Jason's Gold (9 page)

With Miles Canyon and the White Horse Rapids behind him, Jason paddled furiously north down the Yukon. The sun had lost its power, its arc now ominously low in the sky. No more calls from geese or swans, only from ravens, and the word they were croaking was
winter
.

It was do or die.

His canoe was fast, but he still had fifty miles of river before Lake Laberge, where the current would die on him for thirty miles.

“Pull!” he yelled. “Pull!”

Confused, the husky turned around in the bow of the canoe, seeming to ask what he wanted.

“Sorry, King! I meant me, not you!”

Suddenly King pricked up his wolflike ears and studied the shore. Jason stopped paddling, then heard a
chirrup
repeated several times.

There on the left, in the willows, was a cow moose, the first moose he'd ever seen.

From the shore downstream came deep grunts. A bull moose was attacking a small spruce tree and utterly demolishing it with its massive antlers. Suddenly the bull left off the attack, flared his nostrils, and proceeded upriver toward the female.

A second bull, hidden in the willows near the cow, charged out onto the river gravel to challenge the intruder. The bulls paused twenty feet from each other and lowered their antlers, pawing the ground and grunting battle cries. The giants were equally matched, and it was apparent there was going to be a fight. The current took the canoe around the bend before the bulls charged, but a moment later Jason heard the ringing collision of bone on bone.

The pale green Yukon was joined by the Takhini from the west, which briefly clouded it with silt. The valley opened up, and the cut banks disappeared as he entered a slow and swampy alder flat. Then, at the end of his second day below White Horse Rapids, the current died out altogether as he paddled into the head of windblown Lake Laberge.

The wind blew so fiercely that night, it seemed the spruces in his camp would surely snap. At last the gale died out in the hours before dawn. Jason woke to a sheet of ice stretching all the way to the barren highlands across the lake, and the fearful realization that he was trapped.

At dawn the trees were bending again, and, to his amazement, the ice broke into panes of glass that drifted and shattered before the wind. He didn't dare to take the time to warm himself with a fire, or to cook. The wind was blowing hard out of the northwest, and he had to get
through this dead water and into the current before the ice returned to lock up the lake for good.

Jason hugged the west shore and paddled north, bundled like a polar bear from fur hat to sealskin mukluks, but without the clumsy mittens. His fingers felt like frozen claws. The windlashed surface of the lake was wild with waves and whitecaps, but as long as he hugged the shore, he could keep the canoe under control. Even so, the spray turned to ice in midair and fell tinkling into the canoe.

On his second day on the lake there were skiffs coming on from behind. On his third day, still hugging the shore, he couldn't see the skiffs over his shoulder anymore. He could guess the reason. With all their surface for the wind to catch, those boats would be kites; they'd end up wrecked on the far shore of the lake. All those people behind him were trapped in camp.

With each dawn the ice covering the lake was thicker than before, and each day it took longer for the wind to shatter and disperse it.

His fourth day on the lake, the squalls became so severe that he couldn't make any progress and had to go to shore. He was in a quandary. If he couldn't get off this lake, there would come the day, and very soon, when the morning ice covering Lake Laberge wouldn't break up at all. That would be the day that spelled disaster.

Out of desperation, he tried to see if King could pull the canoe from shore. Where the shoreline would allow it, it worked. With the dog straining at his utmost and Jason paddling like a berserker, they were able to keep going.

The sixth day dawned a dead calm. The ice on Laberge was an inch thick. What now? Wait until the ice
was thick enough to walk on, then drag the canoe the rest of the way?

If he waited that long, the Yukon River beyond the lake would itself freeze over, and he'd be stranded with three hundred miles remaining.

Checkmate?

His antagonist, the wind, finally came to his aid. Late in the morning it blew hard enough to create a channel of open water along the western shore, and then it died out as suddenly as it had begun.

