Alaska (90 page)

The exhausted sawyers were so glad to see Kirby that for the moment they forgot their pains and worked the great saw with a vigor, but he noticed that Missy was operating on courage alone, so he scrambled to the top of the structure, gently lifted her to the ground, and took the top handle. As soon as he did so, Tom could feel the difference. The saw came down with more strength, stayed closer to the line, and was pulled back up with authority. For about two hours the two men ripped down the squared-off log, producing planks at a speed Tom had not felt possible.

At the noon break Missy had soup ready, and Kirby stayed at the pit most of that afternoon. He returned next day to help Tom finish off the planking whose length had been determined by the Kernel's drawing, and that night Kirby stayed for supper.

When the actual building of the boat started, with a heavy 543

keel neatly formed, Kirby appeared frequently to give not only advice but also his valued assistance in shaping the form of the boat. He took his meals there too, providing meat and vegetables from his own sources of supply, and late one afternoon Missy came to Tom with a curious request: 'Tom, could you maybe sleep over in the Stantons'

tent tonight?' He stood stock-still, hands at his side, his head in a whirl. He was fifteen years old and Missy was twenty-three, and under no conceivable circumstances would he have said that he loved her, but he had admitted to himself many times in recent months that she was the best woman he had ever known. Never did he refer to her as a girl; a girl would be someone his own age and he had met several in school who were attractive, with every promise of becoming more so as the years passed.

Missy was a woman; she had been the salvation of the Venns during the years of privation and the agent of his father's rejuvenation. She was a wonderful person, courageous, hardworking, amiable, and on those trips down the mountain on the shovel he had clung to her as if they were one person engaged in a great adventure. Recently, as they worked on the whipsaw, he had known how mortally tired she was, and he had wished that he might have done all the work himself. Indeed, he had pushed up and pulled down with doubled effort to spare her, and he did so almost joyously, for his affection for this strong-minded woman went beyond words. He felt they were a team, not one that conformed to any ordinary description, but a pair of likeminded, strong people.

They would cut their planks, and build their boat, and guide it through the canyons and past the rapids, and what happened when they got to Dawson was a problem for another day. Now he was being asked to take his bedroll somewhere else, and he felt displaced.

But when Sergeant Kirby moved into Missy's tent, the building of the boat took a leap ahead, for the Mountie had had numerous experiences with the very rough waters that the stampeders would be facing as soon as they left placid Lake Bennett, and this knowledge caused the first rupture between him and Tom. When he saw that Tom proposed building the boat to the exact specifications laid down in the Klondike Kernel's sketch, he asked: 'Are you sure you want it that big? Two people could ride in something a lot smaller.'

'That's what he said. Look.' There the figures were: '23' long and 5' 6”in the beam'

and that's what the boat would be.

'The point is,' Kirby said, 'there are two places which are extremely dangerous, Miles Canyon and Whitehorse Rapids. A lot of boats are lost there, lives too.'

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'He said a boat like this would make it,' Tom said firmly, not designating who the he was.

'I'm sure he said it. But if you had a boat half that size, you could still pack all your gear, and when you came to the bad spots you could hire Indians to help you portage around. You have the money, I know that.'

'The boat has to be this long,' and it was remarkable to see this city boy, who knew nothing of either wood or shipbuilding, join the timbers to the keel and form them moderately well at the forward post. With help from Kirby and Missy at the difficult joins, and with constant reference to both the sketch the Kernel had provided and the thin metal square his father had bought, Tom built a boat that was better than nine-tenths of those put together by experienced men.

When it was finished, he was disgusted with the number of open chinks he had left where boards did not join accurately, but Kirby laughed: 'Tom, all boat builders leave chinks. That's why we have caulking.'

'What's that?'

'Oakum.'

'And what's that?'

'Hemp and tar. You hammer it into the open spots and make the boat watertight. Otherwise you'd sink.' And suddenly Tom and Melissa realized that in this leaky craft built by a fifteen-year-old boy they were about to trust their lives on a five-hundred-mile run down extremely dangerous waters.

