Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  So silently did he glide down that rocky slope that the cor­poral, when questioned later, confessed that he had been seized by a sudden horror: the stranger drew nearer and yet nearer to the place where the ambush lay, and yet even six feet away, almost within arm’s reach, near enough to have made the sod tremble beneath the corporal’s feet, the Japanese could hear or feel ­nothing but the sigh of the wind in the grass and the stones. He had thought to take this man a prisoner but now all resolution left him, and – like one who lashes out vainly in a dream – he thrust his bayonet at the spectre, just to see if it was there. And there it was, resistance, yes – the bayonet broke through a quilted ­Cossack jacket, a man grunted in surprise and pain, yet when the bayonet had been turned and retracted the victim was still standing, shouting in some unknown and barbarous tongue.

  Another thrust might have done for the gaijin, the corporal said later, though with the air of one unconvinced, but the white man, wriggling clear, next called out in Mandarin, which sobered the Japanese and made him think again. Who but a spy would be travelling as this man, by night, towards the Japanese positions? What white man but a spy would speak a Chinese dialect? The patrol seized and bound its prisoner and brought him back inside their lines.

  The wise old corporal, having already attempted to bayonet his prisoner once, had no wish to molest him any further. He may, indeed, have been a little frightened of him. But the corporal’s lieutenant, taking delivery of the prisoner, thought it his duty to question him in the field, and repaid the bound man for his silence with several blows of his fists.

  At regimental headquarters, the intelligence officer grew resentful at what he perceived as a wilful refusal to understand his questions. By the time the prisoner reached General Kuriki’s compound he could only just stand.

  Here his escorting captain met a reverse: there was no one present who would relieve him of his prisoner. All of the general’s intelligence men were engaged in the study of captured maps and documents and the interrogation of high-ranking prisoners. Had he interviewed the infiltrator himself? And had he got ­anything from him? No? Well, so much for that. We are fighting this war by European rules, on General Kuriki’s orders. In Europe spies are not beheaded. In Europe spies are hanged or shot.

  And so the prisoner, battered and shivering, scarcely able to keep on his feet, was shoved back against the nearest sturdy wall, that of an old Korean farm house which housed the general’s foreign press corps. He slumped there, half dazed, blinking blood from his eyes, while the soldiers of his escort, only three in number, formed up five yards away, their rifles levelled, while their officer stood to one side, one hand holding a lantern, the other a sword poised in the air. The prisoner shook his head and blinked again, trying to understand the meaning of this tableau, and then a word barked out and the sword swished down and three rifles spoke as one.

  There was nothing the writer could do to prevent it. He had turned the corner, lost in thought, hands deep in his pockets to ward off the bleak mountain wind, and he discovered the scene in its moment of enactment: the lantern’s gleam on the blade of a sword; the wind fidgeting with the neckcloths of the firing squad; the face of the condemned man, ghastly pale. It is a white man! the writer thought, some poor Russian prisoner! But as he threw himself forward, a cry on his lips, the sword descended, the rifles crashed, blinding him with their muzzle flashes, and the Japanese officer, perhaps stunned by the sound so close at hand, or shaken by the enormity of this terrible thing he had attempted and achieved, dropped the lantern to the ground, where it spilled and gave birth to a pool of pale flame. All else was plunged into darkness. I am too late, despaired the writer. I have failed another of my own race. With a howl of rage he threw himself at the Japanese captain.

  ‘You brute! One ought not to shoot a dog so, much less a captured foe!’

  He seized hold of the little officer and shook him like a rag. Then a rifle butt swung in the darkness. His head burst into stars and he was lying on the cold stones with his legs sprawled across the dead man. He tried to speak but he could not. Other boots crunched on the stones around him, voices shouted in outraged Japanese. And then he felt something even more ghastly than his mortal predicament: beneath his own body a hideous spasm, the dead man’s legs jerking in their last grim convulsions! He scrambled away from that macabre motion, unwittingly avoiding the thrust of a bayonet, and jumped to his feet, dizzy from pain and from horror. Bayonets glinted and a rifle bolt clacked. But he knew a little Japanese, the coarse dockyard patois he had picked up as a seaman in the bars of Yokohama. He must summon it now.

