Beyond the Ice Shelf ©, is my first e-book volume in a trilogy series.

Visit My Books to see the other e-book volumes I have available.

Here is a preview of my first book’s chapter one. Enjoy!

CHAPTER ONE – Smoke Over the River.

Her father whispered to her soul on her way to class that day…

Edmonton. March winter. Cold enough to bite. Quiet enough to ache.

Talia Anawak pulled her scarf tighter around her face as she walked along the frozen river path, boots crunching rhythmically in the snow. The North Saskatchewan River, mostly frozen, steamed beside her. A silver ribbon twisting beneath the bone-pale morning light. Above her, the skyline loomed: glass and steel, clean and sharp, indifferent to the cold or the people moving through it.

She felt small here. Not because of the buildings, but because of the space and the distance between people. The way everyone rushed past with their eyes fixed forward. Nobody looked down. Nobody looked back.

She had walked this path hundreds of times, as a child with her father, as a teenager retreating from grief, as a student trying to find her way back into the world. Today, the air felt different. Not just cold, expectant. Like the city was holding its breath.

Then she saw him.

A man lay in a heap along the pedestrian bridge, wrapped in a torn blanket, face red from wind and whisky. A Cree man. Older. Maybe fifty or even seventy. It was hard to tell anymore. His cheeks were cracked from the cold, his fingers curled tight against his chest.

Two teenagers on bikes passed by, laughing too loudly. One of them shouted without slowing.

“Get a job old man!”

Talia flinched. Her stomach turned. She stopped walking and just stood there for a moment. She didn’t know what she could do, but she knew she couldn’t keep walking.

Her father wouldn’t have.

Her father, gone seven months now, was swallowed by cancer like a fire under ice. He would have crouched beside this man and asked his name. He would have offered him tea, a story or just a moment of dignity.

She stepped off the path to talk to him. “Excuse me,” she said softly. “Sir?”

The man stirred, blinking slowly at her with bloodshot eyes. “You’re not the cops are you?”

“No,” she said. “Do you need anything?”

He looked at her for a long moment, eyes narrowing as if trying to place her. Then, almost too quietly to hear: “Just need the snow to be quiet.”

She nodded. She needed to do something, but what? She reached in her shoulder bag and bent down to give him a granola bar. He didn’t take it. Not yet, but he didn’t turn it away, either. She left it next to him.

As she rose to leave, her breath caught in her throat. The cold wasn’t what hurt. It was the memory.

She remembered her father’s voice sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a buffalo-hide blanket, her small fingers sticky from bannock and jam. Her father’s voice had always come slowly at first, low and steady, like water warming to a boil. He didn’t rush stories. He let them build, breath by breath, until they filled the room like smoke.

“Our stories tell us where we come from,” he once said, stirring the fire with an old iron poker. “And where not to go.”

He had said that more than once. She used to think it meant danger. Like warning signs on the side of a trail, but now, it felt like something deeper. A kind of spiritual map, not just across land, but time.

“You can’t understand what’s ahead until you remember what came before,” he’d told her.

Back then, she’d rolled her eyes. She’d been thirteen, full of questions and anger about things she couldn’t name. Why their family didn’t have what others had? Why some teachers barely looked her in the eye. Why the stories her father told weren’t in books, or museums, or classrooms.

“It’s not fair,” she’d said once. “It’s not,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t make it untrue.”

He never hid the truth, not about the world, and not about their people. He spoke about the land as if it were family, and about family as though it were sacred. He told her about the ones who were taken. The children, the language, the songs. He didn’t flinch when she asked hard things, but he always ended with hope.

“We survived,” he would say. “We’re still here, and we still remember.”

She remembers that after the diagnosis, his voice changed. It grew thinner, like sinew pulled tight. It cracked sometimes, when the pain flared, but he still told stories. Even when the chemo made him too tired to eat, even when his hands trembled too much to hold a cup, he would lie back on the couch and speak softly into the quiet.

“There’s a story about a man who turned into a glacier,” he whispered one night. “He lay down on the mountain to rest, and the snow covered him. The years passed, but inside, he remembered everything.”

Talia had sat beside him, holding his hand. “Is that what’s happening to you?” she asked.

He smiled, weak but clear. “No. I’m not turning to ice. I’m going home.”

The worst part wasn’t the end. It was the slow unravelling. The way he had to be helped to the bathroom. The way the medicine dulled his eyes. The way his voice, once so full of warmth and wonder, dissolved into silence.

Yet, in her mind, she still heard him. Not just the stories, but the pauses between them. The way he said her name. The way he’d hum sometimes, old songs that had no words, just syllables passed from mouth to mouth for generations. She missed him most in the quiet. Because the quiet used to be full of him.

***

Today the library wasn’t just quiet, it was too warm, the air thick with the scent of wet coats and old paper. Talia sat curled in a corner of the Indigenous Studies section, her laptop open in front of her, her thesis document blinking with unfinished sentences.

