Free Jason's Gold by Will Hobbs Page A

rivers.
    He helped his Canadian friends load their canoe. Then Jamie paddled it a short way up the Dyea River, past the melee of horse-drawn freight wagons and Klondikers on foot shuttling their goods to safety above the high-tide line. She would wait there while her father arranged for packers at the Indian huts just beyond the trading post. Jason called his thank-yous and good-byes to both of them, hesitant to turn away. It didn’t seem right that he’d never see them again. She was pretty, darn it, in addition to being friendly and brimful of spunk.
    With King at his side, Jason finally turned and waded off through the crowd. At the trading post he stood in line to buy a bale of dried salmon for the husky. As he paid, the clerk handed him, without explanation, a map of the trail over Chilkoot Pass, and a second one of the Yukon River to Dawson City. “How long would it take two men to build a boat from timber?” Jason inquired.
    â€œBeen done in two weeks,” the clerk said impatiently. “That was in the days before all this, though, by men who knew what they were doing. For most of these cheechakos coming through here now, two months would be a miracle.”
    â€œWhat’d you call them?”
    â€œCheechakos. Means greenhorns. Means you. If you survive your first winter, you’ll be a sourdough.”
    Jason stepped outside, inspected the map. It was twenty-seven miles from the trading post, up and over the Chilkoot Pass and down to the first big lake on the other side, Lake Lindeman. Four miles long, Lindeman was connected to a much longer lake—Lake Bennett—by a mile of river. At the head of both lakes, an X was marked, with the inscription BUILD BOATS . His brothers would be building theirs at the head of Lake Bennett, where the trail over White Pass came in. People coming over the Chilkoot would build boats at the head of Lake Lindeman, then float to Bennett and beyond.
    He’d lost twelve days, he realized. Twelve days ago he’d waved good-bye to Jack London only a few hundred yards from this very spot where he now stood.
    He’d chosen wrong. If he’d gone over the Chilkoot, he would have arrived at Lake Bennett about the time his brothers got there over White Pass. But how could he have known?
    Still, he should be okay. It was August 13, and his brothers had gotten to Lake Bennett on the fifth. He had a twenty-seven mile hike to Lake Lindeman, another six miles to reach his brothers. Without doubt he could reach them before they’d been at their boatbuilding for two weeks. He could still make it before they left. He had to.

ELEVEN
    Jason whistled to King and quickened his step as they started out along the wagon road from Dyea. It was crowded with Klondikers carrying loads on their backs and pulling hand sleds. To his surprise, he saw more than a few strings of packhorses, as well as horses pulling freight wagons and sledges. Hadn’t he heard that horses couldn’t go over the Chilkoot?
    There was room to skirt the slow spots and nobody minded that he was trying to go fast. This trail didn’t have the stench of defeat and death all over it. Everyone was talking about how hard the pass was going to be, especially the last, straight-up pitch called the Golden Stairs, but nobody was saying it couldn’t be done.
    The wagon road wound through meadows blazing with waist-high fireweed, crossed and recrossed the gravelly river among groves of cottonwood, birch, andspruce. Five miles up the valley the road crossed the river at the limit of navigation. The far shore was thick with Indian canoes. The packers—Tlingit men, women, boys, girls—were loading the packs they were going to carry over the pass.
    Within a mile Jason passed through an encampment called Canyon City, and beyond that he entered the narrow canyon of the Dyea River, no more than fifty feet wide and cluttered with boulders and driftpiles. It was gloomy in the gorge with a