‘What about the bolstered gun you took from Camargo?’ I asked.
‘Under my arm.’
‘It may be all right entering Alaska, but we’re going back into Canada — at Prince Rupert, I presume. What about the customs there?’
They’ll be so busy checking the rifle, it won’t occur to them I’ve got anything else.’ He looked at me, frowning. ‘Come to think of it, what did you do with the gun you took from that little rat Lopez?’
‘It’s in my suitcase,’ I said.
There was a sudden flurry of activity, a jolt and people boarding. ‘Maybe we better hand them in. Or toss them out as we run through the tunnel at the top of the pass. No, the ravine would be better. There’ll be a mist up there today and everybody gawping at the steel bridge.’ A lot of clanking and people shouting, then we were shunted back to finish up being hitched onto a long train of oil tankers. The diesel locomotive gave a mournful bellow, a last warning as the couplings clashed.
I was out on the iron platform then and I saw the actor in his blue jeans running as the train started into motion, a battered suitcase in his hand and the television crews filming from the rear of the last coach, the cameraman being held precariously balanced on the outside of the observation platform. Again the mournful bellow, the wheels grinding on the rails, the actor clambering in, and the camera being passed to safety.
The diesel engine was already nosing its way between the river and the government buildings, and looking back I saw somebody had missed the train, a small red car swinging into the depot and a man jumping out. He stopped suddenly, turned and dived back into the car, which swung quickly round and was lost to sight behind some buildings. I looked out the other side, and there was the bridge over the Yukon where we had stood the previous night and the SS Klondike looking like a white whale stranded on the grass of the bank, and as we crossed 2nd Avenue, the locomotive still bellowing, there was the little red car coming towards us.
I caught just a glimpse of it, and then there were houses and the steep escarpment rising above us with a small plane raking off from the airport. By air I suppose it would have been no more than a few hours to Bella Bella, but most of the coast was only covered by local floatplanes and the direct flight distance was almost 800 miles. Too far, and the terrain too rugged, the weather close in to the Rockies too chancy. And by road the distance given to Bella Coola on the map I had with me was just on 2,400 miles — ‘Rugged driving,’ Tom said. He had done it. There was, in fact, no practical alternative but to go by ferry, which meant the better part of a day on the train, two nights on the American ferry stopping at five ports down the Alaska panhandle before Prince Rupert, and finally another day on the BC ferry to Bella Bella.
My first reaction to this slow progression had been one of impatience, almost of disbelief. Tom, on the other hand, took it for granted. ‘That’s the way it is up here,’ he had said with a shrug. Travel takes time.’ He was used to the journey, had done it several times. For me, to whom the Yukon, Alaska, the Pacific, the Rockies had just been names until now, it was a wonderful experience just to be travelling through this country — except for the feeling I had of being out of my depth and involved in something I didn’t understand.
All my training — my conventional upbringing, too — prompted me to report to the authorities. But report what? — those two Colombian gunmen when I was convinced the thing was bigger than that? And there was Tom — you can’t just shop the man you represent.
Three days. Three days in close company travelling down the coast. In three days I ought to be able to get some sense out of him, persuade him to take me into his confidence and tell me what it was all about.
Spruce, endless spruce, a copper mine closed by the fall in price, glimpses of the highway and mountains closing in from the right, the train dawdling as though it too was enjoying the scenery. And then, past what is claimed as the smallest desert in the world, we crept in to Carcross at the north end of Lake Bennett where it joins the even bigger Lake Tagish. This was the old caribou crossing — hence the name of the place, Tom said, talking of the huge herds he had seen once on a flight up to the North Slope oil complex. Another of those high-structured, wooden Yukon vessels lay on the shore and one of the railway’s early tank locomotives was parked beside the track, bits and pieces of it picked out in white paint, also a freight wagon. We clanked to a stop just after we had crossed the trembling timber swing bridge that spanned the junction of the two lakes and alongside us was the weatherbeaten wood front of the Caribou Hotel with several trucks parked outside, also a small red car. Then I saw them, standing there, just clear of the hotel, outside another clapboard building, Matthew Watson’s General Store painted on the front of it, standing quite motionless, their faces without expression as they searched the carriage windows.
I had gone out to the rear platform and was just stepping down with an excited group of youngsters to take a picture when I saw them. I ducked back, but too late. They were already moving towards the coach. Those two hunters,’ I said as I sat myself down again beside Tom.
He nodded. ‘I saw them.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Nothing. They won’t trouble us until we get to Bella Bella. Then we’ll see.’
The two men were climbing into the coach, each carrying a grip, nothing else. They stood a moment on the iron platform staring at us through the glass of the rear door, the big one frowning slightly, his untidy beard and the moustache seeming blacker than ever in the sombre grey light reflected off the water, Lopez looking tense, his body like a coiled spring as though expecting us to make some hostile move. It was only a few seconds they stood there motionless, but it seemed much longer. Camargo was the first to move, reaching out and opening the door. Then he was pushing through it, and they went past us, not saying anything, not even looking at us.
‘It was only an outside chance they’d be fooled into thinking we’d left by air,’ Tom said, and he shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s better this way.’
The train jolted into motion, and though I tried questioning him again, he wouldn’t answer, sitting there, staring out of the window at the grey expanse of the lake, his mind apparently locked on his thoughts. And those two men with their coffee-coloured skin and black oily hair sitting impassive and silent at the other end of the coach.
At Bennett we stopped for lunch — benches and trestle tables in a bare echoing hall that was part of the depot, a full-bodied soup brought on in steaming tureens by full-bodied women, steak and bean pudding and apple pie. And when we went out to stretch our legs the mountains had gone, the cloud right down on the deck and a light drizzle blowing in our faces. Lopez and Camargo took turns to keep watch on us and a second engine was shunted on to the train for the long haul up to White Pass.
Bennett boasted the one real section of double track on the whole no miles between Skagway and Whitehorse, so we had to wait for the daily train coming in over White Pass from the other direction with another load of passengers for another ‘gold rush’ station meal. We left just after one-thirty.
By then the wind had risen almost to gale force, the rain slashing at the depot buildings, obliterating them almost instantly as we pulled out into the murk. It was like that for perhaps half an hour, then the wind dropped and the clouds thinned to reveal a desolate landscape of bare rock and stunted scrub interspersed with innumerable little lakes. The train was moving now at a snail’s pace, the diesels labouring. We stopped by a small building that was like a signal box. We had reached the summit and the border between Alaska and BC.
We were almost at three thousand feet then and through the first of the snow tunnels, an alpine maquis world where a carpet of autumn-gold growth hugged the ground, crouching for shelter amongst bare, black, ice-scarred rocks and beside small pools still skimmed with the night’s ice. It was here that Tom, who had seemed lost in a world of his own, suddenly turned to me and asked me to get Lopez’s gun from my suitcase. ‘There’s the first of the real rock tunnels coming up in a moment. You’ll be able to get it then without anybody seeing what you’re up to.’