Free Astray by Emma Donoghue Page B

was more of a camp than any kind of town—it looked like a heap of garbage washed up on the riverbank—but Injun reckoned it had all they needed, for now. Since every man in sight was a prospector, whether a veteran of Dakota, Idaho, or Colorado, or a tenderfoot like Goat andInjun, it was like being in a gang. A gang of loners, if such a thing could be. Outside, that was what they called everything outside Fortymile.
    McQuesten, the storeowner, never refused credit; he boasted that no one ever starved to death here, or not unless he was too stupid to roll from his bunk and crawl into town. Injun and Goat were able to outfit themselves at McQuesten’s on a promise of payback come spring. They kitted themselves out in gumboots, mackinaws, mukluks, and the broad-brimmed hats that kept off rock splinters. (After all, Injun was down to one useful eye already.) They filled a wheelbarrow with kerosene lamps, a panning tank, a stew kettle, a saw, and a couple of short-stemmed shovels, tin plates and forks, rope and coal oil, beans, cornmeal, baking powder, lard, salt, chocolate, and tea, and on top, a fragile-looking copper scales and a phial of mercury wrapped in a handkerchief. This mountain of gear was too precarious to wheel around the wilderness, so they left most of it in the back of McQuesten’s while they went off prospecting along the creeks of the Fortymile.
    They’d pick a likely spot, spit in the can for luck, let the water wash away the mud, and peer into the bottom for the glitter. The first time they found some it had a startling greenish tinge to it. Injun let out a yelp like an injured dog, and Goat got him in a half nelson and kissed his ear.
    This was why the Yukon was the place to be, even if there hadn’t been any real big strikes yet. In some goldfields, the stuff was veined into the hard rock, and only expensive machinery could blast it out, but the Yukon gave up her treasurecasually to any man who took the trouble to look for it. Placer gold—free gold, some called it—lying around in the white gravel in the form of good coarse dust or nuggets even. This first spot gave five cents’ worth of gold dust from the pan, when Injun weighed it with slightly shaking hands. The toeless fellow reckoned eight cents a pan’s a pretty good prospect, he said, but Goat laughed and said this here looked pretty good to him. He wanted to stake their claim right away; Injun had to talk him into waiting to see if they could find a richer spot. (In Fortymile, Injun had got the impression Swedes were pitied for their willingness to stake a prospect other men would dig a shit pit on.)
    At night the two fellows lay back-to-back in their sailcloth tent, and in the mornings they counted their bruises; the man with the fewest had to boil the coffee. That was their first game but soon they had plenty. After another week they found a bend in a muddy creek that gave ten cents a pan, and Injun felt the glow of being right, as well as the giddy anticipation of riches. Goat marked out the five hundred feet he liked best; Injun blazed a small spruce tree and penciled on the upstream side, One, and their names.
    That night they lay awake so long laughing and planning how to spend their fortune, they were baggy-eyed when they hiked into Fortymile to the Recorder’s Office. The two of them were so ignorant, they hadn’t realized that they were allowed a claim each, and that the discoverer of the strike was granted double, which meant three between them. They rushed back to their muddy creek the next morning and staked out another thousand feet, marking it One Below and Two Below. Injun put Goat down as the discoverer and himself as the second man, but that was just a formality.
    In Fortymile they borrowed a mule to haul their outfit and a stack of raw lumber to their claim for building a tiny cabin. They left two stumps in the middle of the floor to sit on, and built bunks against the walls. The windows were deer hide (that was a tip