BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (32 page)

And Zimmerman's story flows faster now with
the current.

"Even in the fall the Lewes runs strong, and
you wind through the bends and row yourself clear of the islands.
Rivers come in from the east – Hootalinqua, Big Salmon, Little
Salmon – and creeks come in on both sides. We passed boats tied up
where fellers was prospecting up the creeks. Sometimes we seen a
tent with no boat around, but smoke from a campfire tells you
someone's there. Other times it's a tent and no smoke, and you
don't know what you'll find if you stop, but we wasn't stopping
until it was too dark to keep running safe, and sometimes we was
breaking thin ice to get ashore. Then you just want to get a fire
going, eat a meal, and get warm enough to sleep."

Zimmerman says that almost every mile along
the Yukon they saw evidence of the stampeders that preceded them –
discarded crates, empty tins, a lost gum boot, torn fishing nets,
remnants of broken boats.

"We stopped at Fort Selkirk, where the ACC
got a trading post. Wasn't much there, even though steamers made it
upriver that summer, but we bought some dried bear meat the Indians
brung in. That's at the mouth of the Pelly River, and we met three
fellers that was going twenty miles up the Pelly to work their
claims on Nickel Creek. Said they was getting a dollar fifty to the
pan from the creek bed, and they just been down to the Stewart
district to register. They was expecting a stampede from Dawson
once the word got out.

"I wasn't sold, but my partners wanted to
prospect it, and I wouldn't of made it that far without their boat,
so that's what we done. Tied
Abigail
up, packed a shovel,
pans, and a week's worth of grub, and tramped up to Nickel Creek.
Three days on that creek and her pups and we never washed out more
than wages. At least Rafferty and Orrie learned what colors looked
like and how to work a pan. But we lost a week, and when we got
back to Fort Selkirk we was chipping
Abigail
out of the
shore ice.

"Where the Pelly run into the Lewes is the
start of the Yukon, and from there it's a hundred and seventy miles
to Dawson. A month earlier we could of put our feet up and drifted
there in four long days. But we was into the middle of October,
with short days and ice creeping out from the islands, floes in the
channels. That first night out of Fort Selkirk we made camp on a
bench under some leaning spruce and Orrie's thermometer read zero
degrees. For hours we heared floes grinding the shore ice, and that
night I wasn't sure we was going to make it to the Klondike after
all."

Chapter 37

Zimmerman says they woke up to three inches
of new snow.

"You could shake it right off the branches,
but on the roof of the tent it was froze to the ice that come from
our breath, and down on the riverbank it was crusted from the fog.
That week we spent our first hour of daylight chipping ice off the
hull and oars. There was floes clogging most of the river, but we
pushed off anyway and picked our way through. Even with mittens,
your hands go numb working them frozen oars, but you can't just
bury 'em in your armpits and let the ice steer your boat.

"There was two things we always worried
about. First was getting our hull crushed between two floes. Second
was getting pushed into a sweeper or a strainer."

I ask Zimmerman what that means, and he says
it's a tree near the bank that has been undercut by high water and
fallen into the river. The tree's upturned roots anchor its base
onshore while the river flows under its trunk and through its
submerged branches.

"A hull with low draw and gunwales might
scrape by under the trunk, but anything above the deck gets swept
into the river. And if the trunk is at the waterline or the
branches is strong, that's a strainer, not a sweeper. It'll hold
your boat like a fly in a web until the current flips it or breaks
it apart.

"Steer your boat into a strainer and you're
racing time to cut it free. If it's a sweeper, you drop below the
gunwales or climb over the trunk when it reaches you. Move too slow
and the boat leaves you behind.

"We was able to keep the hull in one piece,
but we knowed our luck wouldn't hold in the dark or the fog, so we
was only boating eight hours, and it took four days to run a
hundred miles. Just when we thought the ice was going to lock up
for good, we got to the White River. That river come fast and
cloudy from the west, and it don't freeze until the coldest part of
winter. Then ten miles later you got the Stewart River pushing in
from the east, and past that the Yukon seems twice as wide.

