Due South: The Reaching Out One: Story Notes
Notes: I did a lot of research for this story. A lot of what I found didn’t make its way into the story, but it was worthwhile, and a little bit of fun. Here are some of the sites I looked at.
Deline (deh-li-nay) is a real town in the Northwest Territories, on the shore of the Great Bear Lake, with a population of about 650 and an RCMP detachment. The town’s website is at www.deline.ca. An older version of the site is available here: http://www.deline.ca/Old%20Site/main.htm and includes a map of the town. Click on the map, then on the red dots to see photos (including one of the RCMP detachment!). For some reason a lot of this content isn’t available on the new site. Another good way to see the town of Deline is on Google Earth--just download the application and put “Deline, NWT” in the search box. If you compare the Google Earth images and the map, you can get a fair idea of what you’re looking at.
A few of the details about Deline in this story are factual--they do, for instance, have cable television, and the hotel has 12 rooms--but most were invented for narrative purposes (for instance, one tourism site stated that Deline has two restaurants, but I couldn’t find any further information about them, so I made up the diner). Feel free to ask if you would like to know if a given detail is true or not.
While Googling for information on Deline, I found YouTube clips of a UFO that was seen, and filmed, by the Kenny family, the proprietors of the Gray Goose Lodge. That tickled me, so I used it as a throwaway detail early in the story. (UFOs are not a major theme of the story.)
Most of the residents of Deline are Dene but all of the local people that are named on the town website and other sites included in my research have Anglo or French names, so I’ve used that pattern when naming background characters--that’s why they’re named things like Connie and Len Martin rather than Running Elk Whitefeather or something like that. All characters and names are fictional, except for the Kennys, who I decided qualify as public figures since they’ve sought publicity for their UFO videos. The only true details about them are their names, their proprietorship of the lodge, and the fact that they believe they have seen, and filmed, UFOs.
Most of my info on the Idaa trail came from this site: http://www.lessonsfromtheland.ca/IdaaHome.asp?lng=English . Click on “start your journey” to follow Ray and Fraser’s route, or use the “Online Story” button to read a meticulously-researched children’s story about some modern-day Native kids who travel the route with their grandparents and learn about their heritage. If you’re at all interested in the landscape, wildlife, Native culture, and/or history of the NWT south of the treeline, I highly recommend this site!
The Dene story about Big Bird comes from here:
http://www.indians.org/welker/bigbird.htm . The story Ray tells in response is a traditional story of my culture (that is, generic white folks), which I have recounted here from memory. The Raven story comes from the old version of the Deline home page--it has frames, so I can’t link to it directly, but pick “museum” on the dropdown menu and then click the “Stories” button. The story I used is called “The Man and the Raven”; there are some other Raven stories there too.
More info on Owen and Mzee, the hippo and turtle of Ray’s second story, can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_and_Mzee .
I got a very nice map of the NWT free in the mail from this site: http://www.explorenwt.com/travel-guides/index.asp . It's very useful for checking how far apart places are, and things of that nature--plus, free, so why not request one? You also get some brochures with pretty pictures in them. (No pictures of Fraser and Ray, but you can't have everything, I guess.)
Last but not least, of invaluable assistance were my betas, primroseburrows and especially j_s_cavalcante, who contributed, among other things, the last sentence.