Down the Yukon

by Will Hobbs

  We worked all night, not that night ever came. Twice we stopped to make coffee, eat the bannock cakes Ingrid had given us, and inspect our progress. When our raft came together it was twelve feet across and eighteen feet long, a platform of nearly uniform eight-inch logs laid across a rectangular frame of notched ten-inchers with a brace running from corner to corner across the middle. At the bow and at the stern we fixed a pair of upright birch poles standing a couple feet above the raft to serve as oarlocks.

  As we were building our oars a scow floated by, one being rowed from bow and stern just as we intended to row ours. The big scow was difficult to bring to shore, but the two men were attempting to do just that. They called out, “Do you need help?”

  Any earlier and we would have gladly accepted it. “We’re okay!” we hollered back, and waved them by.

  Plumb exhausted, we put back on the river twenty-three hours after we’d stopped to help the Swensons. It took both of us heaving at the sweeps, with their long angled oar blades, to keep from broaching on the heads of the islands and the gravel bars. In the brief half-light between sunset and sunrise, the Yukon finally joined together again into one broad river with the Hamlin Hills rising on both sides.

  All of a sudden it came to me that in my haste to get going, I’d left the ax miles upstream—right there on the bank, where I’d last set it down. I was sick. I broke the news to Jamie. She was so exhausted, she gave it the merest shrug. “We’ve still got the saw.”

  She slept, I steered. There was no possibility of propelling the raft faster than the current. All that need be done was to steer it clear of the gravel bars. If only I could quit picturing that ax on the bank, how easy it would have been to set it on the raft. Put my brains in a jaybird’s head and he’d fly backward.

  Man, oh man, was I tired.

  Below Rampart Canyon, a day later, the hills opened up and we were watching for a landmark that the map called Moosehead Rack.

  Moosehead Rack was easy to spot. It had four distinct peaks sticking up along a ridge like tines along a moose antler. A fierce head wind had come up, and we were clinging to the right shore. A fish camp was approaching, and so was a strange mechanical device that had been placed in the river barely offshore.

  It was a Ferris wheel of sorts, fifteen feet or so in diameter and powered by the current, with a wide basket of wood and metal mesh at the end of every spoke. Each basket took half its revolution underwater and the other half in the air. “It must be a fish trap of some kind,” I said. “Let’s go see.”

  We managed to beach the wallowing raft and tie up. As we were threading our way among several birchbark canoes drawn up on the shore, our eyes were drawn to a large fish thrashing in one of the baskets attached to the great wheel—a king salmon in its reddish spawning colors. The salmon was shunted from the basket into a chute and dropped into a wood box.

  A boy of eight or nine walking across the gangplank from the shore to the marvelous fish trap stopped when he saw us coming his way.

  “Maybe we can beg a salmon from them,” Jamie whispered.

  Suddenly the boy ran to the shore and disappeared.

  “You grew up around Indians,” I said. “What should we do?”

  “Just wait. Wait right here. Someone will come out to see us.”

  The boy’s entire family appeared, from little brothers and sisters to what might have been great-grandparents. Though we were unarmed, they seemed ill at ease.

  Something was amiss. I would have thought that the sight of Burnt Paw with a bandanna tied around his neck would have made at least the small children smile.

  A white-haired elder whose eyes were covered with a thin film was straining to make us out. A young woman spoke to him, describing us, I guessed.

  The old man brought his right hand to his lips with a tipping motion, which he repeated several times.

  “We’re invited to tea,” Jamie said.

  SEVENTEEN

  A path led onto a sunny rise overlooking the river, where the family’s canvas tents were flanked by drying racks draped with surprisingly few salmon. We soon found out why.

  Over tea and bannock, we learned from a girl our age who spoke English that two men had recently stopped and stolen much of their dried salmon.

  We asked immediately if the two had been paddling a canoe.

  “A green canoe,” the girl said.

  We told her that we’d had an identical canoe until they destroyed it. We also told her it was likely that the bearded one had started the fire in Dawson. She’d heard of the Great Fire.

