9. Lake Lindeman
It took us far too long to reach Lake Lindeman. Restricted to Roland’s speed, we toiled down the slopes from Chilkoot Pass, while other stampeders left us in their dust. Doug seethed at the slow pace, while the pain from his wound turned Roland surly. They bickered over how the sledges were loaded, how quickly the chores were done in the evening, and who might or might not be pulling their weight in the group. Steve attempted to keep the peace between them, but I stayed well out of it, positioning myself close to the more agreeable conversation of the women.
Even so, I was aware of the days ticking by far too fast. We had to be settled in by freeze-up, or we risked being stranded in the middle of the wilderness without shelter.
At last we reached the lake, its shores transformed into a city of tents. The mass of humanity, bottled up on the shoreline by the need to build boats, could be heard long before we could see our destination. Hammers pounded, saws cut through green wood, men quarreled, and dogs howled. Where once there had been a spruce forest, the hillsides were now only a denuded clearing of stumps and discarded branches.
“It’s a shame,” Steve said as we packed our gear down to the muddy flats. “This must have been so beautiful just a few months ago. The trees reflected in the water, the birds hunting among the blueberry bushes…”
“It’ll grow back,” Doug said, clearly unaffected. “Besides, we’re about to do our own cutting, so don’t get all sentimental now.”
Steve’s jaw tightened, but he only said, “Right you are.”
We found a place on the outskirts of the tent city to set up camp. Most of the tents were filled with other cheechakos, but a few enterprising souls had set up restaurants—actually just a wooden plank on which hot food was served—as well as tent-stores selling kit at extortionate prices.
The lake shore itself was jammed with craft in every stage and style of construction. Canoes made from single hollowed-out logs, flat-bottomed rafts, even a boat in the shape of a hatbox. More traditional craft dominated, however, though a concerning number looked as though they’d sink to the bottom within minutes.
We all ached from our long trek from Dyea, but there was no time for rest. With each passing day, the snow line crept farther down the peaks, and we’d already lost too much time.
The next span of days was spent chopping down trees—we had to trek farther and farther afield as the mass of humanity consumed the forest like a swarm of locusts. Difficult enough, but nothing compared to whipsawing the logs into planks.
The work was brutal, no matter which end of the saw you were on. We placed the logs atop a frame, with one man above and the other below. Above, my back was soon on fire from bending over as I pushed the saw down, then straightening as I pulled it back up. Below, a ceaseless rain of sawdust fell from the cut into my eyes, nose and mouth, and seeped through every gap in my clothing until my skin was rubbed raw.
Roland’s leg meant he couldn’t help chop and transport the trees, or climb up on the frame. He did his turn beneath along with the rest of us, but otherwise sat near the tent with his leg up, staring sullenly at the lake.
Meanwhile, Eleanor and Anna stitched together a sail, gathered moss to caulk the boat, prepared meals, chopped firewood, and washed clothes. Word spread that Eleanor was a nurse, and soon men with thumbs smashed by a misplaced hammer blow, or hands cut from a slippage of the saw, came to her for help. She cleaned and bandaged wounds, set broken limbs, and stitched flesh as needed.
In gratitude, her patients gave whatever they could spare. Food, mostly, but also nails, which were the truly prize possessions on the shores of Lake Lindeman. We had brought our own, but not enough for the size of the boat we ended up building, and I doubted we would have been able to afford more without her work.
And still the snow line slunk closer and the days grew shorter. Fresh ice crusted the still corners of the lake, and spray froze against the sides of the vessels putting out. Five to ten boats a day pushed off from shore, and with each one Doug encouraged us to redouble our efforts. “We don’t want to be left behind, now do we?”
We worked from sunup to sundown every day, amidst a cacophony of sawing, pounding, shouting, and howling. Tempers began to flare. In the next tent over from our party, a pair of old friends quarreled so badly they split up and divided their outfit into two parts—to the extent of sawing through both the tent and their bags of flour, rendering the whole lot useless.
It was inevitable some argument would break out among our group, I assumed between Roland and Doug, or Roland and Steve. I never expected it to be Anna.
A gale of sleet and slush swept through on the north wind, forcing us to put down our saws and hammers, and huddle inside the tents. Eleanor and Anna claimed one, and the four of us men shared the other. The interior was stifling, stinking of our sweat and damp with our breath, while the canvas sides flapped with every gust of wind. Steve entertained us with tales of the deep woods: bear encounters, narrow escapes, stunning vistas.
