North

On Myrtle Creek, six miles above its mouth, the Gordons selected a cabin site, close against the shoulder of a mountain, where a thicket of spruce promised some protection against winter gales. And it was in the building of this cabin that they came first to realize the real comradery, the esprit de corps of the men of the Koyukuk. For the two or three hundred white men who live upon the Koyukuk and its tributaries, all but a half-dozen of whom are grouped far within the Arctic Circle, more than six hundred miles above the river’s confluence with the Yukon, and isolated as few other camps in the North are isolated in the land of the strong cold and the long dark, count themselves more a family than a community. A man strikes it lucky, and the whole Koyukuk rejoices. Another meets misfortune, disease or accident, and down he goes for medical attention—Fairbanks—Vancouver—Seattle—and the Koyukuk pays the bills. And in no other gold camp in the world is it the common practice when a man “goes broke” for another more fortunate than he to invite him to “take yer pan an’ go down on my claim an’ git out what you need.”

And so, in the building of the cabin. Hardly had Gordon felled the first tree when he was suddenly confronted by a bearded giant whose faded overalls were tucked into a pair of rubber boots: “Hello, neighbor!” greeted the man, “Goin’ to locate? That’s good. I’m Pete Enright, half a mile up the creek.”

“Gordon’s my name, Old Man Gordon, they call me down Dawson way. Yes, guess I’ll try my luck here.”

“She’s spotted, Gordon, remember she’s spotted. Lots of gold if you can only find it. Don’t git down-hearted. She’s here, but she lays in pockets.”

Attracted by the sound of voices, Mrs. Gordon and Lou appeared from the little tent pitched close beside the creek.

“Well, for gosh sakes!” cried Enright, staring in surprise at the two. “Ladies! Real white ladies on Myrtle!”

“My wife an’ daughter,” introduced Gordon, “This is Pete Enright, our neighbor just above.”

“You all’s skookum, all right. First ladies on Myrtle, almost the first on the Koyukuk. No wonder you didn’t stick around Dawson. They tell me the whole Yukon country is gummed up with shorthorns an’ chechakos, till a man ain’t got elbow room for to swing a pick. You all’s moose chewers all right, an’ you jist nach’ly had to come where the moose chewers is. Well, I got to go. So long, folks, see you agin. Don’t cut ’em too long, Gordon. Little cabins is easier het than big uns. She gits away down there when the strong cold’s on. Fifty below is common, sixty ain’t nothin’ to brag about, an’ they claim she’s hit way below seventy. My thermometer thicks up so’s she ain’t no good at sixty-seven, an’ I know she gits colder, but I can’t measure it. The cold’s all right when yer fixed fer it. But she’s God’s own country—no shorthorns nor chechakos—plenty room to move around in. So long.”

The man disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared. The three Gordons smiled. “Nice and hearty for a neighbor,” said Mrs. Gordon. “Down below, the way it is now, if we’d have located within half a mile of one of those chechakos, he’d have been growling about our crowding in on him.”

“Different breed of pups up here,” replied her husband. “All malamutes an’ huskies—no mongrels.” The women returned to their duties about the tent, and Gordon resumed his chopping.

It was nearly noon the next day when eight men, headed by Pete Enright, threaded their way through the spruce timber, and came to a halt before Gordon. Each man carried an ax. “Hello, Gordon!” Enright greeted, and turned to his followers. “Boys, this here’s Old Man Gordon, I was tellin’ you about.” He proceeded to introduce each man by name, and when he had finished, addressed them. “All right, boys, go to it!

“Wouldn’t make it no bigger’n ten by twelve, Gordon. Mine’s six by eight—warm as hell, but no room. There’s only one of me, though.”

At Enright’s bidding, the men scattered about the timber and soon Myrtle Creek rang to the song of axes.

“Where’d they all come from?” asked Gordon, as Enright sank his ax to the helve into a standing tree.

“Come from? They’re all Myrtle Creekers. I mushed on down the creek an’ gathered ’em up. The Slate Creek boys all be growling ’cause I didn’t let them in on it, but, shucks, there’s enough of us here to roll up the cabin, an’ chink it an’ throw up a dog shelter, an’ cut yer winter’s wood in a couple days or so.”

“I’m sure obliged,” said Gordon, “I’ll slip over to the tent an’ tell ma to cook up an extra batch of grub.”

“Not by a damn sight!” cried Enright. “We didn’t come up here to eat off’n you all. We come to roll up a cabin. An’ we packed our own grub.”

