of profanity, from the midst of which crackled sentences like:—“Dirty
skunks! . . . See you in hell first! . . . My mind’s made up! . . .
Hell’s fire and corruption! . . . The old codger goes down the Yukon with
us, stack on that, my hearty! . . . Hard? You don’t know what hard is
unless I show you! . . . I’ll bust the whole outfit to hell and gone if
any of you try to side-track him! . . . Just try to side-track him, that
is all, and you’ll think the Day of Judgment and all God’s blastingness
has hit the camp in one chunk!”
Such was the invigoratingness of Liverpool’s flow of speech that, quite
without consciousness of effort, the old man arose easily under his load
and strode on toward Happy Camp.
From Happy Camp to Long Lake, from Long Lake to Deep Lake, and from Deep
Lake up over the enormous hog-back and down to Linderman, the man-killing
race against winter kept on. Men broke their hearts and backs and wept
beside the trail in sheer exhaustion. But winter never faltered. The
fall gales blew, and amid bitter soaking rains and ever-increasing snow
flurries, Tarwater and the party to which he was attached piled the last
of their outfit on the beach.
There was no rest. Across the lake, a mile above a roaring torrent, they
located a patch of spruce and built their saw-pit. Here, by hand, with
an inadequate whipsaw, they sawed the spruce-trunks into lumber. They
worked night and day. Thrice, on the night-shift, underneath in the
saw-pit, Old Tarwater fainted. By day he cooked as well, and, in the
betweenwhiles, helped Anson in the building of the boat beside the
torrent as the green planks came down.
The days grew shorter. The wind shifted into the north and blew unending
gales. In the mornings the weary men crawled from their blankets and in
their socks thawed out their frozen shoes by the fire Tarwater always had
burning for them. Ever arose the increasing tale of famine on the
Inside. The last grub steamboats up from Bering Sea were stalled by low
water at the beginning of the Yukon Flats hundreds of miles north of
Dawson. In fact, they lay at the old Hudson Bay Company’s post at Fort
Yukon inside the Arctic Circle. Flour in Dawson was up to two dollars a
pound, but no one would sell. Bonanza and Eldorado Kings, with money to
burn, were leaving for the Outside because they could buy no grub.
Miners’ Committees were confiscating all grub and putting the population
on strict rations. A man who held out an ounce of grub was shot like a
dog. A score had been so executed already.
And, under a strain which had broken so many younger men, Old Tarwater
began to break. His cough had become terrible, and had not his exhausted
comrades slept like the dead, he would have kept them awake nights.
Also, he began to take chills, so that he dressed up to go to bed. When
he had finished so dressing, not a rag of garment remained in his clothes
bag. All he possessed was on his back and swathed around his gaunt old
form.
“Gee!” said Big Bill. “If he puts all he’s got on now, when it ain’t
lower than twenty above, what’ll he do later on when it goes down to
fifty and sixty below?”
They lined the rough-made boat down the mountain torrent, nearly losing
it a dozen times, and rowed across the south end of Lake Linderman in the
thick of a fall blizzard. Next morning they planned to load and start,
squarely into the teeth of the north, on their perilous traverse of half
a thousand miles of lakes and rapids and box canyons. But before he went
to bed that night, Young Liverpool was out over the camp. He returned to
find his whole party asleep. Rousing Tarwater, he talked with him in low
tones.
“Listen, dad,” he said.—“You’ve got a passage in our boat, and if ever a
man earned a passage you have. But you know yourself you’re pretty well
along in years, and your health right now ain’t exciting. If you go on
with us you’ll croak surer’n hell.—Now wait till I finish, dad. The
price for a passage has jumped to five hundred dollars. I’ve been
throwing my feet and I’ve hustled a passenger. He’s an official of the
Alaska Commercial and just has to get in. He’s bid up to six hundred to
go with me in our boat. Now the passage is yours. You sell it to him,
poke the six hundred into your jeans, and pull South for California while
the goin’s good. You can be in Dyea in two days, and in California in a
week more. What d’ye say?”
Tarwater coughed and shivered for a space, ere he could get freedom of
breath for speech.
“Son,” he said, “I just want to tell you one thing. I drove my four yoke
of oxen across the Plains in Forty-nine and lost nary a one. I drove
them plumb to Californy, and I freighted with them afterward out of
Sutter’s Fort to American Bar. Now I’m going to Klondike. Ain’t nothing
can stop me, ain’t nothing at all. I’m going to ride that boat, with you
at the steering sweep, clean to Klondike, and I’m going to shake three
hundred thousand out of the moss-roots. That being so, it’s contrary to
reason and common sense for me to sell out my passage. But I thank you
kindly, son, I thank you kindly.”
