by Gene Curry
“What are you thinking about?” Hella asked.
“You in silk bloomers,” I answered.
“You are thinking about DuSang.”
“I was thinking I’ll have to kill DuSang somewhere along the way. If he comes he’ll have to be killed. His men won’t be worth a damn after that. But he hasn’t come yet. We better get some sleep.”
We slept for four hours and could have managed with less, given the circumstances, but we had to be patient because of the dogs. As it was we had to fight hard to get them out of their snow burrows. The snow had stopped altogether and the temperature began to drop, freezing the snow in minutes, giving us a good surface to travel on. Once the dogs knew there was no hope of going back to sleep they worked well. Hella pointed: up ahead was the entrance to the Frazer Valley, the funnel that would take us into the mountains. Once into the long valley there would be no easy way out. There could be no backtracking or change of plan. In that frozen valley we’d be caught between the mountains and DuSang—if DuSang came. One part of mind argued that DuSang, the prosperous storekeeper, would give up on the whole thing; would get on the wire to Smith and tell him we’d gotten away. But my mind was no match for the gut feeling that the half-breed would follow us like the half-savage he was.
Traveling was easy on the packed, frozen snow and we stepped up the pace to a six-miler. We moved into the long, narrow valley, all the time urging the dogs to greater speed. It was very cold and the wind made it colder. The valley seemed to run all the way to eternity; no matter how hard we worked the dogs we wouldn’t come to the end of it for at least three days.
Day turned to dusk and then to night. The next day began the same as the day before, but then, about noon, the valley grew narrower, with the timber growing in close, almost blocking our way. We lost time getting the teams through the timber; it was dusk again when we got back to open country. Two hours later we hit a long stretch of land that would have been swamp in summer. Now it was frozen over, but there were treacherous places where the ice was thin, barely covering deep pools and channels.
There was nothing left to do but make camp for the night and move out again as soon as the light could be trusted. “Take it easy, Jim,” Hella said while she busied herself with the inevitable bacon and beans. “They may come, but not tonight. We are too far ahead of them. Now eat your supper and pretend you are eating—what do you like best?”
I said steak and onions. “If not that, fried chicken, Texas style.”
“Texas style? Is that a special style?”
“No, it means the chicken has to be born in Texas. Chickens born in any other state or territory won’t do. And even in Texas there are different kinds of chickens. East Texas chickens are fatter, but Panhandle chickens are tastier.”
“All this is ridiculous,” Hella said. “I think it would be good for us to have a drink. There is half a bottle left. After tonight I think we will have to stand guard, so we will drink the whiskey now.”
After the cooking things had been put away she matched me drink for drink until the bottle was empty. We sat by the blazing fire; DuSang might have been ten thousand miles away. The burning spruce smelled good and the whiskey had driven away the feeling of danger.
Hella said sleepily, “You can leave me in Valdez if you like. With two sleds, two teams, I can start my business again. And I have the five thousand dollars you gave me. I will be set up for life. I would like to come with you to San Francisco, but there is no need to take me.”
“Don’t talk so much,” I said.
Hella stared into the fire. “I am just being practical, Jim. All my life I have been practical. I have been forced to be practical.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I want to be here.”
“Which isn’t one bit practical.”
“I meant practical in the future.”
“Don’t be too practical. We’ll go to San Francisco, have a good time, then you can decide what you want to do. If you get too lonesome for the Yukon you can always go back. I’ll see you get ten times the money you need to start your business again. You can have a real big outfit.” Hella looked angry. “From this widow? This woman? Your loving friend? You would get the money from her, yes?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “Look. She’ll be so glad to get the judge back she won’t be Scotch about the money. I know the judge wasn’t—isn’t—much to look at, but he’s worth millions of dollars to her. Five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars is just a drop in the bucket. We’ll go to San Francisco and we’ll all be friends. You’ll like her fine.” Hella’s voice rose in anger. “I will not get in bed with you and this woman.”
I laughed so hard that some of the dogs jerked awake and began to growl. “You’re crazier than I am. Nobody said we’re going to make it a three-handed game, not that it wouldn’t be a bad idea at that.”
Still mad, Hella reached for the coffee pot. “I will scald you with coffee, Saddler.”
“Not unless you make a fresh batch.”
The empty pot came flying at me and I had to duck. A dog jumped up and barked furiously.
I dug the coffee pot out of the snow and put it back by the fire. “Peace,” I said. “For Christ’s sake let there be peace before you run off the dogs.”
Hella remained sullen for a while. Then she said, “I hate this woman, this widow. I do not want to meet her.”
“All right. Then we’ll leave the judge on her doorstep, yank on the bell and go to Texas. If you don’t want her money we’ll go to Texas and get jobs after the money is gone. I’ll clerk in a store, you can be a waitress.”
Hella smiled as only she could smile. “But that would not be practical, Mr. Saddler.”
“That it wouldn’t, Miss Rasmussen,” I said.
