ALSO ON THE Bella was a bag of crumpled mail that had been waylaid for several weeks. In it was a letter to Meg from Mick. It had been written in Boston on July 28, 1897.
My darling Meg,
Your two letters written before and after you climbed the Chilkoot arrived both at once, today! I dare not delay my response and so I am writing, somewhat surreptitiously from my office desk. I must be brief. I thank the Almighty and your own impressive strength that you arrived safely in Dawson City. I am going to wrap things up here as fast as I can and take a leave of absence.
I will find that Jon Teskey of Wrangell and then I will find you. I can only trust you will be there in Dawson City and not unhappy to see me.
I cannot think at this moment where you might write to me, delivery being clearly completely unreliable, but I will check for a letter at Hotel Vancouver and at the post office in Wrangell, assuming they have one.
I have heard your call, Meg, my love. I am coming to protect you for life, if I may.
Mick.
Meg quickly wrote several letters, all of them saying the same thing: Do not come to Dawson City now. Wait until spring. We lack provisions. Do not worry about me. I shall be here, awaiting you, Mick, my love.
Half of them she addressed to Hotel Vancouver, half to Wrangell Post Office, then she ran to the docks and the trail exiting Dawson seeking those who were still deciding to flee by small boat or on foot for the Outside, begging them to post her letters. Their looks of panic and desperation filled her with fear for their lives and hopelessness that they, or her letters, would ever reach their destination.
As winter set in, Meg harboured a small hope that Mick would arrive after all, since Dawson City fared much better than was feared, thanks to the good government of Inspector Constantine and company. But Deputy Chief O’Mara did not appear and no letter arrived from him. Meg could only guess that he might have reached what was now called Skagway and found his way down to Wrangell before freeze up. She so deeply regretted having mentioned Teskey’s name and anything else about him that she couldn’t bear to think about it. She had nightmares about Teskey killing Mick in various forms of surprise attack.
After Christmas, Meg composed a letter to Mick to be delivered by mail dogsled to Wrangell, with a copy to the post office in Skagway, just in case he checked in there.
I fear I have sent you to your death, she wrote to him, I should have known it is in your nature to go after someone who has done me, or indeed anyone, harm. I can only pray that no harm will come to you. Though given what I have seen of life, it makes no sense to me that there exists a personally caring God who spares one individual’s life and not another’s; still, I have faith in a God of ultimate goodness, to whom we should direct our prayers and actions. In that faith I await you.
You should feel quite at home in Dawson, for half the population in this so-called city is from your side of the border. And we are all getting through the months of darkness and severe cold, amazingly well. At the beginning of the winter, it looked as though we were in danger of starvation. About a thousand people were persuaded to head back from whence they had come, after it was discovered that several of our winter supply boats had been stranded and pirated. Our population was about four thousand. And still is! Because most of those who fled, have come back, including ones who carried my letter warning you not to come until spring.
The few hundred who left with free passage on the last big river boats on October 1st made it to the Outside, as we call it. But for two weeks after that, people panicked again and sneaked off individually, by boat or on foot. It was alarming and pitiful to see. Then came the sudden onslaught of snow storms and the freeze-up of the rivers. We were knee deep and waist deep in snow. The rivers were solid but not smooth. Great boulders of ice rammed up against each other creating formidable obstacles to get around. The individuals who had fled so ill-equipped, returned. Bedraggled. Frozen. Starved. Injured. Snow-blinded. And then the diseases of consumption and scurvy crept in.
Fortunately, we had built a hospital. Unfortunately, with no better doctors than me and a plant doctor, Kate Carmack, and a priest called Judge. I have had the busiest winter of my life! Dog doctoring, people doctoring. No one seems to know or care any more that all my training has been on pigs, rabbits, horses, dogs, and cats. I douse my human patients with ether in the same manner I use with the dogs. An ether-soaked rag over their nose. But it must be used very sparingly, for I fear running out before more supply arrives.
