Jason's Gold

by Will Hobbs

  But he kept picturing the ice pitching up all around him and the canoe being ground to matchsticks. He stayed where he was, immobilized. His ribs were barely improved, and he was still a mass of bruises. He kept looking upstream for straggling Klondikers who might take him down to Dawson.

  None came. Ravens and gray jays were the only living things in the country, it seemed, besides him and the dog and the wolves in the distance. Their howling seemed to drive a cold nail deeper into his heart with each passing day.

  As the days and his spirits darkened, he watched the surface of the river freeze from shore to shore. Very suddenly at the last, just as Henderson had predicted, the jagged, grinding shapes pitched up and locked into place with a crash of finality.

  Winter.

  EIGHTEEN

  The sound of a gunshot, close by, exploded the oppressive silence. The husky came instantly to his feet, ears at the alert. With King at his side, Jason hobbled outside the cabin to investigate, but there was no one around. He hollered himself hoarse. No one was there. The hair on the back of his neck rose; he was scared down to the roots of his chattering teeth.

  The oppressive, almost palpable silence closed back in. Winter abhorred sound. There was only the emptiness of the vast northern forest.

  The next day, two more gunshots, almost certainly coming from the cottonwoods along the creek. Again, silence, and no tracks in the snow. No one had been there.

  It must be the trees themselves, Jason realized, bursting and splitting in the extreme cold.

  He used to pride himself on being able to go it alone, to shake off his bouts of loneliness. No longer. Thank God for King. This place would have already made him crazy with terror if it weren’t for the husky.

  In the mornings, every nailhead on the inside of the cabin was covered with hoarfrost. It took time for the little sheet-iron stove to push back the cold. One day, behind the cabin, he discovered a rusty thermometer nailed to a spruce tree. Midday the mercury was registering twenty-five degrees below zero.

  He had to spend hours outside now, making firewood, though every swing of the ax reverberated in his ribs. And he had to keep open the hole in the creek where Henderson had been drawing water with the bucket.

  The husky was always eager to go out, bite the snow, roll in it. Jason was still awed by the bitter cold, even though he bundled himself thick as a bear to go out. He’d never known what cold was before, not really. Here in the North it seemed an element all its own, a pervasive and lethal liquid pouring down out of the sky. Though he was getting by from one day to the next, the idea of wintering here was incomprehensible.

  On the last day of October, according to the nicks he was carving on the cabin wall, he thought he heard voices from downriver.

  He told himself that the voices were coming from the dark corners of his imagination.

  He heard them again. Shouts. People shouting, and this time not far away.

  You’ve lost your mind, he told himself.

  But King was growling.

  Jason started to get up. King began barking. Suddenly the door shook with loud blows.

  Abruptly, the door was pulled open. There stood a man with cracked lips, a frostbitten white patch at the tip of his nose, icicles in his mustache, and eyes wide like a refugee from an asylum. As the man lowered his heavy pack to the ground and bent to unbuckle his snowshoes, he stammered something about the cabin.

  Was this the owner of the cabin, come to claim it?

  Seven or eight more men under heavy burdens were trudging toward the cabin, mechanically, like sleepwalkers. The last was pulling someone on a sled, someone propped up against a packsack.

  Would they demand that he give up the cabin?

  With a glance back toward the figure on the sled, the man at the door barked, “Get him inside.”

  It was a boy on the sled, a boy no older than twelve. He tried to look past Jason into the cabin. The boy’s face was a mask of fright, as if he was being led to his execution.

  Four men struggled to carry the boy inside. “Watch that foot!” one of them cried out, too late, as the boy’s right foot, wrapped in a blanket, bumped against the door frame. Jason expected the boy to howl in pain, but there came no reaction at all. The blanket fell away, revealing a foot and lower leg massively swollen and covered with only a heavy sock.

  Jason looked to their leader for an explanation.

  “Do you have any whiskey?” the man demanded. His eyes were jittery and his voice brittle as glass.

  Jason shook his head.

