Far Cry

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“A brilliant, hynotic work”—Madeleine Thien
“Beautiful and deeply moving”—Steven Price
“A bracing, electrifying dive into another world, other lives”—Marina Endicott
“This novel brought my heart to a new place”—Claire Cameron
“Rich and strange”—Shaena Lambert

In a novel as compelling as the forbidden love at its heart, Alissa York, one of Canada’s most distinctive writers, evokes an era of unspoken desires in which pain and longing are braided together along treacherous lines.

It’s 1922 at Far Cry Cannery, a quarter-mile of boardwalk and wooden buildings strung along the rocks of Rivers Inlet on the northwest coast of British Columbia. The time has come for Anders Viken, storekeeper and honorary uncle to the recently orphaned Kit, to give an account of his secret self—from his first home in Norway, another land of islands and fjords, to his escape from his family’s loving grip, to his wide-open years of rough living and impossible love.

As the sockeye flood up the inlet, Anders sets his secrets down for 18-year-old Kit, the only member of his chosen family he has left after her mother, Bobbie, scandalized Far Cry by running off with the camp’s handsome Chinese cook, and her father, Frank, was found drowned alongside his own boat. While Anders does his reckoning, Kit fends off the attentions of the cannery manager and tries to earn her keep. Oars in hand, she glides her skiff out over the great returning school and casts her net. This, at least, makes sense to her, as opposed to the convoluted workings of love.”Far Cry is a brilliant, hypnotic work—a collision of invisible, unforgettable lives. It asks what we owe to duty, to family and to love, and gives us the language, and the heart, to bear the beautiful complexity of the answers.” —Madeleine Thien, Scotiabank Giller Award-winning author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Rich and strange—Alissa York’s story of the west coast is so embodied, real, visceral, you can smell the canneries, feel the strangeness of basking sharks the length of a bus, of salmon whacking the hull of a gillnetter in their shocking plenty. Far Cry rests inside its world with authority and magic, shedding light on what the real and secret lives of women and men must have contained: the confusion, the love, the quicksand of attraction, the poverty and mayhem. The sea.” —Shaena Lambert, author of Petra and Oh, My Darling

“There is a vivid rush of sea air and immediately you are immersed in this finely crafted historical novel, gripped by its world and characters until you reach the powerful, tragic conclusion. This book will stay with me for a long time.” —Adam Foulds, author of The Quickening Maze and Dream Sequence

“Far Cry is a mystery that only reveals the whole, shocking truth in the final pages, where the pieces come together with an almost audible snap.” —Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander and Ridgerunner

“Beautiful and deeply moving, Alissa York’s Far Cry immerses its readers in the tumultuous early years of Canada’s west coast fisheries, chronicling with meticulous care a world now lost. This is a devastating, fiercely intelligent novel about love, desire, and loss and the secrets that bind them.” —Steven Price, author of By Gaslight and Lampedusa

“Dazzling and brilliant. . . . A transfixing, glorious novel. . . . With Far Cry, Alissa York has written what is surely one of the finest novels of the year, an astonishing and immersive journey that will leave its readers reeling, and raving to anyone who will listen.” —Toronto StarALISSA YORK’s internationally acclaimed novels include Mercy, Effigy (shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), Fauna and, most recently, The Naturalist. Stories from her short fiction collection, Any Given Power, have won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic and elsewhere. York has lived all over Canada and now makes her home in Toronto with her husband, artist Clive Holden. 
This morning the bay is green. Already the water has begun to stink—the yards-wide streak of the shithouse drift, the waste of a hundred incomers or more. In two days’ time the cannery will come clanking to life. There will be blood on the waves, the sky wild with smoke and reeking steam, the wheeling white bodies of gulls.
 
Time to be getting on. Soon enough some fisherman who has not heard the news will come thudding down the boardwalk and halt to read my handwritten sign. Death in the family.
 
I have left the shutters closed at the store, and here at the cot­tage too. It is not always so convenient living next door to your place of work.
 
I ought to light the stove, warm the old dog lying by its iron feet. Dig out a decent shirt. I wonder, Kit, will you wear a dress? You would feel easier in your work clothes, and is that not what your father would wish?
 
I would have had his body here, you know that, but you wanted him carried home along the headland path—Knox, Willie and myself each gripping a corner of the oilskin while you insisted on taking the fourth. It was good of Ida to help you wash and dress him. Your father was not a large man, and you have always been strong for your size, but that is no job for a girl to manage alone. Young woman, I suppose I should say. I forget you are eighteen years old.
Burial, too, will be no easy task, especially in this country where the mountains lift up out of the sea. Any open ground is cross-hatched, roots over rock—you know the trouble your mother had scraping up enough soil for her garden. You are right, though, the lookout is a fitting spot. Your father and I walked that trail often enough, clearing deadfall and replacing pipe when the waterline broke. A fair view out over the inlet. And yes, he would never have found his rest at sea.
 
You are angry with me for how it happened—but, Kit, he would have been in the same state or worse on his own. I will be careful today. On my honour, only one drink before we troop up the moun­tainside with Frank in his box. Just enough to steady the soul.

