'The freezing part must be easy.' We slogged along the road through an icy mush deeply imprinted by wheel tracks and horse's hooves.

  'Keep your head down, Hank. You'll freeze your eyeballs looking up at the hilltops like that. Why're you doing it, anyway?'

  'I was thinking that the only way out of here would be by airplane. Up and over.' I pointed to the high grey clouds.

  'I thought you had the look of a scarperer. We're nearly to the inn. We can have a few jars and you can tell me about it.'

  The inn, a rough log cabin with mud-caulked and whitewashed walls and floors and furniture that looked to have been hacked out of the trees by hand, had just opened for the day. Reuben bought a bottle of whisky and took two enamel mugs off hooks on the wall. After a toast to drinking itself, I told Reuben Dawes the greatest pack of lies I'd produced up to that time. I'd been tricked into rejoining the Mounties, I said, by a promise of promotion that wasn't forthcoming. I was a victim, I said, of internal politics and rivalry. Talk of this kind is music to a sailor's ears. My time aboard the Sternwood, when I worked my passage from Australia to the United States6, had taught me that sailors bicker and squabble and form and break alliances like school kids. Reuben lapped it up. I went on to say that I had a sweetheart in Montreal and couldn't bear to be separated from her by the length and breadth of Canada. Warming to the theme, and warmed by some good Canadian whisky (the Canadians didn't have Prohibition, which was the only good thing I'd found about the place so far), I told Reuben about Cameron MacKnight. As it happened, this was the name of my father-in-law, who, I fervently hoped, was dead by now back in Australia, but in my fireside chat with Reuben he became an unscrupulous lawyer who was trying to marry my Ellen and take her inheritance. God knows where I got this sort of rubbish from, possibly from the movies, or maybe from hearing my sisters talk about the sloppy novels they read one after another. Reuben, who must have had a damaged liver because he had no capacity for strong drink at all, loved it.

  'A terrible thing,' he said, 'to pluck a young man from his loved one. I loved a girl once myself, I . . .'

  'Yes, yes,' I said, 'but the point is, how do I get away from the bloody place?'

  'Eh?' Reuben was growing confused by this time. There were about twenty men in the place, rough fellows all – beards, slouch hats, woollen caps, greatcoats and half-ton boots. The bar was a long slab of pine atop two barrels and the drinkers leaned against it and the walls. There were two trestle tables with benches pulled up to them and Reuben and I, as the first customers, had the choice spot – two straight-backed chairs by the fire. Everyone was smoking; Reuben and I were rolling cigarettes with his rough sailor's shag and cigars and pipes were contributing to the fug. Occasionally a man leaned across us and spat tobacco juice into the fire. It was a steamy, manly atmosphere, very conducive to getting blind drunk, and Reuben was well on the way.

  'This Fraser bastard is watching me like a hawk,' I said.

  'Bloody Scot,' Reuben slurred, 'all bastards . . .'

  'So I can't see how I can get clear before Dawson City.'

  'Fine place, for a coupla weeks a year . . .'

  'You've been there? I thought you never went ashore?'

  'Not 'zackly ashore. Worked on the river steamers for a while. Yukon River.'

  'Ah.' I said.

  Reuben wagged his finger at me. 'Know what you're thinkin', Hank. Forget it, my son. The Mounties control that bloody river, length 'n' bloody breadth of it. It's the way the thieves an' murderers come in 'n' out, see?'

  'Thieves and murderers? Way up there?'

  'Believe it. Ever hear of Soapy Smith?'7

  'Don't recall the name. Steady, Reuben, don't you think you've had enough?'

  'Gotta finish the bottle. Can't take it on board. Just a drop. Well, ol' Soapy Smith, worst bloody cut-throat in North America. Usta rob people, strip 'em of everything', leave 'em to die in the snow – women, babies . . .'

  'Christ! Where was this?'

  'Up where you goin' – Skagway, th' Yukon.'

  'When?'

  'Ah, well, must've been before the war. 'Bout 1890 . . . somethin'.'

  'Christ, Reuben. We still had bushrangers back in Australia then. Wild blackfellows too, they . . .'

  'Eh? What's that?' He squinted at me from bloodshot eyes.

  'Er . . . nothing. Well, you were saying about the river. Must be other ways of travelling on it apart from steamers. It sounds like the smart way to go.'

