Jack wondered if he might already have said too much. He knew Cyril would worry, and he would certainly not be able to keep things a secret if he told him all he knew, or thought he knew.
“I don’t know,” Jack lied. “I just don’t think he can walk too far or too fast right now. And I don’t think he wants to tell us he’s been sick. Didn’t you hear him coughing?”
“Is that why those coyotes had been out there so long?”
“Probably. Come on. He’ll be wondering what we’re doing.” Jack headed back to the dull glow of the cabin. They picked up some firewood on the way.
Sleeping that night was not very comfortable in a small cabin intended for one trapper. Jack and Cyril found a corner to sleep in among some pelts. Their dad’s bunk didn’t look like it was much better. Malcolm blew out the tallow candle and crawled under a rabbit-skin blanket.
Jack remembered sharing a bed with Cyril when he’d had a cold. But the kind of breathing noises and sporadic coughing coming from under the rabbit-skin blanket that night sounded far worse, and ominous. Only Cyril seemed to be oblivious, as he slept well after a long day’s work.
Jack got up a couple of times or more to add wood to the tiny stove, but its warmth did little to help him sleep. He hoped morning would come soon. Then, in almost the same instant, he hoped it wouldn’t. He was more than a bit apprehensive about the next day. He feared for a confrontation in which he might have to be the man of the house.
The last thing Jack was aware of in that fitful night was thinking about the small sledge he’d seen outside—two runners of bent hardwood saplings and a platform held together with rawhide. He’d assumed that his dad had used it to haul things around on the trap lines. He thought of wet beavers. And he wondered if it might be big enough to haul other things. It was mostly downhill back to the house.
Malcolm was the first up in the gray of dawn. Maybe it was always gray inside the little cabin. His noise with the stove woke up the boys. Water was soon on for tea.
“Do I get to eat my biscuit now, or do we wait for later?” Cyril asked as he blew vapor off his tea. He’d recently acquired a considerable ability to eat almost anything, and at any time.
“Later,” Jack suggested. “We should get packed up first. Right, Dad?”
Malcolm nodded. “Just the furs,” he said. “A lot of things can be left behind until the spring. You know, traps and things like that. I’ll help bale up the rest of the furs for you.”
Jack didn’t want to say it, but he knew he had to. “What do you mean, bale them up for us?”
“So you can go ahead and start back. I . . . ” Malcolm started hesitantly. “I still want to check the beaver traps, like I told you. I might have missed one.”
“Dad, your traps are all here, I counted.” Jack tried not to sound defiant. He looked down as he said it. Then he looked over at Cyril, wondering if he realized what was happening—that this was a mutiny. He hadn’t warned him because he didn’t know it might turn into this kind of confrontation.
But Malcolm did. Maybe he’d expected it. “Cyril, go to the river and get some more water,” he ordered. And when Cyril hesitated, he added, “Now!” A yell that made him cough and snarl for some time.
Jack didn’t know whether or not Cyril was out of earshot, but he began anyway. “Dad, I know what you’re doing. And I think I know why.”
“You don’t know anything yet, boy!” The redness of anger was rising in his face. Malcolm knew that Jack knew. He also knew that saying it would make it seem worse. He looked at Jack and wondered how long he might have known, and what he might have said to Rose, or even to Cyril. “This is between you and me, isn’t it? He made it sound as much like an order as a question. “Between the men of the family. Right?”
Jack nodded, looking straight at his father. “It’s like on the river last summer, isn’t it?” he asked.
It was Malcolm’s turn to nod. And, once again, Jack saw the look of the coyote in the trap from the day before.
“Are you dying?” Jack asked. “Or are you going to do it to yourself?”
“Does it matter? Either way, you’ll be free.” Malcolm looked around and pointed. “There’s more fur than ever. It’ll be a new start for all of you.”
“But we need you to build the scow.” Cyril had come in behind them.
“You were supposed to get water!”
“I forgot the ax,” Cyril stammered, crying. “The hole froze overnight.”
“What did you hear?” Malcolm coughed.
“Are you going to die, Dad?” Cyril asked through his tears. “Do you want to die?”
“What do you know about dying, anyway? Everything dies sooner or later. Some things die so others can live. Where do you think your food comes from? Or the money to buy things?” He kicked feebly in the direction of some of the furs and bales of pelts in the corner near the door.
“But that’s what animals are for. I remember Mom telling us that, when we read a story in one of our readers,” Cyril began to explain.
“And being sick doesn’t mean you have to die, does it?” Jack added. “We’ve all been sick and got better. Don’t you just have to try to get better? Can’t Mom make some medicines for you?”
“Sometimes you get sick and you don’t get better,” Malcolm said, trying to end the conversation. “Sometimes you get hurt and don’t get better.”
Jack knew there was a lot more that could be said, and maybe needed to be said. He also knew Cyril wouldn’t be able to hear and understand those things.
But Rose did need to hear. “You can’t just leave it to us to go home alone and explain things,” Jack said, looking straight at his father, looking at him man-to-man, challenging him. “We know too much, and Mom doesn’t know enough. You’re the one who needs to explain it to her, not us.”
