BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (30 page)

Zimmerman says that by late July he'd bought
and traded his way into an outfit that would sustain him for a year
Inside. Since all his goods were purchased in Alaska, he'd have to
pay customs duties up at Chilkoot Pass, but the Mounties wouldn't
turn him back.

"Toward the end of July I packed for three
fellers from Montana – a man named Rafferty and his boy, maybe
sixteen, named Tim. The third was a schoolteacher named Orrie from
the same town. I noticed they was carrying more tools than most – a
whipsaw and three handsaws, spare blades, a bag of planes and
chisels, even a hand-drill and a level. Rafferty told me he was a
carpenter, and that got me thinking on the way up to Sheep Camp.
Them three was agreeable fellers. Didn't talk much and never been
mining, but all of 'em was comfortable on the trail and knowed how
to use their hands. I figured that was about the best kind of
company I was going to find that summer."

Zimmerman says he realized that Tim liked
horses, so he talked with the boy about what made a good packer and
taught him how to throw a diamond hitch.

"Used the Dyea River to show 'em how to scout
a creek and pan for colors. Told 'em how you could use a rocker to
wash out dumps when you wasn't near the water. By the time we got
to Sheep Camp we was on good terms, so I made Rafferty an
offer.

"I said I was putting together my outfit and
I'd be ready to head Inside after a few more days. I knowed they
was planning to build a boat at Lindeman Lake, and I'd be pleased
to help if they was willing to let me travel with 'em to Dawson.
Told 'em I knowed my way around boats and rivers, and wasn't no
stranger to tools or hard work. And I said I wasn't going to charge
for packing 'em up to Sheep Camp if they was my partners."

"Rafferty said they was going to pay the
Chilkoots to pack their outfits over the pass and down to Lindeman,
but the money I was going to save him wouldn't be enough for the
Chilkoots to pack mine. I told him that don't matter. I could move
my outfit over the pass myself and meet 'em at Lindeman in two
weeks.

"Then I told him the trees was mostly gone at
Lindeman, so it was better to keep moving to Bennett Lake. During
the spring there was a couple hundred tents up there, and while the
stampeders was waiting for the ice to go out, they turned Bennett
into something like a town. Had a saloon and a sawmill, so that was
the place to stop if you was building a boat."

Zimmerman swivels toward the table to tilt
back a slug from his cup. I reach for my own and do the same.

"What did Rafferty say?"

"He said they brung plans for a scow and he
reckoned they could make it a few feet longer. Should hold four men
and three tons, and might even ride the rapids better that way. So
we shook hands at Sheep Camp and I said I'd find 'em at Bennett in
two weeks. Told 'em I'd bring twenty pounds of oakum and pitch and
nails."

I squint skeptically, remembering how long
Zimmerman said it took Gig Garrett and Nokes and the Swedes to move
their outfits from Sheep Camp over the pass and down to Lindeman
Lake, which was five miles closer than Bennett.

"You said the Mounties wouldn't let you over
the pass unless you had a full year's outfit. Rafferty and his
group had a head start and Indian packers. How were you going to
catch up to them while moving a ton of gear?"

Zimmerman cracks a smile. "Progress," he
says. "Them that sees it coming can make a living off of them that
don't. By the end of July, I had a pack team that was healthy and
knowed the trail, and to the Siwashes they was worth fifty dollars
a head. Maybe there was a cable that was starting to run buckets
from the canyon up to the pass, but that didn't signify with them.
They been packing gear up from the beach for white men for twenty
years, and they was sure there was another twenty years coming. So
they always had an eye for horses."

"I packed my own outfit up to Canyon City,
then cached it there and took the team back down to Dyea. Sold 'em
to the Siwashes for two hundred dollars. Then I found the man
running Wallace's cable and offered him all two hundred to send my
outfit up to the pass. That's ten cents a pound, and that's about
what the packers was getting. The engine was shut down when I got
there, but he said they was going to start moving loads again later
that day. There was bags and boxes stacked everywhere in rows. He
said they was backed up but he'd take my money if I could wait
three days.