Our food supply is lasting, just! No one will starve to death. After the panic, calm and a sense of the common good has reigned. My good friend and informant, General Commander and Chief of all Policing, Inspector Constantine, remains in a fury over the seemingly endless stock of whisky that appears in the saloons, compared to the limited supply of food that got through to Dawson. The Alaskan Commercial Company’s store of food continues to be carefully rationed out, at a hefty profit to themselves, I’m sure. And our reigning monarchs of the free-enterprise system that operates here in the extreme, King Big Moose Alex MacDonald and Queen Belinda Mulroney, have somehow managed to keep turning up with goods to sell. The restaurants re-opened before Christmas. Some enterprising mushers have come from Skagway with items that have been auctioned off for sizable fortunes. Twenty dollars for a frozen orange. Hundreds for a turkey. Daisy bought a fancy hat for two hundred and has since sold it for nearly five hundred. And, oh yes, we have caviar and olives. An acquaintance of mine, Anton Stander, bought a diamond for his new love, a dancer, called Violet of the Veils. The cost of that diamond, set into a gold pendent, was no more than the turkey.
I have to laugh, as I’m sure you must shake your head, at the values here. Yet when it comes to the common good, people do rise to the occasion and pass the hat. We will have all the money we need to pay for some doctors and nurses once the throngs arrive at ice breakup. Constantine ordered that no more people be allowed to come to Dawson until practical supplies can be brought in. He even wrote to Washington before Christmas, alerting them to the situation. Their response was to have a herd of reindeer rounded up in Norway… Norway!… and brought to Canada by sea, to be herded overland to the Klondike. I could not believe the ignorance, well-intentioned as it is, that would lead them to do this. The poor reindeer! It would be kinder just to slaughter them where they are. But Constantine was informed, note not consulted, but informed, that about five hundred reindeer are on their way. What’s the matter with our own government that they don’t commission our native people to round up caribou locally!
Constantine works twenty-hour days, just keeping the peace and order here. He is not a man of great vision but of great practicality. Mounted Police headquarters has ordered that priority be given to the Canadian border crossing, where the swarms of people are coming up from Skagway. There’s a huge camp of people who have made it to the shores of Lake Lindeman and are cutting down the forest to make boats to take them downriver at ice breakup.
Captain Moore’s dream of making his townsite the New York of the north has turned into the nightmare called Skagway. His wife, Amy, has written me telling that, by the end of the summer, Skagway’s bay was a mass of overloaded and decrepit ships, literally dropping their cargo over the sides. Horses and dogs, even teams of goats, dropped or thrown over the sides to swim to shore … if they survived the drop! Oh dear, I cannot bear the thought or description of this.
A gangster called Soapy Smith rules the town. People who cross him are shot. Moore’s wharfs were taken over without payment. As was his land. He and Amy have managed to keep only their cabin and fenced-in yard. They have to maintain armed guard over it. They say hundreds of horses are being forced up the White Pass. They’re thin and weak, sick from the voyage, undernourished, their backs overloaded. He says they look like they wouldn’t make it across a pasture, let alone up a mountain pass. Moore warns and rants at the people driving these poor creatures, but they pay no heed.
Oh dear. What is the human race coming to? All for the sake of gold!
No. It’s more complex and interesting than that. Neither I nor people like Constantine, Father Judge, or Kate Carmack came here for the gold. I’m sure it was Kate and not her husband George who first discovered the gold, though he now takes all credit and has become ashamed of the mate to whom he owes just about everything. Kate saw a letter George was writing to his sister in San Francisco, in which he said he would bring his wife for a visit and described her, Kate, as being Irish, with a broad accent!
What think you of that Mick O’Mara! Sure an’ ye must come now and teach George Carmack what Irish be.
Wherever you are, may you be well and have a smile when you know I am here, longing for you.
Meg gave her letters to the musher, including one to Alice and Jacques, for though she had received a load of brooms, no other evidence of Jacques appeared. Lingering on the snow-packed trail with Yukon Sally and Jake at her side, Meg watched the musher, standing on his sled driving his team, until they were out of sight. She couldn’t know what would happen to them or her letters.
