BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (36 page)

"Gig wasn't at the fishing hole near Bonanza,
so I kept going and found him three miles further up, at the hole
near the mouth of Bear Creek. He had a couple of grayling in his
bag and was after another. I told him about the three fellers, and
his jaw tightened when I said the name of the bow-legged one was
Sam Piper.

"'Like hell it is,' Gig said. 'If he's Sam
Piper, I'm Injun Joe.' Gig said he didn't know any Percy Johnson or
Bill Jones from Colorado, but he was dead sure the bald feller was
Sam Nokes. He put away his fishing pole and we sat down on rocks in
the shade and thought about it.

"'That's the first time I heared Nokes was in
Dawson,' Gig says. 'Ain't much left in Circle, so I figured he'd be
coming here sooner or later. And then he was going to track me down
or go bellyaching to Sam Steele.' Gig said he wasn't scared of
Nokes on his own, especially in Dawson, where sidearms wasn't
allowed. And Nokes going to the Mounties didn't signify – their
dispute was in Alaska and the Mounties got no sway over it. But he
didn't know what to make of them other two fellers. They was lying
about being friends with Gig, so it seemed like nothing good would
come from meeting 'em. And there was no telling when they might
show up at the tent again.

"Gig decided to go an hour upriver to Hunker
Creek, so I rode back to Lousetown and packed some grub for him and
a bag of horse-feed. Loaded it on my pony and led it back out to
the fishing hole. There was a little hotel in Hunker with some
cabins around it, smaller than Grand Forks, but he could stay there
until we knowed what Nokes was up to.

"Gig told me to go find a bartender friend of
his in Dawson named Sullivan. Sullivan was a Mountie before Sam
Steele fired him, but he still got friends on the force. We figured
if Nokes was going to try something, he better clear it with Steele
first, so Sullivan could ask if there was any word going around the
barracks.

"I found Sullivan working at the Regina, and
he shook his head and looked grim when I told him about Nokes and
the other men. 'Bounty hunters,' he said, and I thought he was
going to spit. 'They need to show papers, so I should be able to
find out.'"

"Sure enough, when I come back the next night
Sullivan pulls me down to the end of the bar so we're out of
earshot. He says he was right, and that Nokes come into Steele's
office a week ago with an order from a magistrate in Skagway. It
says Gig got to appear in court on charges of stealing money and
dogs in December '96 in Circle. So Steele told Nokes he could take
Gig back to Skagway, as long as he brung him by the
Superintendent's office first to show he got the right man.
Sullivan says all he knowed about the two tall fellers was that
they was working for Nokes and probably come on the trail with him
from Skagway. And their real names wasn't Percy and Bill."

"Why did it take Nokes more than two years to
come after Garrett?"

Zimmerman smiles. "That's what I was asking
Gig, when I rode out to Hunker Creek to tell him what Sullivan told
me. And he couldn't figure it hisself. Gig said he thought Nokes
would come up to Dawson in the spring of '97 when he heared how
rich the Klondike was. If he done that, Gig said he was ready to
work out a deal with him. There was still discoveries being made in
the Klondike that summer. Then '98 come and gone, with ten thousand
cheechakos in Dawson and all the rich ground staked, and Gig
figured Nokes missed his chance.

"I heared the rest of the story at the
Northern Saloon," Zimmerman says, "a few months after I got to
Nome. I sat next to a hotel builder who made money in Circle and
gambled it away in Dawson. Now he was trying to start over. I asked
if he knowed Sam Nokes and he said sure, Nokes had a paying claim
on Mammoth Creek. He said Nokes and his partner went bust when a
hired hand ran off with their money and dogs. They used up all
their grub and firewood and had to come back into town. Bought what
they could on credit. Everybody who could find a dog was already
stampeding for the Klondike. Nokes and his partner finished the
winter in Circle waiting for the ice to go out. They sold their
claim for less than a thousand dollars, and Nokes bought passage to
San Francisco in the spring."

Zimmerman says Nokes owned half of a
boarding-house in Leadville, Colorado, and he went back there to
sell his share. He also convinced a rich retired miner to grubstake
his next trip Inside, persuading him that the Klondike was only the
first of many gold-rich districts that would soon be found on the
Yukon.

