Chapter One

It was a beautiful fall day in 1961 and I was on my way home from school. I was shaking my head to make my long ponytail swing back and forth on my back, as I climbed up the trail of the Notikewin River bank, which was a short-cut to home.

I turned for a final look at the river, before it would be out of sight. I felt the beauty of that autumn day with the crisp clear air after the first killer frost a few nights earlier. The water looked bright blue as it reflected the cloudless sky. The yellow leaves of the poplar trees lining the river bank were beginning to fall. They were silently flowing through the air down to the water where they floated and bobbed in the slow-moving current.

How I loved the fall and the sound of my feet shuffling through the crisp fallen leaves. At the age of sixteen, I was generally satisfied with life. I loved school too. It had taken time though, as I had immigrated to Canada from Denmark seven years before with my mother and five brothers and sisters. We had landed in Grande Prairie in the Peace River Country of Northern Alberta, but were now living in Manning, a village in the far north with a population of about five hundred. We had dreams of a good life in a new land.

When we first came I was teased at school because I dressed funny and did not speak the language. I never seemed to fit in with the rest of my classmates, but I loved to learn and to read.

I was pretty much a loner in school, but that was not bad as I had many older friends and a good social life outside of school. We used to hang out together downtown in the two r