Athabasca Read online

  Copyright © 2021 Harry Kleinhuis

  Published in Canada by Red Deer Press, 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, ON L3R 4T8

  Published in the United States by Red Deer Press, 311 Washington Street, Brighton, MA 02135

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Red Deer Press, 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, ON L3R 4T8

  Red Deer Press acknowledges with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

  Edited for the Press by Peter Carver

  Text and cover design by Tanya Montini

  Proudly printed in Canada by Houghton Boston

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Athabasca / Harry Kleinhuis.

  Names: Kleinhuis, Harry, 1943- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana 2020036197X | ISBN 9780889956346 (softcover)

  Classification: LCC PS8621.L45 A84 2021 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (U.S.)

  Names: Kleinhuis, Harry, 1943-, author.

  Title: Athabasca / Harry Kleinhuis.

  Description: Markham, Ontario : Red Deer Press, 2021.| Summary: “Jack is 14 going on 15. He lives with his family on the Athabasca River. It’s the late 1930s, and the river is still wild and untamed. Jack, as a teenager, is in conflict with his parents and decides to take out on his own by canoeing down the river. Trouble is, on the first day, he breaks his arm, and has to stay stranded, alone, unable to go further. His father follows and finds him and somehow father and son begin to communicate in ways they never have. All of this is played out against the backdrop of a powerful river where nature is dominant and where a family manages their lives alone in the bush, with little or no reference to the world beyond.” -- Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-0-88995-634-6 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH Teenagers – Family relationships—Juvenile fiction. | Athabasca River (Alta.) – Juvenile fiction. | BISAC: YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Family / Parents.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.K645Ath |DDC [F] – dc23

  www.reddeerpress.com

  To all those who sit by a campfire at night to talk and sort things out. Preferably beside a big adventurous river that is taking them to somewhere.

  PART 1

  1

  Jack sat up on the high bluffs above the river and watched the dark patches of ice float by. It was late spring. He knew it was almost time. Time for a lot of things. Time for the river to settle down after the run-off. Time for his dad to link up with Mr. Harley a little farther upstream, for their run up to the trading post in Hinton. Time for him to wait a few more days after that, and then head out as well. But only he knew anything about that.

  From this spot above the river—his lookout, as he called it—Jack had watched the big Athabasca River for seven years, and in all seasons. On good summer days, in the sunshine, when the wind blew from the southwest, he’d watched the bald eagles rise up and circle and soar, looking for their target, their opportunity, and their time to thunder down out of the skies on some unsuspecting prey below. That was how they lived. And survived.

  For seven years Jack had watched and learned. He’d waited, soared, hovered, and sensed the air and the currents that wove their way through his life. He was waiting for his own day to do what he knew he had to do.

  Seven years had been a long time for Jack. But not for the big Athabasca River in its long and twisted valley.

  Seven years is not a long time for the foothill regions of the Rocky Mountains.

  Seven years was only a long time for Jack. A really long time. It was half his lifetime. Seven years that he remembered well. Seven years of growing up into this time, when he knew he was ready.

  Jack looked up into the blue darkness of the clear sky straight above him, beyond where the eagles could fly. He squeezed his eyes shut and wondered. Then he looked down to the sky’s distant haziness near the horizon. He knew the eagles would soon be back, like always. But they would have no more to teach him, and he knew he would not be there to learn from them anymore.

  Jack unfolded his teenage legs, and rose to leave the peace and sanctuary of his own secret lookout above the Athabasca, and the whispering of its currents, and the now infrequent grinding of some of the ice that still floated by from somewhere. The ice and the river still cooled the occasional rush of wind that swept up to Jack’s bluffs and into the poplars, spruce, and pine trees beyond.

  He didn’t hurry. He was reluctant to leave. And equally reluctant to go back to what he knew awaited him.

  2

  From his river lookout, it was almost a quarter-mile up to the little plateau where Jack’s dad, Malcolm Whyte, had built the log house for his family seven years before. It wasn’t pretty. But Jack knew his dad hadn’t been concerned about keeping up with the neighbors, or of offending them. He’d done what he could with the spruce logs cut from the trees close at hand. It was a practical source of building material that, at the same time, allowed him to clear a larger patch of land on the plateau for his crude homestead. The clearing provided a place to grow things, and it was a way to let in some sunlight to that isolated sanctuary to which the Whytes had retreated.

  The roof of that squat little house seemed to rise out of the spring green of that grassy clearing, as Jack climbed up out of the river woods. The roof was straight and square. Probably because it was made from the boards Malcolm Whyte had salvaged from the big, clumsy wooden scow that had carried them downriver from the coal mining town of Brûlé. It had carried them as far as necessary, and had then become the roof of the family’s house.

  Jack remembered that. He remembered that first summer, and his mom crying as they’d taken the scow apart and carried those big boards up the hill, to where his dad had already laid out the first tier of logs for their house. Jack remembered helping. He’d been big enough to drag some of the smaller boards. He remembered the slivers. He remembered himself crying, too, and sweating, and swatting at mosquitoes, and dropping those boards when too many of those damn mosquitoes bit all at once.

