Hawk

By Jennifer Dance

2018 Red Maple Award — Shortlisted • 2017 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award — Winner, Young Adult Category • CCBC’s Best Books for Kids & Teens (Fall 2016)

When a First Nations teen rescues a fish-hawk from a tailings pond in Alberta’s oil sands, he has no idea that soon they will both be fighting for their lives. 

As a cross-country runner, Adam aims to win gold in the upcoming provincial championship. But when he is diagnosed with leukemia, he finds himself in a different race, one that he can’t afford to lose. He reclaims the name Hawk, given to him by his grandfather, and begins to fight, for his life and for the land of his ancestors and the creatures that inhabit it. With a little help from his grandfather and his friends, he might just succeed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jan 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781459731868

Jennifer Dance

Jennifer Dance is an award-winning and bestselling author, playwright, and composer. She is also caregiver for her second life partner, who is journeying through the decline of Alzheimer’s. Jennifer lives on a small farm in Stouffville, Ontario.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER ONE

Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada

Less than an hour ago, I was Adam, the long-distance runner. Now I’m Adam, the boy who ...

I can’t even bring myself to say it.

The car engine dies, and I realize that we are in the garage, yet I have no recollection of the drive home from Dr. Miller’s office.

I stare through the windshield. The walls of the garage swim around me. My thoughts won’t move past this can’t be happening.

Angela walks around the car and opens my door. She’s my mother, but I never call her that. I figure she hasn’t earned the title. She didn’t raise me. Neither did my father. Most of the time, I don’t call him anything, but when I have to use a name, I call him Frank. I enjoy rubbing both their noses in the fact that although they are my biological parents, that’s as far as it goes. They never were and never will be Mom and Dad. They left me up in Fort Chipewyan when I was a baby, and they didn’t reclaim me until I was eight! Like I was a piece of lost luggage.

It will be okay, Angela says. It will be okay.

I climb out of the car and follow her into the house like a zombie. She’s like a zombie too, stuck on a repeat cycle of it will be okay.

I kick off my shoes and leave them where they lie. Angela puts them on the mat alongside hers. A question hits me like an arrow in the heart: how much longer will Angela have to deal with my mess? How much longer will she have to deal with me?

I feel strange, like I’m floating, not walking. Angela hands me the mail, and I put it on the kitchen counter. It’s the same routine as before, but nothing is the same as before. Everything is different. An hour ago, I would have pounced on the McDonald’s flyer, stuffing the coupons in my pocket, but now I couldn’t care less.

Life as I know it is over.

CHAPTER TWO

The female fish hawk is returning from the heavy humidity of the Texas marshes to the cool, crisp air of Northern Alberta where she was born, to the place where memory tells her that lakes and rivers are filled with fish, and men are few and far between. She has never made the migration in this direction, yet she knows the way.

She is here to find a mate.

With a roar, the plane races down the runway. The wheels leave the ground, and we rise into the air, the nose pointing steeply toward the bright blue sky. My stomach gets left behind, but that’s normal for me these days. I often feel as if I’m in several different pieces, all of them trying to stay together.

In seconds, Fort McMurray becomes a toy town, with Highway 63 stretched out like a piece of knotted string. I recognize the downtown core and then the miniature houses of Thickwood where I live. It should be exciting. It’s not. I’m numb.

Briefly, before the plane turns, I see the oil sands to the north, a strange, dull emptiness merging with the distant horizon. No forest. Nothing green. Just hazy brown sky and a landscape the colour of mud. In some strange way I feel as if I’m looking at myself … used up, depleted, empty.

The plane levels out, and we start our journey south. I look down on the river meandering in S-shaped loops through spruce-green wilderness. I know that I’m flying in the opposite direction of the flow. It’s going north, up to Lake Athabasca, where I grew up. A distant memory comes to me: water lapping gently against sand, and a little boat tipped upside down under the trees. For a second my heart feels like it might burst out of my chest. I can’t believe that I miss the old place. It’s been over six years since I left there and came south to live with Frank and Angela in Fort McMurray. I knew that McMurray was the oil-boom town, so I’d thought it would be dirty and oily and smoky. But it’s not! The sky is usually bright blue, and trees are everywhere. In summer, it’s like living in a green bowl with a river flowing right through the middle. In winter … not so much.