  The conversation moved rapidly, with the girl translating to her family. She seemed to be the only English speaker in camp; her name was Marie. Marie told us that they were from the village of Rampart, nearby, and that she had gone to a mission school downriver.

  At every fresh revelation about the men who’d robbed them, there was a great deal of chattering among the family, a great deal of outrage. The old man and a silver-haired woman who might have been his wife listened to the hubbub and sipped their tea. Their lined and leathered faces remained relatively unmoved.

  Marie told us that a theft of salmon from a fish camp had never happened before, not anywhere along this piece of the river, not anywhere they knew of. This just wasn’t done, stealing food. Food was always shared whenever it was requested. But these men hadn’t even asked. They had simply taken.

  The white-haired old man spoke for the first time.

  Marie said, “He wants to know why they destroyed your canoe.”

  Jamie described the race, and explained that the two considered us to be their rivals.

  “Ah,” the old man said afterward.

  “We should get back on our raft,” I said to Marie as I started to rise from the log stool on which I’d been sitting. “We’re hoping to overtake them.”

  “Their canoe is faster,” Marie pointed out.

  “We think they’ll stop and sleep,” Jamie explained. “If they do, we will quietly exchange our raft for their canoe, which used to belong to me and my father.”

  When Marie translated this, there was much approval all around. The old people, especially the old man, were delighted at the thought.

  Then Marie whispered in Jamie’s ear.

  “What is it?” I asked Jamie.

  “They know we’re in a hurry, but they insist we share a proper meal with them.”

  We didn’t refuse. They feasted us with delicious moose steaks and smoked salmon heaped with berries. Such an outpouring of affection I’d never seen in my life. I couldn’t tell what it was, if this was the way they always were, or if they had wanted to show they didn’t hold us to blame for something other white men had done.

  As we were drinking tea again and sharing yet another bannock cake, the blind elder made a lengthy speech while looking at me. He seemed to be able to make out my general shape.

  “Grandfather says you need to be in a canoe if you’re going to race,” Marie said. “A canoe is so much faster. One of our canoes.”

  “We couldn’t bring it back,” I explained.

  “He’ll make another one. It only takes him a few weeks. It’s the right time of the year—the sap is in the birchbark and it’s easy to peel.”

  I shook my head. “It’s too great a gift.”

  “Grandfather says you can never catch up to them on that raft.”

  Jamie and I knew he was right.

  The old man suddenly made another lengthy speech, which seemed to light the imagination of every man, woman, and child in the family.

  Marie listened with care, then turned to us with a smile. “He says even though you are last in the race now, maybe you can catch up. That birchbark canoe is very light. He wants you to know that there is a portage trail from the Yukon over to the ocean. It will save you the last five hundred miles of the river.”

  “The shortcut!” Jamie and I exclaimed at once. “That’s it! That has to be it!” Everyone watched our reaction closely. Some of the little ch
ildren left off playing with Burnt Paw and clapped their hands together in excitement.

  “How long is the portage?” I pressed Marie.

  “Pretty long, pretty hard. He did it a long time ago, when he was young, but in the winter. It’s a winter trail. The people on the Yukon use their dog teams on it when the snow and ice makes it easy. They bring back seal meat, Eskimo clothing, things like that. In the summer, Grandfather says, maybe they don’t use it. Maybe it’s too wet. But he remembers that the trail, after a while, follows a little river down to the village on the coast—Unalakleet. He says maybe you can carry the canoe far enough to put it on that little river, then paddle down to the ocean. Maybe you can do this. He’s not sure, but he thinks so.”

  “Where would we find out about this trail?”

  “Once the Koyukuk River comes into the Yukon, start asking.”

  In a few minutes’ time we were repacking our gear into our two large canvas packsacks. We weeded out the iron skillet and a number of other heavy or bulky items and left them as presents.

  We set to packing the birchbark canoe. It was no more than eleven feet long and a thing of beauty.

