Athabasca

by Harry Kleinhuis

  And with that, he handed Harley over to Amelia, and with continued excitement said, “Come on, Jack! We’ve got a canoe to unload!”

  Jack and Cyril raced down the hill a couple of times to bring up the bundles and packs, while their dad carried up the canoe. The boys knew nothing could be opened until the canoe was back in its spot by the shed.

  Finally, Amelia was able to ask, “Why is it called Harley?”

  And Rose added in a cautionary and motherly tone, “It’s pregnant.”

  Malcolm calmly nodded and said, “We knew that. But we couldn’t leave it.”

  “It was almost in the same place where we found Mr. Harley’s hat on the way up to Hinton,” Cyril chimed in. “But we found her on the way back. Dad says it’s a house cat. We couldn’t leave it in the bush. We didn’t want it to die,” Cyril added.

  In all of this, Harley, a big orangey tabby, seemed to have claimed Amelia’s lap as the safest spot in which to curl up, and was coaxed to produce a gentle purr, much to Amelia’s delight.

  All she asked was, “What does pregnant mean?”

  “I think we’ll find out soon enough,” Rose predicted, feeling the cat’s tummy. Then she added one word, “Kittens.”

  “I’m going to have a family of them? When?” Amelia asked, wide-eyed.

  “We’ll know when it starts to nest,” Rose said.

  Jack was more interested in the other things. “Is that the new saw?” he asked, looking at the flat thing wrapped in burlap.

  “We’ll maybe try it after supper,” Malcolm suggested. “Bring my packs, tools and things over to the shed.”

  That was the signal for Jack and Cyril to do just that. But, since it would be a while before supper, Jack’s eagerness got the better of him.

  “The spruce log’s still propped up and waiting,” he suggested.

  “The man on the bottom pulls down and cuts. The one on top draws the saw back up and guides it,” were Malcolm’s only instructions. “Look at the teeth. It can only cut in one direction.”

  The saw was stiff, straight, and sharp. The boys continued from their earlier feeble effort with the crosscut, and had almost sliced a quarter of the spruce log down the middle, by the time Amelia came out to check on the shelves and call them all in to supper.

  Over supper, Jack and Cyril laughed and talked about their accomplishment with the new saw, and speculated that they could do things better if they could place the logs on a cutting platform. Jack mentioned that his arm was obviously healed because it hardly hurt at all. Cyril countered by offering him the job on the bottom, so that Jack would be the one to get covered with sawdust. Malcolm reminded them both that this was just a practice log and there would be more to follow. Amelia suggested that once they had cut the boards for the shelves, they could then cut some boards for a bigger bed for her. Then she wondered why Jack and Cyril were laughing.

  Malcolm ended the meal by getting up and going out. That, in itself, was not unusual. What was unusual was that he returned from the shed and held out a bag of hard candy for Rose to distribute.

  “Whoa!” Cyril exclaimed. “I saw those in the general store!”

  Rose let each of them have one, and suggested that the rest would be for special occasions.

  For the rest of the evening, Cyril was the storyteller. He sounded like one of the explorers from their school textbooks from which their mom had taught them. Stories about things that always seemed impossible and far away.

  Harley quietly explored on her own, and prowled about in the shadows of the little log house, away from the glow of the lamp. Rose knew that soon there would be another real-life story.

  It didn’t take long. Or maybe Harley had been waiting to settle into some place that looked and felt like her former home, and with people to help her look after things. She even waited until Malcolm and the boys were clear of the house the next morning, and working in the bush, for her to announce that her time had come.

  “Mom! I think Harley’s sick!” Amelia had come back into the house for something, and heard Harley’s unnatural meowing somewhere in the darkened corners of the house.

  Rose came in and quietly took control. She realized that none of the school lessons she had taught the year before would be as interesting, or memorable, or practical, as Harley’s big event.

