Jason's Gold (10 page)

The moose buckled to its knees once again, ramming Jason back to the earth. The animal was utterly exhausted, and so was he.

As the moose's front legs kicked forward in yet another attempt to stand. Jason felt a hoof pin one of his boots to the ground. The weight on his foot and the sudden pulling back of the monster's antlers finally ripped his hands from their grip, and he was knocked loose.

Quicker than thought, he saw the enormous forelegs raining down, and shielded his face. His arms and chest took a terrible trampling from the front hooves.

Though the wind was knocked out of him, he managed to roll over as the moose momentarily turned to face King, who was barking in a frenzy. Then he was being trampled again, this time all over his back and legs.

Jason looked over his shoulder. The moose had its head down, about to gore him with those sharp tines, when the husky came flying. The moose turned its antlers toward the dog instead, and flung King aside like a rag doll.

A moment later the hooves rained down again, a shot rang out, and then all was darkness.

When Jason came to, he knew only pain. At first he was aware of a sharp stab in his chest with the intake of even the slightest breath, but then he felt pain from head to toe and deep inside.

He opened his eyes. Everything was dim and murky. The only light was coming from a crude window made from pieces of bottles stuck in hardened mud. He was in a cabin, he realized. Outside, it was snowing.

He could hear a fire crackling in a stove, but he couldn't turn his head to see the stove. The pain from throughout his body seemed to rush all at once to the back of his head. Suddenly he remembered the moose, and then he remembered the dog flung through the air off its enormous antlers. Was King alive?

Jason lapsed into darkness again, and when he woke, it was to the husky's face only inches from his. “King,” he said, “King.”

The husky nuzzled his cheek.

“You're still alive.” He reached to stroke the husky's head, but the movement hurt too much and he had to pull back. The dog, satisfied that Jason was alive, lay down by the stove with a series of yelps.

Both were hurt bad, but both were alive. Where was this cabin? Who had brought him here?

Jason slept.

The next time he woke, it was to candlelight and the shadow of a man moving in the room. The shadow came and went during the hazy, slow passage of time. The specter was tall and lean, with piercing dark eyes under knitted brows and a wide-brimmed prospector's hat. His face was gaunt, brooding, chiseled from solid granite, it seemed.

“Where am I?” Jason managed. “Dawson City?”

“Hardly,” the man grunted. “You're a couple of miles below Five Fingers. Dawson is two hundred and fifty miles downriver.”

Jason tried to think, to remember. “I have to get going,” he said. “I have to get to Dawson City before the river freezes up.” With the breath it took to speak, his ribs felt like a knife was twisting in them.

The man shook his head doubtfully. “The year before last, I fell onto a broken-off tree branch. It went through my leg like a spear. I had to be somewhere too, but I couldn't even stand up for two weeks. So don't tell me you have to get to Dawson City. Winter's going to have the last word on that. Are you by yourself?”

Jason nodded, struggling against his confusion. “I still don't understand how I—why I'm not dead, and where you came from. Did you fire the shot?”

“I'd been trying to catch up with that moose all morning. I heard some commotion and was coming up
real careful. As I caught sight of you, that bull was within an instant of punching you full of holes, but your dog came leaping in. In the time it took me to raise my rifle and shoot, the dog went flying and the moose had gone back to giving you the devil with his hooves. How did you let that happen? Set your rifle down and walked up on the animal, thinking it was dead?”

It was all coming back. Jason groaned in agreement.

“That's enough talk. You're in worse shape than you know. You've been out cold for twenty-four hours.”

The darkness swept back in on him, and he slept.

In the morning Jason was able to move enough to clean himself with a bucket of hot water the man had heated on the stove. His entire body was black-and-blue. Every movement brought a whirlwind of pain. The back of his head had a fist-sized lump that pounded relentlessly with every beat of his heart.

“Where's it hurt worst?” came the man's voice.

“Ribs. I think I have some cracked ribs.”