The young sailor shot out his hand impulsively and gripped the old man’s.
“By God, dad!” he cried. “You’re sure going to go then. You’re the real
stuff.” He looked with undisguised contempt across the sleepers to where
Charles Crayton snored in his red beard. “They don’t seem to make your
kind any more, dad.”
Into the north they fought their way, although old-timers, coming out,
shook their heads and prophesied they would be frozen in on the lakes.
That the freeze-up might come any day was patent, and delays of safety
were no longer considered. For this reason, Liverpool decided to shoot
the rapid stream connecting Linderman to Lake Bennett with the fully
loaded boat. It was the custom to line the empty boats down and to
portage the cargoes across. Even then many empty boats had been wrecked.
But the time was past for such precaution.
“Climb out, dad,” Liverpool commanded as he prepared to swing from the
bank and enter the rapids.
Old Tarwater shook his white head.
“I’m sticking to the outfit,” he declared. “It’s the only way to get
through. You see, son, I’m going to Klondike. If I stick by the boat,
then the boat just naturally goes to Klondike, too. If I get out, then
most likely you’ll lose the boat.”
“Well, there’s no use in overloading,” Charles announced, springing
abruptly out on the bank as the boat cast off.
“Next time you wait for my orders!” Liverpool shouted ashore as the
current gripped the boat. “And there won’t be any more walking around
rapids and losing time waiting to pick you up!”
What took them ten minutes by river, took Charles half an hour by land,
and while they waited for him at the head of Lake Bennett they passed the
time of day with several dilapidated old-timers on their way out. The
famine news was graver than ever. The North-west Mounted Police,
stationed at the foot of Lake Marsh where the gold-rushers entered
Canadian territory, were refusing to let a man past who did not carry
with him seven hundred pounds of grub. In Dawson City a thousand men,
with dog-teams, were waiting the freeze-up to come out over the ice. The
trading companies could not fill their grub-contracts, and partners were
cutting the cards to see which should go and which should stay and work
the claims.
“That settles it,” Charles announced, when he learned of the action of
the mounted police on the boundary. “Old Man, you might as well start
back now.”
“Climb aboard!” Liverpool commanded. “We’re going to Klondike, and old
dad is going along.”
A shift of gale to the south gave them a fair wind down Lake Bennett,
before which they ran under a huge sail made by Liverpool. The heavy
weight of outfit gave such ballast that he cracked on as a daring sailor
should when moments counted. A shift of four points into the south-west,
coming just at the right time as they entered upon Caribou Crossing,
drove them down that connecting link to lakes Tagish and Marsh. In
stormy sunset and twilight—they made the dangerous crossing of Great
Windy Arm, wherein they beheld two other boat-loads of gold-rushers
capsize and drown.
Charles was for beaching for the night, but Liverpool held on, steering
down Tagish by the sound of the surf on the shoals and by the occasional
shore-fires that advertised wrecked or timid argonauts. At four in the
morning, he aroused Charles. Old Tarwater, shiveringly awake, heard
Liverpool order Crayton aft beside him at the steering-sweep, and also
heard the one-sided conversation.
“Just listen, friend Charles, and keep your own mouth shut,” Liverpool
began. “I want you to get one thing into your head and keep it there:
_old dad’s going by the police_. _Understand_? _He’s going by_. When
they examine our outfit, old dad’s got a fifth share in it, savvee?
That’ll put us all ’way under what we ought to have, but we can bluff it
through. Now get this, and get it hard: _there ain’t going to be any
fall-down on this bluff_—”
“If you think I’d give away on the old codger—” Charles began
indignantly.
“You thought that,” Liverpool checked him, “because I never mentioned any
such thing. Now—get me and get me hard: I don’t care what you’ve been
thinking. It’s what you’re going to think. We’ll make the police post
some time this afternoon, and we’ve got to get ready to pull the bluff
without a hitch, and a word to the wise is plenty.”
“If you think I’ve got it in my mind—” Charles began again.
“Look here,” Liverpool shut him off. “I don’t know what’s in your mind.
