The gold gleamed in me light of the single lantern that hung on the wall in the windowless room.
One by one, he counted out five good-sized nuggets. Then he reached into the pocket on his shirt and took out a square of white linen, edged in lace.
He unfolded it and placed the five nuggets in the middle. Tying up the ends, he returned it to his pocket.
“Nothing gained,” he said, quietly. “And a great deal lost.”
The sack lay between them.
“The rest—the claim,” Duncan said. “I should try to find Sam’s people. And I did promise Amanda …”
“Do what you will, MacLeod.” Fitzcairn shook his head. “I’ve seen enough of the Northern Lights. I’m set on seeing the lights on London Bridge. The sooner the better.”
At his feet, Vixen thumped her tail. Fitz ruffled her ears.
“I know a buxom wench, a flower girl in Covent Garden.” Turning toward Vixen, who sat up attentively, he cupped her face in his two hands. “She’s always been dotty over dogs. This sweet beastie will make her eyes sparkle, I’ll wager.”
“If she’s still there, Fitzcairn,” Duncan said. “Even you can’t expect every mortal woman you’ve ever known to wait forever.”
Fitz chuckled. “Her grandmother was there, and her mother before her. So if she’s not there, her daughter will be.”
“But—” Duncan began a protest.
“They think I’m my own grandfather, you see. Or is it grandson? Oh, you know how it goes.” He waved his hand vaguely in the air.
“Put the gold away for now, laddie.” He got to his feet. “We’ll talk more of this later. At the moment, we’d best hurry, or we’ll miss what the cook so aptly calls ‘evening mess.’”
“Go on, Fitz. I’ll be along shortly.” Duncan went to the door and watched as his friend disappeared in the darkness, the brown-and-white dog close by his side.
Then he donned his coat and walked some distance to the entrance of the fort. Slipping through the gates, he stood alone in the night.
The full moon was up, casting a midday luster on the landscape. The sky was pocked with stars, shining like gold dust thrown onto the cold ebony of the sky.
The still-white expanse of emptiness stretched away before him. He could hear, but not see, the cracking of the ice on the Peel as it flowed on northward, emptying finally into the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean.
Three hundred. Seven hundred. Two thousand, like Darius and the others of the ancients.
Such were the spans of Immortal years, infinite compared to ordinary men. Good men, like Sam and his brother. Bad men, like Smith and Foster.
And a brief candle compared to this ancient, untamed wild.
Mortal or Immortal, it mattered not. This was a land that tested men to destruction.
Mortal or Immortal, it mattered not, some failed that test. Duncan thought of ashes scattered on the snow, of a fresh-dug grave in the fort behind him.
Mortal or Immortal, some passed the test. The man who returned to Skagway for Minnie Dale was one.
Fitzcairn was another.
And he, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, had survived, his head and his wits intact. He felt no pride in this. Only a vast relief, and a wonder at it all.
On the horizon, the Northern Lights began their play. Like Fitz, Duncan had no more desire to see them. He turned and walked back into the fort.
As he did, it began to snow, a spring snow of large wet flakes.
By morning, five inches of white covered everything. In the corner of the fort that was holy ground, icicles hung from the rough-hewn cross above the newest grave. In the golden light of dawn, they sparkled like the finest, most delicate, most fragile crystal.
A cold wind gusted. The crystal broke, fell, and was lost in the whiteness.
AFTERWORD
All fiction is lies, they say. But historical fiction has some obligation to tell the truth, as much as possible …
On the evening of August 16, 1896, a man named George Washington Carmack, panning a small tributary of the Klondike River called Rabbit Creek, found a thumb-sized lump of gold. In short order, he found more—much, much more. Canadian law only allowed one claim per man, so after Carmack and his two Indian partners staked their claims, they spread the word.
Rabbit Creek was renamed Bonanza Creek, and men who had been prospecting the Klondike for years all rushed to the area.
But the Yukon winters are hard, and although fortunes were taken out of the ground in the next few months, it wasn’t until the following spring, when the ice broke up on the rivers, that any news reached the outside world.
That news was reinforced in the most dramatic way possible. In mid-July 1897, the Excelsior docked in San Francisco and the Portland in Seattle, bearing men from the Northland. Men who were carrying with them literal tons of gold.
Within days, the Last Great Gold Rush was on.
Short, intense, and unprecedented in scope, the Klondike phase was essentially over by the summer of 1899, when it was discovered that the beaches of Nome, Alaska, were covered with gold dust. Those who still cherished the dream turned their attention west. (One hearty soul left Dawson City by bicycle. His departure—pedaling gamely across a snow-field—was captured on film.)
But before then, by some estimates as many as a million people from all over the globe, headed for the Klondike. (Although many, if not most, did not even know where it was.) Approximately a hundred thousand actually made it far enough to be “on the trail.” Of those maybe forty thousand reached “the Eldorado city of Dawson.”
Of those forty thousand a number did indeed make their fortunes—by opening stores and hotels, laundries and restaurants, sawmills and whorehouses.
Only a few thousand found gold, and of those, only a few hundred in any quantity.
