In the evening I went downstairs into the tunnels where I planned to have a Christmas service with the men. Col. Urquhart and Major Chandler came along. We were the only ones who had seats for we each had a folded-up overcoat under us. The rest of the "congregation" sat or lay on the floor of the narrow tunnels with candles here and there for lights. I sat at the junction of the two tunnels with my men behind, to right, left and in front of me. I read, prayed, preached and pronounced the benediction sitting down, for the roof was too low for standing. The only thing that was conventionally "churchy" was the use of candles for lighting, and of course my church was cruciform in its ground plan! But there was the Message, there were reverent worshippers, and surely the Unseen Presence also, and these are all you need anywhere to constitute a Christian Church.
After the benediction and when the two officers had disappeared up the ladder, I was assailed by a chorus of voices with "tell us a Yukon story," as the refrain. I stayed, sat down again, and there with my men gathered round me in attentive silence I told my Klondike story of a Christmas Day years ago. In fancy we travelled far from France, forgot the war, and moved for a little while amid snow-clad mountains and silent valleys in a vast and weirdly beautiful land. I named my tale a Klondike Christmas Dinner.
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It was in the winter of 1904. A week or two before Christmas, Jas. McDougal had invited me to have dinner on Christmas Day with him and his wife. Their cabin was half-way up the mountain side on the left limit of Hunker Creek, six miles below Gold Bottom camp where I lived. You need have no fear of having a "green Christmas" in the Yukon with its eight months of solid winter with anywhere from 50 to 90 degrees of frost. It was "fifty below" that morning. Every nail-head on the door of my cabin was white with frost. My little stove had its work cut out, after I lit it and hopped back into my bunk again, before it had warmed the cabin enough to make it comfortable for dressing. I remember how that fall my top bed-blankets had got frozen solid to the logs at the back of the bunk while I was out on the trail one week and they never loosened up until the Spring, so that my bed rarely got disarranged and was very easily "made." When I took out some food for my dogs they crawled out of their kennels stiff with lying for warmth all night in one position. The exposed parts of head and shoulder were coated white with frost from their breath. They bolted their breakfast and got back quickly to the comfort of the nests they had left. The gulch was filled with the white mist which developed in extreme cold. It hid from my view the few cabins on the other side of the creek. Then I came in to get my own breakfast. As a special treat I had sent to Dawson twenty miles away for a pound of beefsteak for which I had to pay a fabulous price in gold-dust. It was real beefsteak but it had been "on the hoof" too long and it was like the camp, "tough and hard to handle." Not so tough though as the steak McCrimmon told me he had got in Dawson by rare good luck in 1897 when he had been feeding on bacon and beans for months. "That bit of steak," he said, "lasted me off and on for a week. I got away with it at last but it was a long, hard fight. Honest, parson, that steak was so tough the first time I tackled it I couldn't get my fork into the gravy."
Breakfast finished and the dishes washed I put on my parka over my other clothes and with fur gauntlets and moccasins I was ready for the road. The parka, by the way, is a loose-fitting, smock-like garment that slips over the head and comes down below the knees and has a hood. It is made of "bed-ticking" usually and so is light to walk in but keeps the heat in and the cold out. First I went across to Bill Lennox's cabin and asked him to feed my dogs at noon. Then I hit the trail for McDougal's. I followed it along the bottom of the narrow valley among miners' windlass-dumps and cabins. At most of them I stepped in for a few minutes to wish my friends a Merry Christmas and also to tell or hear the news. There was always something of living interest to gossip about in those glorious, exciting days. Men were finding fortunes ten or twenty feet below the surface of the ground or even in the grass roots. Fortunes too they were in the alluring form of gold-dust and nuggets, fascinating, raw, yellow gold lying there just where God made and dropped it. I've seen it so plentiful that it looked like a sack of corn-meal spilled among the dirt. It drove men crazy, and how could they help it. A wild, glorious gamble it was, with the thrill of adventure, temptation, and novelty always present, and a wonderfully beautiful land, new and interesting, as its setting.
It was towards noon before I turned out of the main trail, taking one that wound its way up the mountain side for half a mile until it came out on a flat stretch of snow. I was now above the frost-fog and could see, a few hundred yards away, a small straight plume of white smoke rising out of what looked like a big shapely snowdrift. The trail ran straight to it and soon I could see a log or two of the little cabin showing between the comb of snow hanging from the eaves and the snow banked up against the base. The door was low and when it opened in response to my knock I had to bow my head to get in. I entered without ceremony for they were expecting me. I heard a cheery voice with a Doric accent tell me to "come right in." I could hear the voice but could see no one for with the opening of the door the warm air meeting the cold immediately formed a veil of mist. But it was only for a moment for in the North in winter you don't keep the door open long. You either come in or get out, as the case may be, without lingering on the threshold. But what a hearty welcome when the door was shut behind me from McDougal and his good wife! No delay either, no shuffling your feet in the hall until the maid takes your card to mysterious regions in the inner chambers of the house, and comes back to lead you into a waiting room where you may sit down. Betimes the hostess graciously appears and with formal greeting and conventional smile gives you a hand to shake that has on occasions as much welcome in it as the tail of a dead fish. But this welcome was real, immediate, and unmistakable. I was right at home as soon as I stepped into the cabin for in so doing I came into the parlour, dining room, bed-room, and kitchen. They hadn't even a "but and a ben." There was something special about their welcome too, even in the hospitable north. To the miners generally I was known as the "sky-pilot," or "parson," or by my first or last name. But to these two true-blue Presbyterians with their Scottish traditions I was always "the minister," and so in my reception there was a respect and courtesy that gave their greetings a rare fineness of tone. Sometimes it is good for you to have people place you on a pedestal. You usually try to measure up to expectations and in that country self-respect was often the sheet-anchor that kept you from drifting to the devil.
