By three o’clock he had walked every metre of the pad twice.
A shelf of raw grey earth the size of a tennis court, a capped steel casing, core bags, two empty drums, the sump under its tarp, a red jerrycan half full of diesel, the inspector’s pink flagging snapping in the wind. From the downhill edge he saw what Sindre would have seen: Otter Lake far below, the dark seam of Mink Creek, the white dot of the cook tent on its bench.
At a quarter past three the cloud came down.
It came off the far side of the basin like a lid lowered onto a pot, the treetops going into it one after another, and then it was on the pad, full of a fine cold rain. Six degrees, he thought, or less. His breath smoked.
He took the inReach out of his pocket.
He held the power key and the screen came on: a logo, a battery symbol with a sliver of black in the bottom. He flipped up the cap and held the button. The screen began counting down from twenty. At eleven it went white, then grey, then nothing.
He warmed it in his armpit for ten minutes and tried again. Blank as a stone. His phone said no service, which he had known before he looked.
At five the cloud was still on the pad and the rain was through his shell at the shoulders and through his fleece after that.
He was dressed for a helicopter ride: jeans, a cotton T-shirt, a shell that said waterproof on the tag, and the leather boots from Duluth, very good in snow. He took stock. A cook-tent sandwich, squashed. A lighter. A folding knife. The bear spray on his belt. A notebook in a sandwich bag. A pair of dry socks in another, because Ellie had told him that a man with dry socks could survive almost anything. A dead inReach. A phone with nothing to talk to.
No shelter, eleven hundred metres up, in cloud that might sit for a day or three. A night out here, wet, in cotton, at five degrees: he knew what that did and how fast. At four Ruth would have looked at her calendar and rung Dhillon, and Dhillon would know exactly where he was and have nothing that could fly to it but Corey Batt’s helicopter, in cloud that was sitting on the pad. Staying meant waiting for Corey Batt to come back, when he chose, if he chose. Thorsen knew a log rewritten at night. He knew a box that had been dead in his pocket since before the skids left the ground, and a man grinning and saying, which’ll be me.
The camp was across Mink Creek, which nobody could cross. The people who left me are over there, he thought.
Down, then. Down this creek to the lake, down the west side of Mink Creek to its mouth, and across to the landing, where the boats came. And there was a water station on Otter Lake, a red triangle on Ellie’s wall map. A station meant a hut. A hut meant a roof, perhaps a stove, perhaps a radio. He could be there by dark, if there was a dark.
He cut a square from the sump tarp, slit it for his head and put it on over everything. It came to his knees, smelled of drill mud and rattled. On the corner of what was left over the sump was a white printed label. He crouched over it with rain dripping off his nose and wrote, in capitals, as he had written on evidence envelopes for nineteen years:
D. THORSEN + DOG. LEFT HERE 1400 SAT 26 JUNE BY C. BATT. “BACK IN AN HOUR.” INREACH DEAD. WALKING DOWN CREEK TO MINK CREEK MOUTH AND LANDING. 1700.
He signed it and put a rock beside it where anyone landing would see. He broke the sandwich and gave the dog half, and the dog ate it in one movement and looked at the other half, and he ate it himself before he could be generous. Then they went off the edge of the pad into the green.
It was alder, thick as a wrist, bent flat downhill by every winter’s snow so that the stems ran out of the slope at knee height before they curved up: a hillside of springs. Twice he found himself lying on a mat of it two metres off the ground and had to swim down through it to the earth. Where there was no alder there was devil’s club. He grabbed a stalk going down a bank, as you grab a rail, and his palm lit up as if he had put it on a stove: thirty or forty yellow spines, too fine to pull out.
At seven the creek, on his left, dropped over a lip into a gorge.
He should have gone back up and round. Instead he saw, to his right, a long pale stripe down the slope where an avalanche had swept the trees away: grass and low leaves and boulders, going the way he wanted. It looked like a road. He took it.
Then the lip of a gully gave way under him.
He went down three metres in a slither of mud and stones, and his right foot hit a rock with all his weight on it and turned under him. He felt it go.
He lay in a trickle of water and breathed through his teeth until the white went out of his eyes. Bamse came down in two bounds and licked his face.
“I know,” Thorsen said. “Get off.”
The ankle was already swelling against the leather. He did not take the boot off, because he would not get it back on. He pulled the laces as tight as he could stand and got up at the third attempt. The dog went fifty metres ahead and looked back, and came all the way back to lean on Thorsen’s good leg, and went ahead again, like a man walking with someone old.
