Far North Read online

  “I saw it on MTV—it was a show about spring break in different places. It looked like fun—hundreds of people splashing around and all that. The water must be pretty warm.”

  “We used to do that all the time. It’s real near where I lived. You get MTV way up here?”

  “On satellite. We get thirty-nine channels.”

  “That’s a lot more than I got back home in Texas. My grandparents don’t even get cable.”

  “You live with your grandparents?”

  “I’ve mostly lived with them since my mother died—almost nine years now. They’re nice and all that, but it’s pretty slow.”

  That got a laugh out of Raymond. “Man, you should try Nahanni Butte sometime if you want to talk about slow. It only has a winter road to it.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘winter road’?”

  “We’re about twenty kilometers away from the year-round road that they built between Fort Nelson and Fort Simpson, plus we’re on the other side of the Liard River from that road. In the winter you can drive our road into Nahanni Butte because everything’s frozen solid underneath, but in the summer, with all the bogs and everything, you’d just sink into the muck. It takes lots of money to put enough rock and gravel down to make a road base.”

  “But they must have spent a lot of money to make a bridge across the river.”

  “There’s no bridge,” Raymond said with a smile. “The Liard River always freezes real thick just up from Nahanni Butte, so it’s a safe crossing there. You can drive right across the ice. They plow the snow off after every storm.”

  “What about before they built your winter road?”

  “When my dad was a kid, there were no roads anywhere. They had dog teams to get around in the winter. In the summer they used their boats to get in and out, on the Liard River.”

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “I have a younger brother and a younger sister at home, and my older sister lives with my grandmother. How ’bout you?”

  “It’s just me.”

  Raymond didn’t say anything for a while, and I thought our conversation was over. Then he looked back at me with a puzzled expression on his face and said, “I still can’t believe you decided to come up here.”

  “I wanted to see the North. I’d get these letters from my dad. In one of them he said there’s this saying that goes, ‘Once you drink from those northern waters, you’ll never be happy away from them.’ Have you ever heard of that saying?”

  He shook his head. Raymond Providence was thinking about it, thinking about me. My roommate was wondering if I’d made a mistake.

  3

  I THOUGHT WE’D HIT it off real well, but the first couple of weeks it turned out Raymond and I hardly spent any time together. The native kids pretty much stuck to themselves. In the classrooms they all sat in a cluster at the back. They never spoke unless a teacher pried a few syllables out of them, and after school most of them, including Raymond, hung around together at one of the video arcades in Yellowknife. I noticed Raymond was spending most of his evenings at the library working on his math or trying to read A Tale of Two Cities. Once I walked over and said, “How’re you doing with that book?”

  “Not so good,” he said.

  “Same here,” I told him.

  “But you read all the time.”

  “Maybe it’s a great book, but you’d have to be a walking dictionary of extinct words to read it. I think the teacher should be reading it to us, explaining everything.”

  Raymond had a grin on his face. “Tell him.”

  “He already thinks I have an attitude. He could tell I wasn’t too happy when he said I couldn’t do any extra-credit book reports on westerns or science fiction. They all have to be books from his list.”

  After that I pretty much never saw Raymond in the library. He’d watch TV in the dorm lobby. Just before curfew he’d show up at the room, and then he’d sit at his desk and stare at his homework.

  As for me, I was accepting that Raymond and I were as far apart as Texas and the Northwest Territories even though we were sharing the same room.

  After school I’d been playing some pickup basketball with some of the other boom kids, making a few friends or what passed for friends. I missed playing football a lot; I missed faking out tacklers and running for daylight. I was thinking, too, about how the varsity coach back in San Antonio said I was crazy for going north when I could have such a great high school football career. The coach was practically guaranteeing me that I’d be his number one running back. He never really understood how much I wanted to be with my dad.

