North to Benjamin Page 19
He was still, still. Not going to get up.
Edgar threw himself by his old friend, whose black hair remained hardened in spikes, whose eyes were frozen open and glassy.
No collar.
“Oh, Benjamin! Oh—” Caroline wailed.
And there were the dinosaur bones of the old paddle wheels, rising up out of the snow, whose ghostly outline Edgar had seen in the night.
Now he could see no wolf marks—no torn throat, no signs of battle or struggle.
Victoria approached from behind. “Ah, Benjamin!”
“He wanted to stay here,” Edgar said. “But I forced him up so that he would walk with me to your house. He talked to the wolves; he made sure I knew the way and wasn’t scared. And yet here he is. Here he is!”
“I didn’t see him at all,” Victoria said. “Are you sure he was with you? Are you sure there were wolves?”
Well, of course Benjamin had been with him, somehow. Of course there had been wolves! The big one in the woods and on the road, and so many others silvery in the shadows. Hadn’t her own dogs been barking insanely?
How would Edgar ever have found her house without Benjamin, without some part of his friend, anyway, deep inside him?
“We can’t leave him here,” Edgar said.
“No, no!” Caroline said. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “We have to bury him!”
“Kids,” Victoria said, and Edgar knew from the tone of her voice that the workmen would not hold the bridge open much longer. They could not wait, anyway. Look at that sun. Edgar could almost feel the river ice contracting.
Look at that sun, over Victoria’s shoulder. Look at the way the hills plunge down. He could feel the surge of water underneath the frozen skin. The same current that had almost taken Benjamin when Edgar had been wandering, misunderstanding the weight of his own steps.
“Let’s move him at least,” Edgar said.
So they picked up the frozen form of Benjamin. He hardly seemed a dog anymore, he was so stiff and strange, and not light to carry. Edgar and Caroline held up the old dog’s head, cradling him with one last embrace, while Victoria took the hind end. It wasn’t far to the wreckage of the nearest big boat. Edgar made room in the broken boards, and then they laid Benjamin with his head supported, in a frame of graying timbers.
“It’s no treat to bury anyone in permafrost,” Victoria said. “But we’ll come back and do it properly before too long.”
She looked behind her, back in the direction of the truck and the closing ice bridge.
Edgar watched her. With Benjamin’s body resting now before them, it seemed right to hold on to her hand, and to Caroline’s, even with his own hurt hands wearing socks.
Maybe they could be like their own kind of family?
To Victoria he said, “I like the way you sang, and how you love your dogs, and you live in a beautiful house. And you know things, without having to say them.”
“Edgar—”
He looked at Caroline now. Did she and Victoria feel it, rising out of the frozen earth right here, where Benjamin was lying in the ruins of an old riverboat? It was practically a fire. That river was not going to stay frozen much longer. Did they feel it?
“We need to go, kids.”
But they didn’t. They kept standing, and the fire from the frozen earth went through them all—it must have, or Victoria would have dragged them off—and Edgar knew his mother was waiting at the hospital, that she would swim between the ice floes, or steal a helicopter, to come get him. Eventually.
His mother did love him, in her way. She would be his mother forever. But he had crossed a wild and breaking river, and oh, how warm it felt to have it stretch for now between them.
A horn blared in the distance. What did that mean? Victoria turned her head. Caroline’s face lit up.
“How does three weeks of beans sound to you two?” Victoria asked quietly.
“I am very good at making porridge,” Edgar said.
Both Caroline and Victoria had eyes that were kindly, familiar, and they both had nearly the same hook to their noses, which his camera would have loved if it hadn’t been lost now, on or under the ice. They looked like they should have been mother and daughter. So Edgar took a picture with his eyes, and let the sun soothe his cheek and theirs at the same time. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry anymore to get back to the truck, or to do anything in particular, now that the ice bridge was closed.
“Edgar, you are one hell of a charmer, I’ll give you that,” Victoria said. “The both of you, in cahoots!”
He was like his mother, Edgar supposed, who almost always got her way.
“You are both going to be real trouble when you get older!”
Would they? It was hard to imagine being older, being big.
Victoria was crying now. It was Edgar’s fault, he felt. A lot had happened just overnight, and now it was hitting home.
Home. He would like to climb the ladder in Victoria’s cabin. Did she have an extra bed up there? Probably he would just sleep on the couch.
She was crying, but she did not let go of their hands, so Edgar felt like he had done the right thing after all, or part of the right thing, in coming here.
“What’s that?” he asked, looking across, not at Dawson but downriver to where some small buildings were poking out of the snow and woods.
