Читать книгу Arctic Daughter - Jean Aspen - Страница 15

CHAPTER 3

Beautiful as the wilderness is, I don’t recall enjoying it that first summer. Somehow we had expected the sweetness of an extended hike and were unprepared for the continual stress that faced us. We found ourselves in the position of wild animals, dependent upon the land, but unlike them we were neither highly adapted nor specifically trained for this role.

I heard the Indians leave early, the guttural growl of their big engine hushing the woods. The sound faded as they slipped down current and was lost in the song of the river. It was the first of July.

It felt good to be alone. I lay still, listening to Phil’s deep breathing. The ceaseless babble of water soothed me, tempting me back into the fairyland of sleep, where I had been doing . . . what? I couldn’t quite remember. Closing my eyes, I shut out the day ahead and listened. The river sounded like people all talking at once, the pitch seeming to rise and fall. Sunlight dappled my face, teasing me. I rolled onto my elbows. The screen door of the tent was dotted with mosquitoes and I shook it before zipping down one corner to let Net-Chet-Siil out.

The Arctic was no longer in bloom. The succulent green of deep summer was swollen with mature plants coming to fruition. Many had burst from hidden roots, rocketing into the brief summer on energy stored the year before. I call this country “Arctic” because it is north of the Arctic Circle, but the ecosystem is better referred to as taiga. Unlike the tundra of high Arctic, lower vegetation here is mostly boreal forest of spindly white and black spruce.

We were camped on a thinly spruced cutbank. I lay on my stomach and studied the bright ground cover a few inches from my face. Each curl of moss was perfect to its kind. An earthy smell rose from the warm carpet to mingle with the spice of Labrador tea and the rich vanilla scent of spruce bark. The river had changed too. Semitransparent like fine jade, it tumbled over large stones. Close green hills descended to gravel bars, obscuring the mountains beyond.

“They’ve gone?” Phil asked.

“Uh-huh.” I dropped my gaze to his upturned face and kissed him on the lumpy bridge of his nose. “I was just contemplating getting up.”

Even from the tent I could see that the flies were busy with our half-dried moose meat, tasting it with their feet for moist crevices in which to deposit eggs. A parting gift from Ambrose, we had cut the meat into strips to hang near the fire the evening before.

Glancing back at Phil, I could see that he was already repacking in his mind. Net-Chet bounced forward at the sound of our voices, demanding to be readmitted.

“No!” I snapped, unhooking her sharp claws from the frail mosquito netting. “Now go on!”

“Looks like a nice day,” Phil announced, sitting up and reaching for his red-checked wool shirt. The faded blue T-shirt he slept in looked dingy. He stretched and glanced at his watch. Then he shook his wrist and listened a moment. “It’s dead.”

He looked at me and we both shrugged. “Who cares what time it is,” I answered.

“Isn’t it good to be here?” he grinned.

“I wish I knew where here was. When do we get on the map?”

“We’ll just have to keep comparing the map with the country until we get them matched. Our map starts on this side of the old gold town, so if we find it, we’ll know exactly where we are.”

“Robert said it isn’t really on the river anymore,” I reminded him. I was pulling on my jeans and I lay back to tug up and zip them. “We could miss it.”

Phil opened the tent door and crawled out on hands and knees. “I’m going to start loading the canoe,” he said over his shoulder.

“I want to do some laundry before we start.”

Had we known that we were scarcely halfway from the village to the old ghost town, perhaps things would have seemed different, but that morning we were full of hope.

Two hard days and five miles later, we stood panting in the shallows, leaning heavily against the tug of the canoe while white water boiled around our knees. We almost didn’t make that one, I thought, staring back down the foaming trough.

The principle of lining a canoe upstream is simple. The craft is worked on a long rope—one end fastened to the bow, the other to the rear thwart. When the stern is pulled in, the canoe ferries out from shore on its keel. A shifting balance of tension is maintained as conditions change. Lining works well with a moderate current and an even bottom. In rapids, however, we needed direct contact with the craft to hold her and it often took all of our combined strength.

