Down the Yukon (13 page)

As three quick blasts came from the sternwheeler's steam whistle, I stole a quick backward glance over my left shoulder. With much chuffing and belching of smoke, the steamboat left the skiffs behind.

I returned my attention to Donner and Brackett. Stroke by stroke, we were gaining on them. Jamie veered us slightly left, to give us room to pass them.

As we came abreast of them the sternwheeler appeared on our left, no more than a hundred yards away and slightly behind. It was the
Eldorado,
and its captain was being careful not to raise a wake that might affect the race. From the corner of my eye I saw hundreds of people crowding the rails, raising their hats and waving. Over the racket of the steam engine and three more whistle blasts I could hear the shouts and the cheers. Burnt Paw was in a frenzy on my lap, barking to the left at the sternwheeler and to the right at our enemies.

The Eskimos had fallen in behind the two kayaks in order to watch us race, and were chanting, “Ai-ee! Ai-ee! Ai-ee!”

From the shore, perhaps in response to the sternwheeler's whistle, perhaps because people had been watching with telescopes, a fleet of small boats rowed out to meet us. They made a wide path for our kayak and its twin, tied neck and neck for the lead.

The sun was just starting to rise. It must have been one in the morning.

We passed among the giant ocean steamers anchored a mile or so from shore. I was aware of them towering above us, but I never took the time to look.

With a quick glance to my right I saw the muscles in Donner's neck corded to bursting. I remembered him whipping me when we arm-wrestled. Brackett's height came to mind, how much leverage it gave him.

Merely thinking about their advantages sapped me of what strength I had left—there was suddenly little power in my stroke. Donner and Brackett started to slip ahead.

“Paddle!” Jamie cried. “Paddle for the mill, Jason! Paddle as you love me!”

I forgot about Donner. I forgot about Brackett. I barely noticed all the people waving from small boats along our route. Their shouts seemed to come from a great distance. I put my mind on my brothers, on the mill, on Jamie, on my paddle.

Finally I could see, at the mouth of a tundra river, a tent metropolis with a sprinkling of buildings beyond. Nome.

Pull! I told myself. Pull, pull!

I kept the double-bladed paddle moving with everything I had, not too deep, not too shallow. Let Jamie
make the steering adjustments, I told myself, you just give it the power. Give it more power.

More power!

I could see the crowd at the landing now. I could hear a tumultuous roar. There must be thousands, I thought. Thousands.

Pull! Remember how that husky of yours could pull. King, for the love of heaven, help me!

Remember what your brother suffered to stay in the ring with the Sydney Mauler. To beat him!

I kept pulling with all I had.

No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't seem to gain on them. But they weren't putting any distance on us—they were barely ahead.

The crowd at the beach was parting to make a lane.

“Remember, the Alaska Commercial Company building!” Jamie cried. “We'll have to run for it!”

A hundred yards to the beach. Everybody waving their hats. A sea of arms and hats and blurred faces.

The lane. Keep your eye on the lane. Straight as an arrow to the lane.

Keep paddling!

The two kayaks were no more than ten feet apart. Over the roar of the crowd I could hear Donner wheezing for breath. I caught a glimpse of Brackett's granite face turned beet red.

At the last, the beach and crowd seemed to surge forward. Suddenly we were scraping bottom.

“Let's go!” came Jamie's cry.

I was fumbling with the drawstring of the kayak skirt. It wouldn't come loose. I ripped it loose, tried to lift myself out of the kayak, fell sideways into the water and almost onto Burnt Paw. Jamie was staggering beside me, trying to give me a hand up.

Donner had tripped, too, face forward on the beach. Brackett yanked him up; the four of us stumbled forward like drunks. After so long in the kayaks, it was impossible to walk, much less run.

On both sides voices were shouting that we had to touch the Alaska Commercial Company building. A man wearing a derby hat was shouting, “I'm from the A.C.C. Follow me, I'll run straight to it!”

Jamie and I held hands to try to keep each other up, ran and stumbled and staggered forward.

A yelp, and Jamie went down.

The yelp was from Burnt Paw. He'd gotten under her feet.

I gave Jamie two hands and pulled her up. We were looking at Donner's and Brackett's backs.

The boxer ran ahead. We had a chance of catching Donner. I could hear his wheezing.

