The Wanderer

by Timothy J. Jarvis

  ‘I’m a preacher and it’s my calling to succor those in bleak circumstances. Where better to do so? I came out here to help, where I can.’

  I frowned at him.

  ‘What’s more,’ he went on, ‘I succumbed once to the enticements of fabled wealth, and it eases me some to comfort those who’ve likewise fallen prey.’

  My admiration was fast souring, curdled by the rennet of Robert’s priggish manner.

  ‘That gold isn’t fabled,’ I said, belligerently. ‘I’ve seen some of it with my own two eyes, back in California.’

  ‘Was just a figure of speech is all. There is gold in some of the Klondike’s creeks, as you say. May as well be fabled, though. Most of the claims are taken, and even if you were able to gang together with some others and stake yourself a place, you’d most likely be driven off by roughneck claim-jumpers before you’d even had a chance to thaw out a patch of earth to dig.’

  ‘I can look out for myself.’

  ‘Well, it’s not just toughs you’ve got to look out for, there are outlandish-cruel men out there who get up to things as would freeze your blood quicker than a night out in the open at the pole.’

  He struck a pose, with his arm held out before him, began declaiming, ‘There are strange things done, in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trails have their secret tales, that would make your blood run cold.’

  Of course these verses are now familiar to me as the first lines of ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert W. Service, but back then they were novel, and that great poet of Yukon life, the ‘Canadian Kipling’, was yet to publish them. The only explanation I can think of, is that Robert must have encountered and discoursed with Service during his wanderings. Service hailed from Glasgow, as, I was later to discover, did Robert, and it is possible, had the two men met in the frozen Yukon, so far from the city on the banks of the Clyde, they might have struck up an acquaintance over reminiscences of that Dear Green Place.

  ‘Also,’ Robert continued, ‘digging isn’t as easy as you’d think. It’s back-breaking labor. And even when you’ve got down to the gravel layer, chances are you’ll find it isn’t pay dirt and’ll have to try delving elsewhere.’

  ‘Oh, I think I’m doughty enough,’ I said, sardonically.

  ‘You’d be best off turning back now, reckoning whatever sum you’ve outlaid thus far lost through ill fate. You may have wasted money, but, as yet, you’ve risked and endured little. All the dangers and hardships lie ahead of you.’

  He went on to evoke these for me, in a harangue filled with the lurid parlance of the evangelic pulpit. His description of the White Horse Rapids struck me particularly, it was so turgid, and I can recall it practically verbatim.

  ‘At one point the river runs through a narrow gully, the Miles Canyon, then courses down a steeply shelving rock-strewn reach, known as the White Horse Rapids. This isn’t far down the Yukon from the winter camps, you know. Yes, it is a right poetical name, isn’t it? It’s said they were christened by early pioneers who were reminded of the wind-tousled manes of hoary steeds by all the spume. You suppose it’s dangerous? Well, you’d be right there, it’s perhaps the most treacherous stretch of the whole river, and it’s at no point along its course a calm waterway. A lot of rafts and poorly made barks have capsized or wrecked shooting the rapids, and this has resulted in the loss of provisions, and occasionally of life, for some have been dragged under by eddies, smothered by roily waters. Yet, many stampeders still tempt providence in spite of this, for they’re a foolhardy breed. What’s even more astounding is that there are alternative routes, land trails that are well-known, and fairly easy-going. They just take longer is all. Impatience? Brute avarice, I’d call it. Fittingly the roar of the rapids sounds as the tumult of the damned in Hell must, for those that have drowned there will, for their greed, have been cast down forthwith into the infernal lake of fire.’

  Once he had concluded his catalogue of risks and adversities, Robert looked up at a skein of geese that was flying by, far overhead. He continued staring into the sky long after their silhouettes had been lost against a dark high mass of cloud moving in from the east. I said nothing, a little rattled, for I realized that, if the tone of Robert’s disquisition had been risible, in tenor it was probably an accurate reflection of the hardships of the route. Then, after a time, his eyes still fixed on the heavens, he sighed.

