“Oh, you stupid, stupid man.” Celia’s hood was thrown back and her hair flattened by the rotor wash.
He was on his knees at the top of the bar. He did not remember kneeling. The log jam was behind him, grinding in the brown water at the mouth of the creek, and the noise of it and the noise of the turbine winding down were the same noise.
Bamse stood between them, side-on across Thorsen’s knees, and the sound that came out of him was very low and very steady, and went on.
Celia stopped.
She stopped at two metres, exactly, as if there were a line on the gravel. She had a foil blanket in one hand, still in its packet, and a water bottle in the other, and her face was wet and white and full of something that looked, at two metres, like joy.
“Hello, you,” she said to the dog, softly. “Hello, Bamse. It’s all right. It’s only me.” The dog did not stop. She laughed, a small shaky laugh, and looked at Thorsen over his head. “He’s never forgiven me for July. Here. Can you catch?”
She tossed the water bottle underarm. It hit him in the chest and he got a hand on it as it fell. His fingers would not work the cap. He worked it with his teeth.
The water was so cold it hurt his teeth, and it was the best thing he had ever put in his mouth. He drank half of it and then made himself stop, because he had been a doctor’s son longer than he had been anything else, and he could hear his father saying slowly, slowly.
“Good,” Celia said. “That’s good. Now this.” The foil blanket came across the gap and landed on the gravel beside him with a crackle. “Put it round you, shiny side in.” She nodded back at the helicopter. “Get in, the nursing station’s twenty minutes.”
Behind her the rotor had stopped turning.
Corey Batt was standing by the skids with his helmet in his hand. He was not coming any nearer. He was looking at the helicopter’s door, and then at the river, and then at the trees on the far side of the creek, at everything on the gravel bar except the man kneeling on it.
Thorsen got the blanket out of its packet. The wind off the river kept trying to take it to Alaska. He got it round his shoulders in the end, and held it closed with his left hand, and kept his right arm clamped across his ribs, over the sock and the warm shape inside it.
He had been holding his ribs for so long that it would look like ribs. He hoped it would look like ribs.
“Daniel. Look at me.” She had crouched down at her two metres, on her heels, as you crouch to talk to a child. “You’re hypothermic. You know you are. When the shaking stops, that’s bad. Those wet things have to come off, now. Can you stand?”
“Probably.”
“Then let’s stand.”
He didn’t. He looked past her at Batt.
“I’m not getting in that,” he said.
It came out flat and slow, which was how everything was coming out, and it was true. Thirty-one hours ago a pilot had put a yellow box in his lap and gone small over the ridge. That much he could let her have.
Batt heard it. His head came round for a second and went away again.
“Oh, Daniel.” Celia put a hand out, palm down, pressing something flat. “Corey’s been out of his mind. He was at the pad first thing and it was socked in solid, and by the time it lifted you’d gone. He’s been flying the creek all day. He found you.” She looked over her shoulder. “Corey. Tell him.”
“I went back,” Batt said to the river.
“I know you did.”
Nobody said anything. Up the creek, in the canyon, the water was making the sound that big water makes going round a corner it does not fit.
“Right,” Celia said. “All right. Then let me look at you here, at least.” She stood up and took a step sideways, to come at him from a different angle, and the dog moved with her. His lip came off his teeth. She stopped. “For heaven’s sake,” she said to him, quite gently. “I’m trying to help.”
“He doesn’t know that.”
“No. He doesn’t know anything. He’s a dog.” She looked at him with her head on one side. “You’re very attached to him. Sindre was the same.”
“He went ahead of me all the way down,” Thorsen said. “He came back for me every time.”
“Yes,” she said. “He would.”
She pushed her sleeves up to do something with the zip of the first-aid bag Batt had brought over and set on the gravel beside her. The left sleeve of the rain jacket went up her forearm, and the fleece under it, and on the soft inside of the arm, below the elbow, there were four pale curved marks, two and two, like the brackets round a word.
He looked at the water bottle in his hand.
“How long were you up there?” she said. She had found a second foil blanket in the bag and a packet of something and a chemical heat pad. She broke the heat pad between her hands and shook it, and slid the lot across the gravel to him, one thing at a time, keeping her two metres. “Corey says he put you down at two yesterday. At the old pad. That’s KR-31? Nobody knew it was there. That place is a scandal.”
“Two o’clock.”
“And you came down Goat Creek. In those boots.” She looked at his boots. They were not boots any more. “And then what? Rainy saw you this morning, did they tell you? About eleven. She was coming up for the search and she saw a man on the creek below Otter Lake, just for a second, through a hole in the fog. She radioed it in. That’s how we knew where to look.” She waited. “Was that you? Below the lake?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d have seen the lake. It’s quite big. It’s right there.”
“I saw a lot of things,” Thorsen said. “Some of them were there.”
“There’s a hut on the lake shore,” she said. “One of my stations. Plywood, nothing much. There’s a stove in it, and a sleeping bag, and some food in a barrel, and I kept thinking all afternoon, if he’s found the hut, he’s all right. He’s sitting by a stove eating my granola. I kept wanting Corey to put down on the lake and look, and he wouldn’t. Fog, he said. He’s very strict about fog.” She tilted her head. “Did you find it?”
