“Missy? Missy!” Toyatte’s voice brought her back to the present.
“What?” she whispered, irritated that he interrupted her delightful vision.
The old Hoona grinned at her, exposing his black-and-white checkerboard of teeth. “He come. The captain. He come.” He gestured from his eyes to the fjord. “I see. He come!” He left her then without another word, presumably to get the rope and come back to her while Karl untangled himself from the kayak’s oilskin folds. It would be so easy to just let go, surrender to the overwhelming drowsiness that urged her eyelids down, her breathing to slow.…
Karl had shouted for his spiked ice-deck boots while briefly aboard ship, and now was thankful for them as he easily ran across the ice to the crevasse that held Elsa. Back in the fjord, two of his crew were rowing toward them, with blankets and coffee, in a lifeboat that would hold Elsa, if necessary.
One look down at her, and he knew it would be necessary. “Elsa! Elsa!” He refused to believe that she had died. Surely she had simply passed out! The trauma of her fall, the frigid temperatures in which she was encased… Lord, protect her as if you were holding her in your hands instead of this ice holding her. Please, God. If he hadn’t been so busy, he would have been on his knees pleading with God.
Quickly he fashioned a sliding knot, creating a large loop. Looking down, there was perhaps enough room to drop the loop about her head and under one arm. Yet he did not want to risk hanging her. “Elsa! Elsa!” he continued to repeat. She did not stir.
He dropped the loop once, then twice, trying to get it past a knob of ice to her armpit, but to no avail.
Karl looked over at Toyatte, crouched on the other side. “I need to go down to her,” he said slowly, hoping the man understood. He quickly tied another slipknot in a second rope and tightened it under his own armpits. With neither the velocity of a fall nor a slim form to aid him, he prayed he could get low enough to reach Elsa. He tossed the length of the rope to Toyatte and showed the Hoona how to hold him, a much larger and heavier man, with little but the strength of his squat body.
He had no time to worry over the guide. Then he lowered himself so that his straight arms held him above and to one side of Elsa, as if guiding him through a small hatch to belowdecks. He dug an ice boot into one side, grunting in pain at the odd angle of his ankle, then did the same with the other. In like fashion he descended as low as he could go, eventually turning upside down to dangle low enough to reach Elsa.
Karl breathed a sigh of relief when he could touch her. The pulse at her neck told him she lived, and with a little more maneuvering he was able to slip the rope around both her arms. He tightened it, then frowned. Unconscious, her arms might simply move up with the motion of the rope and she might slip right through the knot.
His men reached the crevasse with a shout, and Karl sighed again, relieved. Three men were certain to be able to get them out again. And two now spoke English. “I need to stay down here! I’m afraid she’ll slip through the loop as you lift her.”
“She’s unconscious?”
“Yes.”
Karl’s temples were throbbing from the pressure of being upside down, but he ignored the pain. He touched Elsa’s silky hair, rubbed her scalp. “Elsa, Elsa. Come back to me. Come back.”
“Ready up here, Captain,” one yelled.
“Okay. Leave me here. Pull gently on her rope on the count of three.” He looked anxiously about, wondering if there were obstacles that might impede her progress, but there was little he could do in his position even if there were. He swallowed hard. “One…two… three!”
She lurched upward, and as he had feared, her arms squeezed together over her head. Karl let out a cry. “You all right?” yelled a man.
“Yes. Yes! You got her legs loose. But she’s in danger of slipping through the rope. Send down another!”
In two seconds, another rope came down, narrowly missing Karl’s head. Quickly, he fashioned a seat out of it. “Try to get her up another few feet!” He grabbed hold of her coat at the collar, conscious of the danger she was in. If she slipped through the rope with the next heave, she could go deeper into the crevasse. But he had to have her higher in order to reach her feet and slip the rope about her. “On my count! Very slowly, please! Very slowly! One…two…three!”
