‘Now Ivan understood the nature of their madness. These lost, benighted souls were the remnant of an army of stampeders who had sought to reach the Klondike not by taking the coastal routes, but by passing through the Arctic itself!
‘Oh it was a long way, to be sure, the merchants of Edmonton had soothed them, waving the fanciful maps they gave free with their overpriced outfits. It was a long way, to be sure, they said, but it was the quickest and most convenient – see: apart from a few trifling portages at the southern end of the route, and over the continental divide in the north, the path to the Yukon is downriver all the way – you need only sit in your boat and watch the banks of the Mackenzie drift past you: at night you feast on fresh moose and bear shot without even rising from your thwart. What better and more commodious route was there for men who must – who absolutely must – be sure of reaching the Klondike before winter?
‘Ah yes. The winter. Those who took this long northern road were not, for the most part, men who thought themselves soft. They were men – and a few women, too, for there is good business to be done in a gold rush by certain kinds of lady, and not all of them whores – who came for the most part from Canada or the northern states of America. They knew the bite of winter in the pine woods and the cut of a January wind. But they did not know the winters of the Northland, and nor had they ever viewed the valley of the Rat, a friendly squiggle on their deceitful maps, a mere short-cut between the kindly Mackenzie and the easy Yukon stream. And it was their fate to meet both the Rat and the Winter at the same time and place – a place which they cursed as “Destruction City”.’
‘Rough spot,’ remarked the man on the cot. ‘What was so bad about it?’
It had been the writer’s intention to gloss over the specifics. Things often seem worse if you leave them to the imagination. Let your audience or reader do the work for you. ‘Nothing, really . . . It’s just that winter comes early up there – it’s beyond the Arctic Circle. And the Rat River is no picnic, I’m told, although I didn’t go that way myself. There are a lot of shallows and cataracts, apparently. And most of these poor fools had bought heavy boats built for rivers and lakes, not canoes or scows fit for portaging or towing. They had the devil’s own job trying to hand-line them upstream through the shoals and rapids – the banks were often so broken or overgrown that they had to drag them from the creek bed itself, up to their waists in ice-water from the mountains. By the time they reached the rapids of the middle Rat, where most of the boats were damaged, it was too late to go any further or to turn back that year. They had to settle in for winter.’
‘One would think they might have foreseen all that,’ said the man on the bed. ‘One would also think that reasonable people might have guessed that all the claims on the Klondike would have been staked already by the miners who lived on the Yukon.’
‘Reason had nothing to do with it. I do not know who first termed it “the Stampede”, but they named it well. We stampeders did not give it half a thought: we just lowered our heads and charged. Only the merchants and barmen got rich, as merchants and barmen will. Some of the wiser harlots did well from it too.’
‘One can only hope that the ladies didn’t waste their hard-earned wealth by taking handsome husbands.’
‘Alas, most of them did just that . . . Anyway, by the time Ivan found them the people of Destruction City were in a bad way. They had flour and bacon enough, and sugar and beans and the rest of it, but they had not the skill or strength to hunt for themselves, and so they had no fresh meat to preserve them from scurvy.
‘Their leader was a scowling brute named Lefèbvre, a Red River half-caste who had fought for Riel in the North-West Rebellion. Though he knew how to live on the land, and had saved his followers many times over, he had lately fallen through the ice of a creek and lost half a foot to the frostbite. Until the stump healed he could no longer stalk those caribou and moose which still lingered in the woods. And he told Ivan, having drawn him aside from the rest, that it was useless to send out cheechakos – the tenderfeet – to hunt: a deaf moose would hear them a mile away.
‘Their party had included one other proven hunter, a wandering Texan named Timothy Brown, but he had gone out alone a week before and not been seen since. Meanwhile the situation had grown desperate: there were clear signs of scurvy in the camp: the blackened gums, loosened teeth, the listless temper, stinking breath, old wounds which reopened and bled afresh.
