Fort Simpson (Oct 03/03) - With a dozen people seated in a circle around her, Alphonsine Cazon launched into a series of anecdotes about the past.

She told of a windmill that pumped water into the old hospital in Fort Simpson during the 1940s. She was only 16 at the time, but she remembers soldiers on their way to the DEW line site stopping for a drink of water as they passed through town.

There was also a large garden, tended to by some nuns. Tomatoes, potatoes, peas and carrots, "everything" grew there, said Cazon.

She was telling stories at John Tsetso Memorial Library in conjunction with Literacy Week.

She later recalled a time when she went to the river to refill her family's empty water barrel. Her husband, Baptiste, was away on the trap line at the time.

Took all the water

"It's a good thing I did it that night (because) my roof caught fire," she said, adding that it took all the water in the barrel to extinguish the blaze. "If I had waited another day to do it the house would have went."

As Cazon's trip down memory lane was drawing to a conclusion, Janice Wotherspoon, one of the storytelling event organizers, paid her a compliment.

"You're like a walking storybook," said Wotherspoon.

Audience member Gilbert Fantasque said he found the stories interesting.

"It really brightened up my day," he said.

Wotherspoon and Norma Nicholson formed a literacy society called Noda (lynx in Slavey) almost a year ago. Their association got rolling with a reading tutor program. Nicholson was a mentor to Chris Cli.

Learned to read

"I learned to read stories, newspapers and Marty the Mosquito and Bertha the Bear," said Cli.

Wotherspoon said the group is looking for more members to form an executive. One of its future projects will be to transcribe elders' stories because, like Alphonsine Cazon's accounts, much of the history remains oral.