Northword Literary Magazine vol 01 no 04

northword: A Literary Journal Of Canada’s North

ii winter 2011 volume 1, issue 4 iii

NorthWorda literary journal of canada’s north

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In This IssueFiction, Non-fiction & poetry by

gordon mceachern

louise van alenburg

kiran malik-khan

ms. jeelani’s grade 6

marty rempel

jeff hoffmann

leah hoddinott

douglas abel

kevin thornton

volume 1 | issue 4 | winter 2011 | $9.50


issue #4 is out and in your hands.

And we’re incredibly proud of it. The theme of this issue is Migration. We had no shortage of submissions, which made the task of selecting the few that appear a difficult one.

Migration seems to have had an appeal as a theme. I think it is because migration is part of the creative impulse. Why migrate, after all, if not because you can imagine something better and you set about achieving it? The written and visual art contained herein describe the struggles and the pleasures of creating change, of transforming one’s life. They are powerful pieces and, as you’ll see, the talent came with those who migrated.

We often think that the good ideas and the talent come from away, but that’s just not true. The people come from everywhere, or their people did in some distant past. And they brought the talent with them. Where there are people, there is art.

Enjoy.

Jennifer Hemstock fourth issue editor

northern canada collective society for writers

president Jennifer Hemstock

treasurer Suzanne McGladdery

secretary Linda Black

managing editor Blair Hemstock

media director Kiran Malik-Khan

ad rate designer Velda Peach

members Elizabeth Abel, Douglas Abel, Dorothy Bentley, Patricia Budd,

Jane Jacques, Kiran Malik-Khan, Kevin Thornton.

e-mail [email protected]

This Issue: Volume 1, Issue 4, Winter 2011

ISSN 1920-6313

cover & art Louise van Alenburg

design & layout Kathleen Jacques

editor Jennifer Hemstock

2 the boat in the ice Gordon McEachern

9 kozak Jeff Hoffmann

10 it’s my eyes that see your land Louise van Alenburg

10 migration Kiran Malik-Khan

11 my families migration Ms. Jeelani’s Grade 6

14 road trips Marty Rempel

16 at a spring garage sale after a thaw Marty Rempel

17 blood on the floor Leah Hoddinott

20 sticking around Kevin Thornton

22 marginalia—a column Douglas Abel

24 contributors

contents


2 winter 2011 volume 1, issue 4 3

anuk shook his head at the impossibility of it. He had seen many strange things out on the ice. Aurora Borealis so electric and alive its green folds almost touched the earth. A flat berg floating through an inlet in July occupied by a docile bear and a tame seal who might have been the best of friends. A string of serpentine lights slithering across a winter sky. But the boat in the ice, he agreed, was the strangest.

A gust of wind whistled over the snow dunes, carrying whisps of powder that puffed and dissipated like smoke. The landscape lay scattered with icy little hummocks that reminded Anuk of abandoned corpses on a battlefield. A crystalline blue sky, immobilized by the cold, hovered over a vast white Sahara.

A dozen feet ahead a cliff gently declined to a narrow bay, around which a bulbous lip of granite hung like a canopy, trapping ice and flotsam under-neath. Anuk stood on the edge of the cliff wrapped in caribou furs and heavy alpaca mittens — a gift from his cousin in Ontario. His feet sweated in the gargantuan army surplus boots manufactured in Quebec for winter warfare. That was the way of this land, of this country. Things nobody wanted any-more — boots, ideas, people — eventually they migrated north. Anuk’s round face, lost inside the winter hood, stared across the endless barrens. His could have been a face in Siberia or the Andes or along the Greenland coast. But it was Canada, 200 kilometers north of Igloolik.

Carefully, Anuk began to descend the cliff, clutching his walking stick in the pose of a lonely wizard. Yesterday the weather finally broke, surging up the thermometer to a crisp and pleasant minus-33 Celcius. Before that, for a solid week, beginning the day after Anuk left for the hunt, a destructive cold had descended from the pole and brought Nunavut to its knees. Minus-45, minus-50 and then, for a night and a day, minus-60. The coldest temperature ever recorded in the North was minus-63 Celcius in Snag, Yukon on February 3rd, 1947. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was minus-89 Celsius in Siberia on July 21st, 1983. Anuk moved sideways down the cliff, angling his cumbersome body for leverage. The snow was sloppy but provided enough footing for his boots. He made sure to keep one shoulder up so that the strap on his pack did not slip. It weighed about 30 kilos and if it swung the wrong way it would take him with it.

The bay was so seized with ice it was as if no water existed. And yet by summer there would be wildflowers and patches of sea and lichen alive with insects. The elders at home, the ones who could remember, frowned at the changes that were happening. Government roads disintegrating into mud. Houses tipping into crazy angles because the perma-frost was melt-ing. Open water where there never should be any open water. Anuk reached

the bottom of the cliff and spat. The power of the Arctic winter was to create the impossibility of warmth. Nowa-days, though, anything was possible.

Anuk pulled his water bottle from its marsupial-like pouch and drank. Then he raised the binoculars to his eyes. On the opposite side of the bay, beneath a danger-ous lip of rock, lay the boat.

Anuk heaved his satchel higher — Jesus, it was heavy! — and began to trudge across the frozen crescent of the bay, telling himself that in Nunavut, in Febuary, this was a beach.

His wife Mabel formed up in the snow, her bulbous body, thin legs, her perfectly pudgy Inuit face. She didn’t want him to go. What for? she kept asking. What for? Mabel, standing there in the kitchen over a boiling stew of veni-son, carelessly smoking so that dollops of cigarette ash dropped into the pot. She wore her blue stretchy pants — it’s all Anuk ever saw her wear. She wore them when she was 20. She wore them at 42. And, he assumed, she would wear them when she was 60, if the diabetes and the nicotine didn’t get her. Anuk smiled, wistful. Sad. He fell for Mabel because Mabel was tough and a good cook and because her old man was a legend on the ice. And he liked her name. She would punch him whenever he told her that, even in bed. Especially in bed. I grew up in the Residentials, she explained, and they gave all the girls the oldest, frumpiest names you could imagine. Look around! Even today, only Inuit and Native girls are Mabel or Agnes or Florence or Mary. Gawd, so many Marys. I like it, he would sing. Oh Mabel my Mabel, won’t you shut out the light and come to bed?

The canopy of rock curled above him like a pre-Cambrian wave. He lost his balance, slipped a little. Slipped again. He held the satchel tighter.

The night before Anuk left a Bruce Willis movie bab-bled on television. His brother-in-law, Bill, Mabel’s half-brother, lived with them. Bill sat on the orange sofa all day long, watched movies, filled ashtrays and drank. That’s all Bill did but at least he did it well. Bill’s skin resembled a farmer’s field in a drought, the soft bronze

filled with fissures. The result of age and frost and abuse. To Anuk, Bill was a plant withering in a pot in a forgotten window. But he and Anuk were pals and Bill knew the land — that was something beer and Hollywood could never quite erase no matter how hard they tried.

“Taking the dogs?” Bill had asked.

“For awhile.”

Bill nodded. He knew that meant, as far as I can go with a sled. Which meant Anuk was heading north-east, into the islands and the sea ice. The dogs would find their own way home.

Bill took a long swallow of warm ale and lit a smoke. His coat had the same rangers patch as Anuk’s coat. Not the New York Rangers hockey club, the other ones. The ones who played their games above the 60th parallel.

Bill took another swallow and stood. On television Bruce was bedding a girl who could have been his grand-daughter. Bill could barely shovel a path of snow without wheezing but still he asked, “Do you want me to come along?”

Anuk shook his head. “Naw, this is a one-guy hunt. I appreciate the offer, though. Look after things here, will you?”

Bill nodded. “I’ll look after things here.” Even though, for the next two weeks, Mabel would be looking after him.

