81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  Fourteen

  March 3, 1944

  Charley River

  The snow alone should have been enough to make Crane think twice.

  It came in windblown slaps that whistled through openings in the tumbledown cabin where he had found the Vienna sausage and decided to rest for several days. The temperature had edged up slightly, but was still cold beyond reason. Crane guessed it just below zero and far lower with the windchill. He was becoming good at judging the weather: the difference between regular subzero that could kill the unprepared or unlucky in a matter of hours and the blasts of supercold that could claim a life even faster.

  If Crane had followed his own rules of no unnecessary chances, he would have spent a fourth day inside the cabin eating cornmeal pancakes and waiting for the snow to let up.

  So why, then, was he here, a mile north of the cabin, leaning into a near blizzard and hauling the sledge through fast-piling snow?

  Whatever insecurities drove Crane from the cabin that day, he was dangerously close to recklessness. So many tragedies in the Far North have begun this way. Crane pressed on when he should have stayed put. Army field teams researching cold-weather survival during World War II received the same messages over and over from tribal Natives and old-timers: the weather always has the edge. The smart thing is to hunker down. Never push your luck.

  Crane was doing just that.

  He couldn’t see more than a yard ahead. This frightened him most of all. He could walk directly onto a weak point in the ice, and, with the heavy snow, there was little chance of making a fire even if he managed to pull himself free. The last plunge through the ice shook Crane deeply. He began thinking that the longer he stayed on the river, the more opportunities for disaster. Clearly, it made no sense to march off into a snowstorm. It was the other possibilities running through Crane’s mind—the parade of what ifs—that led him out the cabin door. What if I broke my leg stumbling around the cabin? What if wolves surround it? What if the weather pushes above freezing again and the ice becomes unsteady?

  Crane was in acclaimed company. The high latitudes have witnessed extraordinary feats and exemplary bravery—as well as spectacular insolence and irresponsibility. Crane didn’t have to look far for examples.

  The great tide that began with Canada’s Klondike gold rush in the 1890s left a backwash of bodies. Winter trails were dotted with frozen corpses set like tundra gargoyles, their skin plum colored from frostbite and lips peeled back in weird frosty smiles. Stories abound of would-be prospectors, desperate to outrace rivals, setting off into blizzards and never seen again.

  It’s impossible to calculate how many perished on the way north during the heady gold rush years straddling the turn of the century. Photographs from some of the Klondike jumping-off points—Skagway port in Alaska or the Canadian trailhead at Dawson City—suggest almost comical disregard for the demands of subarctic travel. Some stampeders carried their belongings in tins and coffee cans. The clothing worn by the most ill prepared often seemed more attuned to a Sunday stroll. Some had flimsy leather shoes and derby hats. They look—remarkably and tragically—like Charlie Chaplin’s sad-sack character the Tramp in his 1925 silent film, The Gold Rush, which lampooned the boreal greed. An 1898 photo shows a group of “actresses” heading to the gold rush boomtowns, hiking their dresses as they forge a stream with luggage in tow.

  One route to the goldfields—a difficult passage known as the White Pass Trail from Skagway to the Yukon River on the Canadian side—was so littered with the carcasses of pack animals that it became better known as Dead Horse Trail. Canada’s minister of the interior in 1897 lamented, “The inhumanity which this trail has been witness to, the heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone, cannot be imagined. They certainly cannot be described.”

  Poet Robert W. Service tried:

  There are strange things done in the midnight sun,

  by the men who moil for gold.

  This is how Service began “The Cremation of Sam McGee” in 1907 about a fictional prospector from Tennessee who freezes to death and whose body is hauled onto a pyre by his friend. The poet is said to have fashioned the work on the tale of a doctor, Leonard Sugden, who Yukon lore says once disposed of a corpse in the firebox of a stern-wheel steamer after receiving permission from the late man’s family. The real McGee, named William Samuel McGee, was a Canadian-born erstwhile stampeder whom Service met while working at a bank in Whitehorse. Service received permission to use McGee’s name in the poem, whose popularity opened up a cottage industry in the Far North. Souvenir urns were sold containing the “mortal ashes” of the made-up McGee.

