5

Just a hundred miles south as the crow flies, their camps strung out along the Flat River and on adjacent lakes and streams, Eppler’s neighbours were coming through the winter in more ordinary ways. Closest, near the mouth of Irvine Creek, was Albert Faille, who, with a decade of trapping experience in the area up the Nahanni and along the Flat, had the most seniority. Thirty miles downstream from him, at the junction of the Flat and Caribou rivers, were the pilot George Dalziel’s partner, Nazar Zenchuk, and a newcomer from Yellowknife, John Lomar, hired by Dalziel to help Zenchuk. Both Dalziel and Zenchuk had been in and out of the area for five years; their line was now being worked after lying fallow through the previous winter. Thirty miles up the Flat from Faille were two sets of prospecting partners working adjacent creeks that flowed north into the Flat: Gus Kraus and Bill Clark on Bennett Creek and Milt Campbell and Harry Vandaele on McLeod Creek. Of the prospectors, only Clark had been around longer than Faille. He was well established, with financial backers in Edmonton, and he and Kraus normally flew in and out of the area from their base at McMillan Lake. Vandaele and Campbell, like the trappers, usually used a scow to come up the Nahanni and the Flat onto McLeod Creek.

Faille was having the most “fun,” as he liked to call it, having just started to see again after a bout of snow blindness. He’d tracked an insomniac grizzly, which had left his prints across the trapline, up Irvine Creek and was bringing bags of fat and a giant pelt back to his camp when he went blind. He’d ignored the headaches and his itchy, weepy eyes until it was too late.

By the time he realized what was happening, he was still about five miles from home. He tore the sleeve off his shirt and blindfolded himself to stop the irritation. His eyes felt as though they were stuffed with gravel. “Blindman’s bluff, Albert,” he muttered. “And you better not miss.”

He managed to find a short piece of rope and attach it to the back of the sled. He wrapped the other end around his wrist a couple of times, hoisted his pack, slung his rifle over his shoulder and told his dogs to mush.

“Take me home, boys.”

He had to stop and right the sled when it tipped, which was often. A few times he tripped over it and bags that had fallen off.

“Good idea, Albert. Fall down. Stumble around. Wolves’ll be right over to see what’s up. ‘Where are you going, little man?’”

Once he lost his grip on the rope. He yelled at the dogs to stop, got up and began running after them, only to flip headfirst over the sled. The dogs had stopped instantly.

“Regular circus act. The wolves are laughing so hard they’ve changed their minds about eating me. Good thing, too. Rifle’s likely plugged with snow by now.”

He knotted the rope onto his wrist and kept going, chatting away to himself and his dogs. Later, he rolled down a steep bank onto some ice, finding himself tangled in the straps with the sled and the dogs. While sorting that out, he realized he was on the Flat River. He found the axe, took his rope off the sled and made his way up the line of dogs.

With the rope tied to the lead dog and around his waist, he advanced step by careful step, chopping as he went, the dogs whining and howling for home and crowding up behind him so he had to flail out with the flat of the axe to make them keep their distance. He was wary of overflows, where thin ice covered water gushing from a crack in the thicker ice below.

Finally he reached the other side and felt his way to a gentle slope up onto the riverbank. He went around to the back of the sled and ordered his dogs to mush.

“Stop at our cabin, boys. I don’t want to visit Gus. It’s too far, and once we eat all the bear fat, I’ll be hungry enough to make my way up the harness with my knife between my teeth, lookin’ for some leg of canine, some haunch of husky.”

At his cabin he got a fire going, stumbled up to the cache to store the hide and fat, fed the dogs and gathered willow twigs. He drank as much willow tea as he could to ease the headache.

“Wonder where Bill got those sunglasses?” he said as he drifted into a long sleep.

Late the next morning, groping for the woodpile, he ended up lost in the woods behind it, colliding with trees. He crawled back through the snow, reaching out to feel for the woodpile, for his chopping block and sawhorse, for the log block seats around the fire ring in the clearing in front of the cabin. After that, he found a rope hanging by the cabin door, tied one end to the door and one around his waist, and for a week used the rope whenever he went out. By the time the blizzard hit, he could see again, but not well. All in all, it had been three weeks since he’d last worked his line.

