Romancing the Klondike

by Donadlson-Yarmey, Joan;

  “Emma and I will supply the bread.”

  Joseph smiled. “I was hoping you would.”

  Pearl’s heart leaped. She now knew that she loved this man with the beautiful smile. If only she had the nerve to tell him. She grimaced to herself. She was on this adventure because she was trying to go beyond the boundaries that restricted women in so many ways, and yet she was afraid to cross the one boundary that stopped her from getting what she wanted. A woman never admitted her feelings for a man until he had spoken first.

  “What else were you planning on serving?” Pearl asked.

  “Paul shot a moose yesterday, so we will have roast moose, potatoes, beans, boiled cornmeal, and fish if I can get some from Kate Carmack. Plus, I’ve been saving some eggs and cheese from the last shipment of supplies.”

  “Emma and I can also make some stewed fruit pies for dessert.”

  “Then it is all settled,” Joseph said, with a grin. “We will eat at four o’clock so that will give everyone time to come in from the claims and from Fortymile.”

  “Fortymile, also? That’s a lot of people.” Pearl was already dubious about how this party was going to turn out. No head count and no set amount of food being prepared.

  “Yes. It will be the party of the year.” It appeared that Joseph was not to be discouraged by details or numbers.

  Then he must have noticed the frown on Pearl’s face. He patted her hand. “Don’t worry, it will all work out.”

  Pearl hurried back to their cabin where Emma was taking off her coat after her walk. “Joseph is planning a Christmas party and he wants me to be his hostess.”

  “He does?” Emma squealed. “That’s almost like asking you to be his wife.”

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that was what he was asking?” Pearl had been thinking that but was afraid to say it. She didn’t want to put a hex on it.

  “Maybe he will at Christmas or even New Year’s Eve. Lots of men ask women to marry them at this time of year.”

  “Yes, they do,” Pearl said, dreamily, picturing Joseph proposing to her at the Christmas Party in front of everyone. Then she was brought back to the present by the reality of the Christmas Party.

  “About the party, it sounds like he’s inviting everyone who lives in the north to it.”

  “That’s going to be big.”

  “Yes, and we have to make the bread and pies for it.”

  “We do? Why does he expect us to do that?”

  “Well, I may have volunteered us to do it,” Pearl said, then added hastily. “But that was before he told me how many could be coming.”

  “We should have started baking a month ago. What else is he having?”

  Pearl tried to remember what he had rattled off. “Roast moose, fish, cheese, eggs, potatoes, and some other things, I can’t remember.”

  “Eggs? Where did he get the eggs?”

  “They came in on the last boat.”

  “I’ve missed eggs,” Emma said. “It might be worth all this work just to have a boiled egg again.”

  “It would be nice to have a plum pudding like Grandma’s.” Pearl was referring to the traditional Christmas pudding that their grandmother made every year.

  “Do you realize this is the first Christmas without our family?” There was a hint of sadness in Emma’s voice.

  “I was just thinking that.” Pearl felt her spirits drop. Her first Christmas without her parents, her brother and sister, her aunts and uncles and cousins, and her grandmother. “But we have Sam and Donald.”

  “Yes.” Emma’s face brightened. “And don’t forget Joseph.”

  Pearl smiled. Yes, she had Joseph.

  “I can hardly wait for Donald to come in again so I can tell him.”

  Donald came two, three times a month, catching a ride on a dog team or even snowshoeing down the creek. He stayed with Paul at night and spent the day with Emma. There wasn’t much for them to do but sit at the table and talk and Donald always made sure their wood pile was topped up.

  Pearl found herself going to the warehouse to stay out of their way. Sometimes Joseph was able to visit with her, many times he wasn’t. She didn’t mind. She sketched him when he wasn’t looking.

