Drifting Home (15 page)

“You know I had a man from a big American company sitting right here last year in this living room where you're sitting, telling me it was okay to keep farming for another year!” one of the brothers tells us.

My nephew Berton pricks up his ears, sensing a story. The farmer explains that he and his brother do not own the mineral rights on their land and so, technically, under mining law anybody can stake it for gold or oil or any other mineral.

“Their surveyors had been over it and had staked it but they told us they wouldn't be moving in just yet so it was all right to keep farming. Right in my own living room! We took them to court and had the staking declared illegal. Now what do you think of that?”

We think that long after the minerals have been dredged or pumped from the earth, the soil of the Yukon will still be rich enough to grow oats and if there is no fresh milk in Whitehorse and Dawson it is not because cattle cannot be raised here but simply because of the feeling that this is strictly mining country–a fixed idea that is the legacy of the stampede. We finish our milk and bid the farmers goodbye and set off down the Pelly towards Selkirk, thinking how disappointed the others will be when they hear what we saw and what we had to drink.

Supper is not quite ready and so we lie back on the edge of the bank in the early evening sun, watching the river and the sky. There is a touch of fall already in the air. I notice that the Michaelmas daisies are beginning to show their purple heads above the grasses while in the sky a few mallards and Canada geese are winging south. The mornings are already crisp and before long the tenderer flowers will be blackened by the first frost. August, after all, is an autumn month in the Yukon. Frost usually strikes around the 20th. Indeed, I can recall times when it hit Dawson before Discovery Day, the 17th, ruining the flower and vegetable judging. But generally the weather held past the big day and the cauliflowers from my father's garden, nearly as big as cartwheels, and the marrows, three feet long, and the sweet peas, with as many as seven flowers to a stem, would more often than not win him a blue ribbon. It is difficult to describe the size, texture and flavour of vegetables grown on summer days when the sun shines for twenty-two hours. Our celery, for instance, had a crispness and a nuttiness not found Outside and the cabbages, as big as soccer balls, were firm and crunchy from the heart to the outer leaves.

Pamela announces that the beans she has been working on all day are ready. Beans are a Yukon staple; it is hard to imagine the stampede without them, for in those days they were cooked and frozen and carried like marbles in men's pockets and thawed out in the mouth on the trail. In my boyhood, beans were served at children's parties as sandwiches are served today. Our Wolf Cub hikes in the hills centred around a pot of beans. Each boy was asked to bring a tin of them and all these tins were poured into the common pot and heated up together. But Johnny Gould and his two brothers brought along a brown pot of their own, containing their mother's home baked beans. Sometimes John would throw these into the common pot but more often, it seems to me, the brothers would refuse to taint the best baked beans in town with the tinned variety and would cook and eat their own.

As we clean up the last of our plates with pieces of toast grilled over the flames and the dishwashing crew moves to its task, a cry goes up for more ghost stories. I see Peggy Anne's face light up with fearful expectation and realize that we are again going to have company in our tent. The teenagers are already talking about the cemeteries behind the settlement and about the ghosts living in the silent cabins to our rear. Now, as dusk falls and the fire drops to a mass of coals and the rum is added to the coffee and a sighing little wind springs up to rattle the aspen leaves, I decide to tell them all the legend of the Lost Cabin.

“What
is
the Lost Cabin, Dad? I've heard you mention it before.”

“It's something we don't talk about too much, Patsie. Like the Walker of the Snows. But there's a song about it, you know.”

“A song? Sing it, Dad.”

“I'll do the first verse.”

I give it to them in a minor key, slow, melancholy and brooding:

Oh, somewhere north of Sixty, where a clump of birch trees bloom

By a valley in the Yukon, there's an old, abandoned flume

On a bleak and lonely hillside, where the trees are white with frost

There's an empty, moss-chinked cabin that is lost … lost … lost

And many men have sought it to their cost

“Was there
really
a Lost Cabin?” Peggy Anne asks. “Or is it made up? Were there spooks in it?”

So, allowing myself to be persuaded, I tell them the story:

“Somewhere back in the hills on the benchland overlooking an unnamed valley, there is supposed to be an old cabin sitting on one of the greatest claims in the Yukon – a claim, it is said, richer even than Number Sixteen on Eldorado.