Burnt Paw ran out in front of us, looking behind over his shoulder, looking to his side at Donner.

In the midst of my delirium I noticed one of his ears was up, one down.

There, written large across the second story of a building in the next block, was the lettering
ALASKA COMMERCIAL COMPANY.

Feeling had fully returned to our legs, and we were running as fast as we could run.

But we weren't going to catch Brackett.

Maybe not Donner, either.

“Burnt Paw!” I warned. Zigzagging, he was about to run under my feet.

Barely in time, the mutt looked over his shoulder and saw me, accelerated, and veered off to the right, in front of Donner.

The roar from the throng was deafening. Brackett
had touched the building. Forty feet to go and Donner had two steps on us.

Burnt Paw looked over his shoulder at Donner, but too late.

With his last spurt of energy, Donner was upon him.

I saw Burnt Paw try to get out of the way. He veered left, but so did Donner. Cornelius Donner went down in a heap, and we ran past him.

Jamie and I touched the corner of the building together. The man with the derby hat lifted her arm and mine in triumph.

“The winners!” he proclaimed, tossing his derby in the air. “Both must finish, and these just did!”

Jamie and I collapsed against the building.

I embraced her, let her go. Heaving for breath, I slumped against the building. Neither of us could speak. Tears popped from Jamie's eyes, then mine gushed. Burnt Paw came between us, licked us both on the face.

Donner was above us crying foul. “Their dog tripped me! You saw it plainly!”

“Tripped her, too,” the official from the A.C.C. said dryly. “Anyway, there's nothing in the rules about being tripped by dogs.”

A laugh went up from the crowd. The throng was so close, I was suffocating.

“Stand back! Stand back. Give them room. What are your names as registered?”

“Hawthorn and Dunavant,” I gasped.

“Check the list!”

The official was handed a sheaf of papers, flipped through them, and fingered his way down a page. “Here they are! Jason Hawthorn and Jamie Dunavant.”

“That's us,” Jamie said.

We struggled to our feet as the cheers kept coming,
along with hearty slaps on the back. All of a sudden I thought how strange we must look in our gut pants and jackets.

“Stand back, stand back!”

At last, room to breathe. Just then a grizzled fellow stepped out of the crowd, walked up close to Jamie, and looked at her oddly. He inspected her from several angles, then stepped back into the crowd, said something to a second graybeard, who stepped forward and did the same thing—looked at Jamie this way and that. A smile broke out on his face like he'd just discovered a vein of solid gold.

“What is it?” demanded the official. “What is it, man? Speak up!”

“Why…my partner told me, and I have to agree. This is the Princess of Dawson!”

“You are, aren't you?” cried the sourdough who'd recognized her first. “It's really you, from the Palace Grand Theater! Recited your father's poems…I musta seen you a dozen times if I saw you once!”

The crowd was electrified.

“It's you, isn't it?” the grizzled prospector insisted. “You used to be the Princess of Dawson. I'm sure it's you.”

The crowd hushed, all eyes on Jamie.

“That's me,” she agreed.

A cheer went up from every throat. The word was passed to those who hadn't been close enough to hear, and the roar went down the street and back again.

“Wait a minute!” cried Donner. “What about the rules? Produce the rules!”

“I have them right here,” said the A.C.C. man, pulling them out from among his papers.

Donner snatched the page away from him. “Right
here. Two-man teams. Two-
man
teams!”

For a moment the official hesitated. To his eternal credit, he thought it over for only a few seconds. Then he broke into a belly laugh that could be heard all the way to Dawson City.

“That's just an expression!” he roared.

“No, it's not!” thundered the boxer, who brandished his fist. “She can't be a girl. The race is only for men.”

“All I can say is, fellows…if you were beaten by a girl, which you certainly were, then
more power to her!
”

The crowd went berserk. “The Princess of Dawson! The Princess of Dawson won the race!”

Amid the confusion, a fireplug of a man in an immaculate business suit approached Donner from the side. With a deft movement, he spun him off-balance, tripped him, put one knee on his back, and handcuffed him. “What is the meaning of this?” Donner cried from the side of his mouth.

Several men with badges appeared from the crowd and restrained Brackett.

“What is this all about?” yelled Donner from the ground.

