DOWN THE MIGHTY YUKON

We crossed Lake Bennett in circles. And after most of the boats had passed us, we renamed our raft El Turtle.

“What do you think she’s dragging?” Tip asked. She crawled to the stern and leaned over. “Something like a boulder?”

“Something like a continent,” I said.

That started us laughing. We laughed so hard we could not row. We just sat on the deck, looking around. And when we looked at each other, we started laughing again.

“What’s so funny?” a passing boatman called.

We were laughing too hard to answer.

He dropped down onto his stomach and tried to look under his boat. “Fool kids,” he yelled.

We tried to go north. We rowed, and we poled, and I stood at the stern working the steering oar. When a wind came up, we raised sail and were blown back almost to where we had started from.

Other stampeders, we noticed, were adding centerboards to their boats. And we did the same. We cut a board from our deck planks and slipped it between the middle logs near the center. It could be pulled up or down according to the depth of the water.

At last we were headed north. It was evening by this time, however, and when we spotted a sandy beach in a cove, we steered the raft toward it.

We ended up about a mile farther down in a glacial mud deposit. We waded ashore, sinking to our boot tops, and were met by black swarms of mosquitoes. We hurried back to the raft, the mosquitoes in pursuit.

The outfitter at Skagway had insisted on mosquito netting and eucalyptus oil. I had doubted his word, but now I frantically sought those supplies, which were at the bottom of our stack of goods.

We pushed hard and fast to free the raft from that swamp. And even then the mosquitoes followed us out to the current.

After that we went ashore only when we needed wood for our stove, which we had set up on deck, or when a storm forced us there. Otherwise we lowered our sail and slept on deck, floating along in the Northern twilight until we bumped into something.

Our raft was always bumping into things on those glacial lakes—Lake Bennett, Lake Tagish, and Lake Marsh. Things like ice floes and snags. We spent several nights on sandbars, but we did not care. There were no mosquitoes in the middle of a lake. Fish jumped all around for our supper. And there was always the next day for digging out. We were king and queen of our world, even though that world was only ten by eighteen feet.

The Queen of the Raft was a real talker. And the only person she had to talk to was me.

This is how she would begin a conversation:

“I’ve been thinking today about my dear aunt who died of a broken heart.”

“Oh?” I would say.

“Yes, you see, there was this tavern in her town where her husband used to sit down and drink wine. Well, one night he saw a damsel dark, and they started to spark.”

“He wasn’t true to his wife?”

Tip would shake her head sadly. “He was not true. After that my aunt would not play her harp anymore. Not for anyone. She hung it up on a willow tree—and died.”

“You don’t say.”

“And,” Tip would whisper, fighting back the tears, “on her tombstone they carved a turtledove to signify she died of love.”

And just as I was about to believe it, she would burst out singing:

There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my dear love sits him down, sits him down,
And drinks his wine ’mid laughter free,
And never, never thinks of me.

We laughed until our sides ached. And the passing boatmen would holler, “What’s up?”

We would answer, “Can’t say. We are going downstream.”

I did not know any Tin Pan Alley songs, nor did I have the gift for making things up. The only story I knew was true, about Pa and the traveling dentist, when Pa said, “Next time, apply the anesthetic first.”

But it served the purpose. After a while I simply had to say, “Once my pa had a toothache,” and we laughed just as hard as when I told the whole story.

Boats passed us every day, still coming from Lake Bennett and the higher Lake Lindeman. We slowed some of them down by waving them over to us.

“Which way to Dawson City?” I would call.

Or Tip would shout, “Can you tell us the reason for this stampede?”

“Fool kids!” the men would yell, livid at wasting a few minutes.

The stampeders quarreled in their boats, just as they had on land. One man was left on a sandbar, waving and cursing as his partner sailed away. Finally some Indians noticed him and rowed out in their canoes to save him.

We laughed at these antics from the safety of our small world.

One night we camped on a high bank of Lake Marsh because we needed firewood. Since it was high and rocky, the mosquitoes did not bother us. The next morning I unpacked my rifle, which I had bought at Lake Bennett, and went into the forest to hunt. I was hunting moose, but I ended up picking wild raspberries and onions.

The queen gathered flowers—blue lupines and bluebells, pink wild roses, yellow arctic poppies, and scarlet fireweed. And she decorated the raft.

She said we looked like one of those floating gardens down in Mexico. I thought we looked more like a floating coffin, but I did not say so.

I watched her weave a ring of pink roses in her hair, and then admire herself in the emerald lake.

“Are you turning back into a girl now?” I asked. I always thought of her as a girl, although she still dressed as a boy. We were less conspicuous that way.

She smiled, then shook the flowers into the water.

“It isn’t permanent, you know,” I added hopefully.

“I know,” she said. “My mother thought it best, at least until I get to Dawson City.”

“Then what?” I asked a question that I had been avoiding. “When you get to Dawson City?”

“You mean—am I going to join the Flower Girls, or stay partners with you?”

“Yes, I guess that is what I mean.”

“You don’t like the Flower Girls?”

“They ditched you. And your grandmother Tzipporah and I do not like that.”

She laughed a little.

I asked another question I had avoided. “Are you planning to be a dance-hall girl?”

“Don’t you think I am pretty enough?”

I stared at her straggly cropped hair and bony features. And ragged clothes. I guess her large green eyes were the only feature I had particularly noticed before.

“You’ll do,” I said, “with a few ruffles and pearls. But”—I hesitated—“are you sure you want to be a dance-hall girl?”

