Jason's Gold

by Will Hobbs

  On seeing a chip in the blade of his ax, Merritt Sloper exploded. He was fed up with London’s inviting every man he’d met over to the cabin to share the grub, which wasn’t his alone, and to carry on his endless philosophizing. Jack London moved out to another cabin.

  Six young Englishmen who’d celebrated the previous New Year’s Eve at a resort in Switzerland saw 1897 out on the shores of Canada’s Great Slave Lake, nine hundred miles north of the nearest town and still two thousand miles short of Dawson City. The newspaper and the merchants in Edmonton had trumpeted several “back door” routes to the Klondike that would take no longer than six weeks. For many traveling one of these all-Canadian routes, it would take two winters.

  Few knew the geography of Canada’s Northwest. It was terra incognita. On one of the supposed routes a man killed himself after pinning a note to a tree that said, “Hell can’t be worse than this trail. I’ll chance it.”

  Some used the mighty Mackenzie River, flowing out of the Great Slave Lake, as a highway to the north. Then they would trek west up its tributaries, the Liard at Fort Simpson, the Nahanni, the Gravel River, the Peel, or the Rat. The few who made it over the mountains that first fall were traveling so light, their survival depended on finding game. Some of them starved to death along the frozen tributaries of the Yukon before the year was out.

  The stampeders were coming from every conceivable direction, but mostly they were still coming over White Pass from Skagway and over the Chilkoot from Dyea. Even on New Year’s Eve, some of them were in motion. No one knew that new strikes weren’t being made every day in the Klondike, and so they kept pushing.

  There’d been a land boom in Dyea, and it was already a town to rival Skagway. Piers from both towns extended a mile out to deep water. Plans were under way for a railroad over White Pass. By December, construction had begun on the first tramway over Chilkoot Pass.

  On the Chilkoot it snowed seventy feet, and yet the stampeders kept climbing the Golden Stairs, each breath a rattling agony. They coughed until their ribs cracked. and still they kept climbing. During a single night two men hacked one hundred and fifty stairs in the ice up the final pitch, and collected eighty dollars a day in tolls.

  The tent restaurants and tent hotels at Canyon City and Sheep Camp and the Scales did a big business, as did Soapy Smith’s confidence men, who hiked the trail with bogus packsacks filled with straw, preying on the stampeders.

  Frame buildings had risen at Lake Lindeman and Lake Bennett, housing hotels and restaurants, but tents far outnumbered them. There were tents for hot baths, cafes, hotels, barbershops, chapels, saloons, casinos, real-estate offices, and bakeries, as well as the sleeping tents of thousands upon thousands of Klondikers.

  At least a thousand more Klondikers were building their boats downstream along Tagish Lake, Marsh Lake, even as far as Lake Laberge. No matter the hardship—the closer they could get to the head of the pack, the better.

  All celebrating the New Year in the cold, confident of riches and anxious as racehorses for breakup.

  In Carmack’s old cabin near Five Fingers, Jason and Charlie were in desperate straits but celebrating the last day of the year nonetheless. Charlie had baked a peach bannock for breakfast in honor of the occasion. As they were savoring it bite by bite, Charlie suddenly blurted out, “Knock, knock, who’s there?”

  Jason jerked his head around toward the door. “Is someone here?”

  With a grin, Charlie said, “It’s a game.”

  “Oh…okay…who’s there?”

  “Gretta.”

  “Gretta who?”

  “Gretta long, little doggie, gretta long.”

  Jason laughed. “Ethan and I played this when I was two feet tall.”

  “Knock, knock,” Charlie began again.

  Jason had to smile at how much his friend was enjoying this diversion from the grim reality of their predicament. “Who’s there?”

  “Thistle,” Charlie said.

  “Thistle who?”

  “Thistle be a lesson to us.”

  “I’ve got one for you,” Jason announced. “Here goes. Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Ima.”

  “Ima who?”

  “I’m a-goin’ hunting. See you before 1898 gets here.”

