BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (25 page)

"By the time Gig gets both feet in the water
and starts wading into the pool, Wylie has been under for maybe
half a minute and his hat is floating in the shallows downstream.
Then he gets his hands onto the rocks at the edge of the pool and
pops his head and neck out, and he takes a breath you can hear over
the noise of the water. His clothes and beard is streaming water,
his hair is flat against his skull, and his eyes are bulging out of
their sockets.

"And Wylie is seeing ghosts again, 'cause he
turns and yells as he climbs out onto the rocks. 'She tried to
drown me!' he says. 'I felt her hands on my head! Holding me down,
so I couldn't go deeper, couldn't get up to breathe!'

"Wylie stands up and he's gasping and
shivering, looks like a wet rat. 'She missed and got Timmons last
time,' he says 'but I thought I was done for in this damn
creek!'

"And Gig remembers how he seen Wylie for the
first time at Miles Canyon, sitting on a boulder with his shirt
off, curled up under a blanket in the sun after he got pulled out
of the rapids. And Wylie wasn't yelling that time, just talking
like you or me, even though he come through the worst of the Canyon
hanging onto the hull of his boat after his partner drownded. He
was telling Gig an Indian girl flipped the boat and was trying to
kill him. The same girl that was glowing green and orange in his
dream, when he's standing out on a finger of ice on the Yukon and
the ice starts sinking into the river."

"The same girl," I echo, "that he saw out on
the Yukon ice when he and Gig were sledding up from Circle and
making camp behind an island."

Zimmerman nods. "And Gig told me he was
thinking about what Wylie said when he took Gig's necklace with the
wolf tooth and the folded-up rabbit's ear. And then he cut open the
stitches and seen the two eyes painted on the flesh, with tears
that looked like blood."

"Tell me again what Wylie said."

Zimmerman squints and cocks his head, as if
the memory is painful. "He said it meant she was coming for him,"
he says.

"It was Gig's necklace," I say. "So it meant
she was coming for him, not Wylie."

Zimmerman sinks back against the wall and
seems refocused on the projector behind his eyes. He doesn't
reply.

Chapter 29

Wylie's pan fell into a deep part of the
pool, Zimmerman says, and he had little interest in trying to
retrieve it. He waded back across the creek through shallow rapids
and he and Gig climbed to flatter ground, where Wylie stripped off
his wet clothes and they built a fire from fallen branches. Without
having panned for prospects, they didn't bother to stake. Instead
they hung their wet clothes, ate dried salmon and bread, and then
started back uphill toward the head of the drainage. Wylie seemed
spooked and wanted no part of the Indian River district. Even in
August, twilight comes late, so they made it back to their tent on
the Swedes' Eldorado claims by the end of a long day.

"So they never staked an Indian River
creek?"

"Not on that stampede," Zimmerman says. "But
Gig knowed that some of the fellers who staked on Sulfur or
Dominion wouldn't get around to recording, 'cause they didn't want
to pay the fee or they didn't think their ground was rich. Others
would carve their names off the stakes when they found another
creek they liked better. So when winter diggings got started, there
was going to be chances to pick up an Indian River claim."

Zimmerman says that the Yukon autumn starts
in September and doesn't last long. "Back on the Klondike creeks
you find ice in some of the eddies, where the water don't move.
It's gone by noon, but you know there'll be more tomorrow. By the
end of September you see it creeping out from the river banks, on
both the Klondike and the Yukon. Then pieces will break off and
float downstream.

"The first of the stampeders from Outside
started drifting into town with the ice. There was only a few
hundred that made it to Dawson before the Yukon froze, and they was
moving fast all the way from Dyea. Climb the pass, build a boat,
sail the lakes, run the rapids, and paddle the river. The fastest
did it in two months, got there in September '97. Probably left
Seattle a few days after them Klondike Kings unloaded their gold.
All the rest had to wait for spring. Some of 'em was stuck at the
head of Lindeman or Bennett and some back on the coast, after the
Mounties moved up to the passes and was stopping anyone without a
full year's outfit.