  Harley was a big mature cat, who looked like she might have had some experience in these things. But practice does not always lead to subsequent successful outcomes. She squirmed and howled and looked up pitifully for any moral support.

  Harley struggled and heaved four times. And each time, Rose and Amelia felt the pain with her. Amelia had many questions about the blood and other yucky stuff. Even more questions as Harley’s rough tongue began cleaning each of the mewling kittens in turn. When it seemed obvious that Harley was done, and Rose had inspected her tummy to check, a clean cloth was put in place for the new family’s bedding. Harley continued to clean her brood, and both Rose and Amelia sighed and smiled.

  “Now what are they doing?”

  “They’re nursing—eating,” Rose explained. “They’re doing what all babies do.” It seemed logical to take advantage of the opportunity and continue with the practical lessons of motherhood.

  Harley purred with relief.

  By the time Malcolm and the boys arrived at noon, dragging a big spruce log, Amelia acted like the town crier and announced Harley’s accomplishment. Then she shushed the boys and ushered them over to Harley’s corner.

  The invitation was hardly necessary. Harley’s delivery was probably the biggest and liveliest event in the Whyte household in years.

  “They look like baby mice,” Jack whispered. He’d found one or two of those mouse nests over the years. “Except they’re obviously bigger. And they’ve got some fur.”

  “Mom says their eyes will open in a week or so,” Amelia informed her brothers, sharing the biology lessons she had learned. Then she giggled, “They came out of Harley’s bum.”

  That kind of ended the conversation, while the boys continued to look in at the four furry, squirming sausages pawing to get at Harley’s teats.

  But Cyril had obviously been thinking. “How’d they get in there?”

  It was at that point that Malcolm remembered he needed to sharpen a saw, and headed out to the shed. Pregnant cats might provide the impetus for anatomy lessons, but they don’t necessarily make them any easier.

  Lunch was quiet. Amelia had suggested that the babies needed rest and quiet.

  Jack finally started things with another question. “How come one of the kittens is orange, like Harley, but the other three are kind of gray?”

  “It happens sometimes,” Malcolm said. Maybe he was wondering exactly how much had been said while he’d been out sharpening the saw. “Those three also have short tails. Maybe she mated with a bobcat, although this is a bit out of their normal territory.” Then he looked at Rose quizzically, hoping that mating might have been one of her anatomy lessons.

  It had and it hadn’t. About some of those technical details, Rose had rather formally told the boys, “You’d better ask your father about that.”

  After lunch, it was a long walk back to where the men were cutting spruce trees in the bush. Although he tried, even Malcolm’s striding gait could not separate him from the boys and some of their questions. His answers were brief and evasive. They had a job to do, cutting logs for a scow, he told them.

  12

  A scow had brought the Whyte family down the Athabasca River seven years ago. And, as they had drifted, rowed, and steered through the currents to the remote place Malcolm had selected, they had drifted away from other people into a world of silence.

  That silence was something Jack had seen and felt as he grew. But he had not understood it. Maybe the silence was what he had run away from while, in his mind, he was following those fledgli
ng eagles he had watched from his river lookout.

  Rose had seen some of that in Jack, too. But now some of the silence seemed to have ended, because of what had happened between Jack and his father on the river. Something from which she was cut off because she had not been there, and therefore would not understand.

  There was, however, a growing pile of spruce logs in the yard. They could not be ignored or hidden away.

  “Those are more than just an experiment, or for a few shelves, aren’t they?” Rose asked Malcolm, after another day of him and the boys dragging in bigger and bigger logs.

  They were sitting on the bench, having a second cup of tea that evening. Amelia was busy with Harley and the kittens; Jack and Cyril were busy with a framework on which to cut lumber with their new saw.

  “We don’t have a big canoe anymore.” Malcolm knew it sounded lame and hollow, even as he said it. He also knew there was nowhere to run or get away from whatever might come next. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to anymore. Or that he needed to.

