Astray (9 page)

They’d pick a likely spot, spit in the can for luck, let the water wash away the mud, and peer into the bottom for the glitter. The first time they found some it had a startling greenish tinge to it. Injun let out a yelp like an injured dog, and Goat got him in a half nelson and kissed his ear.

This was why the Yukon was the place to be, even if there hadn’t been any real big strikes yet. In some goldfields, the stuff was veined into the hard rock, and only expensive machinery could blast it out, but the Yukon gave up her treasure
casually to any man who took the trouble to look for it. Placer gold—free gold, some called it—lying around in the white gravel in the form of good coarse dust or nuggets even. This first spot gave five cents’ worth of gold dust from the pan, when Injun weighed it with slightly shaking hands. The toeless fellow reckoned eight cents a pan’s a pretty good prospect, he said, but Goat laughed and said this here looked pretty good to him. He wanted to stake their claim right away; Injun had to talk him into waiting to see if they could find a richer spot. (In Fortymile, Injun had got the impression Swedes were pitied for their willingness to stake a prospect other men would dig a shit pit on.)

At night the two fellows lay back-to-back in their sailcloth tent, and in the mornings they counted their bruises; the man with the fewest had to boil the coffee. That was their first game but soon they had plenty. After another week they found a bend in a muddy creek that gave ten cents a pan, and Injun felt the glow of being right, as well as the giddy anticipation of riches. Goat marked out the five hundred feet he liked best; Injun blazed a small spruce tree and penciled on the upstream side,
One,
and their names.

That night they lay awake so long laughing and planning how to spend their fortune, they were baggy-eyed when they hiked into Fortymile to the Recorder’s Office. The two of them were so ignorant, they hadn’t realized that they were allowed a claim each, and that the discoverer of the strike was granted double, which meant three between them. They rushed back to their muddy creek the next morning and staked out another thousand feet, marking it
One Below
and
Two Below.
Injun put Goat down as the discoverer and himself as the second man, but that was just a formality.

In Fortymile they borrowed a mule to haul their outfit and a stack of raw lumber to their claim for building a tiny cabin. They left two stumps in the middle of the floor to sit on, and built bunks against the walls. The windows were deer hide (that was a tip another old-timer had given them); Injun was surprised how well they let in the autumn light. With a sheet-iron stove they were all set, and Injun soon had some flapjacks on.

At first he couldn’t get the knack of sleeping on his skinny bunk instead of back-to-back in the tent, but at least it was warmer. The walls smelled of sawdust, and pressed close, it was like living in a two-man coffin. Lucky we’ve got no third mate, he said in the dark.

Reckon so, Goat replied.

After a couple of days the cabin was fetid with smoke and feet. Injun pasted woodcuts from yellowed newspapers over the cracks:
Jumbo the Elephant,
and
Ladies Admiring Niagara Falls,
and
A View of Kew.
He found one called
The Forests of Scandinavia
to make his partner feel at home, not that Goat gave any sign of noticing. On the back, there was an article about some rich German with a bee in his bonnet about bringing all the creatures mentioned in Shakespeare to America; he’d released forty pairs of starlings in the middle of New York City. Bet they all got eat by nightfall, said Injun with a laugh, but Goat said naw, immigrants always take over, they’ve got fire in the belly.

In September, the leaves burned red and fell, and all the
Yukon’s little veins froze up. Goat and Injun were so green, they’d never thought to wonder how to mine in the sub-Arctic winter. Sure, you have to burn your way down, said the Irish fellows on the next creek over. So every night the two partners lit a wood fire in their dig, and every morning they scraped past the ashes into the hot thawed earth. The greasy black shaft they hollowed out this way was barely wide enough to let one man crouch. The other would winch the bucket of muck up with a windlass, and pile it in a dump. It was a fortnight before they hit the pay streak—a dried-up creek channel—and started tunneling sideways along it. Already their pay-dirt dump was as high as Injun’s head. But the killing thing about northern mining, of course, was you never knew what you’d got till the spring melt.

