Journey (8 page)

From that first brief question of Philip's she had made the same deduction as he: this one is a foreigner; and in a voice remarkably low and soft she asked in an accent he could not identify: “From where do you come?”

“London.”

“Heading for the gold fields, yes?”

“Like everyone else.”

She said: “You look like a boy. Too young to be making such a trip,” but when she saw him wince she quickly added, like a mother wanting to reassure a child: “Maybe you have more courage when you're young.”

“Have you heard any reports about the overland route to Dawson?”

When she heard these words she actually sucked in her breath
and drew back: “You're not thinking of trying that route, are you?” and when he replied: “That's why our team is out asking questions,” she actually grabbed his right hand with her two gloved hands and said with a voice of deep concern: “Oh, young man! Don't let them drag you along that path!”

She was so agitated that when Philip asked: “Did something terrible happen to you?” she did an unexpected thing. Turning away from him, she raised her right arm and signaled a group of three men clustered some distance away. Catching the wave of her gloved hand, they hurried to her.

“He do something to you?” one of the men, chunky, swarthy-looking fellows in their thirties, asked menacingly, and she held them back with a disarming laugh: “No, no! A nice young man from London. He's asking about going north.” She introduced the three men: “Steno Kozlok, my husband; his brother Marcus, my brother Stanislaus. All farmers from North Dakota, and that includes me.”

“Why did you call us?” Steno asked, and from his heavy accent and dark, squarish face Philip deduced that he and the two other men must be immigrants from one of the Slavic countries or perhaps from Russia. The three looked as if they had been hewn foursquare out of some Middle European oak tree, and Philip thought: I'm certainly glad that I didn't offend her, because if these three came at me…

“My name is Irina Kozlok,” she said in softly accented words that seemed to sing.

“Where are you people from? I mean, before North Dakota?”

“Ah,” she laughed, “you'd never guess.” And she said that her husband Steno and his brother Marcus had come from a distant corner of the Austrian Empire. “His proper name, Kozlowkowicz, but when we marry I find that no one can spell it or say it, so I made him change it to Kozlok. Now everybody can spell my name.”

“But you…and your brother?” Philip asked, and she replied almost teasingly: “You would never guess,” and he said: “Well, you do have light hair. His is even lighter. Swedes?” Again she laughed: “Everyone says that. No, we come from a place you never heard of. Estonia.”

“Ah! But I have heard of it,” he cried like a child who has solved a puzzle. “It's part of Russia.”

Her smile vanished. “It's Estonia, a part of nothing else. Just Estonia.” Then, afraid that she had seemed harsh, she said brightly:
“Men, I want you to tell this nice young Englishman who's thinking about risking the land route what it would be like.”

As soon as she said this, her three companions stepped close to Philip, all speaking at once, and from the jumble of their words, he knew he was receiving just the kind of information Lord Luton sought: “Murderous…they should shoot the son-of-a-bitch sent us that way…no marked trail…you wouldn't believe how many dead horses rotting in the sun…and you got to ford a dozen streams…snow comes, everyone on that trail freeze to death.”

The young woman stemmed the flood of complaints: “They're telling only half.”

“You people actually tried the trail?”

“We did,” Steno said, and his brother added: “But we smart enough to turn back.” Irina broke in: “If your team even thinks about going that way, stop them now.”

“If we'd'a tried to push on,” Steno said, “we'd'a been snowed in, proper, all winter.”

“And without heavy clothes or food,” his wife added.

“What now?” Philip asked. “Back to North Dakota?”

“Hell no!” the three men said almost together. “We came for gold. We gonna get it.”

“How?”

“Only sensible way. Right down the Mackenzie, haul our boat over the Divide, and into Dawson.”

At this firm point, Irina grasped Philip's hands again and stared deep into his eyes as she said softly: “I'm so glad you stopped me…asked me those questions. Please, please, listen to them. Don't take that route. If you do, you'll die.”

