Alaska (91 page)

'Yes.' The boy felt certain that his father, had he lived, would have made the same choices.

So the three climbed down from their perch, returned to the boat, and pushed off as the men on the opposite shore shouted: 'Good luck! Hope you make it!'

The passage of the Aurora

was almost a duplicate of the one made by the two skilled paddlers. Kirby stayed aft to work the sweep, Missy and Tom perched forward with paddles, but they had been in the canyon only a few yards when a rock, not visible before, threatened them from Tom's side, and instinctively he thrust out his paddle and shoved it against the rock. As he did, the paddle bent, and Missy screamed: 'Tom!' but he pulled away and no damage was done.

There was another variation. As the Aurora shot out of the canyon and neared the rocks on which the castaways were huddled, Sergeant Kirby, in line of duty, headed almost straight for them, cocking his sweep just so, and when he was abreast of the terrified people, but moving so fast that any rescue was impossible, he shouted: 'We'll be back to get you. Mounted Police.'

No words along the Yukon trail could have been more reassuring, and as the Aurora

sped past, the abandoned men waved and shouted, for now they knew they were to be saved.

WHEN KIRBY GUIDED THEM THROUGH THE LAST SET OF breathtaking rapids, spume high at the prow and wrecked boats leering at them as if to warn: 'One false move of that sweep and you join us!' the Mountie headed the tested boat toward a point in the direction of Lake Laberge where he must leave them. As they pulled the nose of the Aurora

onto

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dry land, he said approvingly: 'Tom, you built yourself a fine boat.'

'I was scared,' the boy said. 'Not in the canyon. You keep to the middle where the water bulges up, you make it. And it's all so swift. All you need there is courage.

But in those rapids, there you have to know something. I couldn't have done that.'

'Well now,' Kirby said. 'Maybe you've said the wisest thing on this trip. Courage for the canyon. Knowledge for the rapids.' He stopped, winked at this, boy who gave such promise of becoming a fine man, and said: 'Which is the important factor? What do you think, Missy?'

'I don't think you ever gain real knowledge unless you have courage to begin with.'

Tom had other ideas: 'Anybody can have courage. Just grit your teeth. But to handle a boat, or a gun, or someone like Soapy Smith . . . that takes knowing.'

'Let's not make this too serious,' Kirby said. 'Lots of men get through that canyon and the rapids.'

'And lots don't,' Tom said, remembering the wrecks.

The boy hoped that he could retain contact with this excellent man who knew how to meet contingencies. When they crashed through the final rapids with the Aurora almost vertical in the air, Kirby had calmly brought her around, then shouted to two Mounties who were checking the numbers of the boats that made it: 'Exit from the canyon. Men marooned. Send heavy boat through from the other side.' No heroics, no speeches. Find a heavy boat and get started. Tom could visualize how the rescue would be handled, the boat drifting past the rocks, the rope thrown, the kept end led ashore lower down, both ends fastened tight, the people working their way ashore while grasping the rope.

'It would be fun being a pilot through those waters,' Tom said, and Kirby replied: 'Three years ago not six canoes a year came through. Three years from now there won't be seven.'

'Won't the Klondike produce forever?'

'Nothing does.'

Tom sensed that Kirby's parting from Missy was going to be a painful affair, so he left the boat and walked along the shore while they said farewell. The sergeant told Missy of his son in Manitoba and of his wife. He reminded her of what an exceptional boy Tom was and he almost commanded her to look out for his welfare. He said that in some ways Dawson City was rougher than Skagway, but that Superintendent Steele could always be counted on. And he challenged her to find sensible employment: 'I'll be in Dawson one of these days. I don't want to see you down on your heels in mud.'

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Then he said that he loved her, and he was heartsick that she had lost Buck Venn, who seemed one of the best men to come over the Chilkoot, and he wished her well.

He hoped that her dreams would come true, whatever they were, and he ended with a statement she would cherish: 'You're strong. You're like the ravens.'

'What does that mean?' she asked, and he said: 'They survive. Even in the goddamnedest parts of the arctic, they survive.' And he said no more, moving away quickly to avoid the necessity of speaking with Tom again.