  * * *

  Sam and Donald stamped the snow off their boots and stepped into the cabin. They had just dug out their first muck of the day and lit another fire in their shaft. Sam opened the door of the wood stove. Even though the fire was still burning it barely kept the frost off the cabin walls. The temperature had dipped down to minus thirty Fahrenheit for the past few days. But, it was the beginning of December. What else did he expect? Sam placed a couple of logs in the stove and left the door open for light.

  He picked up the frying pan and dropped it. The handle was so cold that he donned his mitts to put the pan on the red-hot stove. It contained the cold leftovers from their morning meal and he reheated them.

  They kept a routine going all day: light a fire, wait for it to burn out and the smoke to clear, go down and dig out the thawed permafrost, light a fire. It was slow work but they weren’t the only ones doing it. The smell of burning wood hung in the valley.

  They ate, then bundled up in their winter coats, mitts, and hats again. Sometimes the fire in the shaft burned slowly, sometimes faster. They kept an eye on it, not wanting the ground to refreeze again.

  The stillness of the fiercely cold air hit them when they stepped outside.

  “I don’t know what is worse,” Donald said. “Breathing the warmer, fetid air of the cabin or this fresher, outdoor air that feels like it is freezing my lungs.”

  Their constant trekking through the knee-deep snow had created a well-worn path. They followed it back to Sam’s claim and the shaft they had been digging since mid-November. This was their second attempt. They’d gone down forty-feet in their first one and had found nothing. They’d been hearing stories that up and down the valley men were finding gold while others one claim over weren’t. It seemed to be the luck of the draw.

  Sam and Donald walked up to the windlass and looked down the shaft. It was still smoky.

  “Guess it’s my turn to go down,” Sam said, taking off his coat.

  Donald unwound the rope until the bucket reached the bottom of the shaft. Sam wrapped his mitts around the rope and slithered down into the hole. He found the candle stub and lit the wick so he could see a little better, then picked up the shovel, banging his elbow on the frozen permafrost that felt as hard as granite. The shaft was cramped with barely room to kneel down. After filling the bucket with ashes and thawed gravel and muck, he tugged on the rope.

  While Donald pulled the pail up, Sam coughed in the smoky air as he pounded at the ground with a pickaxe trying to dislodge as much as possible. The fire only thawed about six inches each time and he estimated that they were down about twenty-five feet, way farther than Louis Rhodes and Clarence Berry had been when they found gold. Sam held the candle against the newly bared ground. Nothing glittered.

  His thoughts turned to Charley Anderson, who had arrived too late to stake a claim and was drowning his sorrows in McPhee’s saloon in Fortymile when two men came in and began drinking with him. Apparently, they were disillusioned about their Eldorado Twenty-Nine and they convinced a drunk Anderson to buy their claim for eight hundred dollars. When Anderson woke the next morning he went across the Fortymile River to ask Inspector Constantine to get his money back. Constantine pointed out that Anderson’s name was plainly visible on the title. He apologized to Anderson and said there was nothing he could do. Anderson figured he might as well see exactly what it was he had bought so he poled up the Yukon River and trudged his way up to the busy creek. Within weeks his claim had proved so rich that he’d been given the nickname ‘Lucky Swede’.

  The paystreak was in the ground. It was just a matter of going down in the right spot or to the right depth.

  “Bucket coming down,” Donald yelled, interrupting Sam’s thoughts.

  Sam looked up and guided the pail t
o the ground. He wheezed as he filled it again and the process was repeated until there wasn’t any thawed gravel and mud left to scrape.

  “Send down some wood,” Sam hollered, as he sent up the last pail full.

  When the bucket came down again Sam piled the wood over the ground. He used the candle to light it and then pulled himself hand over hand up the rope, glad to be out of the dungeon. He hauled up the bucket. This was a slow, laborious process but the only way to get down to the gold.

  “Anything in the pails?” Sam asked, going over to the dump.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “So what do we do?” Sam leaned against the windlass. He was getting discouraged. “We’re further down than Louis was.”