“There are some who claim to have seen that cabin, but only in the distance. Generally they were so far gone that they couldn't finish their journey. The odd thing is that almost everybody who claims to have seen it, places it in a different part of the country. There was a half breed who came out of the Upper Pelly country who claimed he'd seen it; but he'd lost a lot of blood from a fight with a grizzly and he didn't know for sure where. Then there was Bert Masters who described the cabin just before he died; they brought him back, raving, from the Nordenskiold country but nobody else could find a trace of it. Charlie MacGurkey always insisted it was on the far side of the Rat River Divide and his description was like all the others: a snakelike valley and a ridge above it with a clump of white birch trees and an old, abandoned flume. MacGurkey saw it in the distance but his grub had run out and, as it was, he scarcely made it back to civilization. Lost three fingers and some of his toes from frostbite and was out of his mind for weeks before he pulled through.

“Anyway it was MacGurkey who offered to go back and find the cabin. He was grubstaked by an outsider named Kronstadt. They took along a third fellow, not much more than a boy, who went by the nickname of Tubby. The three of them set out in June and headed for the Rat River Divide–the same place where Bishop Stringer almost starved to death and was forced to eat his boots and where Inspector Fitzgerald's Mounted Police party died of hunger after eating all their dogs.

“Somewhere along the way, about August, there was an accident, brought on, I think, by an argument. Tubby fell or was pushed off the edge of a cliff and was impaled on a dead tree part-way down. One of the others went down after him but he didn't bring him back up again. You can guess why. The man was badly injured. He would have to be taken back to civilization. That would mean the search for the gold of the Lost Cabin would have to be abandoned. The thing was disguised as an accident but it's pretty clear that Tubby was pushed the rest of the way to his death.

“After that the going grew rougher. MacGurkey and Kronstadt had to go on half rations because the way seemed longer than MacGurkey remembered. They'd climb to the top of a ridge and look out across the valley and there'd be another ridge to climb. It went on like that for weeks and still no sign of what they were seeking.

“There was an early freeze-up that year. By early October the weather turned cold and the first snow began to fall. Still they pushed on, following MacGurkey's memory of his old trail, both of them growing weaker and, I'd guess, more cantankerous along the way.

“By the end of the month they were out of food and lost in a blizzard so bad they couldn't see more than a few feet in front of them. Kronstadt was suffering terribly from frostbite and was hard put to keep up with MacGurkey who was in no mood to wait for him. The white storm increased in fury–the wind howling like a banshee–and they knew that if they didn't keep moving they'd die. They moved on more by an act of will than anything else, following a twisting valley whose outline was barely visible in the storm.

“Suddenly it hit MacGurkey that he'd seen this valley before–the valley that was shaped like a snake–and as this revelation came to him the storm suddenly died and there, high on the ridge above them, he could see a clump of birches as white as dead men's bones and the long line of an old flume, pointing down the valley like a skeleton's finger and, silhouetted against the sky, the dark outline of an old cabin. It was then that he knew they'd found what they were seeking.

“So they began to clamber up the hillside to the bench above. They could see the old diggings, scarring the hill, and the flume, badly in need of repair, which had probably brought water from a lake somewhere back in the hills. The cabin itself was in bad shape with the roof half caved in and the door hanging loosely on one hinge. But at least the storm had abated.

“And so they reached the cabin and grabbed for the door. But as they did it opened, as if by itself, and it was then that they realized the cabin was occupied. An old prospector, his hair as white as snow and his cheeks as pale as death, peered out and greeted them. ‘Welcome gentlemen,' he said, ‘come on in … I've been expecting you. Got some coffee on, just waiting for you to drink it.' And he beckoned them into the cabin and poured out three cups of coffee, which he offered them because, he said, he knew they must be cold. ‘Why,' said Kronstadt, ‘there's only two of us; you've handed us one cup too many.' ‘Oh, no,' said the old man, ‘this extra cup is for your friend. Go on, pass it to him. He arrived some time ago–just after the first frost.'

“And there was Tubby, with a ghastly smile on his face and the blood hardly dry on his chest and a piece of dead tree still sticking through him. ‘Hello,' he said, ‘it took you guys a long time to find the Lost Cabin.'”

Peggy Anne is beside herself. “Is it true? I mean is it
real
? Did it really happen?”

