Chapter 35
Brendan undid the latch and flung open the door while Maggie slid her pistol back into her skirt pocket, her fingers still curled around it just in case.
A man stood looming in the doorway, dressed in the fur-lined coat and beaded mukluks of a native.
“May I come in?” he asked. His English was stilted, but precise.
“Yes, of course.” Brendan stepped aside and the man came in.
He had a broad, brown face, his hair cut short, unlike the Tlingit, and Maggie realized he must be from one of the other tribes further north, maybe Inuit or Aleut.
She’d seen a few of them around Juneau, usually only stopping briefly to trade.
They traveled by dogsled and their teams of dogs were often tied up in front of the trading post, looking both exhausted and ferocious.
“You’ve come a long way,” Brendan guessed, and the man gave a brief nod. His gaze traveled around the cabin, taking in the comfortable scene and resting briefly on Sheetka, but he said nothing.
“Would you like some coffee? Something to eat?” Maggie ventured. She wanted to ask him about Danny and Da, but she sensed the man would get to it in his own time.
“Coffee,” he said simply, and sat down at the table.
Maggie went to fetch him a cup.
“What do you know of the O’Hallorans?” Brendan asked once he was seated and had taken a sip of the hot brew.
“Not good,” the man replied, and Maggie flinched. “They are in a cabin, on creek. Hunker Creek, they call it. The young one has a broken leg.”
Maggie gave a soft gasp, her hand clapped to her mouth, and Brendan glanced at her in reassurance.
“A broken leg, only?” he asked.
The man nodded grimly. “But it is not good. Very… broken. He cannot move, and there is no doctor in Dawson. They are running out of food.”
“Oh no…” Maggie whispered.
“How long ago did you see them?” Brendan asked, and the man shrugged.
“Ten, eleven days, I mushed past there? By sled, I travel very fast.”
Brendan nodded in understanding. The miners’ slow trek over the pass and down the river in a boat, once the ice had broken up, could take months, but the natives knew the terrain well and were accustomed to it. On a dogsled, they could travel down the Yukon to Dawson in a week or less.
“Can you take us?” Brendan asked the man, and Maggie looked at him in surprise. She’d always considered the trek to Dawson and beyond as good as impossible to undertake—too far, too cold, too terribly dangerous. But if they traveled by dogsled with an experienced guide… maybe it was possible?
Slowly, the man shook his head. “Too far. Too long. And soon the ice break up. I cannot do it.” His voice was firm, brooking absolutely no argument. Maggie couldn’t blame him; to travel five hundred miles back the way he came was no small thing.
“When does the ice break up?” Brendan asked, and the man shrugged.
“In two, three weeks? But in a week, maybe less, it won’t be safe. When it breaks up, you can go by boat. But that takes long time.”
“I know,” Brendan agreed heavily. He glanced at Maggie. “Even if we left this very moment, it would be at least three weeks before we reached them, and that’s traveling as fast as we could, with no accidents or bad weather. Most miners take months.”
Three weeks.
And Danny and her da were already running out of food, Danny with a broken leg, a bad break by the sounds of it.
In three weeks, they could both be dead.
They might likely be dead. She pictured them in their weathered little cabin, hungry, alone, unable to move, as time ran out on any chance of survival.
Maggie met Brendan’s troubled gaze. “We still have to go,” she pleaded. “We have to try.”
He stared back bleakly, the barest smile touching his lips. “I know,” he said quietly.
The next twenty-four hours passed in a blur of motion and fear. Maggie arranged for a leave of absence from the hospital, and Diana Marks offered to take care of both Sheetka and Biscuit.
Although it just about broke Maggie’s heart in two to leave Sheetka behind in Juneau, she knew she had to. The Yukon trail was no place for a small child. Most would say it was no place for a woman, even.
Brendan organized their outfit from his new stock, and Maggie could only imagine how much it cost him to keep his store shuttered for who knew how long, and miss the prospectors flocking to town to buy their outfits.
“A day to travel to Mooresville,” he said, tracing the trail on the map, just as Maggie had with her father and brother back in September.
“Then up the White Pass—it’s a few miles longer, but the Chilkoot is so steep, and we’d have to hike up it with all our supplies on our backs.
