BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (17 page)

"And then you're drifting on smooth current
again. The river spreads out and you steer through a herd of little
islands for fifty more miles to what was left of Fort Selkirk,
after the Sticks burned it down seventy or eighty years ago. That's
where the Pelly come in from the east, and you can finally say you
reached the Yukon.

"Arthur Harper had a trading post at Fort
Selkirk and J.J. Healey wanted his company to trade there too, so
both the ACC and NAT was running steamboats up to the Pelly from
the mouth of the Yukon when the river was clear. Though by the time
Gig and his men got there, Harper was an old man headed back
Outside and his partner Jack McQuesten was getting ACC set up at
Circle."

"Wait," I tell Zimmerman. I flick open his
folding knife and reference the triangle he's already carved, with
the junction of the table and the wall as its base. "Aleutians," I
say, pointing to the etched line that runs from his corner to the
peak of the triangle between us. "Coast Range," I add, pointing to
my side of the triangle. And then finding the divot a few inches
from my corner, "Juneau." Switching the Colt to my right hand, I
lay the open knife on the table. "You still haven't carved the
river."

He picks up the knife and holds its point
down, maybe to reassure me. Then he studies the end of the table
opposite the wall and carves a line a few inches from that edge.
The line starts at my side and runs to his, smiling away from us to
indicate it's a latitude line and the free end of the table is
north. He stabs the table an inch south of the center of this
arc.

"Circle City," he says. Then he etches a
curve from Circle back toward his own abdomen. It's shaped a bit
like a ladle, curling up as it approaches his edge of the table. At
the lip of the ladle, he chips the table at the edge. "Port of St.
Michael," he says, then gestures to the western void between
himself and the table and says "Bering Sea."

He returns the knife point to Circle, raises
his washed-out eyes to mine, then traces a line all the way back to
Juneau. The line undulates like a spent ribbon, but otherwise runs
steadily southeast.

"The Yukon ain't straight like that from mile
to mile," he says, "or even day to day. But that's the lay of
it."

Then starting at Juneau, he brings the knife
back toward Circle, tapping the table every few inches and calling
out the places. Lynn Canal and Dyea. Chilkoot Pass. Lindeman Lake.
Bennett, Tagish, Marsh. The rapids. Lake Laberge. He lets the knife
point run a few inches, then etches a line from the Yukon due east
toward my side of the table.

"Pelly River," he says. An inch toward
Circle, he carves a line from the Yukon that heads west and south,
toward the wall. "White River."

He proceeds and etches the Stewart River as
an eastward flare parallel to the Pelly. Another inch and the
Sixtymile River comes in from the west.

"Sixtymile got its name 'cause it's sixty
miles upriver from Fort Reliance, where Harper and McQuesten built
the first trading post on the Yukon."

Then two parallel rivers, both entering the
Yukon from the east. "Indian River and Klondike River," he says.
Just north of the Klondike, Zimmerman stabs out Fort Reliance on
the Yukon's east bank. Then he carves the Fortymile River as an
arching scratch west, explaining that it's forty miles downriver
from Fort Reliance.

"The camp at Fortymile was for miners
prospecting back in the hills on Miller Creek, and that was the
biggest Yukon camp until Circle City come along." By now the knife
point has covered three quarters of the distance from Juneau to
Circle.

With the Fortymile identified, Zimmerman
seems finished carving tributaries for now. "So where did we leave
Gig and Nokes?" I ask.

"Fort Selkirk," he says. "Where the Pelly
come in, and ACC built a trading post next to the ruins. They
pulled ashore, but whoever Harper put in charge wasn't there, and
on the shelves was just tea and furs, so they cooked a meal and
spent a night in the log house. Then back on the river."

"A hundred miles down from Fort Selkirk you
got the White River, draining high mountains to the west. So much
fast cloudy water you knowed it come from five hundred streams. But
you couldn't pole a boat against the current, so miners left that
country alone.

"Ten miles down, the Stewart come in from the
east, a big river of dark water running slow. The Stewart run back
two hundred miles into the hills, and you could pole up the edges
and work the bars, find flour gold or leaf gold almost anywhere you
look. But you'd be lucky to pan out fifteen dollars a day, and most
days you'd get half that or less. No one struck rich ground on that
river, before or after the Klondike, but there was always someone
looking for it.