“Are you going to be up late?” Mabel asked from the stew.

“Not too late.”

“You come to bed when you’re ready,” she said. “I’ll wait up for you.”

Anuk was in the shed until midnight packing his gear. The dogs knew a trip was coming and yipped and danced in the ice-fog. The satchel lay segregated in the snow, department of national defense silkscreened in black ink along the front.

The clock blinked 12:18 when he slipped into bed beside his wife. Mabel rolled towards him in the darkness and

the boat in the ice

gordon mceachern



her hand found its place between Anuk’s legs. He nes-tled into the mattress and let his lanky knees fall apart and his wife moved her hand gently up and down and for a few minutes, without complaint, she pleasured him to the rhythmic snoring of Bill asleep on the living room sofa.

At 5 o’ clock the alarm went off, CBC news from Inuvik. Anuk rose and dressed in silence and after a few min-utes Mabel joined him in the kitchen, pink housecoat and blue stretch pants, a cigarette between her lips.

“I’ll make you coffee.”

“It’ll freeze, but thank you.”

She reached into the fridge and rummaged around as Anuk, resembling a pre-historic man in his layers of furs, watched. He thought Mabel was reaching for the char or the seal, even the chicken. Instead, she turned around and passed him a package of Maple Leaf hotdogs. “For your trip,” his wife said, “good hunting.”

Anuk enravelled his neck with a scarf emblazoned with a black Canadian flag, then leaned down and kissed her cheek. They were hunting for 13 days but travelling light and the dogs were only going half way.

Mabel stood on the step, shivering. “Radio says minus forty.”

“Minus forty-two.” He snapped the reins. “Take care, love.”

“Anuk?”

Anuk turned.

“Don’t hurt anybody.”

Anuk smiled to himself and whipped the dogs. They were off in a cloud of snow and frantic yipping. Like Bill, Mabel understood Anuk. That’s why he married her and not Ruth or Margaret or Teresa. Mabel knew what Anuk was capable of.

Anuk was still a hundred meters from the boat when he encountered the first body: a young man wearing yellow

coveralls. His gently inclined eyes were closed and the way the hoarefrost assaulted his eyebrows and his hair made him appear as though he had aged very suddenly.

Ten more meters and Anuk could see what he already assumed — the boat was not a ship but a submarine, and it was not Canadian.

A low, lonely wind moaned over the jagged white bay, curling beneath the extended overhang before dissolv-ing into whispering eddies. It sounded like the voices of the dead who could no longer remember the language of the living. The tundra, the ice fields, the captive bay was the loneliest place on Earth. Yet Anuk felt right at home. That, he guessed, was why they had chosen him.

As Anuk approached the submarine his eyes peered at this and examined that and the whole tragic event, most of it anyway, unfolded inside his head.

The vessel was large but not one of the deep-sea reac-tor giants that sailed out from Norfolk or Murmansk. It was 70 meters long, storm-grey, diesel-electric and Chinese. Anuk leaned his stick against the exposed hull and examined the spherical bow, the crushed ballasts, the conning tower stained a smoky black, there was a fire, the aft, like a whale’s fin, already consumed by the bergs. The air was a restless minus-29, enough for Anuk to remove his alpaca mittens. He wanted to touch this tragedy with his bare hands, to feel it under his own brown skin. Every hunt, every prey deserved a modicum of respect. His fingers caressed the white-painted char-acters, Mandarin or Cantonese he didn’t know, touching the Oriental language of the People’s Navy.

What the hell were you doing here? Anuk thought.

He hiked the satchel onto his shoulder and climbed over the hull, using scuppers and rivets for footing.

Drifting snow had already begun to transform the grey boat to white. Maybe another day it would be invisible altogether. Then the Arctic would begin its long slow devouring, like the Erebus and the Terror, eating the vessel alive.

Anuk walked across the superstructure toward the tower ladder. Once he was up top he could scan the horizon to see what other tiny dramas had come to pass during the last terrible hours of this boat’s life. Anuk did not believe the owners would be coming for her. It was common knowledge the Chinese were churning out ice-breakers as fast as they could build them — 60 percent of the world’s steel production was in China — but the North-West Passage remained off-limits, safely inside the territory of a NATO partner irrespective of the pos-turing of the Americans and the Danes. The People’s Navy would never admit their sub was lost and the Royal Canadian Navy would never admit their sub was found — Pacific trade and export agreements could not be derailed by something so silly as an international incident. So the Chinese abandoned their sailors. Sub-marine? What submarine? And somewhere in Ottawa an officer consulted a list of capable Rangers and a quiet phone call was made and here he was. A hatch on the tower wall was blown out and several wrungs of the ladder partially melted. The fire must have been hot. Anuk ascended.

He clambered over the lip, unwieldy in all his furs, and stood on the tower platform. Far out on the ice, across the periphery of the colourless horizon, clouds boiled as if upset by Anuk’s presence. He leaned his forearms on the rail and imagined the frantic officers, unable to free their boat from the ice, unable to submerge due to some malfunction, a fire, perhaps the screws no longer worked, perhaps she’d taken on water — there was a 12 degree list to starboard — and maybe the radios went dead. Lost. Alone. Trapped by the fickle currents. Thrust into this barren bay. Then the record cold roared in. Minus-55, minus-60. A wind-chill filled with razors. They never had a chance. Like Russia, Canada, too, had a Gen-eral Winter to defend her.

Anuk peered over the edge at the ice directly below. On it lay three more bodies, terribly burned. They jumped, thought Anuk. They burned right here where I am stand-ing and in their blind agony they leapt over the side.

The flesh of the Chinese sailors must have froze within

seconds of hitting the air. They resembled lumps of watermelon jell-o. Anuk mumbled a prayer his grand-father had taught him and raised the binoculars to his face. It only took a moment to find more. A few hundred feet away, another black speck. Then a string, one atop the other. Then, a few kilometers into the bay, a large clump, fifteen or twenty men, halted by the numbing cold so short into their trek. Anuk guessed, in their con-fused incredulity, the men had huddled together for heat and huddled together they died. Beyond them, there were no more.

So damn foolish, thought Anuk. No scientist in Shang-hai, no analyst in Beijing, no goddam satellite in outer space could explain to this crew what they were about to encounter.

Anuk broke off one of the frozen hotdogs and devoured it. He sighed. The hot dog was not just protein, it was a little piece of Mabel. Anuk sighed again. He stared down the wide hatch on the floor of the conning tower, from which a ladder descended into darkness. He knew only half the crew were out there dead on the ice. The other half were still inside. This boat is now a tomb. The debate that occurred here played out in his mind, men argu-ing about choices, weighing the pros and cons of life and death. Some opted to march out seeking rescue — desperate, determined — while others, the fatalists, the poets, opted to remain.

Anuk looked back toward the bay. The sailors who left the boat had all walked west, even though south would have been the proper choice. They had all begun to walk toward China.

Bill held the yellow guide rope as he pushed from the shed toward the garage. He’d been drinking rum all morning, half-asleep by the cast-iron stove, but he had to leave when the kindling ran out. The kindling did not come from logs but from broken-down pallets taken from the truck shop up the street.

The storm blew in hard and fast, harder and faster than



Environment Canada predicted, and now Bill could not even see his hand in front of his face. Intense white-outs were common in Igloolik, they blew up suddenly, some-times right out of nowhere, and were known to last for weeks. You could not have outbuildings on your property without guideropes in between. As with sandstorms in the desert, one could stray but a few feet from a path or a house and become lost forever.

Bill reached the end of the rope and fell inside the garage. The plywood building creaked and groaned from the gusts. As Bill stared out the window, wanting more rum, he perceived a collection of barely-visible lumps in the yard.

Anuk’s dogs.

He smiled. Then he noticed the direction of the blizzard. East. Toward the sea ice. Toward Anuk.

