BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  "If you was really thinking ahead, you had ginger and cocoa and pepper. If you didn't say you was packing dried fruit, he'd tell you to cut spruce bark for tea or you'd get scurvy. The rest of your outfit was mostly tools and matches and candles and soap.

  "So when Nokes and Gig and the Swedes showed up with just tents and blankets and a stove and a few weeks' grub, and said they was heading for Circle City, the customs agent looked at 'em funny. He said that the tariff on what they was bringing would be less than twenty dollars, and they could feel good about how much money they saved while they was starving to death on the banks of the Yukon that spring.

  "Nokes chuckled at that and said he'd already spent a full year Inside, and that if this was all they had, the officer was surely right – they'd turn to skin and bones. Before they got halfway to Circle even the mosquitoes wouldn't bother with 'em. But he told the officer they already cached a six-month outfit a few weeks ahead at Fort Selkirk. That's where the Lewes and Pelly rivers come together and lose their names, then roll another thousand miles as the Yukon.

  "And Nokes said one of his partners at Circle had ordered a big outfit for the winter from Jack McQuesten's company. McQuesten been Inside for over a decade and Circle City was his town. His Alaska Commercial Company ran steamboats up the Yukon to the mining camps from the Bering Sea when the river was clear of ice.

  "The customs feller nodded like Nokes knowed what he was talking about, but he must of wondered how four men could travel that light over the pass and all the way down the lakes. He told 'em the Lewes River would start running out the foot of Lake Laberge two weeks before the ice come off the lake in late May. With the sun getting higher, the ice on the lake would melt during the day and freeze smooth as glass overnight. You could count on Laberge being windy almost all year round, but them two weeks was the best time to sail over the ice. I'm sure Nokes knowed that already.

  "They paid their twenty dollars and left. Gig told me later the money they gave the Stick Indians to dogsled their outfit up to the Lewes River on the overland route was what they saved by cheating Canadian customs and not paying the Chilkoot packers to move their outfit to Lindeman Lake from the pass. So Nokes found a way to move everything down the lower lakes in one trip, and they done it without getting drownded or wrecked, which happened every year to miners who was building boats. Even if Gig didn't like Nokes much, he had to admit the man seemed to know his way around Inside."

  Chapter 16

  Heroin, I've read, is derived from opium, which is said to relax the body while unharnessing the mind. Zimmerman has been telling his story for over an hour now, and it seems effortless for him to relive Gig Garrett's journey into the Yukon basin during the winter before the fabulous gold strikes on the Klondike. Maybe the heroin is making that possible.

  We've both washed his story down with the moonshine that was left in this flood-tossed scow, and the whiskey has filled my bladder while it warmed my chest. I stand up, stretch my spine, and take Zimmerman's knife from the table. Gesturing with the pistol, I tell him to rest his voice. Then I backpedal out the door and up the stairs to the aft deck, where I lean over the transom and urinate into the cool spring night.

  When I return to the cabin he's still sitting on his side of the table with his back against the wall, and something tightens in my chest when I see a layer of black coal on top of the orange embers in the stove. It's already warm in the cabin and now it will get warmer. The walls seem to draw closer. Zimmerman pushes my cup toward me and I notice it's been refilled. He grins enigmatically, then leans back against the wall and resumes his story.

  "They left customs and sailed their sleds twenty miles down the ice on Marsh Lake. The next day was ten miles of pulling along the frozen bank of the Lewes to where the overland trail come in from Caribou Crossing. By the time Gig and his men got there, all the bags and gear in their outfit was stacked beside the trail junction, with no sign of the Siwashes or their dogs. The Indians put five dogs on a team, and a good team can pull fifteen hundred pounds faster than a man can walk. But them Sticks must of used two teams to drag the outfit forty miles in a day. Probably 'cause April was wearing out, so streams was starting to run and the snow was getting thinner on the trails.

