The council met at nine in a room at the back of the band office with the blinds down, and Thorsen sat on the steps outside with the dog and waited.
He had not been asked in. He had not expected to be. Fraser had been asked in for ten minutes, to say what he wanted and why, and then thanked and shown out, and he had come and sat down on the step beside Thorsen with his briefcase on his knees.
“I could have got an order,” he said. “For the Guardians’ trail cameras. A production order, from a judge, and served it on their office, and stood there while Ellie copied the folder onto a stick.” He looked at the gravel. “I’d have had it two days ago.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because it’s their folder,” Fraser said. “On their cameras, on their land, under a code they wrote, so that people like me can’t do what I just said I could do. I’d win in court. Then in five years I’d want something else off one of their cameras, and they’d remember.” He opened the briefcase and closed it again. “I’d rather be asked in.”
Through the blinds behind them a man’s voice rose, and went on for some time, and stopped.
On Wednesday night Thorsen had rung Ulsteinvik and told Ingrid what Fraser would be asking for. She had written to the council that night by hand, at her kitchen table above the harbour, in English, on two sheets of blue paper, and Rune had scanned it and sent it to Ellie, who had put it in front of the council that morning beside Fraser’s request. Thorsen had not read it. Ellie had said only, “She writes like a teacher.”
Bernie came up the road at half past ten with Tanner a step behind her, carrying her bag.
They were the last of the camp. The crew had come out in twos and threes all week, and Bernie had refused to leave a dirty kitchen and Tanner had refused to leave Bernie. Bernie had a wool hat on, in July, and her mouth was set.
She stopped at the foot of the steps and looked at Fraser.
“You are the policeman from Prince George,” she said.
“I am.”
“Bon.” She took the bag from Tanner and opened it and took out a hardback book with a green cloth cover, a ledger, the kind with ruled columns, and a strip of tape down the spine where somebody had mended it. “This is the first-aid record of the camp. It is confidential. I keep it three years by law. I am not allowed to give it to anybody. If I give it to you, the agency will hear of it, and I will not cook for them again, and they are the only agency in the North who still have me, because I am sixty-one and I say what I think.” She held it out. “Here.”
Fraser did not take it at once.
“Madame Lavoie—”
“Take it. I have been a coward since May.” She looked at Thorsen. “In May, at camp, in the dry, Tanner tells the story of the hook, and everybody laughs. I laugh. And I go in my kitchen and I think, non. The hook, yes. In July the dog nipped her hand, Celia’s, when she had the pliers. I put the Band-Aid on it myself, a little one, on the back of the right hand. That is not what I dressed in August. And I said nothing. For six weeks I said nothing.” She opened the book herself, at a page with a paper clip on it, and turned it round, and held it in front of Fraser’s face. “There. My writing. Sixteenth of August. Seventeen oh five.”
Fraser read it. Thorsen, from the step, could see only her small slanting hand and the date.
“Lacerations and puncture wounds, left forearm,” Bernie said. She did not need to look at it. “Patient states fall on talus or branch. Advised medevac and antibiotics. Patient declined medevac. And I took a photograph, on my telephone, because I always take a photograph, because one day a lawyer asks.” Her chin came up. “Four holes. Two and two. In the left arm. I thought dog the moment I saw it. Then I thought, but Bamse is a lamb. He was a lamb. He took bacon from my hand like a lady.”
Fraser took the book then. He took it in both hands, closed, and held it, and looked at her.
“I’m going to put this in a bag with your name and the time on it,” he said, “and on Monday I’ll serve an order on your agency for the record, so that it’s come to me the proper way. It won’t save your job. It might save the book, in court.”
“I know what it saves,” said Bernie. “I should have brought it in May. I am only late.”
Tanner had been standing at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his pockets, looking at the dog. He was thinner than he had been in May. He had a cut on his chin from shaving.
“I was there for the hook,” he said.
Everybody looked at him.
“End of July. At the landing. Some guy’s lure, in the dog’s lip. I sat on him and Sindre held his head and Celia went in with the pliers, and he got her, on the back of her right hand, a little nick, and she laughed. Sindre was sorry about it for three days. He wrote Marj about it.” His voice was flat. “That’s not four holes in your arm. That’s a Band-Aid.”