She had been working on her undergraduate thesis for months now. A combined project in Journalism and Indigenous Anthropology, tracing the oral traditions of northern Cree communities and how they encoded ecological memory. Her proposed title: “The River Remembers: Land-Based Knowledge in Cree Storytelling.”

At first, it felt right. Like a way to honour her father. Like a way to bridge his world and hers. His stories and her research, but since his death, the clarity of that purpose had unravelled. Her writing had slowed. Her thoughts tangled. Her once confident arguments now felt hollow.

She stared at the cursor. “What do I even know?” she whispered, too quietly for the room to hear.

She wasn’t sure anymore if she was writing from knowledge or from grief. Sometimes it felt like she was trying to translate something untranslatable. To fit generational wisdom into footnotes and citations. To condense a lifetime of teachings into a thesis chapter.

Her professors praised her for her insight, for her “lived experience,” but that only made her feel more distant. As if she were a specimen being studied, rather than a student trying to survive.

At the University of Alberta, she often felt like she was walking between two worlds.

In one, she sat in lecture halls with professors who spoke of Indigenous cosmologies as “symbolic frameworks” and “mythic systems.” In the other, she carried her father’s journal in her backpack like a sacred object. Full of real people, real places, and real truths.

There was a kind of violence in that split. A quiet one. The kind that made her smile politely in class, even when she wanted to scream.

She remembered once correcting a guest lecturer who had mispronounced the name of a Cree river and reduced a ceremonial practice to “ritualized folklore.” He’d brushed her off. Later, she overheard him refer to her as “passionate.”

They love our stories, she thought, but not our voices.

She didn’t want to be a translator. She wanted to be a witness. A listener. A truth-teller.

Since her father died though, truth had become slippery.

Her father had always been her anchor. Not just to her culture, but to herself. His stories weren’t just bedtime tales; they were maps. Emotional, spiritual, and literal. They taught her how to move through the world.

Without him, she felt adrift. She kept hearing his voice in her head, but it raised more questions than answers now.

What did he mean when he said the land remembers?

Why did he insist that some stories should not be told too soon?

What was he trying to prepare me for?

Her thesis wasn’t just a project anymore. It felt like a search for something lost — not just in the archives or the language, but in her own bones.

She closed the laptop and leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the library window. Snow drifted past outside, soft and unhurried. “I don’t know if I belong here,” she whispered, but even as she said it, she knew she couldn’t walk away. She wasn’t just writing a thesis. She was trying to remember something too important to forget.

***

The library at the University was her refuge. The radiators hissed beside her chair as she sat curled in the corner. Her anthropology textbook still open but unread. Her thoughts floated like snow through her skull.

She stared at a photo tucked inside the book. Her father, standing beside a canvas tent near Fort Chipewyan, smiling despite the wind in his hair. She remembered the trip. The smell of wood smoke, the hiss of snow melting on the fire, the way he had spoken to the land like it could hear him.

He had always said the Cree didn’t lose their stories. They just buried them deep, like seeds waiting for warmth.

A knock on the door jam brought her back to reality..

“Ms. Anawak?”

Her academic advisor stood in the doorway of the reading room, coat still dusted with snow. He was a kind man, older, with thick glasses and a voice like gravel.

“Got a minute?”

She followed him down the hall to his office. A single letter lay on the desk. He pushed it toward her with one word. “Interested?”

She read it.

South Polaris Initiative of Canada.

Project Nereus Expedition (named after the Greek sea god.)

Position available: Cultural Observer.

There is a placement open with our expedition.

We offer: Immediate placement, and full funding.

The expedition is headed to the Antarctic, and leaves in early spring.

If you are interested, please contact our office by the end of this week.

Thank you for your response.

Her breath caught. “This… is this real?”

It was an offer that she never expected. An opportunity of a lifetime.

He nodded. “They want someone who understands Arctic traditions. Someone who can ask questions others won’t.”

“Why me?”

“Because you don’t just study stories,” he said. “You carry them.”

She stared out the window. Snow fell gently over the campus. She felt like she was standing at a crossroads — one path leading into the known pain of staying, the other into something terrifying and new.

“Yes, I am interested,” leaning forward. “I’ll go,” she said.

“When is it?” She questioned. “When would I leave?

“Later this month. You have some time to get ready.”

“OK, thanks for this opportunity. I appreciate it!”

***

The Next Morning she walked the same river path. Same scarf. Same boots. But everything feels different now.

She noticed that a man was gone. Not the man from before, someone else. Another elder. Another friend of her father’s. She had seen the obituary online that morning. No ceremony. No service. Just a name. A photo. A brief line in the community paper.

She stopped at the footbridge, where the man had been yesterday. The granola bar was gone. No sign of him. Only footprints, half-buried in snow.

She whispered a prayer for him. Not a religious one. Not one she learned in school. One her father taught her. Words that weren’t even words. Syllables from a song older than memory.