  'Oh, it's the smart way all right. You c'n go on the rivers clear to Edmonton, pick up the Canadian Pacific. Take you all the way to Montreal an' your sweet Ellen.'

  'Who? Oh, yes.' I was getting a bit stewed myself by this time. 'Must be boats for sale somewhere.'

  Reuben let out a cackle of laughter. Then he lit his cigarette and burnt his fingers. He swore and dropped the butt in the fire. He looked angry now and I wondered whether he was a fighting drunk. He glared belligerently around the room for a second but the light went out of his eyes and he grinned. 'Roll us 'nother smoke, Hank. Yes, there's other ways of travellin' on the river. Look over there.'

  'At what?' I was having trouble rolling the tobacco and also focussing on the group of men by the bar.

  'You can go down th' river on logs. They let these logs go and they rush along, go for miles . . .' He demonstrated with a sweep of his hand that jolted the elbow of a big, black-bearded man standing behind him. Whisky spilled and flared as drops hit the flames.

  'Easy, you,' the man growled.

  'Easy, nothing!' Reuben got out of his chair and drew himself up to his full five foot six inches. He threw a punch at the beard which ended at about eye level for him, that is to say, halfway down its owner's chest. The punch was caught in a giant fist and Reuben was shoved across the room. He was so drunk that he tried to stay on his feet which meant that he went backwards like a cyclist in reverse and cannoned into the knot of men by the bar. Drinks were spilled and curses were shouted. Another oversized individual took reprisals for losing his whisky by pounding Reuben's head into the bar. This knocked over other mugs and brought more shouts and punches. I tried to sneak out the door but I was tripped by a man careering wildly back from the fray. He grabbed me for support and lurched back into the melee carrying me with him. I took a blow to the chest that would have felled a mule and I dropped to the floor thinking it might be safer there. It wasn't: boots beat a tattoo around my head and I had to scramble across the rough planks, picking up splinters along the way and trying to keep my hands out of the way of the hobnails and metal toecaps.

  I stood to make a bolt for the door and was knocked over by a backhander. Confused, I stood up in the middle of a fist fight between two hairy, smelly monsters who probably spent their working hours on a crosscut saw. I went down again and found Reuben with his face in the slops.

  'We have to get out of here.'

  'That's right, bastards! Out!'

  For a moment I thought Reuben had collected his wits and somehow taken on the strength of ten, but it was a bald-headed ox of a chap, four feet around the middle if an inch, who grabbed both our collars and dragged us to the door. Reuben struggled but I went willingly.

  Our conductor pinned Reuben to the wall with his shoulder while he heaved open the door. He slung me through it like a wheat lumper tossing a bag onto a dray.8 From the porch, flat on my back, I saw him get his balance and grab Reuben by the collar and belt. The next I knew my shipmate had landed on top of me. I smelt his whisky breath in my face and felt the wind go out of me in a rush.

  I lay still. Reuben lay still. Then he stirred and rolled off. He sat and felt along his limbs, methodically, one by one.

  'What the hell are you doing?' I gasped.

  "M checkin' for breaks. Did you see 'im?'

  'Who?'

  'Feller who chucked us out.'

  'Of course I saw him. Nearly broke my neck.'

  Reuben hoisted himself to his feet with the aid of the porch post. 'But did you get a good look at 'im? At 'is leg?'

  'No . . . wait.' I thought back. There was still a lot of noise coming from inside, but after one more shattering crash as if the pine bar had been splintered from end to end, it subsided. I tried to picture the man who'd tosssed me around like a toy. 'Yes,' I said, 'there was something funny about his leg. The way he got his balance . . .'

  'That's it!' Reuben cackled. 'What I was tryin' to tell you before that black-bearded bastard clobbered me. He was a lumberjack before he was a barman. He's got a peg leg. He went down the river on the logs, see. An' those logs nipped his leg off neat as scissors. That's the Yukon River for you, boy.'

  'Thanks, Reuben,' I said.

