Jason's Gold by Will Hobbs

Author:Will Hobbs [Hobbs, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1999-01-25T13:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

With Miles Canyon and the White Horse Rapids behind him, Jason paddled furiously north down the Yukon. The sun had lost its power, its arc now ominously low in the sky. No more calls from geese or swans, only from ravens, and the word they were croaking was winter.

It was do or die.

His canoe was fast, but he still had fifty miles of river before Lake Laberge, where the current would die on him for thirty miles.

“Pull!” he yelled. “Pull!”

Confused, the husky turned around in the bow of the canoe, seeming to ask what he wanted.

“Sorry, King! I meant me, not you!”

Suddenly King pricked up his wolflike ears and studied the shore. Jason stopped paddling, then heard a chirrup repeated several times.

There on the left, in the willows, was a cow moose, the first moose he’d ever seen.

From the shore downstream came deep grunts. A bull moose was attacking a small spruce tree and utterly demolishing it with its massive antlers. Suddenly the bull left off the attack, flared his nostrils, and proceeded upriver toward the female.

A second bull, hidden in the willows near the cow, charged out onto the river gravel to challenge the intruder. The bulls paused twenty feet from each other and lowered their antlers, pawing the ground and grunting battle cries. The giants were equally matched, and it was apparent there was going to be a fight. The current took the canoe around the bend before the bulls charged, but a moment later Jason heard the ringing collision of bone on bone.

The pale green Yukon was joined by the Takhini from the west, which briefly clouded it with silt. The valley opened up, and the cut banks disappeared as he entered a slow and swampy alder flat. Then, at the end of his second day below White Horse Rapids, the current died out altogether as he paddled into the head of windblown Lake Laberge.

The wind blew so fiercely that night, it seemed the spruces in his camp would surely snap. At last the gale died out in the hours before dawn. Jason woke to a sheet of ice stretching all the way to the barren highlands across the lake, and the fearful realization that he was trapped.

At dawn the trees were bending again, and, to his amazement, the ice broke into panes of glass that drifted and shattered before the wind. He didn’t dare to take the time to warm himself with a fire, or to cook. The wind was blowing hard out of the northwest, and he had to get through this dead water and into the current before the ice returned to lock up the lake for good.

Jason hugged the west shore and paddled north, bundled like a polar bear from fur hat to sealskin mukluks, but without the clumsy mittens. His fingers felt like frozen claws. The windlashed surface of the lake was wild with waves and whitecaps, but as long as he hugged the shore, he could keep the canoe under control. Even so, the spray turned to ice in midair and fell tinkling into the canoe.

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