Raspberries on the Yangtze

One It all began the day my brother and I decided to poison our mother. It was a warm sunny summer morning. We got up early and ate Rice Krispies for breakfast. We went back upstairs, pulled our curtains and did a sloppy job making our beds. But maybe I should introduce myself first. My name is Nancy. My brother is called Andrew. We don't look anything like each other. He's got dark hair and a long face. His greeny-brown eyes have a wary look to them. Not that Andrew gets into trouble much. Quite the opposite. The reason he's wary is he's always on the lookout for trouble so he can avoid it. I don't look wary. My mother says I should try it sometime. Maybe she's right. I always seem to be in some sort of trouble. Not big tornado trouble, you understand. Just a few whirly gusts that always knock something over. And somehow it's always my fault. That's another difference between Andrew and me. Things are never his fault. Anyway, unlike my brother, I've got blond curly hair and blue eyes and my face is round and freckled. In fact if you didn't know Andrew was my brother, you would never guess it. The only thing the same about us is that we're both tall. And we spend most of our time outside. That's because of the woods and the river. You see, we live in the country in Canada. Actually we live in an old log cabin. You can tell it's an old log cabin because the logs are wide, not narrow, and they have squared-off ends that dovetail into each other. The space between the logs is filled with crumbling white mortar. When we first bought the cabin, it had two sticking-out bedroom windows with a red front door in the middle. It looked like it had a face that was smiling at me. Anyway, then my mum and dad built a bit on the end to fit us all in so I guess you would call the cabin a wooden house now. We live quite near a busy highway, but you'd never know that once you turn down our little gravel road. The house sits on its own at the end. There are pine trees in front of it. But behind it where the land slopes away there are maple and birch trees mixed in with the evergreens. There is a small lawn and there are flowerbeds around the house. In the summer Mum plants out red and pink geraniums, black-eyed daisies and blue and white forget-me-nots. A yellow rose is supposed to grow up one side of the house but something keeps eating it so it doesn't flower much. Anyway, that morning my brother Andrew and I planned a trip down to the Gatineau River. The Gatineau is almost half a mile wide where we live. Each year, when the ice finally melts, it is a highway for thousands of logs floating downriver from the logging camps in the forests up north to the paper pulp mills further downstream towards Ottawa. The part of the river we thought of as our own was a small backwater separated from the big river by a spit of land. Here there was no current and the water was only a few hundred feet across. Every year a few logs always found their way around the spit of land and floated into our backwater. Eventually, after a lot of hard looking, tough decisions were made and we chose two of them for the summer. So that morning, Andrew and I were going to check on our logs. Finding the right log is an important job. You start looking in May after the ice has melted and the log rafts start moving downriver. When you finally find the right one, you pull it up the stony, muddy bank as high as you can. This year, after careful searching, I had found my best log ever. It was smooth, so you could ride it without the insides of your legs going all red, and not too long, so that it was easy to turn when you were paddling it. About a third of the way down there was a branch stub. It was a good shape. It could be a joystick. It could be the hilt of a sword. It could be the pommel of a saddle. It could be anything. It was the perfect log. AndrewWallace, Karen is the author of 'Raspberries on the Yangtze' with ISBN 9780385729635 and ISBN 0385729634.