"We got there just when some warm air pushed
the thermometer above freezing for the first time in a week. Don't
know if it was the weather or them rivers coming in that cut the
ice, but after the Stewart the channels opened up a little, and we
made faster time down to Ogilvie, where the Sixtymile River come in
from the west. From there it's less than forty miles to Dawson, but
the first dozen is jammed with islands, and we didn't want to pick
our way through ice shelves in the fading light, so we made camp on
a big island near the head of that section.

"When we got our tent up, I went out looking
for dry wood for a fire and I found two fellers that was building a
raft near the tail end of the island. They almost looked like
natives – dark faces wrinkled from the sun, red eyes, matted hair
and beards a critter could nest in – and you might of thought they
been five years in the wild, not just a couple of months. They was
friendly, so I told 'em to come up to our campfire for a sip of
whiskey when they was ready to call it a day.

"They said they been three days on that
island, cutting down the biggest trees they could manage with a
handsaw, then stripping 'em and sawing out logs. They left Bennett
the same day we left Lindeman, and the boat they built got shoved
into a strainer on the other side of the island. It had a v-shaped
hull and the ice was pushing it from the side, so they worked fast
to get most of their outfit unloaded onto the island. Before they
finished, the ice flipped the boat and pushed it under the
strainer, then carried it downriver.

"There was three of 'em, and they sent one
feller down to Dawson the next day on a boat coming through. The
other two was trying to build a raft and float their outfit the
last forty miles before the river locked up. If they didn't make
it, the third feller had all their money, and he was going to come
back to get 'em with sleds and dogs.

"By that time we'd eaten our way through a
few hundred pounds, but we couldn't carry both them fellers, never
mind their outfit. Rafferty said we could take one of 'em down to
Dawson, though we might get caught by the ice ourselves.

"I seen them two exchange a glance around the
campfire, and I knowed they was as hungry to get to Dawson as we
was. If one of 'em come with us, maybe the last one could get a
ride with another boat, but then both of 'em would be heading into
a Yukon winter with no grub and no gear. And no money, until they
found their friend. If the feller left behind didn't catch a boat,
he had no chance to finish that raft, load it up, and steer it down
to Dawson through the ice by hisself.

"Even in the light of the fire, you could see
they already figured all the angles. They knowed they had to finish
building the raft, even though the odds was shifting against 'em
every day. Rafferty gave 'em our whipsaw blade and thirty feet of
rope, which was all we could spare, 'cause we might need it
ourselves if we got trapped downriver.

"We pushed off at first light and made almost
thirty miles, then tied up behind a point, up against the shelf
ice. That last morning the sun come up on a white river, and you
could almost walk across it on the floes. We chipped
Abigail
out and fought our way through until we seen log buildings and
tents and boats pulled up against the snow on the eastern bank. We
had to push hard with all three oars to get over to shore before
being carried below the town.

"I split off after that first night in
Dawson. The town was thousands of people by then, but I still run
into Rafferty or Orrie once in a while over the next year. We might
talk about prospects, or what we been doing, or our trip downriver.
And someone always asked if anyone ever seen them fellers that was
building a raft on the island below Ogilvie. And up until I left
Dawson ten months later, we always said no, no one ever did."

Chapter 38

"We chopped off the shore ice below the town
dock and used the oars to pole our way aground. There's no trees in
Dawson and the mud flat was froze solid, so it ain't easy to tie
up. We throwed all our bags onto the bank and dragged the boat up
after 'em, slipping and sliding through ice water as we done it.
That's a hard way to end a three-month trip, but no harder than any
other day since Dyea. For me, the end of the trail felt strange. I
left home for the Yukon in May of '96, and now it was the end of
October '98 and there was no place I was trying to get to.

"You could say Dawson was like Skagway, if
you seen both towns – streets laid out on flat ground against the
water, then built up as fast as you could haul logs down from the
hills and saw 'em into lumber. Hotels and restaurants, post office,
blacksmith, bakery, barber.

