The Call of the Wild: Klondike Cannibals, Vol. 2 (5 page)

*  *  *  *  *

Jack stayed for dinner
at Eliza’s and the three of them made plans to take the ferry across to San Francisco the following morning to buy tickets and outfits.

It was after 9 pm w
hen he left.

When he
arrived back at his mother’s house he saw candlelight flickering in the parlour window, and knew that his mother was engaged in an evening séance. He wheeled his bicycle into the yard and snuck in the back door as quietly as he could, not wanting to disturb the paying customers.

His mother’s sessions seldom
brought in much money, though they frequently caused Jack much embarrassment around town. Flora, a well-known medium, claimed to be able to channel the spirit of a dead Indian chief named Plume. People came to her to ask and answer questions of the dead, usually a recently deceased loved one: a mother, or husband, or daughter.

Jack
had observed his mother’s possession by Plume many times since he was a young boy. He was convinced it was all a sham. As far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as the spirit or soul. In fact, his mother’s silly obsession with all things supernatural had turned Jack into an ardent materialist.

As far as he was concerned t
here was only matter, hunger, and time.

As he walked quietly
up the stairs to his room he could hear his mother’s distorted voice echoing through the parlour door. “Constance…” she warbled, in her strangled voice. “Constance… Constance…”

Jack could hear
table rattling and strange knocking sounds—sure-fire signs of the end of the performance.

When h
e reached the top of the stairs he glanced down the hall and saw that the light was still on in John’s room, so he went over and lightly knocked on the door.

He pulled it open
and found his father in bed, dressed in his blue nightshirt. It looked like he had dozed off reading the
Morning Call
.

“Wha
t’s the word?” John said, waking when he heard the door open. He struggled a little to sit up. His face looked particularly dried out, as if it had been somehow drained of blood. Everyone knew John hadn’t been the same since his accident, but Jack had noted a deterioration in his vitality over the past few weeks. It wasn’t clear how long he had left.

Jack went over and sat
lightly on the edge of the bed. “I sail with Captain Shepard in three days…”

“Oh
!” John clapped his hands together. “Thank God!”

“I have
n’t struck gold yet,” Jack said with a shrug. But his cheeks were more than a little flushed with excitement.

“You will. One way or another.”
Suddenly there were tears in John’s eyes. “Flora worries about you, of course, but she just can’t see it yet. Trust me, I tell her, that boy will be a big deal someday. He’ll come out all right. You watch his smoke! And now here we are…”

They talked
for a minute or two more, mainly about the outfits Eliza wanted to buy, but soon John began to fade. His watery eyes struggled to remain open. So Jack said goodnight and went to his room.

He
’d just crawled into bed when he heard a sharp knock on his door. Jack knew it was his mother. For a moment he considered ignoring her, and hoping she just went away. But she knocked again, louder this time, so Jack got up.

He opened the bedroom door.
Flora looked tired: the dark circles under her eyes were plainly visible through her thick foundation.

“Captain Shepard and I will sail on the
Umatilla
,” Jack said, cutting straight to his big news. They had nothing else to talk about, really.

“Good.”
She nodded, looking relieved. She chewed on her nails. “Good.”

It
looked like she might leave it at that, and wish him good night. But instead she walked into his bedroom. She went over to his crowded bookshelf, picked up his copy of Herbert Spencer’s
First Principles,
peered absently at its cover for a moment, then put it back down. She looked around at the cramped room, with its peeling ceiling-paint and dingy yellow wallpaper.

“I know this
has been hard on you,” she began. “You are so much better than this. We both are…”

Jack looked around. It
wasn’t much, he’d admit, but it sure beat sleeping in prison, or out rough in the rain…

“Are we?” he asked, and immediately regretted it. He
didn’t want to argue.

He’d heard her
rant about their origins a hundred times before: how they were descended from Thomas Wellman, a Puritan who’d settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, and fathered a line of patriots and heroes who’d fought and bled for their country during the Revolutionary War.

Flora shook her head
sadly. Jack had never understood the importance of their lineage, not in the way that she did. To her, their honour was everything.

But she
didn’t want to argue either, so she bit her tongue, and walked back out of his room, turning at the door to face him.

“You must never
stop writing, Jack,” she said. “Do you hear? Promise me.”

“I promise
.” Say what he might about his mother: she was the only one in his family who really believed he could make it as an author.

She kissed him on the cheek,
then turned to go.

“Our
day will come, Jack,” she said. “You wait and see.”

*  *  *  *  *

Flora and John were still sleeping when, just after dawn, Jack snuck out the back door.

As he cycle
d through the empty streets back towards Eliza’s house he listened to the sounds of the sparrows chirping in the early morning light. He felt at peace. For the first time in a long time, he’d slept soundly the night before. He hadn’t woken up in the bleak hours between 2 and 4 am, feeling like a failure, with an anxious knot twisting in his stomach.

Now that he knew he would be
travelling again, he felt giddy, almost drunk with happiness. He thought of all the new sights and sounds that awaited him on the road to the Klondike.

All the
people he did not know yet, but would, and soon.

When he arrived, Eliza prepared the three of them a quick breakfast of panca
kes and black coffee. They buzzed with nervous excitement as they ate.

Flipping
through the morning papers, they read aloud several in-depth interviews with Dick McNulty, William Stanley, and Clarence Berry: rich prospectors who’d arrived aboard the treasure ships. Besieged by reporters, con-men, and long-lost relatives, they were now holed up in various fancy hotels downtown, where they hid out in luxurious suites making plans for the future.

Big plans.

It all seemed so unreal. Jack found it more than a little hard to believe that, in just a couple of days, he and Captain Shepard would be on their way, attempting to find their own destiny amid the wild headlines.

