Alaska (81 page)

They were on the river, fortunately, when they came upon those remarkably fine cliffs which hemmed it in at the old-time mining settlement that some hopeful prospector had christened Belle Isle and which later realists would call by the more appropriate name of Eagle. It was a noble spot, rimmed in by mountains which occasionally formed cliffs delineating the river. There was an island, which in summer, Klope conceded, might be pretty enough to warrant the Belle,

but what he liked especially about Belle Isle was its sense of being a little universe of its own, and when he saw in rapid succession a moose, a pair of red foxes and a line of caribou, he supposed that the animals felt the same way.

The spot was memorable also because it was here, or close to it, that American territory along the Yukon ended and Canadian began. Beyond Eagle, John Klope would pass for the first time into foreign country, but he had no one to discuss this with because to Sarqaq, there were no boundaries from the North Pole to the South, it was all land which had to be dealt with in the same way. When the temperature dropped to minus-sixty-six, you dug in; when it rose to a comfortable minus-ten, you made as many miles a day as you could.

When they were about forty miles out of Dawson they were once more overtaken by severe cold, this time accompa—

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nied by a stout wind blowing up the Yukon from the north, and were forced to hunker down in an area of snow and scrub trees. Placing their sled against the direction from which the wind came, they cut trees to provide additional shelter and allowed the dogs to burrow into the drifts for what heat could be accumulated there.

When better weather prevailed, Sarqaq suggested they both hunt for moose or caribou to take into the starving town, and after making arrangements as to how each would return to the river in order to regain the sled, they set forth, Sarqaq with two of the spare dogs, Klope with the help of Breed and a one-dog harness with which to bring back meat if any was taken.

It was a bitterly cold, lonesome hunt, with both dog and man suffering from the extreme weather, and so forbidding was the cold that no animals were on the move. Klope shot nothing and returned to the Yukon, that great river locked in ice, in bad temper.

Sarqaq was not there, and since darkness came each December day sooner than on the day before, it was obvious that unless he was found, and quickly, night would fall and the two men would face some eighteen hours apart.

The first thing Klope did was build a smudge fire, but the force of the wind soon dispersed what should have been the signal pillar; however, he added more wood in hopes that if Sarqaq smelled smoke, he would be able to trace it to its source. Registering carefully in his mind every turn he made, he moved out in widening circles, shouting for his companion but receiving no reply, and he was about to retrace his steps when Breed, with hearing more acute than his, began to whine and look to the north. There, after a demanding tramp, they found Sarqaq and his two dogs beside a dead moose whose unexpected death throes had wrecked the Eskimo's left ankle.

Stoically, Sarqaq had waited, certain that if any companion he had ever traveled with could find him, it would be this stalwart American. When Klope knelt over him he said: 'Kill moose. Run to knife. Head come around, horn smash ankle.'

Klope said: 'I'll help you to the sled,' but Sarqaq was too much a man of the tundra to allow that: 'We go, wolf eat moose. You get sled, I guard.' And he refused to leave the kill.

So Klope returned to the river, harnessed the dogs, and drove the sled to where Sarqaq waited. In the lowering darkness they butchered the moose, attended to Sarqaq's ankle, erected a protection against the bitter night wind, and settled in till dawn.

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In brutal cold they made their plans. Sarqaq, hobbling about in tremendous pain, gave the impression of a man who had suffered a slight bump: 'We harness all dogs, even Breed.' When this was done with makeshift hitches, he insisted that all good cuts from the dead moose be stowed on the sled, which became possible because the dogs had finished the initial stores of dried salmon. Then he and Klope released the dogs, allowing them to gorge themselves on the offal and the scraps.

Now came an amazing decision. Klope had supposed that Sarqaq would ride atop the loaded sled and that the extra dogs would provide hauling power to carry both him and the moose, but the Eskimo, always mindful of his dogs and the purpose of this trip, refused to ride. With the aid of a stick and one hand on the sled, he proposed to walk the remaining miles to Dawson City.

He started valiantly, maintaining a pace that astonished Klope, but as Sarqaq pointed out: 'S'pose me alone? No help? Me walk all same.'