"When Gig and Nokes and the Swedes got to the
Stewart, they saw the scow from Miles Canyon tied up near its
mouth. Gig was sleeping on the raft, so Nokes kept floating
downstream in one canoe while the Swedes paddled over to the scow
in the other. One of the men on board seen the canoe and come over
to the rail they talked for a while.

"The Swedes paddled back to the raft and
Lindfors told Gig and Nokes about it. He said them fellers on the
scow spent two days poling up the Stewart and panning on the bars,
and they was going to start prospecting on the creeks. They was
still headed down the Yukon to Fortymile, but there was no hurry if
they found good diggings on the Stewart.

"Lindfors said one of the fellers, a man
named Wylie, pitched his tent near the bank of the Stewart. The
others was either sleeping on the scow or upstream panning the
bars. In late spring, the sun only drops below the hills for a few
hours a day, so it don't get dark and what time it is don't matter.
You sleep when you get tired and every man keeps his own clock.

"A dog come up to Wylie's tent and was nosing
around outside. There's a Siwash village further up the Stewart,
and them Injun dogs is born thieves. If you got food or leather in
your cache and they can reach it, they'll steal and eat every ounce
of it. In the summer the dogs got to carry packs when the village
is moving, but when the Siwashes is camped they let 'em forage. So
the dog sniffing around Wylie's tent was probably a malamute
sled-dog.

"Wylie woke up when he heared a noise
outside, and then he seen a shadow moving on the wall of his tent.
He reached for his rifle, propped himself up, and shot through the
canvas. Hit the dog square in the chest. Wylie said afterward that
he must of done it in his sleep... said he was dreaming a Siwash
girl had come to kill him.

"A miner on the scow come running when he
heared the shot, and he finds Wylie outside the tent, standing over
the dog, and the dog is bleeding from the chest and mouth. The dog
takes another breath or two and dies. The other miners come over
and they decide they seen enough of the Stewart. They need to take
the scow back down to the Yukon right away. In a day or two,
someone would come looking for that dog. Probably with other dogs
that could find the dead dog's blood. A good sled-dog is worth
about its weight in gold to a Siwash – the way they live depends on
'em.

"After he told Lindfors that story, the miner
on the scow said there probably wasn't no Indian girl after Wylie,
but maybe her daddy will try to kill him now."

Chapter 19

"By the time you drifted to the Stewart
River, the Yukon is most of a mile wide and you got bars and small
islands everywhere you look. They had to keep two men on the raft
to pole off the bars, with one canoe up front finding the channel
and the other behind to offload weight if it got stuck. Twenty
miles past the Stewart, the Sixtymile River come in from the west.
That's where Joe Ladue built his trading post, after he gave up
prospecting. Built a sawmill there too. Guess he figured that if he
couldn't strike gold in the Yukon, he could sell sluice-box lumber
to them that did. And there was always a few dozen miners camped
around Ladue's post for the winter.

"The Sixtymile River come into the Yukon
sixty miles above Fort Reliance, and the Fortymile River come in
forty miles below, so the mouths is a hundred miles apart. But you
can follow either river to the headwaters and end up in about the
same place. And miners from Sixtymile and Fortymile was working
side by side back in the hills on Miller Creek and Glacier Creek.
Both creeks was just a few miles long, and already staked end to
end by spring of '96. Along with Birch Creek at Circle, that was
the richest ground in the Yukon before the Klondike opened up.

"When they got to Sixtymile, Gig and Nokes
and the Swedes tied up their boats and drank a pot of tea with Joe
Ladue, a short, dark feller who looked like a French-Indian
half-breed but was a born promoter. They asked him what he knowed
about the diggings on Mosquito Creek in the Fortymile District,
'cause Nokes heared it might be as rich as Miller or Glacier.

"Back on them creeks, the mosquitoes rise
like a cloud from the moss on the banks. You got long sleeves and
gloves and a buttoned collar, full beard and a hat, but you still
need netting over your face and neck. Then so many will land that
you can't see through the net, and the whine is so loud you can
barely talk or think. Some men get too swelled up from bites to
work, and some break down or go crazy. Nokes figured that whoever
named it Mosquito Creek must of been honest, so maybe the prospects
on that creek was honest too.

