What the snow reveals

I’ve just come in from an invigorating walk through the season’s first snow. Even though it is a rather meager amount, just enough to obliterate November’s depressing greyness, I still get a thrill out of tramping through its pristine whiteness. If it were deeper I would be tempted to make snow angels. Sterling, our young standard poodle, found it equally thrilling, as he leapt, bounded and kicked up waves of frothy white.  His muzzle was soon encased in the frosty stuff, as he discovered the benefits of eating it.

And with the first snow comes the reminder that we aren’t the only ones inhabiting this vast Quebec wilderness.  The fox, who unbeknownst to us likes to include our bird feeder in his rounds, is now fully revealed by his tracks.  Similarly the horseshoe hares we never see lurking under the spruce trees, except that is for the one Sterling flushed last week, suddenly become numerous as their tracks crisscross the whiteness in front of us.  We only know a moose paid us an overnight visit by the tracks he left behind.  Tracks in the snow can also foretell disaster, like the time I saw a wolf track along side that of a deer.  Although I didn’t come across the deer carcass, I have come across them at other times, while out skiing the trails in the surrounding forest. Invariably a chill runs down my spine as I  glance around to see if there are any watching eyes.

The one track that always makes me smile is that of the otter. His long sliding path through deep snow suggests he is having the time of his life as he slides down an embankment. One time I came across an intermittent sliding pattern through a fresh dusting of snow covering an iced-over lake.  In between the slides were a couple of rows of paw tracks. Clearly the animal had been scampering over the ice to gather speed, then off he went sliding over its smooth surface. When he came to a stop he repeated the fun and did this for quite a few times. I would have loved to been there watching, except my presence probably would’ve ended his fun.

These photos are from past winters, but if I come across an interesting set of tracks this winter, I will post the photo.

Deer and wolf track

The Book Tour

Launching a book can be a little scary and it can also be lots of fun.  For months, only your eyes read your creation as you nurse it through the ups and downs to fruition. Then you pass it around to a chosen few for their first take and wait with baited breath for their verdict. After more massaging, your treasured words pass under the critical eye of your editor and publisher, who invariably come up with more improvements.  Finally it is deemed fit for printing and out into the big wide world it is launched.

As an author you just can’t sit back nervously biting your nails, waiting for the reviews to come in, for readers to comment and for the sales to climb. You have to help it along. So you have a formal launch to which you invite the world and you go on a book tour.

I thought you might enjoy some pictures from the 2006 launch of the 2^nd Meg Harris mystery, Red Ice For a Shroud.  That fall I joined forces with Barbara Frakin who was launching her 5^th Inspector Green mystery, Honour Among Men and Rick Blechta, who was launching When Hell Freezes Over.

Over five weekends in October and November, the three of us travelled all over Eastern and Southern Ontario, spending Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in bookstores, Chapters and independents, usually two stores per day.  At times it got confusing trying to remember which town we were in, particularly when doing Chapter signings. Like any big box store, one Chapter looks like another. Although I prefer the individuality of the independent bookstore, they don’t always bring in the traffic. Sadly, two of the mystery stores we visited have since closed, one in Kingston and the other in Waterloo.  

I also learned about the vagaries of book distribution to big box stores.  Even though my book had been out for several weeks it still hadn’t made its way from the Chapters distribution centre to the individual stores, so for the first weekend of signings, I was forced to lug boxes of books into the stores.

One of the highlights for me was having a reader rush up with the just published Globe & Mail review of Red Ice for a Shroud in hand all excited that I was in the store to sign the book. Another highlight was Rick cooking us a scrumptious chicken cacciatore the night we spent at Barbara’s cottage.

Despite the hectic nature of the tour, mind you most tours are probably hectic, it proved very worthwhile and I believe helped expand the readership of the Meg Harris mystery series to a wider audience. I also discovered that doing a tour with other authors was a lot of fun. So for my fourth book, Arctic Blue Death I did a similar book tour, this time to the Maritimes, with Vicki Delany.  

For the upcoming A Green Place for Dying, I haven’t quite decided yet what I’ll do, but since I will be out in B.C. in June for Bloody Words, I will be organizing some store signings in Vancouver and Victoria. I’ll keep you posted, when and where.

A Green Place for Dying

I'm very excited to show you the cover for the next Meg Harris mystery, A Green Place for Dying.  As you can see the theme of this book is green. I even include a brief visit from a popular Ottawa detective with a similar name, star of another Canadian mystery series.

