Down the Yukon Read online

  Down the Yukon

  Will Hobbs

  to Richard Peck,

  kind and generous friend

  There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,

  And the rivers all run God knows where;

  There are lives that are erring and aimless,

  And deaths that just hang by a hair;

  There are hardships that nobody reckons;

  There are valleys unpeopled and still;

  There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,

  And I want to go back—and I will.

  from “The Spell of the Yukon”

  by Robert W. Service

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Map

  One

  The trouble started over a mongrel dog, small, mostly black,…

  Two

  “I believe she’s cooked, Jason.”

  Three

  Ethan may have been itching to join the excitement of…

  Four

  After the fight, Ethan had as many friends as a…

  Five

  Maybe it was Abraham saying “sweetheart” that set my heart…

  Six

  The entire business district of Dawson City lay in ruins.…

  Seven

  I worked the endless daylight hours of May as a…

  Eight

  Dawson’s milling crowds were anxious to leave town. At any…

  Nine

  The prize money for the North American Trading Company’s Second…

  Ten

  Jamie stepped off the gangplank and we embraced. I kissed…

  Eleven

  Jamie slept through the arrival of four sternwheelers the following…

  Twelve

  Burnt Paw shook himself out, ran atop the gear to…

  Thirteen

  In every nerve of my body I knew this might…

  Fourteen

  I dropped to my knees and shook Jamie by the…

  Fifteen

  “You said we could afford to loaf a little,” came…

  Sixteen

  The island proved to be hundreds of yards wide. The…

  Seventeen

  A path led onto a sunny rise overlooking the river,…

  Eighteen

  From the southeast, the large and silty Tanana River entered…

  Nineteen

  When at last we couldn’t rope the canoe through the…

  Twenty

  It wasn’t an hour before a bit of motion between…

  Twenty-One

  Atop a long spit, the village momentarily passed from view…

  Twenty-Two

  In less than an hour’s time we had our kayak.…

  Twenty-Three

  As three quick blasts came from the sternwheeler’s steam whistle,…

  Twenty-Four

  During our stay in Nome, Jamie and I took rooms…

  Author’s Note

  Other Books by Will Hobbs

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MAP

  ONE

  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 boardwalk—prospectors and hired men from the creeks, doctors, lawyers, gamblers, bankers, dance-hall girls, actresses, shopkeepers, and clerks—fell 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 graying, 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, mate…”

  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.

  TWO

  “I believe she’s cooked, Jason.”

  Same time every morning, I waited for Ethan to say those magic words. It was coffee he was talking about, boiling away on the Yukon stove. Next, Abe would make a remark about Ethan leaving it on the stove too long.

  “Likely you’ve rendered that brew into cyanide,” Abe said dryly as he worried his mustache. “We can sell the grounds to the fellows out at the creeks for separating gold.”

  Ethan laughed heartily. “Don’t you throw ’em out before I’ve had the chance to chew ’em, Abraham.”

  I laughed as I pulled on a leather mitt and grabbed the big coffee pot by the handle. I stepped outside the mill office by the light of our new electric yard lamp into the subzero cold and whirled the pot high over my head and nearly to my feet, around and around in a blur until the grounds were good and settled. Abe held that sinking the grounds with a cup of cold water was more effective, not to mention safer. It was Ethan, impish by nature, who’d taught me how to windmill the coffee. He never failed to watch through the partly frosted windows. In the never-ending seesaw between my older brothers, Ethan got to win out on the small things.

  I brought the coffee back inside, shucked the mitt, and poured three cups. I held mine for a few minutes to warm my hands. This was my favorite ritual, this half hour before the crew showed up, when it was just the brothers Hawthorn starting the workday with coffee and the newspaper and conversation.

  “That Sydney Mauler,” I said. “Imagine, Ethan—heavyweight champion of the British Empire.”

  “Former champion,” Abe pointed out as he read the front page of the Klondike Nugget.

  Ethan chuckled and waved it off, spitting a few coffee grounds through his teeth onto the floor. “It was all a tempest in a teapot.”

  “You wouldn’t get into the ring with him, would you?” I asked.

  Abe put the newspaper down. He was cross. “Of course he wouldn’t.”

  I looked at Ethan. As preposterous as it sounded, he seemed to be amused by the idea. Now that Abe had opposed it, Ethan would have to consider it. Lately that’s the way it was between the two of them.

  I heard a loud thump outside. “What was that?”
/>
  “Something thrown at the fence?” Abraham guessed.

  Sipping my coffee, I got up and walked to the window. “Nothing out there.”

  Suddenly there was something there. Running full speed at the wooden fence around the lumberyard, here came that little split-faced mongrel from the night before, ears flapping. With a sudden leap, as if he meant to clear the fence, the mutt bounded skyward. The thing was, that fence was six feet high if it was an inch. The dog crashed with a heavy thump and fell to the ground. I couldn’t help laughing.

  The mutt picked himself up, trotted off a few feet and studied the top of the fence again. His head was cocked sideways as if his eyesight were better out of the blue eye.

  “Take a look at this,” I said. “You’re not going to believe it. He’s going to try again.”

  Abe and Ethan joined me at the window as the mongrel was making its third attempt, this time from across the street. “Well, I’ll be,” Ethan said, pulling on his curly beard.

  The dog had built up terrific speed. I had to admire his determination, though he had a bird’s nest for brains.

  Like Jules Verne’s rocket to the moon, the mutt went airborne, so high he was clawing for a grip on the top rail. For a second he hung there like a monkey. Then, more like a cat, he pulled himself up and onto the rail, which was nothing but a two-by-four.

  The mongrel trotted toward us along the top of the fence—he had us spotted inside the office—and jumped down when he got to the gate.

  Ethan whistled and said, “Darnedest thing I ever saw.”

  Shortly came a scratch at the office door.

  “It’s for you, Ethan,” I said. “Told you he’d stick like glue once you fed him. I saw him outside the cabin this morning.”