Some of the Kinder Planets

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Eddie had never heard of a navigational instrument called an astrolabe. He had never been away from these, woods or anywhere near a sea, though one time he had watched a steamboat out on the Ottawa River chugging south-east towards Bytown. The Ottawa joined up with the St. Lawrence down at Montreal, a place Eddie had only ever seen on the map at the front of the classroom. And the St. Lawrence joined up with the Atlantic, and across the Atlantic was Scotland, where there was no lum­ber left, to hear his father talk. Just stones and fid­dle tunes and Mama’s family. Papa had no family left, to hear him talk.

  A compass of some kind. Like a miniature wheel, it would fit nicely in a grown man’s palm. If he were a captain out at sea, Eddie would hold this instrument suspended from a ring and, with one eye closed, sight a star along the arm. Then you could read on the circle at what angle the star was above the horizon and somehow out of all that know what the latitude was—where in the world you were.

  An astrolabe: the word means star-taker. It might as well have been a star Eddie uncovered that day from its mossy bed. He had a hold of it about as long as a person might hold onto a star. A gritty star of a pleasing weight in the hand. Cool, greeny gold.

  “Father,” he said. “Look at this.”

  Eddie walked over to his father, who was stand­ing, stretching, about to start work again. He took a deep bite on a half-eaten apple, turned the yellow compass-like thing over in his hands a couple of times, chewing thoughtfully. He nodded.

  Eddie’s father had been to sea, once. But if he, a boy then himself, had ventured up on deck some sleepless night and seen the captain sighting stars, it wouldn’t have been with an astrolabe. A cross-staff, maybe; a quadrant more likely. No one in the 1800s used an astrolabe anymore.

  Still and all, Father seemed to know or guess what he was holding, though he might not know it by name. Eddie’s father might not talk much, but he knew a lot. Now he looked over to where the boy had found the thing. He looked beyond the spot through the clearing and the smoke of the fire, as if someone might come traipsing out of the woods through that smoke, eyes cast down, looking for something he’d lost.

  A bluejay yelling at them from the top of a pine seemed to wake Father from a reverie. He placed the yellow circle on the stump where he had sat to eat his lunch. There would be time to look at it later. Time to shine it up, Eddie thought.

  Captain Overman didn’t notice it there on the stump when he came by to see how the job was progressing. But nosy old Captain Cowley had rid­den down to the site with Overman, and he sniffed about while the other men discussed the business at hand. He hurled a stone at the heron to watch it fly off. He laughed, nudged Eddie in the ribs trying to get him to laugh, too. Eddie moved out of his way, busied himself with some trifle of the oxen’s tracings, tucking his head back along his neck like the heron in flight.

  Then, suddenly, he heard Cowley exclaim, “Wo ho! What’s this, then?”

  Maybe a little bit of the brass surface had come clean in the boy’s handling of it. Maybe the traitorous sunlight gave the discovery away.

  “Wo ho!”

  Cowley was what Eddie’s mama called a “boisterous lot.”

  “Whadya say, boy?” he said, grinning at Eddie in a way that made him angry, as if he had been trying to hide the blasted thing. If only.

  Overman came right away. They both knew what the thing was, though neither of them said as much. Eddie could see something pass between them, something secret and exclusive.

  “Well, I never,” said Overman.

  “Ever handled one of these before?” said Cowley. He wanted to take it back from Overman, but Overman held it out of the shorter man’s reach. It was at that precise moment, as the young captain kept the item away from the grasping, old captain —-it was at that moment that Eddie lost it for good.

  “It’s the boy’s,” said Eddie’s father.

  “I’ll give him ten dollars for it,” said Overman, ignoring Eddie. Eddie stood there, his fingers itching. Ten dollars.

  “It ain’t for sale,” Eddie wanted to say. But ten dollars. Three days of a grown man’s wages ...

  Eddie shrugged — and this is the important thing about it—it wasn’t a yes, just a shrug!

  How had the thing got there? How long had it lain in the earth? What made it worth so much? The questions crowded the boy’s thinking. His tongue felt bee-stung and useless. But would any­thing he had to say have made a difference?

  I would have hidden it in the biscuit tin, you’re saying to yourself. Perhaps. Or maybe you would have spoken up, brashly. “Excuse me, Captain, sir, but I’d like to think about this.” Sure, you’d have said something like that! But Eddie was less than hired labour to the likes of Captain Overman.

  Why didn’t his father say something? Didn’t he see how uncomfortable Eddie was? Hell, the captain talked to Eddie’s father as if he were little more than a slave—Eddie, he paid no attention to at all.

  And so the boy watched as the captain slipped the thing in his saddlebag, mounted his horse and, with a tip of his cap, rode off, with Cowley along­side scowling a bit at his own loss. Eddie watched the men ride away long after they had disappeared from view. For the rest of his life Captain Overman would ride away from that clearing with Eddie’s discovery tucked in his saddlebag.

  MAMA HAD enough words for two parents when she heard what had happened. Father just went out to do the animals.

