Northward to Eden - Softcover

Conibear, Kenneth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552124053 ISBN 13: 9781552124055

Publisher: Trafford Publishing, 2000

Synopsis

In the late 1920s, a fur trapper went to Edmonton to find a wife. After marrying the first woman he spoke to, the story is of the people, the environment and the trials and tribulations they experienced in an isolated area of northern Canada.

About this title

About the Author

Kenneth Conibear, was born in Orrville, Ontario in 1907, and moved with his family to the Northwest Territories in 1912, travelling there by rail, stagecoach and barge. He was raised in Fort Smith and, other than one year of formal education at the Fort Smith mission school, was educated to the grade 10 level by his parents and friends within that community. He was sent out to Edmonton to formally complete grades 11 and 12, and continued on to the University of Alberta where Kenneth majored in English and Philosophy. He was selected as the Alberta Rhodes Scholar in 1931 and spent 3 years at Oxford studying English. He spent the next three years in England writing and had his first novel, Northland Footprints published in 1936. He was referred to as 'The Kipling of the North'. In 1937 his publisher, Lovat Dickson, hired him to travel with and manage Grey Owl's speaking tour of England, and because of that close association, Kenneth has often been consulted as an expert on Grey Owl. In 1938 he returned to the Northwest Territories and had Northward to Eden published, followed in 1940 by the novel, Husky written in collaboration with his brother Frank, the inventor of the Conibear trap. In 1995 his fourth novel, The Nothing Man was privately published and his fifth is 'in the works'. All of these novels are based on his knowledge and love of the people, then northern environment and the animals of the north. Kenneth's careers 'down north' were writer, hunter, trapper, storekeeper and, following his service with the Canadian navy from 1943 to 1946, he returned to the territories and operated freight boats on the Mackenzie River system, chiefly on Great Slave Lake, while continuing his writing. These 'down north' careers were followed by his outside careers as executive secretary of the B.C. Hospital Association, part-time English instructor in English at Simon Fraser University, departmental assistant and student advi

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CHAPTER 1

A MAN WITH A PURPOSE

IN THE small cafe on 96th and Jasper, Jimmie Allen was a man apart. As he came through the swing door it seemed that there was forest moss under his feet, his legs bent as on snowshoes, the stars and the clear skies were over his head; and as he proceeded he bumped into tables, chairs, customers and waitresses with the careless abandon of a Great Dane at a ladies' tea party. It was clear that he belonged to another, a larger, and presumably a less populous world.

Blissfully unconscious of the disturbance his passage had created, he found a table, sat down, grinned at the man opposite, glanced at the folded newspaper which instantly rose like a barrier between them, cocked his head askew in a brief attempt to read upside down, then relaxed and gazed about him as Columbus may have gazed when his keel first grounded in the Caribbean. He was a small man, darkly, healthily and handsomely tanned, dressed in a blue serge suit of conspicuous and uncomfortable newness. A waitress stood beside him, a fair-haired girl with a broad, smooth forehead and wide- set, dreamy blue eyes. She, too, belonged to another world, was as much apart from the other knowing, self-assured waitresses as the small man was from the other uniform, city-wise men. But whereas Jimmie Allen clearly felt completely at home here, would feel at home anywhere, Grasille Jansen as clearly did not. She lacked self-confidence; she lived in a dream-world apart, came out of it gladly, almost pathetically anxious to please, and yet sometimes with a jar of adjustment, to make contact with her fellow-men and women, retired shyly into it when the contact was done. She looked, and was, about nineteen years old. Most of the other waitresses looked somewhere about twenty-five; few of them were over seventeen.

Jimmie favoured the menu with a short stare, the girl with a long one. In anyone else it might have been rudeness; in him it could not be. His eyes, his whole attitude, expressed an engaging and all-embracing friendliness. He found the world a good place, thought everyone a good fellow, expected and invited everyone to agree with him on both points.

"I'd kinda like some pie," he said.

"We have apple, raising, blueberry, lemon m'rang, cus"

"Blueb'ry, thassa stuff," he interrupted. "Y' know, nice big slice 'bout size uv a hunk o' cheese that'd go down purty nice." He spoke at a speed that made her feel breathless, running his words together till they lost all individuality.

"À la mode, sir?"

"Alamud? I guesso'shore'parley-voos français ding-dong with a broom-handle? An' say, what's this stuff they call ice-cream? How 'bout a pailful o' that? Can y'eat'm together?"

Grasille explained, more primly than she wished, that in the language of her calling "pie à la mode" meant pie with ice-cream on it, that the two together made a very popular dish. She wanted to ask him how it was that he had never eaten ice-cream before, but she did not. As she walked towards the serving-grille she was pleasantly aware that his eyes followed her. When he was served she looked about for other customers, saw none waiting, and sat down behind the grille with a magazine. For a moment she found it difficult to fix her attention on the story she had been reading; then she turned a page, saw a picture, and was held.

Born and bred on a farm in central Alberta, Grasille had found much of her life a tedious round of milking dun-coloured cows; she had escaped from them to Edmonton a year before, where her existence was now a monotonous routine of serving dun-coloured customers. The romance and excitement which she asked of life she had so far found chiefly in her books and her vivid imagination. She was quite unaware that both were now knocking at her door. The knocks came as a series of orders for blueberry pie "alamud". Five helpings Jimmie called for, and was wondering whether his stomach could possibly manage a sixth, before she spoke.

"Gee," she exclaimed, "ain't you et anythin' for a week?"

Grasille's sister-waitresses would have credited her with very few points for this imitation of the gay back-chat in which they indulged with their customers; but as her first attempt at any such thing it was significant. And it certainly produced wonders.

"In my country," Jimmie began, "y'eat when yuh got it. Yuh don't when y'ain't."

"What is your country?" she asked and he was off, amazing both her and himself with the ready flow of a tongue which had allowed many a winter to pass in the almost unbroken silence of his own northern land. He was a trapper from the Chenal des Quatre-Fourches, in the remote wilderness of sub-Arctic Alberta. He had arrived on the train from the north that morning, having come to this Mecca of northern bachelors for the specific purpose of finding himself a wife. He had not been speaking five minutes before he considered that he had the project well in hand...

About this edition

• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1552124053
• ISBN 13: 9781552124055
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 250