  The Arctic trails have their secret tales;

  That would make your blood run cold.

  Two hours out from the cabin, the snow was coming down so hard that it made walking in a straight line difficult. Crane had lost all reference points. As any pilot knows, even the tiniest fraction off course compounds itself with every second. Soon you are hugely misdirected. Crane worried he could stray toward the riverbanks, where the water was shallower but the ice thinner.

  At first he thought the sledge was snagged. Crane gave another tug. Why was it pulling back?

  Crane gasped. The sledge was going under.

  He had no time to slip out of the rope. He staggered backward, trying to keep his balance while twisting around in the driving snow to see what had happened. He heard the ice splinter. The back of the sledge was dropping into the water. Its front rose up like a sinking ocean liner. This at least gave Crane some advantage. He had more leverage on the ropes. He pulled back, seeking firmer footing in the snow.

  Crane knew he could wriggle out of the harness and let the sledge sink away. He’d be alive, but with absolutely nothing except his clothes. No food. No rifle. Crane dropped to his side, seeking more purchase on the snow and ice. There was some traction, but not enough to counter the weight of the sledge and supplies. He could feel the void. His mukluks slid off the ice and dangled over the hole, dipping into the mix of water and ice shards. The sledge dropped another foot. Crane could hear the river water gurgling. Crane pulled back harder. The sledge tipped and floated in the water.

  More ice gave way. His legs dropped into the water. For a third time, Crane was splashing into the frigid Charley. Most of his weight, fortunately, was still on the ice. He spun on his hips and managed to get one soaked leg out of the hole. Crane knew this would be his last chance. If the ice shattered below him, then all was lost. He crawled and pulled. His second leg was out. He was sprawled flat on the ice, grabbing and pulling and thrashing with hands and legs like a creature trying to escape a trap.

  The sledge runners bumped up against the edge of the ice hole. Then the sledge rose a bit. Crane was winning. He yanked again, his boots jabbing at the snow even as more fell in the storm. The front of the sledge angled higher. One more burst, thought Crane. The sledge moved past its center of balance and fell back onto the ice. For a desperate moment, Crane feared it could break through again. The ice held.

  There was no time to examine the sledge and how much of his supplies were wet and now crusting over with ice. Crane was shivering badly. Snowflakes stuck to the moisture before it iced up, giving the impression of feathers. Crane leaped up and raced for the riverbank with the sledge in tow. A layer of ice formed over the runners, making it easier to pull.

  As Crane fumbled for the matches in his parka, he gave a glance at the sledge. Amazingly, the damage was limited. The rear was encrusted in ice, and some water seeped into his food stocks. But, in the superchill, much of the flour and sugar froze into clumps instead of fully dissolving. He guessed he could thaw them later over a fire. The washbasin container in the middle was high enough to block most of the water. The rifle and ammo, lashed to the top, were fine. So were the rope and canvas.

  He fashioned another makeshift tent near his fire. He worried that the snow would have ma
de the driftwood too wet to catch fire, but it took the flame. Once again, Crane stripped off his parka, underwear, mukluks, and socks. His shivering ebbed.

  But the river had won. Crane decided to abandon the sledge. He had hauled it close to fifty miles. The rest—however much was left—would be done on foot.

  When Crane’s clothes were dry enough, he hitched himself to the sledge for one last pull. He headed back to the ramshackle cabin to divvy up his provisions into whatever he could carry on his back. This time, he would wait out the storm.

  The return trip to the cabin seemed faster. The wind was at Crane’s back, and the snow was no longer spilling into his eyes and collecting in his beard. In the dying light, Crane saw the outline of the shelter.

