Jason's Gold

by Will Hobbs

  “They say three or four thousand have been there almost since the beginning—August a year ago. When we got there, everybody was waiting for five steamboats that were supposed to be bringing supplies upriver all the way from the ocean. Two different companies in Dawson have food warehouses—both guarded by men with rifles—but there’s hardly any food to buy. A couple pounds of beans or flour was all they’d sell you.”

  Jason could still hardly believe Charlie had been to Dawson City, had just come from there. “Did you see any gold?” he asked, hoping Charlie wouldn’t tire soon and leave off telling what he knew.

  “I sure did. A man buys a shovel, he puts down dust or nuggets. People had gold, all right. Everybody was saying that the grub was going to sell out fast, though, once the steamboats arrived, so we stayed close. Everyone in town was listening for a whistle and keeping one eye on the river. But only two steamboats ever got through, and by the time they did, the ice was thirty feet out from the shore.”

  “Did you buy food then?”

  “No. They hardly had any once they got to Dawson. Way downriver the boats got stuck on sandbars, because of the low water. They had to unload half their cargo to get unstuck; then the other half got robbed at some Alaska mining camp. About all they had left when they got to Dawson was hardware.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “You should’ve seen the panic.” Charlie was sitting up on his bunk now, his eyes wild, as if he were seeing it all again. “The inspector in charge of the Mounties posted a notice on Front Street, right by the river. It said something like ‘For those who have not laid in a winter’s supply, to remain longer in Dawson City is to court death by starvation, or at least the certainty of sickness from scurvy and other troubles. Starvation now stares everyone in the face who is hoping and waiting for outside relief.’”

  “My brothers…”

  “It was bedlam. An official from one of the trading companies went running up and down Front Street yelling, ‘Go! Go! Flee for your lives! There is no time to lose! There are some supplies down at Fort Yukon. Whichever way you go, up the river or down, it’s hazardous—but you must make the try!’”

  Suddenly Jason was struck with a sickening realization. His brothers might not even be in Dawson. They might have gone downriver!

  “What did people do?” he asked. “Did many leave?”

  “At least fifty small boats took off within an hour, to be the first ones to Fort Yukon, which is more than three hundred miles downstream. At the same time, there was an official from another trading company who was calling the other fellow a frightened little cheechako. He said there wouldn’t be enough food down at Fort Yukon to feed everybody who was evacuating Dawson City. ‘Stay put in Dawson,’ he said. ‘There will be no starvation. If there is starvation, it won’t be until spring.’”

  Jason couldn’t help laughing. “That must have sounded reassuring.”

  “Everyone was crazy trying to make up their minds. The two steamboats were leaving within hours to try to beat the ice down to Fort Yukon. Some people were saying it was too late; the ice was going to catch them and wreck the boats, and they’d be stranded. Still, the decks of those two boats were full to bursting, and we kept wondering down to the last minute if we should get on board.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “My uncle George had been running around like a chicken with its head cut off. He’d found a decrepit little steamboat called the Kieukik, and he’d got it in his mind that the only safe thing to do was to backtrack the way we’d come, and hike back over the Chilkoot Pass. So that’s what we did—started back upriver—but the machinery on the boat kept breaking down. A week later we’d gone only thirty-five miles.”

  “Battling the ice, I bet.”

  “You’re right; there was ice on all sides. Finally we ripped a gash in the hull and set out in Indian canoes. We thought we’d be able to buy some more food at the mouth of the Stewart River—we knew that some Klondikers had built winter cabins on the islands in the Yukon there. But they weren’t willing to sell more than a few pounds from their outfits—they were worried about famine too.

  “By this time the river froze up, and we had to abandon the canoes and go on foot. A week or so later—I don’t remember exactly; it was all a nightmare—my right leg went through the ice and my boot filled with water. I was walking at the end of the line. I didn’t tell anybody it had happened, because my uncle—everybody, really—was crazy to keep going. My uncle was always yelling at me to keep up, like it was all my fault. I was in a daze and I just kept walking.