  6

  Back on the Barraclough Fraser observed my scratches and bruises without comment. Stripped to his vest and shorts he did exercises on the deck, and he regularly scrubbed himself down with hard soap and buckets of sea water. He used a cut-throat razor to shave himself to a pink, baby smoothness. Fit and clean, he tied lures for trout and went on with his studies of Indian and Eskimo ethnology for relaxation. I moped around the ship vainly trying to get up card games; I let my beard and hair grow and wasn't particular about washing. I lounged around with Reuben in his free time, learnt a few chords on the banjo and kept my passable baritone in trim. [At this point in the tape Browning breaks off and sings a few lines of 'Oh Susannah'. His voice is cracked and old, making it hard to tell what the quality of the young man's voice might have been. It is possible that he could have carried a tune passably. Ed.]

  Fraser's opinion of me, therefore, worsened, if that was possible, and Reuben wasn't the most comfortable companion either. My slip about the bushrangers and blackfellows had lodged in his drunken brain and stuck. Thereafter he persisted in trying to catch me out. He'd tinkle away at an Irish ballad and then turn it into 'The Wild Colonial Boy' or 'Brave Ben Hall' or some other ditty that I'd known since I could talk, and watch for my reaction. I think I kept a poker face. Reuben had been to Australia, you see, and he could mispronounce place names like Mel-born and tell me how Tulkeroo had won the Cup9 in 1908 and wait for me to correct him. I didn't bite but it was hard going sometimes.

  What with these irritations and the boredom of shipboard life I was almost looking forward to arriving in Skagway. The ship made slow progress due to the frequent calls, some of which had to be made by dinghy because there were no jetties. We were in what was called the 'inside passage' and the water was protected from the ocean winds and relatively calm, although there were treacherous rocks and shoals. Fraser, of course, was up on deck most of the time taking an active interest in the bird life. Myself, I would have been more interested in a cow, preferably cut into steaks – I was getting damn sick of fish and rice.

  A day out of Skagway I happened to be up on deck with Fraser. Even he was rugged up in a skin coat with fur hood. The wind off the land seemed to freeze my beard.

  'Uncommon cold for this time of year,' Fraser said. 'See the ice in the river mouth?'

  We were in a bay which was fed by a wide stream from the coastal mountains. There was snow on the middle reaches and I could see patches of whitish blue in the muddy river water.

  'Is that the pack ice you were talking about? Are we going to get stuck?'

  Just then I felt a bump and I rushed to the rail. The Barraclough had nudged a piece of floating ice and sent it spinning away. Fraser joined me at the rail.

  'No,' he said contemptuously. 'We're not going to get stuck. Might have to do a bit more of that off Skagway but that's all. Going to be a cold one though.'

  'Dawson City's been around for a long time, hasn't it?' I lit a cigarette and kept it cupped in my hand. 'Must be reasonably comfortable. This isn't the gold rush days, eh, Sergeant?'

  He shot me a sideways glance. 'No, Dawson's not too bad. Rough but comfortable enough. But where you're going it's a different story.'

  'What d'you mean?' I yelped. 'Where am I going?'

  Fraser puffed contentedly on his pipe. 'I took the liberty of reading your order papers, just in case they got lost and I had to give a verbal report to the Comptroller, you understand. Seems you volunteered for Arctic duty. You specifically asked for a post on the Mackenzie. That's inside the Circle.'

  'It's a lie!' I shouted. 'I didn't volunteer for anything. I hate the cold. I've never been south of Phillip10. . .'

  Fraser took his pipe out of his mouth and turned his hooded head to look at me. 'There's something odd about you, Connybear. Something that doesn't fit. I don't know what it is but you're going to the right place. The north'll make a man of you.'

  'If it doesn't make me an iceberg.'

  He nodded. 'It's dangerous, to be sure. It'll be up to you.'

  There's not much to say about Skagway, Alaska. Beautiful setting, of course, in a sort of fjord with towering peaks around, that looked faintly green up in the pale sky. But I've known shithole places look lovely when things were going good and sunny paradises seem like hell when my stocks were low. Low was the word for me when I hit Skagway so I wasn't much taken by the natural beauty. It was a busy place in the gold rush days with riff raff from all over the world pouring in. Had its share of sin in those days, I daresay but it was pretty bloody quiet in late 1922. I remember that insurance came into my mind when I looked at the buildings flanking the wide, roughly paved Front Street. They were all made of timber, you see, or nearly all. A good torching and someone could've made a handsome pile. I haven't been back since those times, needless to say, but I suppose it hasn't changed much unless it's become a tourist attraction. God knows why anyone would want to freeze his ass off in a log cabin voluntarily but tourists will do anything.