This was said with such gravity that Philip was momentarily struck silent. Then he said, with a slight bow to each of his informants: “I hope you reach the gold fields, you kind and helpful people from North Dakota,” and Irina spoke for all when she replied: “We intend to.” Then in a gesture of the brotherhood that linked all gold-seekers that summer in Edmonton, she astonished him by gripping his hand tightly, smiling at him briefly, and repeating in a voice as cold as steel exposed in winter: “Do not go the overland route. You're much too young to die,” whereupon she reached up and kissed him.

Half expecting her husband to come flying at him, Philip instead heard Steno saying: “Listen to her, young fellow. We do,” and the four trailed off to start their journey to the Mackenzie. As they
disappeared in the lingering twilight, Philip, still dazed by that farewell kiss, thought: Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a wife like that, so daring, so quick to laugh, so generous toward other people? I wonder if all women in America are like that?

When Lord Luton's four investigators reassembled to report their findings, he listened firm-lipped to their distressing news and interrogated each: “Did you reach the conclusion by yourself?” and each told him of the shocking facts that had become so apparent under questioning. Satisfied that they had been honest in their seeking and in their decision that any version of overland travel was insane, he rose abruptly, nodded, and stalked from the room: “I've got to hear this for myself,” and into the warm night air he disappeared.

Tall, thin, carefully dressed, with his aquiline nose slightly lifted as if he wished to avoid the smell of the rabble, he poked his way about, remaining aloof from the gold-seekers who had been unable to find quarters and were sleeping on the ground, their belongings piled about them. With brief and restrained questioning he satisfied himself that in all this rabble, no one knew anything, and a profound sadness overtook him: They're fools who have been deluded by fools, and they're doomed. When he came upon two men from a small Canadian village who were going to attempt the overland route on bicycles, dragging behind them little wheeled carts holding their gear, he stopped to ask them: “What will you use for greatcoats when the blizzards hit?” and they replied smartly: “Oh, we'll be in Dawson by then.” He did not try to enlighten them, but his depression increased.

Still moving slowly among them like a recording angel, wise, just and impartial, he muttered again and again: “Doomed! That trio won't survive even into November,” and he formed a sound resolve that
his
expedition was not going to plunge blindfolded into such folly: We are men of sound sense, dammit, and we'll not comport ourselves like idiots.

Just then he saw an older man who seemed to be moving with some purpose, as if he had serious business to attend, even though it was now close to eleven at night, and Luton accosted him: “My good fellow, can you help me bring some reason into this madness?”

“Madness it is,” the man replied in a heavy Scottish brogue as he surveyed the people sleeping on the ground. “What is it you seek?”

“Answers, answers. How can I and my party get from here to the gold fields and escape the certain devastation that faces these blundering idiots?”

“You've come to the right man,” the Scot said. “I work for the Hudson's Bay Company and I'm the only one around here who's made the trip, and because I could rely upon my company's various caches of supplies, I traveled extremely light. Almost no gear. And I had Dogrib Indians to help part of the way.”

“How was it?”

“Wretched. It's a crime to send untested men north at this time of year. Many will die.”

“What would you advise?”

“You look strong and sensible. What of the others in your party?”

“Young, able.”

“If I were you, I'd stay here in Edmonton till next June when the ice melts. Then sail down the Mackenzie, a majestic river if ever I saw one, and stay with it almost till it empties into the Arctic Ocean. But stay out of the delta! It's a wilderness of interwoven streams and small islands. As the delta begins, you'll find the Peel River entering via the left bank of the Mackenzie. Paddle up it ten or fifteen miles, and you'll come to the Rat River, feeding in from the west. Go clear to its headwaters, portage over the mountains, not easy but it can be done. There you'll find the Bell. Drift down it, easy paddling, and in due course you'll hit the Porcupine, a grand river. Turn right. Keep going downstream, and with no trouble, little paddling, you'll reach Fort Yukon. And, as the French say,
‘Voilà!'
you're on the Yukon River where you catch an upriver steamboat which carries you direct to Dawson.”