  “In camp I was so exhausted, I didn’t even pull my boot off to dry it out. We built two big bonfires and slept real close to the fire, as usual. I thought, with my boot close to the fire, I’d be fine. I felt no pain. Sometime during the night, in my sleep, I must have shifted position, and my foot ended up nowhere close to the fire. My sock and my boot were still wet, and my foot froze. That’s how it happened.” With this, Charlie fell silent.

  Jason started frying up the bacon for the stew. Then he reached over and handed the boy a piece of yeast cake. “Here. You can chew on this until the stew’s ready.”

  Charlie took the food. His face had paled and he looked exhausted. “Thanks—I’m starving. How long can I stay here?”

  “Until we float out together in the spring, unless you feel like hiking over the Chilkoot this winter. Don’t think I’d join you….”

  The boy had eaten only a mouthful when he looked up with a sudden question on his face. “What about grub? Do we have enough?”

  Instantly, Jason knew he had to steer a path around the truth. This boy wasn’t strong enough to hear it, at least not anytime soon. He knew Charlie couldn’t possibly climb up to the cache to discover their true predicament. “We’re okay if we pace ourselves,” Jason answered, doing his best to sound convincing. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have told them to leave you here with me.”

  The next day Jason went searching for the carcass of the moose that had almost killed him, the one Henderson said a black bear had eaten from and covered up for the spring. Right now it wouldn’t bother him in the least that the bear had eaten from it if he could claim the rest.

  King’s nose found the carcass, or what was left of it. Wolves had been there, wolves and ravens. Nothing remained but the bones.

  Bad luck. More bad luck.

  He’d had enough. Nothing was turning out like he’d thought.

  “A lot of cheechakos will die this winter,” Henderson had said.

  Jason found himself shaking, and not from the cold.

  TWENTY

  Mostly there was twilight, with shades of lavender along the skyline where the November sun was hiding. Some days Jason felled dead trees and sawed them into lengths for King to sled to the cabin for firewood. Most days he took the rifle and went hunting.

  Midmorning, the sun would rise pale and weak. It barely climbed above the hills to the south, upriver. During its low three-hour run, the light was golden and glowing, like a continual sunset. The snow was three feet deep, four where the trees kept it from blowing.

  Upstream and downstream, with King at his side, Jason snowshoed back and forth across the frozen river. The ice was windblown and hard as iron. With slow, deliberate steps and rifle at the ready, he stalked the breaks and the thickets, hair-triggered with anticipation but sensing there was nothing to hunt. He would pause for long minutes, trying to glean the faintest movement from the landscape, but the world seemed to have gone empty.

  Why wasn’t he seeing any moose? Henderson had made it sound so easy. Had Henderson ever wintered here? Did he know for a fact that the moose wintered here?

  Nothing came easy. Everything seemed to be working against him. Charlie, after the torrent of talk at first, had frozen up like the Yukon. Whatever currents were stirring underneath the blank mask that was his face, Jason could only guess. Anger at his uncle must be one of them, anger at himself for letting his foot freeze might be another, but the
strongest current had to be hopelessness at his one-legged future. The hurt behind his voice seemed to say that no one who had both legs had any right to speak on the subject.

  He’d tried cheering Charlie up a dozen different ways; Charlie would have none of them. After the first few days, Charlie wouldn’t even meet his eyes. The boy’s only consolation seemed to be the deck of cards he’d pulled out of his packsack. The only game he would play was solitaire.

  No, Charlie had one other consolation: King. In the evenings, one hand would turn over the cards while the other rested on the husky.

  Every day, when Jason was farthest from the cabin, he’d find himself puzzling over the problem of Charlie. More and more, it was making him angry. It was like trying to tread water in a storm-tossed ocean with an anchor chained to his foot.

  Charlie wouldn’t even learn to use the crutches! There was no excuse for that. Granted that the cabin was small, and he could get around by leaning on things and hopping, but that was no excuse. He wasn’t going to be able to hop through the rest of his life. Didn’t he see that?

