Tisha (37 page)

Fred pulled his scarf down. “Take a look over there.” He pointed to the distance. “See that saddle between those two hills?”

I could see it through the grayness—a dip stretching between two crags that rose up above the timber line.

“We’re heading for that,” Fred said. “It’ll be a long trip. You won’t make it if you don’t take it easy. We’ll go as fast as we can.”

I felt small. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Forget it. We’ll catch up with him, don’t worry.”

Once we left the tundra behind it was like moving
along in a slow-motion dream, following a trail that wound ahead without any end, dipping across a creek, narrowing around a hill, then around still another hill when that was left behind. The dogs never let up, troting along at a fast willing pace when we hit the flats, digging in almost as if they enjoyed it when the going was rough. Night came on fast and black and the Northern lights billowed like curtains across the starlit sky. We didn’t talk. There was no need to, even if we weren’t using all our strength to keep up a steady pace. We were on the trail, stumbling along, snowshoeing across snow ten feet deep, plodding through drifts and sometimes sailing when the trail was smooth enough.

We reached the base of the saddle three hours later, a long slope of white with nothing to mark it but the twin lines of Cab’s sled running up as far as we could see. And alongside of it were the small footprints of Chuck and Ethel. I wondered how they were making out, whether Cab was pushing them too hard or being impatient with them. Halfway up, Ethel’s footprints stopped and I could see where she’d sat down. She’d been too tired to go any further. Cab had gone on a short distance beyond, then come back, picked her up and brought her to the sled.

I thought that when we got to the top of the pass, maybe by some miracle we’d be able to spot Cab’s sled, but we didn’t. It was too dark to see anything but endless stretches of black forest and the dark winding outline of the Forty Mile River.

The ride down was worth the climb. For two miles straight Fred rode the runners, the only sound the squeaking of the sled and the
plop plop plop
of the white clods the dogs threw up behind them. I wondered how they could do it, go on like that for hours taking that burning cold air into their lungs. But they did. They even gave each other a playful nip once in a while when they didn’t have to pull too hard.

We rode down a long slough to the river, then once we were on it we went like an express train, swinging around big drifts and patches of rough ice. Again Fred was able to ride the runners for long stretches and I hardly had to get out. If we hadn’t been chasing Cab I’d
have been in heaven. The moon came out after a while. The river widened, and we began to pass little islands. We were sailing along so smoothly that even Fred must have let his guard down, because without any warning Pancake suddenly veered off to the right and Fred lost his balance. He fell off the runners, fought to stay on his feet, then jumped back on. Pancake was still moving to the right, making a wide sweep. “Haw!” Fred yelled at him, but he kept moving until Fred had to stop the team.

Fred went up to him and he was really mad. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he yelled. “Don’t you have any better sense than that? You nearly killed me, you blasted fool!” He said a couple of other things that weren’t very complimentary. Pancake hung his head and took it all. “Now you damn well better go where you’re supposed to,” Fred warned him. Once in back of the sled he yelled haw, but sure enough Pancake veered off to the right again.

Fred stopped the sled again and this time I thought he was really going to give it to Pancake, but he didn’t. Instead he looked over the area that Pancake had been so stubborn about avoiding, scanning it carefully. He’d told me long ago how many times a man had to depend on his dogs to stay alive and as it turned out this was one of them. “Well I’ll be damned,” he finally muttered.

He went to Pancake then, got down on his knees and put his arms around his neck, then he rubbed his cheek against Pancake’s head, telling him what a good dog he was. I didn’t realize what it was all about until Fred showed me. “See that over there—where the snow’s a little darker, almost a little yellow?” I saw it finally. It was like a shadow. “It’s a warm spot,” Fred said. “Water. At the least we’d have wound up with wet gear. Probably worse. Pancake smelled it.”

It was three weary hours later that we pulled up by a small cabin buried up to the eaves. The owner had dug a path from the door and uncovered the window, but otherwise you’d have hardly known there was a cabin there at all. “You stay here,” Fred said. “I hear this man isn’t too friendly.”

There was smoke coming from the stovepipe and a faint yellow light coming through the window. Inside, a dog growled threateningly when Fred knocked.

“Who’s there?” a gruff voice asked.

“Fred Purdy.”

“I heard of you. You live up to Chicken.”

“That’s right,” Fred said.

“Keep on a-goin’,” the voice said. “Don’ know you an’ don’t wanna know you.”