After Jack had finished his second cup of
coffee and Eliza had written out a list of what they needed, they walked down to the ferry and—paying twice what it had cost Jack the day before—crossed over to San Francisco. The ferry was overloaded, sitting a foot or two deeper in the water than usual, and people everywhere were remarking upon the craziness of the times.

But n
othing could prepare them for the madness they saw when they arrived at the Ferry Terminal.

Even Jack—who thought
he’d seen much of life and knew the score on most subjects—was astounded by the change from the day before.

The wharves and piers were crawling with people of every description.

People from all
walks of life—men, women, children—wandering around in a daze, as if drugged. Jack spotted at least three baby carriages among the crowd.

It was as if the steamers, by virtue of being vessels by which a man could deliver hims
elf to the untold riches of his dreams, possessed a strange gravitational force that drew the inhabitants of the Bay Area down to the docklands.

Whole f
amilies had come out to picnic amidst the mayhem. They sat on blankets and ate crackers and fruit from little dishes while watching the shipping cranes working overtime, loading hundreds of tons of cargo into the creaking holds of a dozen large steamers and other assorted boats. Children ran around in swarms, gawking at the variety of tugs and fishing yachts that had been pressed into service, and were being hastily retrofitted for Northern waters.

As soon as they disembarked
from the ferry, Eliza pressed ahead into the crowd, walking purposefully towards the offices of the main steamship lines. As they fell in behind her, Jack’s eyes searched through the crowd intently. 

Hi
s imagination began to race. The faces he saw began to blend into each other, one after another. For a long, strange moment he saw that the people were little more than marionettes, puppets strung with invisible wire, jerking along unconsciously, as if under the control of a vast yet invisible machine. For a minute or two he thought this realization was full of significance.

But
soon, pulled in a million directions by the sights and sounds, his mind drifted on. He recognized a number of his former classmates from Berkeley’s lecture halls amongst the crowds, and briefly wondered if summer courses had been suspended amidst all this excitement. After all, what kind of man could stand to be stuck in a lecture, listening to some dried-out professor drone on while all this momentous activity was taking place? While fortunes were being made and lost, and a man’s destiny hung on the whims of an hour?

As they pushed and jostled along
among the thousands, it felt to Jack a lot like a World’s Fair, or at least how he’d imagined one to feel. There were the same breathless crowds, the same marvelling at wonders that Jack had read so much about. There was a distinct flavour of carnival in the air, as if P. T. Barnum himself had orchestrated the whole spectacle for effect.

T
hey passed many small ad-hoc shops that had sprung up in the backs of carts, or in hastily constructed booths crowded along the dockland road.

Already there were signs of rampant inflation. The price of canned food was up thirty percent since the week before, and a man might
now sell his beaverpelt hat for twice its usual price. They passed a number of outfitters who had completely run out of heavy woollen blankets. Everything was being hoarded: especially anything warm. Wool socks, fur hats, and sealskin suits were all much in demand.

Up ahead t
he dockland road widened into a crowded square, where they saw the major steamship warehouses.

“Would you look at that,” Captain
Shepard said with a low whistle as they approached the square.

Buzzing with frantic activity,
all the roads leading onto this square were jammed with traffic. Overworked horses pulled wagons stacked high with wooden crates. Ten-foot-high stacks of supplies were piled everywhere, guarded by teams of men clutching bills of ownership.

Some men were trying desperately to buy steam
er tickets, others to sell them. Some waited patiently in long lines, others fought and swore about the delays and congestion.

Bright signs with catchy slogans advertised all manner of new wonder products aimed at the men hea
ding North. It seemed as if every wall and surface existed solely to tempt a man into throwing his hat into the ring. There were posters by equipment companies of all sorts, advertising tents, sleds, furs, compressed foods, medical supplies, folding boats, &c., &c., &c. Jack saw signs, advertising “Complete Outfits supplied on Shortest Notice,” pasted up all over the place.

Jack recognized
the familiar shape of the
Umatilla
, docked at a pier just south of the square. He knew the ship well, having shovelled coal aboard her upon his return from Vancouver three years before. There was a strange symbolism in this for him. He found it hard to believe that he would soon sail North on the same ship, only now as a passenger, rather than lowly coal stoker.

When they finally made it inside the
Alaska Trade & Transportation Company
warehouse, Eliza took charge. No expense was to be spared, for, as she kept saying, “if you are going to do something, you must do it right.”

And sometimes that meant spending a lit
tle bit more.

Over
the course of the next hour, a Company agent showed them around the bustling warehouse.

The
y didn’t have to carry their supplies yet, of course. They mainly picked things out of the Company’s catalogues, with the arrangement that it would all be loaded upon the
Umatilla
later. They were issued bills of ownership, saying they were entitled to x number of provisions and equipment aboard the ship. Eliza was very nervous about all this, and insisted upon carrying all their bills and receipts in a secret purse under her belt.

Captain Shepard and Jack would e
ach have to carry six hundred pounds of staples: wheat flour, cornmeal, rolled oats, rice, and dried beans. He would carry another three hundred pounds of bacon and granulated sugar, and two hundred more of evaporated apples, peaches, onions and potatoes.

And that was just the food. In addition to all that, he w
ould have to carry his own tin stove, plate, utensils and pots, whetstone, chisel, hatchet, box of nails, hand saw, whip saw, files, picks, hammers, jack plane, butcher’s knife, two hundred feet of rope, and a compass.

Then there were the clothes: three suits of heavy underwear, one heavy mackinaw coat and two pairs of matching mackinaw trousers, a heavy rubber-lined coat, a dozen heavy wool socks, another dozen mittens, two pairs of
heavy rubber boots, four blankets and four towels.

Rather than being intimidated by the
thought of all the hardships that lay ahead of him, Jack relished the idea.