  Jack had wondered in that first summer why his mom had only cried at the bottom of the hill, down by the river. He’d thought it was the heavy work and the mosquitoes. But, over the years, he realized it was because of the scow itself. It had brought them to this place, but it would never carry them out. Not back up the river and through its currents to where they had come from. Not them as a family.

  When you’re not quite eight, you don’t think about those things. You haven’t seen enough of life to know how it all fits together. You don’t remember the beginning, and you can’t imagine the end. You only see the day you’re in, when you’re small. And you do what you’re told to do.

  But this was another year. And Jack Whyte wasn’t small anymore.

  3

  “Dad’s starting to get the furs ready.”

  Jack was walking past the garden on his way back to the house. Cyril, his younger brother and the next oldest at thirteen, was tilling the garden with the family’s only shovel.

  “Yeah, I knew he would be,” Jack mumbled by way of reply. “The river’s almost ready, too. Not much ice still floating by.”

  Getting the furs ready was the signal that the busy and critical time of the year was about to start. It was the time when Malcolm Whyte linked u
p with Mr. Harley for the yearly trip upriver to Hinton. They went up there to sell their winter harvest of furs, and pick up whatever supplies that sale would allow. One payday and one big shopping trip for the whole year.

  “He’s been calling,” Cyril called after Jack. “You were gone a long time.”

  Jack knew that last part was a warning. He acknowledged by saying, “Yeah” over his shoulder. He didn’t say why he’d been gone so long. To do that would be to reveal what he’d been thinking about. But Cyril wouldn’t understand such things. Not yet. However, Jack knew Cyril’s day would come, too, soon enough.

  Malcolm Whyte was busy with the furs out by the shed. Checking them, counting them, and sorting them by grade and variety. There were a lot of beaver this year. Winter had been good for that. But Jack knew it was the mink that usually fetched the best price.

  “Where in hell have you been?” Malcolm snarled at Jack, as soon as he heard his footsteps come up behind him.

  “You told me to check the river.”

  Jack had learned how to be surly over the last winter. He’d learned to talk back in a tone to match his dad’s. Maybe it had something to do with his growing too fast, and all the other changes that went along with that. Things nobody bothered to explain, and things he’d considered too private to ask about. Things he hadn’t really been able to figure out on his own, no matter how hard and how long he thought about them. He guessed that, as with so many other things, they’d fade into the background, as he continued to get older and wiser. They were the things his young eagles seemed to do in just a few months of summer.

  There were a lot of other things Jack had been thinking about in the last year or so. He knew there was a big world out there. A world of which, for some reason, they were not a part. When he’d been smaller, it hadn’t mattered all that much. It was all just like the stories and things he and his brother and sister were learning from their mom, in the few books from which she taught them in the evenings, and especially during the long, cold winters.

  Back then, he’d been satisfied when Mom told them they were safe here; that here they were a family; here they were as rich as they wanted to be, because of the work they did, and the things they could do for themselves. In the world away from them, there was something called The Depression. Something that made people poor, and hungry, and desperate.

  Those were among the things Jack Whyte thought about in a land and time—the Athabasca country of the 1930’s—when children grew slowly, if they survived, and where, later on, the hardships of the seasons and other circumstances forced them to grow old all too soon.

  “Clean the traps and let them dry in the sun before you oil them,” Malcolm ordered Jack. Said it like Jack might not have remembered from other times.

  Jack didn’t answer. He just set about doing what he knew he had to do. The same job or chore as in every other spring he could remember. The traps were the family’s means to an income. They needed to be in good order to do their job.

  “Make sure you strip them down good,” Malcolm said. “I don’t want anything to leave a smell on them.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Jack had filled the old tub with water. “I’ll let them soak for a while first.”

  Malcolm grunted in acknowledgement. Then he added, “You can help your brother while the first lot’s soaking.”

  Cyril and Amelia, their little sister, did most of the smiling and laughing in the Whyte family. Jack figured it was that way because they got most of the easy chores. Although he had to admit that digging the garden in the spring was not one of the easiest things to do. Especially for Cyril. He had always been skinny and pale. Even in the hot summer months.

  “Why were you down at the river so long?” Cyril asked. “Were you waiting for the eagles? Or were you waiting for the rest of the ice to melt?”

  “Both. And neither happened.”

  “Maybe Dad will let me go on the fur trip upriver someday,” Cyril mused, as he tugged at a tree root that had wandered into their garden from a long way away. The shadows of the tallest trees in the area nearby didn’t reach to the middle of their garden, but their roots sure did.

  Jack almost laughed to watch Cyril pull on the stubborn thing, while he himself kept on working with the shovel. He knew that more roots would find their way into the garden as soon as their mom got things organized, and they spread some manure from the outhouse that got moved every year.