Anuk steadied himself for the descent into the sub-marine, then paused. The vast tundra lay deserted for two-hundred kilometres and the vessel under his feet was dead as the Voyager space probe yet still...some-thing nagged. To survive on the ice, Anuk’s grandfather told him, a hunter required two gifts from the Spirits: imagination and intuition.

Imagination was as much a necessity as dry boots and salt fish. To be alone for hours, weeks, months, to see nothing but white, to feel nothing but cold assaulted the human mind. A hunter needed that internal cinema, the voices, the ideas for company.

Intuition, said Anuk’s grandfather, was the sense of something more. Some had it, some had a little, some had none at all. It was the difference between flourish-ing on the barrens and leaving home to go drive a tractor in Fort McMurray.

Anuk’s intuition asked him to look again. He did — and couldn’t believe his eyes.

How did I miss that?

Half-a-dozen thick coarse hairs lay scattered about the conning tower floor — hairs Anuk identified immedi-ately. And the scratches, jagged scratches on the railing, on the walls, even on the wrungs of the ladder. Anuk stared down into blackness. “What happened here?” Then he drew his favourite blade, the one with the ivory handle, and descended into the submarine, holding the knife between his teeth like a Caribbean pirate.

Mabel stood over her sink and lit one cigarette after another, staring out the kitchen window at the storm.

The clock read 3:30 in the afternoon but really, an Arctic white-out erased all perception of space and time, leav-ing only two things: those who were caught in the white-out and those who were safe indoors. She inhaled a long, smooth draw of menthol-tinted smoke.

“Oh, Anuk, no other man would ever have me. You need to come home again.”

Tears dribbled down onto peanut-butter sandwiches. Mabel was babysitting the nieces because their parents were on a binge and the girls lay sprawled on the sofa watching a Spongebob dvd.

The storm beyond the window grew in intensity, howl-ing through the streets like a banshee. Mabel needed a valium.

She rushed through the living room — Auntie we’re hungry! — and slammed her bedroom door, escaping the peanut butter and the shrieking laughter of the yellow sponge who lived at the bottom of the sea.

Anuk knew he had to get this over with. He could feel the change in pressure in his eyeballs. A storm was rush-ing up from the south-west, a big one, and he didn’t have much time.

After an eternity on the ladder Anuk’s boot touched the deck of what he guessed was the main control room. The air was still and cold. A thin shaft of blue light filtered

down from the tower hatch. Anuk dug in his pocket until he found the lcd flashlight, clicked on the beam, then wished he hadn’t. The Chinese sub was a mausoleum.

There were bodies all over the room, some curled like fetuses on the floor, others still seated at their work stations. An uncharacteristic lump rose in Anuk’s throat. Beside a computer terminal with strange symbols on the keyboard two sailors embraced in a bond of ice and death. Farewell, comrade, farewell. Another man leaned over a table, photographs of his family spread before him like an unlucky hand at poker. He wagered eve-rything, and lost. Yet another stood rigid in the corner clutching a nautical map of northern Canada, staring at it with crystalline eyes as if the map held some ancient secret. Anuk already knew the secret to surviving the Far North: do not come here.

He hurried through the control room into a narrow corri-dor lined with frozen bananas. The next chamber was a galley and after that a row of cramped little apartments. The door of the apartment with the gold anchor hung open and Anuk guessed it belonged to the Captain. A man with a long face lay on the floor, his head ruined from a single self-inflicted gunshot. Leaning, Anuk could see a second man curled in a ball under the bed. The man still wore his braided cap and epaulettes.

You cannot hide from the Spirits or the cold, that’s what his grandfather used to say. There were more coarse white hairs on the Captain’s door frame.

Anuk pressed on, cautious now. Down a hall of bunks, many filled with stony blue sailors who chose to die with their blankets over their heads. Through a deserted recreation room, more scratches on the floor, more hairs. Anuk stepped through one more open hatch and found his destination: the engine room. An iron gangway dis-sected row upon row of piston arms, the walls lined with gaskets and hoses and cylinders the size of a man’s leg. It reeked of grease and petrol and something else. Feces, and blood.

Carefully, almost in slow motion, Anuk eased the satchel — the bomb — from his shoulder and gently placed it

on the floor.

At the opposite end of the engine room was a Chinese sailor crouched near the ceiling behind a stockade of pipes and fittings. He was alive, Anuk could see intermit-tent puffs of breath, and he held a steel wrench in one trembling hand. The flashlight beam played over the young sailor’s face and his eyes were wide with cold and terror and despair.

Between Anuk and the sailor stood the young bear, fill-ing the catwalk, its jaws open and its massive head held low. The bear was terrified, too.

Anuk refused to back away, he just couldn’t.

I know the seals were scarce this winter, but how much hunger could have compelled you to climb up onto this submarine and slip down that narrow hole?

The bear chuffed.

Anuk eased toward the wall where a horizontal wheel sat beside a lever and a chain, both coated in frost like everything else. The bear watched with its tiny eyes as Anuk gripped the wheel and, grunting from the strain, began to turn it counter-clockwise. The bear understood, somehow it understood. The wheel continued to turn and clank and a hatch opened in the ceiling like a mira-cle — the manual access for loading torpedoes into the aft torpedo room.

The bear noticed the grey glare and leapt, roaring and clawing at the machinery, wanting to get out, needing to get out of this narrow metal coffin, this trap. Saliva flew from its yellow teeth. A hot, musky stream of urine splashed against a cooling pump. With a strength and agility that was frightening the bear scrambled over the main crankshaft beam, dove for the opening and was gone.

Swirling snow blew in.

The Chinese sailor babbled and cried, maybe with joy, as he struggled to extricate himself from the redoubt of pipes and wires. Then Anuk spun the wheel clockwise and the aft torpedo access hatch began to close and the



Chinese sailor began to scream. He went on screaming for a minute but Anuk didn’t care. Anuk was not here to rescue anybody.

The timer on the bomb was chemical-based, which meant as soon as the tiny detonator vials were shattered Anuk would have ten minutes to escape the boat before the chemical reaction ignited ten kilos of thermate and blew the Chinese submersible to smithereens.

Anuk dropped to one knee and opened the flaps on the satchel. The sailor, shrieking now, hung precariously by one arm and threw his wrench. It landed 2 meters up the platform.

“You should not have come here,” Anuk hollered. His words echoed, tense and hollow. “You should not have come here!”

The sailor shouted a curse, or perhaps a bargain. Then his voice crumbled into sobbing. Anuk drew back a fist and smashed the detonator vials. They immediately began to hiss. The Chinese sailor, aware the stranger in furs was not there to help, leapt from a pipe toward the pistons. His foot caught a rubber cooling hose, he spun, then crashed between the turbines into a bilge tank far below.

The man’s agonized moaning filtered through the boat as Anuk re-traced his steps. Back in the control room he paused for another swallow of water. He was pouring sweat, clammy and greasy beneath his clothes, and that would not be kind when he entered the Arctic weather roaring above him. There were only three ways to stay warm in the Far North: layers of clothing, layers of dry clothing, and eating so that your body had the heat of burning calories. And, on cold winter nights, a woman sure didn’t hurt.

Seven minutes.

Anuk climbed the ladder and cursed. The irony of the moment lay in the fact he was destroying the one shel-ter that might save his ass from the storm. He poked his head up through the hatch, emerged back onto the conning tower and rose. Everything — the prow, the stern, the bay, the ice-fields, Nunavut itself — was gone,

drowned by a trillion snowflakes.

The Inuit hunter climbed and balanced himself on the railing. For one brief second his feet touched the grey submarine and his hands the precipice of stone so that he became a bridge between this invading machine and his land. And Anuk thought of the pilgrimage in which they had all just partaken. From China to Canada. From Igloolik to here. But no, pilgrimage was the wrong word. A pilgrimage was a temporary journey. This was a migration. This was permanent. A migration from peace to war. Or, perhaps, from naivetè to wisdom. And for himself? Certainly, there has been a migration from hunter to warrior.