She rose another two feet, and the rope slid to her chin. She might choke! he thought desperately. As fast as he could, he pulled her calves toward him, slipping the double loop around each foot and then sliding them to her thighs. Thank the Lord for the sealskin pants! They protected her from the cold and the cruel bite of the rope. “Good! Good!” he called. “Pull up on the second rope. Use it as your mainstay, and the first as only a means to steady her. She needs to go up fast. The first rope is too close to her throat!”
Obediently, they counted as one above, and Elsa sailed to the top. When he lost sight of her over the edge, Karl screamed, “Now get me out of here!”
He was pulled to the top then too and unceremoniously heaved to safety. The glacier groaned, and Karl rubbed his face. “Let’s get her off this glacier and back to the ship.” He rose, gingerly testing his sore ankles. The two men carried Elsa, one holding her under the armpits, the other her legs, carefully following Toyatte down the side.
When one fell and the three slid ten feet to the bottom, Karl let out a cry of frustration and picked Elsa up himself. “Let me do it! I’ve got her. Get the boat! Hurry! She’s barely breathing! I said hurry!”
Elsa awakened to the sensation of sweat rolling down her spine.
“Welcome back,” Karl said, kneeling beside her chair. Her feet were on a footstool, raised to a wood stove. She was covered in blankets, and by the fur visible around her face, still in her sealskin.
“Thank you, Karl. For getting me out. I thought… I thought I was going to die there.” Visions of her children, laughing aboard the Majestic, shot through her mind. She reached out a hand and caressed his face. “I thought we weren’t going to be together anymore.”
He looked down and then back to her, his gray eyes shimmering. “I thought the same.”
“Are you trying to kill me now?”
“What?”
She cast off a wool blanket, then peeled off another. Elsa laughed as she counted the coverings. “Ten blankets! And a bearskin!”
Karl’s laugh joined hers, a pleasant cello sound in accompaniment to her alto. “I wanted you warm, really warm, after almost losing you. By the time we got you to the lifeboat, your lips and fingernails were blue.”
“And now I’m perspiring so that I’m probably as red as a beet.” She tossed several more blankets off, then winced at a pain in her ankle. “It’s sprained, don’t you think?”
“If I were to hazard a guess.”
Elsa raised her eyebrows and cocked a smile at him. “It could’ve been worse. We just proclaimed our love, and suddenly it looked as if we were going to have to separate forever.”
His eyes did not match hers in merriment. “It did look that way.” He took her hand in his. “I was frightened, Elsa, terrified that I was about to lose you. When you had just been found.”
She nodded, feeling the same intensity of emotions. “I did not want to die. To leave you. My children.”
Karl reached out and gently traced the contour of her forehead, brow, and cheeks. “I don’t ever want to lose you again. Elsa, my love, would you do me the honor of marrying me?”
She wet her lips and studied his eyes. “I would love to spend the rest of my days by your side, Karl.” An impish thought ran through her head. “As captain of your ship.”
He laughed and looked to the floor. “We’ll discuss who captains our ships.” Then his expression turned serious. “But you’ll marry me? Soon?”
“I will, Karl. Gladly. Just as soon as we can.”
twenty-three
Soren tapped his boots against the boardwalk, shaking the street’s sticky mud from them, then leaned against the storefront wall to read the sto
ry in the Juneau First Edition. GOLD STRIKE! the headline screamed. TWENTY-FIVE MILES SOUTHEAST OF FORTY MILE. He had been right in his first reading. He shook his head as he stared at the subheading again. Twenty-five miles southeast of Forty Mile would put that strike so near his own mine that he could practically spit and hit it. He went on reading until a name caught his attention. Kadachan.
Surely there were several Indians named “Kadachan” in the Alaska Territory. His heart started pumping. He hadn’t seen the man who traveled with James Walker in some time. Months. Kadachan. Was it coincidence that a man of that name was so near his old stake? He crumpled the paper to his lap and looked up and down the street. He had a sick feeling in his gut, a sense of foreboding. There were several sizable claims within striking distance of his own. It could be one of many that struck it lucky.