  "Gig was pretty sure the Sticks made off with some of their grub, but Nokes told him not to worry, it was all there. That was something about traveling on the Inside – everyone, even the Indians, cached their goods along the trail, and no one touched what didn't belong to him. People start stealing and men will starve to death, so only greenhorns got tempted sometimes by what wasn't theirs. Whether you left a sack of beans or a poke of gold dust along the trail, you could come back a month later and count on finding it. Same thing with the Siwashes. Nokes told Gig they knowed they wasn't getting paid if they took anything.

  "Gig checked the bags anyway and found Nokes was right. The pots and pans and hardware was all there, same for the extra tent and blankets and grub. The whiskey and tobacco was hidden in the bags of rice and oats. And tied to a drawstring he found something that wasn't there before. A necklace with a leather cord and two charms hanging side by side – a wolf tooth and a rabbit ear. Must of belonged to one of the Stick packers. The tooth was a fang, with a hole drilled through it for the cord. The ear was folded long-wise and sewed together so it showed white fur on both sides. Probably from a snowshoe hare.

  "Gig put the necklace in his pocket until after the Stick chief come by a couple hours later to collect the rest of the packing money. Then he took it out and put it on, so the tooth and ear was hanging over his parka at the breastbone. Told Nokes and the Swedes it would bring him luck finding gold in Indian country. Lindfors and Ruud laughed, but Nokes said there's two kinds of luck in the Yukon, and sometimes they travel together. The first kind makes you rich and the second kind kills you.

  ***

  "You're twenty miles down the Lewes River from the foot of Marsh Lake when the trail from Caribou Crossing come in, but you got thirty miles more to Lake Laberge, which is the last of the big lakes before the Yukon finds its legs. And first you got to get past the rapids, which is only a few miles downstream.

  "The river gets faster and starts curving back and forth and the ice drops off the edges, so you got to pull your sleds further up the bank. What gets your attention is the roaring sound ahead. Then you round a bend and see granite walls a hundred feet high and a few boat lengths apart, with a river five hundred feet wide and ten feet deep getting sucked between 'em.

  "Nokes seen the water in Miles Canyon up close and decided he got no cause to run it. But there was a half-dozen boats pulled ashore in the eddy above the entrance to the gorge, belonging to miners who come over the pass a few weeks before Gig and his group. All them boats was built at one of the upper lakes, out of whipsawed spruce that was bent into shape with nails and patched with twenty pounds of oakum. A couple was made for rowing, tapered at both ends, with v-shaped hulls to cut through water, and maybe thirty feet long. The rest was flat-bottomed scows with pointed bows and broad sterns. With the right wind and enough canvas, you could sail 'em over the ice from the head of Tagish to the foot of Marsh Lake, then wait for the Lewes River to open up, which it done by the end of April.

  "They dragged their outfit down from Caribou Crossing to the canyon over the next two days, starting early when the snow on the river trail was crusted hard. There was still a foot on the ground, but it softens up by mid-day and the streams that feed the river start melting. Then it all freezes up again overnight. But every night is a few minutes shorter than the one before, and every day the sun gets stronger.

  "If you don't want to run the rapids you can portage a mile to the foot of the canyon, but it's a rough tramp up over the bluff, back down and across a flat patch of deadfall. You got to carry everything on your back, and it takes three days to portage a stretch of water that a good boat will clear in three minutes. So that's why there's always men loading their outfits on boats and running the gorge, even though
a dozen of 'em drownded in Miles Canyon or the Whitehorse rapids every year.

  "Gig told me when they strapped on the first hundred pounds and started climbing the portage trail, he wanted to strangle Nokes for refusing to run the canyon. After they got high enough to see the river, Gig changed his mind.

  "That water is a chain of breaking waves and crawling white fists taller than a man, and you can see the spray fly from a hundred feet above. They watched a boat shoot down the center and almost leave the water at the wave crests, then disappear in the troughs. The men piloting it was getting paid to steer someone else's boat, and they knowed what they was doing. They used long oars off the bow and stern to keep away from the walls, where you got reflecting waves that will flip a boat in a second and whirlpools that will spin it in circles for hours. The boat must of took on a foot of water, but even though they was soaked, them fellers steered into an eddy below the rapids and pulled up onto the bank before Gig and the others had a chance to catch their breath.

