The Floor of Heaven (21 page)

In the early morning, he woke up stiff and aching. He came out of his tent, his boots crunching against the fresh layer of ground frost, and for the first time he had a good look at the mountain he intended to climb that day. The camp lay in a broad basin, and from this perspective the Chilkoot stood out from the surrounding peaks. It seemed to rise higher and more steeply, and the sunlight glinted with harsh menace off the green-iced glaciers that fortified its walls. It would be impossible to cross, George suddenly moaned to himself. He’d barely taken a single step, but the muscles in his thighs and calves were still throbbing from yesterday’s ordeal. Yet how could he dare to give up, to turn around and go back? But would that be any less of an embarrassment than surrendering halfway up the mountain? Or, worse, falling to his death, his body lost forever, shrouded each passing year by snow and more snow?

Then George saw the Indians hoisting their huge sacks—one hundred pounds each!—into their backs. And the Day brothers, too, had lit their cob pipes and were raring to head off. George knew he could not be the only one to quit. He was, he chastised himself, too close to his lifelong goal to give up. So in a tremendous burst of will, he lifted his pack to his back, adjusted the leather shoulder straps, and joined the others.

It was four miles uphill to the summit, and George had not gone far before it became clear to him that he was locked in a battle to the death: Either he would cross the Chilkoot into the Canadian Yukon or he’d die trying. Even if he didn’t have the heart, it was no longer possible to turn back.

The snow was thick underfoot. Icy boulders as big as streetcars needed to be traversed. The wind shrieked. A mammoth overhanging glacier reflected the sunlight like a prism, dazzling hues of turquoise, sapphire, and rose bouncing off walls of sheer ice, blinding him, while the huge glacier itself seemed poised to come crashing down at any moment. He sweated under his heavy coat. His socks dripped rivulets of ice. His pack ground down hard on his back as if he were carrying the broad trunk of one of the sturdy evergreens he’d only days before admired. After two miles, the line of bone-weary men reached a flat-ledged slope. The Indians lowered the packs from their backs. It was the signal to rest.

George could now see the pass’s white-tipped summit. It was tantalizingly close. Nevertheless, he decided he could walk no farther.

He was right. When the line moved forward for the final ascent, he soon found himself bent over, climbing in an awkward, hunched fashion rather than walking upright. A snow-covered rock slide blocked the trail, and the only way up the increasingly steep path was to pull himself over one icy boulder after another. His legs were cramping. His fingers were numb. In his wet, slick boots, footholds were slippery and brief. By the time he found the muscle and the ingenuity and the will to get over the rock slide, all pride belonged to another life. Crawling on all fours like a beaten animal, George reached the summit. He’d left American Alaska and now was standing in Canadian territory, at the entryway into the vast Yukon. He felt he should let loose with a triumphant yell, but he just didn’t have the strength.

EVEN IN late May, the ice on Lake Lindeman was still more than a foot thick. It’d be ten days or so, the Day brothers estimated, before it’d start to break and a boat could make its way to the headwaters of the Yukon. But George found that there was plenty to do in the meantime, and in their cruel way, these tasks were nearly as demanding as the trek over the Chilkoot.

Following the brothers’ instructions, a scaffold known as a saw pit was constructed. Logs were first stripped of their bark, then laid on top of this platform. While one man stood on top of the saw pit grasping one handle of a jag-toothed six-foot whipsaw, another gripped the other handle from below. Back and forth the two men uneasily worked the saw, shavings showering down on the man below, the sinews in their arms straining as with each stroke they fought to raise the saw high above their heads; and, inevitably, tempers flared. It was difficult, backbreaking work, but it was the only way to cut the planks for the boats.

At last, the ice melted. And the new boats, the pitch on their seams barely dry, went to sea. The Day brothers headed straight for the Stewart River. But George and his partners guided their twenty-foot boat toward a nearby creek that emptied into the clear waters of Lake Bennett. George had a hunch.

His hunch didn’t pan out. Still, there were more hunches, and more creeks. The team traveled 150 miles up the Yukon. At the end of months of daily panning, George’s share of the dust they’d found weighed a slight two ounces.

GEORGE WAS back in Juneau before winter set in. Though he had nothing to show for all his difficult travel and hard work, he wasn’t discouraged. No one could ever call him a cheechako again. He’d proved himself. At last, he was his father’s son. Proudly, he wrote to his sister Rose, “I have done better than I expected the first year.”