A Green Place for Dying is about a growing issue in Canada, that of missing aboriginal women. Currently there are over 580 missing and murdered women and little is being done about it.  Sisters in Spirit, an organization associated with Native Women’s Association of Canada has been spear heading a movement to raise awareness of this alarmingly high number in an attempt to ignite police and other authorities into action.  In my own small way, I hope by making missing native women the central theme of this book, that I too might contribute to the raising of its profile.

In A Green Place for Dying, Meg returns to Three Deer Point, her wilderness home in West Quebec, to discover that the daughter of a friend has been missing from the Migiskin Reserve for over two months. Treating her as a runaway, the police refuse to do little more than a nominal search and continue to stall even when the girl’s friend turns up murdered.

As the mother struggles with her daughter’s disappearance, Meg vows to do what she can to find her and in the process uncovers an underside of life she would rather not know existed. But the search takes a turn, which forces Meg to finally face her own demons and admit to the guilt she’s been hiding since a teenager.

A Green Place for Dying is due out next Spring and I’m looking forward to meeting you on another round of book events and store signings.

A Magical Moment

I’ve been enjoying the changing parade of photos that are displayed on my computer’s desktop. Many bring back fond memories. This photo, in particular, brought back one very memorable magic moment.

Jim and I, along with several of our hiking buddies, had spent the day hiking along the high ridge of the Saguenay Fjord in Quebec. Sated after a delicious dinner at the hut where we were spending the night, the group of us had gone down to the water’s edge to admire the spectacular sunset. The night was still, the water calm. A perfect evening for absorbing the land’s tranquility.  

But a sudden gasp told us we were not alone. The water rippled. A white nose poked above the surface, sent out a puff of spray and sank back into the water.  Another joined it and then another. Soon there were several places where the flat, red-reflected water was breaking into rippling concentric circles.  

There was only one mammal they could be; the Saguenay Fjord’s famous beluga whale. For the next long while the group of us sat transfixed as several pods of the small white whales fed in the water in front of us. We daren’t utter a word in case we disturbed them. As the red sun sank behind the distant shore, they fed. The only sound was the expulsion of their breath as they broke the surface to breath.

Only when the coolness of the night arrived did we move, while the belugas continued to feed.

It was a treasured moment, one that will always be with us.

I’ve added a few more photos from that spectacular 4 day hike along the north ridge of the Saguenay Fjord.

Upcoming fall events

Summer is over and I’m back in the groove with several events in the offing. In between I will be busily finalizing the next Meg Harris mystery, A Green Place for Dying, to be published next spring.

This Saturday, September 18, I’ll be at the Lyndhurst Turkey Fair held in Lyndhurst, Ontario, north of Kingston, off hwy 15. I’ll be hanging out in the back room of the Lyndhurst Library from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm with fellow writers; Rick Blechta, Susan Gates, Violette Malan, Sue Pike, Mary Mueller and Mike Harper. If you’re in the area please drop by and say hello and even buy a book or two.

The following weekend on the Sunday, I’ll be doing something I really enjoy, attending a book club meeting at Mont Cascades, Quebec. I love meeting readers and discussing my books with them.

On Saturday, October 16, I’ll be at the Thousand Island Writers Festival being held in Brockville, Ontario. This is the second year of the 2-day festival and given the exciting line-up of authors, including Charlotte Gray, Helen Humphreys, Roy MacSkimming and of course moi ;),  it promises to be a terrific event. I’ll be on from 2:00 pm to 5:00 with fellow crime writers, Janet Kellough and John Moss. Our event, called “Words and Wine II” Murder at the Courthouse is being held in the turn-of-the-century Brockville Courthouse, a rather fitting place to be discussing murder, eh?

Photos from our Thelon River canoe trip

As promised in my previous post, here are the photos of our 11 day canoe trip down the Upper Thelon River in the Northwest Territories. Ten of us, including me and my husband, Jim, and our guide Alex Hall of Canoe Arctic, took off from Fort Smith in 3 float planes and flew north-east for a little over two hours to a small lake north of the tree line, where we spent our first night in The Barrens.

The Barrens is a vast, empty land of arctic tundra, mostly flat with water making up at least 50% of an area that covers thousands of square miles stretching eastward from Great Slave Lake to Hudson’s Bay and northward to the Arctic Ocean. We were easily two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest habitation and wouldn’t see another human being for the entire trip or even a suggestion that someone else was sharing the river with us.

