John Barker
Northern News Services

Fort McPherson (Sep 02/02) - They come to her in a dream.

More than half a century has passed, yet still Mabel English is haunted by the events of that September Sunday morning on the Peel River.

More than half a century later, Mabel English remains haunted by what happened at the Peel River in Fort McPherson on a Sunday morning just after the end of the Second World War. - John Barker/NNSL photo

On a crisp, clear fall morning, just after the end of the Second World War, English, a respected Gwich'in who now lives in Inuvik, was but a nine-year-old girl living in her family's tent near the east bank of the river.

"I was home with my two sisters when I heard voices of children playing down by the river," says English. "I knew they shouldn't have been there, that it was dangerous. A slushy ice had froze over the river the night before."

As English went down to the bank of the Peel River to investigate and warn the children, she watched horrified as a boy and two girls -- John Francis, Mary Jane Kunnizzie and Maggie Vittrekwa -- plunged through the thin crust of ice.

Scrambling out onto the ice at grave peril to herself, English yelled up to John Snowshoe, also a young boy, standing at the top of the riverbank, to run to Kunnizzie's log house and get help.

English knew that on Sunday morning most of the community would be there, holding an Anglican service in the home and reading the Bible.

"I told them to grab onto my parka," English says.

Kunnizzie and Vittrekwa were able to, and she pulled the kids, who were a year or two younger than her, soaking wet in their clothes and frigidly cold, but safe, to shore.

Kunnizzie now lives in Whitehorse and still visits English in Inuvik. Vittrewka died a few years ago in the South.

Francis was not able to grab her parka and drowned. His body was recovered later that day.

While the community was grateful for her heroics, still questions were asked. Francis' family asked her why she couldn't save John, too?

"Maybe if he had been a little bigger and a little older, he would have been able to grab onto my parka, too," says English, now 64, her eyes looking somewhere off into the indeterminate distance.

And so, more than 50 years later, the September incident on the Peel River -- when two would live and one would die -- still replays itself over and over in English's dreams.

"That is why I need to tell this story," she says.