Down the Yukon (7 page)

Burnt Paw shook himself out, ran atop the gear to Jamie, then back to me in an instant, his bent tail wagging faster than I'd ever seen it. I lifted him high so my brothers could see he hadn't drowned, then set him down and retrieved my paddle as they gave us a last wave.

The lower end of Front Street was sliding by, and shortly we were under the landslide scar downstream of Dawson.

A few minutes later, almost at the rear of the fleet, we entered the farewell bend. We stopped paddling and looked upstream over our shoulders. “There it goes,” Jamie said, and we watched the Golden City disappear as if, after all, it were only an illusion. There went its hotels and dance halls, its warehouses, all the houses and cabins dotting the hills.

Suddenly there was only the wilderness, the bush, with no hint of civilization along the Yukon's shores.

Yet on all sides we were hemmed in by boats. “Let's see if we can put some of them behind us!” Jamie called from the stern, and I replied joyously, “It will be my pleasure!”

Stroke after stroke, I paddled hard, not so fast that I'd run short of breath or throw Jamie off behind me, but with all the controlled power I could muster.

At the back of the canoe, Jamie was steering as well as paddling. She had an uncanny sense for where the current ran swiftest, and always kept us in the fastest water. With the last fraction of every stroke, she adjusted the canoe's direction while staying in tandem with my paddle.

We were flying. We were overtaking the scows that were nothing more than clumsy platforms of milled lumber, the crude log rafts that wallowed in the troughs between the swells, even the skiffs with two men rowing. Some of the oarsmen nearly burst their lungs trying to match us before they lay up, panting.

Standing at the big sweep oars of the scows or straining at the oars of rowed boats, nearly everyone we passed put in their two cents' worth: “What's the hurry? You off to a fire?” “Did somebody tell you there's a race going on?” “Criminy, we're being passed by a girl.” “Haven't you heard—Nome is upstream.” “I think I've seen that girl somewhere before.” “Is that yapper a dog or a water rat?” “Watch your talk, Clarence, that animal's got a shotgun and he no doubt shoots straighter than you.”

“Don't worry, they'll have to take that canoe ashore in order to sleep,” we heard more than a few times, but we were fairly certain our competition was underestimating our capacity for discomfort.

All the while Burnt Paw ran back and forth on the
gear, barking shrilly. We advised him to desist, but he had a mind of his own. Amid the confusion we just kept paddling, giving friendly waves when the faces were friendly. They almost always were.

The Yukon in this first stretch was running narrow and swift at the bottom of a fjordlike defile. Six miles from Dawson, according to my map, here came Fort Reliance, an abandoned trading post. We quit paddling as we watched it glide by on the right. We drank from our water flasks. The wind had come up, and with all the lint blowing from the cottonwoods lining the river, we were in the midst of a sort of snowstorm. We could barely make out the leaders downriver; there weren't very many of them. “We got here awful fast,” I observed.

Jamie pulled from her pocket the gold watch that had been her father's and opened it up. “Forty-five, maybe fifty minutes,” she reported.

“So we're going about eight miles an hour, right? Let's figure out how many days it will take us to reach the mouth of the river.”

“That would be…around eight days,” Jamie said, squinting her eyes as she calculated. “If we paddled at this rate every hour of every day.” Then she broke out laughing.

“I guess you're right. We can't expect to be logging eight miles an hour all the way down the Yukon. But it gives us something to aim for.”

“Look, another Peterborough!” Jamie exclaimed. She pointed downstream at a sliver of bright green barely visible for all the blowing seed. The other canoe rounded a bend and disappeared from sight.

The wind died, and the Yukon wore a downy coat from bank to bank. Above the steep spruce-clad hills
shooting out of the river, snow-streaked summits reared their bald heads.

Some hours later we came up on the gold camp at Fortymile, so named because it was forty miles downstream from Fort Reliance. We'd succeeded in putting all our competition behind us except the canoe. Our only stop had been a brief one, on a willowy gravel bar midstream. I answered the call of nature on one side of the bar and Jamie on the other. We ate a few hard biscuits and some dried fruit, then jumped back into the canoe.