  “It probably wouldn’t do much good anyway. Lay Charlie down on the floor there—right here on the middle of the floor where we can hold him down.”

  “For the love of God, Uncle George!” the boy cried.

  “Who’s going to do it?” The boy’s uncle was looking wildly around the room at the faces of the men who’d crowded into the cabin. All eyes were averted as they stamped their feet and pushed to get close to the warmth of the stove.

  “Henry, you’re a blacksmith.”

  “Aye, a blacksmith, not a butcher.”

  “He’s your nephew, Maguire,” another man growled.

  “It will heal, Uncle George!” the boy begged. “Give it time!”

  The boy’s uncle knelt and began to unroll the large wool sock. A cloying stench wafted across the room and nearly knocked Jason down.

  Men cursed and reached for bandannas or handkerchiefs, which they pressed to their mouths and noses. All eyes fell on the dead limb, and the room was filled with revulsion. The boy’s right foot and lower leg were horribly distended and blackened with rotting tissue. The boy himself, on seeing it, shrank in horror and wailed, “No! No!”

  The word gangrene was spoken, and Jason heard another voice whisper, “The poison’s probably spread already.”

  Maguire stoked the stove full from the pile of kindling there, then opened the draft slot wide. The kindling caught with a roar, and within minutes the thin walls of the stove were glowing bright red. “Whose knife is razor sharp?” he demanded.

  A man with a walrus mustache produced a broad bowie knife from the scabbard at his hip.

  “Maybe you should use this saw,” another man put in, indicating the crosscut saw that Henderson had left behind.

  “Give me both, then. That pail of water, let’s put it on to boil.”

  The boy’s eyes, as he lay splayed out on the floor, seemed to have rolled back into his skull. He was deathly pale, and his chest was heaving with fright.

  His uncle’s eyes were searching the room. They came to rest on a short-handled shovel hanging from the cabin wall. “Stick the blade of the shovel into the stove, Henry. I’ll need it red-hot.”

  “What for?”

  “To seal the stump so he doesn’t bleed to death. Give me that stick there, Johnson, for between his teeth, so he doesn’t bite his tongue off. Don’t any of you leave; I want all of you here to help hold him down.”

  Jason wiped his forehead. He’d broken out in a cold sweat. Quickly, he pulled on his mackinaw and the oilskin overcoat, put on his fur hat and mittens, and backed out the door.

  Outside, Jason reeled away from the cabin, wading in the knee-deep snow, with the husky following behind. He had to get away. He walked upstream toward the Five Fingers, along the windward side of the Yukon’s bank, where the snow was crusted stiff. When he thought he’d gone far enough that he wouldn’t possibly hear, he crumpled in the snow and held the dog close.

  The first scream carried far in the extreme cold, and Jason heard it distinctly, all the more horrible for the distance it had traveled. Though Jason clapped his mittens to his ears, he continued to hear the boy’s torment, worse than he’d ever imagined from souls cast into hell.

  The husky too recoiled from the sound of the screams—at first his ears lay down flat, then he yawned anxiously, and then he whimpered. Jason broke into tears. He’d heard about battlefield surgery during the Civil War. Once he’d asked his father how men could have en
dured it. His father had answered laconically, “They had no choice.”

  After a minute the forest and the undulating frozen field of white that was the river were again swathed with the eerie silence of winter. Had the boy blacked out? Had he bled to death? For long minutes Jason stayed where he was, dreading to return. Yet he had to find out what the men intended to do. If it was their cabin, or if they were moving in regardless, he was in bad trouble.

  To Jason’s surprise as he neared the cabin, the men were already under way, bent under their heavy packsacks and moving upriver fast in their snowshoes. The boy’s uncle, rifle across his chest, was in the lead, as before. The sled and the boy were nowhere to be seen.

  Jason stood in their path. As they approached and halted in front of him, he sputtered, “Is he dead, then?”

  “Alive, but he lost a lot of blood,” the boy’s wild-eyed uncle explained. “Out cold. He’ll likely die.”