'Where do you get the tar and the other?'

'You ought to have brought it with you, but you didn't. Your Kernel couldn't think of everything, could he?' But Kirby had an idea: 'We'll go to men finishing their boats and see if they'll sell us the caulking they have left over.' And when a bizarre collection of substitutes for real caulking was assembled horsehair, forest moss, strips of linen, burlap they tamped the melange into the cracks, then sealed them with another outrageous mixture of wax, bear fat, tar and pitch, and when all was completed, young Tom Venn could send his first letter home to his grandmother: Pop was killed when a spruce pole doubled back and ran him through. He died brave.

Missy and I are now in Canada so I think it's all right to give you our address, Dawson City, as I don't think anybody could arrest us here. I have built a boat twenty-three feet long and five and a half feet in the beam and in a test it floated like a duck.

As soon as the ice clears the lake we head down the Yukon River, a fine easy trip all the way. I wish Missy had married Pop.

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On Sunday morning, 29 May 1898, the thick ice which had held Lake Bennett in its cold embrace for nearly nine months relaxed its hold and started cascading down the narrow river, which, after ninety miles, tumbled first into a high, rockwalled canyon and then over stupendous rapids before it reached the relative calm of the soon-to-be-clear Yukon. Tom, watching the first open lanes of free water appear like jagged daggers across the surface, shouted: 'It's breaking up!' But Missy and Kirby did not hear his cry, because men in all parts of the vast tent city were shouting and firing their guns.

'Lake Bennett is bustin' open!' More than seven thousand homemade boats edged toward the shoreline as if everyone had to be first out of the lake and first to the gold fields of the Klondike. It was an armada such as had never been seen before, with hardly any two of the crazy boats alike, but into the icy waters of the lake they came, pushed and pulled by straining men who wondered why they had built them so big that ordinary men could not launch them. The great scows had to be wedged in; the one-man affairs those that would be turned back before the canyon could be carried down on the back of the solitary owner. But all that Sunday and the days that followed, the boats were launched, the sails were set, and the men floated toward their treacherous rendezvous with the rapids.

Each boat that set forth, regardless of size, had to carry a name, a number and, in the files of the Mounties, a list of all passengers, for during the previous year too many had been lost. When the time came to christen the Venn boat, which would be Number 7023, Sergeant Kirby had several appropriate suggestions for a name, but once more Tom interrupted to establish the fact that this was his boat: 'It's the Aurora. After the northern lights.'

It was not launched during the first mad scramble, since, as Kirby pointed out, 'you're not rushing to get to the gold fields themselves, let the others break their backs.'

And then he said a revealing thing: 'We can drift down at our own speed.'

'Are you coming with us?' Tom asked, part of him hoping that the answer was yes, because he'd heard about the dangers of the canyon and the rapids, part hoping for a no, because he resented Kirby's relationship with Missy.

'I want to be sure you get through the bad parts,' Kirby said, and on the second of June he called for help from three other Mounties stationed at Bennett, and with many cries of encouragement, for Tom's boat was heavy, the Aurora

was launched, the foremast was stepped and guyed, the big sail was made ready, and the long sweep which Kirby would operate from the stern was fitted into its slot.

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'Good sailing!' Kirby's fellow officers shouted. 'Find yourself a gold mine!'

It was twenty-six miles to the exit from Lake Bennett, and the Aurora, despite her ample sail and the professional steering of Kirby, did not reach that spot before a kind of gentle semidarkness settled like a comforting blanket thrown over the water. Eager to get a fair start in the morning, and loath to tempt the turbulent water ahead in the night, Kirby nosed the Aurora into the right bank and asked Tom to make fast the line which he threw ashore.

They slept on the boat that night, and early next morning left Lake Bennett for the long run to the perilous segment of their voyage, the three-part terror where careless or boastful men without sure knowledge lost their lives. When the June sun was high, thawing snow on the surrounding mountains, Kirby pulled the Aurora

into a small stream of melt-water seeping down from the heights, and there he spelled out what lay ahead: 'In the space of two and a half miles, so much happens, and so fast, that you can be forgiven if you lose your courage.'