For the next ten days, we paddled along the mostly smooth, sometimes windy and occasionally turbulent waters of this great northern river as it passed through large expansive lakes or narrowed between banks of sand, stone and tundra. We portaged five times, averaging a kilometre in length, around rapids and one dramatic falls. We camped out on the open tundra in the full glare of the northern sun.  Several nights we camped amongst the stunted trees of eskers, the sandy remnants of glacial riverbeds from the last Ice Age.  In total we paddled a little less than a hundred miles.

While we saw only a few animals; one caribou, some fox kits and a cow moose and calf, we saw lots of birds, including arctic terns, wimbrels, parasitic jaegers, bald eagles, Bonaparte’s gulls, Canada geese, common loons, red throated loons, a yellow billed loon, willow ptarmigan, Harris sparrows and Lapland longspurs to name a few.

I must not forget to mention the weather, after all I’m Canadian. It was fabulously hot and sunny for all but one day of rain and another windy, cold day that reminded us that we were indeed North of 60.

By the way, I must've killed a million black flies.

And if you think this canoe trip won't provide fodder for another Meg Harris murder mystery, think again... I am, after all, a crime writer. :)

You can see the photos here. And if you want to learn more about our trip, please read the previous post. 

A Northern Adventure

Summer has come to a sudden chilly end with a cold drenching rain. I even put a fire on last night to banish the chill from the air. But what a glorious summer it has been. Endless days of hot, lazy, sun, one for the memory banks.  And I got to do what I love best, roaming the Great Canadian Outdoors.

 I spent three weeks with my husband north of sixty in the Northwest Territories, a week and a half of that paddling through the Barrens on one of the great northern rivers, the Thelon. A memorable experience shared with eight other paddlers, including our guide, Alex Hall, a man who has spent more than thirty-five years paddling the Barrens intricate waterways.

It was our first time in this vast empty world of big sky, tundra, rock, sand and water with only the occasional fringe of stunted trees and we were in awe. Rising hills of golden sandy eskers shone in the sun. Arctic terns cavorted around us. Flocks of geese fled at our sight. A lone caribou watched transfixed as we silently sliced through the water towards it. Paddling through crystal clear water, over shimmering green water grasses wavering in the river’s strong current, like the tresses of some mythical mermaid.

We often came across the tracks and spore of animals that had tread before us;  wolves, caribou, moose, muskoxen, fox and geese. We even found the occasional set of bleached caribou antlers. But only twice did we see evidence that man had once roamed this barren land and these were old, very old; an ancient stone caribou fence more than a thousand years old, a prehistoric stone arrow and tent poles at least a couple of hundred years old. This is not a land where man can easily survive and in years past the few that tried often starved to death. But today no one lives in the thousands of square kilometers that make up the Barrens.

It takes a long time for wood to decay in the sub-arctic, the same way that it takes a very long time for plants to grown. In the harsh climate, where winter reigns 8 months of the year, a hundred year old tree is less than 10 feet tall with its trunk only 4 inches thick and plants are only a few inches high. But they sure can produce fabulous berries. We snacked on bearberries, cloudberries, bill berries, crowberries and cranberries. It was a veritable feast.

Sadly we saw only a handful of animals. Ten years ago these lands overflowed with the 200,000 strong Beverly herd of caribou. Today it is estimated less than 2,000 survive and no one knows why. They only know that few young are being born or are surviving to adulthood. And with the decline of the caribou comes the decline of the arctic wolf.  We’d also hoped to see the mythical muskoxen that have made these Barren lands their home since prehistoric times, but again we saw none.  But we don’t know whether it was because their numbers are down too or they were just being shy.

We’d come prepared for chilly arctic weather and were warmed by hot southern temperatures instead. It was rather nice, except it did bring out the bugs. And if there was one aspect of the trip I didn’t like it was the bugs, relentless, ravenous, flesh eating blackflies that forced us to flee to our tent or encase ourselves in bug juice and bug jackets. They crawled over everything and flew into every orifice and cranny. They were awful. Only on the open water were we really free of them.

But the white nights were magical. At 9:00 at night, the sun was still high in the sky. By 10:30 it was setting only to return at around 3:30 a.m. It never really got dark, just a greyish twilight. Needless to say we made little use of the headlamps we’d brought.

I have loads of photos and when I finally manage to upload them to an album I will do a link. Until then enjoy one of my favourites taken at around 3:30 a.m. of a setting full moon in the pink sky of the rising sun.