BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (31 page)

"'Damn yourself, Henry!' he says, wiping the
dust off his face. 'Every time I get it back on the chalk you jerk
it sideways.'

"That spruce smelled good while we was
cutting it, but it all ended up in the fire. And we got maybe one
eight-foot plank out of the second log, even though the planks was
only six inches wide and an inch thick. The wood was all sticky and
full of knots. By the end of that first day, Orrie and me was both
spitting mad and keeping our distance outside the saw-pit.

“The next morning I talked to some fellers
who was finishing work on their boat and they just laughed. Said
they wasted three logs and two days learning how to whipsaw, and
after that the blade just started running straight on its own. And
that's how it went with Orrie and me – we got the hang of it after
three days. Went back up the river for a couple more logs, then
another few days in the pit and we was done."

Zimmerman says it took about a week to finish
the hull once all the planks were cut.

"Rafferty done a good job shaping the ribs
and gunwales, so once we got the frame nailed tight, we knowed the
rest would come together. But all that wood was green, so even if
you nail your planks perfect across the ribs, the next day you got
gaps where they shrunk. So then you're swapping some of 'em out and
pushing oakum into gaps on the rest. Cover the cracks and the oakum
with pitch, let it dry for a day, then spread on another layer, or
as much as you got left. Every boat is still going to leak, but you
got a platform built into the hull that your outfit rides on, so a
couple inches of water don't matter, and when it gets deeper you
use a tin can to bail.

"We was camped at Lindeman for three weeks,"
Zimmerman says, "and we must of launched three dozen boats.
Everyone dropped what they was doing to help put a boat in the
water, and even if your hands wasn't needed you stood and watched,
maybe fired a couple rounds in the air to send 'em off.

"Summer was over, and you couldn't help
noticing the days getting shorter. The clouds pushed lower and the
wind come up, rattling hard through the night, always blowing down
the lake. We nailed a step to the floor near the bow and rigged a
simple mast for running downwind. Sail was tent canvas stretched
between pine poles. When we got her in the water, we tied the mast
to the gunwales and stacked bags around the base.

"Rafferty named the boat
Abigail
and
she was snug – less than two foot of freeboard carrying three tons
and four men. Where we launched it was just ripples, but a
half-mile out was tailwind swells, so I knowed we could ship the
port and starboard oars after we made a little distance downwind.
Anyone that wasn't steering or watching the sail was going to bail
all the way down the lake.

"They pushed us off and the sun went behind a
cloud and the water turned dark, and you could tell cold days was
coming. The wind kicked up a notch around our ears, and it blowed
away the sound of the guns."

Chapter 36

Zimmerman glances at my eyes, maybe trying to
read me, then lowers his gaze to the tin cup and swirls his
whiskey, and I can sense the gears spinning again. I want to hear
his whole story about the Yukon, but I'm also trying to wear him
down. Decide whether he's intrinsically honest, or catch him in a
contradiction or a lie that suggests his allegiance to Garrett
remained intact – and that he never intended to help us on the
night Drew and I set out for Garrett's cabin. In which case he's
responsible for Drew's death, and I'm absolved.

But if Zimmerman is telling the truth, if
Drew sent him from the cabin to find me, my brother's death lies at
my feet, because my fear of the culvert sealed his fate. And in
that case I see no escape from the path that led me here
tonight.

Zimmerman gestures toward the cabin door and
says he needs to piss. I lift the Colt and wave him toward the
orange coals in the stove. He laughs wheezily, then stretches to
his feet and shuffles over, unbuttoning his fly. The glow dims as
the coals roar and smoke fills the stove, but the stovepipe carries
it away and spares us the smell. He snatches our cups and refills
them halfway from the cask, then slumps back onto his stool. As he
lifts his left hand to drink, my eyes lock onto his half-finger
against the cup, and I visualize the four bloodied fingers lying
severed on the floor of Garrett's burning cabin. Those left-hand
digits helped identify the blackened corpse.

By the time we've both sipped, the coals are
glowing orange again.