The man who'd handcuffed him raised his voice for the crowd to hear. “It's about false identity, and worse.”

“Explain, please,” demanded the official from the Alaska Commercial Company.

“My name is John Tobin. I'm a detective with the Bartholomew and James Agency of Omaha, Nebraska. I arrived minutes ago from Dawson City aboard the
Eldorado.
I've been tracking this fellow who claims to be Cornelius Donner of Dawson City. He is actually George Swink of Jefferson City, Missouri, and he is wanted for
murder and arson in two countries, the United States and Canada.”

The detective stood Donner up and looked him in the eye. “For a year and a half, mister, I've been looking forward to this moment. You've put me through quite a bit of trouble, you have.”

Donner—Swink, that is to say—spit in his face.

The crowd yelled its outrage. The detective wiped his face with a handkerchief and said calmly to Donner, “You'll need a good lawyer, mister. A mighty good lawyer.”

As would have been the case in Dawson City, Nome turned out to be full of lawyers. Four were within earshot, and rushed forward to offer their services.

“I have nothing to pay with,” Swink muttered. “All my assets are back in Dawson City.”

“Impounded by the Canadian government, no doubt,” put in the A.C.C. man.

“You'll be tried in Dawson City first,” said the detective. “Then I'll take you back to Nebraska.”

“I need a lawyer!” Donner cried. “A good one! Who'll represent me? I need an American!”

The four lawyers were about to turn heel. One of them said, “Nobody's working charity for the likes of you.”

Now it was my time to step forward. “I think I can help you, George Swink. You need funds, and I need to get the Hawthorn Brothers Sawmill back. Remember?”

“Twenty thousand dollars!” he said with a look almost of triumph.

I shook my head. “That was your number, not mine.”

“What's your number?”

“We'll have one of these lawyers draw up the papers—legal as can be, with witnesses and all. I'll give
you three thousand dollars for the mill, which is the amount you loaned to my brother Ethan. We'll be fair and square.”

“Three thousand dollars,” he raged. “Who'll pay me more? It's worth far more! I have a saloon in Dawson as well!”

“The New Bodega,” I said. I lowered my voice and said to Swink, “Should I tell everybody in Nome, loud and clear, that your partner died in the fire? Should I tell them that the arson you're accused of is the Great Fire?”

“Don't,” the detective told me. “They'll lynch him dead.”

The crowd had fallen to a hush, wondering what was being said. At last a wag shouted, “Give him three dollars, Hawthorn, not three thousand!”

Swink had as much room to negotiate as a mouse in a trap. A short while later, at the jail, he deeded over his entire interest in the mill for the sum of three thousand dollars, and not a dime more, to Abraham, Ethan, and Jason Hawthorn.

During our stay in Nome, Jamie and I took rooms at the Golden Gate Hotel, Nome's finest. Once we'd bathed, slept out our exhaustion, and filled our stomachs, we strolled down the street shopping for clothes.

Same as Dawson, Nome had its personalities. Right away we heard that Wyatt Earp was in town, the famous marshall from the Wild West days in Dodge City, Kansas, and Tombstone, Arizona. In addition to owning a saloon, Earp was, of all things, a boxing promoter. Earp had already learned that the former heavyweight champion of the British Empire was in Nome and had signed him for a fight.

Jamie and I walked Nome's sprawling tent city and gazed like tourists at the sluice and rocker works and all the pits along the beach. Wherever the beach hadn't been dug, it was the staging ground for industry. Lumber was stacked high. So were mounds of coal, barrels
of kerosene—everything that an instant city on the windswept, treeless tundra required. From the huge oceangoing steamers anchored offshore, freight lighters were arriving by the hour. Some were stacked with supplies, others crowded with hundreds of stampeders. Before the lighters even touched the beach, some people leapt into the shallows and took off sprinting, claim stakes in hand.

They were going to have to sprint a long, long way. We'd learned that the beach was already staked ten miles north and ten miles south, and so were the banks of the river as well as all the local creeks. And some of Nome's placers were proving out extremely rich. Indications were that Nome's first year would surpass even the Klondike's.

Everywhere we went, we were asked if we were going to stake a claim.

Jamie, in a bright new dress and scrubbed so clean she shined, would answer, “We're heading back to Dawson soon as possible. We're anxious to see Jason's brothers.”