I caught Phil’s glance and shook my head. “Not yet.” My arms felt weak and my legs shook with fatigue. Overhead an afternoon thunderstorm growled darkly into the cobalt sky, mounting as we watched. The weather seemed to have changed as we neared the mountains, or perhaps it was only the advancing summer. A warning gust of wind swept upon us, kicking up spray and turning the river a flat, metallic gray as the sun blinked under.

“Well, here it comes,” Phil stated as the first drops hit. He took a firmer grip on the bow decking. “I can handle it from here. Why don’t you go on up to those spruce trees and get a fire started? Here, take the tea things.”

I gave in too easily, and tucking Net-Chet under one arm, ran wobble-kneed over the rocks for the distant forest. My feet were numb from the cold water and my pants clung to my legs. Scattered sheets of blowing rain raked the willows that crowded the nearby bar and flattened the few pioneer plants that poked between stones down on the beach. Ahead loomed the dark, thrashing trees.

I entered the woods abruptly. Humming and swaying, the trees wrapped about me, dense and secret. I cleared a space in the thick moss and kicked into the duff. Beneath the green feathers of sphagnum moss, the years had layered a deep bed of peat interlaced with twigs and punky logs. The flames took easily to the twigs, burrowing into the dry duff with alarming speed.

It was raining hard now. From the relative safety of the forest I could see a little figure out on the river struggling through the driving sheets. A mist rose from the rocks where the rain exploded on impact. Phil became a shadow, a small toiling wraith in a world of gray. Stinging hail joined the deluge, and Net-Chet began to whine as a fine patter sifted through the needles of our shelter. By crouching against the trunk of a tree I managed to avoid most of the rain.

“Quiet, Net-Chet!” I turned on her. Phil was trying to beach the canoe, dragging it onto a rocky spit in search of a place to tie it. I dared not leave the fire to help him. At last he was running up the beach, blindly, head down into the rain. Poor guy, couldn’t get much wetter, I thought.

Phil entered the forest and I seated him on a carpeted hummock of roots, close to the bole of an old spruce. He was soaked and shivering. I poured scalding water over the tea grounds in his stained enamel mug and crawled under the branches with him. His hair was plastered down and streaks of dirt drained into his beard, joining the trapped mosquitoes. Net-Chet was curled up on my only summer coat, so I squatted over the blaze warming my fingers.

“Have some almost jerky,” I offered from a cloth sack. The mist sifting through the trees was becoming a drizzle punctuated with big drops. Lightning scared the gray world beyond the trees. “It tastes pretty good if you don’t look too close. Hey, you know your shirt is running?” I fingered a red stain around his cold, dripping wrist where the dye had leached.

We crouched together, feeling the comfort of wet warmth pass between us, chewing raw, rubbery moose while the storm raged. “Here’s another batch,” Phil said, excising the wriggly pearl of a maggot with the point of his pocketknife.

“Just don’t tell me about it. I’m not looking,” I replied in disgust.

“More protein,” he teased.

I shot him a sour glance. “The cycle is amazing when you think of it. Moose to maggot to fish food in a few weeks.” I closed the cloth game bag and slid it behind us to keep dry. I had made it by sewing two large kerchiefs together. It allowed air circulation while keeping out flies.

The storm rode northward on an expanding evening sky as we gathered up our tea things and carried our squirming puppy back to the canoe. The clean land was tinted tangerine by a low sun. The air felt clammy on our cooled bodies, and cold water spilled into my boots as we pushed the craft back into the current. Within fifty yards we hit a rapid that swamped her. Fighting for every foot of progress, we towed her ashore and unloaded everything, spreading our belongings on the stones to dry.

It was Phil’s twenty-fourth birthday. I baked him a cake in late evening sunlight, using our treasured flour and sugar, baking it before the fire with our folding reflector oven.

One drizzling afternoon a few days later we rounded a bend and stood before the mountains. For the first time, no foothills blocked our view. We grounded the canoe and dropped onto the wet rocks to study the map.

