The Call of the Wild: Klondike Cannibals, Vol. 2

by Herbert Ashe

  But Scotty’s first Captain turned out to be a cruel beast of a man. A tyrant, a monster. A murderer several times over, even, if one believed half the stories Scotty told.

  By the time they got to Australia it was either jump ship or kill the man in his sleep. And so Scotty had left, and after a series of misadventures aboard various ships, ended up in Oakland. He was looking for a position aboard any whaling ship that would take a chance on him.

  How experienced both of the older boys seemed to Jack that day! They had both voyaged round the world. They told tales of fierce gales off the Horn of Africa, of riding Artic waves in northern seas, and the big paydays a man could score aboard a whaling ship with the right Captain.

  As the afternoon wore on, they began to grow competitive, trading challenges and boasts, pounding each other on the back, or punching each other in the shoulder. When it came his turn to punch, or boast, Jack gave as good as he got. Up to that point in his life, Jack had not yet sailed upon the open seas, but he felt certain no man in the Bay area could out-sail him on a small skiff in the shallows, and he was bold enough to say so.

  At first Scotty and the harpooner had ridiculed the notion, but Jack stood his ground, and something about the challenge in his eyes convinced them it must be so.

  Their mad drinking continued: the harpooner found a bottle of rum in the Captain’s cabin, and before Jack knew what was happening, they’d somehow managed to finish it. He felt proud of being treated as an equal by these older boys. After first Scotty, and then the harpooner had slunk off to pass out on the lower bunks, Jack realized he’d drunk them both under the table.

  He remembered the sense of exhilaration this tremendous feat had given him, and how, as he stumbled out onto the deck of the Idler at sunset, he felt that he was now a man at last, capable of deciding his own destiny. The pure feeling of being alive, on the cusp of a life full of adventure, filled Jack as he surveyed the scene before him.

  San Francisco Bay seemed to him a vast church: its radiant sky the perfect dome for a cathedral built of light. Life was bigger than anyone could ever know, and he too could become an explorer if he wished, an adventurer upon the high seas!

  In the grip of his drunken excitement, he jumped aboard his little skiff and sailed for shore. It didn’t matter to the fourteen year-old Jack that shortly thereafter he ran aground, a dozen feet from the wharf—it was low tide—and pitched himself headfirst into the mud.

  It didn’t matter that, in his struggle to get up, he cut his arm on a razor-sharp barnacle, and bore the nasty-looking scar for weeks. Or that he shook and quivered with alcohol poisoning for two days afterwards, and swore he’d never touch a drop again.

  He’d had a vision that afternoon, and it changed him.

  If Scotty can escape, Jack had thought, so can I.

  * * * * *

  Inside the gas-lit saloon, groups of dockworkers and sailors swarmed around a long wooden bar, scheming and plotting and pleading, half-mad with the idea of future fortunes. The focus of every conversation was on the journey North: how to get there, what to bring, who to trust.

  Not far from where Jack and Scotty stood, a group of three young barbers from Nevada were bragging loudly about their recently-acquired steamship tickets to Juneau, much to the chagrin of the other would-be braggarts nearby, most of whom had yet to secure their passage to the Gold Fields.

  “Wherever there are men, there are barbers!” one of the young men kept saying triumphantly, clapping his fellows on the back, and grinning like a fool.

  Jack watched the three men throw back their drinks. Then he signalled to the sour-faced barman, who brought over two glasses and a plate of crackers.

  “What’s wrong with him?” the barman asked Jack, noticing the bruises on Scotty’s face and neck.

  “His missus threw him out.”

  “Uh huh.” The barman leaned forward and squinted a little. “Wouldn’t be sick, would he? Have a fever?”

  Jack shook his head, and smiled warmly, attempting to turn on his charm. “He’s just thirsty.”

  The barman stared at Jack, unconvinced. “Didn’t you hear about the outbreak?”

  “Sure,” Jack said coolly.

