The Wild Read Free Page B

them.
    Jack watched him go and hoped he would make it home in good health, so that Eliza would not have to grieve. He found himself untroubled by the idea of making the journey alone, for most of his life’s journeys had been undertaken as solo ventures, even when he was surrounded by others pursuing their own paths.
    Shepard walked to the edge of town and vanished on the road down to the beach without once turning to look back. The moment he was out of sight, a huge grin broke out on Jack’s face. He felt a strange elation growing within him. Freed of his obligations to and concern for Shepard—and, yes, shorn of the guilt he’d been feeling at bringing the older man along—he felt more confident than ever inhis course of action.
    He turned to look up into the mist at the Chilkoot Pass. He felt it drawing him almost physically, and he was tempted to run there now and climb it all tonight, supplies or not. Throughout the voyage they had heard tales of men who had died on the trail, and thousands who had faltered and turned back. Shepard had wilted at the mere sight of the ominous terrain.
    Not Jack. The frozen north would not defeat him. Only death could stop him now.

CHAPTER TWO
MARCH OF THE DEAD
    T HE WORD AROUND D YEA was that a man with no destination could have camped on the Chilkoot Trail for months without wanting for anything. Warm clothes, dried and salted meats, canned beans, guns for hunting, tents…the trading post and the hardware store down in Dyea would have gone out of business if the stampeders landing by the thousands on the beach had but known that they could pick up all the supplies they needed right on the side of that trail. Especially on the westward side, making the climb up to 3,500 feet, where frigid winds buffeted travelers even in late summer, abandoned gear lay everywhere.
    And if the desire was for fresh meat, the cruel terrain of the Chilkoot Trail provided that in ample supply. Horses collapsed of exhaustion, broke their legs in crevices, orfractured their spines falling backward when the trail became too steep. Some were put down to end their misery, while others were left to die in agony by hard-hearted men who stripped them of their saddles and went on, not wishing to waste a bullet.
    Without Shepard accompanying him, Jack made the decision to travel light. Opening crates, he sorted through food stores and put aside essentials. Much of what they had brought on the voyage he sold to the proprietor of Hayley’s Hotel. Shepard’s clothes he traded to a burly, bearded fellow named Merritt Sloper, whom he’d met on board the Umatilla . Sloper had a particularly fine skillet and several bags of coffee with which he was willing to part, provided Jack wouldn’t refuse him a brew if their paths crossed on the trail.
    The deal struck, Jack took an extra blanket from Shepard’s supplies and then went through his own clothes. By the time he fell asleep that night, he had set aside, sold, or given away three-quarters of what they had brought with them. More confident than ever, contentedly exhausted, he fully expected to sleep through to dawn.
    When he woke in the middle of the night, disoriented, he sat up and breathed in the darkness. I’m in Hayley’s Hotel in Dyea , he thought, and then heard a groan.
    Jack held his breath. He had never been afraid of thedark, but he had learned to respect it.
    The groan came again: a floorboard, protesting under a weight that should not be there. Whoever walked tried to do so quietly.
    â€œWho’s there?” Jack whispered.
    A door drifted open where he did not remember seeing one before. He was so unsettled that it took a few seconds before he saw the hand splayed flat against the wood, and a few seconds more before he followed it back along the arm, across the shoulder, and to the face hanging behind it in the gloom.
    â€œMother?” he asked. With recognition came the familiar smells of