Drifting Home (13 page)

And then, as we touch into the bank, we notice two canoes parked in the shadows and, looking above us, we see a family of five preparing supper. “Oh, Lord!” says Patsie. “People!” These are the first river travellers we have encountered in more than two hundred miles and it is as if a spell has been broken. Until this moment, the river has been ours and ours alone. We have been able to stop anywhere, picnic anywhere, pitch our tents anywhere without fear of intrusion. After the fevered campgrounds of the Outside, where the tents and trailers are lined up like suburban bungalows, the Yukon has been a separate world; it is almost as if we had moved back in time to an era before man walked the earth–except that the signs of man have been everywhere. Now man has appeared once more and chosen the best campfire position, too. I can see the annoyance on the younger children's faces.

“Look,” says Janet, sternly. “They're probably just as unhappy to see us turning up here in our four great boats with all our equipment and all you complaining kids, as you are to see them.”

She climbs the bank to greet them with the same warm, friendly smile I first saw thirty-three years ago on my first day on the campus of the University of British Columbia. I thought then, foolishly, that the smile was especially for me but I soon learned that she smiled that way on everyone. King or peasant, movie star or dead beat, all are treated with identical good humour, for she is a woman without guile or snobbery. She would greet the Prince of Wales or a skid row alcoholic in exactly the same cheerful fashion without either deferring or condescending and if she had a sandwich in her hand or a bar of chocolate she would offer each a bite of it. So now she climbs the bank and walks over to the woman at the top–a handsome woman in her thirties–and exchanges greetings.

The strangers are from New Jersey. He is the vice-president of a big Manhattan bank and both are ardent campers. With their three young children they have brought their canoes down the Teslin river in order to avoid White-horse, since they are trying to escape the blight of civilization, too. They explain that they go camping every summer to some interesting corner of the continent. When Janet asks them why they chose the Yukon, they tell her it is all because of a book they read last winter, a book about the great stampede. Janet, with an enormous chuckle, points down at me, struggling up the bank with a large kitbag, and tells them I wrote it.

The salmon we bought at Carmacks has thawed and we decide to bake it for supper. The fish is easily filleted and cut into fifteen pieces, for Patsie, too, has decided she will break her habit this one time. Each piece is wrapped separately in aluminum foil and placed on an iron griddle on top of the hot coals. Janet includes a little sauce made up of lemon juice, dried onions, celery leaves and soup vegetables (all pre-soaked) together with a little tarragon, salt and pepper.

It is a memorable meal. Nobody is in a rush because tomorrow we can all sleep in. We start with a punch made from lemon and orange crystals and navy rum. Then there are mugs of chicken soup, spiced up by Janet from her supply of condiments. The salmon is fragrant and juicy in its foil wrapping. With it, we eat potatoes, baked in their skins, tinned tomatoes and freeze-dried green peas. For dessert we have bowls of apricots and sweet biscuits. The coffee is made from a dark European roast in a granite pot, with ice cold water from a nearby creek brought to a boil and then removed instantly from the fire.

It is Perri's birthday and our neighbours arrive at the end of our meal with a real birthday cake–a strawberry shortcake, actually baked in a portable reflector oven–complete with one large white candle in the centre. (These people, I think, are even better equipped than we are.) Perri's face glows with gratitude. She is eight today and my mind goes back seven years and five months to the morning when we picked her up from the Children's Aid in Toronto. The whole family assembled for this ceremony and Peggy Anne, the youngest, was chosen to go down the hall with the social worker and bring back the new baby. Thus Perri became Peggy Anne's baby, a gift that prevented any chance of jealousy. Back up the hall she came, holding on to the skirt of the social worker, in whose arms reposed a small, dark bundle. The little head poked out from a swaddling shawl and, beneath an enormous mop of curly black hair, two huge brown eyes regarded us with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. But now on her eighth birthday, she is very much a Berton and a Deaner to boot.

We invite our neighbours to join us at the campfire. Danny Roberts, the Yukon Indian who acts as caretaker for the ghost town, is invited too, with his wife and daughter. Another boat slips in with a lone male occupant. “The rest of the party decided to stay in Whitehorse,” he tells us, “but I was damned if I was going to do that, so I came on alone.”