After that there was peace in the camp we called home. We’d had our first fight, a coffee pot had been thrown, and now all was forgiven. Christ! I thought, it’s just like being married. At any other time such a thought would have chilled my bones, but I guess being with Hella was different.
In the morning we edged our way through the frozen swamp. Here Hella was a lot more useful than I was: she had an eye for the weak places in the ice, now covered with frozen snow. She marked a path with twigs and kept on going until she reached the other side. Then she came back and we took the teams across. The whole thing took two hours—hours we couldn’t spare.
After that we made good time. The dogs were rested and so were we. The miles fell away behind us and we were in good spirits for a change. That’s how it is in snow country: your mood keeps changing. There are dull gray days when you feel so helpless, so powerless against the climate, that you don’t want to take another step. Then there are other days, clear and cold, when the sun sparkles on everything and you couldn’t feel better. This was one of those days.
But you have to watch yourself when you get to feeling too good, because that hard country is always ready to betray you. At the end of the day Hella said we were more than halfway into the valley. The night held clear and we kept moving until common sense—and the dogs—warned us to stop. That night, as planned, we stood watches for the first time. We built a fire but after the cooking was done we slept away from it, for nothing makes a better target than someone outlined against a fire at night.
Nothing happened during the night. It snowed a little, and that was all. Starting out early, we made the end of the valley just after dusk the following day. They might still be following us. If so, they hadn’t caught up yet. Yet there were times when I felt like dumping the judge and high-tailing it for Valdez. The hell with Cynthia and her money! Judge or no judge, she wasn’t going to starve. Far from it, the house—the mansion—she lived in was worth a fortune by itself. And yet I knew I was going to see it through.
The walls of the valley gave way to open country for a while, and here the wind blew harder, knifing through our furs, trying to kill us. It was noon when we saw the river. More a creek than a river, it
was wide enough just the same. Hella said we’d have to be careful because some of the rivers closer to the sea didn’t freeze completely like those in the interior. Again she went ahead while I stayed behind and kept the dog teams under control.
Hella took her team across without any trouble. I was more than halfway to the other side when the ice cracked with a sound like breaking glass. The crack ran right under the feet of the dogs and they barked, recognizing the danger. I tried to turn the dogs away from the widening crack, but they kept on a straight course in their panic to reach the opposite bank. We would have gone into the water in another minute if Hella hadn’t run out onto the ice and dragged and kicked the snarling huskies away from the danger. We had just reached solid ground when the whole surface of the creek broke up. The ice I had just crossed now bobbed and floated loose.
I looked back at the wide creek and said to Hella, “You think that thing has a name?”
Hella shook her head. “I hardly think so.”
“Then we’ll call it after you,” I said. “Hella Creek.” There was no more excitement during the rest of the day. We entered the next valley at nightfall and kept on going far into the night. Well-fed so for, the dogs didn’t give any trouble. There didn’t seem to be much game, and that bothered me some, but Hella said there was sure to be more game in the mountains.
We woke up to face a wall of fog that stretched across the valley. It came right down to ground level, thick and clinging, but rather than give up any more time we started into it, holding the dogs to a walk. The fog was so thick I could barely see Hella, only five yards away. As the temperature rose the surface snow became mushy and there were places where the sleds bogged down and had to be lifted out with the gee poles we carried with the other gear. So far this was the worst part of the journey.
One miserable mile followed another. By noon, after five hours of this, we were ready to drop, and the fog was as thick as ever. We could have been anywhere. Everything was shrouded in fog, we were breathing fog, and with no sense of direction the dogs whimpered their bewilderment. Finally we decided to call a halt when we found ourselves climbing the wall of the valley.
It could have been any time of day or night. We fed the dogs without unharnessing them; without a fire to hold them they would wander off and God knows if we’d ever find them again.
The fog lifted during the night; there was even a moon that grew brighter as the hours passed. It was close to morning, with the moon still bright, when Hella called out to me and pointed.
“The mountains!” she said. “Look, Jim—the mountains!”
And there they were, dim in the far distance, but I could see them. Ghostly shapes in the moonlight, and now that I could see them I began to think we were going to make it after all. What we had to do when we reached the mountains was to find a pass, a way through to the other side. There might be many false starts; if so, we would have to backtrack and keep on looking. And if we didn’t find a way through, we were as good as dead.
The mountains faded with the moon and there was more of that goddamned snow. But it wasn’t so heavy that we couldn’t travel, and then suddenly it was night again. By this time I didn’t even know what day it was, not that it mattered a helluva lot. I asked Hella and she said she thought it was Thursday.
“Or Friday.”
“Or Tuesday,” I said.
It snowed for a full day and part of another, but when it cleared and the feeble sun struggled forth the mountains were no longer dim shapes in the distance. Now they were solid; they had depth. By the middle of the next day we were traveling on an upslope, gradual at first, so gradual that we hardly noticed. But when I looked back after an hour I was able to see far back into the valley. The long climb had begun.