This good man was so eager to correct the errors perpetrated by other Canadians that with his forefinger he drew in sand a map of the many twists and turns he recommended: “It'll be demanding, but relatively easy doing it this way. Portages, yes, and some paddling upstream, but not excessive.”

When Luton looked down at the map he scowled: “We shouldn't care to use the Yukon steamers. We've decided to do it on our own. The challenge and all.” Then he pointed to the mark that represented Fort Yukon: “And under no circumstances would I consider entering the gold field through American territory.”

The Hudson's Bay man contemplated this rejection, checked his temper, and said quietly: “Sir, you interpose conditions that make no sense in this part of the north. I would accept a push from a crippled old woman if it would enable me to complete a difficult journey.” He bowed stiffly and disappeared into the starry night.

As Luton started back toward his hotel he was diverted by a light in the distance. He moved toward it, hearing a rumble of low voices as if many men were conversing, neither in anger nor in jubilation. When he drew closer he saw a large group of Indians, men and women together, engaged in a midsummer ritual dance, their heads tilted back as if imploring the moon to appear, their feet occupied in a formless shuffle, their arms limp at their sides as if semidetached from their bodies. It was neither an exultant dance, nor one of leaping and shouting, but the number of participants, their steady shuffling movement and their low whispering song was almost narcotic, both to themselves and to those watching.

For many minutes Luton remained in the shadows, unperceived by the dancers but participating in their quiet dance through the swaying of his own body. Even as he followed the rhythm he thought: Savages! I've seen them in Africa. And along the Amazon. Same the world over. Halting his swaying, he brought his right thumbnail to his teeth and gnawed at it as he contemplated the hypnotic scene: How many generations before these savages evolve a decent civilization?

His reflections were broken by a man who sidled up from the rear, speaking in broken French: “Blackfeet. Most powerful Indians on frontier. Don't let dancing fool you. Start a fight, two hundred knives at your throat.”

As a cultured Englishman, Luton, of course, spoke French with only a slight accent, and although he resented the Frenchmen of Montreal, he welcomed this man in the wilderness, where, he thought, it was proper for him to be: “Why are they in Edmonton? The Indians, I mean?”

“They've been coming here for centuries, they claim. You built Fort Edmonton on their dancing ground, they claim.”

“Are you a Blackfoot?”

“Métis. Long time ago, maybe grandfather Blackfoot, father Scotch, they claim.”

“Your name?”

“Simon MacGregor.”

“Scotsman.” The two watchers fell silent as they watched the monotonous drag-foot dancing of the Blackfoot braves, then Luton asked: “Does anything happen in the dance? Should I wait, perhaps?”

“Just same thing, maybe five hours,” the Métis said in English.

When Luton whistled at this surprising information, two Indian
men heard him, stepped out of the shadows, and almost diffidently asked in broken French: “You like dance? You want to join?” and when he failed to state strongly that he had no desire for such meaningless posturing, they interpreted this as agreement. Politely, almost gravely, they took positions beside him, edging him not toward the shuffling dancers but to a flat area close to where he had been standing, and there they led him in steps which imitated those of the group.

Since the men were dressed in full Blackfoot regalia—decorated deerskin jackets, tight trousers with brightly colored leather tied below the knee, streaks of red and blue down their cheeks—and since Luton's magisterial bearing showed to advantage between the two braves, they formed a handsome trio. The light from a central fire cast deep romantic shadows across their aquiline faces, prompting the Métis to break into soft applause:
“Très bien! Les danseurs magnifiques!”

Luton, astonished at what he had let himself into, attempted a few additional movements, but when the men actually laid hands on him, trying to guide him into other proper steps, he pushed them away and fled the scene. Startled, the Indians stared at his departing figure, interpreted his rejection as one more evidence of white man's ill will, shrugged, and moved off. Luton, once more alone, again could think only of other savage dancers he had seen, and his unease regarding the Indians of Canada increased. If he did not relish his imaginary view of the United States, he felt a similar dislike for Canada's Indian lands, and with confused reactions to what he had witnessed under the stars he returned to his hotel.