“What else could I be? I already know the songs.”

“After we get to Dawson City and pick up the gold,” I said, “you can be anything you want. Because you will have the money to pay for it. School, business, Nob Hill mansion—anything.”

“I think I will be an actress in the legitimate theater, then,” Tip said. She whirled a pink rose in the water. “Or have an orphanage. What about you?”

I had never told anyone my dream, except Pa. And I hesitated.

“Well, don’t worry that I will tell anyone,” Tip said. “We don’t have many visitors on this raft.”

“It has something to do with horses,” I said. “Maybe own a ranch with horses, like the one I worked on in Wyoming. Or be a veterinarian. I don’t know yet.” I slapped at a couple of mosquitoes that had found us.

“Let’s push off this floating garden,” I said, “or the gold will all be gone before we get there.”

We jumped off, pushed from the rocks, and climbed back on board. The blossoms that fell from the raft danced in the rippling mint-green water.

We had heard about Miles Canyon from the Mounties at Lake Bennett. In fact, I had drawn a rough map of the route to Dawson City from their descriptions.

The upper Yukon was a series of lakes connected by rivers. Miles Canyon was midway along Fifty Mile River, which linked Lake Marsh to Lake Laberge.

At the canyon, between walls of dark basalt, the river narrowed to one third its previous size. In its center was a whirlpool. From this point on, the river constricted further, to only thirty feet across.

The upper Yukon waters gushed through this narrow passage and burst out into two sets of rapids—the Squaw Rapids, rushing over a series of jutting rocks, and then the White Horse Rapids, where water sprayed into the air like leaping white stallions.

“Look for a piece of red calico tied to a tree,” I said to Tip. “And then a sign that reads ‘Cannon.’”

“But what do we do?”

“We beach and portage our raft and supplies around the canyon, about five miles through the forest.”

“We can’t do that,” Tip exclaimed.

“Or,” I continued, reading my notes, “hold to the crest of the current.”

“We will do that,” Tip said. “We will hold to the crest of the current.”

We heard the rapids, like rolling thunder, but we could not tell how far away they were. After a turn in the river, Tip spotted the red calico tied to a leaning tree, then the board with CANNON scrawled across it.

I was having second thoughts, but it was already too late to change our minds. The mighty river had lifted our craft like a twig and was carrying it recklessly onward.

I leaned against the steering oar with all my strength, trying to guide the raft. It broke with a loud snap, and I fell to the deck.

“Lower the centerboard all the way,” I called to Tip. I grabbed the steering pole and plunged it into the raging water, although I knew it was a futile attempt.

“Let’s portage,” Tip screamed.

“Get down and hold on,” I yelled. “If we slip from the crest and head for the rocks, jump off and swim.”

“I can’t swim,” Tip yelled.

I could not swim either. Before the Yukon, all the water I had ever seen was in watering troughs—that is, until I saw the Pacific Ocean, which I was not counting.

The raft plunged up and down, twisting toward the rock walls and then toward the gaping whirlpool. It creaked and groaned. Water sprayed into our faces, blinding us.

Our portable stove slid past me and off the raft. It bobbed a minute in the water and then sank out of sight.

Suddenly, with a great surge, we were spewed out of the narrow gorge. We had ridden the river through Miles Canyon!

Then all at once, before we had time to look about, we were shooting over white rapids and twisting around black rocks.

“We are going to hit!” Tip screamed.

The raft grazed the side of a jagged rock, throwing us across the deck. It rattled for a moment and then plunged forward.

Below the rapids we still clutched the raft, unable to believe the calm.

“Is it over?” Tip asked, looking up.

“That was Squaw Rapids,” I said. “The small ones. Let’s beach and portage like the Mounties said. This raft will split up if it goes through any more rapids.”

“I will split up,” Tip exclaimed.

I looked around. The river was strewn with timber and wreckage. Stampeders crouched on rocks and huddled on the shore.

According to the map, it was about two miles before the White Horse Rapids. I planned to beach the raft before then.

I discovered my rope had washed overboard along with the stove. And the steering pole and oars. In desperation I pulled a rope from the supplies, which were still tied down securely.

I made a lasso and whirled it at projecting rocks near the shore. I missed. I called frantically to other boatmen, but they gestured helplessly. They, too, were at the mercy of the river.

Then I saw the White Horse Rapids, spraying white foam high into the air. They looked like wild, leaping stallions.

At that moment, for some unknown reason, the rapids beckoned to me. I had no desire to beach the raft. I wanted to plunge into the middle of those wild horses and ride them to the finish.

“Hold on, Tip,” I shouted. “We’re going through!”

Our raft was carried by the white horses, first on one back, then another. Sometimes we faced upstream, sometimes down. We were at the mercy of the wild white horses.

I saw the boulder on the right just before we hit it, but there was nothing I could do. I heard the loud cracking of logs and the snapping of rope. And I wondered how fast I could learn to swim.

The raft shuddered and pitched violently. Then, as if knowing it had had enough, it righted itself, and scraped over a gravel bar into shallow water. We were beached.

I lay limp as seaweed, my face pressed against the wet logs. I wiggled my toes, my feet, my arms. I looked up, wiping water and sand from my face.

Tip was sprawled out beside me, looking dazed.

“We did it!” she sputtered.

I dragged myself from the raft and surveyed the damage. The outside log, right side, was cracked and the bow rope broken. The raft was stripped of everything except our bags of supplies, which were still tied down. And the two of us.

“I’m not named Erickson for nothing,” I shouted, and I collapsed on the cold wet sand.