BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (19 page)

"When you lose track of the sun for a few
hours, the sky turns a color almost like amber. That's the closest
you get to darkness, which is something you don't miss until it's
gone. And since it don't get dark, the day never really cools off
neither, and the summer heat just builds up day after day. It seems
strange, but on the Yukon ninety degrees in July feels worse than
forty below in January. The air dries out in the winter, and forty
below on the Inside ain’t as bad as zero on the coast.

"But there ain't a breath of wind in the
summer, so you got to cover yourself against the mosquitoes day and
night, awake or asleep, inside the tent or out. Them bloodsuckers
is only in business from June to September, but they make three
months feel like a year, and you want to dance a jig the first
morning you see frost on the ground. In June and July, at least you
got cold water drifting down the Yukon, and that's a small relief.
The mosquitoes will follow you, but there ain't as many as on land,
so you cook and eat on the river, catch a few hours sleep when you
can. And even if you pull ashore or get stuck once in a while, you
can make seventy miles a day.

"When you get to Fortymile, it's the first
real town you seen since Juneau. Things was starting to favor
Circle City by '96, but Fortymile still had everything a miner
could want. Blacksmith shops and bakeries if you was working,
saloons and dance halls and billiards if you was on a spree. They
even had a opera house with a orchestra and girls singing songs
that was popular Outside the year before. Not the kind of girls
you'd pay to see somewhere else, but it don't take real talent or
beauty to win the heart of a lonely miner.

"Some fellers might strike it back on the
creeks and some might not, but them dance-hall girls would take
home gold every night. Even the horsiest of 'em could fill a dance
card, and every two-minute dance cost a man a dollar and a drink.
The bartender would give the lady a chip worth twenty-five cents,
and at the end of the night she'd cash 'em in for dust weighed out
at the bar. Everybody from cooks to carpenters carried a buckskin
poke, and you didn't have to be a miner to fill one up. Every
establishment had a scale for dust. No one passed paper bills,
because gold dust was money, and if you ran out, you went back to
the creeks to dig for more. When you cleaned up enough gold to come
into town again, you went to the saloon and bought everyone a round
of drinks.

"Gig and Nokes and the Swedes pulled up at
Fortymile and headed straight for the first saloon they seen. But
on the Yukon, what they call whiskey could pass for paint thinner
in most places, and it cost twice what it does Outside, so you
don't drink much until you had your first clean-up.

"They shared a table with a couple of
sourdoughs who come into town from their claim on Miller Creek, and
heared from them fellers what they heared from Joe Ladue – Mosquito
Creek was staked end to end, same as Miller and Glacier. The
sourdoughs said there was a couple of other creeks being prospected
seventy miles back into the hills, but they didn't hold much faith
in 'em. Said they thought it made sense to head on down to Circle,
where new creeks was still being located. Malamute and Mastodon was
two they heared about.

"Circle was growing fast, they said, and
steamers would be getting there from St. Michael by July, bringing
grub for the miners and dropping off rich folks who could afford
the all-water route. That's three thousand miles on an ocean
steamer from Seattle to St. Michael, then another thousand up the
river to Circle. If you wasn't lucky and got iced in on the lower
Yukon, that trip might take a year. So most of the folks that
wanted to run a sawmill or bake bread or sing and dance for gold
dust came in over the passes, same as the miners.

"But people was getting to Circle one way or
another, so log houses was going up every day, even though there
ain't a tree within twenty miles of the Yukon Flats. Logs had to be
dragged over the hills from Birch Creek, so they cost three times
as much as logs at Fortymile. Best get down to Circle soon, the
sourdoughs said, so you can earn enough wages to build a winter
cabin and lay in some grub.

"Gig and Nokes and the Swedes spent a night
at Fortymile, bought some smoked caribou meat, and then pushed off
downriver to Circle. It's a hundred and seventy miles and a few
days' drift to the head of the Yukon Flats, and there ain't much to
catch your eye along the way. Not many islands, so the current
stays strong, with hills rising from the banks and small creeks
coming in fast on both sides. Better prospects for coal than gold
on that piece of the Yukon. Captain Healy built the headquarters
for his company on a bench above the river just past Fortymile, so
you might see a NAT steamer tied up there during summer
navigation.

