Mountain That Walked

I'm not ten feet from the stoop when my foot runs aground on something unfamiliar and I stumble. I manage to keep my balance, but what's in the pot splashes into the snow. In the thin morning light, I stare at the snow and the yellow patch where the liquid is trickling into it. Something black lies beneath. I rub the spot with my foot. It's a boot-I recognize it as belonging to Albert Brooks. The year is 1903, and Charlie Sutherland, a sixteen-year-old orphan, is on the run. Three years earlier, he was sent by Dr. Barnardo's Home in England to work on the remote Alberta homestead of Albert and Buck Brooks. Charlie has been treated poorly by the two brothers, but he has endured. However, when Albert dies under curious circumstances, and Buck accuses him of murder, Charlie has no choice but to run. He ends up in Frank, a coal-mining town in the Rocky Mountains. Once in Frank, Charlie finally finds friendship and a sense of belonging and self-worth-emotional qualities that had eluded him as a mere "Home boy." His new best friend is another English boy, who has recently received the deed to a homestead and is working to save for supplies. Things change dramatically, however, when-as the local aboriginals have for centuries predicted it would-the mountain walks. In this true event of April 29, 1903, Turtle Mountain collapses, burying a portion of the town. What Charlie does next is determined by the lessons he's learned from those he's become close to, the hard-working immigrants and colorful Canadians who struggled against all odds to populate the West. The Mountain That Walked is Katherine Holubitsky's fourth novel. Alone at Ninety Foot won the CLA Young Adult Book of the Year Award, the IODE Violet Downey Book Award and a host of other citations in both Canada and the US, and has been widely translated in Europe.Holubitsky, Katherine is the author of 'Mountain That Walked', published 2005 under ISBN 9781551433929 and ISBN 1551433923.