Down the Yukon

The trouble started over a mongrel dog, small, mostly black, shorthaired and shivering. Without the fur to keep itself warm or the size to pull a sled, it had no business being in the North. How an animal so unsuited to living in the shadow of the Arctic Circle ever made it all the way to the Klondike is anyone's guess.

The gold rush had dumped a legion of abandoned dogs in Dawson City. They were a noisy, thieving bunch generally ignored by the population, including me. I no longer had the heart for dogs. During my struggle to catch up with my brothers in Dawson City, I'd lost a magnificent husky, as fine an animal as ever drew breath.

His name was King. The two of us had clawed our way over the Chilkoot Pass late in the fall of '97, only to lose our race with freeze-up on the Yukon. On New Year's Eve, that's when I lost King. More than a year
later I missed him nearly as much as I missed Jamie Dunavant, the raven-haired Canadian girl I'd met along the trail.

Jamie was performing thousands of miles south, bringing the Klondike to the big cities. She was famous. Jamie had first become a sensation right in Dawson City, on the stage of the Palace Grand Theater. “The Princess of Dawson,” that's what the miners called her.

Man, oh man, how I missed her.

Jamie's theater, as I thought of the Palace Grand, is where I found myself on a Saturday evening in March of '99. Strange to think that an hour later, a chance encounter with a dog would steer my brothers and me onto the road to disaster. Abraham, Ethan, and I were marveling at moving pictures, the first we'd ever seen. New inventions reached “the San Francisco of the North” surprisingly fast.

After the moving pictures, the owner of the Palace Grand entertained the audience with one of his shooting demonstrations. Arizona Charlie's target was a glass ball that his underdressed wife held between her thumb and forefinger. From clear across the stage, time after time, the old frontiersman never missed.

As the crowd spilled out into the subzero chill of Dawson's Front Street, the excited talk produced a cloud of vapor that fell as frost all around us. With buildings just on one side of Front Street and the other side being the riverbank, I could see the jagged ice ridges out on the frozen Yukon all lit by moonlight. Breakup, I was thinking, was only two months and a couple of weeks away.

While my brothers were trading guesses about the workings of the motion-picture projector, I was picturing those few freckles on Jamie's nose, her smile, her hair
black as a raven's wing. For the thousand-and-first time I was pondering whether she really would return to the Golden City as she'd vowed.

Back in the fall, with Jamie gone only a few months, I was certain I'd see her walk down the gangplank of the first steamboat up from the Pacific. The endless winter darkness, however, had all but snuffed out my optimism. By March, despite the increasing daylight and the promise of breakup on the Yukon, I had little hope. Sometimes I doubted whether Jamie Dunavant even remembered me.

It wasn't often that Ethan or I had an excuse to visit dance-hall row. Abraham had laid down the law concerning drinking, gambling, and dollar dances. We were going to live by the code that our long-dead father had taught us, so help us God.

So far we had, though I could tell that Ethan, who had a fun-loving streak as long as Abraham's was short, was chafing at the harness. He resented Abe always playing the patriarch. At twenty-five, Abraham was oldest by only two years, while Ethan was nothing if not a full-grown man, burly and bearded and well over two hundred pounds. At sixteen I'd come into my full strength, but I hadn't yet succeeded in wrestling him to the ground.

As we passed by the entrance of the Monte Carlo, the fateful mongrel was padding down the boardwalk in our direction. I noticed the dog pausing here and there to look up at passersby with half-hopeful, half-wary eyes. Its face was split down the middle, half white and half black. Otherwise it was black except for white paws. The mutt's skinny excuse for a tail was bent at the halfway mark, broken maybe by a slamming door.

Its gaze met Ethan's. The white side of the dog's face
had an eye that was uncannily blue; the eye on the black side was brown.

Ethan slowed to a shuffle. “That animal's all ribs. Look how he's shivering, Jason.”

“Nobody's going to skin him for a fur coat,” I remarked.

A knot of men who'd just emerged from one of the saloons was joking about the weather warming up, which it had, from fifty degrees below zero to around twenty below. One of them, a tall, lanky man in a fur coat, reached out his leg to give the creature a swift kick. Kindhearted Ethan was noticing and gave the fellow a nudge to knock him off his balance and spare the animal a crippling injury.

In an instant, the tall man spun around, discarded his gloves, and roared, “The glubs er off!” His slurred speech left a spear of frost in front of his ruddy face. The accent sounded not quite English, Irish, or Canadian. I wondered if he was a Scot. The crowd moving along the boardwalkâprospectors and hired men from the creeks, doctors, lawyers, gamblers, bankers, dance-hall girls, actresses, shopkeepers, and clerksâfell back in a loose circle, anticipating a fight.