They sat down in silence for a while. Jack checked the fire and wondered if he should put some more wood in the stove. But that would only put off leaving. Malcolm tried to lean back against the wall, but a fit of coughing pulled him forward again, head down.
“We only have the picture,” Cyril stammered. “We don’t know how to build a scow, or anything.”
“No, not yet. But you would have figured it out,” Malcolm said. “That’s why I was ready to trust you with it.” He tried to lean back again. “Maybe we need to have some more tea first, and talk about that.”
The sun was well up into the trees by the time they had talked and packed up what was necessary. The little sledge was big enough for most of the bales and pelts to be strapped onto it. And they had talked about scows and boats that had been on the Athabasca and other western rivers a long time ago. Just in case.
They also talked about death and dying. Cyril had a lot of questions about that. He surprised himself by not crying.
Both Jack and Cyril seemed to be satisfied when Malcolm told them that death wasn’t all that hard. That what really hurt was thinking about it and wondering how it would happen. Malcolm looked at Jack at that point, knowing that the two of them understood. They had been there together, on the Athabasca.
Finally, Malcolm seemed to be resigned to the fact that doing it at home was either his punishment or his responsibility, for having brought his family into this wilderness with him. He looked at the hides and pelts. He wondered what death might have been like if he had stayed in the cabin with the wolves and coyotes lurking outside. His feeble laugh turned into a wracking spell of coughing.
All three of the Whyte men knew it would be a long walk home that day.
Most of the weight was on the little sledge that seemed to glide along surprisingly well. Jack and Cyril alternated pulling it. Neither argued about the bulk or the weight. Malcolm said he could at least carry his own pack and the Cooey rifle. The person with the sledge set the pace.
It was almost dark, and at least a mile or more from home,
when Cyril spoke up. “There are shadows among the trees.”
“They’ve been getting closer.” Malcolm wheezed and coughed. “They can smell the furs, and they probably sense that I’m sick, and . . . ” He didn’t finish. He knew that Jack at least knew how wolves hunted.
“What can we do, Dad?” Jack asked. “Can you move any faster?” But he knew the answer even as he asked it.
There were maybe six wolves in the pack. They were moving with a purpose, and they were getting closer.
“Take the gun,” Malcolm said, holding it out to Jack. “They only want the weakest, the slowest, or a cripple.”
“Dad?” Jack asked, baffled by the implicit suggestion.
Malcolm almost laughed. “No,” he coughed. Then he explained. “There’s too many to let them get close enough to shoot and kill them all. This Cooey’s good, but it’s only a single shot. Can you shoot one in the hindquarters? You know, enough to cripple him?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“They only want a cripple. They don’t mind if it’s one of their own.” Malcolm coughed, bending forward, pointing Jack toward the closing shadows.
Jack took aim.
“Paff!” The shadows scattered at the sound of the gun.
“Did you get one?” Cyril asked.
Jack didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure. But the answer came soon enough—wild, primitive thrashing, moving off into the darkness of the winter forest.
“Move!” Malcolm ordered his boys. “They may be hungry and they may be dumb. But they’re not stupid.”
He didn’t cough again until they saw the lights of the house. “Remember,” Malcolm told Jack and Cyril, “I’ve just got a bad cold. What happened out here,” and he pointed with a sweeping wave of his arm, “is between the three of us.”
24
A week or so later, Malcolm whispered to Jack, “Sometimes you get a second chance at life, sometimes you don’t. Last summer was my second chance with you. It was long enough to be the best part of my life.”
It had been a week of futility. A week filled with more love and conversation than all the years before. And sometimes you don’t have to say very much for it to mean a lot. That week also made it easier for Rose to answer or explain things later to her children.
Afterward, she used words like bronchitis and pneumonia. But what they heard and understood was when she said, “His lungs were sick. They were probably sick since the war.”
“I think the war made him sick in many ways,” Jack added. “And I don’t think he ever really understood just how much.”
25
The ground in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the Athabasca River country of Alberta stays frozen until a week before grasses sprout and flowers begin to bloom. But funerals can’t wait that long.
Jack remembered a big spruce that had blown over, roots and all, near where they had cut the trees for their lumber. He explained his idea to his mom and she agreed.
“When we sawed up the extra logs a few weeks ago,” Cyril mused, “I never thought it would be for this.”
“Maybe Dad knew we might need some practice before we started on the scow.” Jack welled up when he said it. He also knew his dad understood the practical aspects of life and dying, as he and Cyril nailed together a long box out of some of their extra lumber.
It took a lot of pushing and pulling, and the final use of Malcolm’s little sledge, but after a half-hour or so, they had gotten to the tree that Jack remembered. Amelia wondered why the big crosscut saw had been strapped to the top of the box, but decided that, under the circumstances, it was probably better not to ask.
“Well, this is it,” Jack said quietly, as they stopped beside the uprooted tree.
Rose nodded and helped the boys slide the box into the big shadowy hole under the upturned roots, that looked oddly like a crown. Then they all worked together to pack snow around and over the coffin box, adding their tears as they did so.