“That’s Moosehide Village,” Caroline said.
And somehow that felt right too, that he was close to where Chief Isaac had looked for safety with his people all those years ago.
“Would you sing something?” he asked Victoria.
She could not seem to help smiling through her crying. “What, now?”
Yes. Now. While Benjamin still seemed to be looking at them. She sang a song about a riverboat, how there was no road and the whole town flocked when the whistle blew, and who was at the wharf now, what had they brought? And how the waters churned, and the rapids sped, and the big rocks loomed, and the boilers steamed as the fire grew. And how the hills watched, the deep sky sighed, how the good folks eyed the stars from the deck in the steep black hard black night. The song went on and on. Victoria seemed to know dozens of verses, as the wheel kept churning, the fires burning, the big ship rounded, rounded the bend. Caroline, too, sang some of the verses. And Edgar hummed. He could hum. Maybe Victoria could teach him to sing? If they got only a day together, if it was only a week or three, she could still be his mother too, and Caroline could be his sister. They could sing together, why not? Why not? If he could talk to dogs, and cross the ice, and wander the woods at the direction of wolves?
Why couldn’t the song just go on and on?
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I FELL IN LOVE WITH the spell of the Yukon, the idea of the north, at an early age and from thousands of miles away, through the stories my father told from his geological exploration days, and through the work of Robert W. Service, Jack London, and others. I am deeply indebted to the Canadian Children’s Book Centre, which sent me on a whirlwind tour of the Yukon in May 2012, and to the Writers’ Trust of Canada, which opened the doors of the Berton House residency in Dawson City to me and my wife, Suzanne Evans, two years later. That’s where the seeds of this particular story began to take root. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the City of Ottawa through their Arts Funding Program, which helped finance a key draft.
Many thanks to early readers of the manuscript, including: Ashleigh Elson, Helena Spector, Kathy Bergquist, Jasmine Murray-Bergquist, Suzanne Evans, Gwen Cumyn, Anna Cumyn, and Suzanne Cumyn. In Dawson City, special thanks to those at the Jack London Museum, the Robert Service Cabin, the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, the Dawson City Museum, Parks Canada, the Dawson City Community Library, the Klondike Visitors Association, and to the many friends and strangers, too numerous to list here, who went out of their way to share their stories of the place they call home. This novel is of course a work of fiction.
Segments of Jack London’s 1908 short story “To Build a Fire
,” quoted here, are in the public domain in Canada and the United States, as are the lines quoted from Robert Service’s 1907 poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” I am also especially indebted to Helene Dobrowolsky’s Hammerstones: A History of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in and to the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in Heritage Sites’ website for background information on Chief Isaac. The Chief Isaac quote about the catastrophic impact of the coming of the miners originally appeared in the Dawson Daily News December 15, 1911, and is reproduced on trondekheritage.com.
Heartfelt thanks to my agent, Ellen Levine, for early encouragement and guidance on the manuscript, and to my editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, for loving Edgar and helping to steer this ship home. Finally, to my partner in exploring all things north and south, domestic and wild—Suzanne, this story simply would not be without you.
Also by Alan Cumyn
* * *
Tilt
The Secret Life of Owen Skye
After Sylvia
Dear Sylvia
Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALAN CUMYN traveled north to capture the stark splendor of Dawson City, one of the last frontier towns. He is the author of fourteen wide-ranging and often wildly different novels. A two-time winner of the Ottawa Book Award, he has also had work shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Giller Prize, and the Trillium Book Award. He teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a past chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He lives in Ontario, Canada. You can visit him at alancumyn.com/wp.
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A Caitlyn Dlouhy Book
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Simon & Schuster, New York
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Alan Cumyn
Jacket illustrations copyright © 2018 by Dan Burgess
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cumyn, Alan, 1960– author.
Title: North to Benjamin / Alan Cumyn.
Description: First edition. | New York : Atheneum Books For Young Readers, [2018] | “A Caitlyn Dlouhy Book.” | Summary: Summary: Eleven-year-old Edgar and his mother move to Dawson, a town in Yukon, Canada, for a new start, but when Edgar fears his mother’s destructive behavior will force them to leave, he turns to a dog named Benjamin to help him stop the worst from happening.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039210 ISBN 9781481497527 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481497541 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Mothers and sons—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | Alcoholism—Fiction. | Dogs—Fiction. | Moving, Household—Fiction. | Dawson (Yukon)—Fiction. | Canada—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.C9157 No 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039210