AT LAST THEY COULD RELAX. IN CHICAGO THEY HAD

been afraid of Tom's mother's lawyers, and in Seattle they were always looking over their shoulders lest her detectives track them down. In Skagway they feared Soapy Smith, and on the Chilkoot they had feared everything. Then death came and the horrors of the whipsaw, and then the canyon and the rapids. Now, by damn, they were drifting down the placid ice-free Yukon in just about the best boat on the river, and they took it easy.

Tom found special delight in being alone with Missy, as if the real voyage to the gold fields was back on target, and one afternoon as they drifted past the mouth of the Pelly, a large river coming in from the east, he asked abruptly: 'Did you know that Sergeant Kirby has a boy back in Manitoba?' and she replied: 'Yes, and a wife too, if that's what's bothering you.'

He thought about this for some minutes, then said: 'You know, Missy, if you keep going with men who have wives, you're never going to get married.'

'Tom, what's getting into you?'

'I was thinking how good it would be for all of us if you could marry Sergeant Kirby.'

When she made no comment, he added: 'Then the three of us could stay together.'

Only then did she realize that Tom was disturbed about what they would do when they reached Dawson, and she confessed to him: 'Tom, I don't know what we'll do in Dawson.

I'm as worried as you are. You remember this. We're a team. We won't be separated.'

'We better not be.'

'So you look after me, Tom, and I'll look after you.'

'Shake hands on that?' They shook hands, and she said: 'What's more, we'll seal it with a kiss,' and she leaned across the drifting boat and kissed him on the forehead.

In the last warming days of spring, when ice had left the rivers, they passed that series of streams whose waters joined 551

to build the mighty Yukon: the White, the Stewart, the Sixty mile, and when Tom visualized the vast hinterland that had to be drained to form such rivers, he appreciated what an immense land this part of Canada was. America had seemed big when he and Buck and Missy crossed it by train, but it was broken into manageable units by the little towns and big cities along the way. From Dyea, which was nothing, to Dawson City, which hadn't existed at all three years ago, there was nothing, not a town, nor a train, nor even a road.

Some nights they dragged their boat onto the right bank of the Yukon and pitched a tent, especially if they wanted to do some cooking, but on others they simply drifted in the silvery light, for always as they moved farther north the nights became shorter and the twilights so extended that sometimes there seemed to be no night at all, only deepened shadows through which the ever-present ravens flew.

As they lazed along they were sometimes passed by other boats whose passengers, hungry for the Klondike, were rowing through the arctic haze. 'Where you from?' a voice would hail, and Tom would shout back: 'Chicago,' and the voice would respond: 'Minnesota,'

and somehow this simple recitation of names signified a great deal to the travelers.

At last the Aurora,

showing almost no leakage, turned a bend in the river, and its owners saw ahead on the right the formless outlines of a tent city, much smaller than Dawson had been reported to be, and they were disappointed, but then Tom consulted the sketch the Kernel had provided: 'That's got to be Lousetown. And here's the Klondike coming in, and Dawson City will be dead ahead.'

And there it was, this fabulous place with more than a thousand boats occupying its riverfront and outlining the site. It was a dream city, composed of nothing, a nightmare city, perhaps, with more than twenty thousand residents now and another five thousand out on the diggings, and both Missy and Tom felt their hearts beat faster as the Aurora

neared the end of its journey. They were excited not only by the imminence of the decision they would soon have to make but also by the limitless possibilities, and as Tom edged their boat toward the shore and then elbowed his way to a landing spot, Missy suddenly cried: 'Tom, we've made it! Tomorrow we'll find Superintendent Steele and be on our way!' She betrayed no doubt as to the success of their adventure.

It was three hectic days before they found Steele's headquarters, and then they learned that he was downriver at Circle, more than two hundred miles away. But a woman at the Mounted Police headquarters assured Missy that yes, the superintendent had alerted her that Miss Peckham would be 552

stopping by, and yes, her money was safe. The superintendent would deliver it as soon as he returned.

