by Gene Curry
Chapter Four
The big man held out his hand to me. “I’m Rollins and these men are Kelso, Irwin, and Leonard.”
I told them who I was and we shook hands on the introduction. My bacon was frying on the fire and I unsacked some of my canned goods. The boat they were trying to build was a sorry-looking thing and Rollins saw me looking at it.
“What do you think?” he asked. “You say you were a year in this country.”
“In the army. Up north, Fort Yukon. That boat of yours won’t stand up to the river. Take my advice and start over. Want me to come in with you?”
It was plain that Rollins was bossing this outfit, though he was as hungry-looking as the rest of them. But there are men who always take charge. Rollins was one of them.
“What can you do?” he asked me.
“Show you how to build a strong boat,” I said. “I can shoot meat—deer, bear, birds—when the grub runs out. It’s not full winter yet. There will be enough to eat.” The one called Kelso eyed me suspiciously. “We don’t know a thing about you, mister.” He was a stocky man who might have been a teamster at one time.
“I’m not here to rob you,” I said. “What have you got worth robbing?”
Rollins laughed. “He’s got you there, Kelso. I don’t see that we have anything to lose. If we don’t get downriver before it freezes we’ll have to walk.”
“You want me to go away while you talk this over?” I asked. I guessed these men had come from the same part of the country. They sounded like Kansas.
“It’s all right with me,” Rollins said. “How about the rest of you?”
Kelso was the last to nod. I couldn’t see that I’d done anything to get his back up. Maybe he was just naturally suspicious, which wasn’t a bad thing to be along the Yukon.
It turned out that I was right about Kansas; they had left their families behind while they came north to hunt for gold. They might come back rich men, or as starving paupers, or not at all. None of us might get to Dawson. The Yukon is one of the wildest rivers in the world; over the years it has claimed the lives of countless men. Then there is disease and frostbite and the loneliness that drives men crazy. They would have been better off back in Kansas, but I wasn’t about to say so.
“Boat’s got to be as sturdy as we can make it,” I said. “The rapids will do us in if it’s not. How’s the lumber holding out?”
“Everything close by has been cut down,” Rollins said, pointing at the snow-covered hillsides that sloped up from the lake. “There’s still a fair stand of spruce that can be got at.”
“Then we better get at it,” I said.
After we ate the bacon there were a few hours of light left. The wind whipped up the water on the lake and the mountain peaks loomed over us like implacable enemies. Irwin, a small, hardy man, stayed behind to guard the supplies while the rest of us started out to cut the first timber for the boat.
The spruce was ten-inch and had to be cut and peeled before it was dragged a quarter-mile back to the edge of the lake. There it was hoisted on a trestle where it was ripped into one-and-a-half-inch boards. Kelso and Irwin did the ripping, one in a pit under the trestle, the other above. To keep the saw cut straight, the log was marked with charcoal blackened string.
By the time darkness closed in we had a small pile of rough boards, but that was just the start of it. For supper we ate bacon and beans, huddled close to the fire, trying to ignore the bite of the wind. Everybody was too tired to talk and as soon as we built up the fire we dropped off to sleep.
We started work again as soon as it was light, stopping only to eat. It snowed during the day, but there was nothing to do but keep on working. The days passed like that: work, eat, sleep. Gradually the boat took shape: thirty feet long with an eight-foot beam, a square stem and a pointed bow. It had two-by-four ribs to brace the sides against the force of the rapids. I showed them how to caulk it with flower sacks boiled in spruce pitch and then, finally, after a lot of blisters and bad temper, the damn thing was ready for launching.
We loaded on what supplies we had, and that wasn’t a hell of a lot: flour, bacon, dried apples, canned beans and tomatoes. I managed to buy a whole ham from a wild-eyed man—he had three of them—who said he was going to turn back, and maybe he was the smartest man on the shores of that godforsaken lake.
We started out at daybreak. There was a dust of snow, and the ice on the lake was a quarter of an inch thick. Dawson was still about six hundred miles ahead and there was no guarantee that we’d make it out of the mountain lakes and into the river before the ice closed in solid. With the square sail we made fair time for a couple of hours, then the wind died and we had to use the oars. This was the hardest work of all because of the ice, but then the wind picked up again and we got down the twenty-five mile length of Lake Bennett without too much hardship.
