A Moment in the Sun Read online

  It sounds good enough to Hod. They help each other load up, making packs with rope and canvas and tying on near seventy pounds apiece for the first trip.

  “No matter how weary you get, don’t step out of line to rest once you’re on them Golden Stairs,” says Whitey as they nudge their way into the crowd of men at the base of the footpath. “Takes a good long spell to squeeze back in.”

  They start up, Whitey climbing a half-dozen men above Hod. The blasting cold air and the hazardous footing and the weight on Hod’s back drives all thought away, his whole life tunneling down to the bend of the knees of the man in front of him, left, now right, now left, thigh muscles knotting as he follows in step, keeping count at first, step after slippery step, then giving up when the idea of the thousands more ahead proves unbearable.

  The first thing left by the stairs is a huge cook pot, iron rusted a different color on its uphill side, that looks to have been there some while. Then wooden boxes and crates, dozens of them, and who has the energy to stop and look inside as the wind cuts sharp across the face of the slope, and next it is men littering the sides of the line of climbers, some bent over with exhaustion or waiting for a moment’s gap to rejoin the file, others splayed out on the mountain face with their heels dug in to keep from sliding, helpless as tipped turtles with their pack harnesses up around their necks, weeping.

  This is where you earn it. Of course it is still a gamble, gathering all his life’s toil into one stake and chasing after gold. But it isn’t a weak man’s play like laying it on poker or faro, hoping the numbers will smile on you and shun the rest at the table. The weak ones will falter here, only those with the strength, with the will to pull their burdens over this mountain and then down five hundred miles of raging, ice-choked river, will even get to roll their dice in the Yukon. For the first time since he was herded onto the steamer with the rest of the stampeders, Hod feels truly hopeful, long odds getting shorter with each busted, despairing pilgrim he passes.

  I will stomp this mountain flat, he thinks, leaning into the slope and forcing himself not to look up when the trail curves enough to let him see past the men ahead to the distant summit. No use worrying about how far it still is. Afternoon sun and the friction of boots slick the icy gouges, stairs only in a manner of speaking, and though there is a rope you can grab on to it is ice-crusted and unreliable, the great mass above and behind jerking it one way or the other, and Hod vows on his next trip to get one of the alpenstocks they’re selling at the bottom. His legs burn, then ache, then go to numb rubber and then suddenly it is over, teetering sideways to flop in the snow next to Whitey and a half-dozen others. Whitey is laughing and wheezing, pointing at the unbroken line of men and yes, a few women, that stretches all the way down Long Hill and ends in a black pool of those waiting to start the climb.

  “You figure if God got a sense of humor,” he says, “this is a real knee-slapper.”

  They pick a spot in the middle of the hundreds of caches to unload their packs, then walk together to the edge of the ridge.

  “You lookin a might leg-weary, buddy,” says Whitey, a shining new shovel slung over his shoulder. “I’d better make the next run.”

  There are two chutes running down the slope, icy sides polished with the traffic of bodies. Some men have made crude sleds and some just lay on their backs and draw their knees up to their chest, feet pointing downhill, wait a ten count, holler and then let fly, hoping not to stack up if someone catches a bootheel.

  “You got to be shittin me,” says Hod.

  Whitey smiles and sits down on the blade of the shovel, the handle pointing out between his knees. “You give me a nudge and go rest up. We can get us in another couple trips before it’s dark.”

  He is at the bottom in the time it takes Hod to pull his mittens off.

  At their pile Hod pulls out the blankets rolled at the top of his pack to make a nest and even sleeps a little, his legs twitching and complaining all the while, then wakes and gets up to stretch. Men huddle around a little fire, burning a smashed packing crate, smoking pipes and telling tales of gold. Hod lays his couple stale biscuits close to the flame till they are blistered on both sides. They are only yards away from the line of stampeders waiting for the final weigh-in and tariff, a red-jacketed Mountie with a 76 Winchester standing guard in front of a little white tent with the Union Jack flapping over it, his fellows weighing and thoroughly examining the outfits. Nobody is getting past them hauling stones.