  At Heinhold’s he’d heard rumours that the San Francisco police had quarantined Chinatown the night before: just surrounded it in the middle of the night and erected barricades. No one allowed in or out. People said that a plague of some sort had broken out in a gambling hall on Grant Avenue, but nobody really knew for sure. City authorities had reportedly begun burning and sanitizing the nearby buildings and streets, in an attempt to contain the outbreak.

  “As far as I heard,” Jack continued, “only opium fiends need to worry. Good thing we’re both single-malt boys—” He reached for the glasses.

  “Hold on.” The barman dragged both drinks back.

  Jack threw his arm around Scotty’s shoulder and pulled him close, to prove he wasn’t afraid of any contagion. “Trust me, if you knew his wife…”

  The barman grunted, and nudged the two drinks towards them. With one last glare at Scotty, he moved on to serve another group of sailors that had crowded in next to the barbers.

  “You’d better eat something,” Jack said to Scotty, watching the barman closely. “They may kick us out of here yet.”

  He threw back his whisky in one shot, and slammed his glass down. It burned like turpentine on his tongue. He hissed through his clenched teeth. The whisky hit him hard, and he sat forward eagerly on his stool, feeling the vitality of the alcohol as it awoke his thoughts from their slumber.

  Scotty stared at the little wooden plate heaped with crackers, but made no move towards it.

  “The game was rigged, Jack. They got a hundred and forty-seven dollars out of me. Everything I had.” He went on to describe how it’d happened, step by step, in agonizing detail. How he’d been walking along the dockland road when a friendly lawyer approached him, out of the blue, and asked him for betting advice. Somehow he smooth-talked Scotty into walking over to a shell-game at a nearby gaming table.

  Scotty watched the lawyer quadruple his money in five minutes, and was convinced he could do the same. After the lawyer had left with his winnings, heading straight to the bank to make a deposit, Scotty had stayed at the table.

  And promptly lost all his money.

  Jack looked at his friend’s slumped shoulders, his look of utter defeat, and felt a mix of emotions. Part of him pitied Scotty’s sad state, certainly, and hoped that his friend’s streak of bad luck would turn. But another part of him couldn’t help but think that Scotty somehow deserved it for allowing himself to be tricked so easily.

  Jack had learned years ago to avoid games of chance, for just this reason. Either the game was rigged and you lost, or it wasn’t and you lost. Or you won and got hooked by Lady Luck—which meant you would lose everything, in the end. He believed a man should build his fortune with his own hands, not have it handed to him out of the blue by the turn of a card, or a toss of the dice.

  “Did you go to the police?” he asked.

  Scotty stared down at his feet. He told Jack that the local patrolman was in the gang’s pocket, and that he’d been lucky to escape the police station with his life.

  Jack nodded sadly, not really surprised. “Well, there’s always hope,” he said at last. “You’re still alive.”

  Scotty looked up. His hollow eyes burned into Jack’s.

  “And what have I got to live for? I have no wife, no friends, no family. My mother died last year. My last chance was to buy a ticket to Alaska, and try my luck at grubstaking… My God, I wish I’d never laid eyes on that Indian!”

  “Which Indian?”

  “The shell man. He had a way about him, I’ll give him that.” Scotty stared down at his hands for a long moment, as if imagining they still held his money. “I still don’t understand how he fooled me…”

  “You could always shovel coal on a steamship heading North,” Jack suggested. “I worked my passage
home from Vancouver that way, a couple of years ago, when I was through hoboing.”

  Scotty didn’t say anything.

  In truth, Jack doubted any ship preparing to sail to Alaska would be willing to give free passage to a man, regardless if he was willing to work or not. He’d heard the major steamship lines had been so swamped with “volunteers” that some captains had started charging big bucks for the privilege of shovelling your own passage North.

  Everyone knew that the Great Race had begun: the sooner you left, the sooner you arrived and staked your claim. Everyone was betting that all the good claims hadn’t yet been snapped up.

  But eventually they would be, and no one knew exactly when.