‘But Lefèbvre could see that Ivan was a Sourdough, a true man of the north: would he consent, the half-caste begged him, to hunt for them for wages, until they had enough fresh meat cached to eke out their store-bought rations? He would not ask for himself, but his woman was with him, and their little girl now cried all day and complained of aching joints . . .’
The man on the cot nodded impatiently. ‘Ivan didn’t care about money but he couldn’t say no. What happened next?’
‘Well, as you guess, he agreed to hunt for them.’
‘Nice people, the Russians, if you get on the good side of them. They’d give you the coat off their backs. That’s how I got mine.’ It hung on a hook at the foot of the bed, a quilted khaki cotton jacket. Tufts of kapok protruded from the bayonet gash under one arm. This is a man, thought the writer, who lives only by inches.
‘The next day he set off alone down the valley of the Rat. It is a difficult country, with steep gullies and screes and thickets of willow and alder, and often he had to retrace his steps or climb a steep ridge to find better going, but he had woven himself a good pair of snowshoes and he knew how to use them.
‘He was following a nameless creek – nameless to him, at any rate – through a shallow portion of its valley, here almost a mile across, circular in shape and surrounded by bare wind-swept ridges. The sheltered floor of this valley was thickly wooded with birches – just such a place where a few caribou might linger, having failed to keep up with their migrating herd. So he uncased his rifle and entered the trees.’
‘I have a feeling,’ said the man on the cot, ‘that we’re getting to brass tacks.’
Of course we are, thought the writer. I’m slowing the pace of the narrative to set out a scene. I wouldn’t do that if something important weren’t about to happen.
‘The wood was utterly silent. No breath of wind stirred the crowns of the trees. It was deathly cold, and the snow-laden branches were as hard and unyielding as porcelain. The only sound that Ivan could hear was his own bated breath and the hiss of his snowshoes.
‘Onward he crept, stopping every few feet to cock his head and listen, to sniff the air and to read “the great white book of the forest”, as the snow was known in the land of his boyhood. It showed him tracks of smaller beasts and birds – of squirrel and ptarmigan and fox and porcupine – but no sign of moose or caribou. And as he penetrated deeper into that silent forest, into the trees that seemed to watch and to judge him, he began to wonder why the deer would shun such a sanctuary; what it was that had scared them away. And as soon as he had that doubt he just as soon had an answer, one which stopped him in his tracks: somewhere close at hand, not ten or twenty yards ahead, he heard a sound like a man’s stifled cough.’
The man on the cot held up a hand. ‘Before you go any further, please: another cigarette? I want to get settled.’
‘By all means. This is where it gets good . . . So: he heard a cough. And that is not a sound that a man wants to hear in a place such as that. Could it be another hunter, like himself, or an Indian checking his trapline? It could. But in the wild places, when one is alone, one summons one’s own demons, and not all of them take human form . . . So he waited in silence for a long time, and when his patience was exhausted, as the cold crept into his bones, he started forward again, stopping every two feet to watch and to listen. So he came at last to the edge of a clearing, which he observed from behind the last trees.
‘There was a cabin in the clearing. A wooden ca
bin, made of split logs. Yet it was not a cabin of the sort built in this country – a crude four-square shanty or roofed-over burrow – but a true wooden house, a Russian izba such as he had known in his Siberian youth, with a porch and carved shutters. And there above the gable end, at the pitch of the roof, where a Siberian would have carved his okhlupen, the friendly spirit which protects his household, was mounted a wooden cross – a Russian cross, with a short crossbeam on top, a longer one beneath it, and some way beneath this another short beam, slanted up to the right, to show where Jesus had smiled on the repentant thief who hung from his own cross beside him. On the other gable was a wind-vane, its rusted arrow pointing south.
‘Ivan understood the little house at once. It was a hermitage or mission: he had seen them before, deep in the woods, far beyond the reach of the jealous Moscow patriarchs. And though he had devised his own wordless faith in his wanderings through the great northern forest, still he fumbled a hand from his mitt and made the sign of the cross with two fingers.’
‘An Old Believer. The woods are still full of them east of the Urals.’