Three minutes.

There was no other way, Anuk had to leap. The rugged stone was just too high.

On the wind, grandfather’s voice. You can do it, Anuk. You are a wolf. You are a survivor. Grandfather suffocated on a goiter in his throat waiting for a medivac helicopter, a cruel death for a good man. Anuk called to his grand-father, “Give me a hand, for God’s sake,” then jumped, grasped the stone and pulled himself up into the gale.

He elbowed his way over the ledge and log-rolled until the earth shuddered with a brutal crump! Bits of molten metal showered down like meteorites. Smoke billowed. The Chinese submarine was pulverized by the thermate and in seconds, under the storm, the explosion sput-tered out and the bay, except for the wind, fell silent. Like thedesert or the sea, the Arctic could erase a man’s sins, hide his crimes, wipe a conscience clean.

Anuk lay face down in the snow, shivering his penance away. And after awhile he began to scrape himself a nest. Anuk did not feel like the last man on Earth, sur-rounded by a vestige of humanity that lingered like the heat signature of a warm hand. Anuk felt like the only man on Earth, who was and who ever was, alone in a vast white Garden of Eden created just for him.

Mabel stood on the step calling her brother’s name. “Billy! Billy!”

Bill looked up from the row of harnessed dogs and walked over through the fading snow.

“Where are you going, Billy?”

“I’m going to find Anuk.”

“You don’t know where he went.”

“The dogs know.”

Mabel grimaced from the cold. Minus-34. “Should I phone Air Rescue in Inuvik?”

Bill shook his head. “Air Rescue will know about Anuk’s

hunt. They’ll be told to ignore any report that he is miss-ing. We have to look after this ourselves.”

Mabel thought a moment, then pulled a fifty-dollar bill from her pocket and handed it to her brother. “Pick me up a carton of cigarettes on your way home.”

Bill took the money and returned to the sled.

As he glided through Igloolik, hissing over fresh snow, Bill glanced back over his shoulder at the house. He could see his half-sister there in the front window, fading, growing smaller, until eventually she was only a smudge of blue, the tiny spark of her cigarette hovering like a firefly behind the glass.

Hot horns shouting cross fields in saffron danceWhere captives of misfortune toil, betrayed by birthright chancePeace-blue heavens sitting silent up aboveLooking down upon the earth in a tyrant’s tattered gloveStiff backs broken ‘neath the mountain’s steely stareFuelling flames within him, neath our Kozak’s auburn hair.Swordlight shimmer swinging round about his headBearing freedom to the living and rest unto the deadThe forest’s final lover, and the bluebird’s final friendFor unsung infants of the world rides towards his endHorse hooves heaving as his teeth clench tightBearing swift our gallant hero towards his final fightThough not a soul has seen our fortune changing tideHe will dream, he will hope, he will rise, he will ride.Thus a spark is stricken in a gloomy purple-blackBlasting off the load from the peasant’s bending backBearing torchlight through the nightEvil fearing one man’s mightBastion of unfailing lightTyrants taking frantic flightOur freedom burning brightIs riding to the sky.

kozak

—dedicated to my Ukrainian Ancestors

jeff hoffmann



my families migration ms. jeelani’s grade six

class, fort mcmurray

islamic school

ghofrane ben mabrouk It all started when my dad was back home in Tunisia (North Africa).When my dad was in Tunisia, he was working hard enough to survive. He immigrated because he wanted to support his famiy more. So he and did an applica-tion to immigrate to Italy and they accepted him. When he went to Italy he was working hard for his family. Some time later he heard that Canada was a great place to work. Once again my dad did another application and he emmigrated from Italy and immigrated to Canada. He flew to Qubec City. After a year or so, my dad met a guy (a muslim brother). His name was Hechmi. Hechmi told my dad that Frot McMurray was a great place to sup-port his family. My dad followed Hechmi’s and took a train to Fort McMurray. It was really long and tireing for my dad but (Alhamdolila) he made it.

My dad went back to Tunisia to get married. so my dad did an application to sponser her here. All of us (kids) were born and raised here untill now. We haven’t moved from Fort McMurray. I’ve been living here so far for 11 years and I am to hate it!!!!!!!!

My Familie’s Migration | jeehan berhanBefore my dad lived in Canada he used to live in Greek. Then the Canadian goverment gave my dad a choice whether to live here in Canada or in the United States. Then my dad chose Canada. After my dad chose the place where he wanted to live in, he sponsored my mom. My dad chose Canada because he never had ever lived here before so he wanted to see how life was here like here. When my mom and dad first came to Canada they lived in Edmonton. As you know Edmonton is an enormous city, so, my dad couldn’t find work. He traveled here to Fort McMurray and finally found work. But there was one tiny problem. Every month my dad had to drive back and forth from Fort McMurray to Edmonton. So, my mom made it easier for him. She decided to move to Fort McMurray. But it was kind of hard to move because my sister and I were born in Edmonton but we managed to move here anyway. Both of my parents and my sister and I traveled here by car. My dad decided to move to move to Fort McMurray because he found a job here, the job was taxi driving he also liked Fort McMurray because when he came here the city was small and quiet. My mother went to Keyano College here. When she was finished school here she was hired for a job in Tim Hor-tons. She was the cashier. She would give the people their food not making the food. My mom then retired because one of my brothers were born. But, my dad still has his job except it’s a diferent job. My dad moved from differ-ent jobs 2 times. Now his job is called Mcmurray Steam clean.

it’s my eyes that see

your landlouise van alenburg

The air redolent with the smell of henna the chun-chun of bracelets in beautiful wrists Even the moon looks ecstatic on Eid eve Smiles begin the day Family and friends rejoicing every moment thankful just to be together Endless food Traditions celebrated Three days of happiness So much lost with one decision Migration –

It's my eyes that see your land My vision is as coloured as the brush in my hand

The emotions that I truly feel People and raw nature shown in abstract or real

The artist in me to is a mere fool But my brush is a powerful tool

So I paint just what I see It's a journey please come with me.

migrationkiran malik-khan



jana abdoMy mom’s migration to Alberta began in 1986 when she left Newfoundland to go to Niagara Falls, Ontario. After living, working and going to University in Ontario for five years my mom came to Fort McMurray, Alberta to visit her brother. She loved Fort McMurray so much that she decided to stay. Today after living here for eighteen years my mom still thinks Fort McMurray is the best place to live and raise a family.

The End

My Family Migrating | sharique khanMe and my family migrated from Pakistan to Canada. It was my father’s decision to move he chose Canada because it’s a place with many opportunity for jobs and a peaceful place to. My father chose Canada because good place for education. The first place we went to was Toronto, Ontario my father worked in the Maple lodge. My dad worked as a meat cutter. We lived on Toronto for about 6 years then that’s when my dad decided that we would move to calgary. My dad went there to check if its a good place to live after a few days he came back with a really good comment that’s when my family started to pack. We loved calgary just as much as we loved toronto. We loved to shop and go to restaurants. Calgary was a really pretty place down town of calgary was a place to explore there were many statues to look at although it was a very large place we have been every were. My dad worked as a bus driver for about a year then that’s when Fort Mcmurray poped up. We were very sad because we didn’t want to move go to small area and with not the best of malls. My father was decided to go to fort mcmurray because of the diversified my dad heard that they paid more than the transit. So what he did was he sent us on a three month vacation to pakistan why well because in that time he would find us a house and get his job till then. So guess what we arrived to Fort Mcmurry by plane and were shocked of how much we hate it. Me and my sister never ever wanted to go to a place there’s not much of malls or has a small popula-tion. Fort Mcmurray was a quite town it was pretty as calgary but not as big as it. There was no where to go

or no one to play with until I realized that it was my birth day so then I asked my father for an xbox360. We were transferred in islamic school and we were pretty surprised about and we happily joined it too. I then had found my true home Fort mcmurray i realized it may not be big and not have much malls but when your loving familly is with you then home is anywhere for me.

