; he could drift around the clock bundled in his blankets, all the way to the Golden City.