  Jason was about to add what he was going hunting for, but the idea would sound crazy. Besides, he felt superstitious about saying the name of the animal aloud. It was an animal he hadn’t even thought of hunting until the day before, when a remembered piece of conversation had suddenly given him hope.

  The joking mood was broken. Deadly serious now, Jason fed King one of the small tins of fish, then stuffed his pack with everything he might need. He dressed in every layer he had and went out into the cold with the rifle and the husky, snatching up the long, thin pole he had fashioned the previous afternoon. He was going to try to find Henderson’s bear.

  It was crazy, but he had to try it. As he snowshoed upriver, he kept going over and over in his mind what Henderson had said about the bear. The bear had eaten from the moose, then had gone into hibernation. “The den is probably close by,” Henderson had said. Henderson had said something else too, about the Indians watching where the bears den so they could come back and hunt them when they were asleep.

  If he could only find the den.

  The bear would be asleep. Killing it couldn’t be that hard.

  Spiraling away from the place where he’d earlier found the moose carcass eaten by wolves, Jason began probing with the pole. He stared at every irregularity in the snow, scratched under every log, under every over-hanging rock. Nothing looked like a den. Did he even know what a den would look like? How would he know one?

  “King,” he whispered. “Sniff him out for me. It’s a bear I’m looking for, a bear to feed the three of us.”

  New Year’s Eve and here he was, starved from six weeks of half rations and staring at every little hillock, trying to imagine an opening that wasn’t there. Finding the proverbial needle in the haystack would be easier.

  He’d been away from the cabin about two hours. The sun was finally making its appearance in the south, about to make its brief run along the hilltops.

  He stopped in his tracks. You’re getting too cold, he told himself. You need to make a fire.

  King took a few steps in the direction of the cabin, looked back.

  “You’re probably right, boy. We should go back. What do I know about hunting a bear, especially one I can’t see?”

  Then it hit him.

  You’ve only looked on the east side of the river! Bears can swim, can’t they? Of course they can. That bear could have crossed the river and denned on the other side. Get warmed up, make some tea, cross the river, and look over there.

  You have to keep trying.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jason started across the frozen river. Where to look?

  He snowshoed up the far riverbank and scanned the low, rolling hills. A den could be anywhere or nowhere. Despite what Henderson had said, the closest den could be miles away.

  It was just after midday when King came upon widely spaced gashes in the soft snow and began to sniff the track of the small, leaping animal that had passed this way. A fox? Jason wondered.

  Why had the animal been leaping?

  Now King was investigating the leaping tracks in the direction the animal had come from. The husky seemed so intent, Jason followed. Within twenty yards, the leaping tracks led back to an overturned spruce. When the big spruce had toppled over, it had raised a mound with its roots.

  By the time, Jason got there, King was sniffing at a tiny hole in the mound of snow. It was apparent from the tracks leading to the hole that the fox had come here at an unhurried pace, then gone leaping away. Had something spooked the fox?

  The hole was knee-high, only two or three inches across. There was a bit of old moss showing, coated thick with frost.

  Suddenly the husky’s ears went down flat. King snif
fed a few times more, then backed away, tucking his tail between his legs. His ears alternately stood straight up, and flattened back down. King approached the hole again, wagging his tail cautiously.

  “Let me try,” Jason whispered, and knelt by the hole. He put his nose to it, smelled nothing. He put his ear to it, listened hard. He detected the muffled yet unmistakable sound of breathing.

  Heart thundering, he backed away.

  It’s not necessarily a bear, he told himself.

  But it could be. What else could it be?

  He took off the packsack and pulled out the ax. He’d better have the ax ready in case the rifle jammed or misfired. Here was the box of extra ammunition. Yes, there’s a shell in the chamber, and it will take only half a second to lever the next one into place.

  Now what?

  Henderson had made light of the way the Indians hunted a bear in its den. If only he’d said how it was done.

  Maybe he didn’t know.

