"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

Skagway—bacon and eggs and pancakes. We had a patent "Yukon stove," safe to use on
board. It had a hand-cranked fan to get the fuel alight—newspaper and a few lumps of
coal, in our case.
We moved through vistas of great beauty, the snowcapped Cascade Range to our
right—though I had awakened to what I at first thought had been an unsettling dream, the
boat hurtling out of control down an absurdly narrow cataract. In fact, it was half true; we
had gone through the Seymore Narrows, all that water squeezed through a passage only a
few hundred yards wide. By noon we had an unpleasant situation of an opposite nature—
we moved into the open sea, Queen Charlotte Sound, and for several hours the ship was
tossed around like a toy boat. Our kit was secure, but that wasn't true of everybody's.
There was a fury of chasing around cans that rolled all over the deck, and inevitable
disputes over ownership.
One such dispute came to blows, and then the men circled each other with knives
on the pitching deck, with an audience about equally divided between those wanting to
stop it and those eager for blood. Eventually, the first mate fired a pistol into the air and
declared in broken English that if one of them was cut the other one would die. With an
exchange of profane language, the men retreated to their respective sides.
Doc predicted the two would be friends again tomorrow—that they had just
worked themselves into a situation where neither could back down without being
humiliated in public. He was right; the next day I saw them chatting amiably together.
By evening we were back in protected waters, and there were no more dramatic
disputes during the three days we churned north to Fort Wrangell. I was amused to find
that none of my three men had the slightest idea about how to make bread, though they
were carrying over a thousand pounds of flour! They were going to live on flapjacks and
hard biscuits. I taught them the rudiments, and by Wrangell each one of them could use
the Yukon stove, with its baking enclosure, to make a thing that at least resembled a loaf
of bread, though some of it was so dense it might serve better as a weapon than as food.
Fort Wrangell was surprising, to put it mildly. My five-year-old Baedeker said it
was "a dirty and dilapidated settlement inhabited by about 250 Tlingits and a few
whites." Instead we came upon a town that from the water appeared bigger and more
prosperous than Dodge.
(And indeed it had a connection to Dodge: Wyatt Earp had been marshal of both
towns. The paper I bought on the dock noted that he had quit the post and gone north ten
days after being sworn in. "Wrangell was too tough for him," it said, but I supposed he
was just marking time before heading for the gold.)
We had to wait at anchor for a place at the dock, as there were two other steamers
loading and unloading. One was taking on lumber; the fresh smell of pine wafted over the
water. When the wind shifted, there were less pleasant smells from a fish cannery and a
brewery.
When we did dock, the first mate announced that we were staying overnight,
leaving at first light. The Wrangell Narrows are difficult to negotiate even during the day;
we didn't want to be stuck in them after sundown. That was fine with us, after four days
confined to the deck of the ship.
The boys hurried off while Doc and I strolled down the main street—Front Street,
which was really just an extended dock, boards spiked onto pilings. There was a
temporary feel to it, and there weren't nearly as many people around as the size of the
place would justify. Doc eventually sorted it out in a conversation with a publican: A few
months before, there might have been a thousand or more prospectors, headed up the
Stikine River for the Teslin Trail to the Klondike. But that trail was rough and long, and
now that the Chilkoot Pass was open, everybody went on to Skagway and Dyea. That