  ‘Stop! I am an American journalist!’

  There was a moment of silence, the scrape of a boot, the hiss of the wind on the hilltop. Then someone coughed, a painful cough followed by retching, and a voice spoke in English.

  ‘I notice that you sling the bat, old man. I’d be very grateful if you would ask these fellows not to shoot at me again. Please tell them I’m British. Tell them I’ve come to see our military attaché.’

  ‘And the luck of it was,’ Meares told Hughie, passing him the flask, ‘it turned out we really did have an attaché at Kuriki’s headquarters, though I’d just been chancing my arm: I’d actually come looking for Ponting. Even better, the attaché was someone I knew: Sir Ian Hamilton. I’d been with him at Rooival when we finished off the poor Boers.’

  It was past ten thirty. Hugh had pulled the shutters down in the front office, but one of them was broken and would not close all the way, so they switched off the lights and made do with the glow from the telegraph dials.

  Hugh’s head swam from his first nip of whisky. He found it made him bold. ‘But what were you doing there in the first place?’

  A match flared. Meares’s face danced in its mystery. When he shook the match out it was replaced by the point of a cigarette.

  ‘I was on my way home.’

  ‘Home from where?’

  ‘Siberia. Cape Chelyuskin. Quite a trip it was too. Very hard.’

  ‘Tougher than Antarctica?’

  ‘Antarctica was a doddle in comparison. For a start, there were no Russians at the South Pole trying to stop me getting about. And when I worked for Scott I already knew how to handle my dogs. When I went to Cape Chelyuskin I had to learn as I went along. It nearly killed me – when that trip was over I felt like I’d come back from the dead.’

  ‘Why did you go to Siberia in the first place?’

  A precise nasal exhalation of two funnels of smoke. ‘I was trading in furs.’

  ‘And then Jack London saved your life.’

  ‘You might say that . . . I also owe a lot to a shakily held lantern, and to the fact that soldiers usually shoot high in the dark . . . But London was very kind to me. He stayed with me while the officer sent for General Hamilton, just in case the Japs got it in their heads to finish the job. And after Hamilton had vouched for me London took me down to the army hospital and stayed with me all night. I couldn’t sleep from the pain of that bayonet glancing my rib. We talked until morning. My God, the life that man had led! I thought I’d knocked about a bit, but he had me beaten all up.’

  ‘Did you ever meet him again?’

  ‘No . . . Next morning he was dragged from my bedside by a very polite Jap sergeant who was supposed to be his minder. The whole flock of correspondents was being herded on across the river, and he had to go with them, though he was sick of being paraded about like a buckshee trooper. After talking to me he was all for jacking in his commission, or whatever it is that war reporters have, and crossing to the other side to write about the Russians.’

  ‘Maybe he decided the losers make a better story.’

  Meares stirred in his chair like a man jerking out of a doze. ‘Yes! Yes, that’s rather good. The losers make a better story . . . They do, don’t they? . . . That explains a lot . . .’ Hugh heard the flask’s stopper being unscrewed, caught a fre
sh whiff of Meares’s whisky. A hand touched his shoulder and the flask appeared in the dim light of the dials. Hugh took another nip and passed it back.

  Meares continued: ‘So yes, London wanted to go over to the Russian side. I think he hoped he could join me there. But I’d decided to go elsewhere. I needed to get to Alaska.’

  The whisky made Hugh’s head swim in a way he decided he liked. ‘But you said you were on your way south when the Japanese caught you. You said you were going home.’

  ‘I thought I was. But something that London told me made me change my plans.’

  They had given the foreigner his own little corner of the field hospital, screened by a paper partition from the rest of the long canvas ward. His bed was of western design, as was the chair provided to the writer, who – wrapped in a striped army blanket to keep off the night air – poured brandy into two pewter mugs. Having passed one to the patient, he then raised the glass of the paraffin lamp and used it to light two cigarettes.

