Arctic Daughter. Jean Aspen

the bottom deteriorated into slippery rocks and rushing water. Step, jerk, stumble, tug. The canoe fought back, hanging up, yanking. Progress.

      I peered ahead. Did a creek join at the bend? The Indians had told us that the abandoned town was difficult to find. Built near the water in the 1890s, it had been left inland when the river changed course, willows reclaiming the old channel. They said a sternwheeler had come up on the spring flood in those days.

      “It’s a stream,” Phil called from the shore a little distance ahead. “Let’s camp and see if we can locate the town in the morning.”

      “Got a place picked out?” I asked. My eyes searched the shore for a safe harbor.

      “This looks about as good as any.”

      Together we heaved the bow firmly aground. I reached into the front seat and pulled up my coat, setting the squalling pup ashore. Phil tied the painters to a large drift log embedded in gravel and fastened the cable around a boulder.

      Minutes later I had the tent set up and sleeping bags spread out. Phil unloaded camp gear and lashed the fitted tarp back over the craft. Crawling inside just as the clouds opened, we stripped off our wet clothes and piled them under Net-Chet. From bed I stroked her delicate head and listened to the storm. We lay reading aloud while the rain drummed on the tent fly and fog built up inside the tent.

      I tucked my hands between my legs to warm them and tried to forget my hunger. Concentrating on Phil’s voice as he read, I gradually slipped into a dream. I was swimming after a drowning infant. I dove beneath a muddy current and pulled up the lifeless child. As I kicked for shore, I breathed into her lungs, perhaps too hard, for by the time I climbed the beach she had degenerated into two transparent balloons.

      I woke in the stillness of gray, midnight overcast. The tent was empty. I lay motionless in the silence listening for Phil’s presence. I could feel the uneven press of stones against my spine and hear the distant murmur of the river to my right. To my left, a soft twittering of sleepy birds delineated the edge of the forest. Then a slight shift in the air brought the scent of wood smoke and I relaxed.

      I sat up and reached for the shirt I had used as a pillow. Shaking the dog’s mud from my wet trousers, I forced my legs into them and hunched my way out of the tent. The Arctic had a somber look that evening, chill and drab. Across the rocks I could see the canoe, dark against the mottled water. Nearby, a small fire added the only touch of color, the slight movement of a dark figure squatting over it the only sign of life.

      Phil looked up at my approach and smiled. “I chopped up the last of the old moose ribs and boiled them,” he said. Giving the pot a stir and replacing the lid, he ran a spoon under the bail and carefully lifted the blackened little pot from the coals. “See what you think of it. I put in some dried veggies and flour for thickening. Watch out for bone splinters.”

      He seated me on a log he had hauled near the fire. I could see the uneven drag marks trailing up the beach.

      “Have you fed the dog?” I asked, placing the pot between my feet. I pried up the lid and a sour, meaty smell assailed me in a billow of steam. Phil poured us each a cup of tea and squatted on his haunches across from me.

      “I gave her some of the soup.” He hesitated a moment and then said, “I know we decided not to shoot the little tree squirrels, but we have to feed her something . . .”

      “Okay,” I answered, not looking up. The thick, grayish soup tasted good. “I guess bringing her was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

      He didn’t answer. He dipped a twig into his tea and fished about. “The trouble with finding a mosquito leg in your tea,” he said, changing the subject, “is you wonder where the rest of it went.”

      “Only one?” I smiled.

      The next morning was sunny and warm. We discovered a dozen grayling living where the small creek emptied into our river. Grayling are silver fish, twelve to fifteen inches long, with big iridescent dorsal fins of turquoise. They live in clear water and are fun to catch, for you can see them. You often find several living together in some glass-clear “hole.” Like children, Phil and I played along the bank, catching fish and cooking them over the fire in the sunshine.

      It was late afternoon before we set out to look for the ghost town and evening was upon us when we discovered it slumbering among the fireweed. The rotting cabins stood quietly, a part of the woods from which they had been fashioned, and yet so different. Washed by three-quarters of a century, there lingered still that strange ugliness that clings to abandoned dwellings. Where once there had been voices, only the song of a white-crowned sparrow, the tired creak of spruce tree, and the gentle quiver of wind in the tall weeds spoke. Through the seasons it had remained, this old cluster of log piles that had been the homes of men.

      The cabins, their dirt floors covered with wildflowers, seemed small and dank—mere holes to crawl into out of the snow. Trees sprouted in the narrow doorways and on the warped sod roofs. Rotten wooden barrels that had contained flour or nails, treasures in a wild land, lay scattered in the blooming fireweed. Fallen doghouses built in rows had once confined the hard but necessary lives of slave dogs, long dead.

      Many of the cabins were no longer standing. Most were rooflessly tumbling back into the earth. Perhaps thirty people had lived here. A red tree squirrel raced along a naked ridgepole, vibrating at our intrusion, his tail flicking in agitated jerks with each “Chit! Chit! Chit!” I listened for the whisper of dreams from the dark walls and seemed to catch a sigh of loneliness. What becomes of men, I wondered, who strive for the pot of gold and perhaps miss the rainbow? But was I too quick to judge? Perhaps here, too, was someone’s grand adventure.

      We rummaged through quaint old garbage: patent medicines, faded newspapers, tools of another era. These tools had made life possible in this land, and the land hasn’t changed. After a long time in the dirty, dim interior of a cabin that still boasted a roof, I stepped into the lavender twilight and came face to face with a wolf. He didn’t look startled or even impressed. He was tan in color with a black face. Standing perhaps three feet at the shoulder, he coolly returned my gaze a long moment before turning with indifference and trotting out of the clearing on long, silent legs. Net-Chet was engaged in searching for a vole and was blissfully ignorant of her close call.

      Finding the old gold town put us at last on the map, and we carefully marked each day’s travel with little penciled lines. It was encouraging to see the daily change in the landscape that now marked our upstream progress. The river no longer rambled freely, but was often bounded on one side or the other by a two-hundred-foot cutbank, confining it to a broad glacial cut where it swung from side to side as if seeking escape.

      I tried to imagine what the land had looked like ten thousand years ago when a massive ice field capped the Brooks Range and a river of ice had carved this valley. A people very much like ourselves had hunted moose and bear in the Yukon flats, and fished the rivers washing out of the glaciers. In the fall, they picked cranberries and blueberries with their children, and in the spring they saw the ice go out and watched the birds return. They nursed their babies and cared for their old people and told stories around the night fires.

      One day the river swung abruptly, butting into the bare bones of a mountain mass. For some time it had paralleled the range as if undecided, then turned resolutely northward, wedging open a wide valley into its secret heart. Soon we were leaving our familiar gray crags behind for another set of landmarks.

      As the river began its climb in earnest, we developed a different method for surmounting rapids. These were now strewn with large boulders, “boat eaters” we called them, interspersed with deep holes. Water gushed over slippery rocks the size of basketballs and crumbling bluffs often dropped steeply into the river at a bend, affording no beach. In the past, we had grabbed the bow and muscled the canoe up the watery stairs together. Now one of us braced against a boulder, holding the craft in the turbulence of its wake, while the other worked the rope upstream. Finding secure footing, the one with the rope would haul the canoe (and the person guiding it) hand-over-hand up the racing