During that winter of 1897–8, when the land was covered in whitest snow and the light was not from the sun, but from moon and stars, Sapphire Star disappeared from her job in the saloon and was not seen again until spring when she emerged from Molly Doyle’s, in the shape of her old self, but with less sparkle for her old job. Simultaneously, Molly Doyle acquired a grandson, “out of the blue,” as they said. Davey Doyle was a bright healthy baby. But, raising a child on your own and giving up a child because you’re on your own, are difficult things. It wasn’t long before Molly and Sapphire formed an unusual partnership to deal with their human project. Sapphire Star moved in again with Molly Doyle, washed diapers and such by day, sang and danced by night.
It was in the longer daylight of March that a mail musher brought the news to Constantine.
“Headquarters has sent in the big gun,” Constantine reported the news to Meg. “Sam Steele. He’s built a barracks and raised the flag on top of the Chilkoot. No one is getting through if they don’t have the requisite year’s supply, 1,150 pounds of food, plus a tent and tools. You’d think that would slow them down. But they’re coming through by the thousands. Thousands! Says there’s no end to the line-up. Trudging up through seven, eight feet of snow.” Constantine shook his head, put his fur hat back on his head and marched out into the snow-packed streets of Dawson.
The sun brought more light and warmth to the mountains, to the frozen lakes and rivers. The streets of Dawson turned to slush and mud. Avalanches rumbled down mountains. At the end of April, the Chilkoot packers refused to carry. There was an unusual dump of snow looming close to the trail. “Too dangerous now,” they said. “Wait.”
Those who did not wait it out were buried in a sudden avalanche. Many were rescued, but fifty-three people died.
Sam Steele, a Mountie more calm and measured in his words than Constantine, went down to the camps on the still-frozen lakes and registered every man, woman, and child there. He would know the names of those who got lost or died en route to Dawson City. He painted an identifying number on every boat, scow, and canoe being built.
“Thirty to forty thousand!” Constantine raged. He did not know which desk to slap the letter upon. “Thirty to forty thousand escapees, on their way to Dawson!”
His boots pounded heavily on Meg’s porch when he came to tell her.
“Do sit down, Inspector Constantine, please,” said Meg. “Have some tea. Just think … Dawson will qualify as a real city, at last.”
From their point of view, the pack of wolves that roamed the top of Dome Mountain, watched the great rush of people seeking various forms of gold in the Klondike. They stared at the human stampede and could make no good sense of it. One thing they did sense. Danger. Danger had been present ever since the moose pasture was taken over by white humans. Humans who felled trees faster than beavers, humans who howled so noisily all night, and fought so readily within their own pack. This massive pack of human beings carried guns up into the forest and brought down big meat or small, whatever came in sight. Bears, mountain sheep, rabbits, caribou, or wolves. Four young wolves had been ambushed while they romped in what used to be their safe place.
The remainder of the pack left the territory, running north to find more forest and safer territory for the birth of their pups.
The human stampede came from all the continents on earth. They had heard that the Klondike was full of gold and single men. It appealed to the adventurous, the optimistic, and the fortune hunters of both sexes and all ranks of society at the turn of the twentieth century. They expected to launch the new century with great adventure and fortune. They wanted to get out of the cities, which had become polluted with coal smoke, horse dung, and an overhead net of electrical and telegraphic wires. Compared to all that, the Klondike sounded like a sportive winter camp. Canoeing, hiking, and skating were the popular sports of the time. Just the skills required, they thought, to make one’s way over mountain trails and downriver to the Klondike. It was rumoured one might be able to do it on a bicycle. And who couldn’t drive a stake into a piece of ground that sparkled with gold! Some said you could smell the gold, it was that peculiar and abundant in the Klondike.