  He spent the evening making a supply triage: what should be saved and what should be left behind. The snowshoes were an easy decision to cast aside. They had been no help. Food was parceled out. It was about enough, Crane figured, for a month if he was careful. The .22 ammo was getting low. No more wild shots. Either he had a good chance for a kill, or he would not pull the trigger. The matches he grabbed for Hoskin back at Ladd were long gone. He still had some he found at Berail’s along with a flint, which mustered some decent sparks when struck with his Boy Scout knife.

  The storm eased after sunset, but the sky didn’t clear. It felt heavy and low and ready to disgorge more snow. Crane made about a half-dozen plate-size pancakes of flour and cornmeal. They would make the trip inside the pockets of his parka.

  The next morning, Crane set off. He was now a mix of Alaskan wanderer, huntsman, and traveling kitchen. His rifle was slung across his shoulder. Its muzzle rested against the top of his rucksack, which Crane guessed weighed a staggering fifty pounds. But it still felt light after the sledge harness. His right mitten was wrapped around a heavy staff to probe the ice. Two frying pans were lashed together and hung around his neck.

  The snowfall had covered all traces of the spot where the sledge broke through. But Crane could still see the fire ring on the bank.

  He gave the ice a solid bash with his stick. It answered with a nice, sturdy vibration that rippled up the pole and through the thick moose-hide mittens.

  Fifteen

  March 9, 1944

  Charley River

  The hills groaned.

  The sound was low and hollow. It seemed almost sad. As if the mountains were struggling to cast off a great burden.

  Then Crane would see trees bend and sway. Some would snap. It made no sense to huddle in the groves. Branches and tree trunks sometimes broke like matchsticks and crashed to the ground. The best place to hide was behind large rocks if he could find them. Even they shuddered at the force of the wind.

  And, as quickly as it started, it was over.

  Crane called them “williwaws,” a word learned from flight training about Alaskan weather hazards. He was right about their raw power. A williwaw is sudden and scary. But Crane was a bit off in his geography. For most Alaskans, williwaws are a coastal phenomenon of ground winds riding over a mountain ridge and given a supercharged kick by higher-altitude airstreams, pressure differentials, and gravity. Yet the effect in the interior—where such savage winds have other names—can be the same. In the span of just five minutes, a twenty-mile-per-hour breeze can be whiplashed to nearly four times that speed and then, just as rapidly, fade away.

  To Crane, it felt like a beating each time they came. His ribs hurt. His shoulders ached from hunching low for cover. Twigs, pebbles, bits of frozen dirt peppered his face. He asked himself how many more of these he could stand.

  If the winds became worse, he wondered whether there may be a time when he could no longer get up. He would try, but his legs would resist. He’d drop back into the snow to await the next storm. And that would be the end.

  Such sudden and unruly gales go by other names in other places. Squamish winds, as they are known, channel through fjords. Chinook winds roar off the Pacific and roll down the leeward slopes of the Rockies. Mariners from the Aleutians to Patagonia have described in awestruck tones the ragged and rebellious winds that pour off seaside mountains. A nineteenth-century sailor off Alaska said williwaws turned the sea into a frightening “icy froth.”

  Winds also carry perhaps the most important figure in the mythology of the lands where Crane was lost. The Raven is the creator, savior, and shape-shifting trickster in the Distant Time stories of the Native Athabascan tribes.

  There are multiple variations on the same themes depending on the storyteller. But in all, the Great Raven, known as Dotson’ Sa, was there at the beginning of everything. One tale carries echoes of Noah and the biblical flood, perhaps infused by brushes with Russian Christians centuries ago or possibly just an interesting coincidence in a land where spring floods are an annual fact of life.