  Donald shrugged. “We could start tunnelling somewhere else or we could continue with this one. Some men have found gold at twenty-five feet down. Maybe ours is just below the fire now.”

  Sam shook his head. “Or it could be twenty-five feet further down.”

  They’d been having this conversation since they reached fifteen feet. For some reason everyone was using that as a bench mark of where the old creek bed should be.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Let’s go down some more,” Sam said. “I’d hate to quit too soon. Besides there’s nothing else for us to do until spring.”

  “Okay. I’m getting cold standing here. Let’s go see how Gordon is doing.”

  They followed the path they had created to Gordon’s tent.

  “Gordon.” Donald called.

  They weren’t surprised when there was no answer. They had gotten used to his wanderings, weren’t even worried anymore when he was gone for a day or two. Somehow, he managed to survive the cold at night and return to this tent. If a prospector along the creeks saw Gordon he would send word back to Sam and Donald. Some of them even invited him in to warm up and share a meal. It was reported that sometimes he just stared at the person until they became uncomfortable and left, but most of the time he hurried away, a frightened look on his face.

  Donald lifted the flap and peered in. He grimly looked back at Sam. “Gordon’s gone and so is his backpack and clothes.”

  Sam groaned. The only other time Gordon had donned his backpack was last month when he had said he was catching the boat for home.

  “We’ve got to find him,” Donald said.

  “Okay, I’ll spread the word around here while you go into the town site and see if he went there.” He knew better than to suggest the other way around. Donald used any excuse to go and see Emma.

  For the next four days, Sam searched up and down the creeks. No one had seen Gordon. Some of the men, including Henry and Gregory, joined him, while others checked the areas around their claims. No one found any tracks that stood out as beings Gordon’s.

  They were getting close to the shortest day of the year and their daylight only lasted five hours, not much time to spread out and do a thorough search of so big an area as the Klondike River watershed.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Gregory asked, as they tromped through the snow drifts in the bush.

  “Gregory,” Henry hissed.

  “What? I was just wondering.”

  It was a question that Sam had been asking himself. What if Gordon had stumbled over a fallen tree and broken a leg? What if he had slowly frozen to death? No. Sam shook his head. That was impossible. Donald had probably found him in Joseph’s saloon and they were having a drink right now.

  “He’s lived here a long time,” Sam said, more for his benefit than for Gregory. “He can look after himself.”

  At the end of the fourth day, Donald came back and said he hadn’t found Gordon and no one at the town site had seen him. He also mentioned that Joseph Ladue was planning a party for Christmas Day and everyone was welcome.

  The miners all agreed to keep watching for any sign of Gordon as they went about their daily routines.

  * * *

  Sam turned the handle on the windlass and wound the rope until the bucket appeared. He gave it a cursory glance then threw the gravel, muck, and clay onto the dump.

  “Bucket coming down,” he shouted and sent it back to Donald.

  Something in the next pail caught his eye. A gold nugget? He picked it up and looked at it. It was a nugget. He pushed the dirt aside and found another one.

  “Hey, get up here!” Sam yelled down to Donald. He dumped the contents of the bucket onto the ground at his feet and almost threw the bucket down the shaft in his excitement.

  “What? Have we found something?”

  “Come and have a looksee.” Sam could hardly control his glee as Donald’s head peeked over the edge of the hole. Sam held out his hand so Donald could grab it.

  “Where is it?” Donald looked at him eagerly.

  Sam pointed to the ground. Donald dropped to his knees and dug through the muck. He came up with three nuggets. Sam held up the two he had.

  “We’ve done it!” Donald hollered. “We’ve found gold.”

  They stared at each other in shock then jumped up and down and hugged in their jubilation. Sam could not explain the relief, the wonder, the happiness he felt. All the years here in the north had finally paid off. They were really, for sure, going to be rich. No more speculation, no more dreaming. Then his thoughts turned to his other friend and his mood dampened.

  “Too bad Gordon wasn’t here.”

