Mountain Runaways

Jon, Korka, and Aron, 17, 14, and 11-years-old respectfully, are suddenly orphaned when their parents die in a freak landslide while skiing. With no living relatives, they are destined to live with local police officer Greg Vine as guardian. Instead, taking their skills learned from their parents’ wilderness-survival school, they decide to escape into the Alberta winter for the two and a half months until Jon’s eighteenth birthday. Despite their skills and equipment, they soon are hampered by hunger, injury, and cold, all the while dodging search parties and rescue helicopters looking for them. When Aron, whose muteness is suspected to put him on the autism spectrum, meets Leah, a runaway from her stepfather’s abuse, they are at first saved by her skills and supplies, then scared away by her determination to find Aron’s root trauma. Jon leaves his siblings in an abandoned mining town while he hikes to buy supplies in a nearby community, where Officer Vine finally catches up with him. Realizing he has passed his birthday, the trio are set up in an apartment by a social worker and assist Leah to reunite with her now-single mother.

Mountain Runaways is a well-researched, faced-paced adventure with some highly compelling childhood psychology that takes it to a higher level. The series of survival tests, wildlife threats, and other perils that the trio encounter keeps readers at the edge of their seats, and the deteriorating relationship among the three makes for a recognizable and realistic reaction to it all. Jon alternately defends and blames himself for his overbearing nature, Korka chafes under his leadership and her duty to watch over Aron, and Aron silently watches it all, both keeping them alive at points with his small-game hunting and imperiling them with his penchant for running off unannounced. Their arguments are at once petty and essential to survival, and Leah’s appearance is both lifesaving and darkly threatening.

While told mainly from Jon’s point of view, the occasional glimpses into the thoughts of silent, withdrawn, but brilliant and perceptive Aron are among the highlights of the narrative. Fancying himself a modern-day Viking (his parents are both born in Iceland), Aron’s thoughts include references to Jon as “Big Viking” and to Korka as “the maiden”, along with appeals to the Nordic gods to give him strength. While all four youth have well-developed characters, it is the character of Greg Vine that is the least believable, an untrusted family friend who belittles their parents yet is determined to save face by fostering the kids. His dialogue tends to be stilted, cold, and improbably villainous. A small flaw in an otherwise perfect Canadian adventure.