"So I paid him and took my chances. Stacked
my outfit in the line, strapped fifty pounds of gear and grub on my
back, and started up the trail. It was two years and two months
since I left home, and even though I just bet everything I had on
strangers behind me and ahead of me, that was the first day I felt
sure I was going make it to the Yukon."

Chapter 35

Zimmerman says he spent two nights at Sheep
Camp, then went up to Chilkoot Pass to wait for his outfit and
found it was already there, a nondescript pile of forty canvas bags
set off by a few feet from the towers of bags and crates and lumber
that flanked both sides of the trail across the pass.

"There was a couple of Mounties up there and
two customs agents checking outfits and taking fees. A Mountie
gives you a five-minute lecture about the dangers up ahead, and if
you bought all your grub and gear in Victoria and you got unbroken
seals, he says god-speed and waves you on.

"But whatever you got that ain't Canadian
gets taxed, and then you wait for the customs agent. I think I paid
a hundred and sixty dollars, which was most of what I had left.
Took half a day to do it, since there was ten groups waiting and
the agents wasn't in much of a rush. When one of 'em finally got to
me, I asked him what day it was, and he said August first.

"It made me feel low thinking I took over a
year to cross the border after stepping foot in Dyea, and some of
the stampeders that come after me got to Dawson before the river
iced over last fall. All I could do was keep moving forward and
hope the gold fields wasn't picked clean by the time I got to the
Klondike. I started packing my gear down to Crater Lake, two bags
at a time, figuring the Raffertys and Orrie was a couple days ahead
of me and might gain a couple more between the pass and Bennett
Lake."

Zimmerman gives a spare description of his
journey down from Chilkoot Pass and across the staircase of valleys
below it. His traverse seems less memorable than the one Garrett
and Nokes and the Swedes undertook in the winter of '96. Maybe
because by the summer of '98 there were multiple boatmen willing to
ferry outfits across the upper lakes.

"Crater Lake is five hundred feet down from
the pass," Zimmerman says, "and it sits like a dead possum in a big
bowl of granite and scree. It's over a mile from one end to the
other, and the trail goes up and down around the sides, so them
boatmen had plenty of customers, even though they was charging one
cent a pound. It's windy and cold and wet up there even in the
summer, and I didn't want to spend three days scuffling on that
trail. So I carried a hundred pounds around the lake and paid
twenty dollars to have the rest of my outfit rowed across.

"From the foot of the lake it's four miles
following the outlet creek down a rocky valley to Long Lake, and I
can still see that trail with my eyes closed. There was dozens of
fellers humping outfits, but I felt like I was moving the pyramids
by myself. Took five days to haul my gear them four miles. Would of
been more, but I hired a feller with two burros to help me on the
last day."

Zimmerman says on the way to Lindeman he kept
trading his dwindling funds for time.

"It was a penny a pound for the boatman at
Long Lake, and by then twenty dollars was sounding reasonable for
two miles of water. The wind was fierce, so you could sail to the
foot in half an hour. Then a short walk to the head of Deep Lake
and a one-mile ferry to the other end. From there it's one more
hill and down to Lindeman, and that's as pretty a lake as you'll
ever see. The wind dies down and it feels warmer, and you got a
five-mile finger of blue water, with granite slopes rising up on
either side. Wide meadow and a hundred tents at the head of the
lake.

"I humped my first load down there and
dropped the bags in the meadow, with sore shoulders and aching
feet. It was late afternoon and I couldn't stomach walking back for
another load right away, so I just stretched out on the grass,
caught my breath, and watched the clouds go by for an hour. Then I
left my bags where they was and walked around to explore. With all
the fire rings and trampled grass and trash, you could tell a few
thousand people already come and gone. Nothing nearby you could
point to in the way of trees, but I seen men whipsawing logs in
half a dozen saw-pits, and twice that many boats was getting
built."

I ask Zimmerman what a saw-pit is and he says
it's a rectangular scaffold of logs raised ten feet off the ground,
supported by braced logs or sawed-off tree trunks that act as
posts.

"That's the only way you can saw logs into
planks," he says. "Cut down a spruce tree, strip the branches and
take off the top, down to where the trunk is ten inches. Then the
bottom might be twelve or fifteen across. Roll that log on skids up
to the frame and wedge it so it don't turn on you. Lay your chalk
lines down on the top and bottom for one-inch planks. Then one
feller stands up on the frame and straddles the log and the other
stands underneath it on the ground.

