The Wanderer (38 page)

Appendix II

A Tale of Penury
Editor’s Note

Not long after completing my first, slightly cursory, reading of
The Wanderer
typescript, while engaged in my second, more attentive, perusal, I was browsing the shelves of a second-hand bookshop in Stoke Newington and sighted a strange title inscribed, in gold, on the spine of a slim leather-bound hardback. This title was
Tales from the Land of Nod
. It drew my notice, resonated, because the Land of Nod is the place, in the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible, to which Cain flees after the murder of his brother, and, ‘nod’ being the root of a Hebrew verb meaning ‘to wander’, the usual interpretation of the passage is that it implies Yahweh condemns Cain to wander the Earth for all time. The name of the author, Walter Waldegrave, was not known to me.

I bought the book, took it straight home to read. Its first few leaves are blank. They’re followed by a frontispiece; an etching depicting an old man, with a matted beard, dressed in a cloak. He stands, hunched, leaning on a knotty staff, amid a barren, rocky landscape. Facing this illustration is the title page; the text printed there runs as follows:

Tales from the Land of Nod
Ten startling stories heard from the lips of men and
women of the Legion Lost
By Walter Waldegrave

There’s no other information, no publisher’s or printer’s details, no publication date. On the
leaf immediately following, there’s an epigraph:

This quotation is taken from lines 44-47 of Book I of
Paradise Lost
.

Tales from the Land of Nod
is a very strange literary artefact. It contains ten episodes, which are presented as factual accounts. They relate encounters on the trail in some of the least hospitable places of the world, set across a period spanning the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. They lack any overarching narrative; the only thing unifying the collection is the identity of the narrator, Waldegrave, who, of course, might be a fiction. They’re written in an archaic, awkward style. The format of the episodes is familiar from supernatural and horror literature: a frame describes a meeting between Waldegrave and another individual, who then goes on to tell a yarn.

In the first nine tales the central story is presented to the reader in full. In the tenth, however, which has the rambling title, ‘A Tale of Penury, Bloody Murder, Card-Sharping Swindles, Sham Séances, and the Realms of the Foul Olden Horrors that Prowl the Primeval Lightless Ways that Riddle the Earth: The Chilkoot Trail, 1897’, it is withheld. This tale is an account of the first time a bizarre narrative was related to Waldegrave by someone he met on the road. It was this experience, so he writes, that gave him his craving for similar odd tales. The strange inset story is here left out because Waldegrave claims he promised never to recount it to another soul.

There are a number of eerie resemblances between the occurrences ‘A Tale of Penury’ sets forth and the events of Duncan’s life as related in
The Wanderer
. Therefore, I present it here for the light it might shed on the nature of the typescript I found in Peterkin’s apartment. It is, of course, possible, that Peterkin,
having read
Tales from the Land of Nod
, borrowed from it, either as straightforward copying, or as part of a bizarre attempt to make
The Wanderer
seem a genuine account. But the more disturbing alternative remains, and I, for one, can’t shake it.

A Tale of Penury, Bloody Murder, Card-Sharping
Swindles, Sham Séances, and the Realms of the Foul
Olden Horrors that Prowl the Primeval Lightless Ways that Riddle the Earth
The Chilkoot Trail, 1897

My fund of eldritch narratives (at least those I can tell without compromising my principles; it will become clear what I mean by this) is now exhausted, but I feel it important for me to relate how I first came by my mania for wandering the wild and barren places of the Earth seeking men of that strange band, the Legion Lost, striking up acquaintances with them, and asking them to recount for me their bizarre tales of woe and hardship. To this effect, I present the following – the story of my hearing the yarn that, like a drug, got me craving for others of its ilk. Sadly, though, as I promised I would not ever breathe or write one word of it, and will not go against my scruples on this point, this account will have a void at its heart, an absence.

The man who told me the tale forced me to make this pledge on learning I had literary ambitions; I call him Robert here, but, as I also swore not to reveal anything that might give away his identity – he was insistent about this, claiming that danger to him, and to myself, might result from my doing so – this name is a fabrication.