  Henderson seemed to think it was a black bear, from a print he’d seen. The thought of a grizzly scared Jason to death. Even a black bear, he guessed, could weigh four hundred, six hundred, even eight hundred pounds.

  The bigger the bear, the more meat.

  Poke it with the long pole and make it come out? Be ready to shoot it as it came out—that’s all he could figure.

  Jason took off his snowshoes, and he used one of them to clear the snow away within ten feet of the little hole. He needed room; he didn’t want to be thrashing around in the snow.

  With the snow cleared away, he put his packsack on the bare ground and laid the ax, the rifle, and the ammunition on the pack, where it would be close at hand if need be. With the sharp back end of a snowshoe, he began to enlarge the tiny opening in the snow.

  The husky sat close by and watched intently as he worked more quickly now with the blunt front end of the snowshoe. He exposed an opening in the earth, two feet in width and three high. King whined and his ears lay down flat.

  Barely able to breathe, Jason leaped back for the rifle and stood ready, but there was no sound from within, at least none that he could hear. King began to whine once more and Jason whispered, “It’s okay, boy. If there is a bear in there, it’s what we came for. He’ll be so sleepy, we don’t have anything to worry about.”

  Cautiously, he crept back to the entrance, knelt, and peered inside with the rifle ready. An arm’s length away, the tunnel was plugged with vegetation—chunks of moss and grass and twigs from blueberry bushes.

  With his heart in his throat, Jason reached for his long pole and began to feed it through the plug of vegetation. The plug gave, but the pole was stopped only six feet away. He stood and angled it slowly down. If he touched the bear with it, he wanted it to be very gently, at least at first.

  But the pole was stopped again, and he realized that the den must angle away from the entrance tunnel—to the right rather than the left, but at an angle he couldn’t negotiate with the straight pole.

  Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t jab the bear with this pole.

  What now?

  Jason stood ten feet back from the entrance, on bare, firm ground, and began to shout for the bear to come out. He got the husky barking too, but as much as they carried on, nothing came out.

  No bear.

  Had he really heard something breathing in there?

  With the rifle propped up and ready, the ax too, he cleared the plug in the tunnel, pulling the vegetation out with the blunt end of the snowshoe. Then he knelt and put his ear to the entrance once more.

  He heard nothing.

  Maybe he’d only imagined breathing. Or else the bear was awake now, and staying quiet as could be.

  If so, how was he going to get the bear to come out?

  Fire? Smoke the bear out?

  He’d used up the birch bark he had with him and there was no tinder in sight. The clumps of moss he’d pulled out of the den were frozen solid.

  Even if he could make smoke, it wouldn’t pass down into the den.

  His eye fell on a runt of a spruce close by, dead and limbless, bent in a curve. With that pole he might be able to determine where the bear was, exactly—if there was a bear.

  With the rifle ready and his eyes remaining on the entrance, he backed away, leaned his body against the dead spruce, and broke it off at ground level. Once again he probed the tunnel, this time with the curved pole.

  It came to rest against something soft, something that gave. He jabbed at it while keeping his eye on the rifle.

  As if a fish had struck, the pole jumped in his hands, and there came a growl.

  The husky whined, backed away. Jason retreated, grabbed up the rifle, and stood ready, finger on the trigger.

  The bear didn’t come out.

  He hollered again, at the top of his lungs, and got the husky barking again, but still the bear wouldn’t come out.

  “I’m not going in after you,” Jason hollered.

  Was there another way to dislodge the bear?

  Maybe there was. From the length of the pole he had fed into the tunnel, he knew how far away the bear was. From the curvature, he knew where. He didn’t think the top of the den was that far underground. Maybe two feet.

  He had an idea, and he might as well try it. It had to be today. Overnight, the bear might move, now that it had been disturbed.

  Where he determined the roof of the den to be, Jason cleared the snow away, then began to chop at the frozen ground cover with the ax, one eye always at the entrance, and the rifle ready. Surely the sound and the vibration would scare the bear out its tunnel. If it didn’t, he’d expose the bear from above and shoot it.