It kept snowing, and the sky stayed dark. Before the sun failed, Jason was able to go to the open door, though every step hurt, and look out. King got up, whimpering, and looked out with him. The cabin was situated at the mouth of a creek about fifty yards back from the Yukon. The Yukon's opposite shore was dominated by a barren bluff, pure white with snow.

The shelves of ice along the banks had grown toward the center of the river, nearly closing the open channel. “I hope you're heading to Dawson and can take me along,” Jason said over his shoulder.

“I'm heading the other direction, and I'm in a hurry. I'm aiming to trade my canoe for a sled at the village at the mouth of the Nordenskjold.”

“And get some dogs to pull your sled?”

“I pull my own sled.”

It made no sense that a prospector would be going away from Dawson City instead of toward it, but Jason wasn't going to point that out. “I'm worried about my canoe,” he said.

“I pulled it onto high ground. All the grub from your outfit is up in the cache where the critters can't get it, even your rose fruit. I brought enough grub inside, you won't have to climb until you're able—the ladder's around back. You got nothing to worry about.”

Easy for you to say, Jason thought. He craned his neck out the door and spotted the cache high in the air on four stilts. Suddenly, it hurt too much to stand. He had to go lie down on the bunk.

King got up from beside the stove and lay down close to him. Jason dangled an arm over the side of the bunk and found the husky's head. Momentarily, Jason was soothed. Everything would be all right. Still, he kept trying to picture what was going to come of his setback. He might be alive, but he was in bad trouble with ice growing on the river by the minute. What was he going to do?

The prospector went outside, then returned a few minutes later with a slab of meat. He fried some steaks, made bannock and coffee. His dark, full mustache turned down at the corners of his face, which was cheerless as the landscape outside. “Sure glad I was close to your cabin,” Jason said with forced enthusiasm as he chewed carefully. Even eating hurt.

The man gave a contemptuous glance around the room. “Ain't my cabin. I wouldn't have set foot in here if you hadn't needed a place to get out of the weather.”

“Couldn't I just drift down to Dawson City in my canoe?”

“You don't understand. The river can freeze up uncannily sudden—slabs of ice tearing every which way. I've seen it bust a steamboat into matchsticks. You've got a cabin here with a stove in it. Count yourself lucky. A lot of cheechakos are going to die this winter. Hunker down, play it safe, ride out the winter. You have a rifle and ammunition. One moose and you'd be in good shape.”

“Stay here until breakup? Right here? You don't understand…. I have two brothers in Dawson City.”

“Yeah, and I got a wife and three kids in Colorado. Try it if you dare; I'm not going to be here to stop you. There's lots of ways to die in the North. Simply getting your feet wet when it's cold can kill you. How long have your brothers been in Dawson?”

“Three weeks, maybe. They must've staked by now. I was hoping to stake before winter myself.”

“Dawson is a fool's paradise,” the prospector said bitterly.

“So where are you heading with your sled?”

“Upriver to the Little Salmon, then cross-country northeast to the headwaters of the Stewart.”

“Did you come over the Chilkoot?”

“About three years ago I did. Going to strike it rich, are you?”

“Aim to.”

“They say there's quite a few coming over the Chilkoot, making ready to come downriver with the breakup next spring.”

“Thousands and thousands. I guess tens of thousands if you count everyone pouring into Dyea and Skagway…. My name's Jason Hawthorn. I thank you for helping me out.”

The man shrugged. “The Golden Rule is the code of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, or at least it used to be. ‘Do unto others as you would be done by.'”

The bitterness in the man's voice was unmistakable. Jason asked his name.

“Robert Henderson. Just call me Henderson. Heard my name before?”

Jason wagged his head. “Should I have?”

The man smiled sardonically. It was the first smile Jason had seen from him. “No, no…I'm a ghost. I've become a ghost.”

Jason was baffled, and a little unnerved. “This moose we're eating…this must be the one I got tangled up with?”

