“Well,” Jack said, as if it was obvious, “trapping would mean going out on the trap lines with Dad, wouldn’t it?”
Cyril nodded.
“And,” Jack continued, “if Dad and I were both up on the trap lines for weeks at a time, what do you think might happen?”
Cyril frowned back at Jack, beginning to realize. He nodded somberly. “You and Dad argue now sometimes, don’t you,” he stated.
“You understand, then?” Jack asked, by way of confirmation. Neither of them had said it, but both now knew that an uncontrolled explosion of tempers would someday be inevitable. Jack wanted Cyril to know that he wanted to avoid certain disaster.
Cyril nodded again and looked down. It was the best he could do as a sign of respect for his brother’s difficult decision.
“I’ll tell you more before Dad and I go upstream with the furs to meet Mr. Harley,” Jack said quietly. “Now let’s get out of these damn flies.”
5
It felt like the beginning of summer, when Malcolm checked the canoes and organized the supplies needed for the two weeks it would take for him to get the furs to Hinton, and then cruise back downstream with their household supplies for another year. He looked like he dreaded the excursion. And probably he did. Getting a good price for the furs was never a sure thing.
Jack had learned that much, too, or thought he had, as an observer and paddler on those trips for the last few years. He knew it was all or nothing. There were no options. The Depression of the thirties had whittled families and their lifestyles down to the bare and treacherous minimum. It had destroyed many in the process. If something did not succeed, there was nowhere else to turn. Like a trap, there was no escape.
Jack only helped to get his dad as far upstream as the rendezvous spot with Mr. Harley. After that, the two men helped each other when necessary. Meeting up with their neighbor, if, over such a distance, Mr. Harley could actually be called a neighbor, was a privilege for Jack. Aside from family, it was the only society he knew.
The others hovered in the background during these preparations, awaiting orders and ready to help. But not asking questions about the impossible or making suggestions. As in previous years, they knew the big canoe would return with whatever it could, and that essentials had priority. Anything beyond that would be a bonus and an unexpected surprise.
“Let’s see how far we can go before we get wet,” Malcolm said, with about as much optimism as he was capable of, as he ordered Jack into the bow of the big canoe, floating in the lingering mists of an early departure. They were on the inside of a long bend in the river, and could at least begin the trip upstream by paddling. The smaller canoe that Jack would need to come back from the link-up with Mr. Harley was snubbed up to the stern of the bigger canoe. There was a pole ready on top of things, for when Malcolm might need it to pole their way up some of the shallower currents that would come all too soon.
Jack knew the river well enough in the reaches up to Hinton or, at least, the place where Mr. Harley would be. He also knew that, depending on the depth of water in the changing seasons, the river’s channels were not always the same. He learned by observing; he learned by working; and he learned by listening to his dad’s orders about when to pull hard, when to help steer from his position in the bow, and, all too often, when to get out and pull the canoe along by wading in the always icy water.
Jack paid more attention to such river things this time. Although he’d come down solo in the little canoe from the meeting place several times, he knew that a greater adventure was going to happen. He knew that whatever he learned on this part of the river might be needed many times over, and more, on those stretches where he had never been before.
He also knew better than to ask any questions and make his dad suspicious.
He wondered what he might learn from Mr. Harley’s stories at the campsite. But he didn’t wonder for very long.
“Jack! Pay attention! We’re going to veer across the current to the other side,” Malcolm roared from the stern. “And be ready to jump out and pull the canoe when I tell you to!”
Jack felt the bow of the canoe get sucked sideways as the current caught it, and he paddled harder to keep it heading upstream. He knew what to do. He also felt stronger than he had in previous years. He was looking forward to coming back in the smaller canoe. Then, he would be boss.
6
“Mom, why don’t we ever go up to Hinton and to the post?”
Amelia asked it one evening, as she helped with the cleaning up. Just blurted it out, all normal, like she was asking something as simple as when the beans might begin to sprout in the garden.
But Rose seemed to understand what Amelia was really asking. In the same way she knew those kinds of questions could only be asked when Malcolm was not close by.
“We used to live in a town,” Rose said quietly.
“Brûlé,” Cyril said, joining in. “We used to live in Brûlé. That’s where we came from. I remember that. It was a long time ago. You were probably too small to remember.”
“Broolay,” Amelia said slowly, imitating her brother. Scrunching her face and trying to force out the memories.
“I don’t remember much,” Cyril admitted. “Just a lot of houses in rows. Real houses, with lots of windows. And a school. I remember being in Grade 1, and there were lots of books and lots of paper.”
“Maybe Dad will bring us another book for our schoolwork here,” Amelia said wistfully. “If there’s enough money.”
Cyril laughed at that. He knew what the priorities were. He also knew just how much his dad could safely handle in the big canoe.
“Jack should be home tomorrow, shouldn’t he?” Amelia asked. “Tomorrow, or maybe the day after? He’ll remember things about Brûlé. I’ll ask him.”
“Mom knows more,” Cyril said quietly.
Rose nodded and said, “Your dad worked in the mines that dug up coal for the railways.”