"The early stampeders was paddling canoes or
bateaus, trolling fishing lines and coming in with nothing much to
eat. Most of 'em had money and figured they could buy whatever they
needed in Dawson. Some of 'em wasn't fixing to prospect, they was
coming to do business, so they brung medicines or watches or
knives. They didn't figure on a town where grub was scarce and gold
was cheap. In Dawson it don't matter if you'll pay ten dollars for
an onion or an egg, 'cause someone else will pay twenty.

"Counting the fellers working back on the
creeks, there was maybe four thousand in the Klondike district when
the ice started coming in, and the last five steamboats of the
season bringing supplies up to Dawson was all stuck on the Yukon
flats, a hundred miles downstream from Circle City. The river gets
low that time of year, and they couldn't get over the sandbars.

"The men running the ACC and NAT warehouses
was getting nervous even before the ice come in, and they told
Inspector Constantine there wasn't enough grub for everyone to get
through winter. Constantine told 'em to start cutting back and not
sell anyone more than a few days worth of flour or beans.

"Constantine didn't want a famine on his
watch, so he starts telling people they should leave Dawson if they
ain't got a full winter's outfit. Head down past Circle City to
Fort Yukon, where there's plenty of food. A couple hundred men did
take their boats downriver before it froze, but it turned out the
shelves was bare at Fort Yukon too, so most of 'em kept going and
got iced in somewhere down the river. Traded with the Indians or
starved or ate whatever they could shoot.

"A couple of the steamers finally got over
the flats before the ice come in, and they made it up to Dawson at
the end of September. Turned out they was mostly carrying whiskey
and shovels and nails, not much grub. Constantine says any man
willing to steam down to Fort Yukon gets free passage and five
days' supply of food, so another hundred men leave Dawson on the
first of October.

"But there's ice cakes ten feet high floating
down the river by then, and the steamers are knocked off course
right from the start. Both boats get damaged and then froze to the
banks when they make repairs, then a south wind come up and clears
the ice for ten hours, and they make another sixty miles downriver
before the floes crowd into 'em again.

"That's how the Yukon freezes. The ice on the
banks pushes into the river and the squeezes the floating blocks
together. The channels get narrow enough to stop a boat, and you
got to pole your way through 'em and hope you don't get crushed. If
the air turns warm, some of the ice near the banks will break off
and the river might open up again. But after a week or so you got
too much floating ice, and then the shore ice comes back for good.
When it jams all the free ice together, there ain't nowhere for the
water to go, and it starts gushing over and around the ice blocks,
and for a few minutes it sounds like a hundred locomotives starting
and stopping at once. All the blocks are grinding against each
other and some get pushed under and others get tipped vertical, and
then the whole river heaves upward and stops moving.

"One in five boats might get lifted clear,
but the rest end up as kindling or get shoved under the ice. Even
if your boat ain't crushed, now you got to cross the ice on foot.
That's what happened to one of them two steamers in the second week
of October, after the river opened up for half a day and the
captain tried to make Fort Yukon from Circle. He was lucky – got
lifted clear out of the water and no one killed.

"When it's full winter there's layers of snow
built up on top of the ice, and after a few weeks of people
tramping around you got the makings of a trail. So you stay mostly
along the banks, and out on the river you follow the sled tracks
between the humps of ice. But the day the river freezes there ain't
no trail. Just ice cliffs and ramps forty feet high, and no snow
covering the cracks and sharp edges.

"That's a frozen hell, and when them
steamboat passengers made it on foot to an island in the river,
they was still sixty-five miles from Fort Yukon. Some men coming
out of Circle and Dawson on smaller boats was stranded there too,
and a hundred and fifty of 'em picked their way down to Fort Yukon,
with almost nothing to eat and not enough blankets to stay
warm."

"What about Gig and Wylie and the Swedes?
They're sitting happily up at Eldorado while people are risking
their lives to flee Dawson?"