At half past nine, with the light no dimmer than it had been all afternoon, only greyer, the dog stopped dead with one forefoot lifted.
Every hair on his back stood up from his neck to his tail. The sound he made was hardly a growl; it was more a vibration, like a machine. Then he came backwards and pressed against Thorsen’s leg, hard.
Forty metres down the track, in a patch of big leaves, something brown stood up on its hind legs, the size of a large dog. Then it dropped and turned its head, with green stuff hanging from its mouth, and he saw the round ears. A young bear, looking at him with mild interest.
Behind it, a boulder moved.
She had been digging. She came up out of the leaves with her head low and her shoulders high in a hump, brown fur silver at the tips, and she was not the size of anything he had a word for. Her broad dished face swung towards him and her nose went up.
He got his fist into the ruff of the dog’s neck.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’m going.” It was the voice he had used on a man on PCP in a stairwell in Rampart, with a blade in his hand: level, not loud, never stopping. “I’m going away now. You’re all right. I’m going.”
He went backwards up the slope, the bad ankle nearly folding. He did not run, though everything in his legs wanted to, because Ellie had told him on the river, in the voice she used for knots, that if you ran from a grizzly you were food.
The sow huffed, a short hard cough. Her jaws clapped like two wooden blocks, once, twice. She swatted the ground and a clod of earth flew.
“I’m going,” Thorsen said.
She came.
A fast, rolling, stiff-legged walk with her head low, and then a run, and he had not known that anything so big could move like that, like water coming downhill. The dog lunged to meet her and nearly took Thorsen’s arm out of its socket, and Thorsen hauled him back by the scruff. He got the can off his belt one-handed. The safety was a plastic clip over the trigger and his fingers were dead with cold and would not find it. Then they did. He tore it off with his thumb and lost a nail.
Ten metres. He pressed the trigger.
It went off with a hiss like a tyre, an orange cone rolling out low across the grass. He held it down. She came into the cloud at five metres and her head went up and she bawled, wrenching sideways in a spray of mud so close that he smelled her, wet fur and rot, and she went crashing away down the slope with the yearling behind her, and the bush closed.
The wind came back up the slope.
Half the cloud came with it and hit him in the face like a handful of hot sand. His eyes went first, as if thumbs had been pushed into them; then his nose and throat. He was doubled over, blind, streaming, the dog sneezing and pawing at his face, and the can was still hissing in his hand because he had not let go of the trigger. It spat, and went quiet. Empty.
He knelt at the trickle by the track and scooped water into his eyes until he could see light, and then the dog, watching him.
Too early, said the part of his mind that wrote reports. Too long. Into the wind. Everything wrong except not running.
It was twenty to one when he came out on the shore of Otter Lake, and it was as dark as it was going to get.
Not dark: a grey you could not read a map by. He had stopped noticing when he stumbled, and some distant part of him knew that was the thing to be frightened of. He nearly walked past it: a plywood hut the size of a garden shed on the shore, with a stovepipe and a small solar panel, and a cable running from the wall into the lake. Stencilled on the door in orange: MC-2.
His fingers took a long time with the carabiner on the hasp.
Inside it smelled of cold ash. A bench. A grey box on the wall with a green light blinking every few seconds, patient as breathing. A sheet-metal stove and an empty woodbox; whoever used it brought her own. Under the bench, a blue plastic drum, the kind they used in camp for keeping food from bears, its lid clamped on by a steel ring, and through the lever of the ring a cheap brass padlock: somebody’s kit, left here between trips so it need not be carried up and down a mountain. And by the door, in a charging cradle wired to the solar panel, a handheld radio with GUARDIANS — MC-2 on a strip of tape, because the Guardians sampled this station too and shared the hut.
He took it down with both hands. Two bars of battery out of four. He found channel two, the camp, and pressed the key and said his name, and where he was, and that he was alive, and let go.
Nothing. Not even the click and hiss a repeater gives back to tell you it has heard. He went through every channel the thing had, and they were all the same empty seashell sound. The repeater on the ridge carries all over that mountain, Rennick had said, going down the bench line in the cold with his chest out. It did not carry to here.
He put the radio in his pocket. He was shaking in long runs now, and he wanted warmth more than he wanted anybody to hear him. He went out for a rock the size of a loaf, knelt, and hit the padlock. On the fourth blow the shackle sprang out of the body, and he got the ring off and the lid lifted.
There was a jacket on top.