  "Two days later they was portaging the last of their outfit and Gig was walking by hisself along the bluff overlooking the canyon. On the opposite bluff there was another portage trail, and people across the canyon started yelling. Gig couldn't see 'em, but when he looked down there was a capsized boat riding the rapids and passing below him. Two men was bobbing near it and trying to grab on, but they kept getting washed off by waves breaking over the hull. Halfway down the canyon one of the men pulled hisself up and hung on, but Gig lost sight of the other man. That water is cold as ice, and in a couple minutes it will squeeze the air out of you and suck you down. Less if you got heavy clothes and gum boots on.

  "When the boat cleared the canyon, one feller was still clawed onto the hull. A couple of men rowed out to get him and tow his boat ashore. Gig kept going along the trail and dropped his load at the cache, then walked out to the river. There was a few boats pulled up on the bank, but the flipped hull was still floating in the shallows, pinned between a boulder and the shore. The rescued man was sitting on a flat rock in the sun, wrapped in a blanket with his eyes closed and his knees tucked up to his chest.

  "Gig went over to him and he opened his eyes. He told Gig his boat had swamped after the first big drop at the head of the canyon, then turned sideways and flipped coming off the second wave. Like everyone that come Inside over the snow, he had white circles around his eyes and a face the color of mud, but now it all looked pale and gray, and you could see every vein on his neck and forehead. His hair was black and wet and hanging down toward his eyes, which was drained and empty as the sky.

  "That man's name was Penson Wylie, and he was still shivering when Gig got there. Said he seen his partner, a man named Timmons, go under a wave and never come up. A couple of the men who helped rescue Wylie went looking for him, but no one was hanging onto a rock or stuck in an eddy upstream. And no one seen him float down past the rapids. The men searched a half mile downriver and found nothing but a few waterlogged bags from the capsized boat. Wylie lost most of the outfit he and Timmons brung in, but some of it come through the rapids on a scow built by fellers they was traveling with. He told Gig that if his partner was drownded, he could camp with the men on the scow, and what was left of his outfit would be enough. He wouldn't starve.

  "But Wylie was scared for his life anyway, and this was the strange part. He thought an Indian girl was trying to drown him. Said she'd flipped their boat and killed Timmons by mistake, but she was sure to come back for him, maybe just a few miles ahead at Whitehorse. He seen her watching him on his second day out of Dyea, when his group was fording the shallow river on the trail up to Sheep Camp. Then again when he went out to gather deadwood from the trees at Tagish Lake.

  "Wylie said he seen the Indian girl when he was dreaming, and she was glowing orange and green, with sparks falling from her hair and red feathers hanging from her wrists. In the dream he's pulling his sled across the snow-covered Yukon River, coming back to Fortymile from a stampede to an east-side creek. It's mid-afternoon in winter, so the sun is already below the hills and the light is fading, and when he's halfway across the river he finds a channel of open water in the ice. He drops the sled lead and walks careful out to the edge. The channel ain't too wide, but it's black water running lengthwise as far as he can see.

  "When he turns back toward his sled, it's gone, and the girl is standing where it was, twenty paces off. She don't say nothing but he hears her whisper that it's time for him to die. In between them is another channel of open water, one that wasn't there a minute ago. Wylie is stuck on a finger of ice ten feet wide and as long as the river. Then the water starts lapping over the edges and the finger starts sinking. In a few seconds he's up to his knees. When the river closes over his face, Wylie can see the girl looking down at him through the surface."

  I squint skeptically at Zimmerman, wondering how this anecdote could matter. "Wylie was lucky not to have drowned in the rapids himself," I reply, "and he must have been dangerously chilled. He may have been in shock when he talked to Garrett, and had to be hallucinating when he said the Indian girl flipped his boat. Whatever he told Gig Garrett was as meaningless as the rantings of a madman. Why would Garrett even remember what Wylie said, much less pass it along to you?"

  "I didn't hear about Wylie's dream from Gig. I heared about it from Wylie hisself, when I got to know him two years later in Dawson. Maybe he had nervous eyes, but he was sane as you or me.