Drawing upon the inherited strength that had brought his ancestors across the Bering Sea and then enabled them to survive in the world's most inclement surroundings, Sarqaq maintained his pace for about an hour, but when they were safely back on the Yukon, he relaxed his terrifying determination and fainted.

Halting the dogs, Klope struggled to get him onto the top of the sled, tied him there, shouted to the dogs 'Hi!' and off they went.

They spent the two final nights on the river, cold and frightened as to what might happen to Sarqaq's leg, but next morning they had traveled only a short distance when they caught sight of Dawson, that turbulent city where thousands of men pinched themselves in between mountain and river. Klope stopped the dogs, leaned forward on the handles of the sled, and bowed his head from exhaustion. He had completed one of the world's most demanding trips: nearly four hundred miles by train to Seattle, three thousand miles by sea to St. Michael, seventy miles along the Bering Sea to the Yukon, nearly fourteen hundred miles up that stubborn river to Dawson. He had earned the right to find his place in that city and try his luck on its gold fields.

WHEN THEY BURST INTO DAWSON, WITH DESPERATE MEN firing off guns to welcome them, Klope acted vigorously: he sold the cargo of food, including the moose meat, for a small fortune; he persuaded Sarqaq to give him Breed, which the 493

Eskimo did because he knew that this misbegotten dog, so useless in the traces, had saved his life; and he rushed out to the Klondike, to learn that every inch of both the Bonanza and Eldorado shorelines had long since been staked. When laughing men, secure on their own claims, told him that there might be free sites about four miles away, where there was no gold, he stormed back into town prepared to fight anyone bare-knuckle for a claim.

Men who had been on the fields for a couple of years had learned to stay clear of newcomers who were semiwild with disappointment like Klope, and since this particular specimen had that big Eskimo dog that bared its teeth, they gave him extra room.

It was probable, the more experienced men thought, that this one would wind up with a bullet through his chest before long.

They did not know that John Klope was quite a different type of person; he did not propose to die in some blazing shoot-out in a Yukon alley. He was angry not at the men who had filed on all the promising sites, but at himself for having arrived so late. He did not stop to reflect that from the time he had heard of the Klondike, on 20 July 1897, to this sixteenth of December in the same year, he had wasted scarcely a day. The layover in Seattle had been minimal; the stop in St. Michael needed to rebuild the

Jos. Parker

had been inescapable; while the stay at Fort Yukon had been necessary for him to complete arrangements with Sarqaq. Even so, he cursed his luck.

Now his problem was: Where do I find a place to sleep? and there was no easy solution, for most of the town was housed in tents whose temperatures at night could drop to minus-forty. Rarely had so many men lived in such misery, and he could find no one to take him in, even though he had saved lives by bringing in the cargo of food.

The main thoroughfare of Dawsonthe entire place had been empty swampland only a year and a half before was a gaudy stretch called Front Street, with saloons galore, a theater, a dentist, a photographer and forty other kinds of establishments for the separation of miners from their gold. No spot along Front Street was hospitable to Klope and his dog, but there was another street parallel to Front, nothing more than a line of dives, called Paradise Alley, and here in ramshackle cribs lived the women who had come to service the miners.

Some had climbed the Chilkoot Pass, others had been brought up the Yukon on the Jos.

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by their pimps, and some came as actresses, seamstresses or would-be cooks. Failing to find the employment they had hoped for, they 494

wound up on Paradise Alley in whatever kind of pitiful housing they or their pimps could find.

, In one of the more commodious cribs lived a large, noisy, blowzy Belgian woman in her early thirties. She was one of eleven professional prostitutes who had been conscripted as a gang in the port of Antwerp, brought across the ocean and across the United States to work the gold fields. They had been imported, the locals claimed, by an enterprising German businessman who knew what a gold rush needed, and they were some of the best workmen, to use an odd term, in the Klondike.

The lead woman in the biggest crib was known widely and favorably as the Belgian Mare, and when Klope complained openly about being unable to file a claim or find a place to sleep, an American in a bar told him: 'I spent four nights at the Belgian Mare's. She rents an extra bed.'