“I have a lady with me. We’ve been on the trail over six hours and we’d like to stop a few minutes.”

“This ain’t a roadhouse.”

“We don’t want any of your grub. All we want is to get warm.”

“Build yourself a fire. Keep a-goin’, bud.”

Fred muttered something I couldn’t hear and I said, “Fred, let’s go. We don’t have to stop here.”

“Listen to the lady, bud,” the voice said. “She’s makin’ sense. I got a thirty-aught-six pointed at that door and it’ll blow your ass clear to White Horse you try to come in here.”

Fred jumped away from the door fast. “Did another sled mush by here in the last few hours?” There was no answer. “Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.”

“Well, did it?”

“I ain’t sayin’ it did and I ain’t sayin’ it didn’t.”

Fred was mad. He walked back to the sled, took out his rifle and unsheathed it. Then he went over to the cabin door and threw the bolt. “Did you hear that?” he said.

“I heard it,” the voice answered with a little less gruffness.

“Now, you inhospitable sonofabitch,” Fred said. “I’m gonna ask you the same question again. If I don’t get an answer I’m gonna knock out every damn pane in the window. Did another sled mush by here recently?”

“… Yeah.”

“How long ago?”

“Maybe three hours. Cab Jackson it was. He wanted to come in and I told’m the same as I told you.”

“You sure it was that long?”

There was a pause. “Three hours and fourteen minutes. I got a book here I wrote it down in. I always write it down when anybody mushes by.”

“Thanks.” He came over to the sled. “He’d go on to the O’Shaughnessy roadhouse. Probably stay there overnight. It’s eight miles. We can build a fire and rest a while or we can push on. I’m for pushing on if you can make it.”

“I can make it,” I said meekly. He looked so mad I’d have said I could do double cartwheels on the sled if he wanted me to. I’d never seen him like that before. In a way I kind of admired him for how tough and hard he could be, but it upset me too. Up to then I hadn’t thought about what might happen when we caught up with Cab, figuring that somehow I’d be able to reason with him and talk him into letting me have Chuck and Ethel back. But suppose I couldn’t? Cab could be pretty unpredictable. He could get mean about it and start saying some nasty things. Fred just wouldn’t stand by and let him. I began to conjure up all kinds of things happening, maybe even shooting.

“Fred, will you promise me something?”

“What?”

“When we reach O’Shaughnessy’s, you’ll let me handle Cab.”

“Promise.”

“Cross your heart? I don’t want you getting into a fight with him.”

He smiled. “That makes two of us.”

Those eight miles to the roadhouse must have taken us almost four hours. Even though Cab was following the trail the freighter had broken for him coming in, and he was breaking it even more for us, it was still hard going. And I was holding us up. You needed stamina for the trail—the kind of stamina you don’t have unless you’re used to it. All I had to do was trot alongside the sled most of the time, but I was still a drag. Fred never said a word about it, never told me to move faster. He just kept going.

The wind didn’t help any. It started coming at us right after we left the cabin and beat at us so hard for a while that we were pinching ice off our eyelashes
every few minutes. Then one of the lead lines broke and we had to spell each other mending it, each of us working till our fingers were too cold, then the other taking over.

When the O’Shaughnessy roadhouse came into view I felt I’d never seen anything so warm and inviting as the yellow lights in its windows. We pulled up to the welcome yips of dogs tied up in the barn and no sooner did we stop than a bundled up figure came out of the roadhouse door. It was Mr. O’Shaughnessy.

“Inside with ye,” he yelled over the wind when he saw I was a girl. “Oi’ll help yer man put up the dogs.”

I didn’t need any urging. I went to the door so sure Cab would be on the other side of it that my stomach started doing flip-flops. When I opened it the wind shoved me in and nearly tore the door out of my hand. A man who’d been sitting down jumped up and closed it behind me. The heat of the place hit me with a lovely warm sting and the quiet almost made me reel. Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s Indian wife had already pushed the table close to the oil-drum heater. She took me by the arm and led me over to it. “You sit down quick, Teacher. Get warm,” she said comfortingly, then bustled over to the stove to pour a cup of hot tea. I was surprised she remembered me. I hadn’t seen her in over five months, when I’d stopped with Chuck and Mr. Strong.

