BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (16 page)

"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 melted 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.

"Them Siwashes was jabbering Injun and trying
to sell Gig and Nokes pelt bags and antler whistles and anything
they couldn't use, but Nokes knowed exactly what he wanted, and it
took the whole day to get it. Whiskey was a weakness for that
Tagish chief, and Gig and Nokes showed him enough firewater to keep
him glowing for months. The tobacco was worth almost as much. And
while they was negotiating, Gig was toting a loaded shotgun.

"By late afternoon, they was heading back to
camp with fifty pounds of dried salmon, which Indians will eat
every day, same as their dogs do. The Siwashes took all the whiskey
and tobacco. Nokes traded 'em the shotgun and shells too. That
didn't make much sense to Gig, but Nokes told him it was no use
trying to shoot ducks bobbing on the water when you was drifting in
a boat. Hunting birds took time, and the Indians had more of that.
If they saw game, that was different, and they still had the rifle.
But mostly the game was miles back into the hills.

"They gave the Indians all four sleds too,
but they got four wood paddles for 'em, and what made it all work –
two patched-up birch-bark canoes. They loaded the salmon and
paddles in the canoes and pulled 'em back to camp across the wet
snow.

"That was how Nokes planned to get down the
Yukon – load the outfit on a raft and paddle canoes alongside. They
could tow the raft away from boulders and sandbars or drag it
ashore when they made camp. Take turns cooking and sleeping on the
raft, 'cause by mid-May it don't get dark, and when you come off
the river in June the mosquitoes cover you like blankets.

"It took a couple days to chop logs to the
right lengths and drag 'em all to camp, and Nokes wanted 'em lashed
together into pontoons, with smaller logs cross-wise on top. They
laid a floor with branches for the outfit and made a platform for
the stove so someone could cook while they was afloat. Built it all
on the bank of the Lewes and then shoved it in and moored it. With
the bags loaded on, the deck was still clear of the river. You
could sit on the bags and watch the scenery drift by. When the
water was shallow you could stand on a corner and pole.

"They let the raft go and pushed off in the
canoes, Gig and Nokes in one and the Swedes in the other. You're
still on the Lewes, but now you got every reason to call it the
Yukon. A couple hundred yards across, drifting maybe five miles an
hour, never straight for long. Ice floes from Laberge is running
with you the first few days. Got stands of spruce on the inside of
the curves and steep slopes of gravel on the outside, with downed
trees mixed in. The river is always cutting into the hills and
bringing 'em down to the water. Every stream and river that come
into the Yukon from the west is carrying sand and dirt with it. And
flour gold mixed in."

About thirty miles downriver, Zimmerman says,
you reach the first big tributary. The Hootalinqua River run back
over a hundred miles to Teslin Lake, which lies east in a parallel
valley and is as long as Marsh, Tagish and Bennett put
together.

"Past the Hootalinqua you swing s-curves for
forty miles, then the Big Salmon river come in from the east.
That's a clear stream with good fishing for the Indians. The hills
get bigger downstream from there, with trees thick to the tops, not
just spruce but cottonwood and birch. Then the bends flatten out
and you float thirty miles to the Little Salmon, and below that you
got another Indian village on the east bank.

"Like always, the Siwashes start hollering
and waving when white men come by, so Nokes told the Swedes to
drift along with the raft, then he and Gig paddled their canoe over
to the bank, where the Injuns got a landing rigged up with logs.
Nokes wasn't looking to sell or trade, but they did have some money
left and maybe the Siwashes had some smoked moose or caribou.

"It's into May and the water's still cold,
but there's nothing left of winter in the air, so Gig and Nokes was
just wearing undershirts and thin wool, and Gig still had the
necklace with the wolf tooth and the sewed-up rabbit ear hanging
against his chest. They pulled up to the landing and the Siwashes
gather round to see what's in the canoe, waving their hands and
babbling about guns and nails and whiskey and dollars... which is
about the only English words most of 'em know. They look the white
men up and down and then back away and start talking to themselves,
and to Gig they don't sound happy. He's thinking that the Indians
seen the raft with all the bags and was expecting the white men
would be coming to trade something they could use.

"Nokes found an older boy who spoke good
English and talked to him alone for a minute, then Nokes come back
to the landing and told Gig the Siwashes got no decent food they
wanted to sell.

"They pushed off in the canoe and started
paddling to catch up with the raft. Gig asked Nokes if the Indians
was sore that they wasn't bringing whiskey, and Nokes said no. He
pointed to Gig's necklace and said the Siwashes didn't want nothing
to do with it. This tribe was Tagish, but they knowed that necklace
come from the Stick Indians and it was a warning. When the Sticks
give you a wolf tooth and a rabbit ear, it means you was being
hunted."

Chapter 18

"Nokes said the Siwashes was always spooked
about something, and Gig said he'd throw the necklace away the
first time he seen a war party following 'em. They paddled until
they caught up to the Swedes and the raft. The Yukon run northwest
all the way to Circle, but you got to turn every point of the
compass to get there and sometimes you spend a half hour drifting
southeast. Don't matter which way you're heading, it's hills of
sand and spruce, maybe some limestone. You pass huge rocks on the
shore and some in the river, gulls and eagles nesting on the
ledges.

"George Carmack had a one-man trading post
about fifty miles past the Little Salmon, and they tied up the
boats to see if he had anything worth buying, but Carmack was
downriver, fishing with the Indians. Everyone called him Lying
George 'cause he made every prospect he ever worked – gold or coal
or salmon – sound twice as good as it really was. But three months
later Lying George made the discovery claim on Rabbit Creek, and
that opened up the Klondike.

"Fifteen miles past Carmack's come the Five
Finger Rapids, which is spruce-covered bluffs spread out across the
current. It's nothing like the Whitehorse, but you got to stay away
from a whirlpool and some hidden rocks.

"They tied down all the bags on the raft,
towed it to the right channel and let it go, and the raft got
washed over but come through it in one piece. Same story for the
canoes – long as you paddle hard and keep the bow downstream, you
take on water but you don't swamp. Out of Five Fingers you pick up
speed for a few miles and then drop into Rink Rapids, but the water
toward the right bank is deep and fast, so it ain't enough to worry
you.