21. Anna
Iran.
The trees behind me continued to thrash, branches starting to crack as something enormous forced its way through the thick forest.
Coming for me.
The snow clutched at my feet, slowing me. Where was the trail I’d broken earlier? What direction was I even running in?
It didn’t matter. Something was back there, pursuing me. No, hunting me.
I was its prey, and it wanted to devour me.
A scream boiled in my throat, but I had no breath left to give it voice. The wind rose, shaking the trees and sending clouds of snow streaming from the high branches. It moaned through the boughs, but beneath its lonely cry I was certain I heard the clatter of train wheels?—
I broke through from the trees and careened directly into Steve.
We both tumbled to the ground. “Christ, Colin!” Steve exclaimed, reaching to steady me.
I scrambled back from the trees, eyes fixed on the dark mass of forest. Whatever had been chasing me was about to emerge…
But there were no shaking spruces, no snapping branches. Certainly no clatter of train wheels.
Still silence hung over everything, punctuated only by the faint sound of Roland calling for his missing wife.
“Colin? What’s wrong?” Steve got to his feet, then reached down to help me up.
I accepted his hand, my body still trembling from fright. “I…there was something in the woods. Something big.”
Steve frowned and looked to the quiet woods. “A moose?” he guessed.
We hadn’t seen a moose—any large animal, actually—since arriving at Coffin Bone Creek.
Perhaps I’d imagined it, just as I’d imagined something was following Doug and me on our way back from Dawson.
“I…I don’t know,” I said, my heart rate finally falling to something approaching normal. “It was probably just snow falling off branches.”
“It’s easy to get confused in the dark, especially in a remote area,” he said with far more sympathy than I deserved. “Nothing to feel ashamed of.”
He leaned in and gave me a comforting kiss, his lips cold but his tongue warm. I wanted to melt against him and be held, just for a little while…but I’d already wasted enough time panicking over nothing.
“Thank you,” I said, when our mouths parted again. “Come on—we need to find Anna.”
* * *
We didn’t find Anna.
Not that night, or the day after, or even the day after that.
Our mood plummeted, everyone growing grimmer by the hour. Judging by her reddened eyes and swollen nose, Eleanor spent most of her private time crying, though she tried to put on a brave face when we returned to the cabin discouraged and half-frozen.
Anna must have sleepwalked, just like Doug. It was the only explanation that made sense. No one would just go outside into the freezing night without any protective clothing, not unless they had a death wish. She’d either walked until she collapsed, or else waked to find herself in an unfamiliar place and unable to retrace her steps before the cold took her.
Somewhere beneath the steadily falling snow, her body lay alone and frozen. Waiting on spring to again reveal it to the world.
Doug seemed impatient with the search when we went out the second day. When we regrouped over dinner that evening, he said what the rest of us were thinking.
“We need to quit wasting our time.” He held a bowl of reconstituted soup in his hands, though he hadn’t touched much of it. “Anna’s dead.”
Roland’s face went pale, except for two angry splotches on his cheeks. “Shut your mouth. She’s out there somewhere, and we’re going to keep looking until we find her!”
The coldness in Doug’s eyes sent a chill through me. “She’s gone,” he said. “We need to get back to mining. Or have you forgotten why we’re here in the first place?”
“Douglas!” I said, aghast at his callousness. “The man’s wife is missing.”
Doug shrugged. “I’m just saying there’s no point in wasting time looking for a body that we clearly aren’t going to find. We came here to mine gold, not wander around in the woods aimlessly.”
Roland’s teeth clenched and the look he aimed at Doug bordered on hatred. “Do what you want. I’m not giving up on her.”
The next morning, Steve and Roland resumed the search. “I need your help,” Doug told me, and though I wavered, in the end I agreed to join him at the mine. The guilt was still there, gnawing at me—but I wasn’t responsible for Anna’s death. I’d done everything possible to find her.
She was lost to us, and nothing I could do would change that.
Still, my spirits caused my feet to drag as I prepared to go outside. Only Eleanor and I remained in the cabin. She was kneading bread on the table, but her eyes were a thousand miles away.
“How are you?” I asked, as gently as I could.
Her lips trembled, and she dashed away tears, leaving a streak of flour across her face. “Anna’s dead. No one could have survived out there this long in just a union suit and nightdress.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I just…” Her hands clinched the dough, so it bulged out between her fingers. “I can’t stop picturing her body, savaged by starving wolves. Or just lying there, blue and still and alone.”