Sometimes they got so tired of the crawling and scrabbling in the smoky dark, they splashed their faces with water and trudged into Fortymile. There was a snowed-in vaudeville troupe that gave the same turns every night till the crowd howled like malamutes. There were ten saloons, and the code was that any man who came in with a poke of gold dust to throw down on the bar bought hot hootchinoo for everyone in hearing, or real whiskey if a boat had come in. Fortymile men all seemed to have got strange nicknames like Squaw Cameron or Cannibal Ike. (Goat and Injun were too used to their own monikers to remember they’d ever been called anything else.) The stories told in the saloons were of gold men; lucky ones, unlucky ones. A drunken sucker who got tricked into buying what seemed like a worthless stake, but it turned out a bonanza in the end. A Forty-Niner who washed out
thirty thousand dollars but got so fixed on the prospect of being robbed that he slit his own throat before anyone else could.

The weather tightened like a fist. By October the two mates had stopped shaving, since a beard was some protection even if it did form icicles around the mouth. Injun’s droopy Indian-style mustache flowed right into his side whiskers, he was like some old walrus, and Goat’s goatee had spread into a yellow thornbush. When it got to fifty below, they gave up digging, lay in their bunks half the day in the smoky cabin. One of them might lurch out with scarves wrapped round his face to hack a deep hole in the river for water, or hobble into Fortymile—they were both plagued with blisters and boils on their feet—to get another handful of beans on credit. Long nights they curled like grubs in their foul sleeping bags, listing fresh things they’d a fancy for: apricots, cherries, tomatoes. They sang “My Darling Clementine” and “Break the News to Mother” and other old tunes they could only half remember. Injun hummed hymns from his childhood and Goat dredged up some sad Swedish songs. What’s sad about them? Injun wanted to know, but Goat couldn’t translate the words, he said, they’re just sad.

The code was, show your grit, but help other gold men out, because otherwise who’d last a winter? A fellow was entitled to walk into your cabin while you were out, eat his fill, have a kip, and go on his way, as long as he left a supply of fresh kindling in case you came in frozen. Once Injun arrived home to find Goat talking Swedish with some block-faced stranger over the last of yesterday’s bread. He
didn’t like the fellow’s manner and was glad he was gone in the morning.

That winter the mates made all the mistakes of all young men in too much of a hurry to ask. They got stomachache when they didn’t bother cooking their beans long enough, and toe rot from sleeping in wet boots. The one thing they knew never to do was let the fire die out, because of that popular story about the two partners discovered in an isolated cabin, stiff as rocks beside an icy stew kettle with nothing but a pair of partly cooked moccasins in it.

In the night Goat and Injun kept talking, speech slurred from numb lips, just so they’d know they hadn’t died. Your Yukon is a perverse kind of river, remarked Injun, did you know it rises fifteen miles from the Pacific and then meanders around for two thousand more before it falls back down into the Pacific?

Goat grunted as if to say he neither knew nor cared. After a minute he said this cussed place, why did Uncle Sam ever buy it off the Ruskies?

He didn’t, Injun corrected him, that’s Alaska, we’re in the Queen’s territory now.

Goat muttered something about what he’d like to do to the Queen.

Soap out that filthy mouth, said Injun, coughing with laughter, don’t you know she’s about a hundred years old?

Came a long blizzard when water iced on the walls two feet from the fire. Let me in before I freeze, said Goat, stumbling two steps from his bunk to Injun’s. Lying like spoons they shuddered up some warmth. Injun woke from a doze to
find his hand on Goat’s britches and he couldn’t rightly have said whether it was him who’d put it there. His left hand was so numb it hardly knew what his right hand was doing and kept on doing. Then Goat thrashed round to face him and their breath was a hot Chinook wind.

What time is it, Injun wondered, what seemed like days later, and Goat said, what does it matter? They stirred and slept, touched and rolled and slept, couldn’t get out of the bunk except once in a while to throw a log on the fire. You do it. No, you! Numbskull Swede, lazy half-breed, they cursed each other with a curious fondness, tried to shove each other onto the floor, grabbed each other again. The wind made a fearful whining.

There was something wrong with their legs, they were bruised blue and red. Injun’s joints ached and his mouth tasted metallic, like blood. Is my breath bad? he asked. Goat, and his mate said, sure, but I don’t care. Goat’s face was strangely puffy. We’re a couple of beauties, he wheezed, laying his yellow beard against Injun’s bared chest.