It was only a one-room cabin eight feet wide and twelve feet long, log walls chinked with moss, rough board floor, roof of poles covered with a foot of moss and a half foot of earth on the top. The only place I could stand upright in it was under the ridge-pole. There was one window of four panes, each about the size of a woman's handkerchief. The glass was coated an inch deep in frost, but some light came through, though not enough to dispense with candles. Under the window was a table, simply a shelf two and a half feet wide and three feet long. At the end of the cabin opposite the door was the bed and to my left the stove, a sheet-iron one-chambered affair with an oven in the pipe, a simple, small Klondike stove which was not much to look at but capable of great things when rightly handled. After taking off my parka it was to the stove I went first. It's a habit you form in the North any way, but if you have a moustache, as I had, the heavy icicles formed by your breath on a six-mile walk in that extreme cold need to be thawed off near the stove, and that by a gentle, careful process, the reason for this gentleness only experience would make you appreciate. Once this is done there is no need to sit near the stove. Indeed you can't get far away from it if you stay in the cabin.
But I must describe my host and hostess. Mr. and Mrs. McDougal looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife. They were both small of stature and resembled each other. Both were well past middle life. Their hair was growing grey. They had no children, but his pet name for his little woman was "Grannie." McDougal had graduated from a Scottish University and after his marriage decided to leave the old land for America. They settled in California. As the years went on they found themselves getting within sight of old age without enough money laid by to save them from dependence on others in their declining years. Then came the news of the gold discoveries. It appealed to him for he saw in this adventure a chance to lay the haunting spectre of poverty. Grannie stayed behind in their pretty cottage home in the sunny south. A year or at most two and they hoped he would be back with enough to put their minds at ease. In 1897 he set out and after a trying journey reached the Klondike in 1898. He managed to find and stake this shelf of pay-gravel far up the mountain side. It had ages ago been part of the bed of a stream. He worked with eager haste to get enough to go back to his home and loved one. But the run of "pay" was poor and uneven, water was scarce, and his "tailings" required continual "cribbing" to keep from coming down on claims in the creek below. It all meant enforced delay in the realization of his hopes. The summers came and went with "clean-ups" good and bad but in the aggregate not quite enough for the fulfilment of his plans. Grannie was wearying for him and at last after six lonesome years she could stand it no longer. She heard that there was a railway now over the White Pass and steamboats on the river, and so in the Spring of 1903 she bravely set out for the North-land where she could be with her man again. Nearly two years she had been among us, a dear little lady with a heart so kind and pure and motherly that she became the patron saint of our creek. Men fiercely tempted in those strange days have found strength to save their souls because of the ministry of Grannie's life and words.
But we were just sitting down to dinner at the little table in front of the window. Now boys, I feel guilty in describing this dinner to you here knowing the simplicity of your army fare, but perhaps it will be a sort of painful pleasure for you to feast with us in imagination. First I said a simple grace thanking God for our food and asking a blessing upon it and us. We had soup to begin with, thick hot Scotch broth it was, then roast ptarmigan, two each of these plump, tasty little birds which the old man had shot from the cabin door, native cranberry sauce, parsnips and potatoes. These were good "cheechako spuds" shipped in from the South. We had home-grown potatoes in the Klondike sometimes, but in a summer which had one or two nights of nipping frost every month it was hard to ripen them. They were usually small and green, and so "wet" that the saying was "you had to wear a bathing-suit to eat them." Also of course there was home-made bread and excellent tea.
But the dessert was the masterpiece of the meal. It was a good, hot, Canadian blueberry pie about as big round as the top of a piano-stool. It had a lid on it and the juice was bubbling out through the little slits. It certainly looked delicious and it tasted the same. It was cut into only four pieces. I maintain that no self-respecting pie should be cut into more than four pieces except perhaps in the case of a very large family. Grannie gave me one piece, McDougal one, and took one herself. That left one over and when I was through with my piece I was urged of course to have the other piece. What could I do? What would you have done in my place? Courtesy, inclination to oblige, and my palate all said take it. My waist-band said, "Have a care," but it was awfully good pie and I cleaned the plate!