  “Going up the Athabasca in the spring is a lot of hard work,” Jack said in answer to his brother’s suggestion. “Moving that heavy canoe means wading and pulling it along as much as paddling it. The top of me is usually sweating, while my legs are numb and cold from the icy water.”

  Cyril winced and giggled at the thought of it.

  Jack noticed and snorted. “You can take my place this year if you want to. I was younger than you the first time Dad made me come along.”

  Actually, as he thought back to that first time, he’d been proud to have had the privilege, or responsibility. It meant doing a real man’s job, even though he might not yet have been one. It also meant coming back home alone, in the smaller canoe, from the meeting place with Mr. Harley. It was like flying down the Athabasca in the currents and rapids of some of its bends and narrows. It also meant that he had learned something of the nature of the river and how it behaved, through its twists and turns, in its descent down to wherever it went.

  And that may have been the beginning of his idea.

  “Jack, you’re going crooked! You’re dreaming again!” Cyril warned him.

  At the same time, there was a loud growl from the shed. “Jack! You can do this batch of traps now!”

  Jack stepped out of his dreaming and gave Cyril a dirty look, as he handed back the shovel and the boots that went with the digging job. Those rubber-bottomed lace-ups were necessary when their customary bare feet couldn’t handle the job. He headed back to the shed and to the growl.

  “I wasn’t dreaming,” Jack snarled back at his little brother.

  He wasn’t dreaming. But neither was he ready to tell Cyril what he was thinking and planning, either. Jack knew how secrets had a way of oozing up to the surface.

  One of the traps still had what was left of a mink’s foot, bonded to one side of the steel trap. Jack looked at it and thought about it. He imagined one of the sleek-coated animals choosing between freedom and one of its hind feet. Maybe wrestling with the cold, unforgiving steel for much of a winter night. Jack looked for clues to how that might have unfolded. Maybe, in desperation at hearing snowshoes approaching along the trail, it had braved the pain of severing itself from the instrument that held it in its torturous grip.

  Jack wondered just how much he might have to give up—how much he might lose—to gain his own freedom.

  “You’re dreaming!” Malcolm fired another verbal warning shot in Jack’s direction.

  It was only a warning this time. Maybe because Malcolm Whyte was thinking, too. His hands were beginning to shake as he pulled on the cords tightening the bales of fur.

  Jack noticed but said nothing. He’d seen that sort of thing before. He’d seen it and wondered. He knew the shaking was often followed by an explosion of anger. But, more and more, he wondered if it was caused by something else. He knew his own anger had reasons behind it. Often it seemed to come from deep within.

  “Do it right!” Malcolm yelled over to Jack. “Make sure there’s no trace of mink blood on any of them! The smell will spook them.” He said the last part more slowly, as if he’d wakened and realized where he was.

  Jack didn’t say anything. He’d learned not to. He’d never won an argument, because his dad had always been bigger. But not for long. He could feel it.

  Jack had learned to wait. And while he waited this time, he wondered about that coming day of confrontation and, possibly, emancipation. All of which made his leaving all the more necessary
. As with the Great War, Jack knew within himself that a battle right here, on the shores of the Athabasca, would certainly have losers and casualties in its outcome.

  4

  “Yes, I’m leaving. And you damn well better shut up about it.” Jack hissed at Cyril a few evenings later, when he told him about his plans.

  “But what will Mom and Amelia do?” Cyril whimpered.

  “They’ll do the same as always. And you’ll be here to look after them. You’re old enough.” Jack appealed to Cyril’s own sense of self-worth and skills.

  Cyril was young, small, and skinny. In other circumstances, he might have been the logical victim of any bully in a schoolyard. But Cyril was also becoming tough and wiry.

  “That’s why I’m telling you this now,” Jack continued. “This way you can prepare yourself and have some answers.”

  “But why don’t you tell them yourself? You know, when the time comes.”

  Jack and his little brother were sitting up on the bluffs above the Athabasca, at Jack’s lookout. He’d invited Cyril along for this special reason. It was an evening when there was enough of a breeze to blow the mosquitoes away. At least, most of them. The boys had been watching the river below, almost slow and quiet now, and with some gravel bars exposed.

  “Because if I tell them, Mom will have arguments against it,” Jack said firmly. “She’ll make me feel guilty.” He could think of many other reasons, but decided to keep things as simple as possible.

  “But you could wait until next year. You’d be older. It would make more sense then.”

  “No! It has to be now!” Jack was adamant. He was starting to sound like his father. However, he did have one compelling argument. “Don’t you remember Dad saying something about it being time I learned how to trap? You know, really trap?”

  “Yeah. So?” Cyril looked confused. Hunting and trapping were the skills of manhood. Both he and Jack had always snared rabbits, and even set a few of the old traps in the bush up behind the house. And both of them could shoot well enough with the Cooey .22 to provide the family with meat in any season, if they had to.