It was the autumn of ’97. Young, foolish, and reckless with misery following the untimely death of my young wife, my first love, from cholera, the year before, I was lured by tales of Yukon Gold, and, along with tens of thousands of other poor venturesome sapskulls, outfitted myself in Seattle and secured a berth on a ship bound for Alaska. In doing so, I spent most of a legacy I had been bequeathed by a wealthy uncle. I disembarked at Skagway, the Alaskan port from which one could most easily make one’s way to the gold fields in the vicinity of Dawson City. Before the rush, Skagway had been an outpost of the fur trade, a
dismal place of churned mud and clapboard shacks, inhabited by a mere handful of brutish men who bludgeoned seals to scrape a living, but by then it was moiling with unscrupulous provisioners, whores, and crackbrained missionaries, all there to waylay, gull, and fleece the frantic, reckless, and easily duped stampeders who passed through. I myself tarried there a deal longer than I should have, mainly due to the ministrations of a pretty young moll named Laura, who looked something like my dead wife. It was only when I noticed the nights were waxing longer than the days, I realized I would have to light out if I was to make it over the mountains into Canada before winter set in and the notches became impassable. I paid a visit to the Tlingit camp just outside of town and took on three Indians to lug my food and equipment, then found a ferry prepared to take me over to Dyea, a small settlement at the head of the trail.

On the morning of the second day I reached the foot of the Golden Stairs, a set of steps cut yearly into the snow and ice of the steep slope that rose to the Chilkoot Pass. It was a cold and gray day, exceedingly cold and gray. At the foot of the steps was the Scales, a tent city, with a saloon and a couple of restaurants, that had sprung up round a Mountie checkpoint where packs were weighed to ensure all stampeders carried at least a ton of supplies, reckoned a year’s worth – a measure put in place to prevent those bound for the gold fields from being driven to desperate acts of plunder against Canadian homesteaders by hunger and thirst. This stipulation meant that many, those too poor to afford to pay Indians to help them carry their load, had to make several trips between campsites lugging their provisions – the rigors of the route were too much for pack animals. The weight of my baggage was found to be sufficient, and I was allowed through the checkpoint with my bearers. There was a primitive horse-drawn tramway offering to haul loads up to the highest point of the trail, but the fees being charged were exorbitant, and besides, I preferred to trust my things to my
reliable Indians, than to a ridiculous contraption.

I set out up the staircase, clinging to the guide rope, eyes narrowed against the sleet squalls that beset us, seekers of gold, guides, and pack bearers all. A great number of us, hooded against the bitter cold, trudged up the ice steps. We looked pilgrims bound for a shrine containing a precious relic – in a way, I suppose, this is exactly what the prospectors among us were, though it was to gold we pledged our devotions and made our supplications. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we resembled an order of flagellants, for if the man in front, fatigued, slowed, many would – the way being strait, and they, frantic to cross the ridge before nightfall when temperatures would plummet – drive him on by striking out with anything to hand. Lengths of hempen cord served as makeshift lashes, walking staffs and pickaxe, mattock, and shovel handles were used as goads. Or perhaps with our clothing ragged and our belongings bundled up on our backs, we looked more like bindlestiffs or hobos.

About halfway up the staircase, at the pass’s famous false summit – a ridge that appears the highest point of the trail until reached, when a further steep climb can be seen beyond it – there was a ledge of rock beside the path offering respite from the arduous ascent. This shelf was narrow and beetled over the void, but a large number of bone-weary stampeders, careless of the bluff’s edge, sprawled or milled about, querulously bemoaning the hardships of the trail, as if they walked it at the behest of some potentate, rather than of their own volition; the noise they made was similar to one commonly heard at dusk by the sea, that of a colony of gannets roosting. Standing in knots, talking low, the Indians looked askance at their employers, no doubt contemptuous of the bellyaching – that proud race had been climbing the trail for generations. Sitting down, I took off my hobnailed boots and thick socks, rubbed lard into my swollen, blistered, and chilblained feet.