  An hour later he finally broke through. Twilight was deepening. He was running out of time.

  It was too dark to see down into the den. He enlarged the hole with a heavy swing of the ax, then several more, until the hole was eight inches across, but still he couldn’t see and he couldn’t detect motion. He kept looking to King, on his haunches ten feet back from the tunnel entrance, for a sign that the bear was finally going to come out.

  The opening he’d made was big enough to shoot through. It was only a matter of determining direction. Laying the ax aside, he shucked his mitts and took up the rifle, kneeling and probing with the tip of the barrel, a foot, two feet inside. As soon as he felt something, he’d fire.

  With a sudden, powerful jolt, the rifle was knocked from his freezing hands, and it fell inside the den. In the next moment the bear erupted, head and shoulders, through the roof of the den, growling and snarling and clawing at his leg with an outstretched paw.

  In a blur, as Jason lunged for the ax, the bear roared and pulled itself up and free onto the snow. Jason raised the ax, held tight, and dealt the big bear a slicing, punishing blow to the head. The husky was barking wildly. With a glance sideways, Jason saw a second black bear, not full grown like the first but nearly, come charging out of the tunnel, directly at King. The bear went up on its hind legs, claws high, as the husky darted toward it, then away.

  Just then a third bear, a twin of the second, came snarling out of the den.

  It was all happening so fast, like a nightmare.

  The bear in torment from the ax wound was almost on him before Jason realized it. He whirled and came down with the butt end of the ax head hard on the bear’s back, at the midpoint of its spine. The big bear folded, paralyzed.

  When Jason looked again he saw, only for an instant, the husky and the second bear in a snarling embrace. Suddenly the third bear was charging, not at the husky, but at him.

  The charge was nearly instantaneous. All but on him, the bear pulled up short as Jason raised the ax handle to shield himself. The bear stood high on two legs and slashed at him with daggerlike claws.

  Jason saw his chance and swung the blade of the ax across the bear’s belly. Its bowels came pouring out onto the snow. But the bear wasn’t down, and it kept slashing, reaching his skin through two coats and everything underneath. Jason swung
again, this time at the bear’s chest, and had to leap away as the bear crashed to the ground.

  The second bear was giving King a ferocious mauling. Jason ran as fast as he could to get there. He raised the ax, but the bear spun and slapped the ax end over end into the deep snow.

  The ax was lost and he was weaponless, and now the bear turned its full roaring attention on him.

  In desperation Jason leaped for the den, where his only other weapon lay inside. But as he dived and clawed his way inside the tunnel, the bear was tearing at his boots.

  As fast as he could, Jason bellied and elbowed his way downward into the widening den. It was dim, but he could make out the rifle by the light from the hole he had chopped in the roof. He lunged for the rifle, with the enraged snarling of the bear coming right behind. He whirled around with the rifle and fired point-blank into the oncoming bear. In the confines of the den, the explosion was deafening. A second shot, and the bear lay still at last.

  Jason pulled himself out through the roof of the den. The snow was bloody all around, bright red and horrible. The bear he had maimed was moaning, but there was no sound from the husky.

  He went to King’s side and found him still breathing, but he was a sight Jason would never afterward be able to put very far from his mind. The husky had been disemboweled, just like the bear Jason had cut with the ax, and he’d lost a frightening amount of blood.

  This was mortal. Jason knew. King had only moments to live.

  Jason lay down in the snow next to him, and their eyes met. The dog lifted his paw and placed it on Jason’s hand. “King!” Jason whispered as his chest heaved with a sob that came from the deepest part of him, where he mourned his father and his mother and couldn’t call them back either.

  The dog knew how to die, pouring love through his eyes into Jason’s. The great husky’s amber eyes glazed over, and then he was gone.

  PART THREE

  The Golden City

  TWENTY-FOUR