  “I overheard the boys talking about a scow,” Rose said. “I think it’s a good idea.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Malcolm pretended he needed to finish his tea. Finally he said, “Maybe you and I should go down to see how we might launch it in the spring.”

  A quiet walk down to the Athabasca took Rose by surprise. It reminded her of a walk the two of them had taken many summers before, into a ripening hayfield on a farm near Whitecourt.

  Jack had lit the coal oil lamp by the time Rose and Malcolm returned to the house. Amelia and Cyril were playing with the kittens. Jack was surprised to see his mom smile at him.

  “Building a scow seems like a good idea,” she said. “It was a scow that brought us here, remember?” And she pointed up to the roof of the house.

  Jack didn’t know what his mom and dad had talked about, but she seemed to be giving him the credit for it. It made him feel older, more adult.

  13

  It seemed like summer was disappearing while they weren’t looking. The garden had exploded with beans and a lot of other things. There were more than enough fresh things to eat.

  Jack and Cyril had stockpiled enough spruce logs to let them set to work, producing the boards that began to look more and more like a real stack of lumber. They imagined that on good days, they might be able to produce one sixteen-foot board per day. They didn’t say whether that included squaring up the logs or not.

  All of which gave Malcolm time to use the canoe to bring most of his supplies up to his trapping cabin for the coming winter.

  There were still six large logs in the bush by the time of the first snow. “It’s all part of the plan, Mom,” Jack assured Rose, with the kind of swagger that seemed to come with size and his increasing sense of self-worth.

  Jack could not help but notice that things had changed in the routines of the Whytes’ hermitage household in the Athabasca woods. There now seemed to be a purpose to their lives. Before, they had gone from season to season, with each annual cycle being a repetition of the one before. But now, the next spring, or early summer at the latest, would see them haul and slide a scow down to the river. It would be a time of travel, or even departure, he imagined. His dad had mentioned a fur auction in Edmonton. They were like emigrants anticipating a new country and a new culture.

  For Jack, Cyril, and Amelia, it would be almost as dramatic as that. Even Jack had already spent more than half his lifetime where they were. But, in the next year, like Harley with her kittens, they would be born into a world that would be new and strange.

  Edmonton seemed to be their target, or goal—big enough to absorb a new family without them being noticed. Malcolm had said that a good harvest of furs in the coming winter would be needed. They had no other finances.

  “I’ll be back in two weeks or so,” Malcolm said on the first day of his trapping activities. There was enough snow on the ground to cause him to use snowshoes on the trail up to the trap lines, more than ten miles back into the bush and up into the first foothill valley. It was the first time his going up there seemed to warrant more than just packing up and shutting the door behind him.

  “You be careful up there,” was Rose’s goodbye.

  “When can I come up to help?” Jack wondered.

  “You’re needed here. You and Cyril have a pile of spruce to work on.”

  The trap lines were Malcolm’s work and his sanctuary. Another level, another step farther away from everything that he had tried to leave seven years before.

  And now Jack wondered if that was what it had been like for Mr. Harley—if the wilderness had been that man’s escape from things he could not understand but which, from time to time, seemed to overwhelm him.

  Jack stood and watched longer than the rest. Watched long after his dad had disappeared into the forested darkness of winter, on the trail up to his trap lines.

  14

  “We’re going hunting!”

  Jack and Cyril had practically crashed through the door, with Jack making the announcement and Cyril nodding in eager support.

  “It’s good fall meat,” Cyril added, shaking the sawdust off himself.

  Jack and Cyril had been busy for most of the morning with their spruce logs and lumber. However, as interesting as sawing might have been at first, after a steady week of it, it had become real work. Hard work, as they often repeated at almost every meal. But, on this workday, a deer walking by at the far end of the garden was an invitation to do something else.

  “I saw it from up on the saw pit,” Jack explained. “A big buck that looked like it was going to follow our trail up to the spruce woods.”