  “Yes.” Donald’s face turned sober. “But he may still come back.”

  They had been saying that every day in the two weeks since Gordon had disappeared. They, and most of the men on the creeks, watched for Gordon whenever they were in the bush chopping trees or walking from one place to another. Sam and Donald still went to Gordon’s tent each day hoping that he had returned from his wanderings. So far they’d been disappointed.

  “Yes, you are right.”

  They were silent for a moment, remembering their friend.

  “Let’s get more gold.” Donald ran over to the windlass. He scrambled down the rope and soon yelled up that the bucket was full.

  They kept hauling the gravel out until the ground in the shaft was too frozen to dislodge any more. Donald filled the last bucket, lit a fire, and climbed up the rope. They raised the pail, untied it, and carried it back to their cabin. Sam took their water pail and axe and went to the water hole in the creek. He opened it up and dipped the pail in. When he got back Donald had replenished the wood in the stove and the fire was burning hot.

  Sam got his gold pan and put three large double handfuls of dirt and gravel into it. He added water and shook the pan to settle the heavier gold and black sand to the bottom. They went outside and Sam went through the motions of washing the dirt and gravel out of the pan. Donald added more water from the pail he carried and Sam kept the movement going, working against the cold, until there was just gold and some black sand in the crease of the pan. It looked like they had about two ounces of gold. At sixteen dollars an ounce that was thirty-two dollars a pan.

  They sat back on their haunches and stared at each other in awe. They had found the paystreak.

  “I can’t believe it,” Donald said, looking in wonderment at the gold in the pan.

  “Neither can I. To think that all those years of hardship have finally paid off.”

  Donald turned his eyes to his friend. “With your permission, Sam, I would like to ask Emma to marry me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  After discussing it with Joseph, Pearl and Emma decided to make plum pudding instead of pies. It involved making many changes to the recipe. Luckily, they didn’t need plums, since the pudding didn’t include them. It had originally been named after the raisins in it that, at the time, were called plums.

  “Let’s take stock of the ingredients we have,” Pearl said.

  They set the flour, eggs they had gotten from Joseph, sugar, baking powder, and dried fruit on the table.

  “Not anywhere close to what we really need,” Emma commented.

  “Yes.” Pea
rl thought of the apples, almonds, cherries, raisins, lemon juice, mixed spice, carrots, suet, and other ingredients they were missing.

  “Do you think this will work?”

  “Well, we’ll use what we have and call it Yukon pudding.”

  “We’ll start a new tradition here.” Emma grinned.

  The next day while Emma kept an eye on the first batch of pudding steaming on the stove, Pearl and Joseph went into the bush to cut some evergreen boughs for decoration. They carried them into the store and nailed them to the walls. Joseph suspended some kerosene lamps from the ceiling and they put candles around the room where they were safe, all to be lit as it got dark. Pearl and Emma dug out all the colourful ribbons they could find in their wardrobe and draped them over the evergreen boughs.

  Once Pearl and Emma started organizing for the meal, Pearl realized that they didn’t have enough dishes and cutlery for everyone. In a panic, she went to see Joseph.

  “What are we going to do for plates and cutlery?”

  “Most people will bring their own and if they don’t then they can use their hands,” Joseph said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry about it.”

  That was becoming his favourite statement to her and she was beginning to wonder if he took anything very seriously.

  The men cut the moose into pieces and roasted it in various stoves in the new town site. When cool they sliced it for eating. Kate Carmack brought in a large supply of dried fish. The eggs were boiled, the cheese cut, and the bread baked. The day before Christmas, Pearl and Emma went to the warehouse and moved the goods out of the way, while Joseph and Paul brought in a long table they had made from rough lumber. They set it up along one wall.

  On Christmas Eve, the four looked around the room they had created. The lamps and candles were lit producing pockets of light throughout the room. The scent of the evergreens wafted around them.

  “This is exactly like I pictured.” Joseph beamed. “Thank you all for making this happen.”