My Family Migration | samir hamdanPeople move from one place to another to find a better life. My family was living in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. My dad wanted to find a better place to raise us, so he applied for immigration to Canada. Mom, dad, Kamal and I, came to Canada in June 2002. I was two and half years old, Kamal was 15 months old.

Canada is a nice place to live in, because of the respect to human rights of people, the education is good, and the income is more secure. My family first arrived in Surrey, British Colombia near Vancouver city. In Surrey we had two uncles who helped us a lot, but my dad couldn’t find a job there. After some time we moved to Kamloops in British Colombia, because my dad found a job as a computer technical support representative. We lived in Kamloops for one year and my sister Mona was born there in July 2004.

In September 2004, my dad was offered a job as a safety supervisor at Syncrude Oil Sands Company. We travelled here by plane. My family chose to come to Fort McMur-ray because of my dad’s new job and the better salary he will get. But when we came here we liked it even more, because there are so many Muslims here and because there is an Islamic school.

Migrating to Fort McMurray | halima mohammedMigration is when people, animals, or even objects move from on place to another. An example of migra-tion is when I moved from Edmonton , Alberta to Fort McMurray, Alberta. I moved when I was and a half here so me and my family could be with my dad again . He, me, my mom, and my three sisters drove here (my father was the one driving ). We packed all of

our things in a U-Hall truck. My dad’s friend was nice enough to drive it or us . We had moved here because me mother had wanted me and my three sisters (Ashwaq, Ayan, and Sham) had to live with our father again. I was really excited to be with him again. When we had got here it was Summer , so I had not started school till September (I wasn’t so excited to start school). the end

zunairah azamIntroduction: Hello my name is Zunairah Azam and I am here to tell you how my family migrated to Canada. It all started off like this.

Well, as far as I know the first person to migrate inter-nationally was my grandfather. He moved to Pakistan during the separation of India and Pakistan with his mother and he lost his father during that time. He was around 9 and a half then. That must have been a dread-ful time.

After I was born on July, 27, 1999 and was seven months I had an older brother who was 4 years old. One day, my dad came back from work and said that he had decided to come to Canada because he heard that there is better education there, peace, and a comfortable life. My dad also chose to live in Canada than any other country because Canada provided free and good quality of educa-tion, nice employment and he had friends and relatives living there. My mom agreed because during that time the U.S and India were against Pakistan. She said that why should we stay in Pakistan when there was Para-dise waiting for us in Canada. It was hard for them to say good-bye but we moved to Toronto, Ontario on March, 6, 2000.We lived in Toronto for over 10 years.

Later when I was in grade 3 my dad got laid off at work as a technical engineer and so did the rest of the employ-ees because the company closed. After one week my dad found work in Fort McMurray in an oil sand com-pany known as Canadian Natural. So that meant that he would have to go to Fort McMurray for seven days then back to Toronto after seven days. This happened for two years. During that time we were trying to sell our

condo to move so that we did not have to pay so much money on plane tickets but someone only bought it near December when I was in fifth grade.

After that from Octber to May we rented a home and lived in there for 7 months. Then on May 16,2010 in the middle of school we moved to Fort McMurray by plane. My mom and dad is happy and so are my brothers but I am not. The way I see it my whole life has been flushed down the toilet.

celebrate visual arts in wood buffalo

MacDonald Island Park Open Art ExhibitionThe Wood Buffalo Artists Forum is calling all

regional visual artists to help celebrate the open-

ing of the MacDonald Island Park Art Gallery.

We invite visual artists to prepare original artwork

(paintings, collage, photographs, drawings etc.)

with the theme: “celebration!” for a January

2011 exhibit.

Artists may send digital photographs (jpg or pdf)

of their works to:

[email protected]

by January 5, 2011. Due to limited space, only

one piece per artist will be chosen for this first

exhibition.

For information on how to prepare your art for

this exhibition please email:

[email protected]

We encourage all levels of artists to participate!

The Wood Buffalo Artist ForumThe Wood Buffalo Artists Forum is a new non-profit community organisation committed to supporting regional visual artists and developing public appreciation of culture through visual arts.



my father drove a 1950 ford when i was a kid. I remember it because that was also my birth year, the car was blue and apparently our cat liked to sleep under the hood near the warmth and security of the engine block. Ours was not a wealthy family nor was it the era for making long trips unless you were an immigrant coming from the “old country.” Presumably Canada is the new country. My sister once flew in a DC 8 to Montreal, when she was 21, and that was pretty exceptional. I still have a black and white photograph in my album (black pages with photo corners) depicting the whole family, in a very staged picture, gathered round and waving good bye to my sister. It was assumed that since she was going so far, and to a foreign country, and in a plane, she would likely never return. To our collective surprise, she did!

My Dad once drove the family in our blue Ford, with our cat, on a camp-ing trip to New York City. I know that sounds a tad incongruous as I don’t think that koa even has camp sites in Manhattan. As it was we didn’t actu-ally camp. We stayed in little cabins along the way. This was before the age of motels. In fact I don’t think the word motel was in the lexicon yet. The equivalent were called motor courts. These cabins were little wood struc-tures with few creature comforts, including no heat, no air conditioning, and no insulation, either they were way too hot or way too cold. We did have the camping experience as we often slept in sleeping bags. I think it had to do with my mother’s trust issues with strange bedding in exotic locations like New York.

My dad was a man of few words and preferred not to talk about it, but once in awhile, maybe out of sheer boredom he would point things out to us along the way, usually references to other vehicles or possibly something unusual in the landscape, like, perhaps, a meteorite crater if we happened to pass one.

Since all the roads in America, circa 1950s, would be considered secondary by today’s standards it was possible to see the environment as you drove slowly by it. It was like walking through your own neighbourhood and noticing for the first time that it was gradually being over run with university students who were systematically bringing down the collective property values of the neighbourhood and it was probably time to move. Something you might very well have been oblivious to had you simply continued to do drive by’s.

On our family road trips we particularly enjoyed Burma-Shave roadside signs, as an art form and as a source of cheap entertainment. Burma-Shave signs were part of the American folklore from the 1920’s right into the 60’s. They advertised Burma Shave brushless shaving cream, but they could have advertised vacations in Kansas, it didn’t really matter because they were so clever and witty, or so we all thought at the time. The signs were usually in groups of six with one to five words on each sign, each sign was spaced

road trips marty rempel

about one hundred feet apart. The last sign always said Burma Shave. They were a great distraction to my Father’s narration of the trip. “Hey guys is that another crater up ahead?”

A typical series of signs might have some innocuous ref-erence to family humour. She kissed/ the hairbrush/ by mistake/ she thought it was/ her husband Jake/ Burma-Shave. For weary travelers running out of conversation and jogging along at 50 miles an hour, or less, the Burma Shave signs were a great relief and a wonderful and entertaining distraction.

At times the signs took on a greater social significance:

Drinking Drivers Nothing worse They put The quart Before the hearse Burma Shave

By the sixties society had gotten far too sophisticated for the corny low budget roadside ads, by then we all knew that bigger was better and Burma Shave gave way to the 40 foot billboard which enhances the roadsides of America today.

Recently, while driving nervously through Little Portu-gal in the core of downtown Toronto I couldn’t help but notice a La Senza billboard posted vertically on the side of a very tall brick building advertising lingerie on the body of what must have been a forty foot tall picture of a lanky, but well proportioned, model wearing, well, next to nothing. I quickly had to swerve hard right to avoid an on-coming Street Car Named Desire. As I recovered from my near death experience associated with an amaz-ing adrenaline rush, I thought that Burma Shave signs represented an age of innocence long gone. Times have changed and we must learn to adapt to evolving values and mores, but my god that model was hot!