  “They count your damn socks,” grumbles a man by the fire. “Bunch of mother hens.”

  “Man wants to go freeze to death, starve to death, whatever, whilst he’s searching for his bonanza, that oughta be his lookout,” says another.

  “They just after that tariff,” says yet another as he roasts a potato on a stick. “Make you truck in all this gear and then tax whatever wasn’t boughten in Canada. Well hell, these local Indian boys say they got no idea what’s Canada and what’s district of Alaska, didn’t nobody pay it any mind before the strike at Thirtymile.”

  “That’s the deal right there,” says a man with a moustache that drops down past his chin. “Wasn’t for them boys in red, how long you think the border would hold? Wherever the hell it is.”

  The soldiers are noting it all, checking off on their lists the picks and shovels, the cooking pots and utensils, the tents and blankets and lamps and oil and flour and soda and bacon and beans and sets of long underwear, everything down to the shoelaces. If there are firearms they note those too, writing down the make and model, the caliber and amount of ammunition.

  “St. Peter made this much fuss at the Golden Gate,” barks the sourdough whose goods they are poring over, “there wouldn’t be a saint in Heaven.”

  It is nearly evening when Whitey reaches the summit again. He has Hod’s tent and promises to set it up while Hod makes the last climb.

  “Be a place to get out of the weather when you get here.”

  “And you’ll go back down?”

  “I got mine all fixed at the bottom. I tell you, I feel sorry for these poor folks trying to go it alone.”

  The shovel deal makes him nervous, so Hod chooses to run the chute on his back, folding his arms in the way Whitey shows him, like a dead man in a coffin. He has to wiggle a little to get going, then picks up speed, tucking his chin to his chest and not realizing he is screaming with exhilaration till he is halfway down and the air whipping tears into his eyes, rolling sideways a bit like he might fly out of the groove but then sliding to a long stop at the bottom and slammed by the whooping pilgrim behind him.

  He loads his pack as fast as he can and shoves his way back into the line, but there is no speed to be gained on the Stairs, and after two hours of trudging the light dies. The climbers close up then, each with a hand resting on the small of the back of the man ahead, moving slower, digging in at every foothold. There are a few long halts, somebody fallen most likely but no telling, just minutes of bracing still against the night wind, and then creeping upward again.

  There is a cot and a tin cup of lukewarm coffee waiting in the tent Whitey has set up at the top. It makes Hod near want to cry.

  “You’re not slidin down in the dark?”

  “Don’t see why in hell not,” says Whitey, tying the straps of his hat tight under his chin. “I aint gonna fall, am I?”

  It is possible only to do three trips each a day, the men trading few words in passing, eager to use every bit of light. Hod hates the Stairs more with every grinding ascent, but as the days pass their pile of goods at the top grows larger than the one at the bottom, and he uses his rest time to learn what he can about what lies ahead.

  “It’s an easy six miles down to Happy Camp on the Canadian side, then half of that to the edge of Lake Lindeman and the headwaters of the Yukon,” they say.

  “There’s bad rapids between Lindeman and Lake Bennett,” say the few men who have been there and more who haven’t. “And then more on the river beyond. You got to make a boat an
d it better be a good one.”

  “Aint a straight tree left standing for miles around that lake camp, what they say. Whole damn forest been felled and whipsawed into planks and gone floatin down the river.”

  “You don’t beat the ice this season, you got to sit there till May when it breaks up again. Go through half your grub just waiting.”

  “Been so many lost in them White Horse Rapids,” they say, “Mounties make you hire a pilot to run you past em.”

  “Another goddam robbery.”

  “You a good swimmer?”

  “Hell, I’d drown in a bathtub.”

  “Lucky you aint never been in one.”

  Laughter then. They are chasing the same nuggets and know there are not nearly enough for all of them, no matter how big the country, but have been drawn together, at least for the moment, by hardship. Not too many spend the night on the summit, a pair of Mounties left to make sure nobody sneaks across, but even with most of the caches unattended Hod hasn’t witnessed any notable thievery. He and Whitey might be playing it too safe, he thinks, both of them could be hauling all day long and double their chances of getting down the river before the freeze.

