BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (15 page)

"The Siwash boys usually knowed English
better than the men, and Nokes found one that wanted to sell him
fur-trimmed mittens. He held up his own and said he wasn't looking
to trade. Then he said most of their outfit – almost two thousand
pounds of grub and gear – was cached back at Caribou Crossing, and
he'd be willing to pay the Indians two hundred dollars to pack it
ahead to the Lewes River on the overland route. The boy went back
to one of the huts to find his chief.

"Getting to the Lewes River over the ice was
maybe sixty miles on Tagish Lake and Marsh Lake, and if the wind
held up you could sail most of it. The overland route was only
forty miles on a straight path from south to north, six to twelve
on the clock face, and a decent trail, but you had to pull your
sled the whole way. Unless you was like the Indians and had dog
teams. Then you could make the Lewes River in a day.

"The boy brought his chief, and the chief
wanted four hundred dollars. Nokes talked him down to three and
gave him a hundred dollars to start. Then he and Gig and the Swedes
pulled their sleds down the ice to the log-frame tent with a
flagpole flying a British flag.

"Back then there was just one customs officer
at the Tagish station, and he might only see three or four parties
a week. Winter or summer, whether you was pulling a sled or poling
a boat, he wasn't going to open up all your bags. He was just going
to ask you where you come from and what you was bringing in, and
unless you got outfitted in Victoria and could show unbroken
Canadian seals on your packages, he was going to tally up how much
you owed. And anyone who knowed about life on the Inside was going
to be carrying the same grub as every other miner – bacon, beans,
oatmeal, flour, sugar, and coffee.

"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.