By nightfall we were well into the next lake. This was Lake Tagish, and it was a lot more treacherous than the one before. There was a moon and we kept going until the wind blew too hard, and I knew we were getting close to the worst part of the lake. This was the place where there was a split in the mountains that sucked down all the wind from the high mountain valleys. There was nothing to do but put in to shore and wait out the windy hours of darkness.
At the foot of Lake Tagish there was a Mounted Police post and beyond it was Lake Marsh, out of which the waters tumbled into Miles Canyon, the beginning of the Yukon River. The first run of bad water lasted for about three miles, where the water, jammed up between two sheer cliffs, tore along at forty miles an hour. Half a mile beyond the entrance there was a sharp bend that formed a whirlpool, turbulent and white.
“Jesus! You mean we have to go through that?” Rollins said, and I knew that he had never seen anything like it in Kansas.
“That’s Squaw Rapids down there,” I said. “We can portage the supplies around it. No way to portage the boat. The boat will have to go through. It’s that or leave it behind. Look, these rapids have been run before and can be again. We can do it.”
Kelso scowled at me. “Then why are these other boats tied up?”
“They’re scared,” I said.
“Goddamn right they are,” Kelso said.
I shrugged. “I’ll take the boat through by myself if it makes you feel better.”
“You saying I’m scared too?” Kelso asked.
“I’m saying you can walk around the rapids. The water is going to stay as rough as it is.”
“The hell with it,” Rollins said. “I didn’t come all the way from Kansas to stop now. I’ll go with you. The rest of you go around and we’ll pick you up on the other side.”
“Your funeral,” Kelso said.
While the others watched we headed into the gorge where the water ripped through rock walls not more than thirty feet apart. Icy spray whipped our faces as the bow rose and fell with the force of the current. At one point we were heading straight for a jagged rock, then I yelled at Rollins to shift his oar. The boat scraped the side of the rock but the heavy timbers were strong enough to take it. Then we were out past the worst of it and the gorge was behind. We steered the boat into calm water and waited for the others.
That night we camped at White Horse and had a feast of lake trout we bought from some Indians. Everybody cheered up except Kelso, who ate in silence. We slept on the boat and started out early the next morning.
The next day put us at the head of Lake LaBarge, a big lake thirty miles across. There was a fair breeze dead astern and we made good time. On the lake ice was forming fast, but the wind held and we made it across without getting iced in. Now we were into the river and should be making as much as a hundred miles a day. The only bad stretch after that was filled with sand bars and hidden rocks, but our luck held as before. It was getting colder all the time.
I shot a moose that was standing on a sand bar and that night we tied up near an abandoned Hudson’s Bay trading post. I figured we had come more than two hundred miles from Lake Be
nnett. Past that point freezing temperatures held throughout the day and there was ice even on the fast-flowing river. At one point we had to chop through two hundred yards of pancake ice before we could get the boat back in the current.
Three days later we rounded a bend in the river and there was Dawson, a cluster of tents and shacks half hidden by a light fall of snow. Above the town a well-timbered mountain dominated everything. It looked like the last place to build a town, even a ragtag town like this one. Even so, there it was—ugly, dirty, and gold crazed.
And I still had a long way to go.
The steamer, with its reinforced bow, was pulling out from the dock as we tied up. Men stood looking after it, wanting to go back to civilization and yet wanting to stay, held there by the lure of gold. Dawson looked like the most miserable place on earth, but I was goddamned glad to see it. There would be whiskey and hot food, maybe even a few women.
After coming down the river with Rollins I couldn’t just walk away from him, so I helped him get the boat out of the water so he could take it apart and build a cabin with the boards. That was how it worked in Dawson; if you didn’t build your own cabin you froze.
“What are you fixing to do?” Rollins asked me while he worked out nails with a claw hammer. The snow was getting heavier and his face was red with cold.