  ‘So, you have come here all the way from Siberia,’ the writer began. ‘How I envy you your journey . . . I have been told that Siberia is very like our own American north country. Its forests, climate, animals – the bears and wolves and caribou – its mountains and trees, resemble so closely the wilds of Alaska and the Yukon. Yet Siberia is west of our own lands, and makes easterners of us: it turns us around, like reflections in a mirror. And how easily we forget – we who hunted seals amongst the Aleutians, or who climbed the White Pass and rafted down Lake Laberge to the Klondike – that the Czars once owned those lands before us, and were it not for a few audacious Hudson Bay traders and for the prescience of Secretary William H. Seward, those lands would have been lost to us, their gold and their secrets promised to another race.’

  The man in the bed stirred but did not speak. Yet the lantern found an answer in the shadows of his eyes.

  The writer continued: ‘And yet traces of this older dispensation leap out at those who look for them: a double-sparred cross above an Aleutian harbour; a rusted Muscovite flintlock in the hands of a Tagish trapper; the names of Shelikoff Strait and the Kotzebue Sound . . .’

  The man on the cot coughed and turned on his side, wincing at the pain of it. ‘I’d trouble you for some more of that brandy, if you please. The Japanese gave me a pretty good beating.’

  The writer tipped some more brandy into the patient’s mug. He sank carefully back on his pillows, grunting in thanks or in pain. The writer sipped, then went on.

  ‘I heard a strange story once about just such a relic of the old Russian dispensation, and although I have heard many tall stories around the campfire, and told a few myself, this was the oddest tale I have ever been told and yet believed to be true.’

  ‘Please do go on. I wasn’t planning on sleeping. That bayonet gash is playing hell with my rib.’

  ‘I’ll bet it is . . . Anyway, the man who told me this story was a Russian himself, one of a few who still haunted the Yukon river when I arrived in ’97. We called him Ivan, of course, and what his real name was we neither knew nor cared, as we scarcely knew or cared about our own names back then: we took the names that others gave us: a man was Red, or Tiny, or Lefty or Dutch, or had won some nomadic fame in Jo’burg or Deadwood or Kalgoorlie which served him better than any Christian name that his mother had once wished for him.’

  ‘Your own name is rather a good one for a writer. Jack London. Is it the name you were born with yourself?’

  The writer laughed. ‘That would depend who you ask . . . But I was talking of Ivan and his uncanny story, a story so strange that scarcely a day goes by even yet, years later, that I don’t hear its echo . . . Ivan was born on the Russian frontier. His father and mother had fled a farm west of the Urals, escaping serfhood and the persecution of the church, which was then rooting out certain ancient beliefs anathematized by the Muscovite patriarchs. But after a boyhood of idyllic freedom, trapping and hunting in forests unknown to the Cossacks, young Ivan heard rumours of a new railway, still far to the west: the railway which thirty years later –’ the writer tipped his mug to his listener – ‘now speeds the Czar’s army to Port Arthur to contend with our present kind hosts.’

  ‘Much good will their railway do them.’

  ‘Ivan thought the same. Although barely lettered, he understood that railways bring with them policemen, and tax collectors, and monopolists of furs. So he said farewell to his parents and set off east to preserve his freedom, just as men of our nations escape to the west. He hunted on the Amur, fished for crabs out of Vladi­vostok, lived among the Chukchis of the Eastern Cape. Then, still driven eastward, though he could not say why, he crossed the Bering Strait and took to prospecting for gold. For what else does a white man do in Alaska?’

  ‘There are those,’ said the man on the cot, ‘who trade in furs.’

  The writer ignored him: he was still picking his way to the start of his story, and had, in the manner of his trade, set himself a round-about path.

  ‘Ivan was known along the Yukon valley long before the stampede to the Klondike Creek. He was at the Forty Mile River in ’86, at Circle City in ’93, and at a dozen wildcat strikes and false bonanzas in between. Fair of hair yet swart of skin, he had the heavy, stoical features of a natural aristocrat. Such was his quiet authority, his unforced superiority, that one detected in his veins the blood not of the servile Slavs but of a proud Germanic race, one of those pioneering bands who crossed the Volga in Great Catherine’s time, or an offshoot of an even more ancient penetration – those stern Norse warriors who founded and then scorned the Muscovite principalities, and who went on to guard the Kings of Byzantium. When he spoke, which was seldom enough, others leaned forward to listen.’

  ‘I find that Russians generally don’t talk a lot. Not even in Russian.’