  The third week of September was my dad’s week off, and we finally got to spend some time together. It was good to be with him. The first thing he did was take me to an outdoor clothing and sporting goods warehouse to get some winter clothes for me. I’ve never enjoyed shopping for clothes, so I had to tell myself to be patient, because I could see this was going to take a while. We picked up a set of thermal underwear, and I decided on a pair of heavy wool trousers. My father insisted the trousers had to be wool. I was joking around, asking if he’d heard about “the hammer,” and he said, “Yes indeed—the hammer’s for real.”

  The parka I found looked slick. It was light gray and had a waterproof outer shell and a hood ruff of genuine wolf fur. I was starting to get into this, into imagining the kind of cold that would require all this thermal overkill. My dad recommended a thick, soft cap woven from the under-fur of arctic musk-ox. I picked up a world-class pair of ski gloves and huge mittens to wear over them—everything top-of-the-line quality. “You’re going to need all this stuff real soon,” my dad promised.

  What impressed me the most was the boots. My father got me the same kind of tall white snow boots he wore on the rigs in the winter. He pulled out the thick felt liner and said, “Gotta keep these dry, that’s the key. Dry ’em out good if they ever get damp. Once they get wet, they don’t insulate. You hear about people making a mistake and getting bad frostbite, even losing their feet.”

  Our arms were full as we stood in line at the checkout. My dad spotted a little thermometer on the display case and grabbed it. It was a couple inches long, encased in plastic. “For the zipper pull on your parka,” he said.

  I got a chance to try out some of the new clothes when my dad hired a charter boat the next day and we went fishing out on the Great Slave Lake. It was freezing cold out there, wind blowing, too, but I knew that was all supposed to come with the territory, and I never mentioned it. I hate whiners, so I wasn’t going to be one myself. I pulled the musk-ox cap out of my daypack and warmed right up after I pulled it down over my ears.

  When I caught a twenty-five-pound lake trout—a toothy predator with a head bigger than my fist—I was glad I’d come north. There was something about taking that big trout out of a body of water called the Great Slave Lake, doing it alongside my father, having him net the fish after a half hour’s battle with only one of the treble hooks still attached at the last, and just barely. We were together in this strange place, and the wildness of the place itself was what had bent my rod double, and that wildness was running like electricity through the line and right through my veins. This is why I came, I thought.

  We went bowling afterward, and then sat in the café at the alley and talked. With his huge hand wrapped around a coffee mug, my father talked with deep feeling about the land around the drill sites, the landscapes he was seeing from the bush planes and helicopters. Some of the sites were in the forest and some were north of the tree line, out in the barren lands. He spoke of seeing immense herds of caribou fording clear-running rivers and flowing across the tundra. He spoke of seeing a grizzly with three cubs, arctic foxes, snowshoe hares, musk-oxen…. “Any wolves?”

  “I keep looking. Haven’t seen a wolf yet.”

  “So you still like it up here as much as ever?”

  He had to think about that question, rubbing his beard against the grain. “Oh, I love the North, but it’s
a sad time to be here, to my way of thinking.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Flying into all these places where there have never been roads, knowing that the roads are coming soon, and so is everything that comes with them, for good and for bad.”

  “That’s progress, I guess.”

  “It seems like everywhere the geologists have us drilling, they’re finding these kimberlite pipes they’re looking for, and they’re finding plenty of diamonds in their core samples. It’s just exploration up here now—in a couple of years the actual mines will be starting up. The talk is that the Northwest Territories could eventually rival South Africa as the world’s largest diamond producer. I’ve worked with a couple of native people…they need the jobs, but they’re afraid of what’s going to happen. You know, they lived here for thousands of years without ruining it.”

  “Isn’t that because they didn’t know any different?”

  “I don’t know…. Maybe it was a kind of genius, and we just can’t recognize it. At any rate, it makes me sad thinking about it. You’d think we could leave the diamonds in the ground….We could do without the jewelry, but we need diamond drill bits for oil and gas, and they say we even need diamonds for manufacturing those silicon chips for the computers. There’s just never an end to it.”

