The island proved to be hundreds of yards wide. The crossing was painfully slow through a morass of driftpiles, muck, rock, forest, mosquitoes, and muskeg. At last we were on the far side. We walked up the shore until we were opposite the scow. The family on the other side of the swift-running channel was surprised to see us. It had been an hour since they’d fired the shots, and we’d passed from view. The woman had changed from her dress into shirt and trousers.
We were separated by seventy-five feet of rushing water, but it was no more than knee-deep from the look of it. Jamie and I clasped hands, and we started across.
“Ve tank you,” cried the man and the woman, with deep emotion, as we waded alongside their scow. Jamie had crossed with Burnt Paw in one arm. She set him down on the scow, much to the delight of two big-eyed children, a boy and a girl, three and five years old from appearances. Burnt Paw wagged his bent tail and let them very cautiously and delicately pet him.
Like their parents, the children were round-faced and blond. The little girl, like her mother, wore her hair in pigtails.
“Ve much tankful,” said the man, who wasn’t much older than Abe. “I make a bad judgment back der. Most of vater going right, but dis scow, she seemed to vant to go dis vay and I tought, ‘Let her go.’”
“Ve been here hours,” the woman explained. “Vait for vater to come back up—maybe it not gonna.”
“Are you from Germany?” Jamie asked.
“From Svee-den,” the woman replied.
“Are you in the race to Nome, like us?”
“Ve hear about race,” the man said, “from some a dese people ve see, but ve not race. Ve try to get up Koyukuk River before vinter.”
“Before fall, Johan,” his wife corrected him.
“Ve go five hunnert mile up Koyukuk River. Past Arctic Circle. Get some moose, make a cabin, let it snow!”
I asked, “Is there gold up there?”
“Not so much. Ve jes vant to go live der. Prettiest place in whole vorld—I been der, got to go back with Ingrid.”
Jamie’s hazel eyes were sparkling. “I think I remember seeing the Koyukuk where it comes into the Yukon. It runs clear, doesn’t it?”
The man beamed a golden smile. “Five hunnert mile, clear as glass. Birch, big spruce, pine, bootiful mountains…moose, vild sheep, caribou, salmon, garten in summer, mebbe a little gold to buy supplies, couple Indian villages. Everybody friendly, no matter vat kind of people dey are, valk a hunnert mile to help you even in vinter. Dat’s paradise on dis earth, up dat Koyukuk River.”
Jamie and I looked at each other. I know what I was thinking. Maybe we should be going up that Koyukuk River with these Swedes.
We shook their hands and introduced ourselves.
“Let’s see if we can help get you unstuck and on your way to your Koyukuk River,” Jamie offered.
The scow was weighed down by a family’s outfit for a year: tools and clothing, flour and sugar and dried grub of all descriptions. After cutting two more poles, we tried to lever the scow free, all four of us, but we couldn’t budge it.
The only thing to be done was to unweight the scow. We set to work wading the supplies a hundred feet to dry ground. It was going to take a long time.
Not long after we started the unloading, I thought I heard the sound of ax blows in the distance. Standing in loud rushing water, I couldn’t be sure. Some stampeder making firewood, I supposed, if it was anything at all. The sound came and went, and then it was gone altogether. I didn’t give it another thought.
At last everything had been removed from the Swedes’ scow except the family’s canvas wall tent and their Yukon stove. The kids and Burnt Paw watched as Jamie, Ingrid, and I bent our backs to the poles while Johan, roped to the scow and out in front, pulled like an ox toward open water.
We budged it, then we budged it half a dozen more times, and finally the big floating platform of logs decked over with milled lumber came free. Johan jumped on and manned the big sweep oar, keeping the scow out in the current as it bumped and scraped its way into deeper water. I snatched the tie rope, and the rest of us ran alongside in the shallows. Several hundred yards downriver we managed to beach the brute of a craft on a gravel spit that speared out into deep water.
Then came the last of the ordeal. Piece by piece, we began to carry their outfit down the long cobbled beach. Ingrid and Johan begged us to rejoin our race, but they were in a race more urgent than ours—with winter—and we wanted to see them safely on their way. By now we’d learned that our friends, the Swensons, were hoping to catch a small steamboat that served the villages up the Koyukuk. The steamboat made the upriver run from the Yukon only once a summer, before the Koyukuk became too shallow for navigation, and that would be soon. If they missed the steamboat, their dream was at an end.
When we were done, Ingrid gave us a gunnysack of groceries, including several fresh bannock cakes baked with berries they’d picked. They made us promise to come find them up the Koyukuk one day so they could repay our kindness properly. I heard us both saying that we would.
At last we were able to push the Swensons off and wish them luck. We hadn’t realized it, but Burnt Paw was on the scow playing with the kids. Now that the scow was in motion, he raced back and forth across the deck, looking from the kids to us and back as if trying to make up his mind. I shouted, “It’s up to you, Burnt Paw!”
I’m not sure what it was that decided him. Maybe it was having heard how far north they were headed—his shorthaired coat was even less suited for the Koyukuk than it was for Dawson City. At any rate, Burnt Paw leapt into the shallow river and paddled his way to shore.
We felt awful good wading the channel, returning to the big island, and tramping back to the canoe. We were imagining what that upper Koyukuk River would look like. In my mind I was felling trees and building a log cabin.
When we cleared the cottonwoods and first caught sight of our canoe, it didn’t add up, what our eyes took in. It just couldn’t be.
Our hearts were in our throats. It just couldn’t be.
The canoe was under a tree, destroyed. The fallen trunk of a tall cottonwood had crushed it and cleaved it in two.
