Strange Things Done Read Online Free PDF Page A

ink, with a violin and bow in the top right quadrant marking north. The map made the town appear even more cornered, with an angry river circling the south and western shores and dark mountains walling off the north and east—the Klondike Highway the only thin ribbon of escape to the south between river and mountains. A campground and hostel in West Dawson, on the western shore of the Yukon River, was misspelled with an “i,” so that it read “hostil” instead of “hostel.” Areas outside of town disappeared into sketchy nothingness.
    “And Jo?”
    “Yes?” Jo already had one hand on the door handle.
    “Remember, I’m still the editor for one more week, so everything goes through me. It’s still, you know, my story.” His eyes locked with hers. She thought about telling him where he could put his story, but after all, he would be gone in a week. Besides, until she knew for sure that there was a story, beyond someone drinking too much and falling into the river, it could all be wasted energy. Jo allowed Doug to mistake silence for agreement as she closed the door behind her.

    Jo eyed the dark, churning surface of the Yukon River, imagining just how glacial it would be if she were suddenly pitched from the deck of Dawson’s rustic ferry. The width of the river from Dawson proper to West Dawson was probably half a mile, but it looked tumultuous. Jo tried not to think about the thousands of gold prospectors who had gambled their lives to risk these waters in 1896, arriving on roughly hewn rafts or overburdened paddle steamers. How many had lost the bet? Dawson had a long history of being the last refuge of the desperate. Still is , she thought. She was living proof.
    Jo took a sip of lukewarm coffee and Baileys out of a chipped mug that read, “THE PIT.” No takeout cups in Dawson—she’d been given a loaner. Jo wasn’t in the habit of drinking in the morning, or even during the day, but just this once she indulged. Hair of the dog. She knew she’d been drinking too much since things had gone wrong for her in Vancouver. Frank had always said that alcohol wasn’t a good coping strategy. Pot. Kettle.
    Jo hadn’t needed to hang around long at The Pit. By the time the doors to “The Pink Palace” had opened at nine, everyone in town knew that a paranoid, cave-dwelling recluse by the name of Caveman Cal had found a body, which had washed up just outside his makeshift abode on the western shore.
    The sun was just beginning to lift its head, burning the belly of distant cloud and sending a long claw of light across the surface of slate waters like a beckoning finger.
    The ferryman misunderstood her solemn appraisal of the river. “Pretty, eh?” He was not much taller than Jo and a good forty years older. He wore a broad grin that made his face crinkle, though his raisin eyes assessed her with a certain shrewdness.
    “Pretty cold,” Jo sort of agreed. “Haven’t they ever considered building a bridge?”
    The man slapped his knee as though she’d just told the best pub joke in town. “A bridge over the Yukon River!” He continued chuckling, shaking his head. “Where’d be the fun in that, eh?”
    “Public transportation should be fun?”
    Still smiling, he said, “Lady, you don’t know Dawson. If there’s no challenge to a thing, it doesn’t belong here. Folks live in West Dawson for the sport of it. To survive after freeze-up, once they’re cut off from town. They hunt off the land and boil ice for water. Bridge! Ha. Good one.”
    “Oh.”
    “You’ll see.” He gave Jo a look that said he already knew who she was. “One winter and you’ll be a sourdough, too.”
    “Sourdough …?”
    “A survivor. Tough enough to survive, eh?”
    Jo hoped the man was right. Then she hoped she wouldn’t have to find out. “But why sourdough ?”
    “The first settlers here, the miners, made sourdough bread instead of regular bread because they found that even freezing doesn’t kill sourdough