“And Sindre was ashamed, man,” Tanner said, to the dog. “That’s the other thing. About the three hundred bucks from Dr. Oakes. He’d looked at Ellie’s map with her. He knew where the green was, and he went up there anyway with the lines. That’s why he had to tell. Not because he was good. Because he wasn’t, that morning.”
He looked at Fraser. “And Mitch, if you’re looking at Mitch. Everybody looks at Mitch. He told me Saturday, at the dock. That Sunday last August he was on the floor of the drying room behind the coats, out cold, sick in a bucket, from lunch till nearly six. His helper never saw him go. Doug would’ve fired him, and then the kid was dead, and he couldn’t tell a Mountie he’d been lying in his own puke. So he said asleep.” He shrugged. “And his good jacket, the one I told you about with the sleeve ripped. That was a winch line, on the twelfth, four days before. Caught the cuff and tore it to the elbow. I was there for that too. I just forgot.”
A winch line, four days before, a long tear. Not teeth, and not two and two. The sleeve that mattered had been in a barrel on Otter Lake.
The dog had got up. He came down the steps and put his head against Tanner’s leg, and Tanner put a hand on him, and they stood there.
Ellie came out at twenty to twelve.
She came out fast, the way she did everything, and let the door bang behind her, and stood at the top of the steps looking at the road, and Thorsen saw that she was angry and that she was not angry with any of them.
“Four to three,” she said.
Fraser stood up.
“They’ll open the folder. To me, and to you, Sergeant, and to the court, and for this. Only this. Only those two cameras, and only the sixteenth of August, and only after the council’s own person has been through it first, which is me.” She came down a step. “And you’ll sign the thing they’ve written: every frame you take away is theirs, you give it back, and none of it goes in any database anywhere, ever.”
“I’ll sign it.”
“Yes, you will.” She looked at Thorsen. “My uncle voted against. So you know. He said it’s our data and our land and our consent, and once the RCMP has looked in one folder they’ll want them all. He’s right. And he said Caldera’s lawyers will be on the phone by Monday about the agreement, and he’s right about that too.” She breathed out. “He’s not a bad man. He just wanted a different vote.”
Ruth came out behind her, slowly, with her stick, and stood on the top step in the sun.
“Well,” she said. “That’s done.”
“What did you say?” Thorsen asked her. “If I can ask.”
Ruth looked at him as if the question were slightly foolish.
“I said the boy’s family asked properly,” she said. “They wrote. A grandmother wrote, on paper, by hand, and said please, and said what it was for, and said she would understand if we said no.” She came down the first step, with Ellie’s hand under her elbow. “Nobody’s ever asked us properly for anything off those cameras. Not the company. Not the government. Not the RCMP. They tell us, or they don’t ask at all.” She reached the bottom. “So I said yes. And I fed that boy’s dog all winter. That makes me family enough.”
The folder opened at a quarter past twelve, in the portable, with the blinds down.
Ellie went through it first, alone, with the door shut, for twenty minutes. Then she let them in. Fraser and Dhillon sat at the screen. Thorsen stood at the back, against the wall, by the coffee machine, where Fraser had put him.
“You’ll tell me one thing,” Fraser had said on the ramp. “Which arm. You saw it on the gravel bar on Sunday. Then you’ll go out.”
Ellie put up the first frame.
It was the game trail between MC-1 and the bench pad, in colour, a little washed out, with the camera’s own strip of white text along the bottom: the temperature, the moon, the date and the time: the sixteenth of August 2026, fifteen forty-one. Spruce, a slope of moss, rain on the lens in two blurred drops. And on the trail, low, going away uphill, a black dog with a white chest and his tail clamped, at a full run. All four feet off the ground. Alone.
“That’s an animal frame,” Ellie said. “That one was never sealed. It’s been on our drive since May with eighteen thousand others. Dog, running, uphill, fifteen forty-one. I logged it as a feral dog last month and didn’t think about it again.” She did not look round. “Then this one. Two minutes later. The software flagged a person and locked it.”
She put up the second.