  When we’d stowed the shotgun, Burnt Paw hopped inside. We took up the handsome birch paddles that came with the canoe and tried to say good-bye.

  The family had turned bashful, no words at all.

  “That fish trap,” I said, pointing to the wheel. “What do you call it?”

  “Fish wheel,” Marie said. “New invention. My father and my uncle saw one last year. They made this one themselves. Pretty good, eh?”

  Jamie smiled. “May all your racks be full of fish.”

  Marie translated what Jamie had said.

  The old woman approached and placed a palm on each of our heads, and spoke a few words in her tongue.

  Everyone started giggling. Marie whispered in Jamie’s ear.

  Jamie blushed.

  With a smile for me, Jamie said, “Well, time to go, Jason.”

  I took my place in the bow, Jamie took hers in the stern, and Marie gave us a little push.

  We paddled out until a fast piece of the current caught us, then we looked back and traded waves with them. Before long they were specks along the shore, and then the specks blinked out.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Jamie. “What did the old woman say? Was it a blessing?”

  “I don’t think I’ll tell you,” Jamie said, blushing again.

  “In that case, I’ll throw myself in the river.”

  “Anything but that!” She was laughing now. “You don’t want to know, Jason. Believe me, you’d be too embarrassed. I can’t repeat it.”

  I fell to pondering what on earth this was about, but I couldn’t imagine. “Please, tell me. I’m dying of curiosity.”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  I had to think for a minute. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “It was in response to me saying, ‘May your racks be full of fish.’ That was when the old woman put her hands on our heads. What she said was ‘And may the two of you have many children.’”

  “Holy smoke,” I said without looking back at her.

  “Holy smokes,” she replied.

  I closed my eyes and all I could see were those freckles on her nose. I found myself picturing that log cabin up the Koyukuk. I wanted to kiss her so badly I thought I’d explode.

  EIGHTEEN

  From the southeast, the large and silty Tanana River entered among sandbars and cottonwood islands. The ever-greater Yukon spread wide across a broad valley with dark spruce along the shores and hills of lighter green birch and aspen beyond. Mountain ranges in the distance hovered like clouds.

  After the Tozitna came in, the Yukon split around a large island. We took the south channel. A tip from a deckhand on an upriver steamboat had us craning our necks for a mammoth. “Saw a woolly mammoth an hour ago on the south shore!” he’d called.

  “Are you drunk or daft?” I’d shouted back merrily. I was punch-drunk myself from exhaustion. For two days now we hadn’t slept at all. There wasn’t room in the birchbark canoe, and we knew we’d lose any chance of catching up if we went to the shore to sleep.

  With a hearty laugh the deckhand had called back, “Neither. Peel your eyes for the bones of ice-age creatures down there in the mud cliffs—that stretch is called the Boneyard. Mark my words, you’ll see a mammoth!”

  Now our frail canoe was passing under the high mud cutbanks. Suddenly Jamie was pointing to something glinting in the light—a very large and curving piece of…ivory.

  “Now I’ve seen everything,” Jamie marveled.

  “We have truly seen the elephant,” I said, playing on the old expression for taking part in a gold rush.

  Through a veil of weariness, we saw the Nowitna join the Yukon, then the Melowitna.

  Some splintered lumber floating down the river caught Jamie’s eye. It had large block lettering on it that looked familiar. We paddled over to see and found the letters OON from the front of the Moonlight Hotel. More likely than not, we figured, the hotel had gone down in the floodwaters.

  We kept paddling. More than three hundred miles after we’d met the Swensons in the tail end of the Flats, we laid eyes on a river coming in from the north that was running clear as glass. This was the river of their dreams, the Koyukuk. Something told me this was the river of my dreams, too.

  “Wouldn’t you love to see that country four or five hundred miles up this Koyukuk?” I said to Jamie.

  “I would,” she replied. “Maybe one day we will.”

  Great day in the morning, but that was a mouthful.