This done, I looked about me. A man, who, seemingly oblivious to the commotion about him, stood gazing out at the prospect of snow-tonsured peaks, attracted my notice. His clothing marked him out – while we men under the spell of gold were clad alike in hooded furs and oil-slickers, and the natives were dressed in garments sewn from bearskin and deerhide, he wore a stained and torn military greatcoat, a thick woolen scarf, and a beaver hat with earflaps which were tied under his chin with string. His thick matted beard and the locks of hair curling from beneath his hat were speckled with gray, and his back was bowed, though the impression this conveyed of decrepitude was at odds with the suggestion of sinewy vigor there was about him. I could not reach a firm conclusion about his age, though, for his back was to me, and his face, mostly hidden. He carried only a small satchel, seemed to have no pack bearers, and I wondered how he had managed to get past the Mountie checkpoint. It appeared he found something enthralling in the scene before him; perhaps he perceived evidence of the Maker’s workings even in that desolate place. I, too, looked out at the view, but it gave me no solace: I felt no numinous awe, saw only a harsh unforgiving landscape – I had lost my faith on losing my dear wife.

My musings were soon disturbed – a man a little distance away took off his footwear, as I had, and, discovering several of his toes grey, shriveled, threw a conniption fit.

The afflicted stampeder was a very small wiry man, with a face like the blade of a hatchet, honed to keenness by life’s grind. His eyes were shrewd, his lank greasy blonde hair straggled down over his ears and nape, his incisors were prominent, and his beard was pale against his red chapped skin. In short, he was of the type of the luckless rat-like petty miscreant of innumerable popular novels. He was railing about his ill luck and cussing in gruff tones, casting about him with his gimlet eyes and fixing other wayfarers with his glare as if he blamed them for his
suffering.

The rat’s travelling companion stood by, looking down, dull, agape, at his friend’s ruined feet. No two more dissimilar individuals could be imagined. By contrast to the rat, his fellow was tall, hulking, had hands like ham hocks, thick matted hair, a full grizzled beard. In fact, he resembled nothing so much as a bear. And, or so it appeared from the way his mouth was hanging open to catch the swirling flakes of snow, was something of a dolt.

After a few minutes, the rat’s bawling began to roil some of the other stampeders. There were grumbles, then a brute yelled at him, called for him to hold his tongue, keep his head. The brute’s nose was squashed flat against his face, probably a legacy of a life of brawling, and that, combined with his apparent irascibility, gave him the air of a pit dog.

‘I won’t take no orders from someone looks like the kind whose sister’s also his daughter and his lover,’ came the rat’s jeering response.

The pit dog was bemused at first – it took him a while to unravel the insult. Then he snarled, drew a Bowie knife from a sheath at his belt.

‘I’m goin’ uh cut you open from crotch to craw, you stinkin’ weasel,’ he snarled, then bounded at the rat. The bear stepped into the pit dog’s path, swatted him to the ground with one of his giant paws.

Men of the pit dog’s party pulled blades and flew at the bear to avenge the insult. Most on the ledge gathered around, yawping; only the dignified Indian porters backed away, looked on the ruckus with disdain.

On hearing the uproar, the man in the tattered greatcoat turned away from the outlook. My conjectures as to his age were ended then – judging by his countenance, he was only a few years out of his youth, though his hoar-flecked hair and stoop, together with something I had not noticed before, that he had
lost his right arm at the shoulder – his sleeve was pinned across his chest and flapped in the wind – gave him the air of one ravaged by a hard life and old beyond his span.

The fight on the ledge was reminiscent of a scene I had witnessed once in a pit in southern California, when they baited a grizzly with lions brought over from the Dark Continent. Just as the lions were no match for that bear, the pit dog’s friends were no match for this. At the end of the brawl, the big fellow was still standing, panting through clenched teeth, and, though steeped in blood running from many shallow wounds to his arms and chest, barely hurt. His adversaries, however, had fared badly – lay strewn about nursing cracked ribs and broken heads. The rat sat looking smugly on, his frostbite, for the moment, forgotten.

That would have been the end, had not the pit dog, recovered from the blow that had knocked him down, sneaked up behind the bear, blade in hand, meaning, it seemed, to hamstring him. At that the one-armed man took a revolver from his greatcoat, leveled it at the pit dog, and shouted, ‘Enough!’