  “You could go back to the offshore rigs.”

  His face brightened. “What I’d really like to do is quit following the booms for good. Build that place in the hill country we’ve always been talking about. I’m gettin’ far enough ahead we should be able to get a decent amount of pasture. We could raise horses.”

  “Good deal,” I said. He’d had this land dream with my mother even before I was born. “How much longer?” I asked.

  With a smile spreading across his face, my father said, “This winter could be it. But probably one more for insurance—the cost of land and building materials is going up all the time down there.”

  “Still want to do the log house?”

  “Gotta be a log house, sitting on a little bluff in some live oaks above the Guadalupe.”

  “I can sure picture it.”

  “You’re so strong we won’t even need a machine to lift the logs into place…. Meanwhile, I’d like to get you out some into the boondocks up here. I see a lot of great country, and you’re stuck in school.”

  “How could we do that?” I asked.

  “I’ll ask my flying buddies to keep an eye out for a spot for you. I remember how much you always wanted to fly. Would you like to do some bush flying on a weekend, take a look around if they had a seat for you?”

  “You know I would. I already met one bush pilot, that guy Clint who drove me from Fort Nelson. You ever fly with him?”

  “No, these outfits have a lot of different pilots—how come you ask?”

  “Just wondering what kind of pilot he’d make.”

  4

  WITH DAYLIGHT FALLING off by more than ten minutes a day and the cold attacking as we ran between classes, the dark subarctic winter was approaching, and the menace of it seemed to stretch endlessly ahead. It was early October, and homesickness was going around the boarding school like a bad virus. Though they were accustomed to the cold and the darkness, the native kids from all over Canada’s North seemed to have almost no immunity to homesickness. A half dozen had already dropped out and gone home. “Dropping like flies” is how some of the boom kids put it.

  I was worried about Raymond. When he looked at things, including me, he didn’t really seem to be seeing them. The sadness in his eyes was unmistakable. This gray school and the gray skies were enough to dampen anyone’s spirits.

  I took a walk after school one day and ended up wandering inside the public rink where the school hockey team was practicing. I spotted Raymond up in the stands watching, and I joined him. We didn’t say anything for quite a while, and then I asked him how it was going. He said, “Everything’s too hard here. Back home, I used to be good in math. But this algebra…I don’t get it. I don’t see why they have to put letters in with the numbers.”

  “I know what you mean,” I told him. “I had algebra last year. I thought it was going to kill me, but finally I got the hang of it. I can show you if you want.”

  “Could you?” he said, and I said, “Sure.” We went back to watching the hockey practice. “Are these guys any good?” I asked him.

  “Some of ’em are real good.”

  “How come you didn’t go out for the team?”

  “I dunno. I just like to play. At Nahanni we always just get some guys together. People come and go from the game. It’s no big deal; everybody gets to play.”

  “Can’t you just get a few guys together and come and play here on your own?”

  “It’s reserved for clubs and schools and stuff.”

  He looked awfully down to me. I said, “I still haven’t even been on skates. You think you could find me a pair of skates and a hockey stick?”

  “Sure, I guess. Then what?”

  “Tomorrow night, let’s see if we can sort of forget to leave when they close up. Maybe play some one-on-one?”

  “You kidding?”

  That’s just what we did. As it turned out, there was enough moonlight streaming through the windows that we didn’t even have to turn on the lights. Raymond was beautiful, dancing all around the ice with that puck while I was flapping around the rink like a wounded goose, laughing at myself and just trying to keep on my feet. Every time Raymond would slap the puck into the net, I’d yell, “Score!” That smile never left his face the whole time, no sadness in his eyes. It was perfect. We didn’t even get caught sneaking back into the dorm. “That was way cool,” he said.

  “Where’d you learn to talk like that?”

  “TV, I guess.”