Here was his chance. Jason put the husky back in the bow and paddled north with all the strength he could muster. By twilight he was entering the narrowing outlet of the lake, and he felt the revival of the current. Before long it was rushing beneath him like floodwaters. There was just enough daylight remaining to allow him to see the illusion of the boulder-strewn river bottom rising up beneath him as the canoe poured with the slush ice into the reborn Yukon.

On the left shore, people. Behind them, cabins with sod roofs. An Indian village. He paddled for shore, half-dead from cold.

Arms motioned him in. “Plenty muck-a-muck,” a man told him.

He was being invited to eat, he realized. All around the village, racks were full of drying salmon, but it was moose steaks they were roasting around their cook fires.

The Indians' dogs, all tied, were in an uproar at the sight of King, but no one paid any attention to their barking and leaping. People let him know he was fortunate to escape the lake. “
Tomolla
, no.”

The next morning the Yukon narrowed into a winding, steep-walled canyon. He had to be careful not to hug
the turns, where sweepers—trees undermined by the river but still clinging by their roots to the banks—sawed up and down in the current. In the tightest turn of all, he passed over an enormous submerged boulder that produced a vicious boil downstream. The boil caught the canoe, spun it suddenly, and King went flying into the river. It was all Jason could do to brace with his paddle and keep from capsizing.

“King!” he shouted, but the powerful husky was having no trouble keeping his head above the water. Jason made for a gravel beach as fast as he could, with King paddling close behind. The husky dragged himself on shore and shook himself out. They were back on the river minutes later.

It was a gray October day, with no help from the sun. The canoe passed the mouth of the Teslin River and a native village there. Now the Yukon was nearly twice as big as before. It snowed that night, three inches of snow as fine and dry as sugar.

The next day he passed the mouth of the Big Salmon River and another village.

On all sides, ice cakes were hissing in the Yukon. Shelves of ice were forming along the shore, extending ten and twenty feet out. As freeze-up lowered the level of the river, the ice shelves cracked noisily under their own weight and splashed into the water, adding even more ice to the rest jostling downstream.

He passed two more villages the following day at the mouth of the Little Salmon and the mouth of the Nordenskjold. The drying racks were full of salmon.

From around a bend in the river came the roar of rapids. Jason pulled the canoe onto the beach and walked above the sheer bank on the right side to take a look at what was making all the noise. Four stony islands
scattered in a row across the Yukon divided its flow into five rushing channels. This had to be the Five Fingers, which his map noted as
LAST RAPID
.

The big waves in the central slots would surely spill him, but he could picture himself paddling the raceway closest to the eastern bank, where he stood.

Before he got back into the canoe he calmed himself by sitting for a few minutes with his companion. The best friend I ever hope to have, he mused. With the husky's winter coat fully grown out, including a creamy underfur, King looked more splendid and solid than ever.

“These Five Fingers can't stop us,” Jason said to the husky. “Don't let anything stump you, King. That's what my father always said.”

The husky, with a quick dart of his tongue, licked Jason's cheek.

“Five Fingers and an arm and a leg can't keep us from our pot of gold now, partner. We're a couple hundred miles—that's all we are—from staking our claim. We're going to be millionaires!”

Jason was sure he saw a grin on the husky's beautiful face. King barked once, twice.

“Yes, sir. We'll split everything down the middle. Fifty-fifty.”

Back on the river, Jason yelled, “Watch our smoke!” at the top of his lungs, then paddled down the rightmost of the Five Fingers. He felt the sudden acceleration as the canoe dropped swiftly toward a train of foaming waves. The trick was to stay dead center and not let the swirling eddies on either side grab him.

The bow met the first wave head-on and rose high as it sliced cleanly through. Jason paddled hard, careful not to lose momentum, as the canoe dropped into a trough.
It rose with ice cakes on both sides onto a wave that broke over the bow and drenched him, all the way back at the stern, with icy spray. Steady!

Two more waves and they'd shot through. The rapids of the upper Yukon were all behind them. Jamie and her father came to mind; they'd paddled their canoe through this same rapid. Had they picked the same channel? Were they already working their claim, filling gunnysacks with nuggets?