We caught sight of the other Peterborough as it was making a stop on a tongue of land where the Yukon was joined by Fortymile Creek. A church steeple showed through the cottonwoods, as well as a Mountie post and a small cluster of log cabins. Nowadays it was a ghost town, but Fortymile had been a thriving gold camp three years before, when Dawson was nothing but an unnamed mud flat.

As the two men from the canoe were putting back in the river again, we floated up and paddled close for a friendly hello. Their canoe, I noticed, had a distinctive red arrow painted on the bow.

I was shocked to recognize the tall man in the stern from his handlebar mustache and granite face. The Sydney Mauler didn't recognize me. I wondered for a moment who his partner was. The man in the bow looked over his shoulder at me and grinned. I thought I might know him; I had to look twice. Though the roughhewn clothing wasn't recognizable, the full beard and the sneer were. It was Cornelius Donner.

Burnt Paw, growling suddenly, recognized him too.

Donner said to his partner, “Sydney, I believe we've been overhauled by the Hawthorn pup and his vicious mastiff!”

“Donner and Brackett,” I whispered to Jamie. “The two I told you about. Be on your guard.”

“Hawthorn?” Brackett mumbled. “Any relation to Lucky Ethan Hawthorn?”

“He's the boxer's kid brother,” Donner explained.

“Boxer? Human punching bag if you ask me.”

“His kid brother here is more of a wrestler.”

Brackett squinted at me. “Wrestler, eh? Could've fooled me.”

“The girl must provide the power,” Donner mocked. “How else could Hawthorn have caught us?”

“He must have told her this would be a picnic, Cornelius.”

“Who
is
your partner, Hawthorn?”

“My name is Dunavant,” Jamie broke in. “Jamie Dunavant. Say what you please, we aim to win.”

“In which case,” Donner snapped, “Hawthorn plans to give the prize money to me. Or hasn't he told you?”

“Why are
you
in the race?” I demanded of Donner. “Not for the money, certainly.”

“For the glory of sport,” Brackett answered instead, as his eyes, with detectable trepidation, scanned our Peterborough. “You mark my words—I won't be beat by a Hawthorn twice.”

The canoes were starting to drift apart. I did nothing to lessen the gap.

Donner said, “You must think I'm a prophet, Hawthorn.”

“Why do you say so?”

“Didn't I predict we'd meet down the Yukon, in Alaska? The border is only hours away.”

“That was more like a threat, as I remember it.”

“Oh no, you misunderstood. I must have been cautioning you about Alaska's lawless reputation. It's not
like Canada, you know, with a Mountie behind every tree. From what I hear, half the Alaskans you meet are fleeing from the law. Maybe you should stick close to us, for protection.”

Jamie scowled at them and started paddling.

“We can take care of ourselves,” I said, and applied my own paddle. Burnt Paw yapped at them as we pulled away and took the lead.

They made no immediate push to catch us. They merely drifted with the current until we were out of sight.

“That was our canoe,” Jamie said, her eyes welling up. “My father's and mine. Did you see the arrow drawn on the bow, in red?”

“I did.”

“I painted that myself, after Father had written a poem entitled ‘My Canoe Sings like an Arrow.' He sold the canoe shortly before we left for the States. When did those two scavengers descend on Dawson?”

“After you and your father left in July. I remember Ethan saying that Brackett arrived by steamboat shortly before ice-up. Donner got here by dogsled, around Christmas. Hired a team from Skagway.”

“Father would turn over in his grave if we let ourselves get beaten by that canoe,” Jamie said through gritted teeth. “If we keep them behind us from now on, that would suit me. They have more muscle, but they have to paddle their own weight, so it comes out even.”

“Brackett doesn't seem quite right in the head,” she added after a few minutes. “Too many punches, I bet. And Donner, he reminds me of the manager Father had the misfortune to hire to arrange our tour. J. P Putnam was his name, or so he claimed—trustworthy as a viper.”

“He sounds like a salesman for Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, Kidney, Liver and Bladder Cure.”

