Tisha Read online

  Shaking, I watched Mr. Strong ride back and pick up my flowered hat. I knew I was as white as flour when he rode up and presented it to me, and I was ready to burst into tears. But he was a gentleman, not even giving the slightest sign that he noticed it. “Madam,” he said graciously, “since you’re not familiar with the trail, I think it better if you allow me to lead.”

  As he went past I looked back at Eagle. There were a few people waving good-bye, including Mrs. Rooney, and I felt sad. For the past two weeks I’d done more traveling and met more friendly people than ever before in my life. Up to now the longest trip I’d ever made had been from Colorado, where I was born, to Oregon, where I’d been teaching. But in the past couple of weeks I’d traveled to Seattle, taken a boat up the Inside Passage to Juneau, then come North through places I’d only read of but never thought I’d see—Skagway, the Chilkoot Pass, White Horse, Dawson, the Yukon Territory, and finally here.

  Along the way I had so much attention paid to me by men that sometimes I didn’t think I was me. Even though I’d heard that there weren’t too many women in the North, I hadn’t expected to be treated like a raving beauty wherever I went. But I was. In White Horse and Dawson, when I checked into a hotel overnight, the clerk told me there’d be a dance given in my honor. And during the week that I’d spent on the river-boat, sailing north down the Yukon, I’d been invited to sit at the captain’s table every night. A couple of times, in my cabin, I’d look at myself in the mirror thinking that maybe I’d changed in some way, that maybe I was really much prettier than I’d always thought I was. But after a good examination I knew I was just the same plain Anne Hobbs—same gray eyes, not a bad nose, good white teeth. One of the front ones was a little crooked, so about the best I could say was that if I didn’t open my mouth and if my hair were still long I might have a faint resemblance to Mary Pickford. But even here in Eagle, where the riverboat had left me off, there’d been a dance given for me.

  The last of the pack animals passed me and I took one more look at the town. People were moving off now, and beyond them the log cabins and white frame houses looked snug and comfortable. It was a beautiful place and I was sorry to leave. I couldn’t see the wharf from here, but I could see the green waters of the Yukon River snaking for miles in each direction.

  Blossom started to move, following the pack animals along a rutted wagon road that disappeared into the corridor of birches. The birches were beautiful, flaming with the colors of autumn, and they grew so thick on each side that I couldn’t see the mountains beyond them. Wanting to ride alongside Mr. Strong, I gave Blossom a little kick, but he didn’t pay any attention. I tried giving him a few more, then I gave up.

  It was easy going for the first couple of miles, the wagon road gently curving through the forest, the only sounds the clatter of the pack animals’ cowbells and the clop of their hooves. After a while my backside began to ache a little and I felt some stiffness in my shoulders, but I didn’t mind. Blossom wasn’t giving me any trouble and it was warm enough so I could open my jacket. It was hard for me to believe this was Alaska. Even though it was only the beginning of September, somehow I’d expected to find snow on the ground and cold weather. So far, except for a few nippy days and some nights when it came near to freezing, it hadn’t been much colder than it would be back in Forest Grove, Oregon.

  The wagon road ended suddenly and turned into a trail that was barely wide enough for one horse to pass through at a time. Trees and buckbrush pressed in on each side. Branches and bushes tore at my jacket and pulled the threads out. Now I realized why Mr. Strong had offered me the coat. If I could have I’d have ridden forward and asked him for it before my jacket was ruined, but even if I could get Blossom to move faster, the trail was too narrow for me to pass the animals ahead. Most of the time I couldn’t see more than half a dozen of them because the trail twisted and turned so sharply. Twice when I caught sight of Mr. Strong through the trees I yelled to him, but the growth was so thick and the cowbells made so much noise that he couldn’t hear me. Once I thought he saw me and I waved to him frantically, but he just gave me a pleasant wave back and went on.

  The farther we went the more uneven the trail became and I kept slipping and sliding all over the saddle. The muscles in my legs were aching from trying to hold on. After a while I tried to stop Blossom so that I could get off, but no matter how hard I pulled on the reins he kept going. When I kept it up, he turned and tried to bite my foot.