And Zimmerman says the Klondike stampede had
simplified the Yukon trail. The White Pass railroad wasn't running
yet, but thousands of workers had carved its grade up through the
gorges, across the pass, and down along the lakes to the Whitehorse
rapids, and that grade was accessible to pack animals. A village
had sprung up at Whitehorse, along with steamer connections all the
way down the Yukon. So by the spring of '99, the trail over
Chilkoot Pass was defunct, and the journey from Skagway to Dawson
was measured in weeks, not months. But Nokes hadn't told his
investor that he intended to settle a score with Gig Garrett before
he went prospecting for the next Klondike.

Chapter 43

"Before I gone out to Hunker Creek, I stopped
by the Palace Hotel to tell the owner Gig was in the Indian River
district for a week. A friend broke his leg and Gig was helping him
manage his claim. Then I waited until a bartender I knowed come in
for his shift, and I asked him if he seen a couple of tall fellers
that was looking for Gig.

"He lit right up and said 'you mean Percy and
Bill?' He said they was friends with Gig from Colorado City and
been coming in at different times almost every day. They usually
sat at the bar for an hour or so. It was too bad Gig wasn't around,
'cause Percy been telling stories about some of the crooks in the
Colorado camps. He said a couple of men in Soapy Smith's gang
pulled a gun on him in Creede and he had to talk 'em out of
shooting him. And Bill got a scar from a knife-fight with a
claim-jumper in Cripple Creek.

"So when I heared that," Zimmerman says, "I
knowed them bounty hunters was watching the Palace and the tent all
the time, just waiting for Gig to show up in Dawson or
Lousetown."

"But they never caught him, did they?"

Zimmerman shakes his head. "I told the
bartender at the Palace I was packing out to Grand Forks the next
day, on my way up to Eldorado. I figured Percy and Bill would see
the horses was gone and might ask him where I was. Then I went back
to the tent and packed up our clothes and blankets and pots and
grub in the darkest part of the night. I left the tent up and the
stovepipe smoking. Loaded the bags on my three horses and left,
down to the Klondike and upriver on the trail to Hunker Creek. Kept
looking over my shoulder until I was sure no one was following me.
I was halfway there before the birds started chirping."

Zimmerman says he told Gig a magistrate in
Skagway had issued a summons for him, and Percy and Bill were
bounty hunters hired by Nokes. Sam Steele had granted permission
for Nokes and his men to apprehend Gig peacefully and escort him
across the border en route to Skagway.

"It seemed like Gig wanted to set a trap and
shoot the three of 'em," Zimmerman says, "but we just got two
rifles, and I told him I wasn't shooting nobody. And even if Gig
killed 'em all, Dawson wasn't like the mining camps in Alaska. The
Mounties would of tracked him down and he'd go to jail for sure,
probably hang. So Gig and me decided we could slide in with the
crowds that was leaving Dawson for Nome."

A half-formed thought that has been gnawing
at me resolves into a troubling possibility. Maybe when Drew and I
set out to arrest Gig Garrett on that night in 1902, we were
another pair of bounty hunters in his eyes. Led to his cabin by
Henry Zimmerman, who this time had agreed to set the trap. Did
Henry tell Gig we were coming? His story tonight shows he was still
on Gig's side in the summer of '99. And maybe by 1902, Garrett was
done with fleeing and ready to fight.

Zimmerman says he took three horses into
Dawson early Saturday morning and unloaded all the bags on the
pier. Then he bought passage to St. Michael for himself and Gig on
the afternoon downriver boat. With half a dozen new lines
operating, there were boats leaving Dawson almost every day. At St.
Michael they could transfer to an ocean steamer for the northward
crossing to Nome.

Zimmerman's next visit was to a Dawson horse
trader, where he accepted half what his team was worth to close an
immediate sale. He turned over his three horses and told the trader
the fourth would be tied to a rail near the steamship pier that
afternoon. Then he went back to the waterfront, where a stack of
cargo crates provided an inconspicuous perch with a view of Front
Street and the pier.

"The boat come in around noon and was leaving
at two. At one-thirty they was loading, so I went down and showed
my ticket and stowed our bags on board. Still no sign of Gig at ten
minutes to two, and I was standing out on Front Street starting to
sweat. Then I seen him coming in slow on horseback from the quiet
end of the street, and I knowed he would make it. He been cutting
across the north edge of town with his hat down to his eyes, and he
rode up at the last minute.