“He could sell sand to Egyptians. My father was completely taken in. As it turned out, Putnam had been embezzling from us since San Francisco, where he leeched onto us. I suspected him for a thief, but Father would never look into our books. My father had no appetite for accounting. He was a typical Canadian frontiersman—honest as an elephant and possessing a child's faith in human nature.”

“Honest as an elephant?”

“I've never met a dishonest elephant, have you? At any rate, Father assumed that every man he met was as honest as himself. When he died, I was left to deal with Putnam by myself. It was distressing—it was awful.”

“What do you mean?”

“He proposed marriage to me.”

“Marriage!” My breath caught short, I was so taken aback. I was boiling. “You don't mean it. The cad…and you were only fifteen!”

“I told him I planned to return to the North, as Father and I had told him right along. ‘All of that's changed now,' he told me. ‘I love you; I've loved you from the start. I see no reason why you shouldn't go on with the tour. We'll hire someone to play the part of your father—it's not a speaking part anyway.'”

“That weasel…I can hardly believe this!”

“Neither could I. And all of this only hours after I'd buried my father. I told Putnam that as far as his affections were concerned, I had in no way misled him. I'd never given him the slightest encouragement.”

I was so relieved. My head reeled at the image of Jamie with this Putnam. I wanted to knock him down for even thinking of Jamie that way.

“In regard to the tour,” Jamie said, “I told him I had no heart for giving voice to my father's poetry now that he was gone. ‘Never mind that, then,' Putnam told me. ‘You have a brilliant future as a dramatic actress.' I told him I'd heard that before, from well-wishers in every city we'd visited. ‘Fame is your destiny!' he insisted. ‘Only if I choose it,' I said. I told him that an actress is a bird in a gilded cage, and I'd rather have my freedom.”

“It sounds like that's the way you truly feel.”

“It is. I told him I might
write
for the stage one day, but he didn't want to hear about that. There was no money in that for him.”

“You were to be his Sydney Mauler. That's why Donner reminded you of him.”

“Exactly. Half an hour later it struck me like a bolt from heaven that Putnam was on his way to the bank. I caught him there, trying to withdraw the balance of our account. I asked the teller to call the police at once. Putnam fled on foot into the street. I never saw him again, thank goodness.”

“You were all alone. What did you do? How did you manage?”

“I took a job in a laundry and moved in with the woman who owned it. She paid me extra to take her children to the park. The park was the only part of the city that appealed to me. I bided my time until late April, when I took the Great Northern to Seattle. All that time, I was thinking about the days getting longer in the North. I was like a Canada goose ready to fly home, believe me.”

“Fancy dinners, fancy clothes, fancy people didn't suit you?”

“Look at the light reflecting off the Yukon, Jason—that's what suits me. Being with you again suits me. This
glowing northern sky. That moose swimming the river downstream…”

Jamie was pointing. Sure enough, the branchlike object several hundred yards ahead was the antlers of a bull moose swimming for the left shore.

“All of this is what suits me.”

We paddled close, so close I almost could have reached out and touched the animal's back. It was an immense bull with velveted antlers as wide as my outstretched arms.

Burnt Paw tried to stay as far away as he could manage without sliding off the far side of the canoe.

Movement slightly behind us caught my eye. Over my shoulder I was surprised to find the other Peterborough almost upon us. Donner's dark eyes were locked on the moose in the river.

A few seconds later and their canoe had slipped between us and the moose. Brackett, at the stern, reached for a rifle. “Moose steaks, mate!”

By this time we'd drifted thirty or forty feet away from them and the moose. Donner and Brackett were acting as if we weren't there, which suited me fine.

With the moose rolling its eyes back at them and swimming hard for the shore, the boxer seemed about to fire. Donner said, “That hardly seems sporting, Sydney. Let me see…paddle me close. Go on, do as I say.”

My eyes met Jamie's. We had no idea what he was about to do.

“Closer, Sydney—right alongside.”

Donner set his hat aside, peeled off his shirt, shucked his boots and his socks, and was making as if he was about to go over the side of the canoe. “Keep that rope handy.”

Brackett looked just as baffled as we were. “Whatever you say, mate.”

With one smooth motion, Donner was out of the canoe, into the chilly water, and onto the great moose's back. He had ahold of the antlers and was going for a ride!