  An hour later when we were climbing up the side of a steep hill, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer. We’d been climbing for about fifteen minutes, and I was hoping that when we reached the top I might be able to jump off. But as soon as we did the land dipped suddenly and Blossom started down a canyon side that was so steep I was afraid I was going to go tumbling over his head.

  By the time we were halfway down my hands were hurting so badly I could barely hold onto the saddle horn. My jacket was just about ruined and all I wanted to do was whimper. Then things became worse. Without warning the sun disappeared and everything was gray and chill. A few minutes later big feathery snow-flakes were drifting down and it was like being in the middle of winter. When I finally reached the bottom of the canyon, my teeth were chattering. My hands were so numb I couldn’t move my fingers.

  The pack train had stopped and so did Blossom. Mr. Strong came riding back, the olive-drab coat over his arm. He shook his head when he saw how I looked, but he didn’t say anything. If he’d asked me how I was I would have started crying. Leaning over, he helped me on with the coat. “I believe you’ll be more comfortable now,” he said. “There are mittens in the pockets.”

  “Could we stop here for a while?”

  “I’m afraid not, madam, I have U.S. mail to deliver and we have twenty-five miles to cover before nightfall. I must stay on schedule. We’ll have a rest stop at Gravel Gulch.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Seven or eight miles.”

  I knew I wasn’t going to make it without a rest and maybe he suspected it, because whenever he could he rode back to see how I was. Snow kept drifting down, melting as fast as it hit the ground. Finally it stopped. Once when he rode back he complimented me on how much better I was sitting. “You’re not sliding all over the place now.”

  “Thanks,” I told him, “but it’s not me. The snow melted on the saddle and my pants are stuck.”

  He smiled for the first time since I met him. “Are you hurting badly?”

  “Kind of.”

  I wasn’t a crybaby, but for the third time in as many hours I was ready to burst into tears.

  He thought for a moment, then he said, “We’ll stop at the next creek for about twenty minutes and you can stretch your legs.”

  The twenty minutes went like twenty seconds. Then I was back in the saddle again. I tried as hard as I could not to cause Mr. Strong any bother or hold up the pack train, but I just didn’t have the strength in my legs to keep holding on without a rest once in a while. Besides that, the saddle was rubbing me raw in a couple of places. We finally figured out the best thing to do. Every time we came to the top of a hill or canyon Mr. Strong took Blossom’s reins and led him while I walked or slid down by myself. It worked out fine because I could make it down five times faster than the pack animals. By the time I got to the bottom my shoes were full of dirt and stones and I had to spend some time getting stickers and foxtails out of my stockings, but it gave me a rest.

  When we’d started out from Eagle I’d been looking forward to what I’d see along the way, but long before we reached Gravel Gulch I was aching so badly that I didn’t care about anything except getting there. I had leaves and all kinds of twigs down my back and I’d been slapped by branches and brush so many times my face was raw. On top of that I was getting so hungry my head was aching. So when Gravel Gulch came into view I hardly minded when Blossom speeded up, even though it hurt.

  It was only a few cabins nestled in a gulch, the slopes around them t
hick with willow and tamarack, but it looked beautiful. Before we came to them we crossed a few acres of ugly ground that was dotted with excavated mounds of yellow-looking dirt. They were tailing piles, I found out later, the gravel that was left over after gold had been taken from the ground. But then I didn’t care what they were, all I wanted to do was get off Blossom before I fainted or died.

  Four men and a woman were waiting for us. The sod roof of the cabin they were standing in front of must have been over a foot thick. There were still some vegetables left in the garden that had been growing on it, and I thought to myself that my Grandmother Hobbs would sure like to have seen a garden growing up in the air like that.

  The men were glad to see us, but they seemed a little shy when they saw me and went right to the pack animals instead of saying hello. The woman wasn’t shy at all. Her name was Mrs. Ross. Short and fat, with jolly red cheeks, she was stuffed into a lumberjack shirt and a pair of Levis rolled up at the bottoms. She came right up to me, took in my flowered hat and the apparition underneath it and said, “Good Lord, what’na hell happened to you?”