Zimmerman says he pushed off with the
Raffertys and Orrie from the head of Lindeman Lake in the first
week of September. Once the stampeders were afloat, both wind and
current bore them north toward Dawson. While in '96 Garrett had
followed the melting floes down the Yukon as spring turned to
summer, in '98 Zimmerman sailed the lakes toward the river in a
race against autumn and the oncoming ice.

"After Lindeman I knowed we had a solid
boat," Zimmerman says. "She could run downwind in the swells, but
now and then one of 'em would wash over the transom and set us
scrambling to bail. And there was steady leaks from every quarter.
We spent a day at the foot of the lake caulking the cracks and
letting the pitch dry.

"Bennett was longer and rougher than
Lindeman, and there was times I thought we'd swamp for sure. But
halfway down we sailed in lee of a point and the swells dropped,
and then the wind died down toward sunset. Two miles from the foot
of the lake we was running easy when we come up on a wreck about
thirty feet to starboard. The boat looked like one of them we
launched a few days before. She was mostly underwater, port-side
down with waves lapping over the top. You could see a few bags
trapped and floating in the open hull, but we didn't see no sign of
her crew, so we didn't try to steer closer. With the way we was
rigged, we might of pushed our port rail under if we done that, so
we just sailed by. A piece of canvas tied to a snapped mast was
drifting a couple of lengths away.

"Then we come up on the bodies. First was a
big feller, floating face down. The air was getting colder and the
water was freezing, but he wasn't wearing nothing above the waist
but a wool undershirt. We reckoned maybe he gave his coat to
someone else, or took it off and tried to fill it up with air. He
was three boat lengths off to starboard, so we didn't try to fetch
him. The truth is we wanted to keep moving, not go looking for
someone to notify.

"The next body was smaller and closer, maybe
two lengths off. It was dressed in a man's clothes and a coat that
was too big, but you could tell from the dark floating hair it was
a woman. She was face down too, and the sight of her made my head
throb. I could hear Orrie muttering some kind of blessing as we
sailed by.

"The third was the worst, and we almost run
it over before we left it to port. It was a boy about the same age
as Tim, gold-brown hair, too young for whiskers. He was floating on
his back and I got a good look at his face as we passed by, just
beyond arm's reach. His eyes was open wide like he was surprised,
and you almost thought he would pop his head up and ask to climb
aboard, until you seen his mouth was open too, with water washing
over it.

"'Dear God,'" Rafferty says, and he turns
away as if he knows the kid. "I was almost expecting him to hook
the body with an oar and pull it onboard, but he just looked away
until we left it astern. I guess when we didn't bring the big
feller on board, we wasn't going to pick up the woman. And when we
left the woman floating, we couldn't bring ourselves to gather up
the boy. We was heading for the Klondike with blinders on, and
after that I reckon we would of left a drownded baby bobbing in our
wake."

Zimmerman pauses to squint at me, then
relaxes his eyes and furrows his weathered brow. "That's how it was
in the stampede," he says. "We seen different kinds of wrecks
almost every day."

He says they almost suffered one themselves
in the swift water.

"There was men you could pay to take your
boat through Miles Canyon, and they knowed them rapids inside out,
running 'em six or seven times a day. If you was riding too low
they would make you unload half your gear and pack it around, which
is what they done to us. So
Abigail
was down the canyon as
soon as we lightened her load, and we spent a full day humping bags
on the bypass trail.

"We wasn't looking to do that again, so when
we got to Whitehorse we pulled ashore above the rapids and followed
the trail around to scout. We watched one boat after another make
it through, and some was manned by the fellers that owned 'em, not
the men for hire. So we reckoned we could do the same and spare our
legs and backs.

"We put Tim ashore along with a single load
of bags for the four of us and tied down everything in the boat.
Orrie and me took the midship oars and Rafferty worked the stern.
After we run through, we was going to stroll back for them last
bags. By Whitehorse we already been a week on the lakes, so we
figured we ate our way through sixty pounds of grub, and
Abigail
seemed like she was riding high and ready for
spirited water.