I don’t want to know. I want you to know what’s in my mind. If there’s
any slip-up, if old dad gets turned back by the police, I’m going to pick
out the first quiet bit of landscape and take you ashore on it. And then
I’m going to beat you up to the Queen’s taste. Get me, and get me hard.
It ain’t going to be any half-way beating, but a real, two-legged,
two-fisted, he-man beating. I don’t expect I’ll kill you, but I’ll come
damn near to half-killing you.”
“But what can I do?” Charles almost whimpered.
“Just one thing,” was Liverpool’s final word. “You just pray. You pray
so hard that old dad gets by the police that he does get by. That’s all.
Go back to your blankets.”
Before they gained Lake Le Barge, the land was sheeted with snow that
would not melt for half a year. Nor could they lay their boat at will
against the bank, for the rim-ice was already forming. Inside the mouth
of the river, just ere it entered Lake Le Barge, they found a hundred
storm-bound boats of the argonauts. Out of the north, across the full
sweep of the great lake, blew an unending snow gale. Three mornings they
put out and fought it and the cresting seas it drove that turned to ice
as they fell in-board. While the others broke their hearts at the oars,
Old Tarwater managed to keep up just sufficient circulation to survive by
chopping ice and throwing it overboard.
Each day for three days, beaten to helplessness, they turned tail on the
battle and ran back into the sheltering river. By the fourth day, the
hundred boats had increased to three hundred, and the two thousand
argonauts on board knew that the great gale heralded the freeze-up of Le
Barge. Beyond, the rapid rivers would continue to run for days, but
unless they got beyond, and immediately, they were doomed to be frozen in
for six months to come.
“This day we go through,” Liverpool announced. “We turn back for
nothing. And those of us that dies at the oars will live again and go on
pulling.”
And they went through, winning half the length of the lake by nightfall
and pulling on through all the night hours as the wind went down, falling
asleep at the oars and being rapped awake by Liverpool, toiling on
through an age-long nightmare while the stars came out and the surface of
the lake turned to the unruffledness of a sheet of paper and froze
skin-ice that tinkled like broken glass as their oar-blades shattered it.
As day broke clear and cold, they entered the river, with behind them a
sea of ice. Liverpool examined his aged passenger and found him helpless
and almost gone. When he rounded the boat to against the rim-ice to
build a fire and warm up Tarwater inside and out, Charles protested
against such loss of time.
“This ain’t business, so don’t you come horning in,” Liverpool informed
him. “I’m running the boat trip. So you just climb out and chop
firewood, and plenty of it. I’ll take care of dad. You, Anson, make a
fire on the bank. And you, Bill, set up the Yukon stove in the boat.
Old dad ain’t as young as the rest of us, and for the rest of this voyage
he’s going to have a fire on board to sit by.”
All of which came to pass; and the boat, in the grip of the current, like
a river steamer with smoke rising from the two joints of stove-pipe,
grounded on shoals, hung up on split currents, and charged rapids and
canyons, as it drove deeper into the Northland winter. The Big and
Little Salmon rivers were throwing mush-ice into the main river as they
passed, and, below the riffles, anchor-ice arose from the river bottom
and coated the surface with crystal scum. Night and day the rim-ice
grew, till, in quiet places, it extended out a hundred yards from shore.
And Old Tarwater, with all his clothes on, sat by the stove and kept the
fire going. Night and day, not daring to stop for fear of the imminent
freeze-up, they dared to run, an increasing mushiness of ice running with
them.
“What ho, old hearty?” Liverpool would call out at times.
“Cheer O,” Old Tarwater had learned to respond.
“What can I ever do for you, son, in payment?” Tarwater, stoking the
fire, would sometimes ask Liverpool, beating now one released hand and
now the other as he fought for circulation where he steered in the
freezing stern-sheets.
“Just break out that regular song of yours, old Forty-Niner,” was the
invariable reply.
And Tarwater would lift his voice in the cackling chant, as he lifted it
at the end, when the boat swung in through driving cake-ice and moored to
the Dawson City bank, and all waterfront Dawson pricked its ears to hear
the triumphant pæan:
Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece,
Charles did it, but he did it so discreetly that none of his party, least
of all the sailor, ever learned of it. He saw two great open barges
being filled up with men, and, on inquiry, learned that these were
grubless ones being rounded up and sent down the Yukon by the Committee
of Safety. The barges were to be towed by the last little steamboat in
Dawson, and the hope was that Fort Yukon, where lay the stranded
steamboats, would be gained before the river froze. At any rate, no
matter what happened to them, Dawson would be relieved of their
grub-consuming presence. So to the Committee of Safety Charles went,
privily to drop a flea in its ear concerning Tarwater’s grubless,
moneyless, and aged condition. Tarwater was one of the last gathered in,
and when Young Liverpool returned to the boat, from the bank he saw the
barges in a run of cake-ice, disappearing around the bend below
Moose-hide Mountain.