Prospectors not having much luck in New Zealand decided to board a ship that would take them to Seattle and up the coast to Skagway. A dock worker in Japan decided to change his vocation and hop a ship heading across the north Pacific. An Oxford don and a few wealthy students had their valets pack trunks with sporting clothes, champagne, and foie gras. They set off, with valets and all, across the Atlantic on a luxury steamer. They had put their heads together over a map of the Dominion of Canada and decided upon an overland route starting from Montreal.
Chinese entrepreneurs were already on their way. An Indian merchant considered taking his elephants to the Rockies but backed away at the description of snow. Those well acquainted with snow, such as the Swiss chef, tired of cooking for people who wanted schnitzel, schnitzel, schnitzel, set off for the Klondike with his St. Bernard. A club of widows in New York was persuaded by an enterprising gentleman to pay him a grand sum to organize passage to the Klondike on a luxury ship. The widows could take their cats, dogs, and all. But they had to go the long ocean route, down the east coast of North and South America, to Antarctica, and back up the west coast of the continents. Only one of the women stayed the course and reached Skagway.
A young photographer, Frank Quigley, carefully packed up his equipment in Lucan, Ontario, and sensibly took a train to Vancouver, where he outfitted himself lightly and caught an old boat, jammed with people and horses, a team of goats, and various dogs, all bound for Skagway and the Klondike. A photographer, A.E. Hegg from Sweden, did likewise. They photographed the human stampede of hatters and cobblers, street car drivers and butchers, inventors of flying machines and bricklayers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and policemen.
They took photos of the human chain moving laboriously up over the Chilkoot Pass in sunny winter days, tens of thousands of footsteps carrying heavy packs, creating what they called the Golden Staircase. Photos of the piles of packs at the top, buried in snow storms. The camp of forty thousand people building boats at the edge of the lakes, waiting to sail in one armada, the moment the ice went out. And there were photos of the few oxen, goats, and pet dogs that went with five thousand horses up the White Pass. The fifty-year-old woman, fit as a man and dressed like a man, who drove a team of goats up the Pass, made it to Dawson with her goats and became Molly Doyle’s rival in business. Some of the pet dogs, who were fed and not overburdened with packs, made it with their owners to Dawson.
But the oxen and five thousand horses were all driven to an agonizing death on the White Pass. Death from exhaustion. Death by starvation. Death from whippings by humans gone mad. The horses had broken legs. Pneumonia. They were driven over cliffs. They were terrorized into suicide over cliffs. The long route of their death became known as Dead Horse Gulch.
The last musher of winter arrived in Dawson from Skagway. He reported to Constantine some of the things he had seen on the White Pass.
Constantine listened to what he had to say, ranted in outrage at the descriptions of what he had witnessed, paced in consternation, then took the musher with him to consult with Meg. “But don’t tell her about the man drowning his dogs,” said Constantine. “Let me take care of the general description.”
“We’ve got horses in trouble on the White Pass,” Constantine said to Meg. “Riff raff mistreating them. You have any remedies for horse colic and such that Fritz here might take back with him, maybe give some relief to those he finds in trouble on his way back?”
“Stop the horses from coming!” Meg shouted. “Don’t let them on the trail! Outlaw it. Send in reinforcements.”
“It’s foreign territory.” Constantine tried to calm her. “We have no jurisdiction there.”
Meg turned to Daisy. “Can you look after Yukie and Jake? I’m going back with Fritz.”
“No!” Constantine ordered her to stay. But she would not obey him.
Fritz was a tall, lean, sixty-year-old musher who took good care of his team.
“It’s too hot,” Fritz tried to dissuade Meg, “and the snow is too soft. I have to keep my dogs at an easy pace and I can’t let you ride the sled unless it’s downhill.”
“No argument from me,” she said. “I’m a fast walker.”
Yukon Sally and Jake looked at Meg in hurt and disbelief when she said goodbye to them. They looked as though she had suddenly turned and hit them.
“I’ll be back,” she said.
Yukon sat down, staring at her. Jakey lay down and looked up sorrowfully.