Finally, Jack looked over at his mom and asked, “Okay?”
Rose nodded and drew Amelia to her side.
“We’ll have to undercut it first,” Jack told Cyril as they picked up the crosscut.
They made two cuts, side by side, into the bottom side of the big horizontal tree, at about where the stump would normally be. They took a rest, and then began to cut into the top side of the trunk, over the undercuts. They worked slowly, rhythmically, stopping frequently, as they worked their way downward, looking and listening for when the top of the tree would fall away from the stump.
“Get ready to jump back when I do,” Jack warned, and two pulls later he did just that.
The big tree that had been horizontally suspended, groaned, squeaked, and shuddered. Then the stump, with all the roots and all their dirt, parted from the tree itself and, more slowly than anticipated, but as completely as planned, settled silently over Malcolm Whyte’s coffin.
Jack looked over at his mom, nodded, and then embraced Cyril and Amelia, while Rose read the story about love in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians. This time, he thought he understood more of what it said. Especially the part that said, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
“Mom,” Amelia asked as they trudged back home, “why did you shave off Dad’s beard?”
“It’s what he wanted, dear. He wanted to look like a soldier one more time.”
“But he wasn’t wearing a uniform.”
“No. But he was wearing the uniform of his life.”
A few days later, a Chinook wind sucked away most of the snow, as a prelude to the real spring that was to come later. It was enough to provide a work area close to the house, for Jack and Cyril to begin the work on their scow, while Rose and Amelia began to deal with the cleaning up and drying of the last of the pelts.
Inside the house, on the dog-eared calendar, Rose had arbitrarily selected March 15, circled it, and marked, “Scow begun.” In the box a week before that, she had marked a cross and written, “Malcolm.”
“We need to have a date for the authorities,” Rose explained to Amelia, when she asked about it one evening.
“Will we be in trouble because Dad died?” Cyril wondered.
“No,” Rose assured him. “Trouble only happens when you do bad things. Sickness happens naturally.”
“Trouble, like accidents?” Cyril asked. “Dad thinks, or thought, that’s how Mr. Harley died in the flood. But he wasn’t sure.”
“But we do have his cat.” Amelia said. “And his kittens.”
Rose decided it was time to clear the table. Dealing with bobcat kittens or cats might be a situation best left to a future date, when there would be other distractions.
The cleared table gave Jack and Cyril some room to look at the plans for the scow, and decide on their work for the next day. They only had a little room, and only for a while, because the table was also the sewing center for the dresses on which Rose and Amelia had begun to work again.
Spring would be busy, even without a garden and trapping gear to think about.
“Why can’t we just use the canoe paddles?” Cyril wanted to know.
“Because Dad said we need oars to move something this big,” Jack said with authority, tapping the well-worn drawing they called their blueprint. “And this is a good day to find some trees for them.”
Even though it was already April, according to the calendar and Rose’s calculations, the winter weather seemed to have retuned. Much of the snow had already melted, but what was left had frozen as hard as rock, making it easy to walk back into the bush to look for some tall, slender trees that could be made into oars and poles for a scow. Along the way, or maybe because Jack had planned it that way, they turned aside to look at their father’s grave.
“I guess that stump
’s like a tombstone,” Jack said. Although, what he really wanted to see was how the dirt and roots had settled over the box that he and Cyril had made. He was surprised at how well it had all worked. He wondered if his dad would be pleased. He imagined he heard a cough and a laugh.
“Do they care if Dad wanted to kill himself?” Cyril asked. “You know, maybe have an accident?”
“What? What are you talking about?” Jack sounded angry.
“I heard you and Dad talking back at the trapping cabin that morning,” Cyril said by way of explanation. “Do the people Mom needs to give his death date to care that he might have thought about it?”
“Everybody thinks crazy things sometimes,” Jack said. “It’s only when they do them that it matters.”
“Was Dad crazy to live out here? And bring us out here?”
“Why are you talking like this?” There was no doubt about Jack’s anger now. “Why do you even ask?”
“Something I heard in Hinton last summer. People in the store talked about the crazy river people when they thought I couldn’t hear them.” Then he asked, “Is that what they’re going to think about us when we get to Edmonton?”
Jack started walking on, looking up for trees that they might carve into big oars.
“People can think what they want,” Jack told his brother. “All I know is we’ve got to try. If we stay here, there’ll be nobody left to bury us but wolves. Come on!”
Epilogue
The bobcat kittens hardly noticed that the Whytes had left. They had enough to do, hunting rodents around the little log homestead above the Athabasca River, to keep themselves fed and busy in their natural state. Harley and the orange kitten, Samantha, learned to ride a scow down that river and to keep clear of the oars and poles, and all the activity required to keep the scow in the deeper currents, especially through the section called the Gooseneck rapids.
The scow held all that was important to Rose and her children. After all, they had come with very little eight years earlier. The furs of their last winter’s harvest had priority. Their value at auction would determine how much they would have, to start a new life in Edmonton.
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