My sexy-billboard-near-death-adrenaline-experience reminded me of a similar situation in which my nephew got himself into a little fender bender situation while

looking away from the road, for no more than 25 sec-onds, in order to gaze at the wonders of a beautiful young woman walking along the sidewalk with her hip-hugger jeans and belly shirt, with a long bouncing ponytail tucked under her red ball cap. Anyway, what was I saying? I asked my nephew months later about his accident, “Eric was it worth it?”

I was hoping, as a wise uncle, to impart a valuable life lesson through my question. Eric took a good long time to respond. A certain brightness, colour and animation came to his face, as if he was about to part the Red Sea for the children of God, then he slowly replied, Well…she was really pretty!” Thank God he never saw my La Senza girl. Our roads are no longer safe.

When my dad didn’t want to turn into a certain venue or tourist type attraction, be it an historic site, a view point, or if he chose to miss all the Kodak moments along the way, he would simply say, “Oh, sorry kids was that our turn?” As a child I missed seeing Upper Canada Village, Fort George, Fort Henry, the Parliament Buildings and the Statue of Liberty (while camping in Manhattan) and many other places I will never know, in just that same way. When my Dad wanted to see something he just left.

My dad loved to travel and when he retired he kept busy with his wood working shop. Often he would go to an antique showroom and measure a particular piece of furniture and make a knock off version at home in his shop. When he got restless making knock offs, he would either get into his car or buy a greyhound bus ticket and without saying a word be gone. Secretly, I always thought that he had returned to Fort George, or Fort Henry, the Parliament buildings or to the Statue of Lib-erty.

Weeks after his departure, with no apparent negative reaction from my mom, I would ask her with some degree of anxiety, “Mom, where’s Dad gone?” My mom, if washing the dishes at the time, would slowly look up and gaze off into the distance through the kitchen window and slowly, as a small hint of a smile spread across her face would simply say, “Was the cat still in the



car?” I was a little creeped out because coincidentally or not, the family cat was gone too.

My anxieties were lessened somewhat when, on a regu-lar basis, every three days then 8, then two weeks would go by, and a card would arrive. My Dad, where ever he was in the world, assured us that he was having a good time and wished us well and he would be home soon. Then one day he would be in the kitchen slurping his coffee from a large saucer saying, “Heis, heis heis,” as if nothing had happened. I guess nothing really did.

I decided a couple of things from my Dad’s example, because his life’s lessons were not wasted on me. I would never take my kids camping to Manhattan, I would not

buy knock off furniture brands, and I would never take the family cat with me on a road trip.

When my own kids were young I did not take them to Fort Henry, Fort George, the Parliament Buildings or Upper Canada Village. We lived in Alberta and we saw other things.

I sought to be a better parent than my own father and on our family road trips, like most fathers, I taught my kids how to speak Italian and gave them a strong appre-ciation for opera. In addition, while driving, I would endlessly point out things of interest, “Hey kids is that a meteorite crater up ahead?”

at a spring garage sale after the thawmarty rempelEach February a dark steel oil drum is set on the frozen riverover mid-stream and there it sits through the frozen sub-arcticnight. Bets are made as to the day, the hour and the minuteas to when the barrel will break through the ice at winter’s end.Driving over the bridge the barrel is visible to drivers and theodd brave pedestrian as a tiny speck on the ice. Up stream,by the end of April, we hear news of the river break-up as southernsnow melts and swells the Athabasca heaving seven foot thickice slabs to the river’s edge. That winter I counted my winningsmy picture in the local paper holding a handful of twenties to the wind like some Vegas high roller. I bought my daughtera new bicycle. Some winters past, at a Spring garage sale,after the divorce, the bike sold for a few dollars.

you are in an apartment. It is three in the morning. The night is clear and free of clouds. It is the dead of winter. There is blood on the kitchen linoleum again.

In the middle of the kitchen there is a girl, half-lying and half crouched. She has one hand to her lips as blood drips between her fingers and another hand on the floor. Her hair is cut shag style and is a dark red, with strands of it currently hiding her face. Her eyes are a hard green, like two pieces of a coke bottle, only right now they are red from crying. Her light blue PJ tank top, the one with the lace on it, is ripped on one of the shoulders and is spat-tered with liquid gore. She is too tired and defeated to crawl over to the sink and get a rag to wipe the blood away. There are large bruises all over her arms and several smaller ones around her neck; brown and blue and purple and yellow and green, despairs palette. It is dark. The only light is the street-lights outside the apartment building where her brother, father and herself live. Her father’s just come home drunk again.

Her lips have been split by a punch to the face that she didn’t deserve.

She is hurt.

She is tired.

She is crying.

She’s only nineteen years old.

Please, don’t look away.

Here comes her brother, bare feet scuffing across the floor. His red hair is mashed to one side because he was sleeping just fifteen minutes ago. He is six years old and is wearing a flannel pair of Spider Man PJs. He is hugging a blue teddy bear. Across his face is a red hand, five fingers, from where Daddy dearest hit him. He has a dusting of freckles on a band across his nose. There are tears in his blue-green eyes, but he is the man of the house, so he does not let them spill over.

He too is rather large, having inherited his muscle size from his father. Right now, he doesn’t consider that a good thing. His name is Christopher, but pre-fers the name Toph. Her name is Tacey. Tacey Deidre.

Daddy’s snoring off the beer and rage in the master bedroom, so it’s just the battered and beaten pair in the coolness of the kitchen. The only sound in the room is the ticking of the clock mounted on the wall and Tacey’s breath-ing. Neither of them say anything. Neither of them has too. They both know that this night will become a memory unspeakable.

Finally, the silence is shattered by two blood-drenched words.

blood on the floor

Excerpt from a girl named silence

leah hoddinott



“We’re leaving.”

Toph is calm, although he clutches his teddy bear just a little tighter.

“When?”

“Tomorrow night, as soon as the swine leaves. I’ve had enough now.”

“Where will we go?”

“I have a friend in Clarenville. We’ll stay over at his house.”

Toph doesn’t reply. He just walks over to the sink, stands up on his tiptoes, and takes down the rag to clean his sister’s face.

Tacey waits in her brother’s bedroom with the door locked, not making a single sound. She can hear her father stomp out the door, complaining loudly to nobody about his hangover as he goes off to get drunk again. Her breath falls from her split lips, which are disguised by black lipstick. She knows what part she has to play today and has the clothing for it. On her eyes is a dark purple eye shadow and black eyeliner, and on her arms and chest is as much make up and foundation as possible, to hide the bruises on her pale skin. She’s gelled her hair enough to make it look like shattered glass. She is wear-ing a too-tight black tank top with white Capri pants and sneakers. No high heels tonight, on the off-chance that she has to run. Her arms are adorned with sev-eral silver bangles, and a spiked black collar is strapped tightly around her neck. She looks like a complete Goth and knows it. On her back is a khaki backpack, contain-ing two changes of clothes each.

They start out, just the two of them, as the sun sets behind Dave’s Barber shop and casts golden light on the asphalt and concrete jungle all around them, stretch-ing in all directions. Toph is holding Tacey’s hand and is struggling to keep up with the mad pace. In his arms is his blue teddy bear. He is wearing a blue shirt and black overalls, with his Spider Man PJs on underneath because they couldn’t fit them into the backpack. This was

because Toph had a ceramic mask, depicting a woman’s face covered in circus face paint, on his bedroom wall and would not leave the apartment without it. It is cur-rently sandwiched between Tacey’s bras and Toph’s jeans in the backpack, and its weight is starting to make Tacey’s shoulders sore.

“Honestly Toph, why did we have to bring that ugly thing?” She says crossly.

“It’s special, and I need it.”