‘Quite. The house was decades old, he could tell that at a glance, but lately some effort had been made to repair it. The walls had been chinked with new clay, and fresh sod replaced the shingles missing from the roof. In the middle of the roof, offset from the ridgepole, was a new metal stove-pipe. From it emerged a trickle of smoke.’
‘Somebody’s home, then.’
‘The creek, beneath its sheath of ice and snow, ran along one side of the clearing, leaving an open space before the house. As he peered through the branches Ivan saw two rectangular shapes on the ground – two six-foot long mounds of round stones from the river-bed. Such are the graves one finds in the north country, where the soil, frozen like rock only two feet below the sod, does not allow any deeper excavation.
‘Now Ivan received another surprise – he could see two wooden grave markers lying flat in the clearing – each of them a Russian cross. There was something about those snow-covered graves – their heavy silence, the inhuman neglect of those tumbled-down crosses – that unnerved Ivan. But he had formed an idea of who might be lodged in that cabin. Lefèbvre had told him that his missing hunter, Brown, had set out in this direction before he disappeared: might he not have been injured while hunting, and taken refuge in this cabin until he recovered? So Ivan crossed the clearing and banged on the door.
‘There was silence at first, so prolonged that he felt embarrassed, as if he were intruding. Perhaps, then, there was nobody home? But he had heard a cough and seen smoke from the chimney: he knocked again, and this time there was a sound within like the scuffle of rats in a ceiling, whispers like the hissing of snakes. The door swung open, and a gust of warm air belched into his face, bringing with it the stink of unwashed humanity and the smell of a freshly cooked stew . . .’
‘Was it this Brown chap?’
‘No. It wasn’t Brown. It was two other men from the States, a pair of stray stampeders from a different crew. Their names were Cuthfert and Weatherbee, and—’
‘No, I meant, was it poor Brown in that stew you just mentioned? In this kind of story some poor bugger always ends up in the pot.’
‘If you’ll only let me finish, you’ll find that this is not a story of any kind you have heard before . . . And no, it wasn’t Brown in the pot – Lefèbvre found Brown the following spring, frozen in the snow. He’d gone through some ice and not been able to build a fire quickly enough to keep himself from freezing . . .
‘Their names, as I say, were Cuthfert and Weatherbee. Cuthfert had been a man of wealth and cultivation, Weatherbee a commercial clerk, a crude, pretentious fellow. The only thing that had united them at first was their intended destination, the Klondike stream. Yet though they immediately despised each other when fate threw them together in Edmonton, the trail had since taught them – with its back-breaking labour, the heaving of oars and portaging of cargo, the chopping of logs and the hunting of meat – that they had another thing in common: a vicious strain of idleness, a crafty yet resolute determination never to do their fair share of anything. This alienated them from the rest of their company and forced them to make common cause.
‘The pair had stumbled across this forgotten cabin the previous fall, whilst pretending to scout ahead of the others as they hand-lined their boats waist-deep up the Rat. Sensing an easy way out of this ordeal, the two shirkers decided to claim their share of the communal stores and pass the winter in the comfort of the house, the existence of which they kept from the others. And the rest of their party, who were determined to press on to the Klondike that winter, were very glad to be rid of them.’
‘How would Ivan have known all this? Surely Cuthfert and Weatherbee didn’t tell him such discreditable things of themselves?’
Why does he not just let me tell my story? Would it really matter if I were just making it up? ‘Their fellow travellers told Ivan this. And I was there when they did so. By the time I reached Dawson myself, in the thaw of ’98, it was too late to stake a claim of my own. So I took a paid job on Bonanza Creek, working one of Big Alex McDonald’s fractions. Ivan joined us there for a few weeks, after this adventure that I speak of, as he worked to raise a grubstake before he moved on again. He told us his story one night in our cabin, after some rotgut had loosened his tongue. And among those present were a half-breed voyageur called Jacques Baptiste and a tough little scrap of Yankee gristle named Sloper. They had been the leaders of Cuthfert and Weatherbee’s party, and remembered them all too well. Jacques Baptiste said he had never met two such lazy scoundrels, and yet vain and proud as Lucifer.’
