Never Say Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

came the ferry returning from the eastern shore of the mile-wide Mackenzie.
    I walked onto the ferry, scouting each vehicle as they came aboard. Usually you can catch a ride with locals from nearby Fort McPherson who are on their way into Inuvik for the day. A Gwich’in guy helped me out. His name was James and he was on his way to a doctor’s appointment. He told me to throw my stuff in the back of his truck and hop in.
    The drive to Inuvik took about ninety minutes. James filled my ear with how lousy the economy was. He used to have plenty of work when the oil and gas exploration was booming, but ever since the world economy went sour in 2008, he hadn’t been able to find any kind of a job. He’d had to go back to subsistence living. “If we didn’t have the fall caribou hunt,” he said, “we’d be in a really bad way.”
    â€œSame goes for Aklavik,” I told him.
    I had James drop me by the igloo-shaped church in the center of town, a few minutes’ walk from the Mackenzie Hotel. It was early afternoon and the sun was blazing. I told myself that it would be cooler on the Firth River. It was time to think positive about meeting my brother.
    I half expected to find Ryan waiting as I lugged my stuff into the lobby of the hotel. He wasn’t there, but had left a message. Ryan had paid for a second room for me that night. I should go ahead and move in, then look for him at Boreal Books or the office of Ivvavik National Park.
    I tried the bookstore first. There was a flyer on the door with Ryan’s name and the cover of his new book, America’s Grandest Wild Places . The flyer said he would be signing and visiting from noon until two. I had missed him by fifteen minutes.
    I left the bookstore and headed down Mackenzie Avenue. Through the window of the Parks Canada office I saw a tall young man talking with a short park warden in uniform. It took me a couple of seconds to identify the taller one as Ryan. He had the dark, wavy hair I remembered from his website. With the full beard he was wearing now, it was harder to see the resemblance to me.
    I got all jumpy and walked away before either one noticed me looking in. I could always tell my mother and Jonah that he rubbed me the wrong way.
    Well, I couldn’t live with chickening out. I headed back for the Parks Canada office. Ryan and the park warden were having such an intense conversation about the poster on the wall—a big map of the Mackenzie delta—they didn’t notice me slip inside. I sidled behind a partition with a display about Ivvavik National Park.
    â€œAfter the Mississippi,” the warden was saying, “the Mackenzie is the second-biggest river in North America.”
    â€œHere’s where I took the ferry across the river.”
    â€œCorrect. Downstream, here’s Point Separation, where the river divides into three channels and the delta begins. The Mackenzie’s delta—twelfth biggest in the world—is a hundred miles long and generally forty miles wide.”
    â€œA wonder of the world to be sure,” my brother marveled. “What a maze. Thousands of islands and connecting streams, and so many lakes—any idea how many?”
    â€œRoughly twenty-five thousand.”
    â€œHere’s Aklavik! I was hoping to get there—it didn’t work out. When was it first settled?”
    â€œEarly in the twentieth century during the rush for the white fur of the Arctic fox. Inuit from the coast and Indians from upriver began to settle around a new trading post. It became the biggest settlement in Canada’s northwest Arctic. There were more than sixteen hundred people there in the 1950s when the government decided to shut it down. They built Inuvik to replace it.”
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œAklavik was prone to flooding. Where we’re standing right now is well above the Mackenzie’s floodplain. Inuvik was a modern miracle, but when the time to