by Will Hobbs
“Wait a minute…. You mean Carmack struck it rich and never sent word back to Henderson, like he said he would?”
“That’s right. When he found the gold—or Skookum Jim did; nobody seems to know for sure—it was lying ‘thick as cheese in a sandwich,’ as everybody in the world has heard many times. Carmack filled a shotgun-shell casing with gold nuggets and flakes, the three staked their claims, and they headed down the Yukon to the camp at Fortymile. Carmack emptied his shotgun shell on the counter of a crowded bar and declared, ‘Eight dollars to the pan!’ Within hours, the camp emptied out. Everybody raced to stake close to where Carmack had made the discovery.”
“And Henderson?”
“Three weeks later, he was working his claim when some men came over the ridge and started talking about the fabulous discovery at Bonanza Creek. Henderson was confused because he thought he knew the name of every creek within a hundred miles. They said, ‘Right over the hill, here. Used to be called Rabbit Creek.’”
“Henderson must have been blistered. What’d he say? What’d he do?”
Charlie shrugged. “The way I heard it, Henderson said, ‘That rabbit-eating malamute!’ There was nothing he could do. The newspaper said there’s been bad blood over it ever since.”
“‘Bad blood’ must be putting it mildly. And to think, I met Henderson himself! No wonder he said he wouldn’t have set foot in this cabin if I hadn’t needed shelter. What about Henderson’s own claim? It was so close, it must have been worth something. You said he was finding gold there.”
“Henderson didn’t even bother to keep working it, he was so disappointed over missing out on the big discovery. He signed it over to a doctor he owed money to for treating a leg injury. The newspaper said he was born the son of a lighthouse keeper on the Atlantic coast of Canada. He’s been prospecting for twenty-seven years, starting when he shipped to Australia from Nova Scotia at the age of fifteen.”
“No wonder he called himself a ghost. After all those years, he was so close. You know, you’ve got a memory for names, Charlie, and a way with a story. You should be a newspaper reporter.”
“Maybe I could—back in Chicago.”
“Why not?”
“You know, when this thing happened to me—my leg, I mean—I thought I wasn’t good for anything anymore. I’ve been talking a lot to King about it when you’ve been off hunting.”
“You have?”
“He never thought I was worthless. Never cared a hoot about how many feet I had. Then I realized you didn’t either.”
TWENTY-ONE
Jason had been eating only enough to keep going. Without saying anything, Charlie also began to cut back. On the second day of December, as Jason returned from hunting, Charlie had a strange look on his face, worried and accusing at the same time. “I’ve been up in the cache,” he said.
Jason was stung. “How’d you do that?”
“Like a monkey. The point is, Jason, we don’t have the grub you told me we did. We can make it a couple months into the New Year, but how can we hold out until breakup? We’re in a bad way, Jason, and you know what? I bet you never told my uncle George to leave me here. He just abandoned me. Isn’t that the way it happened?”
“As he said, he didn’t have any choice.”
“Henderson didn’t stay with you. Why should you be stuck with me?”
Jason’s temper flared. “I’m not stuck with you, so don’t say that I am. We’re in this mess together, and we’re going to make it through together.”
Charlie looked relieved. “Don’t be mad at me, Jason. Really, I’m not as worried as I sounded.”
“Well, you should be. Now listen—I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I figured out what I need to do. Only twenty miles upstream, at the mouth of the Nordenskjold, there’s an Indian village. I’ve made up my mind to go there and see if I can get some meat or fish from them.”
“You couldn’t get that far in a day—you’d have to camp out in the cold!”
“We don’t have any choice. At the least, they’ll tell me where the moose go. I’ll have to take King along to pull the sled. You’ll be all by yourself.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Charlie insisted, his pride flashing.
“It might take me awhile to make this trip, Charlie.”
“I’ll be fine, if you’ll just quit fussing over me. I’ll keep the fire burning for you.”
At first light, Jason packed the sled. As he produced King’s harness, the husky bit some snow and leaped with excitement. When all was readied, Jason hooked King onto the sled’s tug line, tightened the buckles on his snowshoes, and shouldered the packsack. Charlie handed him the rifle and they wished each other luck. Jason started out breaking trail, with King pulling the sled behind. At the edge of the clearing Jason stopped to wave, and Charlie waved one crutch high in the air and gave a cheer.
If I fail, Jason told himself, we’re both dead.
As he passed the islands of Five Fingers rising from the frozen river, Jason looked back again. The landscape had swallowed the cabin up.
It was cold. Every time he breathed out, there came a crackling noise as the vapor hit the superchilled air. A cloud of ice crystals from his own breath enveloped him as he walked. It coated his eyelashes and clung to the earflaps on his fur hat, to the collar of his sweater and his mackinaw, as well as to the seams of his outer oilskin coat.
After several hours, he made himself stop. He had to make a fire, melt snow, make tea. It was so cold out that when he cleared his throat and spit, it froze before it hit the ground.
To arrange his birch bark and kindling and to strike a match, he needed the dexterity of bare fingers. He shucked his mitts and they fell to his side, attached by thongs he’d rigged for the purpose. A minute was the most he dared leave his hands exposed. Fortunately, his fire starter was full of oily resins. The birch bark flamed up with its usual aromatic black smoke.