"The whipsaw's just a skinny eight-foot blade
with ripping teeth. No frame, but wooden handles on each end. Line
it into the log, and the man on top pulls his handle from his knees
to his shoulders. The feller on the bottom pulls from overhead down
to his waist. That's the cutting stroke, and if the blade don't
stick he gets a face-full of sawdust. Pull it straight for fifty or
sixty strokes and that's a ten-foot plank." Zimmerman smirks as he
swirls his whiskey and drinks. "Sounds easy 'til you try it."

Zimmerman says he still wasn't ready to walk
back to Deep Lake for another load, so he kept moving clockwise
along the lake shore, and found that the village of tents ended
where a shallow river flowed into the head of the lake.

"A couple women was washing pots in the river
and a man was drawing water, and a few stripped spruce trees was
pushed up against the bank in an eddy. And I couldn't of been
happier to see three fellers sitting on a big rock near the logs.
Rafferty and Tim and the schoolteacher Orrie. I guess I was hoping
they might be camped at Lindeman, 'cause I was bone tired from
trying to catch up to 'em.

"Tim breaks out a grin when he sees me and
Rafferty shakes my hand, but Orrie is a queer bird and he just nods
and says 'how long you been here?' Rafferty says the Siwashes
dropped their outfits at Lindeman and said they wanted five cents
more a pound to keep going to Bennett. Rafferty didn't want to
spend more money, but he already paid 'em what they was owed, so he
didn't think they had a choice.

"Then a gold-haired boy caulking his boat
told him there was a good stand of trees in a valley five miles up
the river, and you could tie 'em together and float 'em most of the
way to Lindeman. So that's what they was doing. They told the
Siwashes no and pitched their tent two days ago. Rafferty and Orrie
went up the river today and brung down four logs, and they left Tim
at Lindeman to watch for me coming through. Now all four of us
could go upriver tomorrow and strip down eight or ten."

Zimmerman says felling and stripping four
suitable trees and then dragging them to the river took a whole
morning, and guiding them down the shallow river consumed the rest
of the day, even with the trunks tied together and hauled by
ropes.

"Sometimes all four of us was in the river to
our waists, dragging them logs off the rocks, and even in August
that water feels like ice. By the time we got back down to the lake
I was chilled and scraped and sore. But we only got four logs that
first day, so we went back up the next morning and done it again.
Hauled our dozen logs to a saw-pit that some other fellers was
finished with, and I figured we seen the worst part of building a
boat. At least all the sawing and hammering was on dry ground.

"Rafferty said we was building a scow, and I
seen plenty of them on the canal. Flat bottom, six foot beam,
tapered to a broad point at the bow and squared off a pinch
narrower at the stern. The gunwales had a decent curve so we was
mounting oar-locks at the widest beam, one port and one starboard.
Rafferty brung hardware for three, and the third was going on the
transom so you could use an oar to steer.

"Two of our logs was cottonwood, and Rafferty
wanted one for the ribs and thwarts. Them pieces is pretty simple
on a scow. He cut the gunwales out of a scrawny pine and gave Tim
the second cottonwood, told him to shape the oars. So that put
Orrie and me in the saw-pit, whipsawing spruce for the planks."

Zimmerman says that he started off on the
raised scaffold, working the upper half of the saw, while Orrie
worked the lower half.

"Orrie wore specs, so the sawdust didn't go
straight into his eyes when he was trying to keep the blade on the
chalk line. But he still seemed blind to me. Every time he pulled
the handle down, I seen the blade swing wide of the line. One cut
goes wide to the left and the next goes wide to the right, and I'm
trying to move it back on line on the upswing. Wasn't long before I
was cussing at him to stay on the mark, and pretty soon he was
cussing right back. His hair was copper colored and his whiskers
was thin, so there wasn't nothing to hide the color on his face,
and everytime I looked down he was getting redder and redder.

"Dammit, Orrie," I says, "can't you saw a
straight line? We ain't gone three feet before you turned this
board to kindling."