Yellow, folded, old and stiff and grubby, a woman’s large. Dry. He got it on over everything and zipped it to his chin with fingers that would barely close on the tab, and stood with his arms wrapped round himself and felt the first faint warmth come.
Bamse growled.
He had backed into the doorway with his hackles up and his lips off his teeth, and he was looking at Thorsen. He had never once looked at Thorsen like that.
“Hey,” Thorsen said. “It’s me.”
The dog backed out into the grey. The growl went on, low and steady, the growl from the avalanche track.
Thorsen looked down at himself. Then he unzipped the jacket and took it off slowly and held it out at arm’s length, and the dog’s eyes went with it. He dropped it on the bench.
The growl stopped. Bamse came back in with his head low and his tail going, apologising for something, and lay down across Thorsen’s feet with his whole weight, the way he lay on him at Marj’s.
Thorsen turned the collar of the jacket over. On the label inside, in black marker, the way people mark gear in camps where everything looks the same:
HARKER.
He turned the jacket round. The left sleeve had been mended, from the elbow nearly to the cuff, with a strip of yellow repair tape gone grey at its edges. He held it to the grey from the door. Under the tape the fabric had been punched through: four small tears, two and two, and round them a brown stain that had soaked into the weave and dried stiff as card.
Under the jacket was a zip bag with two bottles in it. One small, amber glass, with a black dropper cap: the little bottle Ellie had said was in every kit on this river. One larger, the same amber, still sealed. The same printed label on both. He tilted the small one to the light.
Custom blend. Th, U, Mn, Zn in 5% nitric acid. Lot and a number. Prepared for Harker Environmental. Not a preservative. Thorium, uranium, manganese, zinc: the four numbers a mine on that creek would one day be held to.
Under the bag was a yellow waterproof field book, its cover soft with handling: the brother of the three Celia had brought him in June, the book a consultant had to keep at every station and put in front of any auditor who asked for it. Columns ruled in pencil, in one small neat hand: a date, a station, the flow, and the number of drops that went into each bottle.
14 June 2027. MC-1. Flow 38. 4 drops.
14 June 2027. MC-2. Flow 6. 2 drops.
Thirteen days ago.
He turned back. The hand never changed: May 2027, the winter’s gap, 2026, 2025. 22 July 2026. MC-1. The day a boy had sent his grandmother a photograph of an amber bottle on a rock. Then August.
16 August 2026. MC-3. Flow 112. 5 drops.
The 3 in MC-3 had been gone over twice, harder than the rest of the line, so that the pencil shone on it.
He turned back through two summers with his thumb. Every MC-3 line had a flow of two or three or four, a trickle off the ice, and two drops, the same two every time, the way you keep a bottle. Every August line for MC-1 ran ninety to a hundred and twenty, and took four or five. Nobody needed five drops of acid to keep a bottle.
His phone would not wake. So he got out his notebook and, holding his right wrist with his left hand to stop the pen jumping, copied the August line, the MC-3 lines either side of it and the June lines, with their page numbers.
There was a shoulder of rock above the hut, going up into the grey. He did not decide to climb it. He found that he had the radio in his hand and was climbing, on his good foot and his knees, with the dog going ahead and waiting.
Every twenty metres he stopped and keyed the radio and listened. Nothing. At the top the trees gave out on a knob of lichen and wind, and he could see across the valley for the first time since the pad: the seam of Mink Creek and the long face of the ridge above the camp. On the ridge, very small, a red light winking.
The radio opened in his hand.
A carrier, and the hiss behind it, and a voice so close and ordinary that he nearly dropped it. Rennick. Kestrel camp, all stations. Anybody on this channel with eyes on the Goat side. Thorsen, Thorsen, Kestrel camp, if you can hear this, we’re coming at first light.
He keyed it and said his name. He said Otter Lake, the hut, MC-2, three times, slowly, the way you talk to a dispatcher when the street is on fire. Rennick’s voice came back over the top of him with the same words, to nobody, and he understood why. The repeater had a big voice for anything that could see it. A five-watt handheld at the very edge of its sight, in rain, was a whisper it did not hear.
Then the battery bar went to nothing, and the voice went, and the radio was a stone.
He sat down on the rock with it in his lap, and looked across the valley at the red light, and what had been waiting for him since the hut came the rest of the way.
The repeater carried all over that mountain: all over the side of it that could see the ridge. The top station was behind the ridge. Nobody at the top station had raised Ed Harker at ten to three, or ever.
A woman low on the creek had.
The 3 gone over twice, in a book any auditor could ask to see.