  The thought nagged at him. Suddenly, he felt an anxious burning in the pit of his stomach. He had to get going. In fact, he couldn’t afford to wait a moment longer.

  “Listen…” Jack said. He put his hand on Scotty’s shoulder, and felt an unnatural heat radiating off his friend’s neck. Perhaps Scotty might have some kind of fever after all, he thought, with a frown. But surely—

  Making a snap decision, he reached into his pocket, pulled out five dollars, and laid it on the bar in front of his friend.

  It was all Jack’s money in the world, but he knew he could make do without it. Scotty could make much better use of it right now: at least he could get himself off the streets for a week or two, and get back on his feet.

  “You know…” Jack began.

  “I know, Jack,” Scotty said, without looking up. “Thanks.”

  * * * * *

  After a few unsuccessful weeks trying to earn a living as an author, Jack had been forced to take a job in the steam-laundry of the Belmont Academy.

  He’d hoped the position would be easy, and allow him to set aside a little money, enough to buy himself another few weeks of writing someday soon. He’d hoped that, in the meantime, he could keep up his studies by reading Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx every night before bed.

  But the job turned out to be much worse than he’d anticipated. In truth, he earned very little. After a sixteen-hour day he had no time or energy to read or think: he would doze off as soon as he cracked open a book.

  Worse yet, the work itself was torture. Starching collars so that other young men could look sharp in their uniforms nearly drove him mad with rage and jealousy. He imagined them all, attracting the admiring glances of beautiful young ladies like Mabel or her friends, at all the dinner parties and balls he would never be invited to.

  What had any of them done to deserve such easy lives? And how was it, exactly, that Jack had come to get stuck in this cage, slaving the prime of his life away for their benefit?

  Those terrible weeks at the laundry made Jack utterly determined to earn his living by his brains. He decided that he would take the big gamble, the long shot, though he might fail.

  Jack had brawn enough to spare: that wasn’t the problem. Since the age of ten he’d endured stretches of intense and often dangerous physical labour. He’d had two paper routes, which meant he’d been up delivering papers before dawn, and was back at it again after dark. Then on weekends he started working setting up pins at a local bowling alley for a crazy Dutch alcoholic, as well as carrying ice from a wagon on Saturday afternoons.

  When he turned fourteen he landed a job at Hickmott’s cannery, often working from six in the morning until nearly midnight. The thing was, he could slave away on the machines for fourteen hours a day and still have courage and strength aplenty to volunteer for the hard jobs. He often said that he worked longer hours than any workhorse or donkey in the city, and it was true.

  But all his hard work didn’t seem to get him anywhere. His mother took his earnings to help run the household, and still the family was just scraping by, just one accident or illness away from ruin and homelessness.

  When he was younger, part of him harboured fantasies of landing a humble job on the floor of some factory or office, and working his way up through the ranks, as the plucky young heroes did in rags-to-riches stories.

  In America, any man could raise himself up through hard work and clean living and become President. Or so the novels of Horatio Alger said.

  Except that, by-and-large, Jack knew that these stories did little but torture the poor, tricking them into working ever harder for less. The harsh truth of things was that there were too many men looking for work, too few jobs, and that the rich had the police, the army, and the government on their side.

  It was necessary to keep people poor and desperate so that the dirtiest and hardest jobs would get done cheap. So that men with starched collars could lead easy lives.

  Jack had learned this lesson early. When he was sixteen he took a job shovelling coal at the San Leandro and Hayward’s Electric Railway power plant. He had approached the superintendent with an audacious plan: electricity was the New Thing, the key to the Modern Age. Everyone could see that. It was obvious that a smart young man like Jack could bet on a solid career in it. And so he’d asked for a job with the possibility of promotion. He’d like to be an electrician or even an engineer someday, he said.