"Ladue was always glad to see new men coming
into the Yukon. He figured more prospectors meant more gold getting
dug up. Then after the dust started changing hands, everyone with
something to sell would get a bit of it. But he told Nokes that
Mosquito Creek was already staked end to end, same as Miller and
Glacier.

"He said they should go up the Indian River,
which come into the Yukon from the east, just a few hours drift
downstream. Ladue told 'em that twenty men was prospecting bars and
creeks on the Indian, and that Robbie Henderson found gold leaf at
Australia Creek, which was a main fork of the Indian seventy-five
miles back from the Yukon.

"That's the same Robbie Henderson who climbed
into the hills a month later and crossed the divide between the
Indian and the Klondike, then found ten cents to the pan at a
little headwater up near Solomon's Dome. Ten cents is a strike, and
when that creek started to look rich he named it Gold Bottom and
went back to Ladue's post to get supplies and tell others about it.
But that was in July or August of '96, and Gig and Nokes was
already passing by in June.

"Still, Ladue told 'em what he already told
Henderson and the rest: there was good prospects on the Indian and
nothing on the Klondike. Nokes only believed the last part. They
spent two nights in Ladue's log house, and he sold 'em split logs
and planks to fix up the raft. Then they bought some smoked caribou
meat and pushed off downriver.

"While they was drifting, Lindfors asked
whether they should spend a few days prospecting on the Indian, but
Nokes said no. Said he seen the Indian, seen the Klondike, and
neither of them rivers looked right. Both was shallow and clear,
and both come in from the east. Like all them Yukon oldtimers, he
knowed rivers from the west carried more gold. They ran fast and
cloudy, drained steeper mountains. West of the Yukon, pup streams
and creeks was wearing out the rocks and grinding gold out of the
veins.

"Rivers like the Indian and Klondike drained
the Mackenzie Mountains to the east. They was good for fishing and
not much else. And their creeks wandered down through meadows of
grass and willows and muck, which everyone knowed was only good for
moose pasture. So Nokes said they wasn't stopping at the Indian,
but if the Swedes was curious, they could prospect a little on the
Klondike, which was four hours further downstream. They could
follow one of its creeks until they got their fill of niggerhead
swamps. While they was doing that, he and Gig would take the rifle
and try to shoot a moose.

"They tied up the raft on the Yukon bank just
below the Klondike, where the Siwashes had rigged a shed for drying
salmon out of canvas and poles. The salmon was still weeks
downstream, so the Indians wasn't selling any fish. A couple of 'em
repairing nets said they was working with George Carmack to get
ready for the salmon run, but Lying George was spending a few days
at their village twenty miles up the Klondike. His wife was a
Tagish, and George spoke all the Injun tongues... talked to
Chilkoots or Tagish or Sticks like a native. Almost looked like a
Siwash himself. He could handle a shovel and a pan, but Carmack
wasn't driven by gold like most of them oldtimers was. He thought
there was better odds catching fish.

"The next morning Gig and Nokes and the
Swedes paddled their canoes up the Klondike, which ain't much of a
struggle, even in early June. Two miles up, Rabbit Creek come in
from the south, so they pulled the canoes onto the bank and headed
up the creek on foot. The Swedes took a pan and a shovel and Gig
had the rifle. You start by climbing through spruce, and every mile
or so the Swedes would cut a shovel into the creek bank and wash
out a pan. Never found more than trace colors, which you see on
every creek in the Yukon.

"After a few miles the valley opens up and
the spruce give way to pasture. The creek can't decide which way is
uphill, so it winds around like a snake. From a distance the meadow
looks like good walking, so you might try a straight path to its
head, but that ain't something you would choose to do twice.
Niggerheads is little mounds of solid mud with waist-high grass
growing from the tops. None of 'em is bigger than a foot across –
if they was, they'd stay froze all year round and only moss could
grow on 'em. When you step on a niggerhead, it rolls to one side or
the other, and sometimes you slide off into the muck between 'em,
which might be knee-deep. So most sourdoughs would rather walk
horseshoe bends up a creek-bed or bushwhack spruce than cross a
niggerhead swamp.