Northern Lights Trilogy (132 page)

He waited and knew to the marrow of his bones that he had been heard. A moment longer, and the icebergs journeyed on in their own directions, opening a path to Karl that led nearly straight to the ship. He took a deep breath and then paddled onward.

“You not cry,” Toyatte said, high above her. “Strong,” he said, clenching his fists as if the vision of him would shore up her dwindling courage.

There had been two more frightening moves of the glacier. One had squeezed her tight, so tight that she could barely breathe. She’d thought all was lost. The other had released her, just as she neared fainting from lack of breath. “My children, my children,” she had moaned in the beginning. As the ice’s frost pierced even her sealskin coat and wool sweater, she began to detach, to feel apart from her body. She was tired, so tired. Her mind, her soul, she supposed, began to contemplate death. And not what she left behind. What was ahead. Would there be the magnificent blue of the ice about her? Of course. Along with the rubiest of reds and sapphire blue the color of her father’s eyes.…

“Missy? Missy!” Toyatte’s voice brought her back to the present.

“What?” she whispered, irritated that he interrupted her delightful vision.

The old Hoona grinned at her, exposing his black-and-white checkerboard of teeth. “He come. The captain. He come.” He gestured
from his eyes to the fjord. “I see. He come!” He left her then without another word, presumably to get the rope and come back to her while Karl untangled himself from the kayak’s oilskin folds. It would be so easy to just let go, surrender to the overwhelming drowsiness that urged her eyelids down, her breathing to slow.…

Karl had shouted for his spiked ice-deck boots while briefly aboard ship, and now was thankful for them as he easily ran across the ice to the crevasse that held Elsa. Back in the fjord, two of his crew were rowing toward them, with blankets and coffee, in a lifeboat that would hold Elsa, if necessary.

One look down at her, and he knew it would be necessary. “Elsa! Elsa!” He refused to believe that she had died. Surely she had simply passed out! The trauma of her fall, the frigid temperatures in which she was encased…
Lord, protect her as if you were holding her in your hands instead of this ice holding her. Please, God.
If he hadn’t been so busy, he would have been on his knees pleading with God.

Quickly he fashioned a sliding knot, creating a large loop. Looking down, there was perhaps enough room to drop the loop about her head and under one arm. Yet he did not want to risk hanging her. “Elsa! Elsa!” he continued to repeat. She did not stir.

He dropped the loop once, then twice, trying to get it past a knob of ice to her armpit, but to no avail.

Karl looked over at Toyatte, crouched on the other side. “I need to go down to her,” he said slowly, hoping the man understood. He quickly tied another slipknot in a second rope and tightened it under his own armpits. With neither the velocity of a fall nor a slim form to aid him, he prayed he could get low enough to reach Elsa. He tossed the length of the rope to Toyatte and showed the Hoona how to hold him, a much larger and heavier man, with little but the strength of his squat body.

He had no time to worry over the guide. Then he lowered himself so that his straight arms held him above and to one side of Elsa,
as if guiding him through a small hatch to belowdecks. He dug an ice boot into one side, grunting in pain at the odd angle of his ankle, then did the same with the other. In like fashion he descended as low as he could go, eventually turning upside down to dangle low enough to reach Elsa.

Karl breathed a sigh of relief when he could touch her. The pulse at her neck told him she lived, and with a little more maneuvering he was able to slip the rope around both her arms. He tightened it, then frowned. Unconscious, her arms might simply move up with the motion of the rope and she might slip right through the knot.

His men reached the crevasse with a shout, and Karl sighed again, relieved. Three men were certain to be able to get them out again. And two now spoke English. “I need to stay down here! I’m afraid she’ll slip through the loop as you lift her.”

“She’s unconscious?”

“Yes.”

Karl’s temples were throbbing from the pressure of being upside down, but he ignored the pain. He touched Elsa’s silky hair, rubbed her scalp. “Elsa, Elsa. Come back to me. Come back.”