“Wolverines were eating all my catch. Wolves too, dining out at Albert’s Café.”

Meanwhile Lomar, down the river, had been hard at work, covering both his and Zenchuk’s parts of the line, and was cleaning hides when the blizzard struck. Zenchuk had left the week before, with Dalziel, to fly out the hides and check another line on the Hyland River in the Yukon.

Up the Flat from Faille, Kraus was alone too, Clark having flown out a couple of weeks earlier from their main camp on McMillan Lake. He’d been picked up by one of their backers, the pilot Wop May, and was off to Edmonton to meet other members of what he had named the Liard-Nahanni Syndicate, to tell them how the prospecting was going on Bennett Creek.

After saying goodbye to Clark and May, Kraus had headed over to the creek. He was lighting fires in the hole to thaw it, then widening it and taking it down to bedrock, lugging the sand, gravel and stones in a bucket up a ladder. Once out of the hole he pulled out the stones and threw them onto one pile, then dumped the sand and gravel in another pile for sluicing in the spring.

His main concern, as he worked, was meat. As soon as he’d arrived back on the creek, he’d been lucky enough to encounter a cow moose and her calf on their way past the hole. He fetched his rifle while they ran upstream. He blasted off four shots at their bouncing rears, hoping to hobble them before they got too far, but nothing happened except they ran faster and disappeared around a bend. He raced for the bend, certain they’d be down, but there was no sign of any moose, and no blood on the snow anywhere. He walked back to his hole, shaking his head.

A couple of days later, as he lugged a bucket of rocks up the ladder, it occurred to him that he’d fallen down the creekbank on his way from the lake. He’d managed to keep hold of his rifle, but the adjustable sights might have hit something. If that wasn’t it, he was going blind. He immediately nailed an old tin can to a nearby tree, crossed to the other side of the creek, took careful aim and fired. When he went over to look, he saw no mark on the tree. He tried again, aiming low this time, grazing the tree a clear eight inches above the tin. Cursing, he reset his sights, using four more valuable shells, and then went hunting down toward the Flat.

He came back the next day, after an unsuccessful stalk and an uncomfortable night dozing under a spruce tree. Finally, about a half-mile from his hole, he bagged a ptarmigan. He carried it back to the hole, lit a fire, stuck the bird on a stick and rotated it in the flames, burning the feathers off, eating the cooked meat around the outside and then cooking more and eating that. He was halfway through the ptarmigan and a long speech concerning his lousy luck when suddenly he stood up, sniffed the wind, looked at the sky and cursed again. He tossed the ptarmigan aside, threw his pick and shovels into the hole, packed up his lean-to and loped away up the creek.

Five hours later he crashed into his house tent at McMillan Lake in a swirl of snow. I’ll stay in bed for a week, he thought. Give my luck some time to change.

A few miles east, Vandaele and Campbell were hard at a game of cards and a bottle of Governor General’s rum when the blizzard hit. They were holidaying, because Vandaele had had an accident down on the creek and had agreed to a period of recuperation to, as he put it, “settle his nerves.”

A couple of days earlier he’d left work in their hole on McLeod Creek to get meat. Down on the Flat he’d tracked and found a cow moose and her yearling calf. Having them at close range, he’d lifted his Ross rifle and fired.

The next thing he knew, he was on his back in the snow, staring up at the milky sky. He could taste blood and feel it cooling on his face. His left arm was numb, fingers unresponsive. He rolled back onto the trail and used his good arm to push himself to his feet.

It seemed that he’d been unconscious for only a minute. He reached for his rifle and examined the barrel; it was split into two parts that were curled back toward the stock, so that the rifle looked more like a crossbow. Handling it, he noted with relief that he was now using his left hand. He headed back to the hole, dazed and shaky, keeping his mind off what could have happened. When he thought of it, he got too weak in the knees to walk.

“Ice in the barrel,” Campbell had said when he examined the rifle. “How the hell … ?”

“I figured it out. I had it slung over my shoulder when we climbed down to shovel out after a burn, so I took it off and leaned it against the side of the hole. It must’ve warmed up enough to collect condensation later.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like a drink.”