I make a jugful of hot rum and the campfire program suggested this morning begins with songs. The performances that follow are better than I have a right to expect in view of the hasty preparations. Penny has planned an imaginative rendering of an old ballad called “Johnny Verbeck,” about a butcher who invents a sausage machine to grind up his neighbours' cats and dogs and is accidentally ground up himself. She has assembled a large cast of the elder children, wearing, alternately, dark jeans and long white underwear so that when they lie down and kick their legs they form the black and white keys of a piano. While the song is being sung by the owners of the legs, Perri, with great aplomb, acts as pianist. Some of the audience think that the piano is supposed to represent Johnny Verbeck's sausage machine but this only enhances the effect. Then Patsie, who has been rehearsing her own group, gives a spirited rendition of Lear's “The Owl and the Pussycat.” In an inspired piece of casting Paul takes the falsetto role of Pussycat while Peggy Anne, in a low bass, plays the Owl. Again, Perri is an enormous hit in successive roles as Bong Tree, Piggy Wig and Turkey and when the two leading characters dance by the light of the moon to a slow waltz, Perri suddenly breaks into “Zowie Wowie Baby!” and the audience breaks up. Next, Peter and Berton perform a kind of double monologue in which they pretend to be a couple of Wows making rude comments in hippie talk about our group. Nobody is spared, including the newcomers and the Danny Roberts family–an inclusion which hugely pleases them. And then, after several campfire songs I perform what Patsie describes in the log as my “usual superb spellbinding act of Dan McGrew.”

We have saved Skip Burns for the last since he has promised to tell several ghost stories, all of which he swears are true. He is a born performer and within minutes he has most of the audience believing that the eerie incidents, which he insists he has actually witnessed, really did happen. I steal a look at Peggy Anne, leaning forward on her log. Her blue eyes–the only blue eyes in this generation of Bertons (my father's eyes were the same blue) – are wide with wonder and I can see that, as usual, she is both fascinated and repelled, as she is by all stories about witches, werewolves, vampires and other creatures of the night. She loves to be terrified. Watching her now, with the fire flickering on her round eager face, the solemn backdrop of the forest just behind us and the broad ribbon of the river below us, bright under the rising moon, I think of other campfires in other times and my own spellbound terror of things that lurked just behind the dark curtain of the evergreens. It was not spirits that I feared in the Yukon, nor vampires or monsters, for I had never heard of Frankenstein or Count Dracula. Not even that authentic northern ghost, The Walker of the Snows, the silent hunter who leaves no footprints in the snow, sent more than a mild chill up my spine. I feared something much more real and easily comprehended; I feared the wolves with their red eyes and their white, sharp teeth. In my imagination I could see them padding stealthily through the underbrush, waiting to pounce and drag me off. The fear was real because the wolves were real. At night, when my parents were out at an auction bridge party, I could hear the wolves howling in the hills above Dawson. There was nothing between our house and those hills, neither moat nor palisade. The forests drifted on, almost forever, to the very rim of the Arctic, and I imagined them to be full of wolves. In the Carnegie library I had read many stories of these animals and none was calculated to allay my terror. Some were tales of the Canadian north by such writers as James Oliver Curwood, all about lonely trappers, huddling in front of a dying fire, while the encircling ring of wolves closed in. Others were set in Russia where wolves were said to chase sleighs loaded with kulaks who tossed out their children, one by one, to appease the beasts. No wonder when the wolves howled in the hills, the skin on my backbone prickled. Once, on one of the islands in the river, my father showed me the fresh track of a wolf–an enormously long paw print–and the idea that the animal had actually passed that way, perhaps minutes before, and might be even now lurking in the underbrush, drove me into an inner panic. But my most dreadful memory goes back before the days when I could read, to a summer afternoon when we took a picnic to the hills above our home. We had spread a cloth on the ground and were unwrapping the sandwiches when my father decided to walk over to Thomas Gulch, a small ravine nearby, to get a pail of water. I came with him, but the gulch was steep and he told me to wait at the top while he made his way down to the stream. That wait seemed interminable. Suddenly, I was surrounded by the terrible silence of the North–“the silence you most can hear,” as Service calls it–no sound at all, save the rattling of the aspens. I called for my father but there was no answering call. For all I knew he had been devoured by a wolf. I called again: silence. The forest began to press in on me and for the first time in my life I felt all alone and lost in the immensity of the wilderness. I began to run, sobbing aloud and repeating over and over again the lines of The Lord's Prayer. I felt the Lord had answered me for I came upon an old cart track in the mosses and this comforting symbol of man's presence urged me on. Then–it must have been only a few minutes later but it seemed forever–I burst into a clearing and there were my mother and my sister laying out the picnic. I felt an enormous wave of relief. “I was lost!” I panted. “
Lost!
” Neither of them seemed to take any notice. A moment later my father appeared with the pail of water. “Why did you come back ahead of me?” he asked and I said nothing because I was ashamed to show my fear. But for many years after that I could not erase the horror of that afternoon from my mind.