  ‘And you’d put yourself through all of this,’ he said, ‘for material gain, which God frowns upon.’

  That irked me. I resented his Pharisaical stance on the, in my view, natural hankering after wealth.

  ‘Thanks,’ I blustered, ‘but I’ll take my chances, and go on. I’m not gutless.’

  ‘I’m not impugning your pluck. Just warning you, is all. Doubtless you’ll make it to Dawson City without coming to harm. But, like I say, when you get there you’ll find local miners have taken all the gold-bearing creeks.’

  Most of those who reached Dawson ended up living on the settlement’s fringes in shanties built using broken-up river craft, disappointed, milling about town, biding their time while deciding how best to make the journey back south, Robert said. Furthermore, he claimed that, due to the huge incursion, disease was rife and the city now teetered on the brink of famine.

  ‘Therefore, you may find you’re able to do some good, if you’re inclined to, and you insist on pressing on,’ he continued. ‘That’s why I’m bound there. If so, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re lending a hand to a community in dire need, or rather two hands, which is more useful, when all’s said and done, than just the one.’

  He grinned, almost diffidently, plucked at his empty sleeve.

  I was disarmed by Robert’s joke at his own expense and began to wonder whether I had allowed my prejudice against preachers to fog my judgment. After all, for all his cant, Robert had only been trying to alert me to the trials he thought I would face. The thawing of my opinion was attended by a sudden onset of cold. Heavy snow began to fall from the black rack overhead, which now shrouded the entire sky. I looked round the corner of the rock behind which Robert and I had been conversing, and was perturbed to see one of my Indians sitting on the floor, clutching his head and shivering. I crossed over to find out what was wrong. It emerged he had taken very ill of a sudden. Concerned for him, the other Indians implored me to let him return to Skagway straightway. I could hardly refuse their earnest pleas, in any case it did not look like the sick man had the strength to take up his pack again. I was resigned, therefore, to abandoning some of my provisions, and was just about to sort out a pile of the least essential items to leave behind, when Robert approached, asked what was the matter. When I explained, he said, ‘Well, as you know, I think it’s foolhardy to go on at all, but since you’re determined, and I’m going that way anyhow, I may as well help you out by toting what I can.’

  I gratefully accepted this offer of aid, partly out of desperation, and partly because my glimpse of Robert’s streak of self-deprecating humor had, as I say, endeared him slightly to me, given me to think he might be more pleasant company than I had hitherto thought, though I still considered him a prig. Thus, as a consequence of the vagaries of fate and a weak jest, I heard the story that fired the great obsession of my life.

  We went on to the end of the trail – Robert, the two remaining Indians, and I – and, after a good day and a half’s slog on from the top of the Chilkoot pass, reached Lake Bennett. During that time my dislike of Robert fast turned to regard, and my regard quickly burgeoned into friendship; he was, in truth, a congenial fellow – I discovered a good heart lay beneath his preachy vesture. And he too had recently lost his wife; this shared tragedy forged a bond between us.

  On the shores of the frozen lake, towered over by hoar-dredged mountains and hemmed in by tenebrous pines, vast numbers of dun-colored tents, brindled here and there with snow, had sprouted up, like toadstools after heavy rain. As we walked down the path into the encampment we passed many m
en whipsawing logs into planks for boat-building; it looked wearisome work.

  On reaching the camp, Robert suggested we take a stroll among the tents. Everywhere we walked he pointed out brutishness and squalor: men brawling, women smoking and spitting, children suffered to run underfoot, besmirched with filth. We saw one man hack another’s ear clean from his skull with a Bowie knife, and a withered prostitute lifted her skirts to us.

  It seemed the good were outnumbered by the low, the violent, the snarling, and the bestial. Whether I would have seen this, had Robert not directed my gaze to it, I do not know – possibly I might still have been bleary-eyed with dreams of making my fortune – but, whatever the case may be, I realized that, were there gold still in the Klondike, there would be a horrid scuffle over it, one I did not have the stomach for; scrabbling in the frozen earth with men such as the men in the camp on the shores of Lake Bennett was not for me, not even for a fortune the like of Hearst’s.

