From a short story I wrote for an anthology I edited called The Mysterious North. No Kate, no Liam, none of the usual suspects and way out of my usual time period. It’s set in the Chilkoot Pass during the Klondike gold rush during the winter of 1898-99. I think you’ll like it.

Excerpt from “Cheechako, A Gold Rush Story”

The greatest crime on the Dyea Trail that winter, as on all the trails, was not murder but theft.

– Pierre Berton, THE KLONDIKE FEVER

It snowed two feet during the night. An incontinent bladder had Inspector James Blade of the North West Mounted Police first up, and so stuck with shoveling the snow away from the door of the tiny hut perched on the edge of the Chilkoot Pass.

“That’ll larn you, Jamie,” a voice mumbled from beneath am mound of blankets across the room.

What it would larn him was not specified. He stamped and swore his way into his boots and took hold of the shovel leaning against the wall. The door was reluctant to open, and he had to shovel a new path to the latrine. The path already had walls of snow too tall for him to see over.

It was a braw day, with the cold striking him to the marrow and the sky hanging over him like a lead weight. The brass buttons on his buffalo coat gleamed dully, and his breath left a trail of puffy white clouds hanging behind him in the air like little ghosts.

Like many of the Mounties hired by Superintendent Samuel Benton Steele, he was young, just twenty-one. The second son of an impoverished British nobleman, he had emigrated to Canada to seek his fortune and had found a measure of it in service to the law. He liked the country, the wide, open spaces, the towering mountains, even the loneliness of it, the miles and miles where no other human being had trod. He liked the few people who lived there, the Tlingit and the Athabascan, one of whose ancestral trade routes the Chilkoot Trail followed to the Klondike. Stalwart, hardy, spare of word, swift in action, generous with aid to those they deemed worthy of it, he felt at home among them, here in the great unknown.

Everyone laughed at him, of course, the rest of the detachment finding it amusing that anyone not born to it would actually consider living in this wilderness. “No saloons, no women?” Pierre Harkness said in dismay. “Jamie, Jamie, when the last stampeder has slogged his way up the mountain and the last white man has disappeared down the Yukon River, it’ll be more than time to be moving on. Listen to your father, lad, and go home.”

Blade didn’t think he would want to go home, in spite of his father’s importuning letters. In the meantime, he did his business in the latrine and went back to the cabin, to find Harkness had built up the fire in the small stove, had made coffee, and was now frying bacon. “You’re not as useless as you appear then, Perry my lad,” he said, stamping the snow from his feet.

Perry grinned up at him from where he sat as close to the stove as possible without actually setting himself on fire, his coat draped over his shoulders.

They were like enough to be brothers, both tall, fair-skinned, with light brown hair and dark brown eyes. Their shoulders were broad and a useful amount of muscle encased their limbs. They looked as if they could hold their own in a free-for-all, and indeed, if they couldn’t have Samuel Benton Steele would have shown them the door.