But what if it was his? What if a claim-jumper had taken over his spot, his tools, and hit it right? What if they were hauling out bucketloads of gold—his bucketloads—until the vein was emptied? His pulse raced. He raised the paper again, trying to read the rest of the story, but his hands were shaking. It was his. Something deep down told him it was so. Someone had jumped his claim.
He dropped the paper to the ground and hurried down to the roadhouse. He did not plan to report to work that day. Not that day or for some time.
Kaatje hurried toward the door. The breakfast crowd had been fed, and they were in the midst of setup for lunch. Since ice break, the town had boomed with trappers and miners ready to enter the riches of Alaska’s Interior.
She smiled when she saw the man at the door. It was Soren. Things had cooled between them since her time away in Ketchikan, but they were still friendly. All in all, it was all right with her. The separation gave her time to think, to be right about her decisions. It was as if she was naming the direction of the wind for once with Soren, and the sensation calmed her. She did not know what was next for them, but she would be deciding it when she did.
“Soren, I—”
His hat was in his hands, and his troubled expression stopped her midsentence.
She hadn’t seen that look since the day he left her on the Dakota plains. Her heart pounded dully in her chest. Perhaps he would make the decision for them after all. “You’re going then?” she whispered.
“Kaatje, look. I won’t be gone long. I need to leave for a while on business.”
“For the store?”
The question caught him off guard. “No, on personal business.”
“For the mine.”
She, too, had seen the headlines that morning.
“Yes.” His eyes did not leave hers. He reached out a hand to touch her shoulder, but she shied away. “It’s only to go and make sure it isn’t my claim they want to stjele from me.” He moved forward and took her hands. “I must stop them. It’s our claim, Kaatje. Our future.”
She laughed under her breath and gave him an incredulous look. “You must be joking.”
He moved away and set the hat on his head. When he turned back to her, his eyes told her he was decided. “This is for us.”
“No, Soren. It’s never for us. It never has been. It is for you, Soren Janssen. Every move you make is for you. You don’t have a giving bone in your body!”
“What are you talking about? I left Bergen for you! I went to the Dakotas for you to start the farm you always wanted!”
“What? Is that what you think? It was for me?” She spat out the last word. “I don’t believe you. That’s a convenient little excuse you’ve made in your mind, Soren, but it is not the truth. You left me on that farm with a baby! With a baby! And I don’t believe you ever intended to come back.” She hoped her eyes sparked all the fire she felt.
“You cannot believe I never intended to return to you. To Christina. I did. I did!” He grabbed her arm, keeping her from running back to the kitchen. “All I wanted was to make something of myself. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
Tears came then. “Don’t you see, Soren? Will you never see? You were always something in my eyes. You were my husband, my man. You were my daughter’s father. You were making a living, however lean the times. But we were together. That was all that was important to me. Together we had made something of ourselves. But not for Soren Janssen. No, for Soren Janssen, it was never enough! It was never enough!”
She turned away to leave him, determined not to watch as he walked out of her life again, but then she paused and spoke over her shoulder without looking.
“What hurts the most,” she said through her tears, “was that we were not enough, Soren. Your wife, your children. And we still are not.”
She walked away, not looking at him, even as he yelled, “I’ll be back, Kaatje. For you and our girls.”
“No!” she cried, turning. “Don’t bother! Don’t bother to come back. If you go away, stay away!”
“It’ll be all right, Kaatje,” he said, ignoring her words. “Because I’ll be rich. It’ll be all right! I’ll be back!” She let the kitchen door swing shut behind her. Christina and Jessica stared up at her, tears in their eyes, obviously having heard most of the argument. They moved as one—as if to go to Soren—but Kaatje held them back. She pulled them into her arms, embracing them, wanting them to feel her determination to never let them go, even if their father did again and again.
“It’ll be all right,” she oddly found herself saying, crying with them, stroking one head of hair and then another. “It’ll be all right.”