Below Five Fingers the country opened up again, and the river meandered among dozens of islands, some half a mile or more in length. He stayed in the channel with the most current and the least ice. The bare bushes along the eastern shore were flecked with red.

Wild roses, he realized. Those red specks must be rose hips, the fruit Jamie had told him about, which would prevent scurvy. He knew a little about scurvy—the scourge of sailors, on account of their diet. It could make your teeth fall out. Scurvy could cripple you; it could even kill you.

Jason landed and went to take a look, then got a sack and started picking. He'd better take the time, he thought. Tomatoes and limes and such might not be available in Dawson City. A present for Abe and Ethan; he'd make tea drinkers of them.

He filled a sack, returned to the canoe and stowed it, then started on a second. This time he worked his way farther downstream and away from the river. He was finding rose hips almost half an inch in diameter. King was keeping an eye on him from a sunny clearing by the shore. It was a crisp day and the sky was a hard blue. Jason's breath made a cloud of frost every time he breathed out.

Suddenly he became aware of splashes of crimson in
the snow ahead. A few more steps, and he realized he was looking at a blood trail…and moose tracks. The blood looked fresh. Was it from a bull gored in a mating battle?

Here was a chance to present his brothers with a substantial amount of meat. With the rapids behind him, his canoe could float at least a hindquarter.

Jason quickly returned to the canoe for the rifle. “King,” he called, and the husky ran to join him. At the moose trail, the husky's nose caught the scent of blood and the fur along his spine stood straight up.

The trail led no farther than a hundred yards, in and out of the alders and the willows. Suddenly, there was the moose, not forty feet in front of him, standing broadside in a small clearing, now turning its head to look at him. Six feet tall at the shoulders, no doubt, this bull was even more massive than the ones he'd seen earlier. The moose was bleeding from wounds on both sides of its neck and one behind the front shoulder.

Those were bullet holes, he realized, not antler wounds. Someone must be tracking the moose. An Indian? A Klondiker?

Jason turned around, saw no one. When he looked back, the moose was gone.

He followed the blood trail through the trees, more cautiously now, rifle at the ready. If he were to finish the moose, it would be a kindness to the animal and helpful to the hunter who was tracking it.

When he glimpsed the moose a few minutes later, it lay fallen in the snow, inert as stone. He wasn't going to have to shoot it after all.

Jason set the rifle against a tree and walked close. The antlers were so broad, he might not be able to touch from one side to the other with arms outspread.

Suddenly the moose blinked, and a hind leg twitched. It was still alive! Before Jason had time for a second thought, the moose was on its feet and charging.

No time to reach the rifle. Time only to run. He saw King look over his shoulder at the monster, saw the husky running too.

Jason tripped and went down hard. Instantly he was back up, but just then the bull rammed him from behind, its antlers like the cowcatcher on a locomotive. All at once the moose threw its rack up and back, and Jason went with the antlers high into the air and above the animal.

Involuntarily, his arms shot out to break his twisting fall and he grabbed hold of two antler tips. He'd landed belly-down in the broad, flat palms of the antlers. At once, the moose was trying to shake him off, and might have. He wrapped his legs around the moose's long, tapering head and clung with all his strength.

Hang on, he told himself. If he shakes me loose, then gores me or kicks me, I'm dead.

He could hear King barking. He could see the blur of the husky darting in and out.

The moose started ramming its head into the ground, trying to smash Jason into the ground. He held on. Suddenly the beast buckled underneath him, and Jason's knees hit the earth. His legs had lost their hold; all he had now was the grip of his hands on the antler tines. He dared not let go.

King rushed in and tried to get under the animal's throat. The moose stood up suddenly, kicking at the husky with its front hooves. King backed away, and the moose tried to shake Jason loose with wild gyrations of its head, and then to crush him into the ground.

Jason felt his legs taking a beating. The strength had
gone out of his arms; he doubted he could hold on any longer. He slipped, and found himself looking directly into the animal's eyes. The smell of musk and blood was bestial. The monster was making an incongruous cooing sound.