When I first arrived, I thought the coolest thing was the fast food. You could get anything — burgers, fries, pizza. Definitely better than eating fish all the time. Whether it was baked, stewed, fried, or made into soup, it was all still fish. The next best thing was the TV. My grandfather had an ancient box with rabbit ears that was right out of prehistoric times, so Frank’s flat-screen with countless channels kept me spellbound for hours. Even so, it wasn’t good enough for him. He soon replaced it with a thinner one, and now we have an awesome seventy-inch model. It’s almost like going to the movies.

At the beginning, Frank and Angela showered me with clothes and toys and video games. They were trying to buy me, but I didn’t care. I took it as payback for the years they gave me nothing. And I never gave an inch of affection in return. They still give me things, but the toys have morphed into the latest iPhone, iPad, and Wii, and the clothes include the best running gear on the market. So why is the old place on the shore of Lake Athabasca tugging at my heart? It doesn’t even have a McDonald’s. It doesn’t make sense. McMurray is my home. There’s fun stuff to do here, and people to do it with, and more girls to see in a minute than I would see all year up in Chip. My stomach lurches. I’m flying toward a very different future, one that I’m sure doesn’t involve fun, fast food, or girls. My heart sinks even lower at the thought of Chrissie, the only girl I’ve thought about for months, or did before all this hijacked my life. What are my chances with her now? Zip.

For the briefest moment, I see a bird flying north. I wish I was going with it. Instead I’m heading south, to Edmonton, to the Stollery Children’s Hospital. And I’m scared.

There’s nothing I can do.

I’m powerless.

I wipe my clammy palms on my jeans and force myself to breathe deeply, the way my running coach has taught me. It doesn’t help.

Angela is in the seat next to me, her fingers working the rosary beads in her lap. She’s praying under her breath. But when I listen hard, I hear the same phrase that she’s been mumbling all week. It will be okay. It will be okay.

I don’t believe her. I don’t think that she believes herself, either.

We fly through cloud. It hangs against the window, thick and damp and grey. I can’t see outside, any more than I can see my own future. I’m flying blind. It’s daunting.

There’s a jolt as the plane touches down. We’ve landed, yet I have little recollection of the last part of the flight. I’ve been reliving the day just two weeks ago when a grim-faced doctor pronounced two words that changed my life.

It’s leukemia.

Angela gasped.

I knew vaguely what leukemia was, but in hope that I was mistaken, I blurted out, What’s leukemia?

Cancer of the white blood cells —

My pulse pounded in my ears, drowning out the doctor’s words. I felt strange, as if I was outside myself looking in. Occasional words pierced the fog: three-and-a-half years’ treatment … Edmonton … Calgary … Children’s hospital … Ronald McDonald…

Do you have any questions, Adam? the doctor asked.

I wanted to know what Ronald McDonald had to do with anything. I didn’t ask. My voice had vanished.

Angela unclips her seat belt, the metallic clunk bringing me abruptly back to my surroundings. I get out of my seat and follow her up the aisle of the plane to the exit, moving oddly, almost gliding, feeling as if the contents of my head are floating along a few inches behind. Angela looks back at me. She’s tired, I can tell. Her eyes are red and puffy. Briefly, I catch a look of pity on her face, and then it’s gone, replaced with a determined but silent it will be okay.

Life has changed. And although part of me hopes that I’m in a nightmare and will wake up soon, somewhere deep inside I know that things will never be the same.

CHAPTER THREE

From high in a clear blue sky, the fish hawk scans the land for one particular fish-bearing river. She sees its familiar shape and knows she is nearly home. She now searches for the tall, dry spruce where her parents had raised her, high above the reach of predators. Her powerful eyes spot a squirrel scampering up a tree and a mouse darting across open ground. Her cousin, the red-tailed hawk, would have pounced on these meals, but the fish hawk is not interested in small land creatures. She eats only fish.

She continues searching, but something isn’t right.

If you’re going to fight a terminal illness, I guess this is the best place to do it. It’s bright and cheerful-looking here at Stollery. Everyone is really nice, and the doctors and nurses seem to know what they’re doing.

But I don’t want to be here in the oncology ward.

I don’t want to see kids with bald heads and skinny arms and gown-covered, stick-like bodies. I don’t want to look like them. I don’t want to be stripped of everything I am. I was second in last year’s cross-country meet for all the schools in the Wood Buffalo Region. I plan to win gold this year.

I mean I planned to win gold this year.

How the hell can this be happening to me?

