5. Dyea
Ihad a difficult time shaking off the…dream?…the next day.
It must have been a dream. I’d been more tired that I realized, dozed off leaning on the railing, and imagined Bessie’s voice in my ear, her form at my back. I was lucky I’d only had a nightmare, and not toppled overboard in my half-asleep state.
We passed Prince of Wales Island and delved into the archipelago, mountains rising on both sides of the waterway. Glaciers wound their way down from rugged peaks, glowing like sapphires when the sun struck them just right. The wind whipping across the deck grew cooler, and mist and rain often obscured the view. The waterway grew narrower and narrower, craggy cliffs hemming us in from either side, until at last we reached the end of the fjord.
Ahead stretched a muddy flat, a ramshackle town rising just beyond. And past that came the ramparts of the mountains, a seemingly impassable wall protecting the interior and all its secrets.
“At last,” Doug murmured, his eyes burning as they fixed on the mountainous horizon. “Now we can really begin.”
* * *
Our disembarkation from the Narwhal unexpectedly offered the first hurdle to reaching the gold fields.
As we drew closer to shore, it rapidly became apparent that there was no wharf at which to dock. Murmurs of concern rose from those of us peering over the railing, redoubling as the steamer slowed.
“Did your guidebook mention this?” I asked Doug.
He’d spent every evening thumbing its pages, occasionally pausing to make a notation in the margins when something caught his attention. At my question, he simply shrugged. “You can’t expect it to make note of every step on the way.”
A flotilla of canoes and scows pushed off from the shore to meet us. The reason quickly became apparent when the captain shouted “Everybody off the boat!”
Eleanor looked up at me in confusion, and I resisted the urge to put a brotherly arm about her shoulders. Men from the flotilla began shouting prices as soon as they were within earshot, all of them absurdly high. Steve, who had joined us at the rail unnoticed, bumped my shoulder with his. “Are they crazy? That’s more than a week’s wage!”
Doug’s eyes narrowed as he watched the motley assortment of boats approach. “They aren’t crazy. They’re smart.” He gestured to the distant beach. “How else are we going to get our outfit to the beach? It’s pay their rates, or swim back and forth twenty times with a hundred pounds of equipment weighing us down. They can charge whatever the hell they want; we don’t have any choice but to pay.”
The rest of the passengers seemed to come to the same conclusion; there was a rush to the railing, shouts to attract attention, everyone desperate to get their outfits off the boat first. The captain stalked the decks, making sure no one was dawdling, apparently eager to get rid of us.
A surprising number of men decided to swim for it, strapping what they could to their backs and striving to hold anything that needed to remain dry over their heads as they entered the icy water. Pack animals were brought up from their hold and sent plunging into the bay, to swim to shore under their own power. Soon the water was filled with struggling horses, mules, dogs, and oxen, their bellows and cries echoing off the rocky shore.
We rushed to secure space on one of the scows, alongside the Kilgores. “Hurry up, cheechakos!” shouted a Native man from a nearby canoe. “The tide isn’t going to wait on you!”
“What’s a cheechako?” Steve asked one of the men on our scow, who held his pole ready while watching us fling our packs and trunks aboard as quickly as possible.
“You are.” He spat a wad of tobacco juice over the side. “Newcomers. Tenderfeet, if you prefer.”
Doug scowled at that; he hated it whenever someone implied they knew more than he did. Unless it was part of a scheme, of course; then he’d happily play the rube, laughing under his breath the entire time.
As soon as we had the last of our outfit aboard, the scow men began polling hard for the beach, no doubt hoping to shuttle more than one group from the steamer that day. A great expanse of sand and mud lay before us. In other circumstances, it would have offered a barren, dismal appearance. But now, it looked more like a stirred-up anthill, crowded with people and animals. Dogs barked, horses stumbled onto dry land, and men milled around seemingly at random. A few had pitched tents on the beach, and others set up metal stoves and began cooking their dinner. The air smelled of sizzling bacon, salt, and human and animal waste.
Sand scraped the bottom of the scow, and the crew joined us in hurling our things onto the shore, landing barely past the waterline. “Better get your outfit above the high water mark quick,” one told me.
For a moment, I wasn’t certain what he meant. Then the next wave came in, reaching higher than the one before, licking the bottom of one of our sacks of dried beans.
