“Boots ’pear a tad big for you,” says Joe Raven.
The way he has to cock his head to focus the one eye on you, Hod can’t tell if the Indian is mocking him or not.
“Might be.” He is trying not to limp, trying desperately to keep up.
“Don’t worry. By tomorrow your feet’ll swoll up to fill em.”
Canyon City is only another junkheap of tents and baggage near a waterfall. Hod forks over two fresh-minted silver dollars for hot biscuits and a fried egg served on a plate not completely scraped clean of the last man’s lunch while the Indians sit on their loads outside and chew on dried moose, taking up the cards again.
“Gamblingest sonsabitches I ever seen,” says the grizzled packer sitting by him on the bench in the grub tent. “Worse than Chinamen.”
“I’m paying twelve cents a pound,” says Hod. The coffee is bitter but hot off the stovetop. “That fair?”
The packer looks him over and Hod flushes, aware of just how new all his clothes are. “What’s fair is whatever one fella is willin to pay and another is willin to do the job for at the moment,” says the man, biscuit crumbs clinging to his stubble. “Three months ago that egg’d cost you five dollars. Just a matter of what you want and how bad you want it.”
After Canyon City the trail starts to rise, Hod lagging farther behind the Tlingits and thinking seriously about what he might dump and come back for later. There are discarded goods marking both sides of the path, things people have decided they can survive without in the wilderness beyond, some with price tags still attached.
“We maybe pick these up on the way back,” says Joe Raven, lagging to check on Hod’s progress. “Sell em to the next boatload of greenhorns come in.”
A small, legless piano lays in the crook of a bend in the trail, and Hod can’t resist stopping to toe a couple muffled, forlorn notes with his boot.
“Man could haul that over far as Dawson and play it, be worth its weight in gold,” says Joe, and then is gone up the trail.
The light begins to fade and the Indians pull far ahead. Whenever Hod thinks he’s caught up he finds only another group of trudging pilgrims who report not to have seen them. He staggers on, over and around the deadfall, searching for footprints in the early snow. I’m a fool and a tenderfoot, he thinks, heart sinking. They’ve stolen it all and I’ll be the laugh of the north country. It is dark and steep and slippery, his pack rubbing the skin off his back and his feet screaming with every step when he stumbles into the lot of them, smoking and laughing in a lantern-lit circle around the dog-eared cards.
“Another mile up to Sheep Camp,” mutters Joe Raven, barely looking up from the game. “Gonna blow heavy tonight, so we best skedaddle.”
If he takes his load off for a moment he’ll never be able to hoist it again. “Let me just catch my breath,” says Hod, holding on to a sapling to keep himself from sliding back down the incline while the Indians gather the rest of his outfit onto their backs.
“You doing pretty good for a cheechako,” Joe tells him, adjusting the deer-hide tumpline across his forehead. “We had one, his heart give out right about this section. Had to pack him back to Dyea, sell his goods to raise the passage home. Somewhere called Iowa, they said his body went.”
The night wind catches them halfway up to Sheep Camp, and when the sharper at the entrance asks Hod for two dollars to collapse, still dressed, onto a carpet of spruce boughs covered with canvas in a flapping tent shared with a dozen other men, he hands it over without comment.
In his sleep Hod walks ten miles, uphill and with a load on his back.
“We take you to the Stairs, but we don’t climb,” says Joe Raven as they dump his goods next to a hundred other piles in the little flat area at the bottom of the big slope. “Too many fresh suckers comin in to Dyea every day to bother with this mess.”
The last of the tall spruce and alder dealt out yesterday evening, only a handful of wind-stunted dwarf trees left along the trek from Sheep Camp to the Stairs, and now nothing but a wall of rock and snowfield faces them, near vertical, all the way to the summit. There is a black line of pack-hauling pilgrims already crawling up the steps chopped into the ice, and here on the flat ground an ever-growing mob of adventurers crowded around a pair of freightage scales to weigh their outfits before starting the climb.
“Gonna take you a couple days, maybe twenty trips,” says Joe Raven, counting Hod’s money.
“When I take a load up, what’s to keep folks from stealing the rest of my outfit?”
The Tlingit winks. “Anything you steal down here, you got to carry it up.”
“But whatever I leave at the top while I’m hauling the next load—”
“You white fellers don’t much trust each other, do you?” the Indian grins, then rousts his tribe of relatives with a whistle.
When Hod puts his outfit on the balance it is scant forty pounds.
“Sell you four sacks of cornmeal, twenty dollars,” says one sharper loitering by the scales.
“Sell you this yere case of canned goods, beans and peas, for fifteen,” says another.
“I got these rocks here,” says a third. “You roll em in your bedding, slip em in with your flour and soda, Mounties won’t take no notice. Good clean rocks, ten cent a pound.”
“You aint that short, buddy,” says another man, a stampeder from the look of him, pale yellow stubble on his face and pale eyes, one blue, one green, and pale skin made raw from the weather. “You can pick up twice that weight from what’s been cast away on the trip up.”
He says his name is Whitey, just Whitey, and that he’s from Missouri and has been waiting here since yesterday, searching for a face he can trust.
“The deal with this Chilkoot,” he says, “is you always got to have one man mindin the store while the other carries the next lot up, then you switch off. It’s simple mathematics.”
Whitey shows Hod his own pile, the same goods bought for the same double prices from the same outfitters in Seattle. “One load comes from your pile, then the next from mine. It don’t matter who carries what, we both do the same amount of work and both get to spell ourselves at the top while the other climbs. It gets dark, one of us stays up there with what we’ve carried and the other down here with what’s left. We’ll get her done in half the time and won’t be wore out for the rest of it.”
It sounds good enough to Hod. They help each other load up, making packs with rope and canvas and tying on near seventy pounds apiece for the first trip.
“No matter how weary you get, don’t step out of line to rest once you’re on them Golden Stairs,” says Whitey as they nudge their way into the crowd of men at the base of the footpath. “Takes a good long spell to squeeze back in.”
They start up, Whitey climbing a half-dozen men above Hod. The blasting cold air and the hazardous footing and the weight on Hod’s back drives all thought away, his whole life tunneling down to the bend of the knees of the man in front of him, left, now right, now left, thigh muscles knotting as he follows in step, keeping count at first, step after slippery step, then giving up when the idea of the thousands more ahead proves unbearable.
The first thing left by the stairs is a huge cook pot, iron rusted a different color on its uphill side, that looks to have been there some while. Then wooden boxes and crates, dozens of them, and who has the energy to stop and look inside as the wind cuts sharp across the face of the slope, and next it is men littering the sides of the line of climbers, some bent over with exhaustion or waiting for a moment’s gap to rejoin the file, others splayed out on the mountain face with their heels dug in to keep from sliding, helpless as tipped turtles with their pack harnesses up around their necks, weeping.