I’m hundreds of kilometres from home, and I don’t know what lies ahead. I don’t know what they’re going to do to me, how much it will hurt, or how much pain I can take. My future is one huge question mark, and although I hate to admit it, I’m scared, really scared. Even though Angela is here with me, I feel completely alone. I can’t talk to her. She left me when I was a baby, and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive her for that. Or Frank. Several times since they reclaimed me, Angela has told me how hard it was for her leaving me in Fort Chipewyan with my grandfather.

Hello! How about asking how hard it was for me!

Both she and Frank told me they did it for me, because they wanted me to have all of the opportunities that they never had. They said they had to leave Fort Chip to be trained and get good jobs, blah-blah-blah. I didn’t buy it then, and I still don’t buy it now. They left me! It was my grandfather who took care of me all those years. Recently, Frank and Angela have changed their story. They tell me they were just kids themselves when I was born, so they needed to grow up before they could raise me. They say I’m old enough now to understand. But they are wrong, because I still don’t understand. They are always wrong — about everything.

Eventually, once they figured out they’d grown up enough, they sent me a one-way plane ticket. They told me my grandfather was coming to live with us too. Soon, they had said. But soon turned out to be more than six years. He moved to McMurray just a couple of months ago, and I’m pretty sure that my parents only flew him down here because they’d heard rumours about school kids doing drugs and getting arrested, committing suicide, or getting pregnant. Frank and Angela must have figured my grandfather could provide round-the-clock daycare while they were both working. Like I need a babysitter — come on, I’m almost fifteen!

All the same, I was looking forward to him coming. I thought it was going to be great, because I remember being happy when I lived with him. But when he arrived, everything was different. With the four of us under one roof, everyone was on edge.

Before my grandfather came, Frank would tell me to be respectful to my elders, and by that he meant him. But I never saw him doing anything that earned my respect, so I never gave it. And now that my grandfather lives with us, Frank isn’t respectful to him at all. In fact, the two of them can’t get along. Frank is such a hypocrite. He only gets along with Angela. And I don’t get along with either of them. My grandfather is the only one I feel any affection for, but he’s so stuck in the old ways that it’s like he’s from another planet, and we have nothing in common. When everyone is in the house at the same time, I stay in my bedroom. My grandfather does the same. It’s a good thing that both Frank and Angela work shifts, or we’d never come down to eat!

Now that I’m stuck here in the hospital, the idea of living in a house where four people are at war sounds half decent. If I could go home, I’d be nicer to them — if only I didn’t have to be here.

Here! There are ten beds in this ward, and the other nine kids all look much worse than me. Some of them are totally bald. I can’t even tell for sure if they’re guys or girls! And their age is anyone’s guess. When I first got here, most of them stared at me silently. A few said hi. I didn’t say it back. Angela smiled at them, whispering to me that I should be nice and make friends. But I didn’t want to be nice. And I still don’t. I don’t want to make friends. Not here. Because all the kids here have cancer with a capital C. How can I be one of them? I tell myself I’m going to wake up soon, and this will all have been a bad dream. But it’s no dream. I’m awake. There are ten beds, and I’m in one of them.

One in ten: it’s a statistic that has been plaguing me since I left Dr. Miller’s office when Angela told me over and over that everything would be okay. She said the survival rate for leukemia is much better than it used to be, and that I have a 90 percent chance of becoming cancer-free and living a completely normal life. She said it quite a few times. Perhaps she was trying to convince herself that it was true.

When I think about getting 90 percent on a test, it seems really high. But instead of focusing on that, I focus on the 10 percent of people who fail the test; the 10 percent of people who will die. To me, that sounds really high too. One in ten. Five days ago, I didn’t think I would be the one. Three days ago I considered that I might be the one. But today, in this ward with exactly ten beds, the possibility is crushing me, and my insides heave. One in ten. My chest tightens, and my skin prickles. One of these ten. My heart does a powerful thump, and my body feels as if I’ve been zapped with electricity. Then anger comes out of nowhere. I want to hit someone … or something. But the last few days have shown me that even punching pillows turns my knuckles blue

Reviews for Hawk

[carolibrarian-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hawk by Jennifer Dance.Adam, a First Nations teen, Adam has been recently diagnosed with leukemia and is struggling with accepting the changes that it will bring to his life. Having given up his ancestry for the finer things in life, Adam now must look back and find the answers he is looking for. There is a reason his grandfather always called him hawk.A pair of mating fish hawks named Three Talons and White Chest. Three Talons and White Chest are struggling to live in what is left of their mating area which is in the center of the oil sands in Alberta. Readers will see the effects of the mining on the land, on the animals and on people. Highly recommended for teachers to use a tool for discussion about the environment.