The snow wasn’t as deep as it had been in the valley, but so far the surface was crisp; deeper into the mountains there wouldn’t be as much ice as snow. We were still in the foothills and a search for a pass wouldn’t come until much later. Here the sun was stronger and it burned for a longer time each day. I was so glad to see that sun, for it reminded me—and I needed to be reminded—that there was another world that didn’t freeze over for ten months of the year. I checked our back trail again, but by now fog covered the valley and there was nothing to see. Up where we were the air was clear and very cold, and the sun was shining bright. That was all that mattered. We were still well below the tree line; another day would take us to where there was no firewood.
So we rested the dogs and collected as much dry wood as we could find. After this fires would have to be small, used for little more than cooking. The drier the wood, the lighter the load. With that in mind we picked carefully, passing up anything that wasn’t old and well-seasoned. We used our trail hatchets to cut the longer pieces into more manageable lengths, and by the time we finished there was enough firewood to take us over the mountains, if we used it sparingly.
That night we heard wolves for the first time. It started with one long, drawn-out howl that seemed to drift all the way to the moon. I don’t know if it’s true that wolves howl at the moon. This one seemed to, and I tell you it was the most lonesome sound I ever heard in my life. People who don’t know what they’re talking about like to say that wolves and coyotes sound much the same. No such thing. The howl of a wolf is like nothing on this earth. Compared to it the coyote’s howl is like the caterwauling of a horny old tomcat on a backyard fence.
The first howl was answered by others until there was a whole chorus of howls echoing through the foothills. One by one, the huskies woke in their snow burrows, snarling with their muzzles raised to sniff the night wind.
Hella woke too and crawled out of the sleeping bag. “They are not close, the wolves,” she said. “But they know the dogs are here. If they get hungry enough they will come closer. They will come closer every night. They are afraid of humans except when they are starving. Then they will attack even a man with a rifle. But mostly what they try to do is to entice the wilder dogs away from camp so they can kill and eat them.”
Something in her manner puzzled me. “There’s something you’re not saying. Out with it.”
“All right.” She gestured toward the coffin on the sled.
“I think the wolves are interested in that.”
“But how can they be? The judge is frozen solid. How can they know?”
“I don’t know,” Hella said. “But I have seen it in Finland—and here. They know there is something, and so they will keep following us. They will become bolder as our fires grow smaller. But if we can keep the dogs under control the wolves cannot do us any harm.”
“Unless they’re crazed with hunger?” I said.
“You wanted the truth,” Hella said. “Now go to sleep, it is time for my watch.”
I slept but I didn’t sleep well, at least not for the first few hours. You know how it is. You wear yourself out sleeping badly, then not long before it’s time to get up you sleep like a drunkard. That’s how I was when Hella shook me awake and handed me a cup of coffee. Bacon was frying on the fire. It was daylight and the wolves were silent. During the night Hella had harnessed the dogs and they still slept in the traces. More and more I realized how valuable she was. In the desert I could have given her lessons; here she was the one with the knowhow.
“Still no sign of DuSang,” I said.
“Don’t even talk about him,” Hella said.
Chapter Ten
We were making our way up a long slope when a rifle boomed and Hella dropped with a bullet in her back. She cried out and fell on top of the sled and the frightened dogs were dragging her away before my brain took in what was happening. Hella lay on top of the sled with her feet dragging the ground behind. Other rifles opened up, but I wasn’t hit, not even scratched. The runaway sled with Hella on it went over the top of the slope. The first rifle boomed again—a heavy caliber, by the sound of it. The bullet clipped a piece of fur from my coat, but I was over the top of the slope before the big rifle fired again.
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Hella lay in the snow beside the overturned sled. The runners of the sled were dug in deep and the dogs, pulled up short, were snarling and barking. I ran to Hella. Her eyes were open and her breath was coming light and shallow. She tried to smile.
“I can’t move my legs, Jim,” Hella whispered. “Get my rifle and put me where I can see them. You go on. Please get my rifle and go on.”
“Like hell! We’re in this together.”
I tried to stop her when she began to crawl toward the upended sled. “The rifle. Get me the rifle,” she kept saying. I could hear them shouting from the bottom of the slope.
I carried Hella to the shelter of some rocks and gave her the rifle. “There’s no pain, I can shoot,” she whispered, and to prove that she jacked the loading lever of the Marlin.
Two men came running and I shot one of them. Hella shot the other. When the bullets hit them they rolled all the way to the bottom. The big rifle boomed again and the bullet shattered on a rock close to my head. Two other rifles joined in, firing from the bottom of the slope. Then it got quiet and I heard DuSang’s voice yelling at me.
“Send the coffin down the slope, Saddler. Your only chance to live. The woman’s shot and you’re on your own. Send the coffin down and we’ll clear out.”
“Like hell!” I yelled back. “You want the coffin, come and take it!”
I looked at Hella and she was dead. Just dead. There had been no death struggle. She just died.
Her head lay on the stock of the Marlin. Her fur hat had fallen off and her white-blond hair was bright in the mountain sun. Her face was turned sideways, toward me. Her face wasn’t peaceful. It had no expression at all.