“Yeah,” Cyril added. “Big engines that blew out lots of smoke and pulled long lines of cars. Some with people in them. I remember that.”
“Then why did we leave?” Amelia asked, frowning.
“The mine closed,” Rose said. “There was only so much coal they could dig out that was of any value.”
It was starting to get dark. Cyril might have added more from his shadowy childhood memories. He also had a big secret simmering just below the surface.
If Rose had been able to see him clearly in the dim light, she might have asked him what he was thinking. Or maybe not. There were too many secrets and too many things unspoken in their Athabasca solitude, so far away from previous memories. There were too many secrets stifled by the demands of survival and the labor it imposed.
Two, maybe three days later, Rose began to worry. Jack should have been back if everything had gone well. Even if Mr. Harley and his canoe full of pelts hadn’t been at the meeting place, Jack would have been sent home. Malcolm would have sent him back, as in previous years. It would only have taken him a day. Less, if the current was strong, and Jack had been able to take advantage of it. Rose knew that, too.
“Jack should be home this evening at the latest,” Rose said to no one in particular.
“We could go down and wait for him, couldn’t we, Mom?” Amelia asked. “And Cyril could do some fishing.”
“Nothing’s biting now. The fish aren’t moving anywhere.” Cyril said it with finality. There was an edge to his voice.
Rose took that as a sign of Cyril’s own anxiety. Jack was Cyril’s only companion. They were all each of them had out here. They were boys. They did boy things, as Rose imagined it. So, like her, Cyril was right to be worried.
But Amelia wasn’t. She was in Rose’s image, and her helper.
As the three of them headed out, anxious to find out something, Amelia skipped on ahead on the trail to the river.
>
The three of them watched the river flow by near the shore, and then looked to the farthest point beyond the bend. They could hear the river hiss over nearby gravel bars and gurgle in the eddying currents farther out. Even the small canoe would have been able to cover a hundred miles, traveling downstream, if it stayed in the stronger currents.
“How far is it to where they meet up with Mr. Harley?” Rose asked, looking over at Cyril.
“Seventy miles, I think Jack told me,” Cyril answered.
Finally, as darkness seeped into the Athabasca valley, and only the peaks of some of the visible foothills still reached up into the sunlight, Rose said, “Jack will be pulled out and camped somewhere by now. He knows not to risk the river in the dark, no matter how close to home he is.”
She nodded for Cyril and Amelia to start back up to the house, while she scanned the river one more time. Not knowing was always the hardest.
Maybe it was because of that, of seeing the worry in his mom’s face, as they later sat in the glow of the coal oil lamp, that Cyril let the words fall out of his mouth.
“He’s not coming back.”
“What?”
“He told me not to tell you. But Jack’s not coming back.” And with that statement, and all its implications, Cyril began to sob uncontrollably. It was a throbbing explosion of fear, anger, grief, remorse, and the deepening agony of not knowing exactly where his brother was.
As Amelia whimpered in the background, Cyril finally sobbed, “He told me not to tell. He told me to wait at least a week. He said he was old enough to be out on his own.”
Even in the light of the lamp, it was as if a dark cloud had settled over them. A cloud that had always been there, like some foreboding omen, but which now could not be held back any longer. It was like some inevitable tragedy had deepened the misery of their lives. Logically, Rose might have anticipated that some unforeseen disaster would sooner or later overtake them in their isolation. She might have anticipated some force of nature—something beyond their control. But this was personal, and deeply painful.
“Jack said he wouldn’t be able to stay through the next winter,” Cyril said. Then he added, “He knew he wouldn’t be able to go out on the trap lines with Dad.”
Cyril might have added more, but he’d glanced over at Amelia.
Rose nodded. “I know,” she said softly. “I’ve had my fears.”
7
“Show me where,” Rose said with quiet authority the next morning, looking over at Cyril. “Show me where Jack made a cache of supplies for his trip.”
“He never showed me,” Cyril answered, understanding the question and realizing the implications. “All he said was that he’d keep some secrets to himself. Maybe he didn’t trust me.”
“Yes, that would have been a heavy load for you to bear,” Rose told him, nodding slowly. “Especially with what you already knew.”
“He just said he’d store some stuff downstream, maybe near a special tree or other marker.” Cyril remembered their conversation from the night before they’d loaded up the furs. He remembered thinking it strange that Jack had said even that much. Especially when he didn’t really need to.
“We’ll go and look after lunch,” Rose told Cyril and Amelia. But then, almost as soon as she’d said it, she said, “No, we’ll go and look now.” She led the way down to the river, almost at a run.
Rose waded out into the Athabasca to look up into the bordering forests. She searched for any tree that might stand out as a marker, like Cyril had mentioned. But she saw nothing. No large ancient pine that might have been overlooked by lumbermen in earlier years.
“It wouldn’t be this close to the trail,” Cyril suggested, as he walked along the shore, trying to come to a spot below where Jack’s lookout was.
“That’s it!” Rose said. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she repeated, looking over at Cyril for confirmation when she spotted a big pine tree.