Injun woke up later, unnerved by the silence. The blizzard had to be over. He was starving and sore. Slowly he heaved Goat against the wall, tucking the sleeping bag round him, and got to his feet. He took a sip of water from the cup on the stove. His face in the tin plate was weirdly mottled. What had they done to themselves? It occurred to him that they were dying and his heart lifted oddly.

It took Injun the best part of the day to stagger into Fortymile. My partner and I, we’re dying of gangrene, he told McQuesten, taking down his trousers in the back of the
store. The owner snorted and said, don’t you fool boys know about scurvy? He sent Injun off with a bottle of lime juice, so sour it made him retch.

On the journey back, the sun came up over the ice, and Injun had forgotten his wooden mask with the slit in it. By the time he made it home he was so snowblind he was surprised he hadn’t stumbled into some abandoned shaft and snapped his legs. His eyes were full of scalding sand, the good one as bad as the bad; the whole world was scarlet with fire, and the more he rubbed, the worse it hurt. Goat laughed but spooned stew into Injun’s mouth like a mother.

Any way you looked at it, these were awful days. They’d come all this way to work like half-starved galley slaves. Even after the lime juice fixed their scurvy, they had a damaged look about them. Some mornings Injun stumbled through the dusk, past the smog rising from their shaft, to peer at the brooding outline of their dump. How much was black dirt, how much gold? A tree made a sound like a pistol shot and Injun jumped before remembering it was only the sap freezing. He could make out the purgatorial glow of other shafts on the next creek over, but the snow muffled all sounds. The world was empty but for small creeping things in their holes. He felt entirely temporary, and it occurred to him that the mine he and Goat were so painstakingly thawing and grubbing out this winter would, in years to come, close over again like a scar. Fortymile would fall to dust and wolves would bed down in these shacks, the ice would seal over the trail.

But Injun always finished what he set his hand to and Goat
was the same way. Also there was no way to Outside till spring unless they were insane enough to trek a thousand miles over the mountains. Also things had been different between them since the blizzard, they kept their kit on one bunk and slept on the other, or lay shoving and laughing and groaning in the dark. It was like a pact they didn’t need to discuss.

Come May, at last, the cabin was green with mildew and the two partners coughed so wetly in the mornings it sounded like branches ripping off a tree. The creeks began to shrug off their ice; Injun and Goat’s shaft seeped up to head height and they had to abandon it. It was time to build a long sluice box and divert some of the creek through it; time to see what they’d earned for their winter’s punishment. They soon got a rhythm going: dump in a shovel of paydirt, let the water sweep the dross away, leaving the gold caught in the cross-riffles and matting at the bottom. Every three days they did a cleanup, lifting out the sluice box and panning the residue.

After the first week it was becoming clear to Injun that they were losers.

Goat would hear nothing of it. The good stuff’s lower down the heap, he insisted.

Injun rolled his eyes. The black dirt was speckled with gold, all right, but so was every sandbank in this part of the world. Their poke was mounting up slowly, miserably, but other men lurched into Fortymile screaming like ravens, their pockets bursting with Midas dust. Gold men went on sprees from saloon to saloon, the crowd bearing them along like
champions, smashing furniture. The Irishmen on the next creek over boasted of washing out twenty, twenty-five cents a pan. Fortunes were made and drunk all that summer, while Goat and Injun bent and sweated their strength away.

One day Goat said he’d had it.

What do you mean, you’ve had it?

I’ve had it up to here with gold mining.

Injun told him he just needed a whiskey. They walked into Fortymile, barely exchanging ten words along the way. Frost was tinting the mountains yellow already, the summer was on the turn. Injun picked up a page of newspaper in the street, it said the tenth of August. He blinked at it. Lookit, Goat, he said, I forgot my birthday. Yours too. Reckon we’re twenty-three now.

Goat cleared his throat and spat before turning into the nearest saloon.

Injun went on to the store and handed over his meager poke, but McQuesten snorted as he weighed it in his hand, and tossed it back to him. He agreed to extend their credit a month or two longer, in case the boys’ luck was around the corner. Injun’s mouth felt gummed up with shame. If you fancy a change, McQuesten remarked, I could use someone in the back of the store.