  “If you’d just got it home,” she shouted, loud enough that the words followed him out to the pigs. “If you’d just got the blessed item home!” She made it sound like a relic, like something sacred up at the Roman Church. Something that might have been dropped by Christ in his travels, perhaps. She didn’t know what it was Overman had gotten away with. She only knew he’d gotten away with some­thing. An injustice had been done. “He’d ‘ave had his hands full trying to get the cursed item out from under my nose,” she called after Father. And now the item sounded like something belonging to the Devil. Eddie only hugged little Isabel and pon­dered these things in his heart.

  That’s how it happened. How long did he hold it? A handful of minutes.

  Time passed. The job at Green Lake ended. Overman paid off Eddie’s father for his work but nothing was said about the blessed and cursed item. Father gave Eddie a three-dollar bill. But Eddie never saw a penny for his find, not so much as a farthing.

  MANY YEARS later he would read a story in the Renfrew Journal (the paper in those days, before the Mercury came along). Eddie was a man by then, but the whole business came flooding back to him. It was his discovery they were talking about in the article, though his name figured nowhere. An astrolabe, it was. Now the item had a name, at last, though Eddie would always tend to call it “the item,” remembering his mama’s fire on that August day. Then another name jumped off the page of the newspaper and slapped Eddie — a full-grown man, remember— across both cheeks.

  He read, “Evidence points strongly to the instrument being one lost by Samuel de Champlain.”

  Eddie’s eyes blurred, the words disconnected like birds let out of a cage and flying up into his face. He blinked. He read again. He had attained only a modest education, Edward George Lee, but he knew well enough who Champlain was. The Father of French Canada; one of the greatest explorers of the Age of Exploration.

  But even a great explorer, it seems, makes mistakes. Led to believe there was a quick route to the North Sea up the Ottawa River, Champlain took an expedition that way in 1613. He kept an extensive diary, including regular readings of his astrolabe to determine his latitude. He was a map-maker, after all. And there was, before him, an uncharted country—uncharted in the ways of the Europeans, that is.

  Champlain doesn’t mention losing his astrolabe in those diaries, but there is a point at which, all of a sudden, instead of giving an exact reading of 45° 34’, for instance, he says, “We are now at somewhere around 47.�
�� And this point is where Eddie found the astrolabe.

  According to the great explorer’s diary, the little expedition ran into what foresters call a windfall. It was hard slogging through thick pine growth blown down by a tornado. In Eddie’s mind’s eye he could see it: these men clambering over great

  logs, through slashing thorns and the mud of late spring. He knew just how impenetrable such a stretch of forest could be; how easy it would be for something to fall from your pack, your pocket...

  “The astrolabe was unearthed by a fourteen-year-old boy near Cobden,” said the article. It was a quote from Captain Overman, now retired. The captain went on to say what a crying shame it was that the Canadian government could not see its way clear to purchase this extraordinary relic of Canadian history for the people of this great dominion.

  The asking price was only five hundred dollars.

  Overman, a local man, as he was described by the Renfrew Journal, was credited with finding the priceless artifact. That’s what the article said. An unnamed boy unearthed it; the captain found it. The eight years of schooling Edward George Lee had had were not quite enough to understand the difference between “unearthing” and “finding” something. He would never really figure that out. But as his mama would have said, bless her soul, an injustice had been done. His heart told him as much.

  To be sure, Overman no longer owned the “instrument.” He had given it to his boss, R. W. Cassels, the president of the Ottawa Forwarding Company, as a present. It was Cassels who would have gained from the sale. But as Eddie read the article, it was not ten dollars or even five hundred dollars that was on his mind. In his mind’s eye, he could see his father holding the beautiful filthy mystery in his hands and staring off through the smoke looking for someone who might suddenly appear: a man, his eyes cast down, looking for something he had lost.

  CHAMPLAIN’S ASTROLABE has gone through many hands since Edward George Lee held it briefly on that bright August morning, but it now belongs to the people of Canada. In 1989 the Canadian government bought the relic from an American antique collector and put it on display in the Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec. And on the card below it is also a passing mention of the nameless fourteen-year-old boy who discovered it. Famous and forgotten.

  How I would like to have held that thing in my hands. How I would have liked to clean it up, with baby Isabel sitting nearby watching as the shine came through. I would have glinted the light from the oil lamp into her eyes off the shiny side of Champlain’s astrolabe and made her laugh. How wonderful it would have been to take the item apart and ream out two hundred years of grit, make it so the arm turned smoothly, the thing could work again. How I would have liked to hold it up on a cool August night and sight along that arm, measure some star’s angle above the horizon and know, if only for a moment, where in the world I was.

  Scientists say that at the beginning of time there was a Big Bang, and that everything in the universe was created in that holy explosion. So we are star-dust. Imagine that. Everything Stardust. Stars in our own right.

  I wonder what Edward George Lee would have had to say about that?

  Based on a true account by Charles MacNamara in The Canadian Field-Naturalist, December, 1919.

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  GROUNDWOOD BOOKS, established in 1978, is dedicated to the production of children’s books for all ages, including fiction, picture books and non-fiction. We publish in Canada, the United States and Latin America. Our books aim to be of the highest possible quality in both language and illustration. Our primary focus has been on works by Canadians, though we sometimes also buy outstanding books from other countries.

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