Running in cake-ice all the way, and several times escaping jams in the
Yukon Flats, the barges made their hundreds of miles of progress farther
into the north and froze up cheek by jowl with the grub-fleet. Here,
inside the Arctic Circle, Old Tarwater settled down to pass the long
winter. Several hours’ work a day, chopping firewood for the steamboat
companies, sufficed to keep him in food. For the rest of the time there
was nothing to do but hibernate in his log cabin.
Warmth, rest, and plenty to eat, cured his hacking cough and put him in
as good physical condition as was possible for his advanced years. But,
even before Christmas, the lack of fresh vegetables caused scurvy to
break out, and disappointed adventurer after disappointed adventurer took
to his bunk in abject surrender to this culminating misfortune. Not so
Tarwater. Even before the first symptoms appeared on him, he was putting
into practice his one prescription, namely, exercise. From the junk of
the old trading post he resurrected a number of rusty traps, and from one
of the steamboat captains he borrowed a rifle.
Thus equipped, he ceased from wood-chopping, and began to make more than
a mere living. Nor was he downhearted when the scurvy broke out on his
own body. Ever he ran his trap-lines and sang his ancient chant. Nor
could the pessimist shake his surety of the three hundred thousand of
Alaskan gold he as going to shake out of the moss-roots.
“But this ain’t gold-country,” they told him.
“Gold is where you find it, son, as I should know who was mining before
you was born, ’way back in Forty-Nine,” was his reply. “What was Bonanza
Creek but a moose-pasture? No miner’d look at it; yet they washed
five-hundred-dollar pans and took out fifty million dollars. Eldorado
was just as bad. For all you know, right under this here cabin, or right
over the next hill, is millions just waiting for a lucky one like me to
come and shake it out.”
At the end of January came his disaster. Some powerful animal that he
decided was a bob-cat, managing to get caught in one of his smaller
traps, dragged it away. A heavy snow-fall put a stop midway to his
pursuit, losing the trail for him and losing himself. There were but
several hours of daylight each day between the twenty hours of
intervening darkness, and his efforts in the grey light and continually
falling snow succeeded only in losing him more thoroughly. Fortunately,
when winter snow falls in the Northland the thermometer invariably rises;
so, instead of the customary forty and fifty and even sixty degrees below
zero, the temperature remained fifteen below. Also, he was warmly clad
and had a full matchbox. Further to mitigate his predicament, on the
fifth day he killed a wounded moose that weighed over half a ton. Making
his camp beside it on a spruce-bottom, he was prepared to last out the
winter, unless a searching party found him or his scurvy grew worse.
But at the end of two weeks there had been no sign of search, while his
scurvy had undeniably grown worse. Against his fire, banked from outer
cold by a shelter-wall of spruce-boughs, he crouched long hours in sleep
and long hours in waking. But the waking hours grew less, becoming
semi-waking or half-dreaming hours as the process of hibernation worked
their way with him. Slowly the sparkle point of consciousness and
identity that was John Tarwater sank, deeper and deeper, into the
profounds of his being that had been compounded ere man was man, and
while he was becoming man, when he, first of all animals, regarded
himself with an introspective eye and laid the beginnings of morality in
foundations of nightmare peopled by the monsters of his own
ethic-thwarted desires.
Like a man in fever, waking to intervals of consciousness, so Old
Tarwater awoke, cooked his moose-meat, and fed the fire; but more and
more time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was day-dream and what
was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness. And here, in the
unforgetable crypts of man’s unwritten history, unthinkable and
unrealizable, like passages of nightmare or impossible adventures of
lunacy, he encountered the monsters created of man’s first morality that
ever since have vexed him into the spinning of fantasies to elude them or
do battle with them.
In short, weighted by his seventy years, in the vast and silent
loneliness of the North, Old Tarwater, as in the delirium of drug or
anæsthetic, recovered within himself, the infantile mind of the child-man
of the early world. It was in the dusk of Death’s fluttery wings that
Tarwater thus crouched, and, like his remote forebear, the child-man,
went to myth-making, and sun-heroizing, himself hero-maker and the hero
in quest of the immemorable treasure difficult of attainment.