If we take the White Pass, we can bring a horse and lead it up. ”
“Dead Horse Pass,” Maggie said softly, and he nodded, his expression somber.
“It’s not an easy trail, on either man or beast.”
After that, they’d camp on the shores of Lake Bennett while they built their boat, something neither of them were experienced in, and then then they’d sail five hundred miles down the Yukon River, through treacherous rapids that Maggie already knew had cost many men their lives, camping each night by the side of the river.
Besides the dangers of the river, there were other threats—grizzly bears, wolves, accidents.
One miner Maggie had patched up had told her a man had cut his own hand off with a whipsaw while building his boat.
Considering she’d never even used a saw before, Maggie feared a similar fate was possible for her, or even Brendan.
Just a day after the man had shown up at their door with news of Danny and Da, Maggie took Sheetka and Biscuit to Diana’s home on 5th Street, her heart aching with both love and fear for the little girl as well as her father and brother.
“I will be back,” she told Sheetka, while Diana looked on, her homely face full of sorrow.
“As soon as I can. And with Danny and Da!” She injected a note of jolliness into her voice that didn’t raise so much as a flicker of a smile from the girl.
“And you have Biscuit and Mrs. Marks to keep you company…”
Maggie scanned Sheetka’s face, wishing she knew what thoughts and emotions were veiled by the girl’s dark, opaque eyes.
In the nearly two years since Maggie had brought her into her home, Sheetka had not spoken a single word.
She’d laughed, she’d cried, she’d screeched the house down, but she had yet to frame one syllable.
Maggie still lived in hope that she would, and occasionally, Sheetka had looked at her in a certain way, an interest livening her expression, her lips parted, and Maggie had thought she’d been about to speak.
But she never had.
Maggie dropped to her knees in front of the girl and gently put her arms around her thin shoulders. “I love you,” she whispered fiercely against her hair as Sheetka clung to her. “I love you so much, Sheetka, and I will be back for you, I promise.”
As Maggie tightened her embrace, Sheetka burrowed against her shoulder. And then, miraculously, Maggie heard her whisper something against her cheek. “Ma…”
“Maggie?” she guessed, leaning back to look into the girl’s face. Tears shone in her dark eyes, turning them luminous. “Sheetka, darling…”
“Mama,” Sheetka whispered, and hugged her again, burrowing her head once more against Maggie’s shoulder while she blinked back tears of both joy and sorrow.
Mama. How could she leave her little girl? And yet she had to, for the sake of her family. The rest of her family, so one day they could all be together again.
An hour later, Maggie and Brendan were boarding SS Queen, the same steamer that had taken them to Juneau from Port Townsend nearly two years ago.
The deck was crowded with miners heading for Mooresville and Dyea, hardened, rough-looking fellows in mackinaws and mukluks, seeming like they were well prepared for whatever was ahead.
But were they? Maggie stood at the deck with Brendan as the steamer left Auke Bay, heading for the Inside Passage and the Lynn Canal, two thousand feet deep and twelve miles wide, narrowing to only three miles at its northern end.
Spruce-covered mountains rose up as the steamer left Juneau, the Indian village huddled at the side of the bay, the great Treadwell mine clanking and clattering on Douglas Island in the harbor.
Soon they’d left it all completely behind, and then there was nothing to see but mountains and trees, sea and sky.
The air was cool, the sun warm, the fog lifting in ghostly shreds of mist from the tops of the trees, as Maggie and Brendan remained by the railing, watching the land slide by.
It was only ninety miles to Mooresville, no more than a few hours on board, and then the hard work would begin.
“What do you think Mooresville will be like?” Maggie asked curiously. She felt Brendan was far more knowledgeable in these matters than she was, having traveled up and down the northwest coast to buy his own stock.
“Small but growing fast, I’m thinking,” he replied with a wry smile.
“Word hasn’t gotten out widely about the rush yet, but it will.
” He glanced at the crowded deck. “These fellows were already hanging around Fort Wrangell or Victoria, which is how they heard about it so quickly, but once you get the men from Seattle and San Francisco and beyond…” He shook his head.
“How many of them will die on the trail because they don’t know better?