“Go on downriver,” I said. “I got business in a camp called Dulcimer.”
“You don’t mean gold-mining business?”
“That’s right.”
“I figured you didn’t.”
I liked Rollins, a straightforward man in his slow Kansas way. The others didn’t mean anything to me, especially Kelso, who hadn’t let up in his dislike of me. It seemed to me that Kelso was one of those men who never make a go of anything and hate the world because of it. He had a dumb, resentful face and little piggy eyes without much going on behind them. As he worked he glanced at me now and then. I’d be glad to see the last of him.
“You need some money?” I asked Rollins.
“Could use it,” he said. “But don’t know when I could pay you back. Or where.”
“Don’t worry about paying it back. If you get the money send it care of Jim Saddler, post office, El Paso, Texas. They’ll hold it for me. How much do you need? A hundred be all right?”
“It sure would help us to get started. The other men are as broke as I am.”
I dug into my coat and peeled off one of Cynthia’s hundred dollar bills. Kelso’s eyes narrowed when he saw the money, then he turned away and began to stack the boards from the boat. The wind was blowing hard and the snow was starting to drift.
Rollins rubbed his face. “Damn! It looks like this could turn into a blizzard. You’re not going to start out before it clears?”
“No, my business in Dulcimer isn’t that urgent. First I have to buy a sled and some dogs. Then I’ll follow the river the rest of the way. I’d better get to it if you don’t need any more help.”
“We’re all right now,” Rollins said. “Good luck to you, Saddler. One way or another you’ll get the money back. That’s a promise.”
I went up into the town to get a drink and found it in a ramshackle saloon jammed with gold-seekers making a lot of noise. Like in Skagway, nobody talked of anything but gold, but here the fever burned hotter. There were men there who shouldn’t have been there at all; men who didn’t know what the hell they were doing. More than a few of them would be buried there. Some might have friends; the others would die because this was country without any mercy.
As usual there were desperate men looking for grubstakes, and before I had been there for five minutes I was approached with any number of deals. The more desperate the man, the wilder the deal. They all knew where the gold was; all they needed was money to get it out. There was some money to be made in the diggings, working for other men, but that was the last thing anybody wanted to do. To have to work for someone else was a sure sign of failure.
I got talking to a man who didn’t try to bum any money off me and he said dogs were going to be hard to find anywhere in the gold fields.
“Any kind of good dog’ll cost you two or three hundred dollars,” he said. “And the cost of feeding them will set you back about a dollar a pound for meat. They’ll eat most anything, but most anything is scarce in these parts.”
Well that didn’t sound so good. I knew I was going to need six dogs, so that meant I was going to have to shell out more than two thousand dollars for a sled and team. I asked the man where I could find some of these high-priced dogs, and he said to look for Duncan McClure over in Lousetown on the other side of the river.
“McClure’s your best bet,” the man said. “He’s got the best dogs and won’t rob you more than’s fair. But you won’t find him there today. He’s up on one of the creeks hauling supplies. Be back tomorrow or the day after. Ask anybody over there and they’ll tell you where to find him. You know anything about handling dogs?”
“Some,” I said.
“What you need most of all is a good lead dog. Without a strong lead you’ll be in for a hell of a time. Keep them well fed, mister, or they’ll turn on you. Men in this country have been eaten up by their own team.”
I had heard such stories but wasn’t sure they weren’t just tall tales of the frozen North. Yet windy stories sometimes turn out to be true, at least a few of them. Sled dogs can be vicious bastards, and it’s no wonder, the hellish things they’re put through. I had done some sledding in the army, and that wasn’t any time lately, but I figured I’d get back in the routine fast enough. When you’re new to sledding or haven’t been at it for a long time, the first days are always the worst. Handling a sled isn’t just letting the dogs whip it along. A lot of the time you have to manhandle the damn thing. If you’re traveling on ice you have to watch out for holes and do your best to avoid them, because once you’re in water there’s no way to get out and you freeze in minutes. Then, too, you have to keep up with the dogs; when they’re well fed they can set up a lively pace. That means you have to run a good deal of the time. In the end, though, the worst strain is on the arms.