  Then Jason would force his mind off Charlie and look around at the frozen mountains. It was still so strange to find himself in this place, to hear the sound of his own breathing in the midst of the emptiness, to see his breath and the dog’s crystallize in the air. It was strange the way the ice fog would come and go, and it was strange returning to the cabin sometimes and seeing the flue smoke bent down to the ground by the cold.

  Then came the day no smoke at all was coming from the cabin. It was King who stopped in his tracks and swiveled his ears forward, recognizing that something was amiss. What was it? Why had the fire gone out?

  With deep foreboding, Jason snowshoed hurriedly up to the cabin door. He fought back his fears, burst through the door, and found Charlie sitting at the little table, playing solitaire in the cold.

  “What happened?” he demanded

  “Nothing,” Charlie answered flatly, staring at the cards. He had his coat and his fur hat on, and every breath was making a cloud in the room, it was so cold.

  Jason’s eyes went to the heap of kindling and split firewood of various sizes—all unburned, none of it used since morning. “You let the fire go out,” Jason said, his voice loaded with tension. “Why?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Saving wood.”

  Jason wanted to scream at him, wanted to knock over the little table, scatter the cards all over the floor. He couldn’t take much more of this. “What are you talking about?” he demanded. “You know we have plenty of wood—I told you that.”

  “You told me everything.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You have a better way to do everything—to start a fire, to keep it burning…. Now I’ve let it go out. I can’t do anything right.”

  Charlie’s lip was trembling. King was looking at him with great concern.

  Jason was struck by the husky’s reaction, humbled by it. He felt his own anger begin to ebb away. This kid was only twelve years old, and he was scared. Jason pulled up the other chair. sat down close to Charlie. He didn’t know what he was going to do or say, but he had to do something. He reached for Charlie’s hand as Charlie was turning over a card, held it firm. “Charlie,” he said, “I can’t do this alone.”

  “Oh yes you could. You’d be a lot better off without me.”

  “That’s not true, Charlie. I need you.”

  “For what? You do everything. You cook, you clean up, you start the fire, you split the wood, you get the moose—”

  “You see a moose?” Jason quipped, hoping to lighten the mood.

  “You won’t let me do anything. You do it all.”

  “Won’t let you? Hey, wait a minute, this sounds like a conversation I used to have with my oldest brother, only now I’m on the other side. Go ahead, start the fire, make supper….”

  “I could split wood too, you know.”

  Jason was about to express his doubts. Suddenly he knew the right thing to say, and he even believed it to be true. “I’m sure you can do whatever you set your mind to.”

  With that, the thunderstorm in Charlie’s head seemed to break. He started the fire and set about making a stew.

  They shared the meal with quiet satisfaction. After dinner, they played cards together—three-card monte. Charlie was looking him in the eye now. Jason realized he liked this kid, really liked him.

  What else could he do, he wondered, to help Charlie get back in the game?

  “I’ve been thinking about the hunting,” Jason said. “Maybe the moose can detect King’s scent. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to leave him here. If I get something, then he can still sled the meat.”

  “I’ll teach him to play three-card monte,” Charlie said, a smile lighting his long-blank face.

  In the morning the wind was howling, and snow was blowing horizontally. This wasn’t a day for hunting. Jason decided to read a little, then drifted off to sleep.

  He awoke midday, to find the husky at his side but Charlie gone. He had the sudden premonition that something had happened to him, and he craned his neck to look out the murky window.

  The wind had subsided. It was snowing lightly now, and Charlie was outside, struggling with his crutches. On the snow and ice, he was trying to walk. He was trying to walk back to the cabin along the hard-packed path from the creek.

  Time after time, Charlie fell down. Each time, he would pull himself up and try again. It hurt Jason to watch. But Charlie’s eyes blazed with determination.

  Then he took an especially hard fall. This time, he wasn’t even trying to get up. Jason squinted for a better look, wondering what Charlie would do. Call for help, he hoped. Jason fought the impulse to run outside and help him to his feet.