  I gave him a poke. “It’ll rot your mind, you know.”

  “You read too much. Your head will get too big.”

  “Then what?”

  His eyebrows lifted way up and then dropped. “Explode, I guess.”

  After that, Raymond and I started spending more time together. I helped him with his algebra, and he was picking up on it fast. We found out there was open hockey on Sunday afternoons. I’d sit in the stands and watch him skate circles around guys. People were telling him he should be on the school team. Back in our room, I called him the Great One. I told him he’d have no trouble making the team.

  He thought that was pretty funny. “Sure, Gabe. I’m Wayne Gretzky like you’re a scout for the Edmonton Oilers.”

  “Still, you should talk to the coach—maybe it’s not too late to sign up.”

  “Maybe next year,” he said. “Tell you what—I’ll go out if you go out.”

  “Sure, Raymond. But by the time I’m ready for the school team, you’d be ready to retire after your big career in the NHL.”

  Everything seemed better. I thought he was over the hump.

  Right before our three-day weekend at the end of October, I got a call from Clint. He said to meet him at the floatplane dock first thing in the morning if I wanted to do some sightseeing. I realized that my father had come through for me, and I was going to get to do some flying.

  Clint was saying that he hadn’t heard where he was flying to yet, but he’d been hired by a Dene council to take a kid and a village elder back home. “Wear everything you have that’s warm and then some,” he was saying. “A polar bear would freeze to death inside that airplane!”

  With the memory of my van ride with Clint not all that distant, I’d have liked it better if it had been some other pilot, but then, beggars can’t be choosers.

  I never had a chance to talk my flying plan over with Raymond. When I drifted off to sleep it was past curfew, and he still hadn’t showed up.

  In the morning I was raring to go. No guts, no glory, I told myself. Raymond had slept right through my alarm and was sleeping so soundly I didn’t want to wake him up. In a couple of days, I figured, I’d be back and could tell him about my big adventure. I reme
mbered Clint’s warning and wore all my warm stuff, the thermal underwear and even the wool trousers instead of my jeans. I stuffed my daypack with a couple of changes of underwear, some spare socks, my huge mittens, and my toothbrush.

  I left Raymond a note saying I was going flying, pulled on my ski gloves, and hurried through the empty streets making vapor clouds every time I exhaled. It was 7:00 A.M., an hour before first daylight. There was a good buildup of ice along the shores of Yellowknife Bay.

  Clint was already there, fueling the floatplane. In a winter flying suit with a fur ruff around the hood, he looked the part of the dashing bush pilot. “Hey, Stump,” he called. “Good to see you dressed warm. Starting to cool off, eh?”

  “Hammer’s coming down,” I agreed.

  “Getting close—you’ll know it when you see it. Freeze-up on the lakes and rivers is coming any day. Then the hammer. After this trip, we’re switching all the planes from floats to skis.”

  Clint’s passengers were supposed to have been ready to go at dawn. He told me about the bush plane as we waited for them. It was a red-and-white Cessna 185, single-prop, two seats in the front, two close behind, a very small cargo area behind that. Somehow I’d expected a bigger airplane. “Great old plane,” Clint said. “It’ll lift about anything you can stuff into it.”

  Dawn came and went, other planes were taking off, and Clint was muttering, “We’re burning daylight.” We went back inside the office, where it was warm. Clint glanced at his watch and I looked at mine.

  “Hey, that’s some watch you got there,” Clint said. “Looks pretty high-tech.”

  “Bombproof, too,” I said proudly. “My dad just got it for me.” I fished my new pocketknife out and showed him that as well. Clint was impressed with the titanium handle. “Never seen one of these before. It’s really light—much lighter than a regular pocketknife.”

  Ten o’clock rolled around, and still nobody had showed. Clint was muttering to himself now. We went back out to the airplane. “Too late to get there today,” he said. “Can’t fly in the dark—do they think this is a 747?”