“Where do you suppose the ghost town is?” I asked Phil. “We’ve got to be getting close. Do you think we could have missed it?” We glanced from map to mountains attempting to fit it together. Somewhere nearby was the abandoned gold town. Ahead were dusky blue peaks, jagged and almost naked of trees. Behind us the shaggy, meandering shoreline was lost in a lush belt of foothills, dividing us from the past.

“About four miles to the inch . . .” he shook his head. “It’s hard to tell. The creek we saw yesterday could be this one . . . or maybe this . . .” he traced a muddy finger along the map. “Hope it wasn’t this one or we’ve missed it.”

“Well, I’m not going back.” It had started to rain again and Phil bent over the map, shielding it with his body. From her nest in the canoe, Net-Chet was complaining ever more insistently. The bugs were vicious on the bar, stinging as they bit into my wet face. They seemed to prefer rainy days as long as there was no wind. Irritably, I shoved Lady Grayling, stern first, into the current, playing the rope through my chapped hands to adjust the pitch.

“I’ll take it awhile,” I said, glad for a chance to warm up. I threw my weight into the rope, running it over my right shoulder and using my left hand to control the angle. Water piled into the side of the canoe, forcing it out. The river was shallow and pebbly, hooking slowly into another broad curve. I relaxed, placing each foot with care and feeling the thigh muscles tighten rhythmically, dependably. Step, splash. Step, splash. Slowly the bottom deteriorated into slippery rocks and rushing water. Step, jerk, stumble, tug. The canoe fought back, hanging up, yanking. Progress.

I peered ahead. Did a creek join at the bend? The Indians had told us that the abandoned town was difficult to find. Built near the water in the 1890s, it had been left inland when the river changed course, willows reclaiming the old channel. They said a sternwheeler had come up on the spring flood in those days.

“It’s a stream,” Phil called from the shore a little distance ahead. “Let’s camp and see if we can locate the town in the morning.”

“Got a place picked out?” I asked. My eyes searched the shore for a safe harbor.

“This looks about as good as any.”

Together we heaved the bow firmly aground. I reached into the front seat and pulled up my coat, setting the squalling pup ashore. Phil tied the painters to a large drift log embedded in gravel and fastened the cable around a boulder.

Minutes later I had the tent set up and sleeping bags spread out. Phil unloaded camp gear and lashed the fitted tarp back over the craft. Crawling inside just as the clouds opened, we stripped off our wet clothes and piled them under Net-Chet. From bed I stroked her delicate head and listened to the storm. We lay reading aloud while the rain drummed on the tent fly and fog built up inside the tent.

I tucked my hands between my legs to warm them and tried to forget my hunger. Concentrating on Phil’s voice as he read, I gradually slipped into a dream. I was swimming after a drowning infant. I dove beneath a muddy current and pulled up the lifeless child. As I kicked for shore, I breathed into her lungs, perhaps too hard, for by the time I climbed the beach she had degenerated into two transparent balloons.

I woke in the stillness of gray, midnight overcast. The tent was empty. I lay motionless in the silence listening for Phil’s presence. I could feel the uneven press of stones against my spine and hear the distant murmur of the river to my right. To my left, a soft twittering of sleepy birds delineated the edge of the forest. Then a slight shift in the air brought the scent of wood smoke and I relaxed.

I sat up and reached for the shirt I had used as a pillow. Shaking the dog’s mud from my wet trousers, I forced my legs into them and hunched my way out of the tent. The Arctic had a somber look that evening, chill and drab. Across the rocks I could see the canoe, dark against the mottled water. Nearby, a small fire added the only touch of color, the slight movement of a dark figure squatting over it the only sign of life.

Phil looked up at my approach and smiled. “I chopped up the last of the old moose ribs and boiled them,” he said. Giving the pot a stir and replacing the lid, he ran a spoon under the bail and carefully lifted the blackened little pot from the coals. “See what you think of it. I put in some dried veggies and flour for thickening. Watch out for bone splinters.”

He seated me on a log he had hauled near the fire. I could see the uneven drag marks trailing up the beach.