“Must've weighed fifteen hundred pounds. All I brought back was a hindquarter. By the time I went for more, a bear had gotten to it—dragged the rest of the carcass a short ways, then covered it with duff and branches. Figured I'd leave it there, fouled as it was. No doubt that bear's fixin' to den and not much interested in eating. In the spring, though, when it comes out, it'll remember where it cached the meat. The den is probably close by. Too bad I didn't spot it.”

“Why is that?”

“For future reference. This was a black bear—I saw a print—and black bears are good eating. The Indians keep close track of den sites. In winter, they'll hunt the bear in its den.”

“Really? In its den?”

“That shouldn't sound so amazing. I mean, the bear is asleep.”

“Have you ever done that?”

“Never had the occasion.”

Though Henderson said he was going to go, and
soon, Jason didn't really believe it. How could Henderson leave him there, alone?

And yet, in the morning, Henderson did just that. Packed his things, said good-bye and good luck, and ghosted away. Jason fought the impulse to call him back, to cajole, to beg, but he kept his tongue as fear crept into him as tangibly as the cold. Henderson headed upriver, paddling and then poling.

Jason tried to put the gaunt, tortured prospector out of his thoughts. He stared downriver at the bleak skeletal cottonwoods, his mind lurching to plot his escape. He'd come too far for this to happen to him.

Downstream, the Yukon broke into channels as it wound its way among numerous islands. Two hundred and fifty miles, no rapids. Henderson was wrong about having to stay here. Why couldn't he just wrap himself in his blankets and float?

Because it wasn't only the matter of not being able to paddle. He couldn't make camp, split wood, make a fire, or cook.

In a few weeks' time he would be able to do those things. The cabin was warm, and he needed to heal.

A few weeks would be too late.

How could Henderson have left him? He was only a cheechako. He might not even have the grub to get through the winter. People said breakup came at the end of May. That was seven months away!

At least Henderson had left him with a supply of split firewood, enough for a few weeks, it looked like. And as he looked around he realized that Henderson had left a small crosscut saw as well as a pair of snowshoes—five-foot long Indian-made snowshoes of birch frames and rawhide to keep him above the snow when he was out
looking for that moose or getting firewood.

No, he had no bone to pick with Henderson. The man had saved his life.

What about Jack London? If Jack hadn't given him the outfit, he would've stayed on the ocean side of the Chilkoot pass, maybe even gone home.

What about his brothers? They were sitting pretty in Dawson only because they'd taken his inheritance for packing money.

Then there was Jamie, that pretty girl, telling him to collect rose hips. He would never have run into that moose if it hadn't been for her.

He laughed out loud, at himself. It was a bitter laugh born of desperation, and it hurt.

He had only himself to blame.

 

As the days passed, Jason fought the impulse to throw himself in the canoe and drift. A hundred times he told himself that Henderson was wrong. The moon was up; he could drift around the clock bundled in his blankets, all the way to the Golden City.

But he kept picturing the ice pitching up all around him and the canoe being ground to matchsticks. He stayed where he was, immobilized. His ribs were barely improved, and he was still a mass of bruises. He kept looking upstream for straggling Klondikers who might take him down to Dawson.

None came. Ravens and gray jays were the only living things in the country, it seemed, besides him and the dog and the wolves in the distance. Their howling seemed to drive a cold nail deeper into his heart with each passing day.

As the days and his spirits darkened, he watched the
surface of the river freeze from shore to shore. Very suddenly at the last, just as Henderson had predicted, the jagged, grinding shapes pitched up and locked into place with a crash of finality.

Winter.

The sound of a gunshot, close by, exploded the oppressive silence. The husky came instantly to his feet, ears at the alert. With King at his side, Jason hobbled outside the cabin to investigate, but there was no one around. He hollered himself hoarse. No one was there. The hair on the back of his neck rose; he was scared down to the roots of his chattering teeth.