The same trail. The same two drops of rain on the lens. The same date, fifteen forty-three. A figure, coming up the slope towards the camera and past it, in a yellow rain jacket with the hood up, so that there was no face, only the dark inside of the hood. A cooler in the right hand, the kind with a handle across the top, and a long pole across the same shoulder with a cup on the end, a dipper. And the left arm held tight across the chest, bent at the elbow, the hand tucked in under the right armpit, the way people carry an arm that is hurt. The way a man on a boat holds a hand he has just cut, before he looks at it.
Nobody said anything.
“Mr. Thorsen,” Fraser said, without turning. “Which arm?”
“Left. Inside of the forearm, below the elbow. Four marks.”
Fraser wrote it down.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s all.”
Thorsen went out. On the ramp the dog was waiting for him, and he sat down beside him in the sun and put his hand on the white of his chest, and felt his heart going under it, quick and steady.
All four feet off the ground, he thought. Running away from it. Uphill. Alone.
The team went up at one.
Fraser had found a helicopter in Smithers, and a judge in Prince George at eleven o’clock on Canada Day night who had read his application for a general warrant twice and signed it. They went up to the strip in the truck: Fraser, Dhillon, a woman from the RCMP’s technical unit with two hard cases who said almost nothing to anybody, Ellie, and Ellie’s cousin from the freighter, who was a Guardian too and carried the cameras.
Thorsen did not go. He had known since Wednesday that nobody would ask him.
He stood at Ruth’s gate and watched the helicopter lift off the strip and go up the river, low, towards the mouth of Mink Creek and the lake beyond it. He knew where the padlock hung and which way the door opened. He kept his hands on the top rail until the sound had gone.
“You can come in now,” Ruth said from the porch. “It’s not going to come back any quicker if you watch.”
Paige called at two, which was one in Nesvik.
“It’s me,” she said. “Paige. Dolan.” A pause. “You gave me your number at the cannery. After.”
“I remember.”
“My mom read the EAO letter on Wednesday,” Paige said. She said it fast, like something written down. “Caldera sent it on to Harker Environmental at nine at night, and Mom opens the mail. She read it, and she went home and sat in the truck in our driveway for an hour with the engine off. Then she came in and told me to call you.” A breath. “So I’m calling you.”
“Paige, before you say anything—”
“I know. Sandoval. I called him first. He’s coming at four with a recorder. I’ll say it all to him.” Her voice went harder. “I wanted to say it to somebody first who’d know what it meant. You never showed that picture to anybody. Nobody in this town keeps anything to themselves. You did. So you.”
He waited.
“Celia took me off the lower stations,” Paige said. “MC-1 and MC-2. The first week of July last year. I told you Doug does the rota. He does. She told him what to put on it.”
The rest came fast. Celia had done the lower stations herself after that, because she liked the walk, and left Paige the top station and the blanks and the data entry. For carrying she had asked Doug for men off the drill who would hold a pole and not ask what was in a bottle: Mitch, Sindre on his days off, Imogen once, the week nobody else was free, and that week the numbers had been fine. Celia had always said she took whoever Doug sent. It had been her own picking. And she had had Paige sign the custody forms for the whole run, hers too, because the tech signs and it saved time. So Paige’s name was on MC-1 on the twenty-second of July, when she had been doing blanks in camp, and on the sixteenth of August, when she had been in Juneau. The numbers at the lower stations had gone up that July. Paige had asked. Celia had said it was the flow. Glacial rivers, Paige.
“And Sindre came back from MC-1 one Sunday saying she’d shown him how you spike a sample,” Paige said. “QA, she called it. Matrix spikes. You put a known amount in, to check the lab. He was a marine-biology kid. He’d have looked it up.” She breathed. “I thought, okay, she’s Dr. Harker. Okay.”
“And in September.”
“In September he was dead, and I sat at my desk entering August, and the numbers were up again, and my name was on the forms. He used to call us both the water lady. I couldn’t think it any further. So I quit.” She stopped. “She didn’t know I’d been in Juneau. If she’d found out, she’d have known Mom covered for me. That’s all the river story was. I’m sorry I lied to you.” A breath. “And when you put that picture on my bench I knew the rock, and I knew who was at MC-1 in July, and it wasn’t me. That’s why I said keep it that way. I didn’t want you showing it to her.”