The light on the bar had gone the colour of weak tea. He could see her quite clearly, and Batt behind her, and the float, and the freight cache, and the trail coming down out of the trees on the east side, where a boy had driven down at ten past one on a Sunday afternoon to fetch the freight with his rod and his dog.
“Never saw it,” he said. “Never left the far bank. Fever. I had a long talk with my father for about an hour. He’s in California.”
She went on looking at him.
“Poor man,” she said, and he could not tell which of them she meant.
He got the second blanket round him and the heat pad inside his shirt, on the left side, away from the sock, and drank the rest of the water. The shaking came and went in long waves. When it went, he could think, nearly, and what he thought about was her.
Marj’s top step on the ninth of June, three field books in a dry bag before anybody had asked her anything, and the camp’s hands in her coolers: a woman who could see split samples coming would want to be the one who had asked for them. The boy’s second thing that day had been somebody in yellow at the lower station at noon, seen from Batt’s window, where no ticket put anybody. Batt had written the top station into his log. He had never put down at the lower station in his life, and that was true, if what you put down at was the orange helicopter marker on the slope above it. And the bottle against his ribs was no preservative: thorium, uranium, manganese, zinc, a few drops at a time on the high days, into the creek the whole project would be measured against.
She was crouched at her two metres again, the woman who had written every one of those drops down, watching him drink her water. He thought about a nursing station with its bright lights, and somebody saying let’s get that wet shirt off him, and Celia being so helpful, holding the scissors.
He did not think she would hurt him. He thought that a woman had stood on a cutbank in August with her hands on a boy, and that the boy had very likely never been meant to go into the river either, and then he had.
“Celia.” Batt had come a few steps nearer. He had his helmet under his arm and his eyes on his watch. “I’ve got forty minutes before this cloud’s on the river. Less, maybe.”
“Then we’ve got forty minutes,” Celia said, without turning round. She sat down on the corner of a freight crate, in her yellow, with her elbows on her knees, at her two metres. “I’m not leaving him on a gravel bar, Corey. I’m not leaving anybody on a gravel bar ever again.”
It was the only thing she said that evening that seemed to come up from somewhere deep, and he put it away to look at later.
They sat. The light went down another shade. The dog lay down across his feet at last, with his chin on his paws and his eyes open, watching her. Once she reached into her jacket for her phone and the dog lifted his head a fraction, and she took the phone out very slowly, as you would in front of a police officer, and looked at it, and put it away.
“No signal,” she said. “There never is. Sindre used to walk up to that big rock to get one bar.”
“Did he.”
“He was always calling his grandmother.” She was looking at the river. “Sweet kid. Such a sweet kid.”
Thorsen pulled the blanket tighter.
And then, because the shaking had stopped and his head was clear, and because he was a fool, or because some part of him needed to hear what she would say, he said, “His grandmother sat up all night. That night. Waiting for him to call.”
Celia did not move at all.
Then she said, “Yes. She wrote and told me. I’ve thought about it every day.” And she got up off the crate and went and stood beside the helicopter with Batt, with her back to him, and looked down the river.
He heard it before they did. Or the dog did, and he felt the dog hear it: a lift of the head against his shins, and the ears coming up and forward.
An outboard. Down the river, under the noise of the water, a long way off, and coming on.
It came round the bend below the bar a few minutes later, a grey aluminium centre-console riding high up the slack inside of the bend, with a figure at the wheel and a second in the bow in an orange float coat. Even at four hundred metres he knew the one at the wheel by the way she stood, with her weight back and one hand flat on the top of the windscreen, as if she were holding the boat down by the scruff of its neck.
Ellie.
She did not come straight in. She went past well out and looked at the jam and the brown tongue of water coming out of the canyon, and the eddy that curled back under the bar. Then she came round in a long arc and put the boat into the eddy bow first, and let the eddy swing her stern out, and caught it with a touch of throttle at the moment when it would have gone too far, and the bow kissed the gravel at the bottom of the bar, and the man in the float coat went over the bow into the water up to his thighs with the bow line in his hands and leaned back on it.
Corporal Dhillon. He looked up the bar at Thorsen, and at the helicopter, and at the two people in yellow standing beside it, and said nothing about any of them.
“Mr. Thorsen,” he called up. “Are you hurt?”
“Ankle. The rest is just cold.”
“Can you walk?”
“Downhill.”
“Good. It’s all downhill.” Dhillon looked past him. “Mr. Batt. Dr. Harker. Can I borrow one of you?”
It was Batt who came. He dropped his helmet on the gravel and got his shoulder under Thorsen’s left arm without being asked, and between him and a stick of driftwood Thorsen got up onto his good foot and the other one, which shouted, and they went down the bar together like a three-legged race, with the dog going ahead and coming back. Batt smelled of jet fuel and sweat and coffee. Up close his face had a grey look to it under the tan.