"But in Skagway, people come off the boat
with clean clothes, quick eyes, and a lively step. The greenhorns
wasn't worried about what they didn't know – they was just itching
to get on the trail. And Skagway slapped 'em on the back, then
knocked 'em out and picked their pockets. Pushed 'em back onto the
boat or forward up the hill. If they made it to Lindeman, there was
a tent city to greet 'em. And another at Bennett and Tagish and
Whitehorse.

"Then in '98, that whole wave of tents and
boats and men washed up at the mouth of the Klondike, with my crew
on the tail end. And a lot of fellers didn't know what to do when
they got there. Even that first day in Dawson, walking them mud
streets filled with piles of lumber and half-loaded wagons and
empty barrels and sleeping dogs, we seen men just sitting on the
edge of the plank sidewalks, chewing tobacco and planting their
heels in the dirt. They looked like they forgot why they was there,
so now they was just watching other people come and go.

"There was still plenty of fellers on the
streets, women too, heading from one place to another, most times
with something to buy or sell. We talked to a dozen strangers who
stopped to say hello while we was hauling our bags up to the meadow
on the north end of town. Mostly they wondered where we was from
and told us where to buy whiskey and bread. Orrie asked a feller
with a droopy mustache and a silver tooth about prospects and the
man laughed and said every creek out to fifty miles was staked.

"We set up our tent, and you could tell from
all the open sites there wasn't as many camped in the meadow as
there was before."

"How long before you went looking for
Garrett?"

"The next morning," Zimmerman says. "I went
down to the Commissioner's office to see if he had a claim in the
Klondike district. Until I done that, I was just guessing he come
up from Circle or wherever he was. Been close to three years since
he wrote me, so I didn't know for sure he was even alive."

"You said Gig sold his claim on Skookum Gulch
in the summer of '97, and now you're looking for him a year later.
He must have staked somewhere else by then. Or was he still camped
down in Lousetown with Wylie, stealing from the cheechakos?"

Zimmerman's eyes flash and the corners of his
mouth tighten, as if he's tasting something sour. His expression
foretells a rebuke, but instead he answers even more deliberately,
as if he's critiquing each word internally before uttering it.

"There wasn't no claim listed for Gig in the
Klondike," he says. "I checked top to bottom on every creek. Didn't
look for Wylie, 'cause I hain't met him yet.

"When I didn't find nothing in the ledgers, I
asked the clerk if he ever heared of Gig Garrett, and he said sure,
every sporting man in town knowed Gig. Said Gig was dealing faro at
the Palace last winter, pulling in cheechakos that made it
downriver before the freeze. Some feller that just opened a pawn
shop sat down at the table and decided Gig was dealing a crooked
game. There was a big argument, but he lost his money and Gig lost
his job. Then Gig moved over to the Fairview, the clerk says, and
that's where you can find him now.

"So around noon I gone over to the Fairview,
and that was one of the best hotels in Dawson, just open a few
months. I went into the saloon and seen Gig standing behind the
bar."

"Did you recognize him right away?"

"I did, but maybe only 'cause I knowed he was
there. He disappeared when Jessie died, and that was four years
before, when he was twenty. Now his face was darker and looser,
with hollows and wrinkles like a grown man's face, and the whites
of his eyes was stained with red. If he had a beard I might of
passed him by in the street, but it was getting into winter so he
shaved it off – just kept a full mustache curling down to the
corners of his mouth.

"I come up to the bar for a whiskey and when
he set the glass down I looked at the stubble on his chin, and on
the left side I seen a little white scar he got from slipping on
the boat as a kid.

"'I reckon a man don't have to come all the
way to the Klondike to pour whiskey,' I says, spreading my fingers
out on the bar. 'They got a tavern at the Cabin John Bridge Hotel,
and you can pan five cents a day out of Rock Run.'

"Gig stops pouring and snaps his head up and
looks me in the eyes. Then his eyes go quick to my hands and back
to my face. That's when I realized I probably looked a fright
myself, moving every day for three months, washing up out of a
bucket, and no proper shave or haircut since Dyea.