  Further, we learnt, from conversations overheard, that the ice had formed on the Yukon early that year, making the river impassable until the spring thaw, then at least four months off.

  So I decided to return to Skagway, secure passage on a boat bound for a port further down the western seaboard. When I announced this intention to Robert, he said, if I would have him along, he would like to postpone his trip to Dawson City and accompany me. I was touched, told him I would be glad of his company. He then asked if I had any objection to going back by way of the White Pass Trail, and trying if we could do any good there. He explained that, though the route was less severe than the Chilkoot Trail, in some ways conditions on it were worse, largely because thieves and grifters preyed on wayfarers. I assented.

  As it was getting late in the day by then, we decided we would have to spend one night there, in the camp, wait until the following morning to set out. First I dismissed my Indians, then spent most of the rest of the afternoon selling off my gear, save my tent, at the best price I could get, sadly still a bad loss. When I went to meet Robert, at the spot where we had pitched our tents, I found him talking to a young woman, looked like a wanton to me, and a boy who was not more than eight or so. As I came upon them, I heard the woman say, ‘His c—ks——r father hit ’im so hard it jes’ jumped outta his head.’

  Then I noticed the boy was missing an eye, his right, the orbit a raw pit. Robert took the boy’s chin, turned his head this way and that. The boy sniffled, but otherwise submitted to the examination.

  ‘Looks, at least, like it’s healed up nicely,’ Robert then said. ‘I am so sorry though.’

  ‘All the other kids is mean to ’im now.’

  ‘Look. I tell you what,’ Robert said, taking, from his pocket, what I, at first, took to be a marble. ‘You have this, boil it up, then pop it in. It should fit well, I reckon. It’ll keep dirt from the socket, and the other children won’t tease him anymore.’

  I peered closer. It was a beautifully crafted glass eye. The mother took it, and she and her son scampered off. I greeted Robert, then asked him where he got the glass eye from.

  ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘It’s a long story.’

  He would not be drawn on it. Then we went off to get ourselves a plate of beans before turning in.

  The following morning, we set out, early, along the White Pass Trail.

  I will not bore you with the details of that fatiguing and fretful journey. The route did not come to be known as the Dead Horse Trail for nothing – the frozen carcasses of horses, ponies, and mules strewed it; they lay on their backs, four legs stiff in the air like stovepipe hats, hides partially flayed by the wind, ribs poking through like the timbers of wrecked coracles. Our toils were, in small part, recompensed by the fact we aided some stampeders in straits, though we were unable to convince any of the idiocy of continuing into Canada.

  Not long after gaining Skagway, I managed to talk the captain of a steamer, bound for Seattle, into taking me on. I tried to persuade Robert to likewise seek a working berth, but he said he preferred to stay on in the frozen North and continue his humanitarian enterprise, meant to head back down the trail once more, make it all the way to Dawson City this time. His eyes filled with sentimental tears when he talked of this duty, which, despite the high esteem I, by that stage, held him in, still irked a mite.

  We spent our last evening together in a saloon – a seamy, noisy, sawdust-and-rotgut establishment typical of that place – drinking cheap whiskey (Robert’s scruples did not extend to temperance). After a few glasses of the acrid liquor, an enigmatic phrase my friend had employed when we first met, and which I had hitherto forgotten, returned to me, prompting me to ask him a question.

  ‘You mentioned before you were led astray by the lure of riches. What did you mean by that?’

  ‘Do you believe there are things that, though beyond the ordinary ken of man, nevertheless mold our lives, weird forces at work?’

  ‘No, I do not.’

  ‘Neither did I once. Back then I would have scorned such notions, but now…’

  ‘You have your belief. I’m not a religious man.’

  I tried hard to keep the scorn from my tone, but Robert heard it, looked a touch wounded.

  ‘It was not to God I adverted.’

  He was silent a moment, then peered at me through the fug in that place.

  ‘Will you permit me to tell a tale? It’s true, and concerns things that befell me back when I was a rash youth.’

  Given that Robert was still young, I thought this formulation queer, but ignored it.