“I’ll not permit it!” cried Gordon. “Ye’ll eat my grub, or ye’ll not work on my cabin! Who d’ye think I am to——”

Enright laid a huge hand on Gordon’s shoulder, “Hold on, Gordon,” he said, “You listen to me. You ain’t on the Yukon, now—you’re on the Koyukuk. Our ways is a little different here, than some other places. But there’s reasons for it. Take this grub business. It’s a hell of a job to pack grub up from Coldfoot. You’ve figgered yer grub to run you till a certain time—everyone does. Of course if it was only one man, fer a few meals it wouldn’t cut no figger. But there’s eight of us fer may be three or four days, an’ we ain’t what you might say light eaters. Anyhow we’d make a hell of a hole in any man’s grub pile. Now, we’d all be eatin’ our own grub anyhow so it’ll last as long as it was figgered to last. Hell, man! You might better roll up yer own cabin than be et out of grub. On the Koyukuk we like to do one another a good turn. An’ when we do we don’t want no half ways about it, neither. All we got up here is each other.”

Four days later the eight men returned to their claims, leaving the Gordons in possession of the largest and most completely equipped cabin on Myrtle. Ten by twelve, it stood at a sharp bend of the creek surrounded by the thicket of spruce, all chinked, banked, and furnished, even to a rocking chair which one of the men had devised for the comfort of Mrs. Gordon. Nor did the cabin alone bespeak the handiwork of the miners, for conveniently grouped about it were an ample dog shelter, a pole meat cache, and a huge pile of dry wood, all chopped and ready for the stove, a reserve supply against the coming of the strong cold.

During the fall Gordon prospected the bars up and down the creek, staking several likely locations and panning, before the freeze-up, considerably better than wages.

When snow fell two men on Slate Creek “went pardners,” and having no use for two dog outfits, Gordon bought a team of six good dogs and a sled. Then he and Lou took the outfit and struck into the hills for caribou, returning a few days later with six fine carcases which were hoisted onto the meat cache.

The days rapidly shortened, and with the long nights came the cold. Gordon was burning in, now, on a bar close to the cabin. Each day at noon the sun hung lower and lower in the heavens, his rays weakened, and the shadows lengthened upon the snow. At last came the day when sunset followed sunrise with no interval of time between, and thereafter for many long days the only sunlight to be seen was the noontime gilding of distant mountain peaks. Daylight came to mean dim twilight, and a great deal of Gordon’s work was done by the light of the moon and stars.

But he worked with a will, for his frequent test pans showed that he had struck pay. Lou helped, even with the cutting and carrying of cordwood to keep up the fire that thawed the gravel, and when she was not at her father’s side she was off in the hills with the dogs and her little twenty-two rifle with which she added no small contribution to the family larder in the way of rabbits and ptarmigan. As Gordon chopped his wood, and laboriously man-hauled it on a rude travois to his workings, as he tended his fire, and as he shoveled out his layer of thawed gravel, his thoughts were always upon the time when he could afford a “b’iler” to loosen his gravel with steam. The boiler got to be an obsession. He talked boiler for hours on end to his wife and daughter, and he talked it to the men of Myrtle and Slate Creeks when chance threw them together. In vain the men argued that the cost of bringing a boiler into the Myrtle Creek country would be prohibitive, and that even if one were brought the spotted nature of the workings would necessitate its frequent removal to new locations. But Gordon remained obdurate. And amused, the men went their ways and among themselves dubbed him B’iler Gordon.

At Christmas time the Gordons made the trip to Coldfoot, as did most of the inhabitants of the creeks, for the midwinter trading. Beside the white people there was a goodly sprinkling of Indians and Kobuk Eskimos whose chief aim in life seemed to be to squat upon the floor of the trading room and listen with unconcealed delight to the scratchy music that wheezed from the horn of a cheap phonograph. The fact that they understood no word of the ragtime songs and talking records seemed to detract in no slightest particular from their delight, as over and over again the dozen or more badly worn records were proudly fed into the machine by one of their number who had been instructed in its manipulation.

Being the only white women with the exception of the dancing girls, Mrs. Gordon and Lou were the invited guests of the trader’s wife. The men foregathered in the saloon which, with its dance hall, divided honors equally as to popular diversion, with the evening meeting conducted in the trading room by an itinerant missionary.