Either must he attain the treasure—for so ran the inexorable logic of the
shadow-land of the unconscious—or else sink into the all-devouring sea,
the blackness eater of the light that swallowed to extinction the sun
each night . . . the sun that arose ever in rebirth next morning in the
east, and that had become to man man’s first symbol of immortality
through rebirth. All this, in the deeps of his unconsciousness (the
shadowy western land of descending light), was the near dusk of Death
down into which he slowly ebbed.
But how to escape this monster of the dark that from within him slowly
swallowed him? Too deep-sunk was he to dream of escape or feel the prod
of desire to escape. For him reality had ceased. Nor from within the
darkened chamber of himself could reality recrudesce. His years were too
heavy upon him, the debility of disease and the lethargy and torpor of
the silence and the cold were too profound. Only from without could
reality impact upon him and reawake within him an awareness of reality.
Otherwise he would ooze down through the shadow-realm of the unconscious
into the all-darkness of extinction.
But it came, the smash of reality from without, crashing upon his ear
drums in a loud, explosive snort. For twenty days, in a temperature that
had never risen above fifty below, no breath of wind had blown movement,
no slightest sound had broken the silence. Like the smoker on the opium
couch refocusing his eyes from the spacious walls of dream to the narrow
confines of the mean little room, so Old Tarwater stared vague-eyed
before him across his dying fire, at a huge moose that stared at him in
startlement, dragging a wounded leg, manifesting all signs of extreme
exhaustion; it, too, had been straying blindly in the shadow-land, and
had wakened to reality only just ere it stepped into Tarwater’s fire.
He feebly slipped the large fur mitten lined with thickness of wool from
his right hand. Upon trial he found the trigger finger too numb for
movement. Carefully, slowly, through long minutes, he worked the bare
hand inside his blankets, up under his fur _parka_, through the chest
openings of his shirts, and into the slightly warm hollow of his left
arm-pit. Long minutes passed ere the finger could move, when, with equal
slowness of caution, he gathered his rifle to his shoulder and drew bead
upon the great animal across the fire.
At the shot, of the two shadow-wanderers, the one reeled downward to the
dark and the other reeled upward to the light, swaying drunkenly on his
scurvy-ravaged legs, shivering with nervousness and cold, rubbing
swimming eyes with shaking fingers, and staring at the real world all
about him that had returned to him with such sickening suddenness. He
shook himself together, and realized that for long, how long he did not
know, he had bedded in the arms of Death. He spat, with definite
intention, heard the spittle crackle in the frost, and judged it must be
below and far below sixty below. In truth, that day at Fort Yukon, the
spirit thermometer registered seventy-five degrees below zero, which,
since freezing-point is thirty-two above, was equivalent to one hundred
and seven degrees of frost.
Slowly Tarwater’s brain reasoned to action. Here, in the vast alone,
dwelt Death. Here had come two wounded moose. With the clearing of the
sky after the great cold came on, he had located his bearings, and he
knew that both wounded moose had trailed to him from the east.
Therefore, in the east, were men—whites or Indians he could not tell, but
at any rate men who might stand by him in his need and help moor him to
reality above the sea of dark.
He moved slowly, but he moved in reality, girding himself with rifle,
ammunition, matches, and a pack of twenty pounds of moose-meat. Then, an
Argus rejuvenated, albeit lame of both legs and tottery, he turned his
back on the perilous west and limped into the sun-arising, re-birthing
east. . . .
Days later—how many days later he was never to know—dreaming dreams and
seeing visions, cackling his old gold-chant of Forty-Nine, like one
drowning and swimming feebly to keep his consciousness above the
engulfing dark, he came out upon the snow-slope to a canyon and saw below
smoke rising and men who ceased from work to gaze at him. He tottered
down the hill to them, still singing; and when he ceased from lack of
breath they called him variously: Santa Claus, Old Christmas, Whiskers,
the Last of the Mohicans, and Father Christmas. And when he stood among
them he stood very still, without speech, while great tears welled out of
his eyes. He cried silently, a long time, till, as if suddenly
bethinking himself, he sat down in the snow with much creaking and
crackling of his joints, and from this low vantage point toppled sidewise
and fainted calmly and easily away.