  She wasn’t expecting an answer and I didn’t give her any. “One of you galoots get this poor thing down from there,” she said. A man came over to me and lifted me out of the saddle as if I was a toy. When he set me down my knees gave way, and the next thing I knew the woman was practically carrying me into the cabin.

  She sat me down beside a cookstove that had all kinds of things warming on it, took off my coat and jacket and told me not to move. I didn’t have to be told. If she’d have wanted to kill me I wouldn’t have raised a finger to stop her. She was swabbing my arms and hands with a washcloth when somebody started to come in. Whoever it was shut the door right away when she told him and everybody else to stay out until I came back to life.

  I told her my name while I dried myself off with a towel she gave me, and she asked me where I was headed.

  “Chicken,” I said. “I’m the new teacher.”

  “Chicken! Honey, from the looks of you, you ain’t even gonna make it to Liberty.”

  She was so hearty and outgoing that she made me feel better right away. If she’d been wearing a shirtwaist and long skirt she’d have reminded me of Miss Ivy, a teacher who’d taken me in when I was still in high school.

  She didn’t let the men in until she was sure I wasn’t going to faint or cry, then she served up a delicious lunch of hot bear soup, hot sourdough bread and moose pot roast.

  The men at the table didn’t have too much to say, talking a little with Mr. Strong about their “clean-up”—the gold they’d taken from the ground—and speculating about the kind of winter they thought they were in for. I could tell they’d have liked to talk to me, but they were being polite and letting me eat. I was starved and ate so much finally that I could hardly move when I was done.

  Mrs. Ross shooed them outside as soon as they finished so that I could lie down for a while. A half hour later when it was time for me to get up, I was glad the men weren’t around. The insides of my thighs were so chafed I waddled around like a duck for a few minutes.

  Before I got on Blossom again Mrs. Ross gave me an old stained pillow to put under me. It made it a little harder for me to balance myself, but it helped.

  Once we were out of Gravel Gulch the going was easier. The country smoothed out into a series of gently sweeping hills, and I wished I weren’t so saddle sore, so that I could really appreciate it. Sometimes, when we’d be riding across the crest of a hill I could see for hundreds of miles in every direction and I’d feel expectant and afraid at the same time. It was all so big that it made me feel as if something exciting was going to happen, yet so quiet and lonely I felt lost in it. But as big as it was, when we’d stop to water the horses at a creek and have a drink ourselves, there’d always be an old tin cup sitting between some rocks or hanging from a nail driven into a tree.

  Darkness came slowly after a long twilight, but once the sun was down it became cold fast. It was past eight o’clock when we reached Liberty, and I was so bone-weary I hardly paid any attention to what was going on. Even if I had there would have been nothing to see but an old sagging cabin and a smelly stable nearby.

  All I wanted to do was get into a bed and never wake up, so when Mr. Strong told me that after the horses were unloaded and stabled we’d have something to eat, I asked him just to show me where I was going to sleep. An old man who tended the stable for him hobbled ahead of me to a one-room cabin that smelled stale with sweat He took three bedrolls down from a shelf and laid them out, then put some horse blankets on them. Before he left he told me that I’d be most comfortable nearest the stove. There was a kerosene lamp hanging over a homemade table, and some water warming on the small stove, but I didn’t even bother to turn the lamp down or think about washing or brushing my teeth. I just lay down on the bedroll, pulled a couple of blankets over me and tried to sleep.

  From the start I kept drifting in and out, too exhausted to wake up and too sore to fall into a deep sleep. I felt the floorboards move under me when Mr. Strong and the old man came in and lay down, and during the night I heard one of them snoring.

  I kept dreaming that I was still on Blossom and that he was walking all the way back to Eagle with me. No matter what I did I couldn’t stop him. When we arrived I felt terrible. I’d been riding for two days and I was back where I started.