“Have you fed the dog?” I asked, placing the pot between my feet. I pried up the lid and a sour, meaty smell assailed me in a billow of steam. Phil poured us each a cup of tea and squatted on his haunches across from me.

“I gave her some of the soup.” He hesitated a moment and then said, “I know we decided not to shoot the little tree squirrels, but we have to feed her something . . .”

“Okay,” I answered, not looking up. The thick, grayish soup tasted good. “I guess bringing her was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. He dipped a twig into his tea and fished about. “The trouble with finding a mosquito leg in your tea,” he said, changing the subject, “is you wonder where the rest of it went.”

“Only one?” I smiled.

The next morning was sunny and warm. We discovered a dozen grayling living where the small creek emptied into our river. Grayling are silver fish, twelve to fifteen inches long, with big iridescent dorsal fins of turquoise. They live in clear water and are fun to catch, for you can see them. You often find several living together in some glass-clear “hole.” Like children, Phil and I played along the bank, catching fish and cooking them over the fire in the sunshine.

It was late afternoon before we set out to look for the ghost town and evening was upon us when we discovered it slumbering among the fireweed. The rotting cabins stood quietly, a part of the woods from which they had been fashioned, and yet so different. Washed by three-quarters of a century, there lingered still that strange ugliness that clings to abandoned dwellings. Where once there had been voices, only the song of a white-crowned sparrow, the tired creak of spruce tree, and the gentle quiver of wind in the tall weeds spoke. Through the seasons it had remained, this old cluster of log piles that had been the homes of men.

The cabins, their dirt floors covered with wildflowers, seemed small and dank—mere holes to crawl into out of the snow. Trees sprouted in the narrow doorways and on the warped sod roofs. Rotten wooden barrels that had contained flour or nails, treasures in a wild land, lay scattered in the blooming fireweed. Fallen doghouses built in rows had once confined the hard but necessary lives of slave dogs, long dead.

Many of the cabins were no longer standing. Most were rooflessly tumbling back into the earth. Perhaps thirty people had lived here. A red tree squirrel raced along a naked ridgepole, vibrating at our intrusion, his tail flicking in agitated jerks with each “Chit! Chit! Chit!” I listened for the whisper of dreams from the dark walls and seemed to catch a sigh of loneliness. What becomes of men, I wondered, who strive for the pot of gold and perhaps miss the rainbow? But was I too quick to judge? Perhaps here, too, was someone’s grand adventure.

We rummaged through quaint old garbage: patent medicines, faded newspapers, tools of another era. These tools had made life possible in this land, and the land hasn’t changed. After a long time in the dirty, dim interior of a cabin that still boasted a roof, I stepped into the lavender twilight and came face to face with a wolf. He didn’t look startled or even impressed. He was tan in color with a black face. Standing perhaps three feet at the shoulder, he coolly returned my gaze a long moment before turning with indifference and trotting out of the clearing on long, silent legs. Net-Chet was engaged in searching for a vole and was blissfully ignorant of her close call.

Finding the old gold town put us at last on the map, and we carefully marked each day’s travel with little penciled lines. It was encouraging to see the daily change in the landscape that now marked our upstream progress. The river no longer rambled freely, but was often bounded on one side or the other by a two-hundred-foot cutbank, confining it to a broad glacial cut where it swung from side to side as if seeking escape.

I tried to imagine what the land had looked like ten thousand years ago when a massive ice field capped the Brooks Range and a river of ice had carved this valley. A people very much like ourselves had hunted moose and bear in the Yukon flats, and fished the rivers washing out of the glaciers. In the fall, they picked cranberries and blueberries with their children, and in the spring they saw the ice go out and watched the birds return. They nursed their babies and cared for their old people and told stories around the night fires.

One day the river swung abruptly, butting into the bare bones of a mountain mass. For some time it had paralleled the range as if undecided, then turned resolutely northward, wedging open a wide valley into its secret heart. Soon we were leaving our familiar gray crags behind for another set of landmarks.