“And your mother’s job.”
“Mom quit yesterday,” Paige said. “So.”
The helicopter came back at ten to eight, in a clean gold evening, with the river shining and the mountains clear to the tops.
Ellie came to Ruth’s kitchen at half past, alone, and sat down without taking her jacket off, and ate the stew Ruth put in front of her without looking at it.
“I can’t tell you anything,” she said, when it was gone. “Fraser said.”
“Then don’t.”
“I’m going to tell you two things.” She pushed the plate away. “One. It was all where you said. Exactly where. The lid the way you’d left it. The lock the way your rock left it. Fraser had the tech photograph every single thing before anybody touched it, from every side, and then again after.” She looked at her hands. “The tech took the lock to bits on the floor of the hut and built a new one round the insides of the old one, same make, so it’ll open for whatever she opens it with and look like nobody’s been near it. Took her an hour. She didn’t say a word the whole hour. Then she said, there.”
“And the book.”
“Page by page. Front and back. On a little stand with a light, like at a museum. Two hours.” Ellie’s voice had gone very quiet. “I read some of it over her shoulder. I shouldn’t have. Two drops on the low days, the way anybody keeps a bottle. Four and five on the high-flow days. All the way back to the summer before last, and on into this June. My river.” She looked at him. “The ninth of July’s in there. MC-1, four drops. The morning she told you was clear.” She stopped. “The sixteenth of August, the tech did twice. She put the lamp down low across the page so the pencil shone, and you could see it. Somebody’s written a three over a one, MC-3 over MC-1, and gone over it again. Pressed so hard it’s dented the page. You can read the one underneath.”
“And the jacket,” Ellie said. “Separate gear for the dirty work. You don’t wear the jacket that’s had acid on it into a camp where somebody might split your samples, and you don’t put a bloody one in the camp laundry.” She turned her mug round. “And the book’s not a secret book. That’s what I kept missing. It’s her field book, the ordinary one, the one any auditor can ask for. The EAO’s man will ask for it on Thursday. No book, no consultant. So she wrote her drops down because a careful sampler writes down what goes in a bottle, and the one line that could hang her she made agree with Corey’s ticket. And it lived in that barrel because nobody carries a field book up and down that mountain, and nobody opens another sampler’s barrel.” She looked at the window. “Then they put it all back, the book, the jacket, the sealed bottle, in the same order, and the lock on, and my cousin put a camera in a spruce looking at the door and another inside, up on the beam over the stove, where you’d never see it unless you knew.” She looked up. “That’s two things. That’s more than two. I’m going home.”
She did not go home. She sat there.
Fraser called Mandel at nine o’clock from the RCMP office, and then he walked down to Ruth’s and stood at the bottom of the porch steps in the evening light, and did not come up.
“She won’t,” he said.
Thorsen had known it from the way Fraser walked.
“She says the folder’s good. She says the first-aid book’s good, and the Dolan girl’s good, and the book in the barrel’s very good indeed, if it’s what we say it is and if we can show who wrote it. She says it’s the best thing she’s heard all year.” Fraser put his hands in his pockets. “She says supplier records Tuesday. The firm in Vancouver has been served and they’re pulling the archive. She’ll look at the whole thing on Tuesday afternoon, with the order and the lot record and the handwriting, and decide. Not before.” He looked up the valley, towards the mouth of the creek, which they could not see from there. “She’s right.”
“And Celia’s in Nesvik.”
“Celia’s in Alaska,” said Fraser, “where I can’t touch her, and where on Tuesday afternoon I still won’t be able to touch her, whatever Leah says. And on Thursday morning a man from Victoria is going to walk into that hut with a clipboard.” He was quiet a moment. “So I’ve given her the valley back. As of six o’clock tonight Goat Creek and Otter Lake aren’t a scene any more. It’s on the board at the post office, and on the Guardians’ channel, and Rainy’s been told she can put down on the lake again if anybody asks, and Dhillon’s told Caldera, who’ll tell their consultant, because they tell her everything.” He looked at the river. “I’ve done all I can do from here. The rest is up to her.”
He went away up the road.