“Oh, come on, you two spoiled kids,” said Daisy, “I’ll let you sleep on her bed.”
Meg, Fritz, and his sled dogs took off at a steady pace. From the outskirts of town, Meg could hear the frantic and plaintive howl of Yukon Sally. Then it stopped and Jake’s even more frantic howls sounded. Then stopped.
Meg asked Fritz to halt. It wasn’t long before Yukon Sally came bounding up to Meg, nearly knocking her over as she put her fore paws on Meg’s shoulders and licked her face. Meg looked at Fritz.
He shrugged. “Ain’t surprisin’ since you won’t chain your malamutes up.”
They set off again with Yukon Sally running alongside. Then they heard Constantine shouting as he came up the trail with his team at high speed and Jake running alongside.
“You’ll have to let him come with you,” said Constantine as he threw a pack of dried fish onto Fritz’s sled. “Yukon jumped the fence and Jake was going to injure himself trying. Meg, you keep them back of Fritz’s team and they should be all right.”
“But Jake’s too young to do the White Pass,” Meg worried.
“He’s not carrying anything,” said Fritz. “He can do it. Or my team will carry him. Come on. Trail’s melting. Let’s hike!”
Constantine saluted as Meg waved goodbye to him.
“Never seen anything like it my entire life,” said Fritz as they sat round the campfire at night, Yukon and Jake sticking close to Meg, Fritz’s team curled up together in the shadows. “Are you sure you have the stomach for it? Men gone mad. Men who brought horses they have no feeling for, dogs they don’t understand. They do terrible things to those animals. I think you should turn back when we get to the lakes. Take a ride back on the boats. I reckon it’s too late to be of any help in any case.”
“I’ll stay the course. Have to see if I can give any relief.”
“I saw a man gone mad, start pushing three malamutes, one by one, through a hole in the ice. He’d bought them for a high price and had no clue how to handle them.”
“What do you mean, you saw? You just watched?”
“No. I ran and grabbed him as he was shoving the third dog. I put his own head down into the hole but then I yanked him out, just in time. Let him live. His first two dogs died a terrible death. People saw that but did nothing to stop it. They just trudged on up the trail in their own madness. Human nature! Rather be with dogs any day.”
He saw tears well up in Meg’s eyes but nothing he said succeeded in making her turn back. “Would an army doctor refuse to go to the battlefield?” she said.
“It’s man’s work,” said Fritz. “It’ll make you tough and … indelicate.”
Meg laughed. “I’ve never been delicate. Nor wanted to be.”
“No Achilles’ heel? Don’t kid yourself. Everyone has one.”
“You’re well read, Mr. Fritz.”
Fritz laughed. “A gentleman of the first order. And I can see your dogs wouldn’t let me be otherwise. They’re good-looking malamutes. Good breeding stock.”
“I know,” said Meg. “Next year when Yukie is going on three, I’ll let them mate.”
“And what about you? You ever going to mate?”
Meg looked into the darkness. “I’m awaiting the right male.”
Meg and Fritz came down onto the wide trail from the summit of the White Pass. All the way, they encountered the dregs of the human stampede, moving slowly, steadily, wearily, up and over the summit. The slow human stampede had every kind of character: the vociferous and the quiet, the solemn and the jesters, the tedious and the bizarre. A young man played a fiddle at the summit. A woman sold cigars. Another offered fortune-telling for five dollars. Absent from the slow motion stampede were the delicate, the fearful, the indecisive, the shysters, and some of the smart business people. They remained in Skagway selling their wares, or had taken the ship to go back home.
Meg could smell the dead horses long before she could see them. She could hear the dying before she could see the pain and terror or surrender in their eyes. The large round, expressive eyes of horses. Their bony bodies, heaving, or still. The broken limbs and smashed heads of those who had stumbled or fallen or been wilfully pushed off the trail and over cliffs.