“Ready up here, Captain,” one yelled.

“Okay. Leave me here. Pull gently on her rope on the count of three.” He looked anxiously about, wondering if there were obstacles that might impede her progress, but there was little he could do in his position even if there were. He swallowed hard. “One…two… three!”

She lurched upward, and as he had feared, her arms squeezed together over her head. Karl let out a cry. “You all right?” yelled a man.

“Yes. Yes! You got her legs loose. But she’s in danger of slipping through the rope. Send down another!”

In two seconds, another rope came down, narrowly missing Karl’s head. Quickly, he fashioned a seat out of it. “Try to get her up another few feet!” He grabbed hold of her coat at the collar, conscious of the
danger she was in. If she slipped through the rope with the next heave, she could go deeper into the crevasse. But he had to have her higher in order to reach her feet and slip the rope about her. “On my count! Very slowly, please! Very slowly! One…two…three!”

She rose another two feet, and the rope slid to her chin.
She might choke!
he thought desperately. As fast as he could, he pulled her calves toward him, slipping the double loop around each foot and then sliding them to her thighs. Thank the Lord for the sealskin pants! They protected her from the cold and the cruel bite of the rope. “Good! Good!” he called. “Pull up on the second rope. Use it as your mainstay, and the first as only a means to steady her. She needs to go up fast. The first rope is too close to her throat!”

Obediently, they counted as one above, and Elsa sailed to the top. When he lost sight of her over the edge, Karl screamed, “Now get me out of here!”

He was pulled to the top then too and unceremoniously heaved to safety. The glacier groaned, and Karl rubbed his face. “Let’s get her off this glacier and back to the ship.” He rose, gingerly testing his sore ankles. The two men carried Elsa, one holding her under the armpits, the other her legs, carefully following Toyatte down the side.

When one fell and the three slid ten feet to the bottom, Karl let out a cry of frustration and picked Elsa up himself. “Let me do it! I’ve got her. Get the boat! Hurry! She’s barely breathing! I said
hurry!
”

Elsa awakened to the sensation of sweat rolling down her spine.

“Welcome back,” Karl said, kneeling beside her chair. Her feet were on a footstool, raised to a wood stove. She was covered in blankets, and by the fur visible around her face, still in her sealskin.

“Thank you, Karl. For getting me out. I thought… I thought I was going to die there.” Visions of her children, laughing aboard the
Majestic
, shot through her mind. She reached out a hand and caressed his face. “I thought we weren’t going to be together anymore.”

He looked down and then back to her, his gray eyes shimmering. “I thought the same.”

“Are you trying to kill me now?”

“What?”

She cast off a wool blanket, then peeled off another. Elsa laughed as she counted the coverings. “Ten blankets! And a bearskin!”

Karl’s laugh joined hers, a pleasant cello sound in accompaniment to her alto. “I wanted you warm, really warm, after almost losing you. By the time we got you to the lifeboat, your lips and fingernails were blue.”

“And now I’m perspiring so that I’m probably as red as a beet.” She tossed several more blankets off, then winced at a pain in her ankle. “It’s sprained, don’t you think?”

“If I were to hazard a guess.”

Elsa raised her eyebrows and cocked a smile at him. “It could’ve been worse. We just proclaimed our love, and suddenly it looked as if we were going to have to separate forever.”

His eyes did not match hers in merriment. “It did look that way.” He took her hand in his. “I was frightened, Elsa, terrified that I was about to lose you. When you had just been found.”

She nodded, feeling the same intensity of emotions. “I did not want to die. To leave you. My children.”

Karl reached out and gently traced the contour of her forehead, brow, and cheeks. “I don’t ever want to lose you again. Elsa, my love, would you do me the honor of marrying me?”

She wet her lips and studied his eyes. “I would love to spend the rest of my days by your side, Karl.” An impish thought ran through her head. “As captain of your ship.”

He laughed and looked to the floor. “We’ll discuss who captains our ships.” Then his expression turned serious. “But you’ll marry me? Soon?”