"I took the horse to the rail while he slung
his bags, and we was the last of fifty-some passengers on board.
When the boat pulled away I was looking for Nokes and Percy and
Bill to come running up and spot us on the deck, but there was no
sign of 'em. Just folks I didn't know standing on the pier and
waving goodbye."

When I ask for a brief description of the
boat, Zimmerman tells me it was a stern-wheeler named
Polly
,
and like all the other Yukon steamers she wasn't much more than a
floating box a hundred feet long, with modest curves and a pilot
house on her flat roof. Her upper deck held numerous small
state-rooms separated by curtains, and was surrounded by a
four-foot-wide walkway protected by a railing and the overhanging
roof. The lower deck housed the boiler, wood bin, machine shop, and
cargo bays. Its v-shaped bow was exposed to the elements and held a
staircase to the walkway. Passengers were welcome to stand, sit, or
curl up under a blanket anywhere they could find room. Zimmerman
says he and Garrett sat on the walkway near the stern, with their
backs to the wall and feet through the railing, watching the
scenery drift by.

"Coming down the Yukon in the middle of
July," Zimmerman says, "on a boat that ain't getting swamped by
rapids or crushed by ice – there's worse ways to travel. If the
engine don't break down and you stay in the current, you're moving
fast enough to keep the mosquitoes away. The sun is on you close to
twenty hours a day, but the cold rising from the water keeps it
tolerable. When the sun goes behind the hills, it cools off and
gets damp for a few hours 'cause the frozen ground under the moss
chills the air."

He ticks off the landmarks that he etched in
the table earlier tonight.

"Fort Reliance, ten miles below Dawson. That
was the zero-mile mark for naming the rivers." He points to an
etched line that runs into the Yukon from the west, his side of the
table. "Fortymile River and the mining camp, or what was left of
it. We stopped but only a couple fellers got on and no one got
off."

He gestures toward the carved Yukon between
Fortymile and the chip-mark on the table that designates Circle
City. "On that part of the river you still got hills and trees and
granite bluffs coming down to the water. But it's a hundred and
seventy miles to Circle, and before you get there the trees
disappear and the hills flatten into sand and grass. The river
splits into pieces and laces through more islands than you can
count, all of 'em covered with driftwood and gravel and bogs. The
channels come and go, so if you're piloting a steamboat, all you
can do is look for deep water and try to power your way across the
sand bars when you hit 'em. It's a lot easier going downstream than
up. That's the Yukon flats.

"We stopped at Circle and a few miners got
off with tools and grub they brung from Dawson. Some of the claims
up on Mammoth and Mastodon was being worked again, now that all the
Klondike creeks was staked."

Zimmerman points to the apex of his carved
Yukon, equidistant from the two of us near the free end of the
table and a foot or two beyond his reach.

"You get up to Fort Yukon and the river turns
southwest, after you been running northwest all the way from the
lakes. That's where the Porcupine River come in from the east."

"Porcupine? You never carved that one."

Zimmerman leans over the table with his hand
extended palm up, but I won't give him the knife. Instead I take it
and stretch toward the etched river's inflection point, then stab
the table at Fort Yukon and drag the knife tip east toward my
edge.

"It's more northeast, but that's the spot,"
he says. "The Porcupine drains a big country running back a couple
hundred miles. You might think all that water coming in could
stitch the Yukon back together, but you still got a hundred more
miles of the flats."

Zimmerman says the Yukon finally gathers
itself into a single channel framed by legitimate banks. Stretches
of straight water emerge, no two in the same direction, but the
connecting curves keep the general direction southwest. Tundra
gives way to grass-covered hills before granite reappears,
solidifying the banks and rising away from the river. The drainages
that split the hills and descend to the Yukon resemble the valleys
five hundred miles upstream – the ones that carry gold-bearing
creeks.

"They call that stretch the Lower Ramparts,
and there was a town growing up at the mouth of Minook Creek. Back
in '96," Zimmerman says, "before word about the Klondike spread
downriver, a Russian miner named Minook was drifting through and
some Siwashes told him there was gold on the upper parts of that
creek. So he gone prospecting back in the hills and found it, on
that main creek and some of its pups. Minook Creek wasn't no
Bonanza or Eldorado, but it was richer than the creeks at Fortymile
and Circle. And the gold was the best anyone seen on the Yukon,
with less silver and tellurium mixed in. So it paid eighteen
dollars an ounce when Klondike gold brung sixteen or seventeen.