“Hell!” Roland shouted. “Get it out of the water!”
I was closest to the fifty-pound sack, so I grabbed it and hauled. Even as I did so, another wave came in, washing around my ankles and snatching at more of our outfit. Anna let out a cry of despair as a trunk lifted on the wave and was drawn out toward the bay.
“I’ll get it!” Steve yelled, splashing after the trunk and grabbing the handle.
Doug heaved up two fifty-pound sacks of flour, staggering a bit under their weight. “Hurry! Grab what you can, and let’s move!”
I took up another sack in danger of floating away, and rushed after him, to a clear place above the high-water mark on the beach. Dumping our loads there, we ran flat-out back to the water’s edge and rescued more of our things from the incoming tide. Eleanor did the same, as did the Kilgores, but our strength and speed couldn’t beat that of the tide.
We’d almost succeeded in rescuing the bulk of our outfits, when I heard Eleanor’s angry shout. I dropped the last sack of bacon onto the pile and hurried back to where she stood staring out at a wooden crate bobbing away. Even as we watched, it began to sink, then vanished beneath the water in a stream of bubbles.
“I hope nothing important was in there,” Steve said, jogging up behind us.
“It was our lime juice. A dozen quart bottles.” Her shoulders slumped. “Now we’ll have to worry about scurvy on top of everything else.”
Steve cast her a puzzled glance. “Scurvy? But we’re not at sea.”
“We also won’t have fresh vegetables in for months on end,” Doug said as he arrived. “According to the guidebook, plenty of miners get scurvy over a long winter, with nothing but dried fruits, beans, and cured bacon to eat.” His mouth thinned, then he shrugged. “Oh, well—nothing we can do about it now, eh? Is that the last of our things?”
Exhausted, we all collapsed to the sandy beach beside our jumbled outfits and watched as our fellow stampeders fought the tide as we had. Some of them hadn’t been alert to the danger, left their things in reach of the incoming tide, and were now returning to discover everything gone.
“Poor fellow,” I said, watching as one hurled himself weeping to the sand.
Doug shook his head. “Fools,” he judged. “They should have been more careful.” He rose to his feet. “I’m going to find a place to pitch our tents.”
Once he was gone, Steve said, “Your brother is…severe at times.”
“He’s had a difficult lot in life,” I replied, wanting to defend him.
“You’ll have to tell me about it some time.”
Curse it—that was the last thing I could do. Our current alias was of brothers who’d had a happy, comfortable past with no secrets whatsoever. I’d already said too much.
I had to remember: I wasn’t Steve’s friend, because that would require being more than the role Doug had assigned me. Fortunately, Steve was distracted by the bustle around us, and didn’t seem to notice I’d failed to answer.
Doug found a clear space above the tide line to pitch our tents alongside the Kilgores. As we worked, Anna shielded her eyes from the setting sun and peered at the ramshackle town that had sprung up behind the beach, squeezed in at the foot of the nearest mountain. “Why are we sleeping in a tent? Let’s at least find a hotel.”
The sound of fiddling and bawdy singing drifted to the beach from the buildings, all of which looked as though they’d been thrown together as fast as possible and might collapse beneath the first good snow. The largest belonged to what I guessed to be a brothel and a gambling hall, and a part of me was surprised Doug hadn’t made his way over to try his hand at a bit of cards.
“Given what the ride over from the steamer cost, can you imagine the price of a room? Or more likely, a bed stuffed in a room with a dozen men?” I asked.
“Aye,” Roland, said. “We’ve precious little coin left, and we need to save it to stake our claim.”
Anna’s nostrils flared and her jaw tightened. Seeing it, Roland added, “Don’t you worry. By this time next year, you’ll be living like a queen, I promise.”
“Exactly,” Eleanor said, putting an arm around Anna’s shoulders. “It’s important to remain focused on why we’re here.”
As the long day of the arctic summer came to a close, I walked down to just above the reach of the waves and looked out over the water. Doug joined me, and we stood in contemplative silence for a time.
The steamer was long gone, not so much as a dot on the horizon. There was no turning back now; Seattle might as well be on the moon, for all our ability to reach it. The crags looming over the inlet seemed suddenly like enormous gates, shut against any retreat.
Whatever fortune befell us, until next summer at the earliest, there was no leaving this vast wilderness. We could only move forward, and hope for the best.