For whatever reason, we were always to set out at dawn on these expeditions, to maximize the amount of ground we could cover before nightfall, I suppose, considering the middle of the day was often too hot to travel without the danger of dehydration and severe heat exhaustion. When travelling alone, it could progress to heat stroke, and that was likely to be fatal.

I pulled on the T-shirt I’d picked out especially for the occasion — it was a snazzy burgundy, had the faded words North Bay emblazoned across the front, and almost had the status of a family heirloom, since Dad had owned it before me — and a pair of only slightly ratty cargo shorts, and lumbered out of my room. I’d thought my parents would be up already, but I could still hear two sets of soft snores from their room and one from my brother’s. Rubbing my hand drowsily over my close-cropped hair and sparse facial growth, I walked up by the door to the pile of stuff I’d been given the day before: the giant backpack people once used for long recreational hiking trips back when wealthier classes had all kinds of leisure time, filled with a couple of changes of clothes, herbs and other medicines, dried foods packed as tightly as possible so I’d be able to ration them, a toothbrush, a water bottle with a filter, and a few other small, helpful tools.

I also had two books. One was an ancient, tattered sheaf with a yellow cover in a ring binding: a Perly’s map book of Ontario with all the roads I could potentially follow. It was bizarre to think about the millions of petroleum-guzzling vehicles that once roared down those red and black lines on the maps, spewing forth the very exhaust that would contribute to the end of their hapless civilization.

We all received this map book when we graduated. I guessed they must have collected and stockpiled a bunch of them ages ago. The cover of this one was dated 1988. I suppose that made it a real antique.

The other book was a small paperback Dad had given me. He admitted I could probably do without the extra weight, but to him it held an important meaning for our mission as a guild, so I couldn’t turn it down. It was titled The Plague, by Albert Camus, a writer from almost two centuries ago. Dad said it was about people doing their best to be kind and decent when plunged into an inhuman situation in which people might easily lose their empathy and become brutal — much like the world we had inherited.

Allister Thompson spent his youth dividing his time between working as an editor for Toronto-based publishers and touring with a rock band. He is also the author of an alternate history sci-fi novel, The Music of the Spheres. He currently runs his own freelance editorial business in North Bay.

Excerpted from Birch and Jay by Allister Thompson. Copyright © 2025 by Allister Thompson. Published by Latitude 46. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Birch and Jay publishes on June 6.