“I will, Karl. Gladly. Just as soon as we can.”

S
oren tapped his boots against the boardwalk, shaking the street’s sticky mud from them, then leaned against the storefront wall to read the story in the
Juneau First Edition.
GOLD STRIKE! the headline screamed.
TWENTY-FIVE MILES SOUTHEAST OF FORTY MILE.
He had been right in his first reading. He shook his head as he stared at the subheading again. Twenty-five miles southeast of Forty Mile would put that strike so near his own mine that he could practically spit and hit it. He went on reading until a name caught his attention.
Kadachan.

Surely there were several Indians named “Kadachan” in the Alaska Territory. His heart started pumping. He hadn’t seen the man who traveled with James Walker in some time. Months. Kadachan. Was it coincidence that a man of that name was so near his old stake? He crumpled the paper to his lap and looked up and down the street. He had a sick feeling in his gut, a sense of foreboding. There were several sizable claims within striking distance of his own. It could be one of many that struck it lucky.

But what if it was his? What if a claim-jumper had taken over his spot, his tools, and hit it right? What if they were hauling out bucketloads of gold—his bucketloads—until the vein was emptied? His
pulse raced. He raised the paper again, trying to read the rest of the story, but his hands were shaking. It was his. Something deep down told him it was so. Someone had jumped his claim.

He dropped the paper to the ground and hurried down to the roadhouse. He did not plan to report to work that day. Not that day or for some time.

Kaatje hurried toward the door. The breakfast crowd had been fed, and they were in the midst of setup for lunch. Since ice break, the town had boomed with trappers and miners ready to enter the riches of Alaska’s Interior.

She smiled when she saw the man at the door. It was Soren. Things had cooled between them since her time away in Ketchikan, but they were still friendly. All in all, it was all right with her. The separation gave her time to think, to be right about her decisions. It was as if she was naming the direction of the wind for once with Soren, and the sensation calmed her. She did not know what was next for them, but she would be deciding it when she did.

“Soren, I—”

His hat was in his hands, and his troubled expression stopped her midsentence.

She hadn’t seen that look since the day he left her on the Dakota plains. Her heart pounded dully in her chest. Perhaps he would make the decision for them after all. “You’re going then?” she whispered.

“Kaatje, look. I won’t be gone long. I need to leave for a while on business.”

“For the store?”

The question caught him off guard. “No, on personal business.”

“For the mine.”

She, too, had seen the headlines that morning.

“Yes.” His eyes did not leave hers. He reached out a hand to touch her shoulder, but she shied away. “It’s only to go and make sure it isn’t my claim they want to
stjele
from me.” He moved forward and took her hands. “I must stop them. It’s our claim, Kaatje. Our future.”

She laughed under her breath and gave him an incredulous look. “You must be joking.”

He moved away and set the hat on his head. When he turned back to her, his eyes told her he was decided. “This is for us.”

“No, Soren. It’s never for us. It never has been. It is for you, Soren Janssen. Every move you make is for you. You don’t have a giving bone in your body!”

“What are you talking about? I left Bergen for you! I went to the Dakotas for you to start the farm you always wanted!”

“What? Is that what you think? It was for me?” She spat out the last word. “I don’t believe you. That’s a convenient little excuse you’ve made in your mind, Soren, but it is not the truth. You left me on that farm with a baby! With a baby! And I don’t believe you ever intended to come back.” She hoped her eyes sparked all the fire she felt.

“You cannot believe I never intended to return to you. To Christina. I did. I did!” He grabbed her arm, keeping her from running back to the kitchen. “All I wanted was to make something of myself. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

Tears came then. “Don’t you see, Soren? Will you never see? You were always
something
in my eyes. You were my husband, my man. You were my daughter’s father. You were making a living, however lean the times. But we were together. That was all that was important to me. Together we had made something of ourselves. But not for Soren Janssen. No, for Soren Janssen, it was never enough! It was never enough!”