Epilogue
Ayear and a half later, I sat on the front porch of our little home in Sacramento, waiting for Steve to return from work at the railroad offices. Eleanor sat in a second chair, reading a book on nursing, her brows drawn together in concentration. The light of the evening sun bathed everything in a warm glow, the sounds of insects and birds filled the air, and I delighted in the heat and life as I never had before.
Soon enough, Steve appeared around corner, breaking into a grin when he spotted me waiting for him. “Colin,” he said, coming onto the porch. “Sister,” he added with a teasing note in his voice to Eleanor.
Our neighbors believed Eleanor to be Steve’s sister and my wife, a convenient fiction that allowed us to keep house together. Now she rolled her eyes at him and stood up.
“Bernadette invited me for dinner,” she said, absently patting her hair to make certain it was still in place. “I should be going.”
“And will you be coming back before morning?” I teased.
A blush touched her cheeks. “That remains to be seen.”
Once she was gone, we went inside, and Steve immediately embraced me. “How was work?” I asked.
He shrugged. Working indoors in a small office didn’t suit his character, but for now at least, he shied away from spending much time outdoors. We all did.
As we made sandwiches from leftover roast, I said, “My editor wants me to write a story marking the second anniversary of the gold rush. Specifically, he wants me to relate my own experience in the gold fields.”
As astonishing as it may seem, I was now a journalist. Sickened after a lifetime of lies, I’d sought work based on exposing the truth.
Some of it, anyway.
Steve had been about to take a bite from his sandwich, but lowered it back to his plate. “What are you going to write?”
“Not the truth,” I said unhappily. “Not that I even know what the truth is, really.”
None of us would ever know what haunted us on Coffin Bone Creek. A spirit, perhaps, but much more than a ghost. Was it a god born of primal nature, a curse laid by human hearts, or something far beyond any guess of mine?
With no monster pursuing us, we managed to make our slow way to the junction of Coffin Bone Creek and the Yukon. By the time we spotted the river, we were on our last legs, mentally and physically. Chances are, we would have died before we reached the next camp downriver.
Luck smiled on us that day, however, in the form of a musher carrying mail between Fort Selkirk and Dawson City. The barking of his dogs was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard. Seeing what dire straits we were in, he left some of his own supplies with Eleanor and me, and took the injured Steve to the nearest camp. He returned shortly with another dog-sledder, and soon enough we were being tended to by a group of kindly miners.
Once we were strong enough, they took us via sled to Dawson, to the care of Father Judge, head of St. Mary’s Hospital. He tended our injuries and dosed us with spruce-tip tea, a trick to ward off scurvy he’d learned from the Native tribes of the area. The wound on my forehead healed a second time. My lungs would never again be quite what they were before the smoke of the burning cabin, but I escaped with no other permanent injuries.
A week or two into our convalescence, some of the miners who’d helped us made the journey into Dawson. Curious after our confused story of fleeing a fire, they’d gone to our claims on Coffin Bone Creek to see the site for themselves.
“Why’s the mine shaft filled in?” one of them asked after we’d exchanged pleasantries.
I sat on the edge of Steve’s hospital bed, where he lay swathed in plaster so his broken ribs could mend without doing even more damage to his body. The two of us exchanged a glance—someone had filled the shaft in, then.
Maybe it had been the creature. But I didn’t think so.
“The whole place was a bust,” I lied, making sure I sounded as disgusted as possible. “No paydirt in the ground, no dust in the river. We backfilled what little we’d dug through so none of us would fall in coming back from the latrine in the middle of the night.”
They seemed satisfied by the answer. I hoped it would keep them—and anyone else—from staking new claims on the creek.
“Tell some of it,” Steve suggested now. “That men died along the trail, beneath avalanches and in rivers. Or caught out after freeze-up, starving in the cold. Write about lack of food in Dawson City, and how lucky it was we made it through with rationing. About barely having enough money to pay for a steamer to take us to Saint Michael, then back to Seattle.”
“Discourage them from going?”
“If you can.” He put aside his plate and slipped his arms around me. I leaned into him, closing my eyes, breathing in his scent.
Our trip to the Klondike had cost Steve his father and step-mother, Eleanor her money and her lover, and me my brother. At least we’d found each other to cling to when the inevitable nightmares haunted our sleep.
I lay awake that night, Steve a warm shadow beside me, and thought about my article.
About Coffin Bone Creek.
I’d change the name and locate it closer to Dawson City, in hopes no reader was inspired to look for it. I didn’t want anyone else to find it.
I didn’t want anyone to find Doug.
He was still there, I was certain. Still alive. Curled up beneath the ground with his gold, like a worm in the soil.
And I prayed no one disturbed him.