  ‘Of course. I enjoy hearing a yarn spun.’

  Then, as we sat there, at the counter, staring into our tumblers like crones scrying for auguries, Robert told me a bizarre tale as would shock you and grume your blood, if only I could tell it, a tale set in Glasgow, Scotland, a tale of penury, bloody murder, card-sharping swindles, sham séances, and the realms of the foul olden horrors that prowl the primeval lightless ways that riddle the Earth. But to say any more would be to break my word for, as I wrote at the beginning of this account, I promised him then I would not ever divulge the story to another soul.

  When he was through, my companion took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. Though the fire in the saloon’s grate had died right down, and a biting wind howled in through the open door, he was sweating profusely. At a loss for words, I murmured that I was sorry. He grinned and turned to me.

  ‘Oh, it’s not your fault.’

  I had been filled with horror by what I had heard, so packed the bowl of my briar, lit the tobacco with a match taken from a pot on the bar, and took a calming draw.

  ‘What did you do after?’ I asked.

  Robert took his own pipe from his shirt pocket.

  ‘First, could I thieve some ’baccy from you?’

  I assented, gladly. He took my pouch and set about filling and lighting his pipe, a deft feat one-handed.

  Once he had it smoking nicely, stem clenched in his teeth at the corner of his mouth, he continued his tale. Following the awful caper, he told me, he had fled for North America. On his arrival in the New World after a rough but uneventful crossing of the Atlantic, he had settled in Boston, a town he chose on a mere whim. Many years followed, filled with a slew of tribulations – poverty, hardship, a spell in a labor camp, some time wandering the brutal Old West – before he finally wound up in New York, where he suffered a beating at the hands of a drunken mob and was taken in and nursed back to health by a preacher. Robert repaid this kindness by staying on, once recovered, and helping his rescuer, who was aged and doddery, if not doting, with his duties. When the minister died, a few years later, it was only natural that Robert take over his flock. He subsequently married a member of the congregation, a beautiful young woman, who returned his affections in spite of his being a cripple, but, as he had already told me, she died in childbirth two years after their wedding.

  ‘The pain has not paled one bit, though it’s been many months since I suffered the loss,’ Robert conclu
ded, biting his lip. ‘When I heard of the Klondike Gold Rush and of the stampeders’ hardships, I came out here to wander these frozen lands and offer succor where I could. I’ve found respite from my grief in ministering and preaching to those in need.’

  Again, I said how sorry I was to hear tell of his woes. Smiling, he once more brushed my expressions of sympathy aside, suggested we eat. This proposal met with my favor, I realized then I was ravenous, my composure, and appetite, restored by pipe smoke. While we tucked into some poor fare brought out by the barkeep, it dawned on me that Robert’s apparent youth could not be reconciled with his account of his life. I challenged him.

  ‘It is of no consequence to me whether you choose to credit me or not,’ he countered, with some asperity.

  I glared at him, shook my head. The anger that had flared up died away, and he looked down at his food, said, in a tone of mollification, ‘But I am grateful to you for listening. Each time I tell my tale, its burden grows lighter.’

  I could not respond straightway, as I was chewing one of the lumps of tough, gristly meat that were swimming in the stew we had been brought (lamb on the menu, but I doubted this, particularly as I had seen the proprietor of the place buying a broken-down old mule from a stampeder only the day before). Once it was pappy enough to swallow, I replied, ‘I’m sorry. It isn’t that I didn’t believe you. I was bemused is all.’

  ‘As for that, all I can say is that I haven’t, in my outward seeming, aged a day since…Since then. I don’t expect you to believe that. I wouldn’t myself if I didn’t have proof of it every time I look in a glass.’

  I nodded, turned the conversation to other topics, sensing it would be futile to press Robert further. I am, to this day, unsure whether the weird things he told me of were delusion, a mere pack of lies, or the entire truth. I quail to consider this last possibility…

  We finished our food, then Robert proposed we share another bottle of whiskey before turning in. I agreed, he ordered it, and the barkeep brought it over. Robert poured us both a slug, then asked me what I thought I might do with myself on my return south.