After almost a year on his own, his confidence remained absolute. His belief was religious in its intensity and its certainty. Although he was unable to point to a single piece of tangible evidence, he had no doubts. He concluded the earnest letter to his sister by revealing the cornerstone of his unshakable faith: “There is a big gold field in the Yukon, and I want my share of it. And am going to have it if the Lord wills it.”

SIXTEEN

t was one thing, however, for George to believe he’d strike it rich, and it was another to be broke in Alaska with winter setting in. By October, when even the deer had been driven from the mountain meadows above Juneau by the first heavy snows, George had no choice but to abandon his tent. With great reluctance, he dug into the last of his nest egg and took a closet-sized room in a hotel off Front Street. Food, to his relief, wouldn’t be too much of a problem. He’d always been a good rifle shot—truth was, like Charlie Siringo, he could be a little vain about his marksmanship—and there were still ducks and geese bobbing up and down on the waves just beyond the tidal flats. A wing shot, and George would have a feast he could roast over a spruce fire. Netting salmon swimming upstream was even easier. And after the birds flew south and the spawning salmon completed their run, he’d still be able to dig for clams or hook a bottomfish. He wouldn’t starve. Of course, if he could get work, that would certainly give his circumstances a lift, and he’d be able to save for the grubstake he’d need to head back up north in the spring. But this time of year, no one was hiring; even the Treadwell mine, across the channel, was turning people away. Money or not, he’d just have to make do. “I think I can wiggle through the winter all right,” George wrote to his sister, as much to shore up his own spirits as hers.

But George hadn’t anticipated the complete loneliness of the existence he’d be locked in to. Although in his shepherd’s life he’d known solitude, it was nothing like the prison he now occupied. In California, he’d found solace simply from being in the hill country; invigoration came from spending days in windswept meadows, from nights lying in a field on his back gazing up at the starry Milky Way sprinkled across the heavens. During the long winter months in Alaska, he was besieged. The snow would not stop falling, and the cold would not desist. All George could do was take refuge in his tiny room. Fully dressed, with a cloak of blankets wrapped over his shoulders for additional warmth, he still found it impossible to escape the howling, frosty wind that whooshed into his room each endless night, forcing its ice-cold way into every fiber of his being. Alone and lonely, he brooded.

It was a well-practiced habit. George had taken refuge in his thoughts during his days and nights while tending to his flock in Modesto, and it had always been a comforting excursion. In his mind, he’d travel to an imagined place where the bonanza he so desperately wanted was within his grasp. He could escape by celebrating the triumph, the fortune of gold, he saw in his mind’s eye.

The solitary Alaskan winter, however, chilled his dreams. George could not help reminding himself that he’d actually been to the Yukon—only to return empty-handed. A man alone, the reality of his failure became his constant companion. He revisited it. He nurtured it. And in time, the intensity of his expectations subsided. He lost his faith. It had all been folly, he decided. What sort of vanity had it been to think that he’d somehow be the lucky one to strike it rich in the Yukon? Yes, he told himself, he was his father’s son. Only now when George acknowledged this pedigree, it stung like a curse.

He shared his weary resignation in a letter to Rose: “I have not been doing much as I can get nothing to do.… Some of the men came back from the Yukon reporting good diggings there. But I don’t think I will go back in there again. If I can get good wages here in Juneau I will stay until I can make a grubstake for Becky and me.”

Becky! During the hard course of the winter, one dream had been broken. Yet when it had shattered, another had taken on new significance and had grown more elaborate, more impassioned. The only escape George could make from the constant grinding loneliness was to envision an existence with Becky. It had been, he wrote to Becky in a beseeching letter, the mistake of his life to have left her behind. Together, he proclaimed with the solemn ardor of a convert to a new faith, they could create a life filled with happiness. He asked her to join him in Juneau in the spring.

As soon as George mailed the letter, his days took on a purpose. They were no longer empty. He had something to look forward to. He kept busy by plotting out the future, their future, in his mind.

He waited for her response. When the letter didn’t come, he blamed the mails. Then he worried that Becky was sick. But he entertained no anxieties about her loyalty or her love. It was all he had left, so he refused to doubt it. He clung to Becky; and in this way, she protected him.

Her letter never came. Finally, it was Rose who answered. Becky, she revealed with a no-nonsense brevity, had found someone else.

