I am currently reading Drifting Home by Pierre Berton. The book follows the journey of Berton and his large family as they travel along the rivers of the Yukon towards Dawson City.
In the book, Pierre Berton reflects on his father and their relationship.
It also included a story, which Berton told his children around the campfire one night on that journey. I really liked that story, so I wanted to share it in my latest post.
It is the story of The Lost Cabin of the Yukon, rumored to contain a treasure-trove of gold inside.
There are some who claim to have seen that cabin, but only in the distance. Generally they were so far gone that they couldn’t finish their journey. The odd thing is that almost everybody who claims to have seen it, places it in a different part of the country.
A man named Charles MacGurkey, who claimed to have seen the cabin, decided he wanted to journey back to find it on the Rat River Divide. Along with another man named Krondstadt and a young person named Tubby, they ventured out in June to find the cabin. They headed towards where Bishop Stringer had once eaten his boots and gained the nickname, the Bishop Who Ate His Boots.
Around August, either by accident or with malicious intent, Tubby fell or was pushed off the edge of a cliff and impaled on a dead tree part of the way down. Tubby wasn’t dead, but taking him back to civilization meant the search for the gold of The Lost Cabin had to be aborted.
The two men didn’t want to give up their search, so they disguised the incident as an accident and left Tubby behind to die.
The going got rougher and the two men had to go on half rations as the journey seemed longer than MacGurkey remembered. By early October, the weather turned cold and the first snow began to fall. Still they pushed on, following MacGurkey’s memory of his old trail, both of them getting weaker.
By the end of the month they were out of food and lost in a blizzard so bad they couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of them. They moved on more by an act of will than anything else, following a twisting valley whose outline was barely visible in the storm. Suddenly, it hit MacGurkey, that he had seen the valley before. This revelation came to him and the storm suddenly died and there, on the high ridge above them, he could see a clump of birches as white as dead men’s bones and there, silhouetted against the sky, the dark outline of an old cabin. It was then that he knew they’d found what they were seeking.
They began to clamber up the hillside to the bench above. The cabin itself was in bad shape with a roof half caved in and the door hanging loosely on one hinge. They reached the cabin and grabbed the door. But as they did it opened, as if by itself, and it was then that they realized the cabin was occupied.
An old prospector, his hair as white as snow and his cheeks as pale as death, peered out and greeted them.
“Welcome gentleman,” he said. “Come on in, I’ve been expecting you. Got some coffee on, just waiting for you to drink it.”
He beckoned them into the cabin and poured three cups of coffee. Krondstadt said, ‘There are only two of us, you’ve handed us one cup too many.”
“Oh no,” said the prospector. “This extra cup is for your friend. Go on, pass it to him. He arrived some time ago, just after the first frost.”
And there was Tubby, with a ghastly smile on his face and the blood hardly dry on his chest and a piece of dead tree still sticking through him.
“Hello,” he said. “It took you guys a long time to find The Lost Cabin.”
Naturally, that night, it was uneasy sleeping in the forest for many in the Berton family.