  In fact, there were a couple of men you could call kind of tourists in the place when we arrived in the Barraclough. I ran into them in the hotel where Fraser and I put up for the night before catching the train over the Chilkoot Pass. Fraser and I checked into our rooms. He went to discuss police business with the representatives of law and order in Skagway and I had a farewell drink with Reuben Dawes in the bar. Although it was an American possession, Alaska wasn't yet a state and wasn't subject to the Volstead Act. I doubt if they could've enforced such insanity up there. Reuben and I breasted the bar, ordered whiskies and found ourselves standing next to two men who were drinking rum. Both were solid, well-fleshed characters aged fifty or more. Their clothes and shoes were expensive, they were smoking dollar cigars and had rings on their fingers and watches worth hundreds but their hands bore the marks of rough work and their voices were those of men who'd rather spit than use a handkerchief.

  'Old town ain't what it used to be, Ollie,' says one of them, knocking back a couple of ounces of rum.

  'Here's cheers, Hank,' Reuben said. He drank off his whisky and slammed the glass down. 'Your shout,' he said, watching me out of the corner of his eye.

  'Blast me,' says the other rum drinker, who, I noticed, was dark-skinned with a slightly Oriental look about him. He had a white moustache but it was very sparse compared to his companion's luxuriant pepper and salt growth. 'I ain't heard that since we used to drink with Kangaroo Pete in the Klondike in '97. Remember, Charley. He'd put his glass down, just like that and say, "Whose shout?" ' Reuben looked sourly at them while they pounded each other's shoulders and laughed. I took a quiet sip of my drink and sat pat.

  'I'm sorry, partner,' the one called Ollie said. 'Me 'n' Charley here's reliving old times. Didn't mean to be rude or nothing. You an Aussie?'

  'No,' Reuben said.

  'Didn't think so,' says Charley, 'mostly big, raw-boned guys, more like your friend there.' He tipped his hat in my direction. 'If you'll excuse me saying so, mister.'

  I nodded and smiled.

  'I'll get back to the ship, Hank.' Reuben and I shook hands. We'd had some good times but I wasn't sorry to see him go. Operating under an alias is bad enough without having someone around with a twitching nose.

  'Well,' Charley says, 'my shout.' That set them laughing again and this time I joined in. I was short of money and this pair looked as if they could go on shouting all night.

  We settled in at a table and after a few more rounds I had their stories. Oliver Fisher and Charley Moon were gold prospectors who'd struck it rich in the Klondike in 1896 and '97. To hear them tell it they'd grubbed the gold out of the frozen earth with their bare hands. They both made big strikes on the same creek, worked them night and day, fought off claim jumpers and bandits, and left the territory with enough money to last them the rest of their lives.

  'Never thought I'd come back,' Ollie said. 'Got me a ranch in Wyoming, fine cattle, good wife. Never put a spade in the ground again 'cept to dig a fence post and I don't much care to do that.'

  'What brought you back then?' I asked politely.

  'This old varmit came driving through in his goddamned Buick. We'd lost touch, see? See how he's fatter 'n me? Well, he's richer too.'

  They laughed some more and I bought a round – my first.

  'Spit in your eye,' Charley said. 'Yeah, I got rich. Got in on some oil in Oklahoma. They tried to cheat me out of it of course, but an old Yukon man don't cheat easy.'

  'Why d'you say of course?'

  'Ain't you had a good look at me, Hank? Can't you see I don't come from London, England nor Dublin, Ireland?'

  'Well . . .'

  He bent his head closer to mine over the table. 'Part Indian,' he said. 'Han, from around where Dawson City now stands. 'Course, I don't go round in beads and make a war dance 'bout it.'

  'Charley left these parts as a kid and went to sea,' Ollie said. 'Came back after the gold and I'm here to tell you what he knew about this country as an Indian paid him off a hundred times as a white man lookin' for gold.'

  'I can see how it would,' I said. 'And now you're back in your happy hunting ground.' I could've bitten my tongue out as soon as I'd said it but, fortunately, Charley and Ollie were at the merry stage and they found it funny. When the merriment had died down they asked me about myself and I gave them the prepared story. They shook their heads at the mention of the Mackenzie River.

 

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