The hot sugary tea felt good going down his throat. He could feel it warming him from the inside. King’s pot of boiling water needed only half a minute to cool down enough for him to drink it.
Hastily Jason rewrapped his face with a wool scarf. Only his nostrils and eyes were showing, but still the hostile cold poured through. It poured through everything, including his wool-lined moose-hide mittens and his wool-lined sealskin mukluks. It was forty below and dropping, he guessed. When he tossed what was left of his boiling tea into the air, it made a great whoosh, turning into a cloud that drifted off barely above the ground. Watching it go, the husky looked back at him quizzically.
“Oh, I’m full of tricks,” Jason told him.
The sun appeared for an hour; then it was twilight again. Jason kept walking, but not fast. If he broke a sweat, he would freeze up.
When twilight was about to fail, he made his first camp. With a snowshoe, he shoveled away the snow where he would sleep, slashed spruce boughs for bedding, and made a pole-frame lean-to and roofed it with his tarp. He started his fire, dried out the linings of his mittens and mukluks, dried his socks—he planned on sleeping in all three pairs he had with him. A fine snow was falling as he set out with the ax to find dead wood. He’d need plenty to take his fire through the night.
There was no danger of freezing to death while sleeping. Every two hours he woke up shivering. Overhead, a brilliant aurora was writhing about like a curtain of magic rainbows. It was unspeakably cold. With a hooked stick, he would pull the unburned ends of logs onto the bed of glowing coals, then reach for his biggest logs to heap on top. In moments, his fire would be blazing again and he’d be warm enough, with the husky pulled close, to fall back asleep.
On the morning of the third day he crossed the Yukon to the site of the village at the mouth of the Nordenskjold, where he had stopped in the first half of October. Ominously, there was no smoke coming from the brush shelters.
“Hello!” he called as he snowshoed into the village. “Hello? Is anybody here? Anybody at all?”
Every s
tructure, empty. Not a soul.
It took him a few minutes, standing dumbfounded, to formulate a theory. The Indians had been drying salmon when he was here. As soon as the last run was over, they must have left with their dogs and their sleds. That’s why Henderson had been in a hurry to get here to do his trading. He knew they’d leave.
But where had they gone?
He had no idea, and they hadn’t left a trace.
Had they left to follow the big animals, wherever they went?
Henderson, he remembered, was going to continue up the Yukon until he reached the Little Salmon, then follow it up into the mountains. Henderson wouldn’t go where there wasn’t plentiful game, not in winter.
The mouth of the Little Salmon, according to his map, was another twenty miles up the Yukon. He remembered a village there too. Perhaps that one was a year-round village. Maybe some Klondikers had made their winter camp there. What choice did he have?
Jason pressed on. The wind started to come up. Even a breeze seared like a hot iron. Soon it was howling. He wondered why his legs kept going, why he wouldn’t let himself turn around. Late the next day he was still trudging forward, recalling a long walk he’d taken when he was no taller than Ethan’s waist. He’d talked his brother into hiking to Mount Rainier. “I know I can do it,” he’d pleaded. “Just let me try. You’ll see.” They’d walked for hours, eyes fixed on the peak, and the immense snow-clad mountain had never drawn closer.
He remembered the sudden realization that the mountain was much farther away than he had thought, and how he’d stopped to inform Ethan of his insight. “I think you’re right,” Ethan had agreed thoughtfully, and then they decided to turn back. It took years before he figured out that Ethan had known all along. After all, Mount Rainier was sixty miles away!
He looked up. Through the ice fog along the Yukon, he could make out the mouth of the Little Salmon and the shelters clustered there. Minutes later he found out that this village too was occupied only by profound silence. It seemed like he and the dog were alone in all the world.
Yet here was the track of a moose, a single moose, that had meandered among the shelters and up the white wastes of the Little Salmon.
He would follow that track. The moose pellets weren’t steaming, but the track had been made since the last snow, only two days previous.
For two days he followed the moose track up the Little Salmon. Sometimes his attention lapsed and he would lose all connection to the dog behind him, the moose track, his churning legs. His mind would drift. It came to him what this endless moose chase was like. It was like the time he’d nearly killed himself at Duck Lake with his brothers watching.
He’d been trying to see how far he could swim underwater. Each time he’d broken his own record. On his last try he pushed himself farther and farther, simply refusing to come up for air. On the verge of finally bursting to the surface, he willed himself to keep going, and he blacked out.
By mule-headed stubbornness, he’d nearly killed himself that day. If his brothers hadn’t been watching closely, hadn’t hauled him out so quickly and thumped him sputtering back to life…
Jason stopped walking, heaved a sigh that turned into a puff of cloud. And you didn’t learn a thing, he thought bitterly. Everything you’ve gone through, from stowing away on the Yakima to standing in this spot, has all been swimming underwater. You did this to yourself.
He should turn around and go back to Five Fingers, that’s what he should do.
That’s what he should do.
His eyes went back to the moose track, and he made himself concentrate. The track’s significance came back. If he didn’t get this moose, Charlie would never see his mother in Chicago and he would never see his brothers in Dawson City.