And so we were, but we had to wait out a storm that lashed Cape Nome for three days. It washed away the diggings all along the beach and destroyed a fortune in goods that couldn't be pulled from the waves in time. The shallow-drawing Yukon sternwheelers, able to moor in the mouth of the river, were spared.

As soon as the weather cleared, we boarded the
Eldorado,
which would take us across the sound and all the way up the Yukon to Dawson City.

After a pleasant few hours at Unalakleet, where we were able to present Father Karloff with a check on the Bank of Cape Nome for the amount of $6,700, the
Eldorado
steamed south to the old Russian port of St.
Michael. The following day we entered the northernmost channel of the Yukon. I was able to see those five hundred miles of the lower river I'd missed due to our portage. Jamie and I were both at the rail when Kaltag's few cabins appeared on the left bank. There was the greenish Kaltag River, where we'd paddled in among the salmon.

Though we never laid eyes on him, George Swink was on the
Eldorado,
too. John Tobin had him cuffed in a private room and never let him out among the passengers. I had no doubt he would be brought to justice.

Our return to Dawson City was a thoroughly joyous one. Jamie and I had quite a story to tell, and my brothers provided a most appreciative audience. As I described the last moments of the race, and the role Burnt Paw had played, that mongrel I'd named Nuisance proved a rapt listener. His ears were perked high, and his blue eye was staring at me as if to make sure I got it right.

When I came to the part about Burnt Paw tripping Jamie, his ears went down to half-mast. As I told of the pivotal moment when he tripped Donner, Ethan slapped himself on the leg so hard I was afraid he'd broken it all over again.

Abe, in his wry way, said to Ethan, “I seem to remember you calling him Underdog, or some such, before he was Burnt Paw.”

“Yes, sir—watch your step—he's back in town!”

The first order of business, to my mind, was for the three of us to visit the mill and to have our name restored in large letters at the entrance. Before the day was out, we'd accomplished it.

While we were nailing the sign up at the mill, Jamie was paying a visit to Arizona Charlie Meadows. He did
indeed want to buy her play,
The Adventures of Big Olaf McDoughnut.
She told him that she had a new character and a new scene to add, and he paid her five hundred dollars on the spot, with all terms as they'd agreed before.

The play made its debut three weeks later at the Palace Grand, with Klondikers by the hundreds roaring their approval. Jamie and the Hawthorn brothers were watching from seats in the third row. From his private box, Big Alex McDonald clapped and cheered and whistled every time his fictional counterpart entered a scene.

As I knew they would, Jamie's prospector jokes had the house roaring with laughter. But that wasn't the best part. The most popular scene in the play was all the more effective because so many in the audience knew it to be true. When Big Olaf McDoughnut invited the boy who'd lost his leg at the knee, Charlie Maguire, to reach into that glass bowl of nuggets and help himself, the young actor hesitated, then took very few nuggets, exactly as I remembered my friend Charlie doing in real life.

“No, no!” Big Olaf insisted. “I mean fill both trouser pockets full as you can get 'em, then your shirt pockets, too. Gold means nothing to me, lad. Nothing!”

At that, everyone in the theater rose, turned around, and applauded Big Alex McDonald, who saluted them modestly. I only wished Charlie could have been there to see it.

When the curtain came down on the play, the house erupted with deafening cheers for Jamie's celebration of the Klondike. When the curtain came up on the actors, and they were showered with flowers and nuggets, Arizona Charlie took the stage in buckskins, as always. The silver-haired frontiersman acknowledged
the renewed applause, then motioned to Jamie several times—urgently—for her to come up and join him on the stage.

I could see what Arizona Charlie aimed to do—reduce the entire house to tears. He wanted Jamie beside him as he told of the passing of the poet of the Klondike, and how the author of the play they had just enjoyed was none other than the poet's daughter, the same girl many of them had known as the Princess of Dawson.

The man in buckskins beckoned to Jamie once more, but he had met his match. Firmly, she shook her head. The consummate showman, Arizona Charlie recovered before the audience even knew what had transpired. In a dramatic voice, he announced, “A hand for the playwright, Jamie Dunavant!” and pointed her way.

Jamie stood to acknowledge the cheers, gave the audience a wave and a golden smile, then sat down. “Whew!” she said, taking my hand. “I'd rather paddle the Norton Sound!”