I hung on his every word, his voice washing over me like golden honey. What would it have been like to travel with him instead of Doug? To use my keen eye to document the habits of Golden-mantled Ground Squirrels rather than search for easy marks?
Eventually, his stories wound down, and we all sat in silence, listening to the sleet tapping on the tent. One side bowed gently beneath the accumulating weight; Steve pushed it up from the inside and the ice slid free.
I slipped my hand into my pocket and fingered the links of the bracelet that reminded me so much of Bessie’s. I knew it couldn’t be hers, and yet the coincidence still nagged at me. Like a splinter in the back of my mind.
My thoughts grew drowsy, and I sank toward sleep. The bracelet seemed to grow hot in my hand.
“Colin,”Bessie whispered from just on the other side of the tent’s canvas wall.
“No!” Anna shouted.
I jerked fully awake, heart pounding. A dream—it was just another dream?—
Anna’s sobs cut through the rattle of sleet. Roland hurried to unlace our tent flap, while Eleanor said, “There, there, it’s all right, Anna. Just a bit of spilled tea; I’ll have it cleaned up in a moment.”
Anna didn’t sound consoled. As Roland threw the flap open, she stumbled out of the women’s tent and into the sleet. She looked wild, her hair half out of its bun, her face noticeably thinner than when I’d met her onboard the Narwhal.
“Here, girl, what’s the matter?’ Roland asked as he levered himself out of the tent with his makeshift crutch.
Anna spun on him, her fists clenched. “What isn’t the matter, husband?” she snapped back. “We’re in a filthy tent, in the freezing cold, working ourselves to the bone! I’m tired, and I haven’t been warm in days, and—and?—”
“Now, now.” He reached for her, but she pulled away.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, tears mixing with melting sleet on her face. “I never wanted to come here! This was your dream. You dragged me here to help you, and I hate it!” Her small hands curled into fists. “I wish you’d died in the avalanche.”
Roland physically staggered, as if she’d slapped him. Steve hurried out of the tent and put himself between them. “All right, that’s enough. Tempers are high, it’s easy to say things we don’t mean.”
Doug followed him, going to Anna’s side and leaving Steve to deal with Roland. “It’s all right,” he said soothingly to her. “I know it’s difficult now, but this is only a temporary hardship. Just imagine…”
He took her elbow and steered her away from Roland. Spinning a tale of the golden future she’d have, if she just put her trust in our venture.
I’d seen him do it a hundred times before, when a mark started to question why his investments hadn’t yet yielded any return. Doug could weave a narrative of a heavenly future from whole cloth, and have his target believing every word that fell from his lips as if it were gospel. Within a minute, I could see Anna’s shoulders relax.
I started to pull back inside the tent, when I noticed Roland. Though Steve was speaking to him in a low voice, his gaze was fixed on his wife and Doug, and the look on his face was dark indeed.
* * *
Anna and Roland seemed to reconcile—or at least, neither of them spoke of the incident again. It seemed to spur Roland to push himself harder, though, and he could seldom be seen sitting with his leg up afterward. Eleanor warned him to give the injury a chance to heal, but Roland merely waved her off.
At last our boat was complete. We christened her the Golden Belle, a fancy name for a vessel made from green lumber and caulked with moss and pitch.
“Ready to give her a try?” Steve asked as we lined up on shore.
Nearby, a large boat that was simply a square with low sides, floated out onto the water. The men around it started to cheer, but the sound quickly turned panicked as the boat began to sink in the shallows.
“I suppose,” I said nervously. What if all our hard work came to nothing, like that of the poor bastards now arguing how to get their boat back out of the water and try again?
Doug had no such qualms. “Finally! Let’s push her out.”
We heaved her the last few feet over the beach and into the lake, Roland letting out a pained grunt at the effort. As I held my breath, Steve jumped into the boat and stomped his feet, then walked back and forth. The Golden Belle bobbed gently at the end of the rope securing her to shore.
“She seems sound,” Steve judged. “Let’s start loading her.”
We did so in an ordered manner, pausing after every hundred pounds to make certain she wasn’t taking on water. But she remained proudly afloat, and soon enough we had moved everything from the shore into the boat.