  “You’re leaving without him?”

  “We have no choice! We can’t wait him out.”

  “But where are you going? Where did you come from?”

  The man’s eyes blazed with panicky fire. “We’ve no time for talk and explanations. Lost too much time already.”

  “You can’t leave him behind!”

  “We have no choice,” Maguire repeated. “It was Charlie’s bad luck he froze his foot, and there’s nothing can undo that.”

  “You can’t leave him!”

  The man brandished his rifle. “Get out of my way!”

  “You don’t understand—I don’t have the grub to feed myself. What have you left me to feed him with, if he lives?”

  The man’s face went apoplectic with fury. He brandished the rifle again; King growled deep in his throat.

  “Don’t you understand?” Maguire cried. “We have nothing to give you. We have only what’s on our backs, with two hundred and fifty miles to go and every day shorter than the last. Now, move aside or I’ll shoot you where you stand. Put him out in the cold if you must!”

  Jason hesitated, scarcely believing what he’d just heard. Then he stepped aside.

  None of them, as they passed by, would look him in the eye. In shame, they trudged mechanically upriver like the walking dead.

  NINETEEN

  In a fever-tossed delirium, the boy named Charlie teetered along the razor-thin margin between life and death. In and out of consciousness, he fought Jason’s attempts to force tea and oatmeal and stewed fruit down him, to change his dressing and salve his wound, to bathe him clean when he fouled himself. Yet Jason prevailed, and kept him alive.

  Three, four, five, six days. There were times when Jason thought he couldn’t bear the boy’s torment another minute.

  “Put him out in the cold,” his uncle had said. Let the cold kill him. Put him out of his misery the way horses were put out of their misery on the Dead Horse Trail.

  What if Henderson had done the same to him?

  Monstrous, even to think of it. He had to fight to keep this tangle-haired kid alive, no matter what might come of it—even if it meant starvation for both of them.

  When the fever broke at last and the boy’s eyes came into focus, his gaze darted wildly around the cabin from Jason to the husky to the door, then back to Jason. “Who are you?”

  “Jason Hawthorn.”

  “Where are they? I’ll never catch up!”

  He doesn’t remember about his leg, Jason realized. He doesn’t know. “They’re long gone,” Jason said. “You weren’t well enough to travel.”

  The boy’s eyes went around the room, from the opposite bunk and the shelf of magazines above it, to the wash on the clothesline strung across the room, to the window made of bottles. “Who else lives here?”

  “Just me. I’m holing up here for the winter, on the way to finding my brothers in Dawson City.”

  “Is that…a wolf?”

  “It’s a dog. A husky. His name’s King.”

  At the mention of his name, King got up and went to the boy’s side, let himself be petted.

  “It’s warm in here,” the boy said approvingly.

  “That’s right. Nice and warm. Try to rest.”

  Shortly after he awoke the next time, the boy looked startled. His head snapped back with a sudden realization, as if he’d taken a punch. Very slowly, he lifted the blanket, and he gasped.

  Then he stared at the floor and saw the enormous darkened bloodstain there. Jason had tried without success to wash it away. The boy’s face went pale as a corpse and his lips began to tremble.

  Try to take his mind off the leg, Jason thought. “Where were they going, Charlie?”

  “Who?”

  “Your uncle, and the others. Where were they going?”

  “Skagway,” the boy mumbled.

  He’s still delirious, Jason thought. Try it another way. “Where did you start out from?”

  With an absent look came the answer: “Chicago.” With that, the dark-haired boy groaned and looked away, buried his face in the blanket, and sobbed himself to sleep.

  Jason went outside to split wood and to think. If only he knew what to do, how to help this boy cope with the calamity that had come crashing down on him. Make some kind of crutches? If the boy was going to be able to get around at all, he’d need them. Fashioning crutches would give Jason something to do. And it would keep his mind off his biggest worry, whether he had enough food to take the two of them through the winter. Henderson had said he should get a moose, but there hadn’t been a moose around since the one that nearly killed him.