Zimmerman snorts. "Grub was tight, but the
only ones that panicked was the cheechakos. The ones that come into
Dawson with nothing but gum boots, a fur hat, and a shovel.
Sourdoughs like Gig and Wylie made it through the last winter and
knowed what to expect. If the warehouses was going to ration flour
and beans, they might get hungry but they wasn't going to starve.
They had a couple months stocked in, and there was ways to get
more. And the Swedes started laying in grub when Gig and Wylie was
out at Quartz Creek."

"Why were Swedes stockpiling food in August?
I thought the cheechakos didn't start getting to Dawson until
September."

"Because that was when they decided to
leave."

This isn't the answer I expected, so I ask
Zimmerman why the Swedes would walk away from their Eldorado claims
after eighteen months of sacrifice brought them exactly what they'd
sought. Staking a thousand feet of the richest ground ever
prospected took effort and luck, and the Swedes had come up with
both.

The Swedes didn't walk away empty-handed,
Zimmerman says. After they found the pay-streak on 48 Eldorado with
their last winter shaft, they worked their summer cut across its
sixty-foot width. When they finished sluicing and paid for their
supplies and hired hands, they cleared eighteen thousand dollars.
Then they sold that claim for thirty thousand, and 49 Eldorado for
forty.

"They knowed there was a lot more gold left
in them claims," Zimmerman says. "But they was going to spend half
the dust in their pokes and another year getting it out. Maybe two.
And they was worried about a tough winter. When Alex McDonald
offers you more gold than you ever seen, it's hard not to take
it."

Zimmerman says the money was a home-stake for
the Swedes, enough for them to buy land and houses in Vancouver.
Ruud had a gal in Minnesota he wanted to marry and bring out west.
Lindfors had left his wife behind and wanted to start over. If they
sledded their gold Outside after the Yukon froze, they could be in
Vancouver by January, take a year to get established, and then head
back Inside in the spring of '99. By then there might be steamers
running up to the foot of the White Horse Rapids and ferries on the
lakes. They could bring in a full-year's outfit and afford to do
things right.

"The Swedes struck it on Eldorado," Zimmerman
says. "But there's ten thousand creeks on the Yukon, and they was
sure more Eldorados was waiting to be found."

Chapter 30

Zimmerman tells me the Swedes bought a sled
and five dogs. They packed a tent, a stove, blankets, and a month's
worth of food, and set out upriver in early November. But even
though they were retracing their journey from Dyea, and even though
Ruud had tramped to Dawson over the ice from Circle the previous
winter, they didn't realize how hard the going would be. The Yukon
had frozen and thawed and frozen again, leaving ten-foot-high cakes
of ice piled and skewed in every direction. The trail was still
rough-edged and bare in spots, so the dogs suffered lacerations on
their feet, which froze after ice wedged into the cuts.

Seeking level terrain, the trail wound back
and forth through the piles of ice, and while the dogs could follow
it, the sled frequently caught an edge and capsized, requiring the
Swedes to stop the team and reload whatever had fallen off. And
righting the sled reminded them that half of what it carried was
food for the dogs.

It took ten days to get to the Pelly River,
Zimmerman says. I reach for the knife and size him up momentarily
before offering him the handle. He stabs the tip into the table on
my side, about a third of the way along the etched line from Dawson
to Dyea.

"On the way up to the Pelly they seen boats
smashed by the ice and stampeders that got caught by winter. You
pass a tent and stop to check on it, and inside there's a feller
with frozen feet or a broke leg, or just too weak and hungry to go
on. Sometimes it's a man and a woman. They're lying in blankets on
the snow, and all they got is a hot stove and what's left of their
grub. You might give 'em something to eat if you can spare it, but
they's hoping someone will sled 'em down to Dawson. If you say
people is leaving Dawson 'cause there ain't enough to eat, that
just makes 'em feel worse. Some that was in terrible shape got
taken care of, and some died out on the ice."

Above the Pelly, the Yukon is still the Lewes
River, and it runs steeper and faster, so the ice jams are even
more daunting than the ones downstream. Zimmerman uses his hands to
describe their asymmetry: ramps angled downstream and cliffs
against the current, which makes it easier for the Swedes than for
anyone traveling downstream, even though it requires releasing the
dogs and handing the sled and supplies down the faces of the
cliffs.