"Downriver the trees give out to sand and
limestone banks, so the next morning Nokes steered them ashore
where a wooded creek come in from the west. By now they been three
months on the trail from Dyea, so Gig and the Swedes is itching to
get to Circle... ready for a haircut and a hot bath. But Nokes
tells 'em they got to spend three days camped on the bank, fighting
off mosquitoes and chopping down good-sized spruce. Then they got
to saw off the tops and branches, drag the trunks to the river, and
lash 'em together. Build a second raft they can float down to
Circle behind the first one.

"Stripping and dragging trees rips up your
muscles and hands, but a half-dozen decent trunks will build the
walls and roof of a winter cabin at Circle, and without a cabin you
freeze to death by November. Sell the biggest logs to the sawmill
and they'll cut 'em into eight-inch planks for flooring. Sell
whatever you got left from both rafts to the building crews. Now
you can pay for a couple months of grub. Gig hated every minute of
them three days in the woods, but it seemed reasonable when they
poled two log rafts over to the bank at Circle and was met by half
the town.

"It don't matter whether you step down from a
stern-wheel steamer or paddle up to the dock in a bathtub, anybody
new draws a crowd looking for news from the Outside. And while
you're shaking hands, every dog in town is sniffing around your
outfit looking for something to steal."

Zimmerman pulls the knife out of the table
and advances it along the diagonal ribbon from Dawson to Circle,
toward the head of the table and equidistant from us.

"So we made it to Circle, Owen," he says,
jabbing the knife back into the scarred tabletop. "Cheers." He
lifts his cup, swirls its contents, and knocks back a sip, then
stares at me until I do the same.

The whiskey sears my chest as I exhale. "What
month are we in?" I ask hoarsely.

"First week of July," he says. "1896."

Zimmerman wraps up the story of Garrett's
journey Inside. Gig and Nokes and the Swedes divide up what's left
of their outfit, disassemble the rafts, sell the usable logs, and
split the proceeds. Everybody gets a hot meal and a bath and rests
for a day or two, and then the Swedes pack out to Mastodon Creek,
which by now is being worked by three hundred miners over its
entire six-mile length. The Swedes stake two claims high on a
Mastodon pup called Baker Gulch.

Nokes has a partner in Circle whose name
Zimmerman can't remember, but he and Nokes have adjacent claims
downstream from Mastodon on Mammoth Creek and are digging and
sluicing them together. They have a dog team for hauling gear to
their site, and the partner happens to be back in town buying food
for the dogs when Nokes arrives, so he's one of the men that greets
the newcomers at the dock.

Also shuffling onto the dock is a man who
reached Circle ten days earlier. "Penson Wylie," Zimmerman says,
"who come downriver on the scow. The feller who shot the Siwash dog
sniffing around his tent on the Stewart River. Gig recognized him
from Miles Canyon, where Wylie's partner drownded."

"You said Wylie was hallucinating," I remind
Zimmerman, "about an Indian girl that he thought flipped his boat
and tried to drown him.

Zimmerman shakes his head and his stained
front teeth emerge in a smile. "I said Wylie was sane as you or me.
He had a dream the Indian girl was trying to kill him. Told Gig
about it at the canyon, and told me the same thing two years later
in Dawson."

That doesn't sound right, I think. Zimmerman
said earlier that Wylie told Gig the Indian girl was responsible
for drowning his partner. I ignore the discrepancy and ask why Gig
would have even noticed Wylie in the crowd on the dock, given the
need to land their outfit and the fact that he'd only seen Wylie
once, dripping wet and wrapped in a blanket many weeks earlier.

"Gig didn't notice Wylie right off,"
Zimmerman says. "But Wylie remembered Gig from the rapids and come
up to him on the dock. Gig was still wearing the necklace with the
wolf tooth and the rabbit's ear, and Wylie asked him where he got
it. Gig told him it come from the Stick Indians that was packing
their outfit back at Caribou Crossing.

"Wylie said he seen one like it once before
and asked Gig if he could look at it up close, so Gig takes off the
necklace and hands it to him. And while Gig is watching, Wylie
pulls a jackknife out of his pocket and cuts the stitches on the
rabbit's ear, which is folded over longwise with the fur on the
outside.

"He unfolds the ear and looks inside, then
shows it to Gig. Painted in black on the flesh is two eyes, and
each of 'em is dripping a tear the color of blood.