Or stake his claim.
The thought provoked a smile, which brought a sharp pain to his cracked lips. The gold rush! He’d forgotten all about it!
The gold rush, the Klondike gold rush. It had taken on the quality of a made-up story.
A gust of wind howling down the pearl-colored ice was about to reach him. He raised his mitted hands to block his face, and the gust passed by. The wind was replaced by a dead calm. The full moon was rising over the hoarfrosted cottonwoods along the river. From a great distance came the hooting of an owl.
The mountains were glittering with extreme precision in the cloudless, brittle-cold air. He was straining to believe in the gold rush. It didn’t seem possible that a metropolis of sorts existed even farther north than this, several hundred miles farther north. That his brothers were there seemed even less plausible.
Nothing seemed real, especially the moose track he was following. It would only be real, he mused, if he could put a bullet through this moose and touch it as it lay dead.
He kept walking by the bright white light of the moon. His friend Jack could have read The Seven Seas by the moonlight bouncing off the snow.
The next day, the moose track was joined by another, and now he was following two of the beasts up the frozen river.
He began to see mirages in the extreme cold: the sun squashed down and then fractured in two, a mountain range thrown up at an impossible angle. He saw Jamie’s face suddenly painted across the sky. He’d forgotten she had those few freckles on her nose. He leaned forward trying to kiss the sky. Her image faded.
“You fool,” he heard himself say.
Still, it was comforting to let his mind drift, to think of her. He recalled the wild look on her face as she was paddling that One Mile River.
It was a gray day, threatening snow. It had warmed up to twenty below or even ten, he guessed. He was in despair of ever overtaking the two moose. As he turned another in the endless bends along the frozen river, he stopped dead in his tracks. He realized he’d lost the will to continue.
Something up ahead, it seemed, didn’t quite fit the landscape—a crude log cabin at the edge of a clearing and slightly above the river.
Another mirage.
But the mirage wasn’t going away. Maybe there was a cabin there.
He trudged closer. Yes, it really was a cabin, an extremely small one. His heart leaped, but then he realized there was no smoke coming from it. Never mind, they could be away hunting.
Look inside this cabin, then turn back around.
Up close, he was stunned to see a beaten trail leading from the cabin to the river, and the unmistakable tracks of snowshoes. There really was someone here!
“Hello?” he cried. “Is anybody in there?”
There were no windows to peek through. A piece of heavy tarp served for the door.
As his mitten pushed the canvas to one side, light fell on two bearded men in fur coats and fur hats. Startled, Jason jumped back, lost his grip on the tarp. “Ho in there!” he cried out—no reply. Once again he pushed the tarp aside. The bearded men were sitting on rounds of wood, right there, right there in front of him.
A cooking pot was suspended over a fire, but the fire had gone out.
The men weren’t moving, he realized, and in the next instant he saw why. They were frozen solid.
He cried out in terror, then clamped his mouth shut. If the moose were close by, he’d spooked them.
He dropped the canvas over the opening and retreated. He stood there frozen by fright, with the husky puzzling at him. All he could think about was that this was how he was going to end up, and Charlie too.
He had to get one of those moose.
Wait, there might be some way to identify these two. Their kin would want to know.
He crawled back inside with the two men sitting by the dead fire. There was a piece of shoe leather sticking out of the ice in the bottom of their cooking pot. This was what starvation looked like.
Here, on the log wall, was what he was looking for—a message scrawled in pencil and punched over a nail:
Ours is the folly. Left Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie River. Seeking Dawson but lost. Too far, too late. Skin boat crushed by ice. Seen no game in weeks. Lack str
ength to continue.
God bless,
Samuel Whittaker and Villy Champlain
November 30,1897
They’d written this message less than two weeks before. They had died, maybe, only days ago. Where was Fort Simpson? Where was the Mackenzie River?
Jason folded the paper and put it in the pocket of his coat, then secured the tarp over the door to keep the scavengers out. He started upstream, more desperate than ever to catch up with those moose. But then it started snowing, and heavily. Before long, all trace of their tracks was obliterated.
“Let’s go home,” he told King.
He’d failed.
TWENTY-TWO
It was New Year’s Eve. All over the North, people found themselves in situations they could never have imagined when they set out for the Klondike.
A preacher from Farnellville, Ohio, and his daughter and a dying horse were stranded on the summit of Laurier Pass in the northern Rockies.
A circus with performing dogs and a tightrope walker were mired down on the Ashcroft Trail in the vast interior of British Columbia.
The wealthy stampeders who’d bought passage to Dawson City via the Bering Sea on the “all-water route” were seeing the year out only halfway up the Yukon, in the ramshackle shanties they dubbed Suckerville, where their two steamboats had been iced in for months. They’d left Seattle in the last days of July.
On New Year’s Eve, twenty-one-year-old Jack London was using a borrowed ax to chop the ice free from the spot where he and his partners drew water. Along with a number of other parties, theirs was wintering at the mouth of the Stewart River, sixty miles short of Dawson City. Suddenly the ax slipped in London’s hands and struck a rock.