Cyril nodded. He could see where the brush had recently been pushed aside. Jack had been there, possibly on his return trip from the Hinton run.
Rose forged into the bush and looked up at the same time, trying to keep sight of the big pine. But there was nothing at the base of the tree. No hollow or anything like that. Of course not. Jack would have taken as little as possible to hide down here for his trip, so as not to attract attention. Rose knew that. Anything removed from her stores would have been noticed. Jack would have done it over a few weeks to avoid suspicion.
“Mom!” Amelia had kept walking and looking up. “Mom! There’s a red cloth of some sort.”
Just barely visible, in the first crook of a sapling, Jack had wedged a small medicine bottle and used a tag of red cloth as a stopper.
“Like a message in a bottle,” Amelia whispered, as Rose pulled the bottle from its perch. Her hands were shaking, as she pulled out the red plug and then shook out a small, rolled-up piece of paper. She wondered when and where Jack must have written it. How long had he been committed to this desperate undertaking?
Rose’s hand trembled and she had to wipe at her eyes, as she quietly mouthed the words of her son’s note.
Mom, I had to do this. You know I did. And you know I couldn’t tell you. I had to do this myself or there would have been trouble for anyone I told. And you would have tried to stop me. It is like some of the stories in our reading books that you taught us. I have to go and find myself. The young eagles do this every year. It is not easy for them. But I have watched them, and they always seem to do all right. I cannot say where I am going because I do not know yet. Mr. Harley last year talked some about the fur trading days, when people traveled up and down this river. I have matches and that small ax that Dad thought he had lost trapping. I did not take much food because it is summer.
Thanks for being my mom. I will come back. Jack.
“He’ll be back when he’s ready. He’s all right. He knows how to use that little canoe.”
Rose said these things slowly, not looking at either Cyril or Amelia. Saying them out loud so that it might make them true. She dabbed at her eyes and then at her nose, as she led them back up to the house. If she had looked up into the midday sky, she would have seen a couple of Jack’s eagles circling up on the rising currents of air.
“But that little canoe is Dad’s trapping canoe,” Amelia said, as they stepped out of the bush near their little log house. “How will Dad go up the little river to scout out the beaver dams and take supplies up to his cabin?”
That was the way it had always been. In the fall, Malcolm Whyte had always ferried things up to his trapping cabin, and made sure things were in order for the winter. The small canoe had been his way to do that.
“Fall’s a long way off, Amelia. A lot can happen in the meantime,” Cyril told her.
Rose heard him and nodded to herself. But, as a mother, she dared not give voice to her dread and foreboding.
8
Jack had only ever looked forward to the spring trip for one reason. That was when they would meet up with Mr. Harley, their only nearby contact—if he could be called that—with the outside world.
The Whyte children had always only referred to him as Mr. Harley. Perhaps it was a sign of politeness, in which Rose had encouraged them, or maybe he was important as their only neighbor, and probably the only one who knew that the Whyte family existed, and where they lived.
Harley was already at the junction of a creek, where there was a flat place to camp for the night. The creek was slow and sluggish and afforded Malcolm a place to tie up his big canoe without unloading it. The smaller canoe would be whatever shelter he and Jack might need for the night.
“Good winter?” Malcolm asked Harley, who hadn’t risen from beside his fire.
“Ah, you know.” Harley let the words hiss out quietly between his teeth. “You?”
“About the same, I guess.”
>
It would take a while for either of the men to get into the rhythm of talking again. The long winter may have thawed with the spring, but the warmth of a new summer had not yet had the same effect on their tongues.
Not that either of them lived alone. Malcolm had his family, and Harley, as he had revealed at their second meeting, had a wife of sorts. She was an Indian woman who, apparently, was a match for his taciturn ways, and who expected little in return for the work she did in their house or camp, somewhere up toward the foothills.
Maybe it worked for them because Harley was a Métis, who had followed the rivers out this way from the Battle River, when too much progress from the railways had pushed him toward the solitude of the mountains. Harley never mentioned his woman’s name. He just kind of chuckled one time, saying she could skin a rabbit faster and better than he could.
Jack earned his spot by the fire with the men by bringing in enough firewood for the night. Not a hard thing to do now that the river had receded from its spring flood, leaving a lot of driftwood up at its high-water mark. He’d noticed a couple of fish, gutted, splayed, and propped to cook by the fire. He also saw other things, aside from the fish, that indicated that Harley had been camped there for at least a day or so.
Malcolm nodded toward his son. “Tea, Jack.”
It was the signal for Jack to fetch some clear water and set the tin in the coals of the fire. The tea would get maybe a second or third boiling before the evening was over, if there was enough to talk about.
“There must be lots of berries up where you are,” Malcolm said, when Harley brought a small bag of what he called sausage over to the fire, after the sun had set.
In the old days, it might have been called pemmican. It was stuff that Harley’s woman had pounded together, made of dried meat, animal fat, and dried berries. She’d squeezed it all into long sleeves of cloth, and then smoked them slowly beside a fire. The smoke cured and dried it some more, and had the added benefit of giving it a salty flavor.
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