Two or three days would ordinarily have sufficed for the midwinter trading and its attendant social activities, but upon Christmas day the strong cold fastened upon the Koyukuk. The thermometer, which up to that time had hung between forty below, and ten above zero, on Christmas day dropped suddenly to sixty below. On the day following it was still sixty, and thereafter for ten days the warmest record was fifty-four below.

The men of the creeks waited for a let-up. There is a saying in the North that trailing at fifty below is all right as long as it’s all right. Which means that if everything goes smoothly and without accident, no particular harm will result. But who can confidently expect to trail without accident? At fifty below the one absolute essential to life is constant motion. No clothing, however warm, that a man can possibly pile onto himself and pretend to leave any freedom of movement for walking, will protect him from the grip of the frost unless he keep moving. Any circumstance that necessitates a halt without shelter spells disaster. A broken dog harness, a damaged sled, or worst of all, encountering water on the ice, means a halt, and as nothing can be accomplished with the hand encased in heavy mittens, it also means baring the fingers to remedy the evil, and baring the fingers at fifty below for more than a minute or two at a time means that the fingers will freeze to the bone.

Water on the ice at fifty below? More chance of it than at any warmer temperature, for at fifty the creeks freeze solid to the bottom in the shallows, and the water thus dammed beneath the ice bursts through and comes rushing down in a torrent on top of the ice, but under the snow, so that before he knows it the unwary trail musher may find himself ankle deep in water, which at fifty below spells death unless he can immediately reach shelter and a fire. Nor can the danger be averted by forsaking the creeks, for in the land of the strong cold the level surface of the rivers and the creeks are the only practicable highways. And these things the men of the Koyukuk knew, and knowing them, waited for the let-up.

And as they waited the talk was of gold. Old Man Gordon discoursed at length upon the possibilities of a “b’iler.” Someone spread the report of rich strikes further up the Koyukuk on Nolan Creek, and on Wiseman. Many signified their intention of hitting out for the new district in the spring. But Gordon was not one of these. He swore he would stay where he was, and would bring in a “b’iler” and show them all that the real bonanza of the Koyukuk was Myrtle. A stand in which he was upheld by Crim, the trader, and some few of the miners.

The morning of the fourth of January, with the thermometer at 30 below, saw a general exodus from Coldfoot. And as the sourdoughs mushed back to their claims, the Gordon sled was weighted with more than its freighting of grub, for when Lou had casually mentioned within hearing of some of the men in the trading store that she had read every scrap of paper in the cabin, there had been a general ferreting among the cabins of Coldfoot with the result that fifty pounds or more of well-thumbed books, and magazines were added to Gordon’s load.

The coming of spring brought confirmation of the rumor of a strike on Nolan Creek. Coldfoot stampeded. The miners, all but a straggling few, hit the trail for the new diggings. The saloon followed the miners and the trading post followed the saloon. Coldfoot was dead. And Nolan became the metropolis of the Koyukuk.

Among the few who remained were the Gordons. Disregarding the advice of friends, the stubborn Scot stayed on Myrtle, insisting that when he should bring his “b’iler” in and begin thawing the gravel with steam, they would all stampede back to Coldfoot.

When he had finished sluicing his dump he weighed up dust enough to pay Crim, outfit himself for another year, and put aside a considerable sum toward the purchase and transportation of his beloved “b’iler.”

Late in the fall Mrs. Gordon succumbed to an acute attack of appendicitis, and was buried by the grief-stricken husband and daughter upon a wooded knoll just behind the cabin. After the death of his wife, Gordon drew more and more within himself, and more and more he became obsessed with his one idea—his “b’iler.” And so for three years he washed the bars in summer, and burned into the gravel in winter, the while his “b’iler” fund grew slowly.

In the meantime, quite without the old man’s notice, Lou had developed from awkward girlhood into full rounded womanhood. And a very beautiful woman she was, the soft curves of her figure giving no hint of the splendid muscles that rippled and played beneath the velvet softness of her skin—muscles that rendered her absolutely tireless on the trail, and allowed her to swing an ax like a man. Perfect health steeled her nerves to an almost uncanny accuracy with the rifle. She did all the hunting, now, and no ptarmigan was brought into the Gordon cabin that had not been shot clean through the head with the twenty-two, or was any caribou hoisted to the meat cache that had not been instantly killed by a well-placed shot from the thirty-forty.

Left to her own resources, the girl divided the time not occupied with her simple household duties between hunting, and reading, and the breeding of dogs.

In the magazines which she devoured from cover to cover, she had occasionally run across an article upon the selective breeding of animals. One such article dealt with race horses, another with dairy cattle, and the information contained therein she eagerly digested, and proceeded to apply to the breeding of dogs.