“Well done,” I said to Steve, clapping him on the arm. The muscle beneath my hand was firm from hard work, and I found myself reluctant to let go.
“It was a team effort,” he said self-deprecatingly.
I shook my head. “You were the one with experience. If not for you, we’d still be stuck on the shore.”
We all climbed in and cast off. The sail filled with wind, and we were underway, leaving behind the crowd still on shore. Behind us, the unfortunates with the sunken boat were attempting to drag it out of the lake with ropes.
We turned our faces forward, to the future and the gold fields. Lake Lindeman gave way to a narrow waterway, that in turn emptied out into yet another lake. As we delved farther north, herds of caribou thundered past, accompanied by the last birds fleeing south before the winter.
“It makes you wonder,” Steve said to me, “whether or not humans are as smart as we like to think ourselves. No other animal is stupid enough to go toward cold and darkness instead of away.”
Though his words were light, a shadowed look in his eyes suggested he wasn’t entirely joking. “You’ve spent the winter in the wilderness before, surely?”
“I have. Never the entire winter, though. And conditions were less…extreme…than what we’re likely to encounter.”
“We’re prepared,” Roland said gruffly. “We’ve plenty of stores to get us through the winter.”
“We’ve lost a lot of time,” Doug said, glaring at the flakes of snow drifting lazily from the sky. “We need to stake a claim and build a cabin before the river freezes. If we can’t do that, we’ll have to winter in Dawson City. According to the guidebook, we can’t dig in the summer—any hole fills with water if the ground isn’t frozen solid.” He glanced at Roland. “In other words, we stand to lose everything.”
“We’re on the water now,” I put in, before Roland could respond. “Things will go faster.”
“That’s right,” Roland agreed, but his burning gaze was fixed on Doug. “I’m not letting my family sit through a winter here for nothing. Come spring, we’ll be millionaires.”
The Golden Belle carried us through a chain of lakes, each more beautiful than the last. The landscape was like nothing I’d ever imagined before: majestic, rugged, and utterly wild. The wind from the north blew cold, and squalls of rain mixed with slushy snow and sleet passed through more and more frequently.
Anna spent most of the time huddled near the center of the boat, dressed in thick layers even on days when the wind died and the sun shone. She roused herself only when we would put in for the night, quietly helping Eleanor with the cooking before retiring.
One evening, I volunteered to help Eleanor with scrubbing the tin pot and utensils in the river after dinner. To my surprise, Steve joined us.
When we were out of earshot of the others, I asked, “Is Anna all right, Eleanor? She doesn’t seem…” I trailed off. Happy wasn’t exactly the right word. None of us were happy. Driven, perhaps, by the promise of a gleaming future, but not happy.
She sighed as she crouched by the water. “It can be difficult, when someone else controls the direction of your life. A father, a husband.”
A brother. But no, I’d always followed Doug because I wanted to, not because I had to. He’d seen me at my worst. He knew the truth, and he still loved me.
“I thought she wanted to come,” Steve said, grabbing a handful of sand from under the water to scrub out the cook pot. “When Pa suggested they come to the Yukon with me, he made it sound like she was as excited as him.”
“What’s it like, having a step-mother your age?” Eleanor asked, an edge to her tone I didn’t entirely understand.
“She’s two years younger, actually. I can’t say I know her well—I left to help catalogue wildlife on Mount Rainier one summer, and when I came back they’d been wed. I do know that Pa loves her very much.” A line sprang up between Steve’s brow as he scrubbed. “Her family lost everything during the financial panic. Pa helped them out with a loan, met Anna, and courted her.”
“And the loan was forgiven when they married?” Eleanor guessed.
Steve’s face flushed. “Yes.”
“You make it sound as though Anna was sold off,” I said, compelled to speak up on Steve’s behalf.
Eleanor hesitated, then glanced at Steve. “No, that’s not…I misspoke. She’s finding the journey difficult, is all. Once she sees our first pan full of gold, I’m sure she’ll feel much better.”
Steve nodded his agreement. “She might be upset with Pa now, but as you say, she’ll come around once we start making our fortune.”
I met Eleanor’s gaze. “It’s good of you to be her friend,” I said. “I’m sure your presence is the bright spot in our travels for her.”
To my surprise, a light blush touched her cheeks. She looked down at the water, then back up.
“I will try to make it so,” she said.