“I’m sorry,” Batt said, very low, into his shoulder, so that nobody else would hear. “Mate. I’m so sorry.”
“Watch your feet,” Thorsen said.
At the water Dhillon took his other arm. The boat’s bow was at waist height and the eddy was trying to take it away all the time, and Ellie was holding it there with the engine, looking over her shoulder at the current. Thorsen got his good knee on the bow, and Dhillon put a hand in the middle of his back and pushed, and he went over onto the deck on his face, on his left side, with his right arm still clamped across him. Something in the sock clicked against the aluminium. He lay there and listened to it not break.
The dog came over the bow behind him in one long jump, and landed on him.
“Bamse,” Ellie said. “Off. Off, you lump.” She did not take her eyes off the water. “Hello, Thorsen. You look terrible.”
“Hello.”
“Rainy said you waved.”
“I didn’t know if she saw.”
“She saw. We were on the west bank below the canyon by two. Cliffs, all the way. We came round by water when the creek peaked.” Ellie reached down and pulled a sleeping bag out from under the console and threw it on top of him. “Get in that. Amrit, I can’t hold her here much longer.”
Celia had come down the bar behind them. She stood at the edge of the water with her hands in the pockets of the yellow jacket.
“I’ll ride down with you,” she said. “Somebody should sit with him. I can—”
“No room,” said Ellie.
There was room. There was room for six. Celia looked at the empty boat, and at Ellie, and Ellie looked back at her with the flat, polite patience she kept for people who explained the river to her.
“Of course,” Celia said. “Of course. You know best.” She looked down at Thorsen in the bottom of the boat, in the sleeping bag, with the dog on him. “Keep him warm, Ellie. And don’t let him be brave.”
Dhillon, still in the water to his thighs, was coiling the bow line. He did not look up from it.
“Dr. Harker, Mr. Batt,” he said. “Thank you both for your help today. I’ll want to speak to you about the search. Tomorrow, at the office, nine o’clock, if that suits. Just so it’s all written down.”
“Of course,” Celia said again.
“Mr. Batt?”
Batt was standing a little way up the bar with his helmet in his hand again. He nodded.
Dhillon threw the coil into the bow and pushed off and came over the gunwale in one movement, dripping, and Ellie backed the boat out of the eddy into the current. The current took it at once. She let it swing them round, and put the bow downriver, and opened the throttle a little, and the bar went away behind them.
Thorsen lifted his head. Celia was walking back up the gravel to the helicopter, not hurrying, with her hands still in her pockets. At the top she turned and lifted one of them. Then she got in.
The rotor began to turn when they were at the bend. He watched the machine lift and hang above the bar and the float and the freight cache, nose down, and then go away down the river ahead of them, low under the cloud, towards the village, until he could not hear it any more over the engine and the water.
The river was big, bank to bank in a single body, carrying whole branches and mats of willow. Dhillon was in the bow with a hand searchlight, because it was getting to be the light in which a log and a wave look the same, and he called back to Ellie as they came: Left. Wood. Clear.
Thorsen lay in the bottom of the boat in the sleeping bag with the dog on top of it, and shook. It was worse now that he was safe. The body holds on until it is allowed to let go. His teeth hit together like somebody typing, and Dhillon came back down the boat, took off his float coat and the fleece under it, put the fleece over Thorsen’s head and shoulders inside the bag, and went back to the bow in his shirt sleeves.
“You’ll freeze,” Thorsen said, or tried to.
“I’m from Surrey,” said Dhillon, without turning round. “Cold’s nothing. We’re used to disappointment.”
He took the sock out somewhere on the way down.
His fingers had stopped being fingers, and the sleeping bag was in the way, but he got a hand in under the fleece and the shirt and drew it out, warm, the shape of the bottle hard inside the wool. It looked like nothing. It looked like a grey sock with a hole in the heel.
“Ellie.”
She looked down. She looked at the sock, and then at his face.
“Here.” He held it up. His hand was shaking so much that the sock swung. “Give it to Dhillon. When we’re in. In a bag. Write the time on it.”
She took it from him. She held it as you hold something a child gives you that you don’t understand and don’t want to drop.
“What is it?”
“Don’t touch what’s in it,” he said. “Don’t take it out. Not here. Just a bag, and the time.”
She looked at him a moment longer. Then she opened the dry box under the console with one hand, keeping the other on the wheel, and put the sock in it, and shut the lid, and snapped the catch down, and kept her hand flat on the lid, as she had held the windscreen.
“Okay,” she said.
That seemed to be all he needed. He lay back. Above him the cloud had come down onto the tops of the spruce on both banks, so that the river ran in a grey tunnel, and the roof was going by. The dog had put his head on Thorsen’s chest, on the place where the bottle had been, and was breathing slowly, in and out.
Somewhere ahead of them there were lights. Ellie had said something to Dhillon about them. He would lift his head in a minute and look.
He felt Ellie’s hand take hold of the collar of the fleece, as she had taken Gordie’s bow line on the first day: something that might go over the side if she let go.
He did not lift his head.