In the waiting days Missy and Tom had ample opportunity to explore Dawson, but ten minutes would have sufficed to learn all that was needed. The streets were incredibly muddy, and peopled by men in beards and heavy dark clothing. Material of every description had been utilized in the making of huge white signs proclaiming all the services usually found in an ordinary town plus those unusual additional ones necessary in a mining boomtown. Dawson, it seemed to Missy, was a place in which thousands of men stood around doing nothing and in which everything was for sale. Six different emporiums announced WE SELL OUTFITS and four others announced that they bought them.

Each night Missy and Tom returned to the riverfront and the tent they had wedged in among a hundred others, and after the third aimless day of wandering these crowded, meaningless streets, they took serious counsel. Missy said: 'Tom, you and I will never find a place in the gold fields. That's for men who know what they're doing.'

'I'm willing to try.'

'No!'

Her curt dismissal annoyed him: 'If the men I see are clever enough to find gold, so are you and me.'

'Two years ago, yes. But now we'd have to go ten, fifteen miles into the country.

Spend a winter there, maybe.'

'If I can build a boat, I can build a cabin.' The idea of spending a winter helping a woman like Missy was not distressing; it was downright agreeable.

But Missy, haunted by the doleful predictions of the Klondike Kernel, saw that he had been correct. The gold of the Yukon lay in servicing the great mass of men, not in competing with them. Sixteen lucky miners were making money that June on their fantastic finds; six hundred were coining gold from their stores, their rental of horses, their trading in leases, their medical or legal services. She saw also that enterprising women no more skilled or determined than she were doing extremely well with fortune telling, the running of brothels, the selling of doughnuts and coffee.

Three women had banded together to run a laundry, which was stacked with miners'

clothing, and one seamstress seemed to be prospering from the sewing of shirts.

'What do we have to offer?' Missy demanded during the long twilight, and Tom replied: 'I can build boats.'

Unwisely she laughed, and when Tom flushed, she pointed to the riverfront where more than a thousand boats were for sale, their mission accomplished. Realizing the ridiculous-553

ness of his proposal, he, too, laughed: 'Anyway, I can build cabins.'

They talked on, rejecting one impractical alternative after another, but as they spoke, Missy kept looking at their nearby boat, and this gave her a viable idea: 'Tom, we have double rations in the Aurora.

All our food and all of Buck's too,' and the more they considered this, the more appealing became the idea of opening a food shop of some kind and selling at profit their excess. The arrival this summer of regular boats up the Yukon from the Bering Sea meant that there would be no starvation in 1898 as there had been in '97, but there would be opportunities for enormous rewards.

Using the sail which Sergeant Kirby had sold them atop the Chilkoot Pass, Tom painted an enormous sign, one which dominated the waterfront: MISSY'S GOOD MEALS CHEAP, and the tent restaurant was in business not along the main street where competition would have been severe, but along the river where thousands of men were almost forced to congregate in the first days of their arrival.

To his own surprise, Tom was not loath to knock apart the Aurora, which he had built with such care, and after some of her planks were converted into tables and benches he bought for almost nothing another boat, so poorly built that it practically fell apart.

The two proprietors slaved over their restaurant, Missy doing the cooking, Tom the washing-up and the procurement of additional food from various sources. Mostly they relied upon their own cargo of dried foods so carefully chosen by Buck and the Kernel, and the diet they served was heavy on starches and caribou or moose meat brought in by some hunter.

They learned to equate gold dust, which passed as currency in Dawson, with dollars, and although their banner proclaimed cheap prices, the rates were surprisingly high.

Their specialty, a loss leader you might say, was a breakfast of pancakes and syrup, greasy caribou sausage and cups of steaming coffee for thirty-five cents. Hungry men who gorged on this bargain were apt to return for lunch and supper, on which Missy and Tom made a real profit.

They had been in successful operation some six weeks when Superintendent Steele returned, and hearing that they had arrived in Dawson, came looking for them along the riverfront.

'Hello,' he greeted Tom as he entered the tent. 'You remember me? I'm Samuel Steele, and I'm glad to see you prospering.'

'Hey! Missy! It's the superintendent!' And when she ap-554

peared, obviously involved in heavy work, Steele congratulated her on having, as he said, 'found your footing.'