“Well, they claim it did.”

“But … but,” her brow furrows. “If it
really
happened, how did you find out about it–if, like, everyone was dead?”

“Can't say, Peggy Anne; I'm only telling the story the way I heard it.”

“Did you ever
see
that cabin?” The odd thing about Peggy Anne is that even when she is serious and feeling weird inside from the story, she can't help smiling.

“Not me. Would I be here if I'd seen it?”

“Sing the song again, Dad,” Patsie asks.

“Well, there are several verses. I'll sing the last one.”

Oh, each man has his cabin … and each man has his dream

And for each man there's a hillside and a flume beside a stream

And each man seeks his cabin to his last expiring breath

And he finds it on the hillside slopes of death … death … death

On the bleak and lonely hillside slopes of death
.

Now there is absolute silence around the fire.

“I'll give twenty dollars to anyone who'll sleep in the old graveyard tonight,” I say, wickedly.

No one takes me up on the dare. Instead, one by one, they drift off to their tents except for Peggy Anne, who slips into ours.

“It's a hell of a story,” Patsie writes in the log, as she describes the events of the day. “Dad had to stare out into space as if he wasn't looking at anyone else because he'd break into laughter.”

There is no point in telling any of them, even Patsie, that years ago I made the story up for a radio play and later turned it into a folk ballad for a Toronto revue where it was sung to the accompaniment of a guitar by a promising young performer named Robert Goulet. Nobody in the Yukon has ever heard of the Lost Cabin.

DAY NINE

T
he day is made for drifting. High above us on the right bank as we push off into the channel we can see the spectacular wall of rock–a sheer cliff of columnar basalt, jet black, rising four hundred and fifty feet to a poplar-topped plateau. This rampart runs from the Pelly's mouth all the way to Twin Falls, some eighteen miles downriver – a great palisade, looking as if it were fashioned by some monstrous hand. On the opposite side the eroded banks rise six feet from island-dotted waters.

Paul suggests that the family stick together and so the three rubber boats and the canoe move into the centre of the channel and are then lashed into one great floating island, rotating slowly in the broad Yukon. From beneath us there comes a familiar rasping sound, which puzzles the children. I explain that it is the silt-laden waters of the Yukon, enriched by the new sand of the Pelly, scouring the sides of the boats like soft sandpaper. This abrasive whisper is one of the sounds of my boyhood and I remember my father explaining it to me as we drifted back home to Dawson one evening in the old
Bluenose
.

The phrase “one big happy family” pops into my mind. At this moment, the cliché describes us exactly as we float through the wilderness. Some of us are reading; others are talking and watching the scenery unwind; the Wows are starting a poker game to Paul's competitive delight; Perri, who has been playing with her doll, sets it aside to comb Cheri's hair; Skip is playing the harmonica; Peggy Anne is drawing pictures and so is Patsie, finishing a sketch of Fort Selkirk in the log book; Penny is weaving a macramé headband for her mother. Both Penny and Pamela make their own Christmas presents–lampshades of tissue paper, scarves of Batik work, dolls and dolls' clothes for the little girls, crocheted and knitted things. Is this part of the so-called new “youth culture,” I wonder, or–thinking of my father and his loom–is it, too, in the blood? He picked up the idea of weaving from my Aunt Florrie, my mother's eccentric sister who came from Toronto to live near us in Victoria. She had been an art student like Patsie, and had studied painting on the left bank in Paris. She had a small hand loom on which she used to weave brightly coloured belts and headbands and this caught my father's curiosity. While her interest was artistic, his was scientific. He began with a small loom but soon graduated to more complicated devices. Nothing would satisfy him but that he design and build his own loom, inventing and adding refinements. On this creation he produced, from designs carefully laid out on graph paper, the most beautiful fabrics. Once he wove cloth for a tweed suit for my sister, tailored it himself, and carved all the buttons by hand. He became, of course, an active member of the Weavers Guild for he never entered upon any enterprise without going into it fully. I had thought that the loom was lost but now I learn from Pamela, who is also a weaver, that it is still in the basement of Lucy's home in Vancouver. Pamela says it is in good condition, and that she is having it shipped east where she intends to use it. She adds, not without a sense of challenge, that it is perhaps the most complex loom she has encountered. It must be in the blood, I think.