  “Been wondering the same,” says Whitey when he staggers up with the morning haul. “Met a fella says he’s waiting up here for his partner to come before he crosses over—lemme go find him and we’ll work something out, couple dollars to look after our tent, and I’ll be right on your tail. I’d sure like to see the last of this damn Chilkoot.”

  Hod sees it is mostly Whitey’s outfit left when he gets to the bottom. He loads up with canned goods, rigging a pair of lanterns to hang over the back that rattle some when he moves but won’t fall off. His legs have hardened to the trail. He works the sums as he climbs, a new-bought alpenstock to help his balance—two men hauling over two hundred pounds, each making three trips a day staggered, so even if doubling up means only one more climb a day—but that’s counting on good weather, which keeps its own account book, and the Tlingits at the scales are muttering about an early freeze this year. He wonders how to ask Whitey to partner with him on the other side and how that will be, no telling what a man is like till you’ve gone down the long road with him. Whitey brings up whiskey with every load he hauls, and there is a sentry line of empty pint bottles outside each of the tents, but he is never passed out when Hod gets to the top, has never missed a turn on the Stairs. Hod has relied on other men in the mines, depended on his brother diggers for his life on occasion, but partnering, with no one the boss and no one the worker—

  It will be half the treasure if they make a strike, of course, but also half the work. This north country is so big, so empty, the whole flocking mass of them, thousands of stampeders, only an aimless scattering of piss-ants in its white immensity. A man alone, tiny black dot stumbling over its treacherous surface, can disappear without a trace.

  “Young fellas like you and me,” Whitey likes to say, “they aint no limit to what we could do in times like these. Got a steady man in the White House who understands there are fortunes to be made if the government will just step out of the way and let us at em. The world,” Whitey likes to say, “is our oyster.”

  The tent at the summit is gone.

  The tent is gone and the goods, all of them, the picks and shovels and lamp oil and bacon and beans and flour and the mackinaw suit and mukluks and the thirty-five-dollar China dog coat he bought in Seattle gone with it, only the half-dozen empty whiskey bottles marking the spot where his cache had been. None of the men around, busy with their own tortured passage, have noticed a thing.

  “You mind your stake, brother, and I’ll mind mine,” they tell him.

  His outfit is gone and no matter how quickly he slides to the bottom, he will find the rest of it gone too. He’s been taken. Nobody pays attention to his cursing, nobody watches as he circles back again and again to the spot where the tent had been set up, kicking the bottles across the snow. There is gold in the country beyond the Pass and one stampeder less in the race can only be good news. Hod wanders the summit for an hour, howling, the other adventurers turning away from him, embarrassed to be on the same mountain with such an idiot greenhorn, before he remembers he is still strapped to the final load. He slips his tumpline and lets it all thud to the snow, glass in one of the lanterns breaking, and seeks the counsel of the North West Mounted Police.

  LIGHTNING

  There is some folks say the pine air is good for you but Clarence is not one of them. Nothing but the trees all around, pine and pine and pine till you come to the swamp and get some tupelos, the wood the quarters been built from cut from pine and the boiler fires burning pine and the barrels Old Brumby make out of pine and the smell in your nose while you hack and pull is pine like everything else in the damn turpentine camp they keeping him at.

  But this is the day.

  Clarence reaches high with his long-handle chipping ax, raking a V-shape into the wood to get the gum bleeding. It’s him and Wilbert hacking the old section on ladders with Shiflett, who is a free white peckerwood, cutting sap boxes in the virgin pine off to the left. How stupid you got to be to stay in this gum patch if they don’t chain you to the beds at night? All Shiflett got that the turp gang don’t is his nasty, stringy-hair wife, who Stewball seen her once and it put him off thinking bout women for a week.

  “Sooner stick it in a snappin turtle mouf than in that mess,” he say. “Even her own childrens is scairt to look at her.”