  I had better, thought the writer, speed things up. A plainer style is now coming into fashion. And he may fall asleep before I’m done.

  ‘Well, anyway, that was Ivan. August of ’96 found him at Forty Mile City. He had come in from prospecting a distant creek, intending to tap Jack McQuesten for credit to blow off some steam and lay in a winter outfit. But he was in Bill McPhee’s saloon on that very same night when Lying George Carmack threw onto the counter a Winchester shell full of soft Klondike flake. The next morning Forty Mile was a ghost town, its stoves and its candles still burning, and Ivan was at the head of a fleet of canoes on the Yukon, battling two hundred miles upstream to stake their new claims on the Klondike.

  ‘By the following year, when two tons of pure gold steamed across the bar into Seattle’s harbour, Ivan had made a vast fortune. And that fall, just as the Yukon froze again, isolating the boom town of Dawson for its second winter of existence, the first trickle of outsiders rafted down the stream. They brought with them rumours of an even greater swarm of tenderfeet detained in the southern mountains and waiting for the spring. They told how Soapy Smith’s army of bunko men, killers and lawyers had seized Skagway and Dyea on the American side, preying on stampeders as they tried to cross the passes. They said that Ottawa had decreed a new telegraph line to Dawson City, and that a cable car was being rigged to speed stampeders over Chilkoot Pass. Worst of all, as far as Ivan was concerned, there was already talk of building a railway. So by the fall of ’97, long before the main body of stampeders even reached Dawson City, Ivan had decided it was time to move on.’

  ‘I expect he was broke.’

  The writer was taken aback: the man on the cot, it seemed, knew something about the ways of prospectors. ‘You’re right. He was. He’d spent every poke he dug from the ground on women and whiskey and faro, just as he did every time he struck rich. He lost his claim on the turn of a card in Belinda Mulroney’s saloon, and was secretly glad to be rid of it.

  ‘And so, free once more, Ivan borrowed a grubstake, turned his back on the squalling infant city and entered the darkness beyond. While others who had str
uck it rich were taking their profit and heading south, Ivan went the other way, turning his face north and east, the same path he had followed all through his days. His plan – if you can call it that – was to head north to the valleys of the Peel and the Porcupine, find his way thence across the eastern mountains, then pan the untouched rivers running to the Arctic Sea.’

  The man on the cot coughed, then raised his mug for a refill. ‘You’re very kind,’ he said. ‘Please do go on. I expect we’re getting to the strange part you mentioned.’

  The writer silently cursed himself. It was hard, hard it was, to break the habit of a lifetime. But a new century stretched ahead of him, a taciturn, unadorned age in which a man might no longer grow wealthy by charging by the word.

  ‘I’m just getting to that: Ivan followed the ancient fur trail north through the Tombstones, along the Porcupine River then up the Bell ’til he reached Summit Lake – that heart-shaped mirror of the continental divide, which feeds its still waters to two different seas. From there, he followed Two Oceans Creek to the head of the Rat River. And it was there, amid the tumbled rocks and willow thickets of that treacherous stream, that he received the first great shock of his journey.’

  ‘Ah. Good.’

  ‘For there, where he had thought to find only desolation, was a strange sight indeed – a shanty town had sprung up by the frozen rapids of the Rat, a filthy hodgepodge of cabins and wigwams and huts, some little better than holes in the snow. And those who dwelt there were not mere Indians or half-breeds but white men like himself. Aye, and white women too! Halting at a distance, he heard the shouts of angry voices, the scream of a woman. He smelled the ordure that fouled the snow of the campsite, and he saw the boats upturned by the frozen rapids, where the first sudden thaw would seize them and shatter them.

  ‘The yelp of his dogs brought swaddled figures in twos and threes from the smoky shelters. When he reached the bottom of the draw there were four dozen people all waiting in silence, staring at him as if at a ghost. Then one of them, a little taller than the others, with a face burned black by frost and by sun, stepped forward and held out a hand. “Welcome to Destruction Ceety, mah frien’. Mah name is Lefèbvre. Tell us, Ah beg you: ’ave you jus’ come from dee Klondak? Are dere any claims yet for dee takeeng?”