  The superintendent of the power plant smiled and said he needed more young men with Jack’s resolve and ambition. But, naturally, Jack would need to start at the bottom and work his way up. Jack was so taken in by the fantasy of promotion and advancement that he accepted thirty dollars a month—ten dollars less than he’d earned at the cannery—to shovel coal for twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

  This was his big chance to prove himself. Within two days the problems with his wrists started, and he’d taken to wearing thick leather splints to bolster them, even though they left terrible oozing blisters on his forearms.

  For a couple of weeks, Jack gave it his all.

  Finally a fireman at the plant had the courage to tell Jack he was doing the work of two men, who, before he’d arrived, had been paid forty dollars a month each for shovelling the coal Jack was now throwing for thirty.

  Jack was shocked. He was saving his bosses fifty dollars a month, and for what? His wrists had been repeatedly sprained from the crazy amount of shovelling he was doing everyday, to the point where he was worried about permanent disability. Worse yet, the fireman told Jack that one of the men he’d replaced, unable to support his wife and daughters, had hung himself.

  This set Jack thinking. What sort of lives did his bosses lead in exchange for all this misery? Were they thankful for their lot in life? For the cosmic luck that had landed them on top of the human scrapheap? No. They were the smallest men Jack had ever met, cold in their hearts, unlovable—even to themselves.

  They never felt the riches they owned, only the lack of those they had yet to acquire. It was for men like this that ninety-five percent of the human race was enslaved, doomed to life in a cage.

  Jack realized they would use him up like they had used up the men who had shovelled before him. Eventually his strength would falter, or he would have an accident, and when he did, they would discard him without a second thought. And he would slide into the pit of human misery.

  Disappear without a trace.

  It was a bitter pill, but Jack swallowed it. He quit the power plant immediately, deciding to let career go hang. He wanted to see more of the world, while he still could. The road offered Jack the same thing the sea did: a chance at greatness that was denied him at home.

  Since this first major lesson at the power plant, he’d seen it again and again: how the bosses harnessed a man’s courage and ambition to the machines of industry; how they ground him down, left him broken and sick, until many were sleeping on the streets, or riding the rails, or locked up in prison.

  By the time these men realized they’d been had—and many never did—they no longer had the strength to resist. And so generation after generation came and went, feeding the parasites who grew fat and useless on their lifeblood.

  But not Jack.

  He would break out of the cycle through his own superhuman will. Once
free, he would help as many men as he could to follow.

  * * * * *

  Eliza lived with her husband Captain James Shepard in a small house on a quiet, tree-lined street in Oakland.

  It was almost 8 pm when Jack arrived. He had to knock several times before his sister answered.

  “You’ve been drinking,” Eliza said when she opened the door and saw the flush on his cheeks.

  Jack felt instantly guilty. He hated disappointing her. She was always making sacrifices for him: scraping together money to patch his clothes or pay for his books. She’d even bought him a bicycle so that he could meet with Mabel and her friends down at the library, or go for joyrides in the hills around the city.

  And now here he was: late for dinner, drunk, broker than ever.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I ran into an old friend down on his luck. I couldn’t leave him…”

  She nodded coldly, her eyes searching his. “Come on in,” she said. “We’ve left you out some chicken and potatoes…”

  “Wait. Can we talk for a minute?”

  “No, Jack.”

  “But…”

  “No.”

  Without another word she turned around and walked back into the house. Jack quickly followed, pulling the door shut behind him.

  * * * * *

  The library was small and lined with leather-bound books of military history.

  “How’s the Boy Socialist?” Captain Shepard asked, looking up from a well-worn volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as Eliza and Jack walked in. He was smoking tobacco out of his curved cherrywood pipe, and blowing circles of blue smoke in the air. Although the Captain’s military-style moustache was as black and finely oiled as ever, Jack noticed more streaks of grey in his mutton-chops than before.

  “Better ask the papers,” Jack said with a grin.

  Back in the spring Jack had been dubbed “the Boy Socialist” by the local press after his arrest for giving a soapbox speech down at the park near Tenth and Broadway. His brother-in-law had been teasing him about it ever since.