  The Koyukuk split around a large island in its mouth before its crystal waters joined the Yukon and ran side by side against the muddy torrent as far as we could see downstream. I fancied that my life and Jamie’s were two rivers destined to join into one.

  Or would they run separately into the sea?

  At a fish camp on the island, we asked about the Swensons. The Swedes were easy to describe: man, woman, boy, girl, all with hair of gold, on a scow and hoping to catch a steamer up the Koyukuk.

  “By jingo, yes,” we were told by a fisherman repairing his net, and he began to elaborate. The woman behind him listened as she removed strips of salmon from the drying racks.

  The fisherman had seen the Swensons the morning before in the village not far upstream. “Sorry you miss them—boat leave yesterday,” he said at the end, pointing north.

  “They got on the boat that went up the Koyukuk?” Jamie asked hopefully. “That would make us happy.”

  “By jingo, yes!”

  “We’re going this way,” I said with a wave down the Yukon. “We’re close to Nulato now, eh?”

  He pointed down the Yukon. “Sure, twenty miles, no more. Right side.”

  “Do you know of a portage trail to the ocean?” I asked urgently.

  “Twenty mile past Nulato, at little place called Kaltag. Winter trail.”

  “But it can be done in the summer?”

  His face clouded. “Winter trail,” he repeated. “Summer, pretty bad. ’Nother canoe ask me about dat portage yesterday. I say same thing.”

  “Was it a green canoe?” Jamie asked.

  “Yeah.”

  They were only a day ahead, not two. We thanked the fisherman and paddled on with renewed hope and renewed trepidation.

  “I’d bet Donner had only the flimsiest notion of the portage before,” I said, thinking aloud. “By now he knows more, but how much? From the scale on our map, the distance of the portage from Kaltag to Unalakleet would be about eighty miles. Our map, and presumably theirs, doesn’t show any rivers. When the old man gave us the birchbark canoe, he told us to paddle it down a small river. They might not know about that. If they think they would have to carry the Peterborough eighty miles overland, they won’t even consider it. Maybe they’ll stick with the Yukon.”

  Jamie looked doubtful. “They’ve let themselves get behind the pack. Now they
have to gamble on the portage.”

  I said, “I have the unhappy feeling that you’re right.”

  We clung to the right shore. It was cloudy and the wind had the ocean’s salty bite to it. Our map showed we were due east of Norton Sound. The seagulls wheeling overhead might have been at the sea only hours before if they’d flown the route of the proverbial crow. Yet the Yukon was nowhere near entering the sea. From this point the great river was going to flow nearly three hundred miles south before it turned west and finally north over a course of several hundred more miles.

  Whatever Donner and Brackett were going to do, our only chance lay in the portage.

  Twenty miles down from the mouth of the Koyukuk, the cabins of Nulato came into view atop the tall riverbank. A little closer and we could make out the long green crescent of the Peterborough at the village dock. There on the bow was the red arrow Jamie had painted.

  No sign of our enemies. “Here’s the chance for us to return them the favor they did us,” I said, my voice half strangled. “We can sink it.”

  “Not Father’s canoe,” Jamie said instantly. “We’ll hide it somewhere.”

  “Agreed.”

  We were just about to come abreast of the dock. A young man came down the slanting path from the village with a fishing net in his hands and placed it in the canoe, which was otherwise empty except for a paddle.

  We asked about the canoe. “They traded me for an Indian canoe like dat one you have,” the young man told us with a wide smile. “Now, look, I have a Peterborough! Pretty good, eh?”

  “I’m glad you have it,” Jamie told him. “It used to belong to me and my father.”

  The young man’s eyes furrowed. “Those two didn’t steal it, eh?”

  “My father sold it to someone else, who must have sold it to them.”

  “Good, that’s good. You in dat race?”

  “We hope we’re still in it, but we’re in last place.”

  “Hunnerts of boats come by here yesterday, last night. Those two dat traded for my canoe said they needed a lighter boat to go across to Unalakleet.”

  “That means they must know about a river down to the sea.”