  II

  It was dark and cold the next morning when Mr. Strong shook me. “There’s hot water on the stove, madam,” he said. “You will have twenty minutes to wash up and prepare yourself. Then we shall have breakfast and be on our way.”

  Ordinarily I loved getting up early and starting a new day, but after he went out I had to force myself to move. It took me five minutes before I could even stand. I had charley horses in both my legs and I didn’t know which part of me hurt most. On top of the potbellied stove there was a kettle of water. I limped with it over to a wooden counter, poured some hot water into a basin, then got some cold water from a big barrel. The water didn’t look that clean so I decided I’d skip brushing my teeth.

  It was just starting to get light when we finished breakfast and were ready to go. But this time when Mr. Strong cupped his hands to boost me into the saddle I was too stiff to raise my foot. He and the old man had to get together and lift me.

  Our next stopover for the night, Mr. Strong told me, would be Steel Creek, twenty-four miles away. “We’ll stop at Dome Creek for lunch,” he added.

  “Everybody here in Alaska seems to live either on a creek or a river,” I said.

  He didn’t think too much of my observation. “It’s natural enough, madam. If they didn’t they wouldn’t have any water.”

  I was tempted to say they could always dig a well, but I didn’t.

  He’d found a smaller saddle for me as he’d promised, and it helped a lot at first by not rubbing me where I was raw, but after a while it started new raw places.

  I’d thought Blossom had been mean the day before, but today he was even worse. Now that I had a smaller saddle I thought I’d be able to make him mind me. Instead he showed me right from the start who was boss. He’d stop whenever he felt like cropping some late grass or a few leaves that were still green, then to make up for lost time he’d jog along till he caught up with the pack train, punishing every bone in my body. I told Mr. Strong about it and he gave me a small box of chocolate creams. “Feed one to him every so often. It will keep him in a good mood.”

  They kept him in a mood, but it wasn’t good. He was as smart as he was mean. After I gave him the first chocolate he kept turning his head every few minutes for another, whinnying and making terrible throaty sounds until I gave in. Twenty minutes later I gave him the last chocolate, showed him the empty box and tossed it away so he knew there was no more. After that he was worse than ever. I couldn’t do anything to make him obey, until finally I just stopped caring. I rode hunched over, only seeing the creeks we crossed as Blossom splashed through them,
and once I watched his legs turn blue as we sloshed through a patch of late blueberries. Sometimes I fell as much as a quarter of a mile behind the pack train.

  It was about an hour after we left Gravel Gulch that I looked up to see the pack train halted and Mr. Strong waiting for me. Up ahead was what looked like a field of cotton. A light wind rippled its surface, and it was so beautiful that it made me forget how bad I was feeling.

  “What’s that?” I asked Mr. Strong.

  “Tundra.”

  “I mean the white stuff.” I didn’t think it could be cotton, but it was.

  “‘Alaska cotton,’” Mr. Strong said. “From this point on, madam, you’ll have to look where you’re going. We’re going to cross all that.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” I said.

  He stared at me owlishly. “Have you ever crossed a niggerhead flat?”

  “No …”

  He wheeled his horse and the pack train started forward. I soon found out what he meant. At first I enjoyed myself. We rode through acres and acres of silvery bolls, their long silky fibers waving like pompoms atop a slender stem. Then we hit swamp. Out of it grew big hummocks of matted grass that looked like giant mops. They grew so thick that I thought of getting off Blossom and walking on them. Like the other animals, he wasn’t having easy going. The mud sucked at his hoofs, and he kept slipping all over the place and stumbling over submerged roots. We slowed way down and soon fell behind the rest of the pack train.

  I was so busy holding on that I didn’t see the herd of caribou until we were almost on top of them. I heard them first, making peculiar coughing sounds. Then, as though they’d come out of nowhere, there they were a few hundred yards ahead on solid ground. They were grazing, eating some kind of white moss, a forest of antlers over their heads and a shawl of white around their shoulders. The closest of them lifted their heads, big eyes staring curiously. Then they went back to grazing as if they hadn’t seen a thing.