This is my first BWL Blog Post! I hope you enjoy it and please, leave comments!
I’ve been part of the BWL family for just over a year. Thank you to Jude, Jay, JD, Michelle, Nancy, and the rest of the BWL staff for shepherding “The Aquamarine Necklace: A Janice Maidstone Mystery” to bookshelves last July. I look forward to having it joined by a sequel later this year (more on that in future blogs).
To wind up an amazing year of writing and travelling, I spent the entire of December at the Gushul Writers Cottage in Blairmore Alberta. Gushul Residency Program (Artists and Writers) Owned by the University of Lethbridge and managed through the Department of Art by the Gushul Residency Program Committee, this facility has hosted hundreds of artists, poets, and scholars from Canada and around the world.
The tiny cottage had everything I needed to focus and write in comfort. Whether I gazed out the window to Crowsnest Mountain for inspiration or absorbed the romance of the Canadian landscape when the trains whistled past (many, many loud trains less than half a block away), it was a month I’ll always remember.
In such proximity to Turtle Mountain, referred to as “the mountain that moves” by Indigenous Blackfoot and Kuetani peoples, and the catastrophic Frank Slide, I remembered my first, long piece of (unfinished) fiction.
For my premier blog, here are the opening chapters of “The S∞nders”. Though this manuscript may never be published, it’s only fair that the first chapters get a chance to breathe. It is in the magic realism genre, with a main theme of “found family”.
The S∞nders
Foretold
At the foot of the mountain that moves, a ramshackle, two-room cabin huddled on the edge of town. Its porch, listing slightly to the east as if pushed by the prevailing winds, had a couple of chairs on which the cabin occupants often watched the sun set.
A wizened woman, recently arrived from the Old Country, absently touched her crystal pendant, and rocked gently in a well-worn chair in front of the warm potbelly stove. Close by, her granddaughter and infant snuggled on a cot under the window.
In the village of her birth, the old woman foretold the future for those who offered a few coins. This gift of prophecy had been passed down to her through the matriarch of each generation in her family. The Stone worn around her neck focused the power of Sight.
When the new regime declared her power the work of the devil, she took her granddaughter and unborn child and fled. Surely, life on the new frontier would be safer.
They settled in this thriving town at the base of the mountain. But the old woman was not at ease. Was it only the unfamiliar surroundings? Or did her visions of earth shaking and great darkness foretell something else?
With a deep disquiet this night, she paced the rough wooden floor, stopping to look out the small window to dark slopes, so high they blocked the stars. The wind, so often howling, was no more than an occasional whisper. When her eyes drooped with fatigue, she returned to the rocking chair and warmed by the stove, dozed.
Calm
Turtle Mountain stood silhouetted against the sky. Snow still lay in her deep ravines, while nodding glacier lilies and twinkles of purple shooting stars sprung up along the melting fringes in the meadows on south-facing slopes. Down on the grasslands, furry crocus sheltered in prairie wool.
On this April night in 1903, glittering stars spilled across the black velvet sky. The tinge of midnight blue lining the eastern promised the coming of dawn.
The full moon reflected silver off the brooks and streams. Not yet swollen with melting snow, the water trickled gently toward the Oldman River a few miles to the east. Trout languished in the deeper pools waiting for feasts of newly hatched mayflies and midges.
Could the rustle of leaves in the poplar groves be the sound of wood nymphs gleefully rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the morning sun?
Coyote puppies yipped when their harried mother returned with a freshly caught hare. They pounced on the still warm carcass, giving the bitch a respite before their attention turned to her engorged teats. She momentarily tolerated their sharp milk teeth before wearily trotting off to continue hunting. The pups whined, then turned their attention back to the hare.
A thin grizzly, recently emerged from her den high on the northern slopes, snuffled the ground. Her massive paws ripped deep into the soil, throwing clumps of dirt, ants and their eggs into the air. The nursing sow depended heavily on this fat and protein, as well as fresh plant shoots and carrion, to produce milk for her two insatiable cubs and to regain the weight lost over the winter hibernation.
An owl swooped low over a pond and startled the resident beaver. The iconic Canadian mammal dove, the sharp slap of its tail on the water echoing across the valley.
A doe stepped daintily through the brush and browsed on the succulent new growth of saskatoon and chokecherry bushes. She ignored the distant whistle of the Canadian Pacific train as it crossed through the last prairie town before entering the mountains.
Chaos
In the moonlight, on its high migratory path, a solitary Golden Eagle’s sharp eyes caught the movement of small rocks breaking loose from a narrow ridge on the north face of Turtle Mountain. She watched the rocks careen down a scree slope, pinging from boulders, until finally coming to rest at the base of the talus. Their ricochet echoed off high mountain ridges in the cold spring air.
The mule deer, heavy with unborn twin fawns, stopped browsing and nervously stamped a front hoof; the bear paused from her excavation, angry black ants still swarming over her muzzle; the weary coyote raised her hackles and bared her teeth at the unseen danger.
Small creatures of the forest floor froze, then fled into their burrows.
Then with a boom rolling across the landscape, The Mountain gave way. Limber pines, sentinels for a thousand years, swayed and were swallowed by billowing clouds of dust and leaves, dried pine needles and lichen.
The old woman dreamed of these clouds, filled with noise and terror. When the floor beneath her chair began to shake, she woke and her hand went automatically to the talisman cradled between her shrivelled breasts. Rocks gained speed down the steep north face of the colossal limestone mountain, and the earth shook. In seconds, the cabin was torn from its gravel foundation, and the amulet tumbled in the avalanche of boulders, dust, and rubble, where it was lost into the darkness.
One hundred ten million tonnes of rock covered the small mining town at the base of the mountain that moved.
Silence
The wall of air in front of the avalanche blasted clouds of debris down the valley. When the great wind passed, silence descended.
No birds. No coyotes. Not even the whine of mosquitoes rising on the spring air.
People in neighbouring farms and towns were shaken from their beds with the cataclysmic thunder of tons of rock breaking away, sliding, bouncing and tumbling from the 7200 foot mountain summit. Scrambling to get dressed in the pre-dawn darkness, they stumbled out of their houses into the clouds of dust and gaped with horror at the masses of boulders. They called their neighbours and ran to help. Two men scrambled across the still settling rocks to stop the westbound morning train before it crashed headlong into the rock field.
Party telephone lines hummed. Every able-bodied person ran, rode or drove. They showed up with picks and shovels but stared with disbelief at the wall of boulders more than fifty feet high. How could they hope to search for survivors?
Frail human minds, even those toughened by the harsh Rocky Mountains, could not process the comprehend the devastation before them.
Then, amid the gloom of settling dust, they heard a cry.
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The Aquamarine Necklace: A Janice Maidstone Mystery, by Bonny Beswick — Books We Love Publishing Inc.
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