  It begins with the waters rising and the Great Raven building a huge raft to carry pairs of animals of his choice. The Great Raven then began to remake the world. He asked a muskrat to swim to the ocean floor to bring back mud. The raft began to transform into an island that grew bigger and bigger. Dotson’ Sa filled the island with berries and plants, lakes and rivers. Later, it came time to remake men and women. He first chose rock to make them, but realized they would live forever. The Great Raven decided clay was better. It brought mortality. He liked his creation, so much, in fact, that he desired a human wife, but was driven away by the people who saw Raven as a nuisance. As revenge, some say Raven unleashed mosquitoes on the earth to pester humankind ever more.

  But Raven had his benevolent moods. As always, there are many interpretations of the same story, but one goes like this: A powerful chief once stole the sun and moon and hung them in his home as trophies. The world was dark and cold. Famine set in, as people could not hunt or fish. Animals starved because they could find neither food nor prey. Raven concocted a plan. He knew the chief’s daughter went every morning to a small stream to collect water. Raven turned himself into a tiny fish and jumped into her jug. She took a drink and swallowed the fish, making her pregnant. She gave birth to a boy. Years later, when the child was young and precocious, he started crying. His grandfather—the chief who stole the sun and moon—asked what he wanted. The boy gestured to the purloined orbs hanging from the rafters. The chief let the boy play with them. The boy then hurled them back into the sky to return the sun and moon.

  In the winters of the past, Athabascan families huddled in shelters, and some burrowed into the ground for added insulation, and they shared these stories and entertained themselves with riddles. Outside, ravens hunted for scraps as one of the few animals that rode out the dark season.

  The river valley was wider now. The water flowed slower on the flatlands, making the ice more solid and predictable. But the route was less direct. The Charley meandered as the land leveled.

  Without knowing it, Crane had crossed the Tintina Fault, which cuts diagonally south of the Yukon River in eastern Alaska and into western Canada. It marks the northern edge of a geologically complex zone of quartz, granite, feldspar, and other minerals. It’s now part of central Alaska’s “gold belt.” Some of the gold remains deep in the earth around quartz veins and other deposits. But the easier target—and the cause of eureka moments that touched off gold rushes—is the gold that has been washed down into creeks and rivers over the ages. Gold is far heavier than most sediment and sits at the bottom of the waterways.

  For Crane, more was changing than the scenery. The days, too, were significantly longer as the earth shifted toward the spring equinox. There were more than eleven hours of daylight now, and it grew by about six minutes each day. Crane started to make considerable distance with the longer days and ever-lighter pack.

  Crane had experienced the subarctic nights from their deepest point. He couldn’t quite picture the flip side: the near-endless summer days. His friends at Ladd told him about the 1:00 a.m. cookouts and the annual midnight baseball g
ame on June 21. In the 1943 edition, months before Crane’s arrival, the Ladd Quartermasters beat Fairbanks 6–2. The winning pitcher was a soldier named Treskovich, whose ethnic roots were enough to bring out a handful of Russians curious to see this peculiar American pastime.

  Crane guessed his food would last a few more weeks, probably until early April. He had fewer than two dozen bullets.

  The hills moaned again. Crane watched the treetops fold over. He had maybe half a minute until the winds hit. There were times when he regretted giving up the sledge. This was one of them. It would have offered perfect protection. He did the only thing he could: turn his back to the winds and cower low. He covered his face with his mittens. All he could hear was the howl of the wind and the flapping of his fraying parka. From a distance, Crane might not appear like a man at all. He could be another dark outcrop on the river waiting to be covered by the blowing snow.

  If the weather turned worse, he wondered how long he could last.

  Crane rose. He always checked his rifle first after each wind blast. The fear was that some blowing debris could jam the bolt or clog the trigger. That would be an easy fix in normal circumstances. But Crane had no tools to disassemble the weapon. Even if he could, he dreaded fumbling a rifle piece onto the ground and turning the .22 into nothing more than a fancy club. A few times, bullets slipped from Crane’s fingers and were lost in the snow. He now made sure to roll out his sleeping bag as a catch cloth whenever he was handling the ammo. At this point, it might be better to lose a finger than a bullet.