'What is it?' Missy asked, for she knew that because she was a woman the decision would be left to her.

'First a canyon, deep and very swift. Water piles up six feet higher in the middle than on the sides. You catch your breath. Then a pair of rocky rapids.'

'Then what?'

'Then a peaceful sail downriver to Dawson.'

'Have you ever taken a boat through?'

'I have.'

'Then let's go!' Tom cried, but Kirby said: 'No. You can make this decision only after you've seen for yourself.'

'And if we turn coward?' Missy asked, and he whipped about as if he had been struck: 'Dammit, ma'am! Some of the bravest men in Canada and America take one look at that canyon and say ”No, thanks.”It's not because they're cowards. It's because they have the good sense to realize they don't know a damn thing about boats.' He glared at Tom: 'Do you know anything about boats?' And Missy replied: 'We don't, but you do.'

Subdued by the seriousness of what they were about to encounter, the three people in the Aurora

moved swiftly downriver toward the entrance to Miles Canyon, first of the tests, but as they neared it, a group of men gathered on the right bank shouted to them: 'Better not try the canyon in a boat like that. You'll sink sure.'

Tom, who was steering through the easier water, headed for the shore, and the men, seeing a woman aboard, tried to 547

frighten her: 'Ma'am, I sure wouldn't try that canyon in that there boat.' Kirby, aware that these men condemned all boats about to enter the canyon, called: 'What do you suggest?'

'We're practiced hands. We'll guide you through, safe and sound.'

'How much?'

'Only a hundred dollars.'

'Too much,' Tom cried, and the men yelled back: 'Then portage around. Indians'11

do it for two hundred.'

'Thanks,' Kirby shouted. 'But we may risk it.'

'Ma'am, before you do, please go to the other bank, rest your boat, and climb up that little hill to see what awaits you in the canyon. Then come back and pay us ninety dollars, and we'll see you through, safe and sound, like we say.'

Kirby took over the sweep, and when they were well out from shore, he headed directly toward the other bank, as the men had suggested: 'I planned to do this anyway. You must see what faces you.'

When they were atop the cliff and looking down into the turbulent canyon, even Tom, who had been eager to try it, grew afraid, for below them rushed the icy waters flooding out from the lakes, and as they roared in they turned and twisted and threw white spume.

'Oh!' Missy cried, and when the others looked to where she was pointing, they saw at the exit a series of jagged rocks, barely above the waterline, onto which three or four small craft had foundered. All goods had been lost in the swift current, but it looked as if the passengers had saved themselves by clinging to the rocks.

Suddenly Missy and Tom lost much of their desire to test this canyon, but now a boat much like theirs came down the approach, manned by two bearded prospectors whose faces could not be clearly seen. They might have been in their twenties, but they could also be tested older hands in their forties. The would-be pilots on the bank hailed them, there was the same discussion, and the same rejection of the hundred-dollar offer. The two men would venture into the canyon relying upon their own skills.

They had no rear sweep, but they did appear to be powerful paddlers, and as their craft leaped toward the swirling waters where the canyon narrowed and the rushing water increased its speed, they paddled with fury and dexterity. Tom had never before seen skilled men handle a boat, and he was thrilled when the craft headed directly at a menacing cliff, then swung safely past as the men paddled heroically. In less than a minute and a half the boat shot out the far end, and Tom cheered.

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But now the boat must clear the rocks on which former attempts had come to grief, and instinctively Torn shouted: 'Watch out!' As if obedient to his warning, the men paddled even faster than before and scraped by the rocks to which the marooned prospectors held. Their heavy boat dipped and darted, more like a bird skimming the calm waters of a lake than a small craft caught in big turbulence. It was a masterful performance, and both Tom and Missy were willing to try duplicating it.

'You ready?' Kirby asked, and Missy asked him: 'Can we do as well?' and Kirby said: 'That's why I've come along.' Then, to Tom: 'You're captain. It's your boat.'

'Let's go!'

'And if we make it, which I believe we can, do you want to head right into the other rapids?'