At least these miners have a better idea of what they’re getting into. I hope so, anyway.”
“And do we know what we’re going into?” Maggie asked, trying to sound light and failing.
Worry gnawed at her stomach as she thought of what was ahead, and how little she knew about it.
Beyond Juneau, all of Alaska and the Yukon seemed like a vast and empty expanse of mountain and snow.
She could not imagine entering it, never mind crossing five hundred miles of it—in a boat they would build themselves, no less.
Brendan smiled down at her, his expression tender yet also bleak. “We can’t know,” he told her bluntly. “We might think we can, but neither of us has ever braved the wilderness the way we’ll have to now. And Juneau is so much milder in climate than the Yukon?—”
“But it’s only May,” Maggie protested. “We’ll be back before the cold weather starts.”
“We might not, Maggie,” Brendan told her gently. “If at any point we get stuck somehow, we might end up wintering somewhere along the trail.”
Maggie swallowed hard at that most unwelcome thought, thinking of Sheetka being without her for so long. “But we don’t have the supplies for that,” she protested.
“I’ve brought enough to last a few months,” Brendan told her as he gazed out at the canal, his eyes narrowed against the glare of sunlight. “Just in case, but you’re right, we don’t have enough.”
“Brendan…” Maggie laid a hand on his arm.
“Thank you,” she told him with quiet, heartfelt sincerity.
She needed him to know that she wasn’t taking him for granted, as she sometimes had before.
“I’m so grateful to you, and I can’t even imagine what kind of sacrifice it is for you to come all this way, and I’m so glad you’re willing to make it.
” She paused before continuing haltingly, “I can pay for things too, if needed. I’m not saying that out of pride or independence or what have you,” she continued hurriedly.
“I just don’t want you to shoulder the burden alone?—”
“Maggie,” Brendan cut her off gently, “Danny and your da feel like my family, too. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.” He put his hand over hers. “I want to be here, I promise. As for paying, let’s see how much it all costs. We might empty out both our bank accounts on this venture!”
Her hand tensed under his as she looked up at him anxiously. “Do you think it’s foolhardy?” she asked quietly. “They might… they might already be dead. I know that.”
“They might be,” Brendan agreed evenly, and she was glad he didn’t try to pretend that it wasn’t a possibility, even a distinct one.
“But, like you said, we have to try.” He smiled down at her, although his eyes drooped with sadness and worry.
“And you’re a trained nurse with plenty of experience setting bones. If anyone can rescue them, it’s you.”
“Not without you.” She gazed up at him, wanting so much to say something of what was in her heart, what had always been in her heart, but Brendan knew what that was already.
It was his turn to say something, if there was indeed anything to say.
The other night, before they’d been interrupted, Maggie had thought he might say it. Now she wasn’t sure.
But in any case, she told herself as Brendan removed his hand from her arm, they had more important things to worry about now.
Five hours later, the SS Queen sailed into Mooresville, no more than a huddle of tents by a wharf, with the original cabin and a few hastily constructed shanties and shacks in the distance.
Originally, it had been the homestead of Captain William Moore, a Canadian surveyor who had claimed one hundred and sixty acres and named it Mooresville.
They’d learned on board that it was in the process of being renamed Skagway, a variation of a Tlingit word for ‘Home of the North Wind’.
Maggie wondered how Captain Moore and his family felt about being overrun by so many miners.
His land had become a sea of churned-up mud and canvas tents, their sides flapping in the stiff breeze off the harbor.
“Let’s find a place to pitch our tent and I’ll see to the horses,” Brendan told her.
He’d bought two packhorses back in Juneau, and he led them off the steamer himself, while Maggie kept watch over the pile of sacks and crates that held their supplies.
The air smelled of smoke and brine, and she felt a sudden, surprising lift in her spirits as she looked around the shantytown, with miners striding and swaggering about, piles of supplies and packhorses lining the wharf.
They were finally here. They were really doing this.
Then she lifted her gaze to the mountain that towered over the little settlement, rising right to the sky, the pass they were meant to ascend no more than a dip of dark shadow between the spruce-covered ridges, and her excitement drained away completely, replaced only by a deep and uneasy dread.