Never Say Die

by Will Hobbs

  The pictures Jonah enjoyed the most—no surprise—were the ones Ryan took of the immense caribou gathering on the upper Trail River. Jonah wanted to see those over and over. “My, my,” he kept saying. “That’s what it was like, all those years ago.” He put his hand over mine and rested it there.

  Two days later Jonah died in his sleep. The weekend after his funeral, people came from far and wide to remember him. The community hall was packed. There was throat singing and drum dancing and fiddle music and tables full of food, most of it from the river and the land and the ocean.

  That night Ryan gave his slide show to a packed house. People wanted to see pictures of caribou, and did they ever! It was a celebration of our land that did everybody proud.

  People took to Ryan in a big way. And to think how afraid I had been, only weeks before, of him even showing up in Aklavik.

  I wish Jonah had lived long enough to see that issue of National Geographic. The cover story was Ryan’s “Change Comes to the Arctic.” The cover photo was of the grolar bear at the Last Mountain campsite, standing at the edge of the Firth River. Even without a human arm in its jaws, the strangeness of the creature and the look in its eye jumped out at you.

  The article ended with Ryan reporting the results of the new 2010 census of the Porcupine caribou herd, and the relief that washed over Aklavik when we heard the amazing news. The aerial survey had counted 170,000 caribou, up from 120,000 in 2001. “Why the Porcupine herd was rebounding while the Bathurst herd to the east was collapsing,” Ryan wrote, “has the caribou biologists scratching their heads and calling for further study. On the street in Aklavik, people say that’s the way it’s always been—boom and bust—and trust that they and the caribou will survive whatever their warming climate throws at them next.”

  Ryan stayed with us for three weeks, and helped us rebuild at Shingle Point. He cleaned a whole lot of fish and even tried some muktuk. I think he liked the experience of chewing blubber better than the taste. My brother took a lot of colorful pictures out there. My favorites were of the fish racks, bright red with drying char, and the ones of a fifteen-foot, milky white beluga whale being butchered.

  Ryan talked to the elders and he talked to the young people. Lots of people wanted to feed him. He claimed he gained ten pounds.

  The morning before Ryan flew back to Inuvik to collect his truck, he took the picture of me in front of Moose Kerr School, the one on the article’s last page. I’m pointing to Aklavik’s motto, NEVER SAY DIE.

  We keep in touch by email. Ryan hopes I’ll go to college instead of working in the diamond mines or on the offshore rigs if and when the big oil companies start drilling in the Beaufort Sea. He offered to teach me how to do landscape and wildlife photography. He says there will be a huge demand for photographs from the changing North, especially from an Inuit photographer.

  Truth be told, I got hooked when I first turned through the pages of Ryan’s article and saw a photograph of three magnificent caribou bulls fording the Trail River. In the background, an ocean of caribou is lapping against the mountains. Hey, I thought, I took that picture.

  A closer look, and I noticed lettering in small print alongside the photograph. NICK THRASHER, it said. Jonah would have liked that.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WILL HOBBS is the award-winning author of nineteen novels, including Far North, Crossing the Wire, and Take Me to the River.

  Never Say Die began with the author’s eleven-day raft trip in 2003 down the Firth River on the north slope of Canada’s Yukon Territory. Ever since, Will has been closely following what scientists and Native hunters are reporting about climate change in the Arctic. When the first grolar bear turned up in the Canadian Arctic, he began to imagine one in a story set on the Firth River.

  A graduate of Stanford University, Will lives with his wife, Jean, in Durango, Colorado.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  OTHER WORKS

  ALSO BY WILL HOBBS

  Changes in Latitudes

  Bearstone

  Downriver

  The Big Wander

  Beardance

  Kokopelli’s Flute

  Far North

  Ghost Canoe

  Beardream

  River Thunder

  Howling Hill

  The Maze

  Jason’s Gold

  Down the Yukon

  Wild Man Island

  Jackie’s Wild Seattle

  Leaving Protection

  Crossing the Wire

  Go Big or Go Home

  Take Me to the River

  CREDITS

  Cover art © 2013 by Vince Natale

  Cover design by Sarah Nichole Kaufman

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2013 by Will Hobbs

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hobbs, Will.

  Never say die / by Will Hobbs.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When fifteen-year-old Nick Thrasher agrees to join the photographer-brother he has never met on a journey down a remote Arctic river, their search for migrating caribou turns into a struggle with the elements and a fearsome bear that is part polar bear, part grizzly.

  ISBN 978-0-06-170878-7 (trade bdg.)

  ISBN 978-0-06-170879-4 (lib. bdg.)

  EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062223845

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. Inuit—Fiction. 4. Climate change—Fiction. 5. Caribou—Fiction. 6. Bears—Fiction. 7. Canada—Fiction. 8. Aklavik (N.W.T.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H6524Nev 2012

  2011053289

  [Fic]—dc23

  CIP

  AC

  * * *

  12 13 14 15 16 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

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