For purposes of this book, Duncan and his friends are numbered among that few hundred, despite the enormous odds against them. The valley in the Mackenzies isn’t on any map, though the theory of “looking where the rivers used to be” was a popular one among some of the prospectors.
Most of the rest of their journey, however, is as close-to-life as I could make it. In the Seattle/Skagway/Wilderness chapters, names of hotels, bars, ships, newspapers, restaurants, mountains, lakes, rivers, forts and some people are real. (Claire and her “Uncle,” however, are not.)
The story of Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith is all true. Under me guise of an upright businessman, Smith ran a con on the honest citizens of Skagway and the thousands of argonauts who chose to travel the White Pass, for nearly a year. He had men—like Slim Jim Foster—steering hapless newcomers directly into the clutches of his thugs. He controlled the law, (what there was of it) at least one of the churches and a number of saloons and gambling houses, besides the Parlour. He amassed a fortune and on the Fourth of July in 1898, actually joined the governor of Alaska in leading the town’s Independence Day Parade!
Four days later (as Duncan predicted) the good citizens of Skagway did come for him. A man named Frank Reid, head of a vigilante committee formed in March to stand against Smith and his gang, shot it out with Soapy on Juneau Wharf. Smith lost. His grave lies on a hill above Skagway. Frank Reid, who was mortally wounded in the fight, died a day later. He’s buried nearby, under a monument praising him as the savior of Skagway.
I’ve taken two liberties in my story. The first is allowing Our Heroes to actually reach Dawson City before the winter. In reality, only a handful of the aforementioned forty thousand got through in 1897—many didn’t because they were traveling without sufficient provisions. The vast majority of the gold seekers were stopped by the weather on the shores of Lake Bennett. They wintered there in an ever-growing tent city. The amazing flotilla—seven thousand boats of all descriptions—didn’t take to the water until the end of the following May.
The second—and larger—liberty has to do with dates. Astute viewers of Highlander will know that the on-screen date for Double Eagle is 1888. I
managed to not take note of that until I was some way into the book. The fact that Kit O’Brady left San Francisco for Alaska in a steamer that went down off Portland, (an event that actually did happen in 1898) led me to mistake the late 1880s for the late 1890s.
But the story flows so well from Double Eagle that—inspired by Rebecca Neason, who moved the Chinese invasion of Tibet a decade in the interests of her story—I have concluded that in the world of Duncan MacLeod, the Last Great Gold Rush occurred some nine years earlier. (This is the same world where Lord Byron’s friend the doctor is named Adams rather than Polidori.)
If you’ve read White Silence and would like to know more about the Gold Rush, go buy Klondike by Pierre Berton, Canada’s premiere historian. His father crossed the Chilkoot in 1898 and hearing of that experience led to his lifelong fascination with the event. Some of the truths he recounts are as fantastical as—well, as the existence of Immortals.
I further recommend the novels and short stories of Jack London, from whom I borrowed my title. His fiction is as true as Berton’s fact. London was there—as an adventurer and as a reporter.
The poetry of Robert Service, the other author usually associated with the time and place of White Silence, provided my epigraph (and Minnie Dale’s name). Service wasn’t there, until sometime afterward. Nonetheless, his verse—doggerel though it may be—is filled with a real sense of the land and the people.
In the rest of the book, all of the background information of Danny O’Donal’s life is factual—details of place and events in New York City, both before and after the war; details of the aftermath of Cold Harbor and the siege of Petersburg; details of life in Temperanceville, which in 1872 became part of the city of Pittsburgh.
Other minor details—information about Native Canadian burial practices, the fact that Gounod’s Faust was the most popular opera in America at the turn of the last century, the approximate weight of mules—came from a variety of sources, all of whom I thank for their help.
So—enjoy! And maybe learn a thing or two about one of the most fascinating historical events of the last century.
On sale in July 1999 from Warner Aspect!
HIGHLANDER: BARRICADES
by Donna Lettow
author of HIGHLANDER: THE ZEALOT
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION …
MacLeod is teaching journalism at the University of Paris as the turmoil of 1968 escalates from protests to strikes and rebellions. Duncan’s students and friends are manning barricades … just like those the Highlander remembers from 1848. A century ago MacLeod joined the doomed protesters; now he’s fighting to prevent a repeat of an historic tragedy. But a violent anarchist—and rival immortal—will stop at nothing until the streets of Paris are again flooded with the blood of young idealists …
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE …
He is Immortal. A Scottish warrior born four hundred years ago. He is not alone. For centuries he has fought others like himself. He can die only if a foe takes his head, capturing his life-force in an event known as the Quickening. But his battles are eternal … for in the end, there can be only one. He is Duncan MacLeod. The Highlander.
CRUCIBLE OF ICE
Three Immortals—MacLeod, his old friend Hugh Fitzcairn, and Fitz’s student, young Danny O’Donal—trek to the Yukon, seeking glory, gold, and the Northern Lights. But in the raging blizzards of the far north, the quest becomes a nightmare. For even Immortals can starve, freeze, and go mad, trapped in a frozen hell where implacable nature can kill the Highlander or his companions—again, and again, and again …
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