One of the drunk's companions, a peacock of a fellow in a double-breasted Prince Albert coat with a diamond stickpin, retrieved the gloves with his silver cane and was handed the long fur coat. His full dark beard struck me as an unlikely match with his bowler hat, high button boots, and all the rest. Most likely he was a gambler, though gamblers tended to sport goatees or go clean-shaven. It was working men and the prospectors out at the creeks who favored full beards.

The would-be dog kicker, meanwhile, was circling Ethan in a boxer's stance with fists held high. His gray
ing, waxed handlebar mustache extended far past his face. The shape of his head brought to mind a thin slab of chiseled granite. His nose was anything but angular, squashed flat as if by a streetcar.

“I apologize,” Ethan said sincerely. “I was afraid the dog would get hurt.”

“S'what?” the tall man retorted, redder-faced than before. “He belongs in the street, not on the boardwalk. Is the cur yers?”

“No, he's not.”

The drunk looked around. “Anybody's?”

No one answered. All the while, the dog was watching closely. Its eyes went from one of them to the other and back. Its thin ears, when Ethan was talking, stood straight up. When the drunk spoke, their top halves folded forward, as if on hinges.

“I didn't think so. Well, then, mateâ¦”

Quick as a cobra, the tall man's long arm flicked out. The speed of it was surprising from a man who could have been forty and was three sheets to the wind. Barely in time, Ethan rolled his jaw to the side and took the punch glancingly. I saw the alarm and anger in Abraham's eyes. Though Abraham walked with a limp, he was nearly as tall as this boxer, strong as whipcord, and fiercely protective of his brothers.

Ethan raised his hands calmly to protest, but the man continued in his fighting crouch, hands in motion. It was then I noticed Irish Nellie Cashman pushing her way to the front of the crowd.

Distracted by Irish Nellie, Ethan took a sudden punch in the stomach.

“Deal with the bully, Ethan!” Irish Nellie cried.

Recognizing the tiny woman, Ethan was amused by her eagerness for him to mix it up. The day before, Irish
Nellie had come to the sawmill for a donation to the home she wanted to build for the downtrodden, just like the one she told about building in Tombstone, Arizona.

“Careful,” Abe whispered. Ethan was no fighter.

“Don't, Hawthorn,” someone yelled from the crowd. “That's the Sydney Mauler!”

We hadn't heard the name before, but we got the picture.

In an instant, the Sydney Mauler, with a darting left, drew blood from Ethan's nose. Ethan removed his mittens and handed them to me. My brother wiped his hand across his face, saw the bright crimson there. His broad forehead furrowed with determination. It did the same at the mill when he was wrestling logs or huge pieces of machinery.

His long-armed opponent was in a fighter's crouch, but not for long. With a quick right hand, Ethan put him on the icy ground. The boxer got to his knees with his eyes still swimming, then fell back on his hindquarters, supporting himself with one hand. He stared at Ethan with surprise and anger. Then a grin spread slowly across his face.

The crowd erupted. “Well struck, Ethan,” Irish Nellie rejoiced. A grizzled miner held Ethan's right hand aloft. Taken aback, Ethan wrenched his hand down.

“Don't you know who the Sydney Mauler is?” The voice had come from the peacock with the dark beard.

Ethan shrugged, shook his head. The drunk, having regained his feet, was reaching for his coat and gloves.

“This gentleman is none other than Henry Brackett of Sydney, Australia, alias the Sydney Mauler, former heavyweight champion of the British Empire!”

Ethan looked at the boxer, then back to his cohort with the silver cane. “And who are you?”

With a short, theatrical bow, he introduced himself as “Cornelius Donner, promoter
extraordinaire.”

With his dark, piercing eyes fastened on Ethan, the promoter reached out and shook his hand. In a friendly, soothing baritone, he said, “I'm pleased to make your acquaintance. Hawthorn's your name?”

Ethan was one to make friends quickly, but I watched him catch himself. “I've got to get back to the mill. If you'll excuse me, let's all get out of the cold.”

“We'll meet again,” the boxer growled. “And not when I'm half-seas over.”

“Rematch!” someone yelled.

“
Grudge
match!” declared the promoter, smiling like a rogue.

“Rematch!” the crowd roared. “Grudge match!”

Ethan was shaking his head. “Let's get back to work, Jason. Enough with this foolishness.”

“Amen to that,” Abraham agreed.

We headed up Front Street toward the sawmill. Just before we angled out of sight, I looked back where we'd been. Still abuzz, the crowd hadn't dispersed.

That's when I heard the pat of small feet and looked down to see that split-faced black mutt close on Ethan's heels. “Look behind you, Ethan,” I said. “You better run Nuisance off while you have the chance. He'll stick to you like glue.”

Ethan reached down to pet the beggar on the head. “We got anything to feed him at the mill? Should I take him to the cabin?”

Now I understood how that creature had made it over the Chilkoot Pass and five hundred miles down the Yukon.

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