So down Paradise Alley, Klope picked his way to the Mare's crib, and she did have an extra bed and she was in the habit of renting it out. Of course, there were only flimsy walls separating the rooms, so that anyone renting the bedroom almost had to participate in the Mare's lively and repeated profession, but Klope, always a loner, was able to blot out the reality of the Mare's occupation.

He was, however, grateful to her for her generosity, and especially for her good will, because although she spoke no English, she did go out of her way to make him comfortable, as she did with all men. It was when he took her out to breakfast one morning sourdough flapjacks and moose meat patties that he met the man whose claim he would ultimately inherit. He was Sam Craddick, a disgruntled miner from California, one whose father had struck it moderately rich in the Gold Rush of 1849, the real one they spelled in capital letters. Craddick had expected to find lodes of gold similar to those in California, and the idea of washing tons of sand to find flecks of placer gold disgusted him.

'Have you a claim?' Klope asked, and the man said: 'When I reached here last summer, all the good sites were taken. I met the Mare same way you did.'

'So you staked no claim?'

'Hell yes, I staked one. But not down on the streams where the gold is. High up on a hill overlooking Eldorado.'

'Why would you stake up there?'

And while the Mare wolfed her flapjacks, for she was a prodigious eater, Craddick used the slab-sided breakfast table on two trestles to explain mining theory to Klope: 'Today, yes, you find gold along the streams down here. And that's 495

where you'll always find it, time out of mind, if it ain't in a lode like in California.'

'You think the mother lode lies under the hills?'

'I do not. I don't think there's a mother lode in the whole of Canada, or Alaska either.'

'Then why did you claim, on a hill?'

The miner said: 'Today's gold, yes, it's found down here in the running stream you see. But yesterday's gold, and maybe the bigger lot where was the stream that captured it?'

'You mean, there could've been another river?'

'That's what the experts say.'

'But wouldn't it be lower? Not higher?'

'Ten years ago it would be lower. But let's say a million years ago? Who in hell knows where it could've been?'

Klope asked: 'You mean it could've been much higher than today's river?'

'You ever see pictures of the Grand Canyon?'

'Everybody has.'

'Remember how that little river cut that deep canyon? Maybe it was something like that.' Craddick stared at Klope, then asked abruptly: 'You want to buy my claim?

The whole damned thing?'

'Why would you sell?'

'Because I'm fed up. This is hell country compared to California.'

Klope thought: He's saying just what that fellow from California said. Maybe the Klondike is too tough for these men. Out loud he asked: 'How big a claim?'

Craddick, aware that he had on his line a buyer on whom he might unload his mine, said honestly: 'Standard size. Five hundred yards parallel to the stream. Usual distance east and west.'

Klope interrupted the Belgian woman eating her pancakes: 'Is he a good fellow, yes?'

The woman laughed, embraced Craddick, and cried: 'Damn good man.' She called for other men in the tent restaurant to testify, and when with the help of hand signals she explained the question, the men confirmed her opinion: 'He is honest and he does hold a legitimate claim on the hills above Eldorado.'

But when the Mare started out to defend the reputation of a man whom she knew to be reliable, it was difficult to stop her, and now she left the restaurant, stood in the middle of the frozen street, and with her right fingers to her lips uttered a piercing whistle. From a store midway down the street a young man in the red and blue uniform of the North West Mounted Police appeared. When he saw, as he suspected he

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would, the robust figure of the Belgian Mare, he walked sedately down to see what was the matter this time.

He was a fine-looking officer, twenty-eight years old, clean-shaven, and with the frank, open manner that betrayed his origin in some small Canadian town far to the east. He was Sergeant Will Kirby, taller than the average member of his distinguished force but no heavier. Since his job had required him to learn French, he conversed easily with the Belgian woman, who told him that the American Klope was demanding references from Craddick, whom she knew to be a trustworthy man.

When Kirby called the men out from the saloon, for he had been taught by his superiors to avoid both saloons and brothels, he recognized the miner at once: 'Sam Craddick is a good man. I've known him more than a year.'