  There is a gang of dippers on the right, collecting the flow from the notches in the young trees. Even further off he hears Crowder, which is another free peckerwood, chopping at the used-up pines for boiler kindling. And here come Reese the woods rider on his little glass-eye pony they call Sunshine, shotgun across his lap, right wherever you don’t want him to be. Thirty mile of swamp and longleaf pine, legs chained for the short-step, they aint afraid you gone to run. Reese just here to remind you.

  “Put a little muscle in it, boy,” he mumble through all that chaw in his mouth. “You aint nearly scratched the face yet.” And he spit.

  They all spit, the shotguns, chaw and then spit, but Reese win the turkey every time. Twice as far and right on the bullseye. He sneaky, too, that little pony catfoot up behind you and if Reese don’t like how you workin splat! it fly right past your ear and hit the tree. Come on a stretch of pines got black juice runnin down longside the white gum it mean Reese been there.

  But even with him and all the rest around Clarence know that this the day.

  Clarence wipes his brow with the back of his sleeve and can’t help but touch where he’s slipped them into the seam of his county-issue forage cap. He hopes his sweat don’t soak into the match head.

  When they first brung Clarence in he pick out Brumby straight away cause that old man been in camp the longest, ever since they built it, and the old hands always know how it stacked.

  “I was a blacksmith before I learn this here,” Brumby say, never looking up from his work. “Back on the Langford plantation. Make you anything you can think of out of metal. Mister Langford always brag on me, ‘My Brumby save me five hundred dollars a year,’ he say. Five hundred dollars. And then when he start boilin his own molasses and seen what a barrel bought from up north cost, he send me out to prentice at cooperage.”

  They give Brumby a half-dozen green convicts to help make his staves, cutting and planing and drying the boards, but he do all the bevel work and the rest by hisself, shaving and sanding and setting the hoops and gouging the croze so the head fit in tight—make you seven, eight straight-stave turp barrels a day if they don’t want him for no metal work on the stills. They more than three hundred convicted in the camp and Brumby one of five that don’t wear the hobble irons. Once in the winter when it was raining too hard to go out and cut boxes he shown Clarence through the whole deal.

  “You a young man yet,” he say. “You learn to be a cooper, then you got a trade when they set you loose.”

  “That’s four ye
ars left they give me.”

  Brumby laugh at him. “Four years aint nothin. I was here makin barrels before you was born.”

  Story is Brumby had him a young wife and she start slippin round on him, take up with a man run a spirits house by the Georgia line. One day this man don’t show up there, and nobody think much of it till he found floatin toward Savannah in one of Brumby’s barrels.

  “Trade or no trade,” Clarence let him know, “I aint doing no four more years here.”

  Come evening when none of the shotguns was near Clarence step into one of the barrels didn’t have its insides glued yet and try to squeeze down till he nearly stuck. Brumby think this is funny.

  “I know what you thinkin, son, but nobody gone sneak out this camp in a turp barrel.”

  “But they told me—”

  “That nigger was in pieces,” he say, quiet. “And even then it was a tight fit.”

  Clarence climbs down, careful not to step on his chain, and moves his ladder around the tree. You got to leave some bark between the cat-face slashes or else the tree gone die on you, but you can fit three or four boxes on a pine this old, hacking higher on the trunk every year. And then one day there just no more point to it, too high to climb for too little gum and they cut it down to burn. Brumby one of the few old ones in camp aint been used up like that, look in their eyes and it’s nothin left. Hollow wood.

  Clarence sets the ladder again and climbs halfway up and takes a look. They cut the low branches away, so you can see a fair piece. Reese is riding off toward the dippers on the whiteface pony. Reese would be easier to fool but Sunshine is short-legged and night-blind and won’t get you out of the county. Clarence is waiting for Musselwhite and his racer.

  Musselwhite is the meanest and maybe the smartest of the shotguns, cut you with his eyes and take note of things, and is always bragging how much he won running his Lightning on Saturdays. Lightning is a sorrel quarterhorse and all Clarence need to know about that is it can cut fast through the trees and every time Musselwhite ride it past the boiler fires it shies and crow-hops.