"'That means she's coming for you,' Wylie
says, and before Gig can say anything Wylie picks a stone off the
dock, wraps the necklace cord around it until it's tight, and
throws the stone and the necklace out into the river.

"'I don't want no part of her,' Wylie says,
'and you shouldn't neither. But so there's no hard feelings, I got
something better for you. You can help me work a lay on Mastodon
Creek.'"

Chapter 22

The headwaters of Birch Creek, Zimmerman
tells me, lie about a hundred miles southwest of Circle City on the
eastern flank of the Mastodon Dome, from which ridges descend,
divide, and divide again. Birch Creek collects tributaries from the
resulting gulches on its way down to the Yukon Flats, where it
turns northwest and snakes parallel to the Yukon for two hundred
more miles before the sinuous creek and the island-clogged river
finally meet. The most important stream Birch Creek swallows back
in the hills is Mammoth Creek, which along with its tributaries
Mastodon Creek and Independence Creek was responsible for most of
the gold that found its way down to the assayer's office in
Circle.

With those three creeks staked from end to
end, the Swedes settled for claims on a Mastodon pup called Baker
Gulch. But Penson Wylie had managed to convince the owner of
twenty-one above Discovery on Mastodon to offer him a lay. That
meant Wylie could work the upper hundred feet of the claim at his
own expense, give half of whatever gold he washed out to the claim
owner, and keep the rest. Wylie realized that even if you were just
working a lay, you still needed shelter, firewood, grub, tools, and
lumber for sluice boxes, and all of those cost money. On his own he
couldn't afford to work a lay, much less an entire claim, and that
was the situation most miners faced after locating back on one of
the creeks. Many were happy to sell their claims before they ever
turned a shovelful of dirt, often to the first person offering a
hundred dollars more than the recording fee the miner had already
paid.

So it wasn't entirely surprising or
altruistic that Wylie invited Gig to share his lay on Mastodon
Creek. Gig could have found work building log houses in Circle for
twelve dollars a day, but he hadn't traveled thousands of miles to
work for wages. He still wanted a taste of the Yukon gold fields
he'd read about, and even if Wylie could only offer him twenty-five
percent of what they took out of a hundred-foot sliver, at least
they'd be working rich ground. And with his share of the remaining
outfit, the dwindling dollars he had left from Juneau, and his
portion of the proceeds from selling the logs, Gig wasn't entirely
destitute. So Wylie sized him up as someone worth approaching.

"Birch Creek run into the Yukon two hundred
miles below Circle," Zimmerman says, "but the upper part of it is
only six miles back across the headland from town. From there you
tramp through meadows for fifty miles, then climb into the
headwaters for another fifty. That's where Mammoth Creek come in,
and that's where Gig and Wylie was headed, after they found Indians
to pack their gear. Can't use sleds in the summer, so every dog
carries a pack, but maybe only forty pounds, and that's why it
costs more to carry outfits back to the creeks in the summer.

"Gig and Wylie climbed Mammoth up to Mastodon
Creek and set up a tent on Wylie's lay toward the end of July. They
started working where Wylie left off, shoveling out three or four
inches a day on a cut between rim-rock and the creek. Sluice-box
lumber was too expensive that far back in the hills, so they built
a rocker, and they would shovel eight hours and rock out their
diggings when they got tired."

I ask Zimmerman what a rocker is and he says
it's "a poor man's sluice box" folded into a device the size of a
wooden crate and set on wooden rockers, like a cradle. The box is
separated into top and bottom compartments by a tin sheet with
hundreds of small holes. A few shovelfuls of diggings are dumped on
top of the sheet. Then the miner pours water from a half-gallon can
onto the dirt while using a handle to rock the box back and forth.
Dirt and small debris wash through the holes in the metal, while
pebbles and nuggets are trapped above it.

Below the sheet, the debris-filled water
falls onto an angled plank covered with a blanket, slides down the
ramp, bounces off the back wall of the box, and washes out through
a slit in the bottom into a bucket, so the water can be reused.
Heavy grains and small nuggets of gold are trapped by the blanket.
When the diggings have dissolved, any large nuggets are plucked
from the metal screen. Then the blanket is carefully removed and
washed in a different bucket, from which the collected gold dust is
later panned. Rocking is much less efficient than sluicing, but
it's the only practical way to wash out diggings at bench claims
above the creek, or at claims without divertible running water.