Tacey snorts and they continue on, past bums in the mouth of alleyways who give Tacey a hungry stare but scowl when they see Toph walking slightly behind her, past Irma’s Diner where Tacey had worked after school, past Toph’s elementary school, past the bus stop where Tacey took the bus to Stetler every day, past the bridge on the river where Loni had drowned herself six months before, past all of the important landmarks in their lives. They are leaving them all behind. All that they carry is the backpack, the teddy bear, the money for one-way tickets to Clarenville, and a scrap piece of paper in Tacey’s pocket that holds all of her hopes and fears in several little words. She did not call the number yet, for she is too proud to beg over the phone. Better to do it in person. The words contain a promise, an ally, salvation. All she has to do is claim it. If it means that she has to be a servant to him, so be it. So long as they could both have a safe place to run to.

They are in the bus station. It’s cold and dingy and stinks of old water and mildew, but that does not matter. Tacey walks up to the lady at the ticket booth and says “Two tickets to Clarenville, one-way.” Her voice quavers slightly, and she mentally curses her fear.

“What train?”

“Eight ten.”

“That’ll be forty-two dollars please.” The woman gives Tacey a look that says Single mother. I bet she’s a hooker. Somehow she misses the quiet desperation in Tacey’s eyes, or the faint bruise on Toph’s cheek.

Tacey ignores her and hands over the cash. Tickets are passed, and she walks away, Toph in tow. It is only seven-thirty, so they head over to the café and buy stale tuna sandwiches in a packet along with chocolate milk, spending their remaining money. They sit together on a blue metal bench and eat them, not complaining about the dingy taste and the iffy milk. All the while Toph never says a word, just wipes the crumbs off of his teddy bear and lap when he is finished. Tacey draws a tissue out of her pocket and wipes the crumbs off of his mouth. Then they both sit back, not knowing what else to say. In one swift action Tacey had become Toph’s only guard-ian. Tacey wonders about this as they look at the clock and watch the hands slowly tick away the seconds and minutes.

Finally, they hear the rush of steel against metal tracks and see the light of a train in the distance. Tacey stands up and puts on her backpack. Toph clutches his teddy bear tightly. There are sudden tears in his eyes.

“Tacey, I wish we didn’t have to leave.”

“I know.”

“I wish Daddy could be a daddy again.”

Tacey kneels down and gives Toph a big hug as two fat tears roll off his cheeks.

“It’s ok.” She whispers, fighting the knot that builds in her own throat. “You won’t have to be afraid of Daddy anymore. Now lets get on, alright?”

“ ‘k.” Toph murmured, scrubbing the wet trails off of his cheeks.

The train pulls up with a hiss and the doors swing open. They wait until the crowd of people trickles out, and then walk in, handing the tickets to a particularly fat ticket master. Tacey stores her backpack overhead, and they take a seat near the window. Several minutes later the train starts moving out of the station, and Tacey almost cries with relief. They are free. For now.

There are footsteps on a muddy sidewalk, sticky from recent rain. The full moon is out, and the air is crisp and

cold. Tacey’s heart is beating rapidly in her hands. Blood only she can see is slowly run-ning down her arms and dripping on the ground beneath them, and they walk over it and it is gone forever.

Save me.

She stares at the black iron gate in front of her. It is only at waist height and has a pattern of intertwining vine leaves carved on the top. Most importantly, it’s unlocked. Toph shivers beside her and sticks a grimy hand into hers.

“We’re here, Toph.”

The gate swings open with a loud screech speaking of rust and lack of oil. They walk up the walkway and up to the front door. Tacey’s heart beats faster.

All or nothing. If he does not accept us we may as well throw ourselves into the river.

She lifts her hand and presses against the doorbell, unconsciously holding Toph’s hand tighter.

A minute passes. Footsteps from within. The door swings open, and it is all Tacey can do not to cry. Because there he is, the old man, wrapped in a light-blue bathrobe and bunny slippers with a book in his hands.

There is a moment’s silence. Then “Do you still make hazelnut hot chocolate?” Tacey asked, trying very hard not to let the fear in her voice show. Will you still help me?

“Only the very best.” The old man’s look of astonishment quickly melts into a smile. “Come on in.”

They stepped in, and Tacey turned her face away when she saw what was on the wall. It was a single mural, stating the words Welcome Home. Tears filled her eyes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We’re here now. We’re home.



she stopped twenty yards from the icy river’s edge and took a photo. Unless you knew where to look there was nothing left to say she’d been there. The footprints were mostly covered, both sets rounded by the cold, lessened by the night.

They were about a hundred yards from the edge of town. The wind was crackly through the branches and it bounced down to the river, going who knows where from there. South-east maybe towards Waterways and Saskatchewan, south-west down sixty-three to civilization. She had always wondered, growing up, if it were the same wind that came back every night. Logic said it was silly to personify such a base force of nature yet it was comforting to think of the wind as an old friend, wrapping her up, cleaning away the old, staring things anew. She closed her eyes and inhaled the familiar smell of Winter, taking her back twenty years to the start of high school.

“But I don’t want to go.”

“You must Sonia. This scholarship is important. Our people need it. You need it.” Left unspo-ken was the pressure of being the first. The first girl, the first to win the award, the first to get out of from under.

They’d been sitting on the bank of the river that summer’s day, she and the old man, on the big boulder, near the house she’d grown up in. The boulder was the only permanent thing in her life, or so it seemed. It was safe and reassuring, warm in Summer, solid in Winter.

She had gone away, studied hard, passed well. She always came back though, weekend trips home paid for by the First Nations trust or from money she earned waitressing. And she knew that one day she would come back for good.

The old man was the unofficial elder of the village. He kept her in touch with home when the others pretended there was nothing wrong. Short sharp conversations to let her know when she was needed. He didn’t like the cell phone she had bought him, but it was part of the deal. Even at thirteen she had an iron will noticably absent in her mother, who’d never found a man she didn’t like for at least one evening, or her petty-thieving Father, long gone to Edmonton and no longer part of their lives.

So she went away to better herself, the old man’s words not hers, and her studies were punc-tuated through the years by short staccato-like phone calls summoning her back.

“Your Mother’s in jail,” was the first, and she came back to plead for mercy, fourteen years old, and rescuing her sister Sonia from the flophouse they’d been in. This was followed, over the years by variations on a theme, all of which summonsed her from her cosy little world in the hostel and then later the singles quarters that sheltered her from the real world.

“Your Mother’s in trouble/jail/hospital.” Variations on a theme that never really changed as she bad choice after bad.

“Your Aunt has thrown your sister out of the house.” A frequent occurrence.

“Your Mother’s in hospital,” followed by, “ Your Mother died.” An event not as sad as it should have been. Maybe she found the peace she hadn’t had in life.

There was a brief respite after that, before the old man took to phoning more frequently. Harsh, angry reports from a man who had never learnt how to talk on a tel-ephone, each one chronicling what she had escaped, what she had left behind.

“Sonia’s in trouble at school,” “Sonia was arrested.” Your Aunt has thrown Sonia out again.” Sonia’s pregnant.” Sonia fell down the steps and had a mis-carriage.” Sonia’s been arrested again.” Sonia’s had another miscarriage.”

What he wasn’t saying, couldn’t say, was ”Sonia’s making the same damn mistakes your Mother made.” Sonia likes men with her drink and drink with her men.”

“Sonia needs you.”

That was it really. By the time it came to the really bad stuff, she was out of University and in B.C., with a career to follow and a path that led further away from home, not closer as she promised.

The old man seemed disappointed, and he called less and less. She heard occasional reports from other people but it was two years before she finally realised why nobody would say anything.

He was big and scary. No one knew what he saw in Sonia, who by now was a little mouse of a woman, all life beaten out of her. Maybe it was the house. She’d bought it back from the council, the only home she knew, and let Sonia live there. In truth she had bought it for the view of the river. And the boulder. He moved in, and there was nothing from the old man. Even he was scared.