HARKER on the collar, and the dog backing out of the door from it with his lips off his teeth. Four tears in the left sleeve, two and two. On the bench line at six in the morning in May, among a dozen bare wet arms: old pale marks on the inside of Celia’s left forearm. Four, curved, two and two. He had seen them and not counted them.
He sat on the rock above her hut and was more afraid than he had been on the avalanche track.
Something in him older than fear said leave it.
He went back down to the hut on his backside. It was a scene, and he had broken it. He put the book back in the barrel, and the bag with the sealed bottle, and the jacket, folded as near as he could remember, and the dead radio in its cradle, and hung the broken lock back through the ring. From the door it looked shut. From a metre away it did not.
The small bottle he kept.
A bottle carried out of a hut at night by a man with no badge and no witness was a gift to any defence lawyer in British Columbia. But if he left it, and the woman with the neat hand got here before anybody with a badge, it would be at the bottom of Otter Lake by lunchtime.
He put it in one of the dry socks, folded the top over twice, pushed it down inside his shirt against his ribs on the right, and buttoned and tucked the shirt in hard. He could feel it when he breathed.
He did not light her stove. He sat on her floor with the dog on his feet and waited, not sleeping, while the green light went on and off, because there was a side creek between here and the river, and Ellie had said dawn.
At three he shut the door and put the carabiner back through the hasp. The hut was hers. He did not want to be in it when the light came.
He heard the side creek before he saw it.
It came out of a slot in the valley wall and spread across a fan of boulders, ten metres wide, and under its roar was another sound, deep and irregular, like furniture being moved in a room below. Stones, rolling along the bed. Rainy’s bowling alley.
Four o’clock. Lowest, Ellie had said.
He cut an alder stem as long as he was. He put a hand flat on his chest over the bottle. Then he went in, in his boots, facing upstream, leaning on the pole.
The cold took his breath: it went in, a huge involuntary gasp, and would not come out, and he stood in it to the knees with his mouth open until he forced it out. He felt for the bottom with the pole, then the boot, and the bottom moved: stones rolling, knocking his ankles, the bad one, so that he cried out.
To the thighs. The water climbed his legs and leaned on him. Bamse was upstream of him, swimming hard and going nowhere, his blue eye rolling. Thorsen got a fistful of the dog’s ruff.
Halfway the pole bowed and the bottom rolled under his bad foot, and for a second he stood on one leg in the middle of it with the dog’s ruff in his fist and the whole creek leaning on him. Then the boot found a boulder. He came out on the far side on his hands and knees, with the water pouring from his clothes, and lay on the stones.
He was laughing.
He lay on his back in the dawn and laughed, a cracked idiot sound, because the alternative was crying and he did not think he would stop. The dog stood over him and shook, ears to tail, and lay down on his chest.
He put a hand inside his shirt. The bottle, whole.
He did not remember getting under the spruce. He remembered the shaking after the ford, great jerks that bent him double, and dry needles, and pulling the dog in against his belly. Then nothing.
He woke hot at nine, his face hot and his body cold, the right palm red and shiny round the spines, the ankle filling the boot like something poured into it. He crawled to the creek and drank grey water from his hands, too much, and twenty minutes later his gut cramped and he was on his knees in the moss.
At about ten he heard a helicopter, far behind him, up the valley in the cloud, towards the pad. It went round, and round, and stopped. He knew one helicopter on this river. He found he was standing very still under the trees, like a man in a doorway when a car slows on the street.
At eleven, another engine, deeper, heavy and uneven, a radial; he had sat beside it a week ago with a dog asleep on the mail sacks. It came down the valley above the fog that lay along the creek. He limped out onto a bar where a gap had opened in the fog just below the lake, and for one second there were floats up there, yellow, in a slot of blue.
He waved both arms over his head, shouting, the way the boy had waved at the drone.
The gap closed. He did not know whether he had been seen. He went on.
The rest of the day was the canyon.
There was no trail on this side. The ground rose as the creek fell, and twice the slope ended in a cliff and he went back and up, hauling on the stems. He lost two hours. The fever came and went. When it came, the trees moved. He told the dog about the jacket, more than once, and the dog listened each time with the same courtesy.
At seven, from the rim, he looked down across the gorge and saw it.
Grey gravel on the far side. A brown silt bank above it, crumbling. A stake with a rag of faded flagging. The creek going past below in flood, with whole trees in it, turning over.
Six hundred metres round the bend from the bar where the boy had stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the boat go. Ten minutes, if you were twenty-two.