Meg put a cloth over her nose. Her malamutes kept closer to her, Jake falling in line behind Yukon Sally, both moving in most apprehensive silence, their tails held low. Fritz’s dogs pulled ahead down the trail, wanting to get away from the sick and dying and groaning, the smell of the dead.
“There’s nothing can be done,” Meg said when she could speak, “but put them out of their misery. How much ammunition do you have?”
“I’m saving it for the bastards who brought them here.”
Meg grabbed his gun and aimed it at a horse in agony. She put five out of their misery before she let Fritz regain his gun. It was out of ammunition. “Now, let’s get to the beginning of the trail,” said Meg. “See if we can do anything preventative. Anything to stop this massacre!”
Yukon and Jake stuck with her as she sped down Dead Horse Gulch, yelling to those who were still trying to bring horses up, “Stop. Turn around. Certain death! No horses allowed on this trail!”
“I’ll shoot you if you don’t turn back!” Fritz pointed his gun and tried to herd men back.
“What the hell! Not more of you bleeding hearts trying to stop us!” one shouted threateningly at both Fritz and Meg. “Get the hell out of my way!”
“It’s a free country. You can’t stop us,” said another.
“I’ll shoot you in the knees!” Fritz informed them.
They pulled their own guns. “It’s a free country! You’ll go down first if you don’t get out of my fuckin’ way.”
“If it’s gonna be like this all the way up the trail … !” said another, reconsidering but keeping his hand on his gun.
Meg and Fritz carried on past them, down the trail, shouting at everyone with horses, to take them back.
Then, down near the beginning of the White Pass, Meg and Fritz spotted Moore and another man, trying to stop anyone from going up with a horse.
“Police! Stop!” the other man was commanding, with the gestures and authority of an officer, though he wore no uniform or gun.
“I’m Deputy Chief O’Mara, from the Boston Constabulary,” he shouted. “You men listen to reason. Carry your own goods or don’t proceed. No horse can make it up the Pass.”
Meg ran to him. “Mick!” She buried her face in his chest. Held onto him so tightly that her sobs were pushed back down into her chest.
“Meg, my darling,” he said into her ear as he rocked her for a moment. Then he let her extricate herself. Yukon Sally, then Jake, sat down attentively as Meg turned to address those gathering around.
“Chief O’Mara is telling you the truth,” she spoke loudly. “No horse can make it up the trail. Your horse will die a terrible death. And it will be your doing. Then you’ll have to carry your own gear, or abandon it there. You might as well repack here and start off without your horse. Let it live. I’m a veterinarian, better known to you as a horse doctor. I have seen the carnage on the trail. Do you have any particular questions?”
Back in Moore’s cabin, they sat round the table, Mick and Meg with arms around each other talking with Captain Moore and Amy, while Yukon Sally and Jake curled up patiently near the doorstep outside. They had sniffed and pawed Mick, found him acceptable.
“What I found in Wrangell,” Mick told Meg, “was the gravestone of Teskey. He had been shot dead for cheating at poker. That’s the way it is in that town. Just wish it hadn’t taken me so long to get there and back up here.”
Amy leaned across the table to Meg. “Your sister, Alice. She came in on a luxury steamer last week. Sent word to us, asking to meet her at the Star Hotel. Skagway’s finest. She’s a mighty stylish woman, your sister …”
“Alice!” Meg sat upright. “I don’t believe it! Alice … on her own? What about Jacques … and the kids?”
“Jacques is looking after the business and the kids. Alice said she’s taking a vacation. Wants to see a bit of the world. Just like you.”
Meg sank back into Mick’s arm. She gripped his hand on her shoulder, feeling suddenly sickened and sad. The children. The horses. The dogs. How could human beings abandon them like that?
“But your sister took one look at the Chilkoot,” said Amy, “and decided she wouldn’t follow you over that. She got back on the steamer. Is on her way up to St. Michael’s. She’ll arrive in Dawson by riverboat.”
“As will we,” said Mick, decisively, taking Meg’s other hand in his, beaming as he announced. “In our own style … married, with dogs.”