Skip finishes his last tale and then, with a howl, he pounces upon Peggy Anne who screams in terror and delight. None of the family wants Peggy Anne in their tent tonight because we all know that after a horror movie or a ghost story she stays awake most of the night. At last, it is agreed that she will stay with Janet and me. By now it is everybody's bed time; Perri has already dropped off to sleep on her log, her face for once in repose and her stomach full of birthday cake. We make our way through the gloom to our beds and the visitors move off to theirs and I look past the orange triangle of my own tent, pitched in the lee of the abandoned Anglican church, and gaze at the hazy contours of the forest, where the white limbs of the birches stand out in the murk like dead men's bones, and I utter a silent thank you that the wolves, at least, are not howling on this night.

DAY EIGHT

N
obody shouts “rise and shine” this morning, because nobody is going anywhere. The sun is already high in a cloudless sky when the first risers tumble from their sleeping bags.

The view from the bank where we prepare breakfast is breathtaking. Spread out before us in a huge semi-circle is the river; beyond it runs a continuous cliff of black basalt. Directly across from us, the Pelly cuts through the wall and mingles its muddy waters with the mainstream. Behind us, the empty village stretches for more than half a mile along the bank.

Selkirk is the oldest settlement on the river. On an island, across from us, is the site of the old Hudson's Bay post that Robert Campbell established in 1848 and fled four years later as the Chilkats from the coast burned it to the ground. Campbell then made a record-breaking snowshoe journey, three thousand miles from this point to the nearest railhead at Crow Wing, Minnesota–an incredible feat. His company did not return to the confluence of the Pelly and the Yukon but in 1898 the Yukon Field Force, two hundred and three soldiers from the Royal Canadian Rifles, the Royal Canadian Dragoons and the Royal Canadian Artillery, made their headquarters here. Their task was to help the Mounted Police keep the peace and prevent the Territory from falling into the hands of the Americans who were pouring down the river by the tens of thousands. Until the steamboat era ended, Selkirk remained a thriving community.

After breakfast, in groups of twos and threes, we begin to explore the settlement. The Anglican church directly behind our campfire is in almost perfect condition, though empty of pews–the floors still polished, the stained glass windows unshattered. In the Mission School next door, the desks sit in neat rows and the last spelling lesson remains scribbled in chalk on the blackboard. We find a supply cupboard bulging with missionary tracts that date back to 1901. They contain stories of dedicated churchmen bringing the Word to the natives of Africa and Asia; but none appear to have been read.

Patsie, Paul and I walk up the old roadway that runs along the river, poking our noses into the various stores and cabins. The police station and the Taylor and Drury trading post are still marked by the original signs. Farther upstream, the cabins are in greater disrepair, doors hanging from broken hinges, windows smashed, some roofs crushed by the weight of the winters' snows. Here again we find the refuse of settlement: a rusted bedstead poking through a tangle of briar roses and the ungainly skeleton of a barber's chair, half hidden in the foxtails.

At the upstream end of the village we come upon the original parade ground and orderly room of the North West Field Force, newly restored by the army with the sites of the old buildings marked on a large map and a stone cairn commemorating the event. The rest of the village demands this kind of treatment, for it is an authentic historic site, but no funds have been set aside for its preservation.