The oppressive, almost palpable silence closed back in. Winter abhorred sound. There was only the emptiness of the vast northern forest.

The next day, two more gunshots, almost certainly coming from the cottonwoods along the creek. Again, silence, and no tracks in the snow. No one had been there.

It must be the trees themselves, Jason realized, bursting and splitting in the extreme cold.

He used to pride himself on being able to go it alone, to shake off his bouts of loneliness. No longer. Thank God for King. This place would have already made him crazy with terror if it weren't for the husky.

In the mornings, every nailhead on the inside of the cabin was covered with hoarfrost. It took time for the little sheet-iron stove to push back the cold. One day, behind the cabin, he discovered a rusty thermometer nailed to a spruce tree. Midday the mercury was registering twenty-five degrees below zero.

He had to spend hours outside now, making firewood, though every swing of the ax reverberated in his ribs. And he had to keep open the hole in the creek where Henderson had been drawing water with the bucket.

The husky was always eager to go out, bite the snow, roll in it. Jason was still awed by the bitter cold, even though he bundled himself thick as a bear to go out. He'd never known what cold was before, not really. Here in the North it seemed an element all its own, a pervasive and lethal liquid pouring down out of the sky. Though he was getting by from one day to the next, the idea of wintering here was incomprehensible.

On the last day of October, according to the nicks he was carving on the cabin wall, he thought he heard voices from downriver.

He told himself that the voices were coming from the dark corners of his imagination.

He heard them again. Shouts. People shouting, and this time not far away.

You've lost your mind, he told himself.

But King was growling.

Jason started to get up. King began barking.
Suddenly the door shook with loud blows.

Abruptly, the door was pulled open. There stood a man with cracked lips, a frostbitten white patch at the tip of his nose, icicles in his mustache, and eyes wide like a refugee from an asylum. As the man lowered his heavy pack to the ground and bent to unbuckle his snowshoes, he stammered something about the cabin.

Was this the owner of the cabin, come to claim it?

Seven or eight more men under heavy burdens were trudging toward the cabin, mechanically, like sleepwalkers. The last was pulling someone on a sled, someone propped up against a packsack.

Would they demand that he give up the cabin?

With a glance back toward the figure on the sled, the man at the door barked, “Get him inside.”

It was a boy on the sled, a boy no older than twelve. He tried to look past Jason into the cabin. The boy's face was a mask of fright, as if he was being led to his execution.

Four men struggled to carry the boy inside. “Watch that foot!” one of them cried out, too late, as the boy's right foot, wrapped in a blanket, bumped against the door frame. Jason expected the boy to howl in pain, but there came no reaction at all. The blanket fell away, revealing a foot and lower leg massively swollen and covered with only a heavy sock.

Jason looked to their leader for an explanation.

“Do you have any whiskey?” the man demanded. His eyes were jittery and his voice brittle as glass.

Jason shook his head.

“It probably wouldn't do much good anyway. Lay Charlie down on the floor there—right here on the middle of the floor where we can hold him down.”

“For the love of God, Uncle George!” the boy cried.

“Who's going to do it?” The boy's uncle was looking wildly around the room at the faces of the men who'd crowded into the cabin. All eyes were averted as they stamped their feet and pushed to get close to the warmth of the stove.

“Henry, you're a blacksmith.”

“Aye, a blacksmith, not a butcher.”

“He's your nephew, Maguire,” another man growled.

“It will heal, Uncle George!” the boy begged. “Give it time!”

The boy's uncle knelt and began to unroll the large wool sock. A cloying stench wafted across the room and nearly knocked Jason down.

Men cursed and reached for bandannas or handkerchiefs, which they pressed to their mouths and noses. All eyes fell on the dead limb, and the room was filled with revulsion. The boy's right foot and lower leg were horribly distended and blackened with rotting tissue. The boy himself, on seeing it, shrank in horror and wailed, “No! No!”