The report came through the Police this time, and she went home to find Sonia in hospital with a collapsed lung and broken ribs.

“Fell down the stairs,” said the Doctor, frustration clip-ping his tone. “Fell down the stairs, “ said the boyfriend, a drunken leer on his face as he leaned against the door-jamb, not inviting her in.

Fell down the stairs,” said Sonia, not looking her in the eye. The house was a bungalow, no basement.

“You need to come home,” said the old man. It was his only phone call, but it was enough. It took six months before an opening was available, during which time

Sonia fell down the steps twice more. The RCMP detach-ment, naturally enough was sympathetic, but without witnesses, without Sonia’s testimony, there was nothing they could do.

“They are married in the eyes of God,” said the priest, a drunken fool who refused to interfere.

“He loves me”, said Sonia, not even bothering to make it sound believable. They were in the kitchen. In the next room drinking with his friends, he made a coarse sug-gestion as what he could do to the two of them. They laughed. She seethed, wanted to shoot him, knew she’s be the number one suspect. She dreamed of killing him, knew many ways to do it, could never see how to get away with it.

Chance, the storm and a blocked toilet conspired to give her the opportunity. She was out walking along the river, late November, behind the house. The storm was coming and the weather report had said it would be a bad one so she was taking one last walk before the Spring.

He stumbled out the back door, mumbling something about fixing the crapper in the morning. It was cold, and she could see him stagger to the water’s edge and lean against the boulder for support as he dropped his pants and squatted. She watched him desecrate her special place and instead of enraging her, the silence before the storm seemed to calm her.

She only hit him once. It was enough.

The storm came in half an hour later and lasted for three days. There was never any realistic chance of finding him, so they said. They pieced together his last move-ments, investigated the river’s edge. She took photos. She glanced over towards where the branch was, buried until April at least. The place where he’d fallen into the water was all covered up and iced over. Maybe he’d float downstream. Maybe he wouldn’t

Too late for the police evidence team. Way too late for the sonovabitch.

From behind: “See anything Sergeant? Any evidence at all?”

“No,” she said, “there’s nothing here.”

sticking aroundkevin thornton



Book 2.0: Technological Progress?this spring i jumped on the techno-wave and bought an e-reader—a Kobo, to be exact. Or rather, I bought it for my wife, but was the first to use it extensively. And, despite misgivings that I was hastening the death of the book as beloved object, I have to admit that I like our Kobo. It is all the things the hype says it would be: light, portable, capacious, easy to use, easy to read, convenient. Purchasing “books” is simple and almost instanta-neous. The ability to adjust font size with a few clicks is extremely useful; I find that a smaller font is fine during the day, but a larger one is a gift to tired, and old, eyes in the evening. Best of all, if you finish a Kobo book when you aren’t anywhere near your library, you can simply open another one you’ve downloaded, or browse one of the hundred or so “free” (read, out of copyright!) classics that come with the reader. Under those circumstances—Whoops! That’s the end of that book. What else does Mr. Kobo have?—I’ve re-acquainted myself with Sherlock Holmes. And who knew that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species could be so fascinating?

This particular reader does have a couple of annoying features. It’s “conveni-ent” because it doesn’t require a separate charging device: you simply top it up by plugging it into your computer, using the same USB cord employed to synchronize content and download—fewer accessories to worry about, or lose. The corresponding disadvantage is that you have to have a computer to plug it into. Portability and convenience on a long trip disappear if you have to lug your laptop along as a battery charger.

A greater annoyance is the bookmark function. When you close a book in the middle, or close the reader itself, Mr. Kobo will mark your exact spot, and go to it the next time you power up. Except that sometimes, for no reason we have figured out, he doesn’t. It is extremely frustrating to have reached about page 400 in Darwin, to close the reader, open it again, and find you are back at the introduction, no matter what you do. The frustration grows when you realize that, given the particular way this book is set up in Kobo, the only way to get to “about page 400,” is . . . one page at a time. Right click, right click, right click, etc., etc. The frustration is compounded when I think how childishly easy it would be to flip to “about page 400” in an actual book, and then skim for a page or so until I recognize where I left off.

The problem is one of those that so often occur with technology. Is the glitch some kind of “random” error, or is it the result of something we did but didn’t know we were doing when we did it? And why can’t we remember exactly what we were doing when the device “decided” to do what it did? Online manuals and help sites are usually worse than useless in helping to assess such problems. The Catch-22 is that you really have to know the answer to

the question you’re asking in order to type in the correct question that gives you the correct answer. My response in this situation is always the same. First, restrain the urge to throw something, specifically the expensive piece of hardware that will not function better as a result of impact with the wall. Second, long for a “real” object, the printed manual, that I could skim and browse until I located the answer to the problem, usually in one tenth the time it takes not to find the answer online.

Within a month of purchasing the Kobo, an email mes-sage informed us that we needed to give it an extensive “software upgrade.” This fix could be done either in-store, or online from the Kobo website. I chose the latter and the process was not difficult or excessively time-consuming. I did have some fears when I learned that all previously purchased books would have to be down-loaded and installed again, but nothing was lost in the process, which seemed to be automatic. Yet those fears, and the other techno-inconveniences mentioned, got me thinking.

I do like our Kobo. But what are the long-term disadvan-tages that relying on sophisticated and specific software (Kobo software vs. Kindle software vs. Nook software), delicate and rapidly changing hardware, and month-by-month or week-by-week advances in technology create for the person who just wants to . . . read a book?

Think of the “technology” required to read a traditional book. It’s primitive, ridiculously simple, and basically unchanging. Hardware: book, eyes (perhaps with hard-ware enhancements for the latter—glasses). Software: literacy. Power source: anything that produces light. Other requirements and accessories: none. Portability: anywhere you can carry it. Transfer and sharing poten-tial: limited only by the software requirement (literacy). That’s it. Apart from a basic hardware device (eyes) fail-ing, there is really nothing that can break, nothing that needs to be adapted or upgraded. The other required hardware element—the book itself—can of course be damaged or destroyed. Yet, with absolutely minimal

care, that piece of hardware can last for decades, even centuries. What is the average life on the warranty for an e-reader, a laptop, an IPod or a cellphone?

Similarly, the basic operating “software” for opening of a traditional book—literacy—is tremendously dura-ble and reliably up-to-date. I acquired my basic version overfifty-five years ago, and it still works. It allows me to “open” over four hundred years’ worth of documents, from Shakespeare to Swift to Shaw to Stieg Larsson, at “the blink of an eye.” Yet there are computer documents I have, transferred from previous machines, that I can no longer access at all. Some old (six years) scanned photos from a program that I no longer have will not open except with that program. Unless I purchase a new version of that program, for my new basic operating system, the documents are inaccessible. I have also dis-covered that, on the new laptop I recently bought, with its latest version of Windows, one of my favorite photo management programs, purchased only five years ago, not only will not run, but will not even install. A trip to the manufacturer’s website—which, I have to admit, is an extremely swift journey on my new computer—reveals the discouraging fact that the software is not available for Windows 7. Period. A “better computer” gets me disappointed faster. I will have to find, and learn, a brand-new program, in order to do what I already knew how to do, but now cannot do in the way I have done it, because of “technological progress.” How soon will the e-reader documents I have now become inaccessible—without expensive retrofits—as the readers and their programs get “better”?

Printed book. Eyes. Light. Literacy. For all their lightness, compactness, immense storage capacity and portability, are our new e-readers really that much of an improve-ment? You can read a book by sunlight, the light of an oil lamp, candlelight, even moonlight. Have you tried charg-ing up your Kobo or Kindle with kerosene?

marginalia a column by

douglas abel



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Northword Literary Magazine vol 01 no 04

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