‘Ah. Please carry on.’
‘The cabin was smeared with ordure and rotting scraps of food and soot and ashes from the stove. Their bedrolls teemed with vermin. Unwashed pewter dishes lay in a basin of foul greasy slops, now frozen solid, showing that it was long since either man had drilled through the creek ice to draw water for washing. Ivan would have turned and fled, but the door was held for him by a pair of staring red eyes in a red, ragged beard. At the back of the cabin another filthy wretch stood over a stove, stirring a pot with the blade of a bread knife. They shrank from the light which seeped through the door, like creatures exposed by the turn of a rock.’
‘Now, you did say that this Brown chap was not in that cooking pot?’
‘I did, yes . . . Ivan had seen cabin fever before. He had known men who had been “bushed” – maddened by the silence and darkness, by the malign, stalking cold of the great northern winter and by agonizing solitude: or worse even than solitude, by the constant confinement with another of one’s kind, one whose presence becomes unbearable, whose every whisper and breath, every eccentric habit or careless movement, kindles flames of searing hatred, of homicidal rage . . . Ivan had seen this before. But there are in the Northland laws of hospitality: he could no more turn away from breaking bread in their company than they could refuse him the warmth of their shelter. And so he leaned his rifle on the porch and stepped into that vile shambles.’
‘It will soon be morning. Your keepers will come looking for you.’
‘Very well. I’ll get on with it . . . Ivan was offered an old crate to sit on while the man at the door – Cuthfert – sat on another and acted as host. The second man stayed beyond the pine table in the middle of the house, but he reached across to shake hands, muttering his name, Weatherbee, and, as an afterthought, his city of origin in the United States. Then he went back to his work at the stove, stirring the pot as he listened to the talk, smiling as if at some private joke.
‘As Ivan’s eyes grew accustomed to the murk inside the house he saw that the gums of both men were quite black and that most of their teeth were already missing. Weatherbee’s feet were bandaged in rags, but Ivan could tell that some of the toes were no longer present. The pair were deathly pale – the pure, milky white pallor of men who have lost their battle
of wills with the winter, who no longer dared to go outside, even in the twilight, to chop wood or draw water or hunt for fresh meat. They were both in the late stages of scurvy. Unless they were rescued they would not see the spring.’
‘I’ve never seen it myself, but I’m told that the scurvy is a bastard when it gets a hold.’
‘It is . . . So presently Weatherbee passed them both mugs of coffee. Ivan looked at it suspiciously; it had a greasy sheen on it, the look of the slops in the frozen tin basin, but as the two of them stared at him he had to take a sip. Not only was the coffee foul with grease and lumps of rotten matter, but it was so thick with sugar that the mere taste of it made Ivan’s head swim: he had to force it down past his own rising gorge.
‘Seeing his distress, Cuthfert asked him if he did not like the coffee, and Ivan could only say that the drink was very sweet. At that Cuthfert looked at Weatherbee, and a cold expression came over his face, and he asked him very quietly from which of their two private hoards of sugar the guest’s portion had been taken. Weatherbee made no reply except to bare his black gums and the stumps of his few remaining teeth. From the reeking tomb of his mouth there issued an intermittent creaking hiss, an eldritch sound like a lizard’s death rattle: Weatherbee was laughing at Cuthfert.
‘Ivan saw a terrible stillness come over Cuthfert’s features, the blank, ugly set to his eyes as he gazed back at Weatherbee. Off to one side, in the shadows, Ivan saw a flicker of movement like a rat creeping along the wall, and when he peered closer he made out a hand – Cuthfert’s hand, inching towards a curious old axe that leaned near his chair: a hook-nosed Finnish axe with a bearded collar, such as Ivan had known in his youth. Watching the hand steal towards it, Ivan understood how dire relations now were between his hosts, and so he spoke in a loud, jolly voice.
Minds of Winter Page 25