***
 
They’re halfway to the lookout before Kit realizes she hasn’t dressed for the occasion. Overalls dragged on over the shirt she slept in, boots. Not that it matters: hardly anyone has bothered to climb the waterline trail. The Pauls have come, of course, Willie and his two sons helping Uncle Anders lug the coffin. Mr. Knox walks behind them, then Ida Paul holding young Annie’s hand. Kit brings up the rear.
 
It’s no mean feat carving out the grave. They make a start at the base of a windthrown hemlock, the root mass torn up along with whatever foothold the great tree had managed to find. Ida stands alongside her daughter while her husband and sons take turns with Uncle Anders’ spade. Knox gets out his pipe and fills it. Kit feels his glance—sympathy or something like—and steps back out of his fruit-scented smoke.
She’s mostly quiet inside. Still, she feels something slip when Ida puts an arm around Annie and draws her close. A year ago, Kit would’ve had her own mother beside her. Who knows, if Bobbie hadn’t left them, there might’ve been no burial to attend.
 
Once the men have torn out a scrubby yew, the box goes in. In minutes they’ve filled the shallow trough. Everyone helps drag dead­fall to cover the grave—one fair-sized log and a dozen mossy limbs.
 
When the last branch has been laid, Knox looks as though he might be about to say a few words. Uncle Anders beats him to it, speaking in his old language, something he rarely does. Kit under­stands nothing beyond her father’s name.
 
When her uncle falls silent, Knox gives a sorry smile. “Rest in peace, Frank.” He nods to Kit and turns to head back down.
 
While the others linger, Kit follows the cannery manager, catch­ing up with him along the trail. Knox gives her a searching look before responding to her request. Yes, he can set her up with a fisher­man’s licence, if that will make her happy. If she’s sure.
 
 
 
Standing at the end of the long dock, Kit stretches her gaze to the bay’s far shore. Beyond Morden Point, the inlet opens wide. She could walk two docks over, crank up the Dogfish’s engine and steer her out over the deeps. Except that would mean standing where it happened—where she found him face down, floating between the dock and his own boat’s hull.

Her hair flies up on a gust. She tucks the home-cut bob behind her ears. Forget the Dogfish, she needs to get the feel of a company skiff again, now that she’ll be going out with the fleet. She’s had three long years of rowing nothing bigger than the Coot, keeping close to shore. I mean it, Kit, no more than a stone’s throw. Her father wasn’t a rule-maker by nature, but neither was he one to be disobeyed.

Before that, she’d taken her uncle’s rowboat out as far as she pleased. He’s up there now, Uncle Anders, standing some thirty feet above her on the headland, hands on the railing of the storefront porch. She resists the urge to lift her eyes to him, lift her hand. It’s a feeling she’s known all her life, her uncle watching over her. Shame he didn’t keep a closer eye on her dad.

Moving into the cannery’s shadow, she makes her way along the wharf. Men hunker in their skiffs, checking their nets, patch­ing their scrappy sails. A dozen or so kids roam the docks. Not a woman in sight—the fishermen’s wives packing the week’s grub boxes, the washers and packers scrubbing the cannery down. One turn of the clock until the fleet goes out, another until the collector boat steams into the bay with the season’s first catch in her hold.

It’s where Kit belongs, out there over the returning schools. Her father had long trusted her fish sense. She knows how to find them, my girl. She’s got the nose. More like the ear. It was akin to listening, reaching a thought out to where they might be.

Third dock along, Knox said, skiff number forty-four. Kit looses the painter line from the cleat and steps aboard. Already she feels calmer, drifting back from the dock, settling herself on the thwart. Taking up the oars, she pulls a line of narrow strokes until she’s clear of the other boats. Rowing lets you watch what you leave. Far Cry Cannery and its quarter mile of town strung along the bay’s eastern shore—boardwalk linking shacks to sheds, to proper little cottages with dark-green doors. Steep stairs cut up through the brush to where the cookhouse and the China House jut from the slope. Above it all, the slash of the waterline trail.

On the headland, Uncle Anders’ cottage sits alongside the store. Nothing but boardwalk and scrub from there out to the manager’s house on the point. She’s passing it now, pulling round to come level with the mouth of the bay. A surprise to see the par­lour windows open, curtains sucked out to flump on the wind. Of course—Mrs. Knox isn’t there to keep them closed. She’s stayed behind in the city this year, too sick to make the trip north.

And now another unexpected sight: the manager himself, home instead of holding forth at the wake. Stepping out his front door to stand among the flower tubs on the porch, he catches sight of her and waves. Wave back, Kitty-cat—her mother’s voice in her ear, whether Kit wants it or not. Never hurts to have a friend. Kit raises her hand briefly before closing it again on the oar. Knox waves on, as though she’s leaving for good rather than just out for a row. Shit for brains, her father would say if he could.

Kit rows out into the inlet, the mountains tipping up into view. This side of the headland is still mostly wild, her cabin just visible among the trees. She ought to be up there now, checking her gear, resting; a week of gillnetting in the skiff on your own is no joke. She could ask around for a boatpuller, but what man would agree to row for a girl? More to the point, whose company could she stand?

In open water now, she glides for a time, her oars suspended. Evening light, the sea all round her. She’ll manage on her own.US

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