  On the ridge above the creek, Jason found young birches of just the right diameter for crutches. The snowshoe frames were made of birch, and so were canoe paddles and sleds. Birch should be good for crutches as well. While he was among the birches, he would strip more bark for fire starter.

  Jason was back in the cabin whittling lengths for the crutches when the boy wakened again. “I have to go outside,” Charlie said.

  As the boy tried to stand on his left leg, he swooned and fell back to the bunk.

  “You lost enough blood for two people. Don’t try getting up just yet.”

  The boy stared at him fiercely. “Just help me up, will you? Don’t tell me not to try.”

  Jason hesitated, then stepped closer. Charlie tried again, clutching tight this time, and managed to hop outside, where he leaned on the cabin and relieved himself.

  “Does it hurt bad?” Jason asked afterward. He didn’t want to say the word stump.

  “Hurts worse when I stand up.”

  After he finished helping Charlie back to his bunk, Jason went outside. It was late afternoon already, time to think about supper. He took the ladder from behind the cabin and climbed up to the cache. He threw the makings for a mulligan stew into a bag—some bacon, dried onions, dried potatoes, and other dried soup vegetables.

  In the cabin, he spread it all out on the table, then started heating water in a stewpot on top of the stove. Charlie was awake, lying on the bunk with his hands behind his head, staring at the log rafters.

  “This will need to soak and simmer for a while,” Jason said, tossing the vegetables into the water. “I’ll fry up the bacon a little later.”

  “Can I stay here?” Charlie asked, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

  Jason threw some salt in the pot, then covered it. “I could use the company.”

  “Good,” the boy whispered. Then he turned to face Jason, propping himself on his left elbow. “How long were they here?”

  “Your uncle and the rest? Not long. They thought you were a goner.”

  “When they get back home to Chicago, that’s what they’ll tell my mother. They’ll tell her I’m dead.”

  “Well then, you’ll just have to surprise her.”

  A faint smile crossed Charlie’s face. “She’d like that, all right,” he agreed, nodding his head. But the smile was erased almost immediately by dread.

  Jason wished the boy would talk. He wanted to hear his story. “Tell
me again, Charlie, where your uncle and the others were going, and where you started from.”

  “We were trying to get to Skagway. We started in Dawson City.”

  “You’ve been to Dawson?” Jason could barely believe what he was hearing. “How long were you there?”

  “Ten days or so. We got there the twenty-fifth of September.”

  “You might have seen my brothers,” Jason said urgently. “Their names are Abe and Ethan. They’re twenty-three and twenty-one. Abraham’s taller, with a mustache; Ethan’s powerful like a lumberjack and has a beard.”

  Charlie put his right hand to the tousled hair spilling over his forehead, pulled on it as he closed his eyes. “I don’t remember those names,” he said at last. “So many people there. Everyone has a mustache or a beard.”

  “I suppose they were already at the creeks, staking a claim. Did you?”

  “Stake a claim? No, we didn’t. People were saying that the new discoveries don’t amount to much. It looks like maybe you had to be there earlier, maybe a lot earlier.”

  “But you did get there early, and so did my brothers. The Klondike is the richest goldfield in the world!”

  “I suppose so, but how big? Oh, lots of people still think there will be new strikes anytime now—maybe they’re right. I’m sorry; I just said what I heard.”

  Jason’s mind was reeling. It can’t be too late, he thought; it just can’t be.

  “There’ll be new strikes,” Jason insisted. “There have to be.”

  “Gold wasn’t even what people were talking about. Famine, that’s what everybody was talking about. There’s hardly any food there.”

  Jason winced. “My brothers traded away some of their grub.”

  “We never had much, and that’s why we had to turn around. We had money, because of the investors at the bank where my uncle’s a clerk. All the way from Chicago, my uncle kept saying, ‘We can buy grub in Dawson. The most important thing is to go fast and get there first.’ When we got to customs, the Mounties weren’t enforcing the weight limit for food yet—”

  “They are now. How many people are there in Dawson City?”