She broke down, then; great, wracking sobs. They’d been friends, had spent nearly every waking moment together for months. Every time we left her alone in the cabin, she must have felt Anna’s loss anew.
I put my arms around her, and she buried her face in my shoulder, flour-dusted hands gripping the back of my coat as if she’d collapse without something to hold onto. Her sobs went on and on, and I rubbed her back gently, making soothing noises in my throat.
Eventually, she released me and stepped back, wiping her face. “I’m sorry,” she began, but I held up a hand.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I began.
I wanted to say more, but Doug’s voice echoed from outside. “Col! Hurry it up!”
I sighed. “Duty calls.”
Eleanor turned back to her dough, head bowed. “Go on.” She paused. “And thank you.”
* * *
Two days later, Steve’s urgent cries for help rang out from the edge of the forest.
I was manning the windlass, the north wind creeping through any gap in my clothes it could find to chill my skin. At his shout, I looked up and saw him at the edge of the trees, one arm around Roland, who leaned heavily on him.
“Something’s wrong with Roland,” I called down to Doug, then hurried off without waiting for his reply.
“What happened?” I asked as I approached.
“My damn leg.” Roland’s face bore a sheen of sweat despite the cold, and he spoke through gritted teeth. “Thought I was almost done healing, but it’s been getting worse the last few days.”
I lent him my shoulder, and between us Steve and I helped him back to the cabin. He collapsed in a chair close to the stove, injured leg out in front of him.
Eleanor sprang into action, carefully unlacing his boot and drawing it off. Gentle as she tried to be, Roland gasped with pain.
The smell hit as soon as the boot was off. Not the honest stink of sweat, but the foulness of rotting meat. Eleanor pursed her lips and rolled up the legs of his trouser and the union suit beneath.
The wound she had stitched so carefully atop Chilkoot Pass gaped open, the edge swollen and red. Yellow pus and greenish matter oozed out, and I turned away before I gagged at the sight.
“You should have said something earlier,” Eleanor said, “before it got this bad.”
Roland shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I had to find Anna.”
She didn’t argue. “Steve, boil some water. Colin, fetch me my medical kit.”
It sat on a shelf near the stove so none of the tinctures within would freeze. As I handed it to her, Roland asked, “What are you going to do?”
“To begin with, thoroughly wash the injury with carbolic acid.”
“Is it going to hurt?”
She gave him an impatient look. “What do you think?”
I excused myself, stomach queasy, and returned to work with Doug. Steve joined us about half an hour later.
“It could be worse,” Steve hedged when I inquired about his father. “Eleanor removed the dead flesh. So long as the rot doesn’t spread, he should heal.”
“There’s a hospital in Dawson,” I said.
“And in Seattle, and right now, we’re as likely to reach one as the other,” Steve replied with a grimace. “Pa can’t walk seventy miles. If he gets worse, we might try dragging him on a sledge, but if the weather turns on the way…”
He trailed off; it would be a death sentence, and we both knew it.
“Let’s hope he heals,” I said. “And Anna? Are you going to look for her, or…?”
Grief shadowed his blue eyes. I took his hand and gave it a comforting squeeze. “She’s gone,” he said. “We all know it. If we had any idea where to look for her body…but there’s been no trace. Not a footprint, or a snagged thread from her nightdress, or even a hair. It’s as though she turned into snow and blew away.”
* * *
Steve returned to the mine with us, while Roland remained stationary by the stove. The enforced idleness didn’t sit well with him, and he grew more and more sullen. Occasionally he glared at Doug, as if he imagined my brother had something to do with Anna’s disappearance.
As for Doug, he lost two more teeth that I could see, perhaps more in the back of his mouth. But he had none of the other symptoms of scurvy, and seemed bizarrely untroubled by the losses.
“I’ll make myself a set of golden teeth,” he told me when I expressed concern for his health. “Then they’ll match!” He grinned, showing off the gold-capped canine that still clung to his gum, even though the teeth to either side had fallen out.
I worried about him, but other than the strange tooth loss, his health genuinely seemed better than ever. Whereas Steve and I stumbled into the cabin at night and groaned out of bed in the morning, he seemed inexhaustible. If we hadn’t had to stop shoveling when we reached the depth thawed by our overnight fires, he might have worked day and night alike.