James watched as Soren left the roadhouse and jogged over to the mercantile. In half an hour he was out again, with a satchel of supplies in his hands and new boots on his feet.
It had begun. And as suspected, Soren was running to the gold mine like a grizzly to a fat salmon. James kicked the boardwalk on the opposite side of the street and waited for Soren to see him, but the man did not see anything other than his own visions of sugarplums. He hurried down the street toward the ferry gate, apparently intent upon buying his way to Skagway and then hiking over the pass.
James smiled for the first time since his days with Kaatje in Ketchikan. The dog was leaving town! But his smile quickly fell. Soren’s departure didn’t clear his way to Kaatje. On the contrary. To remain faithful to his decision in Ketchikan, he would need to steer clear. The thought made him ache inside. She would need support now, but he couldn’t be there for her. The thought of it threatened to pull him into parts like a man drawn and quartered.
He clenched and unclenched his hands as he paced along an alleyway, wanting to be away from prying eyes. He needed a task, a vision, something to keep him busy and away from Kaatje while Soren was away. While Soren was away! Suddenly an idea came to him—James would follow the man back into the Interior. Every panting breath, every aching step, every decision of Soren Janssen would be echoed by James Walker until he knew the truth.
With luck, he would be the one to show Soren the new deed to the mine and the name on the paper.
By the third day on the trail, Soren knew that he was being followed. On the second, he had decided that it was a coincidence, that another party had simply departed Skagway the day after him, as he had the day after the party before him. But on the third day he knew. He could sense it, as he could sense a claim-jumper working his mine. And he could guess who it was. James Walker.
The man was like a flea on an alley dog’s hind leg. Soren had not been able to take a decent drink while in Juneau, to say nothing of satisfying his pent-up frustration from being without a woman for too long. He could see why Walker would shadow him while in Juneau, waiting for him to trip up, so he could lay claim to Kaatje. But why here along the trail? What would Soren’s journey mean to the lout? Walker didn’t care anything for him. Unless he was in cahoots with the Indian who’d stolen his claim. If anything, Soren’s departure could have been his chance to move in on Kaatje, to tell her what a fool Soren was for leaving her. Why not stay with Kaatje and make the most of the time he had with her before her husband re
turned instead of trailing him? And Soren was not meandering along the trail. He was moving along, like a man possessed. But James was matching his speed.
And he kept matching his speed, day after day. Somewhere between Lake Laberge and the river, Soren lost him. Perhaps Walker had turned back or taken ill. He cared not. All he cared about was getting to his mine and returning with his fortune. With some gold nuggets in his pocket, he could win Kaatje back with pride. What did James Walker have, after all? Years in the Interior? Superior hunting skills? Ha! As if that could satisfy a woman. No. A woman needed fine things to wear and a husband of whom she could be proud. He was going to make Kaatje proud, build the finest mansion Juneau had ever seen, and buy his daughters anything they wanted. He stayed up nights, thinking about all that he could finally accomplish with the wealth he would bring home in shimmering gold.
James passed Soren one night along the end of Lake Laberge and, by hiking into the night, assumed he was gaining at least a half-mile on him each day. If he calculated it right, that would put him a day ahead of the man in reaching the mine, more than enough time to find out what had transpired in the mine and prepare for the confrontation that was as sure as the river’s flow.
He passed familiar sites—where he and Kadachan had saved Kaatje from the grizzly, where he had pretended to ignore her as she gathered early berries but could do anything but, and finally, the mine, where he had first come to care about Kaatje’s tender heart. Even the glimpse of it as he rounded the bend of the river made his heart palpitate and his lips clench together. Hadn’t this place been the place of incredible pain to Kaatje? Where she saw the evidence of an ill-begotten love, a family abandoned? As if it were the same day, he could remember following her deep into the woods, her slim form racing through the trees and columns of light cascading from the canopy above. He could hear her guttural cry of anguish.
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