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pupils drawing near, smells the sweet-bitter breath, feels the tickle of frosted beard against his neck. He catches a strange muttering he cannot quite understand. The woman lying alongside stirs and seems to moan in her sleep, but the man cannot be sure nor raise his chest. “Ahhh!” she cries out, and still the pressure builds until the man finally comprehends. The nightmare ends with the burn of the dagger against groin and the shuffle of sled rising into silent sky, while the woman fades deeper into a drawn-out sigh. The real beginning traces to a plump, lonely boy living on a subsistence farm in the lush valley stretching south from the Columbia River in the late 1880s. His widowed mother had answered an ad posted in the Portland paper for housekeeping duties, then married the ex-logger and freeholder who wanted a permanent cook and saw the boy as payment on a debt. The hawk-faced man never drank liquor, prayed by the table each morning at dawn, and once slapped the boy across the face with enough force to knock him to the ground behind the barn. His older sisters shied from the man’s touch and stiffened when called by name and stopped looking their brother in the eye, forcing him to play alone by the creek when chores were done, watching ruddy spawners maneuver and bite each other in the clear water. As years passed, his mother grew wan, no more picnics under the apple trees on dry days, and stopped tutoring the boy on his letters and numbers. The memory of his natural father lost detail, and the boy understood the meaning of the infant brother who arrived on a following spring. His bitterness formed a plan even before his mother’s labor cries faded from mind. It’s a familiar story, played out with regret — the boy waiting until the house slept, then lifting coins from the old butter crock. He stood outside the bedroom door long enough to distinguish his mother’s irregular breath from the stepfather’s rattle. He had hoped she would wake up. He dashed down the dewy lane under a moon bright enough to cast shadows. By dawn he was 12 miles closer to town, hiding in a grove behind a church. Week’s end found him shoveling coal below decks, lurching to the corner to puke as the freighter crossed the bar and rolled up coast toward Puget Sound. Season rained into season, the boy grew to manhood on Inside Passage workboats. He gradually wandered further north until he found work on the steamer traveling in and out of Juneau. A fumbling giant, his downcast eyes furtive, with thick forearms and a hulking manner, bunched muscles between his shoulders, hairy as a bear, the young man kept to himself, drinking silently in raucous saloons after work, sleeping alone on pallets in the fo’c’s’le of his latest gig. He might have gone on forever, just another aging deckhand, but the gold found by Skookum Jim and Carmack electrified the Rain Coast with visions of vast and royal wealth. He disembarked at Capt. Billy’s Wharf in Skaqua Bay in the summer of ‘97, and watched as thousands of goldrushers overran the old German’s homestead and threw up a boom town filled with murder, swindle and theft. He hauled his ton
Sandra Kleven - Lone Man of gear over Chilkoot Pass. Winter found him on the Klondike diggings, but like most others, he barely earned enough for beans and flour by hacking at the frozen gravels in the pits of other men’s claims. The desolate lessons of childhood had settled into his bones like an injury that could not heal. Attempting to drive dogs past Fortymile during a March cold snap frostbit his face and took three or four toes. He was lying in a drift, growing ever more sleepy, unable to decide whether to rise up and live, when rescuers dug him out and wrapped him in a black bear hide. For six weeks, he lay up, feverish with pneumonia, at a ramshackle roadhouse run by the woman trying to escape a bad marriage, and the glacial chill at his core softened with April’s pungent thaw. Ten years older, she was, skeptical and careworn and heavyset, with three young children and startling green eyes, and determined to make the roadhouse pay. Her husband was a freighter and gambler, a musher known for beating his dogs and blackening her face, and though she had driven him from her bed, he bragged to drinking partners that he’d never let her go nor give up the low-slung cabin and barn he’d built with his own hands one day’s travel down the Valdez Trail. The young man healed but didn’t leave, continuing to chop kindling and tend dogs. As boreal summer jungled up, he took the boys fishing for grayling and supervised the harvest of late-summer chums. The girl, a wisp with pigtails and freckles, would crawl into his lap to whisper raven fables she’d heard from the Gwich’in grandmas at the river-mouth fish camp. For her he carved figurines from birch, and shaved smooth sticks of diamond willow for the boys. The woman never spoke of what was evolving between them, but he could see the sparkle of pleasure in her eyes at the sound of his voice, and at night he lay in the barn smiling with anticipation of boiled coffee at the broad table with family and boarders. He wondered how the touch of her hand might feel against his cheek. The turn came in the soggy fall, when the giant spine-covered leaves of Devil’s club yellowed and fireweed began to die. He and the children approached the cabin in
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