  Pressing his face against the makeshift window, Jason could see tears streaming down Charlie’s face. Tears of utter frustration and rage.

  Then Charlie struggled himself upright again, bracing with both crutches. He turned around and walked all the way to the creek and back.

  “Where have you been?” Jason asked sleepily when Charlie finally came in the door.

  Charlie flashed a huge smile. “Down to the Golden City. I met that Jamie you told me about. Prettier than the Gibson girl, if you ask me.”

  “Met Jamie, eh?”

  “Said she was tired of waiting for you. Took a shine to me instead.”

  “I never said she was my girlfriend, Charlie.”

  “Didn’t need to. Anyway, she prefers younger fellows.”

  “You rascal.”

  Charlie was giving King a good petting. The husky even rolled over to have his stomach scratched.

  “Don’t you steal my dog’s affections away too.”

  As winter tightened its grip, Jason kept trying to locate the moose that would take them through till breakup. Dread was gnawing at him, but not so much that he didn’t relish his return to the cabin every day. Charlie was there.

  Charlie was a plucky customer, no doubt about that. His stump had fully healed, and it wasn’t hurting him anymore. Getting around on the crutches had become second nature, and he’d even made good on his vow to split wood. It helped that it split so easily in the cold, almost of its own accord.

  As the twilight failed with the dying afternoons and the interior of the cabin was plunged into gloom, Charlie would light a candle. They had plenty. They passed the hours talking, telling stories from Seattle and Chicago and all they’d known before.

  Sometimes they played cards; other nights they took turns reading aloud to each other from the collection of Scientific American magazines on the shelf. The most recent issues were seven years old, but that didn’t matter as long as they had something to read. Every one of them, they discovered, was inscribed in a fancy hand with the name of George Washington Carmack. This was the name, they both knew, of the American who was the world-famous discoverer of the Klondike gold. They concluded that they must be spending the winter in a cabin that used to belong to a
man who was now fabulously wealthy and famous.

  “Henderson was awful prickly on the subject of this cabin.” Jason recalled. “Why would that have been?”

  “His first name wouldn’t have been Robert, would it? Robert Henderson?”

  “It sure was.”

  “Well, he’s sort of famous too.”

  “That prospector? You know something about him?”

  “Robert Henderson’s the Canadian who told Carmack to look where he did for the gold. I read all about it in the newspaper when I was in Dawson. But Henderson lost out.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lost out’?”

  “According to the story, Henderson met Carmack and the Indians who were with him—two brothers named Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie—at the mouth of the Klondike River. They were netting salmon there to sell to some miners at a camp downriver called Fortymile. Henderson told Carmack he was going back to work a creek that flowed into the Klondike—Gold Bottom Creek, he was calling it. Carmack asked him, ‘Any prospects up there?’

  “‘For you, but not for them,’ Henderson said, meaning the Indians. Carmack took offense, because he had been living with the Indians from Tagish Lake and Caribou Crossing for many years. In fact, these two men were the brothers of Carmack’s wife.”

  “You’re kidding. What a story. Go on!”

  “Let’s see…. After netting salmon for a couple more days, Carmack decided to go see what Henderson had found, and maybe stake a claim himself. He left the Klondike at Rabbit Creek, I think, and the three of them crossed over a ridge and down into Gold Bottom Creek, where they met up with Henderson and a couple others Henderson had told about his diggings. They were getting eight cents to the pan, which was supposed to be pretty good.

  “While they were there, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie asked Henderson if they could buy some tobacco from him. He refused.”

  “Uh-oh. Carmack must’ve been boiling.”

  “Must have been, but he didn’t say anything. Henderson asked if Carmack wanted to stake along Gold Bottom Creek, but Carmack said no. Then Henderson told Carmack he should try prospecting along Rabbit Creek on the way back. Carmack said he might, and, according to the story, he promised to send word back right away to Henderson if he found anything. Now, this is the good part—guess what Carmack found over there? He found the richest gold creek in the world! It got renamed Bonanza Creek, and one of its forks was named Eldorado Creek.”