Blueberry Mountain.

How it all came back, in like a twisting, a reverberating note, dancing around into higher vapors, free to soften away until heard no more. In watching, Never Cry Wolft, I remembered a small wish I had, when I was a young boy I wanted to wander the wild, uninhabited, inhospitable landscape of the Canadian Wilderness. I grew up spending every summer in an indigenous peoples, wilderness camp for youths, along side of Native Elders this Christian camp, though close to home was still, Northern Ontario. Every summer during the school holidays, my mother, would pack up my brothers and I and send us to spend time with other boys and girls our age. We would study in earnst, survival habits, earning badges and making crafts. We would set out in canoes to the Twin Sister Islands with nothing but our paddles and find our food, make our shelter and have fun. The girls would be on one island, the boys on the other. Though the islands were only 100 yards apart we still could compete and see each others failures. A small group of us, would go each year during this test to the big shadow. A mountain so flat faced and tall that the shadow could be seen from the mainland. That shadow, stretched almost to the boys island and hid us as we entered its reach. So cold was the shadow to turned the water black. We would slowly skid to the shadows maker, a mountain they called, Blueberry Mountain, who the Elders told the tale of blueberries at the top, never picked by humans, only the wildlife and a single warrior, who named it so. That summer, I spelt out in my minds climb that I would make it to the top this time of Blueberry Mountain and jump off with my summer friends as my witness. My simmer friends, who in the shadow shivered its cold and dared of us who would try to scale it again. I remember the black water and the silver rock face we edged, foot by grab, to get to the bravest heights yet, this year, to jump, some daring the others to go higher. My brother went as high as any of us have but, became too scared to jump and couldn't get down. With trying, he held the mountain close and but, fell, still holding to Blueberry Mountain, he slid against the face of such shear rock and could not stop falling. Not until he hit the black water and in the lucid, amber foam of his splash, he disappeared, deep. As fast and as loud as he screamed falling, his reaching out of the water, was without shame, a scream that should have stayed deep in the black water. First, he broke the surface, pitching himself up and backwards and down he went again and in that moment all eyes pleaded with me for help. I was almost near the top but, could not have climbed down fast enough to help, naked, I turned to face the mountain and with one hand out, the other hand pushed myself away enough to suffice not the same fate as my brothers. I, with both feet first, struck, breaking the water murderously hard, sent in like an arrow. Both arms out, breaking the black water, and taken in deep, the darkness focused on me, with both eyes open the deep closed and further now I felt from my brother. I saw nothing, I heard nothing and I felt nothing. Pushing the mass of black that beheld me, I shoved and clawed and kicked the stillness, cold and angry, I pulled the surface to me. I tried to seek my brother, the others, no one was to be heard but, over my brothers cries, I selfishly felt the relief in hearing his pain, felt joy in his heed of their attempts to quiet and pull him out of the water for the screams from the shadow that day had early signals from the mainland, return, now! That night, with my arms weakened from the slap of the water but, no where near as broken and bloodied as the front, right side of my brother. We joked later, that he left a lot of skin on the rock face of Blueberry Mountain and a bit more on the side of the canoe as we desperately spent the better part of the ordeal trying to hoist him into. We, the boys, the next afternoon were lectured, on safety and stupidity, lectured on the evils of skinny dipping but, we were not that stupid, as if a bathing suit would have protected my brother from hurting himself. If my brother never fell that day, I may have made it to the top of Blueberry Mountain.