  "And I met Wylie through Gig. They got to be friends further down the river. After Gig left Dawson to get away from the Canadian law, he and Wylie worked a prospect together across the border in Alaska. They was in Rampart, on Little Minook Creek, when a miner jumped Gig's claim and got stabbed to death. Wylie disappeared and Gig had to leave the Yukon for good."

  Chapter 17

  Their outfit was shrinking, but to move everything down from the canyon they still had to cover the twenty miles to Lake Laberge twice. Before they even started packing their sleds the next morning, Gig had seen the miners in the scow push off and float downriver with Wylie and what was left of his gear on board. Once again, Zimmerman tells me, Gig felt a blackness welling up inside him, directed vaguely at Nokes. Twenty miles that they could have drifted in an afternoon would take them half a week shuttling back and forth with sleds.

  Gig's resentment dissipated, Zimmerman says, when he saw the waters downstream. From the foot of Miles Canyon, the Lewes River descended steadily for five miles before reaching the wildest water on the Yukon trail. The Whitehorse Rapids fell two hundred feet in just over half a mile, with currents almost as fast as those in the canyon and with waves and backwashes eight feet high. And since the rapids poured over, around, and under enormous rocks, the Whitehorse was even more chaotic and deadly, punctuated at the end by a nine-foot falls.

  A few of the best-designed boats and most skilled handlers ran the Whitehorse without mishap, but only as light boats, after most of their cargo had been portaged. And the majority of boats that came through Miles Canyon unscathed were lined down the sides of the Whitehorse with heavy ropes, their cargoes portaged as well. Even these boats were carried or windlassed up and over the rocks to avoid the final drop.

  "So by the time they got past the Whitehorse," Zimmerman says, "Gig reckoned that if you wasn't dragging a sled around the rapids, you was probably hauling your boat over the rocks. And that was after you spent two weeks whipsawing and hammering green lumber on one of the upper lakes. Maybe Nokes got it right when he decided not to build a boat, though Gig was ready to burn his sled by the time they got to Lake Laberge."

  The last and lowest in the chain of lakes, Zimmerman tells me, is fifteen hundred feet below Chilkoot Pass and two thousand above sea level. It's also the prettiest, flanked by trees rising into the hills, which rise in turn into white-peaked mountains. He traversed it in the summer, when gulls bobbed in wind-sheltered bays with clear water lapping over rough red stones. When Gig Garrett got there it was still frozen, but its diminishing ice was mel
ted smooth and clear of snow.

  "Nokes told 'em they was done with dragging sleds," Zimmerman says. "Laberge got wind and waves enough to swamp a boat, but when it's iced over you can fly." The lake is thirty miles long, and they sailed their cross-tied sleds its full length in a day, managing their diminished outfit in a single trip.

  "They was coming into May by then, with the sun circling the peaks sixteen or eighteen hours a day, and if you look up into the hills you got cascades everywhere, even with the ice still solid on the lake. But you can't look around for long – things change every minute in that country. Gig and his men was lucky to skate Laberge before the ice broke up."

  By the first week of May, the foot of Laberge marks the last ice on the Yukon Trail. From there the Lewes River rolls thirteen hundred miles to the Bering Sea, combining with the Pelly to form the Yukon and absorbing a dozen other impressive rivers and countless streams along the way. Since moss-covered ground was emerging around the lake, Gig wondered how useful their sleds would prove on the trail that followed the Lewes.

  "Nokes kept saying they wasn't building a boat, and they didn't have a whipsaw or oakum or pitch or much in the way of nails. But they did have a hand-saw and an axe, and after they made camp where the Lewes run out of Laberge, Nokes sent the Swedes out to find a few decent spruce. Said they was going to float their outfit downriver on a raft.

  "The next morning Lindfors and Ruud went out to chop trees. Nokes and Gig dug out the whiskey and tobacco that was hidden inside the grub bags. They packed it on a sled along with the shotgun and cartridges, then tied the four sleds into pairs and dragged them around the lake to a village of Tagish Indians.