Gordon took scant interest in her “putterin’ wi’ the dogs” and gladly turned over their entire management to her, allowing her to keep the profits of the venture for her own. By the end of the third year these profits had mounted to a tidy sum, notwithstanding the fact that she used of it largely in the purchase of books and magazines whenever and wherever she found opportunity, and also in the purchase of materials for the underclothing which she fashioned by her own handiwork into garments that copied those in the fashion plates of the magazines to the utmost nicety. Her outer garments, of fur in the winter and squaw cloth in summer, were the strictly utilitarian garments of the land of the strong cold.

Quick to realize their superiority, the girl concentrated on the two native breeds of dogs, the malamutes and the huskies. And the pride of her stud was a great upstanding brute of a dog called Skookum, whose mother a pure strain husky, she had mated with an old, but magnificently muscled husky she had bought cheap in Nolan, because his temper had soured with age until his owner feared to handle him. Later she shot him when in a fume of wolfish ferocity he ran amuck and killed two of his own pups. Upon Skookum, the sole survivor of the litter, the girl lavished a world of affection, and a wealth of patient training. For, from the first she had seen in the tawny, amber eyed puppy the making of a great dog, inheriting as he had the superb physical build of his father, and it is true, his father’s wolfish temper, but blended with it the staunch loyalty and sagacity of his mother who was a famous trail dog on the Koyukuk.

The fame of Lou Gordon as a breeder of dogs had traveled the length of the river. She drove a ten dog team now, five malamutes and five huskies, and each dog in the team had been carefully selected from the pick of her kennels. Of this team Skookum was the leader, and few indeed were the trail tricks his mistress had not taught him. On the narrow trails of the Koyukuk the tandem rig was used almost exclusively, and following the leader came the other four huskies, and behind them the five malamutes. Thus, the longer geared huskies broke trail for the shorter legged malamutes which in turn compensated by bearing the brunt of the pull. As, among all her dogs, Skookum was the girl’s favorite, so was he her constant companion, he alone being allowed to run at large.

Although not an inherent fighter like the malamute, the husky breed develops now and then a wonderful fighter. Skookum was such a dog, his longer legs and heavier body giving him a decided advantage over any malamute, and added to this physical advantage was the sagacious cunning of his generalship. Before he was two years old he had fought his way to the leadership of the team, displacing old Kamik, a crafty and incorrigible fighter, and an equally incorrigible thief.

Lou Gordon knew dogs. She had picked Skookum for a leader from tiniest puppyhood, and to that end she bent all her energy upon his training. She talked to him as she would have talked to a human companion, and it was her fancy that he understood every word she spoke. While in no sense a demonstrative dog, Skookum had nothing of the supreme indifference of the malamute. His smouldering yellow eyes followed her every movement, and by little signs and quirks of expression, he gave evidence of understanding. A raised eyebrow, a single wag of the tail, a pricking of the mobile ears, and on rare occasions, a lick of the long red tongue upon her face or hand, told the girl as plainly as words what was passing in the great brute’s mind.

There was nothing of the brutal in Lou Gordon’s training of her dogs. When occasion demanded she used the whip, and used it unsparingly, but always in the correction of an acquired fault, that if persisted in would detract from the value of the dog, or of the team as a unit. She never punished a dog for fighting, nor did she ever punish a hungry dog for stealing. Many hungry dogs came her way—dogs that she was able to buy cheap because through abuse and inadequate feeding they had become of little value to their owners. These dogs she took home, and by judicious handling and feeding developed them into able-bodied trail dogs that commanded top prices.

The care and management of from fifteen to thirty dogs was no small task. She owned and operated with the help of an Indian boy her own fish nets, and dried her own fish. She hunted caribou, and tried out her own tallow. For she early learned that on the trail her dogs could not be kept in condition on a straight fish or meat diet. She bought corn meal and rice by the hundred-weight, and when working, her dogs always got one feed a day of cooked ration, boiled rice or cornmeal, mixed with tallow.

The result was that her own team was by all odds the best team on the Koyukuk, and the dogs she offered for sale on her semi-annual trip to Nolan and Wiseman, were eagerly snapped up at top prices.

And so it was, at the approach of Christmas, on the fourth year of their residence on the Koyukuk, father and daughter were living alone on Myrtle, for the last of the others had long since gravitated to the new camps, the old man burning, digging, and dreaming of his “b’iler,” and the girl busy with her dogs and her books.