  “But your dad has the rifle, doesn’t he?” Rose asked.

  “He just took the .22 this time,” Cyril said. “He had too many traps to carry and didn’t want the extra weight of the big rifle. Right, Jack?”

  Jack nodded, and used his best argument to seal the deal, so to speak. “I still have six shells that I didn’t use when Dad and Cyril went up to Hinton, remember? I was supposed to use them to keep deer from your garden, Mom.”

  “Yeah, they were for deer,” Cyril said eagerly. “And this is definitely a deer.”

  “And we do need meat. And it’s cold enough to keep it now.” Jack said, as if there could be no argument. He could have said more, if needed.

  He was taller than his mom. Had been for some time. And he was the man of the house. But, more than that, since the events on the river early in the summer, he’d become like his dad’s second in command.

  More than a foot of snow muffled any noise they might make tracking the big buck. Once they got to the edge of the clearing, Jack had little difficulty picking up the deer’s prints.

  “If you want to lead, you’ll have to carry the gun,” Jack warned Cyril in a hoarse whisper. “That’s the rule, remember? You don’t want to get shot in the back if I trip or stumble, do you?”

  Cyril obeyed his brother and the logic of trailing behind, all the while looking impatiently in all directions.

  Jack used both arms to carry the big .303 Ross rifle. His dad hadn’t said much about it, except that it was an army surplus rifle that was cheap and affordable, even in a Depression.

  “It shoots straight, far, and hard,” Malcolm had told Jack once during a hunt. He didn’t add that in the muddy trenches of the World War, it had a reputation for jamming. It had been replaced by a more standard military rifle. “Keep it clean,” Malcolm said as a warning, and showed Jack how.

  All of which explained why Jack often did just that, whether the rifle had been used or not. Like sharpening the new saw, it was something in which he took pride.

  “We really do need meat, don’t we?” Cyril whispered as they trudged along.

  “Yeah. Dad hasn’t had time to go hunting yet. And the weather’s been too warm,” Jack whispered. “Now, s
hut up. He can’t be far. He’s walking slowly from the looks of his tracks.”

  It was a clear day, with a slight breeze coming toward them. They would be out of the poplars soon and into the grove of spruce and other conifers of their so-called lumbering valley. Jack motioned for them to stop every hundred yards or so. By standing still, they would be better able to see anything else that moved.

  “Look for something horizontal,” Jack whispered. “Something at right angles to the tree trunks. That’ll be the back of the deer. It stands out because it’s flat.”

  The big buck had stopped to browse on some dry grass he’d kicked loose, under the snow on a rise. Both boys saw it and, aside from Jack slowly settling to one knee and raising the rifle, they were motionless. A head shot would have been a clean kill. But the deer was feeding, and its head moved unpredictably. Jack took the sure shot, like his dad had taught him, and fired. One shot, even from three hundred feet, was all it took. The deer crumpled where it stood.

  “Wow! That was loud!” Cyril exclaimed. “And it was good. One shot! You got him!”

  “Let’s make sure,” Jack said, trembling as he rose. “I guess we can make some noise now,” he grinned.

  After they raced up to the deer, they noticed it had been a crippling shot, up in the shoulders. The deer was still struggling.

  “I can finish it,” Cyril pleaded. “You said I could have a shot. Dad let you shoot that rifle when you were thirteen.”

  Jack looked back and forth between the buck he’d hunted and shot and his little brother. He was in a position to make decisions. He could be generous and let Cyril take some of the credit.

  “All right,” Jack said at last, feigning reluctance. “You know where to aim, right?”

  Cyril nodded and accepted the rifle. It suddenly looked bigger and felt heavier than he remembered, from when he’d watched and helped Jack clean it. Just to be ready.

  “I didn’t eject the shell,” Jack reminded him. Another safety lesson—let the one firing the gun be the one to load it. “There’s another two rounds in the magazine.”