We dug through the layer of paydirt and hit bedrock below. Now came the most profitable—and difficult—part: following the paystreak. We prized the gravel out of the shaft’s wall until it became clear which direction the paystreak lay in, and began to tunnel through the frozen ground to follow it.
Doug never took the windlass, insisting on being down in the paystreak itself, beneath a ceiling of dirt frozen to the consistency of iron. It was so low we couldn’t stand upright, instead half-bending and half-crouching to shovel out the gravel-filled mud thawed by our fires the night before. Each of us carried a single candle, and the flames reflected in his eyes, giving their brown a touch of yellow.
It was painful work, and all my muscles ached when I ascended the perilous ladder to the world above. But at least there was some warmth left in the shaft from the previous night’s fire, whereas whoever manned the windlass had to endure the wind and the cold.
And cold it was—brutal, bitter, and rapidly deepening. The frost on the inside walls of the cabin thickened, remaining unmelted even close to the stove. Indeed, anything farther than two feet from the stove froze solid: slabs of bacon, bread, cups of coffee. Frost accumulated like snow on the floor, which we shoveled out the door each morning.
The mercury in Steve’s thermometer froze solid at minus-forty degrees Fahrenheit. When snow fell, it hissed like sand against the ground, and our breath crackled audibly each time we exhaled.
In these conditions, working the windlass was both miserable and dangerous. I had to constantly check my toes and fingers to make sure they still had feeling, keep my scarf from freezing to my face, and watch for frostbite on any fraction of exposed skin.
“It’s too cold,” I said one night, as Steve and Doug emerged from the shaft, the light of the fire pink behind them. All was night now, or almost, the sun crawling across the sky below the level of the surrounding hills, then vanishing again after a mere five hours. “I nearly got in trouble earlier—I took off a glove to tighten a knot, and it froze to my other glove while I was holding it. My fingers were numb in an instant, but I managed to run in to the stove in time.” I looked back and forth between them. “Maybe we should stop until it warms up a bit.”
“No,” Doug said immediately.
Steve frowned at my brother. “Colin’s right—it’s getting too dangerous.”
“Colin is a weakling.”
I swayed back as if Doug had struck me. His words, the sneer on his face, cut deep.
He’d sworn he’d never tell anyone what I really was: weak. A coward. More: he’d never looked at me with contempt.
He was my older brother, and he’d promised to protect me. For a moment, I wasn’t a grown man nearly in his thirtieth year, but a fourteen-year-old child, bawling out the ugly truth into his shoulder.
Steve shot Doug a furious glare. “You need to apologize to Colin. Right now.”
Doug laughed, the gaps in his teeth like missing tombstones. “He knows what he is. But that’s all right. I’ll cover for you again, little brother. You hide down in the warm dark with Steve, and I’ll work up here.”
He walked away, conversation ended as far as he was concerned. “What a prick,” Steve said, then glanced at me. “Sorry. He’s your family, and I shouldn’t say that. Even if it is true.”
“It’s complicated,” I said. Then, in case he decided to ask what Doug had meant about covering for me, I added, “Can we please go inside? I’m worried about a patch of skin.”
Steve immediately hastened me inside and sat me by the stove, insisting Eleanor take a look. There was indeed a small white patch high on my left cheek.
“It will blacken and peel off,” Eleanor said. “Fortunately, it isn’t deep. But we all need to be very careful in this cold.”
“We should put a halt to the mining, at least until it warms up a little,” Steve said, looking at Doug.
Doug shrugged. “I said I’d work the windlass. I’m not afraid of a little cold.”
“That isn’t safe,” Eleanor began, but Doug turned abruptly to her.
“You brought us here to dig for gold, didn’t you?” he snapped. “Well, I’m digging for it. So quit complaining.”
Her mouth hung open in shock at the venom in his words. For once, Roland roused himself in his chair beside the stove. “I say let him do it. It’d serve the bastard right to freeze solid.”
Doug slowly turned his head to Roland, a strange grin on his lips. “Would it, now?”
Roland’s fist clenched. “Wipe that smile off your face.”
“Pa, don’t,” Steve said, but Roland ignored him. When Doug just continued to smirk at him, Roland struggled to stand up, his fist clenched.
“Help!” called a voice from outside.
Anna’s voice.