As the river began its climb in earnest, we developed a different method for surmounting rapids. These were now strewn with large boulders, “boat eaters” we called them, interspersed with deep holes. Water gushed over slippery rocks the size of basketballs and crumbling bluffs often dropped steeply into the river at a bend, affording no beach. In the past, we had grabbed the bow and muscled the canoe up the watery stairs together. Now one of us braced against a boulder, holding the craft in the turbulence of its wake, while the other worked the rope upstream. Finding secure footing, the one with the rope would haul the canoe (and the person guiding it) hand-over-hand up the racing chute. Already behind us lay nearly a thousand feet of elevation.

We were approaching another fork in the river when we pitched camp on a sandy, white beach late one afternoon. It was a clear, still day and the low-hanging sun gave the country that peculiar golden quality that outlines every detail in color. A few yards upstream a sandspit protruded into the current in graduating shades of blue, sheltering the canoe from the main stream.

There were few mosquitoes on the bar. Their numbers naturally diminish by midsummer. We stripped off our clothes and hung them on small willow bushes to dry. A slight breeze tickled the naked hairs on my back and legs as I worked, but did nothing to deter several bloodsucking flies. They were as long as a finger joint with iridescent, rainbow eyes and sharp, triangular mouths.

I staked down the tent floor as Net-Chet circled my legs, whining. She was never happy until home was established. Pushing in the last peg, I tightened the nylon guy lines. Phil had plucked a small seagull and was heating water to cook it when I plopped down in the warm sand by the fire. A large spider danced away, lugging her egg sack.

“We need to refill Wonderbox,” I said.

“Again?” Phil was squatting near the blaze, positioning the teapot.

“Well, we’re out of pancake mix, oatmeal, sugar, and powdered eggs.”

He looked helplessly at me. “We’ve eaten a third of our supplies.”

“I know, but we have to eat something. And so does Net-Chet, and she eats almost as much as we do. If there were more small game or fish . . .” I trailed off. We both knew the problem. In the far north small animal populations are cyclic. We had seen only four arctic hares all summer and no spruce grouse. Our attempts to fish on the main river had been fruitless. We now ate the tiny tree squirrels.

“Well, we may be hunting big game before too long,” he stated.

“I haven’t seen any of that either,” I said. We stared at one another in silence.

Phil poured boiling water into two mugs and added sand from a plastic bottle. I grinned at him. The day before I had spilled some sugar and he had saved it, dirt and all.

“To my golden retriever,” he smiled, handing me a cup. “The way you jumped into the rapids after that gull I shot.”

“A Bonaparte’s gull. Honestly, Phil. Next it’ll be chickadees,” I teased him. “Here’s mud in your tea.” We sipped in silence. “We might be better off if we ate more. As it is we are dull-witted and weak. Very ineffective.”

“Any way you look at it, it’s a gamble. Use up all our supplies and keep strong to find more, or ration food and starve longer,” he answered.

A vague hunger had come to live with us, an uneasy craving that even a full belly could not quench. We had planned to depend on small game for protein, but instead found ourselves living on diminished servings of starch. A listless apathy haunted our movements and we found ourselves inclined to sleep away long hours, even entire days.

“I feel like I could eat a whole moose myself,” Phil told me seriously. “Waiter! Bring me a moose, medium rare, and a bushel of apples.” Phil was a big fan of apples. His mother would buy them by the box, for he ate eight or ten a day.

“If we do shoot a moose we’ll sit and eat for a week.” I grinned at the thought.

“Can you imagine drying a moose in the summer? Out here?”

He had a point. Curing the horse had been hard work, even with a table, oven, and refrigerator. “I’d like a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich,” I said suddenly.

He leaned forward with a wicked grin. “Well, I’d like a chocolate cream pie with a tender, flaky crust and mounds of real whipped cream.”

He had me there.

Net-Chet rose from her place on my coat and nosed into my lap. She really was a lovely animal, I thought, stroking her silky ears. Similar to a golden collie in color, she had a white diamond on her forehead and snowy ruff and legs. Her tail had the curl of a husky, but her fine bones seemed to promise a smaller dog.