The word
gangrene
was spoken, and Jason heard another voice whisper, “The poison's probably spread already.”

Maguire stoked the stove full from the pile of kindling there, then opened the draft slot wide. The kindling caught with a roar, and within minutes the thin walls of the stove were glowing bright red. “Whose knife is razor sharp?” he demanded.

A man with a walrus mustache produced a broad bowie knife from the scabbard at his hip.

“Maybe you should use this saw,” another man put in, indicating the crosscut saw that Henderson had left behind.

“Give me both, then. That pail of water, let's put it on to boil.”

The boy's eyes, as he lay splayed out on the floor, seemed to have rolled back into his skull. He was deathly pale, and his chest was heaving with fright.

His uncle's eyes were searching the room. They came to rest on a short-handled shovel hanging from the cabin wall. “Stick the blade of the shovel into the stove, Henry. I'll need it red-hot.”

“What for?”

“To seal the stump so he doesn't bleed to death. Give me that stick there, Johnson, for between his teeth, so he doesn't bite his tongue off. Don't any of you leave; I want all of you here to help hold him down.”

Jason wiped his forehead. He'd broken out in a cold sweat. Quickly, he pulled on his mackinaw and the oilskin overcoat, put on his fur hat and mittens, and backed out the door.

Outside, Jason reeled away from the cabin, wading in the knee-deep snow, with the husky following behind. He had to get away. He walked upstream toward the Five Fingers, along the windward side of the Yukon's bank, where the snow was crusted stiff. When he thought he'd gone far enough that he wouldn't possibly hear, he crumpled in the snow and held the dog close.

The first scream carried far in the extreme cold, and Jason heard it distinctly, all the more horrible for the distance it had traveled. Though Jason clapped his mittens to his ears, he continued to hear the boy's torment, worse than he'd ever imagined from souls cast into hell.

The husky too recoiled from the sound of the screams—at first his ears lay down flat, then he yawned anxiously, and then he whimpered. Jason broke into tears. He'd heard about battlefield surgery during the
Civil War. Once he'd asked his father how men could have endured it. His father had answered laconically, “They had no choice.”

After a minute the forest and the undulating frozen field of white that was the river were again swathed with the eerie silence of winter. Had the boy blacked out? Had he bled to death? For long minutes Jason stayed where he was, dreading to return. Yet he had to find out what the men intended to do. If it was their cabin, or if they were moving in regardless, he was in bad trouble.

To Jason's surprise as he neared the cabin, the men were already under way, bent under their heavy packsacks and moving upriver fast in their snowshoes. The boy's uncle, rifle across his chest, was in the lead, as before. The sled and the boy were nowhere to be seen.

Jason stood in their path. As they approached and halted in front of him, he sputtered, “Is he dead, then?”

“Alive, but he lost a lot of blood,” the boy's wild-eyed uncle explained. “Out cold. He'll likely die.”

“You're leaving without him?”

“We have no choice! We can't wait him out.”

“But where are you going? Where did you come from?”

The man's eyes blazed with panicky fire. “We've no time for talk and explanations. Lost too much time already.”

“You can't leave him behind!”

“We have no choice,” Maguire repeated. “It was Charlie's bad luck he froze his foot, and there's nothing can undo that.”

“You can't leave him!”

The man brandished his rifle. “Get out of my way!”

“You don't understand—I don't have the grub to feed
myself. What have you left me to feed him with, if he lives?”

The man's face went apoplectic with fury. He brandished the rifle again; King growled deep in his throat.

“Don't
you
understand?” Maguire cried. “We have nothing to give you. We have only what's on our backs, with two hundred and fifty miles to go and every day shorter than the last. Now, move aside or I'll shoot you where you stand. Put him out in the cold if you must!”

Jason hesitated, scarcely believing what he'd just heard. Then he stepped aside.

None of them, as they passed by, would look him in the eye. In shame, they trudged mechanically upriver like the walking dead.