After I got through drinking at the bar I bought a bottle of whiskey and went to look for food and a place to sleep. The food was caribou steak and black coffee and I got it in an eating place that was half tent and half shack. Snow blew in through openings, but with the stove going full blast in back it was warm enough. There were two long trestle tables with men wolfing down grub anyplace there was room to sit. Heavy food is the only thing that keeps you going in that cold and they were laying in all they could afford. I put away two steaks at fifteen dollars apiece and three cups of bitter coffee at a dollar a cup.
I asked the cook-proprietor if there was a hotel where I could put up. He looked at all my new gear, especially the fur coat, and frowned.
“We got a few places they call hotels,” he said in a Yankee twang. “But they’ll rob you for a bed and maybe they’ll rob you in the bed. Men have been murdered for less than you got. Mounties do their best, but they can’t be everywhere. You want to rent a snug little shack, maybe I can fix you up. Place has got a good stove and a real window. I don’t mean a window made of empty bottles. A genuine glass window. Door is strong, has a drop bar on the inside, so they can’t rob you in your sleep.”
I got another dollar cup of coffee. “You mind if I look at a hotel first?”
The cook shrugged. “Suit yourself, mister. Only don’t wait too long. I’m offering you my rent shack because you look like a man won’t wreck the place or burn it down if you get drunk. Last month I rented my first extra shack to a man that brought in ten others. They broke everything in sight, even the stove. That’s what set the place afire. Since then I watch who I rent out to. You want to leave some money to bind the deal. Got to ask you for twenty dollars to hold it for you. You think that’s too much?”
“Not in this town,” I said, and gave him the money. “I’ll probably be back.”
“Can’t refund the mon
ey if you change your mind,” the Yankee said. “Go look at the hotels and you’ll see what I mean.”
I thought I knew what he meant all right. Dawson was a hard-drinking town full of wild men from all over. I guess the Mounties tried to keep the lid on the cutting and shooting, but I knew there would be plenty of noise all night long. My thoughts turned back to the Slocum brothers and Soapy Smith. I knew the Slocum brothers’ interest in the judge’s body; what Soapy had in mind I had no idea, but knowing him it had to be sneaky. He might have sent men ahead of me, or right after me. And who knows? Ben Trask might not have been the only hired killer on the boat.
The snow was still whirling in the wind when I went to check the first so-called hotel. It was a two-story place and some of the windows were broken and boarded over. There was a small saloon on the first floor, and like every other saloon in Dawson, it was jammed with boisterous drinkers fortifying themselves against the blizzard. As I came in one of several bouncers picked up a raging drunk and tossed him out into the snow.
I went to the desk and got a laugh from the clerk when I asked for a room. “You must be dreaming, mister,” he said. “Here they sleep three to a bed and they sleep in shifts. You get your eight hours, then you pay for another eight, or you get out. You want to sleep on the floor, the rate is half.”
I got much the same story at the next place I tried. By now the Yankee’s rented shack was looking better and better. With men sleeping in shifts all the rooms in the hotel had to be louse ridden. I could just about smell the piss-and-puke-soaked blankets; the bed-bugs would be out in force.
On my way back to the cook tent the snow was so thick I could barely see. Suddenly I felt a blow on the back of my head that might have killed me if not for the fur hat. Even so I went down on my knees. There were white lights in my head and it wasn’t the snow. The second blow caught me on the shoulder without doing much damage and I managed to roll away from the third. But I lost the rifle in the roll and when I grabbed for it all I came up with was snow. Now I could see there were two of them, bulky shapes in the half light. Both had clubs and they were swinging them at my head. I kept fumbling to get my coat open, but I had mittens on and knew I wasn’t going to make it. I guess I had seconds to live when a third shape, very tall, grabbed one of the club swingers from behind and tossed him against the side of a building. The tall figure picked up the dropped club and slammed the second man across the side of the head. A slap in the ear is as bad as a kick in the balls. He screamed and tried to run. Another crack across the back of the neck dropped him like a stone. I felt myself lifted by powerful arms and propped against a wall.