She didn’t know what she believed anymore, but she knew that she believed in this.

***

Preparation.

The expedition didn’t leave for another few weeks, but Talia had already begun to live like she was halfway gone.

She moved through her days with a strange kind of detachment. Floating between lectures, reading assignments, and quiet evenings in her apartment. Her suitcase sat open in the corner of her bedroom, half-packed: wool socks, long underwear, a windproof parka she’d borrowed from a cousin who’d worked in the oil fields. A stack of notebooks. Her father’s journal. She kept adding to the pile and then walking away, unsure if she was preparing for a journey or just trying to feel prepared.

Her apartment felt too quiet now. She hadn’t invited anyone over lately, not since the letter arrived. She hadn’t told many people, either. A few close friends. Her cousin Nat. Her advisor. Everyone had the same response: “That’s amazing.” “What an opportunity.” “Your dad would be proud.”

She wasn’t so sure.

Some nights, she would lie awake and stare at the ceiling, wondering if she was making a mistake. Not because she didn’t want to go. She did. Desperately, but because she wasn’t sure if she was going for the right reason.

She wanted a break. That much was true. A break from the city, from the weight of grief that clung to her coat like smoke. A break from the feeling of always being slightly out of place. In classrooms, in conversations, even in her own skin.

She also knew that no train, no expedition, no map of the Antarctic could erase what she carried.

“You can’t outrun the stories,” her father used to say.

“Especially the ones that live inside you.”

***

In preparation she started keeping lists. A habit she picked up from her dad. Things to bring. Things to read. People to call. Questions to ask. But the lists always blurred into something else, into thoughts too big for check boxes.

What am I hoping to find?

Who will I be when I get back?

Will I want to come back?

She didn’t know.

What she did know was this: she needed to go. Not just for the research. Not even for the story, but because something inside her had shifted since her father died. Cracked open like river ice under weight, and she needed to follow where it led.

In her best moments, she hoped the expedition might help her find something lost. A story, maybe. A sense of clarity. A thread between the past and the future. In her worst, she feared she was walking straight into a void. Either way, it would be movement. Forward. Southward. Away from the ache of standing still.

She zipped her suitcase ready for her departure, fingers trembling only slightly.

“I’m not ready,” she whispered. Then she pushed forward anyway.

***

The next day Talia stood on the platform at Edmonton’s VIA Rail station, a small pack over her shoulder, her father’s journal clutched in both hands.

She was heading east by train. A quick connection in Toronto to Montreal, then on to Halifax. The expedition would leave from there, after orientation. She had asked to take the train instead of flying.

She wanted time. To think. To breathe. To write.

The platform was nearly empty. Just a few others, bundled in winter coats, their faces half-hidden by scarves and steam. The train arrived with a low mechanical sigh, its windows glowing gold against the grey sky.

She found her seat by the window. As the train pulled away, she opened her father’s journal. Soft leather, full of his sketches and notes, stories scrawled in a mix of English and Cree syllabic.

On the first page, in faded ink, he had written:

“The first story my father ever told me was about a woman who followed the stars into the ice.”

In a flashback she remembered her father’s story.

She was eight years old, curled by the fire, her breath fogging in the cold air of the trapping cabin. Her father’s voice rumbled low as he told the story:

“Long ago, before the world had names, a woman looked into the sky and saw a star calling her. She followed it. Through wind and snow. Through silence and time. Until she stood at the edge of the world, where the sky touches the ice. There, she found something waiting.”

“What was it?” she had asked.

“No one remembers,” he said. “But they say it spoke to her. Without words. It told her the truth, and when she came back, she could never speak again.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one would’ve believed her.”

***

She was here now, on a train heading East.

Talia stared at the fields outside the window, white and endless. Her reflection shimmered in the glass, dark eyes, tired but steady. Her father’s cheekbones. Her mother’s hair. A face that never quite felt like it belonged in either world.

She turned to a blank page and began to write about her journey…

Just then, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She answered quietly.

“Hey, Talia,” her cousin said. “You okay?”

“Yes, I’m on the train. Just left the station.”

There was a pause. “You hear about the raid in Cold Lake?”

Talia’s stomach sank. “No. What happened?”

“RCMP tore down the protest camp. Said it was illegal. They arrested six people. Two of them were elders.”

She closed her eyes. “Oh no!”

“Some of our people were there. Auntie Marie got shoved. She’s bruised up badly.”

“I should’ve been there.”

“You’ve got your own fight,” her cousin said. “Just… don’t forget us while you’re down there.”

“I won’t…take care.”

The call ended. Talia stared out the window. The snow blurred past, endless and white.

In her chest, something burned.

She went back to writing in the journal, her pen steady despite the shaking of the train:

“The stories are waking up. I can feel them. In the silence. In the cold. Something is calling me, just like it called her. The woman in the ice.”

“I don’t know what is out there, but I have to follow it.”

“I guess I’ll know when I find it.”