George was devastated. In a single winter he’d lost everything; and he was certain there’d never be anything else for him in his life. Defeated, despairing, he instinctively fled his room after reading his sister’s news. He trudged out to a street covered in high white drifts and held his face up to the gusts of falling snow. It poured down on him in thick, cold waves, and he surrendered to it. George hoped the snow would keep coming and coming, covering him until he was lost forever.

IN THE end, a poem restored him. It nudged his heart toward a change of mood. On Christmas Eve, surrounded by his loneliness, he recalled an image from the previous summer and he began to write: “But a whispering comes from the tall old spruce / And my soul from the pain is free.” His mind had been yearning, and in its desperation it had found a new destination. He focused on a clear, idyllic picture of the hewn-log trading post in Dyea that looked out on a “tall old spruce” and an inlet of shimmering blue water. The fine, bright beauty of the setting had affected him when he’d first encountered it, and in a burst of sentimental emotion he found himself traveling back to it on Christmas Eve in his poem. Soon his thoughts would often be making the journey to Dyea from his little room. And with each new trip, its perfection grew.

In the process, a plan took hold. He’d no money to speak of, certainly not enough to grubstake another journey over the Chilkoot and into the Yukon, even if he were of a mind to take up prospecting again. But if he pitched his tent near old Healy’s place in Dyea, he could live off the land—deer and fish were plentiful—and maybe he’d find work as a guide or a packer. At least, he’d be out of the stifling confines of Juneau and in the open air.

As soon as the snow on Front Street began melting into a muddy slush and the promise of spring could be felt in the warming sun on the beach as he dug for clams, George found an Aleut willing to take him up to Dyea in his canoe. He pitched his tent not more than a stone’s throw from the trading post, and he waited with a fair amount of apprehension about how old Healy would take to his presence.

George had heard all the stories: how when J. J. Healy had been the sheriff in Chouteau County, Montana, he’d a tendency to hang whomever he arrested without fussing too much over the severity of the infraction. How Healy’d held off a band of wild prairie Indians by waving his lit cigar over a keg of gunpowder and threatening to blow ’em all, himself included, to kingdom come if they didn’t ride off. How he’d shot his way out of at least a couple of dozen other tight scrapes as he loped through Mexico, the West, and Canada. And George had seen enough of J.J. to appreciate that while his hair had turned white, he still was a crusty old bird, his back as ramrod straight as a marine’s on the Sitka parade grounds, and his stare as unforgiving as a drill sergeant’s. Yet, oddly, Healy never said a word to George about his pitching a tent where the merchant couldn’t miss seeing it each day when he sat on his porch. Perhaps Healy’d become resigned; in the course of his far-flung travels he might well’ve come to learn that a man couldn’t outrun civilization. Or maybe Healy enjoyed the prospect of company. In fact, to George’s considerable surprise, whenever he had occasion to purchase tea or tobacco at the trading post, Healy was downright pleasant, even friendly.

That was how it happened that on a rainy May afternoon George was in the post chewing the fat with Healy when two Indian trappers carrying a bundle of furs entered. As a rule, Healy didn’t have much truck with Indians; he’d spent too many years of his rambling life avoiding getting scalped ever to feel comfortable around ’em. Besides, most of the braves who came to the post were Chilkoots hoping to buy molasses and lemon extract for mixing up some hoochinoo, an alcoholic brew that had a genuine kick to it. Last thing you want to deal with, Healy had once told George after he’d ordered some Chinooks—like most white men up north, he used the word dismissively for all Indians—out of his store, was a drunk red man. So Charlie was bewildered when Healy gave these two Indians a friendly greeting.

To George’s further astonishment, he introduced the two braves as politely as if they were guests arriving for tea. The big one was a broad-shouldered, hawk-nosed man, and with a frank, unnerving curiosity, he fixed two eyes as black as lumps of coal on George. Healy called him Skookum Jim. Skookum, George knew, was the Chinook word for “strong,” and with just a glance George decided the name was appropriate. The Indian looked to be as tall as a spruce and just as sturdy. Still, Healy felt obliged to explain how Jim had earned his nickname: “He can carry a 150 pound sack ’cross the Chilkoot as if it were a feather.” The other Indian, George figured, might’ve been made up from what little was left after the Indian gods had finished putting Jim together. He was a skinny runt of a fellow with a weaselly look. Healy said he was Jim’s nephew and called him Tagish Charley.