 

Jamie's play kept the Palace Grand alive. By the end of the summer, some of the theaters and dance halls were closing. In one midsummer week alone, eight thousand people had left Dawson.

Some of the mills closed down, but not ours. We even kept it running through the winter.

Jamie lived in Melinda Mulrooney's Fairview Hotel, where she and her father had lived.

We saw each other every day. We were engaged to be married.

Jamie and I married several days after the ice broke on the Yukon. The day was June 1, 1900. I'd recently
turned eighteen and Jamie seventeen. It was time. We were ready for the adventure.

A couple weeks later we embarked with Burnt Paw once again down the Yukon, this time in a handsome, river-worthy, twenty-five-foot skiff. We had a year's outfit on board with all the provisions and tools for getting started in the bush.

It was with a heart full of pride and love that I waved good-bye to my brothers that day in Dawson City. In the future, we'd come back to see them, or they'd come to find us, but it wouldn't be often. I suppose this was the way it was meant to be, with the two of them sticking together and me heading off over the northern horizon.

Dawson had a future, but on a far lesser scale than it had imagined itself, and much more civilized.

With Dawson so well connected to the Outside, it wasn't the place for Jamie and me. Our hearts were in the wilderness.

At the village of Koyukuk, just a mile up from the Yukon, we traded our skiff for seven husky pups, dog harnesses, a basket sled, and enough baled salmon to feed a team through the winter.

After a week a little sternwheeler arrived, and we started up the river of our dreams. The Koyukuk ran so clear we could see every stone on the bottom. At every village we asked after Johan and Ingrid Swenson. Everyone remembered them. Everyone kept pointing upriver.

We entered a country with vast stands of birch and aspen and tall spruce. Along the banks we saw moose, caribou, wolves, grizzly and black bear. The skies were teeming with birds. Hundreds of miles upriver we crossed the Arctic Circle. Mountains on both sides rising
three thousand feet kept us from seeing the sun for several hours around midnight, not that we cared. We could climb one of these mountains any time we pleased for a view of the midnight sun.

We found our friends. The Swedes were surprised to see us—and pleased. Johan and Ingrid had settled at the mouth of the John River, only a few miles up the Koyukuk from a man named Gordon Bettles, who'd opened a store at the upstream limit of steamboat navigation. A new village named Bettles was taking shape around the store.

We settled at the mouth of the Wild River, next stream up from Johan and Ingrid and their children. They helped us pole our outfit up there in a boat they'd made from whipsawed lumber, and they helped us build our log cabin.

When winter came, we were ready.

There was a little gold in the creeks, and I meant to try my hand at it, but it wasn't gold that we or our friends were after. It was the independent life. Even without gold, the fishing, hunting, berrying, and gardening would pull us through.

Jamie and I were of one mind. Every day, summer and winter, would bring labor, but it would be meaningful labor in the midst of incomparable beauty and never lacking for adventure. We meant to raise our children in this place.

The first one came in October of 1901.

We named him Homer.

Our twins we named Rebeccah and Elizabeth, after our mothers, who died young.

Abraham and Ethan made five. To our good fortune, each one of our children survived, all of them healthy as weeds.

All the while Jamie was writing plays for the stage in Dawson and for Alaska's new gold mecca, Fairbanks.

Burnt Paw had a lot of years left in him. Summers he was always with me, up and down the river; when winter came, Jamie would outfit him with a knitted coat, and he never failed to come along.

A day rarely passed without a small war breaking out among our sled dogs, but for whatever reason they never laid a tooth on Burnt Paw. Maybe it was because he rode in the sled instead of pulling it; maybe it was because he lived in the cabin with us instead of out in the snow with them.

As time went by, Burnt Paw wasn't the leaper he once had been, nor the traveler. To his last days he favored that front right paw, and even little Ethan knew why. Burnt Paw's history was the stuff of legend. The children's pet was a sort of mythic hero, thanks to the bedtime stories their mother had fabricated over the years from his exploits in the mists of the previous century. When Jamie and I appeared in this saga it was infrequently, and as minor characters.

In his last few years, when Burnt Paw preferred to lie close to the stove and dream, the children thought we were lucky to still have the old fellow underfoot.

And so did I.