Jason's Gold by Will Hobbs

move again.
    Some Klondikers weren’t even bothering to unpack their horses at night. Jason could imagine all too well the agony of the mute animals all around him. Most were half-starved to begin with, and there was virtually no grass under the dense forest. Rare was the party that was packing any hay. His wasn’t.
    Every mile there were more dead horses along the trail, and from all sides came the croaking of ravens.
    The ravens always took the eyes first.
    Half an hour rarely went by without a pistol shot from ahead or behind. The third morning, Bailey brought out his own pistol when one of their horses couldn’t rise. The blast tore a hole in Jason’s sense of fair play. He was part of this, he knew, coaxing and dragging these poor creatures to their death. He felt like an accomplice in a crime.
    â€œThat’s Porcupine Hill,” he heard somebody say. He looked up to see a jumble of boulders above, gigantic boulders, with horses squeezing between. It took anexcruciatingly slow hour to reach those boulders. When they did, a horse was down in the trail not far ahead and neighing in torment. “Broken leg,” came the report down the line. “Turned its leg in a crevice.” Jason saw the butt end of an ax raised high in the air. He turned away, numb and shivering in the drizzle. The dull, bone-crushing thud came like a pronouncement of doom.
    It would have taken time and effort to remove the carcass from that spot between the boulders. Men, women, and animals resumed the march right over the horse’s body.
    Â 
    Jason had lost all sense of time. As best he could recall, they’d been under way for six days. It had all run together, connected by shouts and curses and the cloying stench of death. Far below, under the cliffs, the dead horses lay in heaps. They lay everywhere along the sides of the trail, hundreds and hundreds of them. White Pass had gotten a new name—everyone was calling it the Dead Horse Trail.
    Jason was ashamed and sick at heart. Still, the nightmare went on. More and more people were retreating down the trail in the muck. A man sat along the side of the trail stone-cold dead, shot through the back. Another man, enraged with his ox, which had become mired in the mud, was burning its belly with a torch. Still the ox couldn’t free itself, only bellow in pain. Jason watched a packhorse walk right off the edge of a cliff—a suicide? Grown men sobbed their hearts out in despair.
    And now they were looking at a thousand-foot climb in the rain up streaming rivers of mud. For two hours they waited for their turn to start up it. “Couldn’t we camp right here?” Bailey asked.
    Robinson coughed and spat. “No level ground.”
    All around them people were retreating. Some were admitting they were beaten. Others were going to try the Chilkoot.
    With so many trying to move in opposite directions, it was chaos. “We’ve covered only fourteen miles,” Bailey said to his partner. “Fourteen miles in a week.”
    â€œI’ve seen enough,” Robinson said. “I’m done. Let’s go home.”
    Jason helped them turn their horses around, then watched them go. He shouldered his packsack. His brothers were in front of him, not behind. He had sixty dollars in his pocket; he could buy meals from stampeders now if only he could keep moving forward.
    A few minutes later he tried to skirt a bad bottleneck in the trail. A man with crazed bloodshot eyes drew his pistol. “You do that and I’ll shoot you dead.”
    It was obvious he would.
    Jason stayed put. What was he going to do?
    Immobilized, he sat along the trail in the drizzle, coughed and shivered. He didn’t know how much more cold and wet and misery he could stand. Two men on horseback were picking their way down the trail. These two didn’t have the stamp of defeat on them. Professional packers, he guessed.
    â€œDid you pack for the Hawthorn