Our eyes went to the freshly hewn stump of the cottonwood. There were bright white chips all around its base and gum boot tracks everywhere in the mud.
“How could they have done this?” Jamie cried.
I was too stunned, too angry to speak. Two pairs of tracks along the shore led from downstream and returned in the same direction.
“They heard the gunshots,” Jamie said. “They saw the family in trouble, saw we’d stopped to help them.”
“And then they did this!” I stormed. Through tears of rage, I said, “Jamie, I don’t think we can salvage the canoe.”
“We can’t,” she agreed, unsuccessfully fighting back tears of her own.
We looked up and down the river. We were utterly alone.
“It’s a matter of time before someone uses this channel,” I said. “Someone will come along. Donner and Brackett did.”
“They might have been following us down this channel. We haven’t been looking behind us.”
“No, we haven’t.”
“There are so many channels besides this one, we might be stuck here.” Jamie’s eyes fell on the broken canoe and our gear crushed under the trunk of the cottonwood. With a rueful laugh, she added, “Right now maybe I would trade this adventure for the combined gold of Nome and the Klondike.”
“We may be out of the race,” I said, “but we aren’t maimed or dead. That’s something, I suppose.”
A grim smile crossed her face. “I don’t know if it was a shred of decency, or if it was because they were in a hurry, but at least they didn’t take the time to destroy our gear. If this tree has broken any of our hard-boiled eggs I’m going to be really furious.”
Her smile forced one of my own. “Our canoe paddles are missing, but we’ve got all our tools—saw and ax, knives, rope, canvas, even some nails.” I was thinking hard, casting around for solutions. My eyes went upstream to a huge driftpile at the head of the island. I studied it closely—there were a number of splendid logs up there not that badly entangled.
Jamie’s eyes had followed mine. “A log raft?”
“We could make a couple of sweep oars and row standing up. For blades, we could saw a couple of three-foot sections from the canoe. Then we could nail and lash them to a couple of thin, stout poles—”
“There’ll be some alder or birch in that driftpile. You know, Jason, as long as we don’t ride on a boat with someone else, we’re still in the race. You never know what could happen. Maybe the opportunity will come along to exchange our raft for Father’s canoe. They think they’re so much faster than anyone else that they can afford to sleep on shore.”
“We’ll keep our eyes open. Wouldn’t that be something!”
We worked all night, not that night ever came. Twice we stopped to make coffee, eat the bannock cakes Ingrid had given us, and inspect our progress. When our raft came together it was twelve feet across and eighteen feet long, a platform of nearly uniform eight-inch logs laid across a rectangular frame of notched ten-inchers with a brace running from corner to corner across the middle. At the bow and at the stern we fixed a pair of upright birch poles standing a couple feet above the raft to serve as oarlocks.
As we were building our oars a scow floated by, one being rowed from bow and stern just as we intended to row ours. The big scow was difficult to bring to shore, but the two men were attempting to do just that. They called out, “Do you need help?”
Any earlier and we would have gladly accepted it. “We’re okay!” we hollered back, and waved them by.
Plumb exhausted, we put back on the river twenty-three hours after we’d stopped to help the Swensons. It took both of us heaving at the sweeps, with their long angled oar blades, to keep from broaching on the heads of the islands and the gravel bars. In the brief half-light between sunset and sunrise, the Yukon finally joined together again into one broad river with the Hamlin Hills rising on both sides.
All of a sudden it came to me that in my haste to get going, I’d left the ax miles upstream—right there on the bank, where I’d last set it down. I was sick. I broke the news to Jamie. She was so exhausted, she gave it the merest shrug. “We’ve still got the saw.”
She slept, I steered. There was no possibility of propelling the raft faster than the current. All that need be done was to steer it clear of the gravel bars. If only I could quit picturing that ax on the bank, how easy it would have been to set it on the raft. Put my brains in a jaybird’s head and he’d fly backward.
Man, oh man, was I tired.
Below Rampart Canyon, a day later, the hills opened up and we were watching for a landmark that the map called Moosehead Rack.
Moosehead Rack was easy to spot. It had four distinct peaks sticking up along a ridge like tines along a moose antler. A fierce head wind had come up, and we were clinging to the right shore. A fish camp was approaching, and so was a strange mechanical device that had been placed in the river barely offshore.
It was a Ferris wheel of sorts, fifteen feet or so in diameter and powered by the current, with a wide basket of wood and metal mesh at the end of every spoke. Each basket took half its revolution underwater and the other half in the air. “It must be a fish trap of some kind,” I said. “Let’s go see.”
We managed to beach the wallowing raft and tie up. As we were threading our way among several birchbark canoes drawn up on the shore, our eyes were drawn to a large fish thrashing in one of the baskets attached to the great wheel—a king salmon in its reddish spawning colors. The salmon was shunted from the basket into a chute and dropped into a wood box.
A boy of eight or nine walking across the gangplank from the shore to the marvelous fish trap stopped when he saw us coming his way.
“Maybe we can beg a salmon from them,” Jamie whispered.
Suddenly the boy ran to the shore and disappeared.
“You grew up around Indians,” I said. “What should we do?”
“Just wait. Wait right here. Someone will come out to see us.”
The boy’s entire family appeared, from little brothers and sisters to what might have been great-grandparents. Though we were unarmed, they seemed ill at ease.
Something was amiss. I would have thought that the sight of Burnt Paw with a bandanna tied around his neck would have made at least the small children smile.
A white-haired elder whose eyes were covered with a thin film was straining to make us out. A young woman spoke to him, describing us, I guessed.
The old man brought his right hand to his lips with a tipping motion, which he repeated several times.
“We’re invited to tea,” Jamie said.