I plopped down and looked around. There was no sign of Cab. Some blankets were strung across part of the room to shield the bunk beds and I wondered if he and the kids were behind them. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy put the cup of steaming tea down on the table and helped me off with my parka. The man cleared his throat.

“Some night to be out on the trail,” he said to Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. He was really talking to me, but he was being courteous. When people came in off the trail they were cold and tired and you didn’t talk to them until they talked to you first. A snore came from behind the blanket.

I kept my voice low. “Is Cab Jackson here?”

Mrs. O’Shaughnessy shook her head. “No.”

“You looking for him?” the man asked me. From the
way he asked it I had the feeling he already knew the answer. He was tall and pale, and he wore glasses. One of the lenses was cracked and ringed with adhesive tape.

“Yes.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “He’s been here and gone. Left about a half hour ago.”

“No, ye’ll not catch oop with
that
bludy rascal bafore he’s ta the Indian village,” Mr. O’Shaughnessy said in his thick accent. A friendly pixie of a man with sauerkraut eyebrows and a veined nose, he was trying to convince Fred and me it wouldn’t be any use for us to try and catch Cab. “Stay an’ have yersilves a good noight’s sleep. It’s too foine a sthring of dogs the man has.
Too
foine fa the loikes uv him. Not that yer own sthring ain’t a dandy,” he said quickly to Fred, “but thim a his are greased loightnin’. An’ Jaysus, man,” he exclaimed, “he’s an hour’n a half hid start on ye already!”

Cab had stayed only long enough to warm up and eat, he’d told us after we’d changed clothes. He’d made up his mind not to stop for sleep until he reached the Indian village.

“You’re sure that maybe he won’t stop anywhere else?” I asked him.

“An’ where would he be stoppin’?” He seemed surprised I’d even ask such a thing. “There ain’t nahthin’ ’twixt here ’n the Injin village but one lone cabin.”

The steak his wife had pan fried for us was thick and delicious, but I “could hardly finish half of it. Once I found out that Cab had pushed on I didn’t have much of an appetite.

“What made him go on?” I asked. “What’s his hurry?”

Mr. O’Shaughnessy looked over at the man with the broken glasses as if asking him, then answered the question himself. “Because he’s daft! Oi told’m he wuz daft, too. It’s an outra-a-a-geous hardship for the little tykes,’ I sez to ’im. Wud he listen? He wud not. ‘Oi’ve made up me moind,’ sez he. ‘Oi has a mission Oi’m on, ‘n’ Oi shall not sleep until Oi’ve finished with it. Oi makes no stop till Oi’ve done whut Oi’ve set out ta do.’ Did he say that or shall Oi be kicked inta Hell seven toimes for loyin’?” he asked the man.

The man nodded. He was a neighbor named Joshua Potter and he’d just dropped by for a visit. “That’s just about what he said,” he agreed.

“Oi’m sorry, lass,” Mr. O’Shaughnessy said to me.

Mrs. O’Shaughnessy came over to the table. “You not eat,” she said.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

The man sleeping in the bunk started snoring again and kept it up until Mr. O’Shaughnessy went behind the blanket and poked him. He hadn’t waked up the whole time we were there.

I looked over at Fred. There were dark circles under his eyes. He’d hardly spoken a word since we’d come in. “Suppose we went over The Drop,” he asked Mr. O’Shaughnessy. “You think we’d have a chance of catching him then?”

“The Dhrop?” He crooked his head and made a grudging sound. “It’s a bad toime for takin’ that trail. Bad indeed.”

“It would save us two hours.”

Mr. O’Shaughnessy looked at the other man. “Phwat do you think, Josh?”

“You might catch him,” he said to Fred, “if your sled holds together.”

“You have some chain I can borrow?” Fred asked.

“All ye need,” Mr. O’Shaughnessy said.

Fred glanced at me. He was tired. We both were. He looked away quickly. “If you’ll tell me where it is I’ll go get it,” he said, standing.

“I’ll go with ye.”

Fred collected his clothes. As he was about to go out, I said, “Hey, you’re forgetting something.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“My duds,” I said, getting up. I’d used the term to make him smile and he did.

“Oh. Yeah …”

I collected my own clothes and gave them to him.

“What’s The Drop?” I asked Josh after they went out.

“Ptarmigan Drop. A pass. Bad one.” He raised one hand and held it flat. Then he tilted it steeply. “Drops like this,” he said. “This time of year it’s half ice.”