"Of course we found out them rapids look a
lot different when you're in the middle of 'em. It felt like we was
throwed from the top of that first wave down to the bottom of the
river, and all we could see and hear was water crashing down from
all sides. The second wave broke over the bow and the third washed
over the boat, so we was half sunk, even though we was still flying
downriver. Boat got spun sideways through a drop and then crashed
into a rock that tore off the starboard oar. We slipped around
that, spun some more, and then I lost track and just knowed that we
was part of the current. We come down the last drop backward, all
three of us hanging onto the gunwales, and I was sure we'd be
sucked under the falls and flip, but the water bubbled under us and
spat us into an eddy. Some of the bags was loose and floating. We
had one oar left and the boat was like a tub full of freezing
water, so we was lucky to get her ashore before she rolled."

Zimmerman says their bags weren't completely
water-tight, and they lost two fifty-pound bags of sugar and the
outermost layer of flour in several bags. They spent a couple of
days repacking their gear, patching their boat, and sawing new
oars, and they counted themselves lucky so little was ruined.

Past Whitehorse, only the thirty-mile length
of Lake Laberge separated
Abigail
from the headwater
tributaries of the Yukon.

"We was almost halfway down the lake, running
with the swells when the wind backed off and clouds started filling
in from the north," Zimmerman says. "That was the first day we seen
that kind of weather. Then the wind dies and the swells fall apart
and turn to chop. The sky goes gray and pretty soon there's
snowflakes. Up ahead the clouds is dark and low, so you can't see
more than a couple miles down the valley. We knowed it was time to
get off the lake, so Rafferty points to a strip of rocky beach on
the western shore where there's washed up logs and driftwood. Orrie
and me took the oars and we started rowing over there.

"When we got closer there was a couple of
dogs running up and down the beach, and then a man comes out from
the trees and starts waving his arms and calling out to us. He's
speaking English, but we can't make out what he's saying until we
tie the boat up tight along the shore. Talking face to face we
figure out he's Russian with a heavy accent. Got a thick brown
beard with gray streaks and says his name is Volkov. His boat
swamped in the waves two days ago and his partner drownded. It
don't take long in that cold water.

"Volkov points to a green canoe that's tipped
over near the tree-line and says he was paddling close to the
shore, hunting ducks and tracking his boat down the lake. Then a
squall come up and the swells got big right away, and he couldn't
get back out to the boat. It blowed through in twenty minutes, but
it took him an hour to find the wreck, and no sign of his partner
or their two dogs. He salvaged what was floating and brought it to
the beach, made a shelter out of the canoe, and the next day the
dogs come running up to him out of the woods. Volkov said when his
stuff dried out he was going to paddle down to the foot of the lake
and try to find what was left of his boat. He shot three ducks and
ate one with his dogs, but he only got a week's worth of grub left
from his outfit.

"While we was talking the wind come up again,
and it clocked around to the north for the first time. The snow
picked up and was blowing sideways. We got our tent up quick and
burned driftwood in the stove. Made room for Volkov and let his
dogs have the canoe. There was no use thinking about boating into
the wind, so we settled in, and the snow come and gone but that
northerly kept blowing for three days.

"We ate what was left of Volkov's ducks and
gave him a dozen cans of tinned meat and some dried salmon for the
dogs. That's how most fellers on the Yukon Trail done it when they
found folks down on their luck. Give what you can spare to get 'em
through the next few days. Volkov wasn't ready to walk away from
his wreck, and we couldn't take him anyway, but there was other
boats coming behind us, and maybe one of 'em could."

Zimmerman says that the fourth morning was
clear and calm, so they broke camp and said goodbye to Volkov, who
hoisted his dogs and bags into his canoe and paddled down the
western shore with his bird gun propped beside him. Out in the
heart of the lake, the prevailing wind came up, and
Abigail
made it to the debris-strewn foot of Lake Laberge by the end of the
day.

"It was late September when we rowed into the
head of the Lewes River, and the nights was getting longer than the
days. With a couple inches of snow on the ground and ice creeping
in from the banks, we knowed we was racing the ice, but getting out
of them swells done us a world of good. We got most of the cracks
patched better, so we wasn't bailing as much, and we could lay off
the oars and watch the hills drift by."