Mad Dogs and an Englishwoman by Polly Evans

Author:Polly Evans [Evans, Polly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-440-33826-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Bruce had now decided to rent a car of his own, so I traveled with him; Thomas, who was out of a job and could enjoy a few days’ holiday, made his way in the dog truck with Elmer, a recently arrived client from Virginia, who had a white Father Christmas beard and a round belly in perfect keeping. Frank would drive with another new client, Dick, in the pickup, once it had been fixed by the garage.

Bruce and I left Muktuk midafternoon and headed up the Klondike Highway. The road was good, but the snow on the surrounding land was horribly sparse. Whole hillsides glared brown and rocky with just odd, sorry-looking remnants of half-melted snow. Where did the trail run? we wondered. We hoped it didn't go over these hills, or the mushers would need to fit their sleds with wheels rather than runners.

We drove through huge swaths of starkly beautiful, charred forest—a massive fire had raged here during the terrible summer of 2004. Occasionally, a pure-white Arctic hare lolloped over the road in front of our tires.

At nine-thirty, we reached Dawson and the unambiguously named 5th Avenue Bed & Breakfast to find that Thomas and Elmer had arrived just before us. The bed-and-breakfast was a turquoise-painted weatherboard house on a street corner. The outside may have been in keeping with tradition, but inside, Tracey and Steve's spacious home embraced the twenty-first century with newly decorated bedrooms and en suite bathrooms. To us, after several nights sleeping on floors and in the back of the truck, all this seemed like seven-star luxury.

We were strangely relieved. Every one of us, of course, would infinitely rather have been facing a sleepless night down at the checkpoint, waiting for Saul to come in, but that option was off the menu. In the circumstances, there was nothing for it but to drop our bags and head straight back out for a couple of beers.

We trudged along the snow-packed 5th Avenue. Dawson is colder and darker than Whitehorse in winter. It lies more than three hundred miles northwest of the Yukon capital and just over 150 miles as the crow flies from the Arctic Circle. In December and January, they have almost perpetual darkness here; in midsummer, Dawson basks beneath the midnight sun.

Tonight, though, the temperatures were not too biting and we only had a couple of streets to go to Diamond Tooth Gertie's, where Tracey had suggested we'd find plentiful food, drink, and entertainment. The building was an old one—it was originally built in 1901 as the Arctic Brotherhood Hall—although now the music was not two-steps and waltzes but cover versions of sixties hits performed by a band of middle-aged men with neatly parted hair and clean, pressed shirts tucked into their jeans.

Diamond Tooth Gertie herself was probably a little more raucous. A celebrated dance-hall queen of the Klondike gold-rush days, she was named for the diamond she had inserted between her two front teeth.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, it wasn't just Gertie's diamond that glittered in Dawson.

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