He found he was crying, and that the fever was not the reason. He let it run until it was done. Then he went on.
It was half past eight when he came out of the trees at the mouth of Mink Creek.
Ahead, the Dalgleish, half a kilometre of brown water going by fast and silent. On his left, Mink Creek came out of its gorge in a long tongue of standing waves, and forty metres across it was the landing: the gravel bar, the float, the freight cache under its tarps, the Caldera sign.
Between him and it was the water that had taken Sindre.
It was the whole day’s melt coming down at once, and he felt it through the stones under his boots. A spruce as long as a bus came out of the gorge, rolled once, showed its roots like an open hand, and went under. The creek was still rising: a hand’s width up a snag at the edge in the time it took him to look at it.
There was the log jam he had looked at from the landing in May. A gravel bar stood in the middle of the mouth, and the floods of other years had piled trees across from his side to it and on from it to the far bank: twenty or thirty trunks stripped grey, jammed at every angle, with the water heaping up white on the upstream side and going under with a long sucking roar.
He knew what lay under a log jam. The water went through and a body did not.
He should wait. Ellie would wait. Dawn, and the water lower. Eight hours of fever, soaked, no food, the jam shifting in the flood, and a helicopter on the river he did not want to meet in the dark.
He had never been able to wait. Two women had told him so.
The dog went first.
Out along the first log, lightly, claws scratching on wet wood, and stopped, and came back. Out again a different way, left, where the logs lay bigger and lower, and this time all the way: across the jam to the middle bar, across the second jam, jumping a gap, scrabbling, and down onto the far gravel.
He stood on the landing in the rain and barked.
Thorsen got down on his belly on the first log.
It was barkless and slick and cold as iron. He went along it on his stomach with his arms round it, pushing with his good foot, the water a metre beneath him. He did not look at it. He looked at the log, the next log, the dog.
Left, where the dog had gone. Across one gap on his knees, holding a root. Onto the middle bar, where he lay with his face on the stones and breathed. He touched the bottle. Then the second jam.
It was worse: thinner logs, newer, with water sheeting smooth and brown over some of them. He took the biggest. It was the dog’s; he could see the scratches.
Three metres from the far bank, the log rolled.
A quarter turn under him with no warning at all, and he went off it sideways into the creek.
His arms caught the next log. Both, hooked over it to the elbows, chin on the wood. The rest of him went in, and the creek took it. It pulled his legs downstream and under, towards the jam, and he felt branches go past his knees under the water like hands, and the pull went on, steady and enormous, as if the whole river had his boots and was leaning back. His arms began to straighten. He felt the elbows open a degree at a time.
He thought, quite clearly, so this is how.
He thought of the boy coming up once, twenty metres out, in the red sweater.
He thought nothing.
Five seconds. It could not have been longer. Then Albert Kane, an old man shaking in a sleeping bag. Get over the log. Never under. Belly on it and kick your feet up behind you.
He kicked.
The dog was barking. On the gravel three metres away, into his face, high and furious, nonstop, the way he had barked at the drone, with his whole body. His right boot hit something under the water. A branch. He got his heel on it and pushed, and it held, and his chest came over the log, and his belly, the bottle crushed between his ribs and the wood. One knee up. The other. He crawled the last three metres on hands and knees and fell off the end onto the gravel of the landing beside the dog, and did not get up.
He lay on his face on the stones. After a while he put a hand inside his shirt. The bottle was in the sock, whole. He left his hand there.
It was twenty past nine. The second time he thought of the freight cache he went to it, on hands and knees, and sat against a pallet of drill rods under a flapping blue tarp with the dog against his legs, and shook.
At half past nine he heard the rotor.
He got out from under the tarp onto the open gravel, because there was nowhere on a bar to hide. It came down the river under the cloud, the hard flat beat bouncing off the water, and turned over the creek mouth and hung there, nose down, looking. Then it settled onto the bar fifty metres away in a storm of grit and spray that flattened the willows and tore the tarp off the freight.
The rotor slowed. The door opened.
A woman stepped down in Caldera yellow, hood back, and ducked under the turning blades and came across the gravel towards him at a run, a foil packet in one hand and a water bottle in the other, her face white and wet and open. She was calling his name.
“Daniel. Daniel. Oh, thank God.”
Celia Harker.
Beside him, Bamse stood up. He planted himself on the gravel between Thorsen and the running woman with his legs braced, and his hackles rose from his neck to his tail, and he lowered his head, and growled.