Never Say Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’d spend the extra days in Inuvik instead. He was still hoping I could come on the trip.
    I see your phones are just landlines in Aklavik, no cell service. Call me at the Mackenzie Hotel in Inuvik anytime in the week before the trip or leave a message. We can work out shopping details then. I honor your feelings for your grandfather. If I don’t see you, here’s hoping the not-too-distant future will bring us together .
    I was so up and down and all over the place with my feelings. I wondered if I had made a mistake telling him he couldn’t come to Aklavik. No, I still couldn’t picture it.
    May turned to June. School was over, the bugs were out, and the sun was up twenty-four hours a day. Ryan was on the road somewhere in his pickup with his rafting gear and camera stuff. My mother was home from Yellowknife, and Jonah was somehow still hanging on. The skin on his gaunt face was papery thin.
    I was visiting my grandfather nearly every day. I told him about the fish I was catching, the birds I was shooting, the muskrats I was trapping, and the moose I’d been lucky enough to get. The bull was wading one of the countless small streams that meander through the delta. Jonah was delighted with the organ meat. He still didn’t know anything about Ryan’s letter and the Firth River trip he had offered me.
    The head nurse at the clinic in Aklavik had recently suggested to my grandfather that he might be more comfortable, as she put it, at the new regional hospital in Inuvik. Jonah waved that off without even having to think about it. My grandfather wanted “to go to the other side,” as he put it, at home in Aklavik.
    With only a week to go before my brother’s date with the bush pilot, my mother said maybe I should reconsider about going on the trip. “I have a feeling this trip is going to open some doors for you. Jonah will understand. I think he would want you to go.”
    â€œYou’re probably right about that,” I said. “I just can’t.”
    My mother gave me a hug and said she was proud of me. She told me I had been a big part of her father’s life. “You haven’t told your brother yet that you’re not going, have you?”
    â€œNot yet,” I said. “I guess I will pretty soon.”
    The day after that, during my visit with Jonah, after we’d been talking about some of our adventures on the sea ice, he came out of a lull in the conversation with this: “One of my biggest regrets, Nick, is that I never took you way back into the mountains up the Firth River. I was only there one time myself, a long, long time ago. But oh my, so pretty—it was something to see. Hunter’s paradise. Saw so many caribou all at once, well, they covered the valley and the mountainsides far as my eyes could see.”
    â€œThat was something, Grampa. I hope to see it someday.”
    He gave me a look and said, “I think you should, sooner rather than later.”
    I could tell that he knew. “Who told you?”
    â€œYour mother.”
    â€œHmmm … she wasn’t supposed to.”
    â€œWell, it’s hard to argue with a mother’s instincts. I’m glad I found out.”
    â€œBut I want to be with you. A month is way too long…. I’d even miss the beginning of the whaling season at the coast.”
    â€œYour mother and your aunt can run the motorboat and open up the cabin by themselves. You can catch a ride with somebody soon as you’re back.”
    â€œTrue, but I’ve been thinking anyway that my brother’s trip is going to be a bust. He wants to take pictures of huge numbers of caribou, like you saw back in the day, but it’s been years since anybody’s seen that.”
    â€œCould still happen. If big numbers are still out there to be seen, he picked the right place to go look. He also picked the right time. The cows and their calves will be migrating east out of the