At midnight there was still enough light in Ruth’s kitchen to see contour lines, if you held the map up to the window.
Fraser held it up to the window. He did not want the lamp on, so he stood with his back to the room and the map flat against the glass like a man checking a banknote, and the rest of them looked at the back of his head.
There were eight of them, and the dog.
Ruth was at the stove, because in her opinion there was no police operation that could not be improved by moose stew. Dhillon sat at the end of the table in a fleece with his sleeves pushed up, eating it. Beside him was a big young constable from Prince George, who had come in on the afternoon plane and had so far said nothing but thank you, ma’am, and was on his third bowl. Ellie’s cousin, who would drive the Guardian boat, sat on the wood box by the door in his boots with his elbows on his knees. Ellie’s aunt sat very straight in the good chair with her handbag on her lap, as if she had come to see a lawyer.
On Friday her husband, Ellie’s uncle, had voted against opening the folder, and she had sat beside him at the back of the band office and agreed with every word, and when it passed she had shaken hands with the people who outvoted him, and tonight she had put on her Guardian vest and come because it was her job. She had not yet said a word to Thorsen.
Ellie sat on the counter by the sink with the radio in her lap, cleaning her thumbnail with the corner of a fuel receipt.
Thorsen stood against the wall by the fridge on his strapped ankle, which after eight days still did not like standing. He had come up the river that evening in Gordie’s boat, six hours flat out on a high river; Gordie had tied up at a quarter to twelve, said he would never do it again, and gone to sleep in the bow under a tarp. Bamse lay across the doorway to the hall with his chin on his paws, where he could see everybody in the room at once, and every few minutes he lifted his eyes to Thorsen without lifting his head, to make sure.
The window looked down the bank to the river. It was not dark out there and it was not light: a long grey-gold glow along the mountains to the north, where the sun was going along just under them, out of sight, to come up again in four hours. The float lay on the grey water below the bank. Beside the float, on its post, the grey box of the CBSA telephone. Two hundred metres along the bank, the RCMP office, with its blind down and nobody’s truck outside it.
“Right,” Fraser said.
He brought the map down and laid it on the oilcloth again and put a bowl on each corner. He had warmed since Wednesday. Not much. About a degree a day, like a lake in May.
“Rainy has her booked out of Nesvik at six thirty their time. Seven thirty ours. That puts the Beaver on this float about twenty to nine. Dr. Harker will get out and call CBSA from that post.” He did not look out of the window at the post. “She’s done it every time. She has never once not done it. That’s the kind of woman she is about forms.”
“She waited for the lake,” Dhillon said.
“She waited for me to give it back.” Fraser did not look up. “On Friday night I gave it back. By Saturday night somebody had asked Rainy.”
“She’s very good about forms,” Ellie said.
Fraser let that go by. He put a finger on the map.
“We go up at two. Ellie’s cousin takes the three of us in the boat to the creek mouth, west side. Then up the line to the lake.” The line was on the map in pencil, a wavering run of dots up the west side, high on the bench above the creek, crossing the side creek high up, where it ran in a bedrock slot you could step across, three hundred metres above where Thorsen had forded it, and on to the south end of Otter Lake. Ellie and her cousin had cut and flagged it on Saturday, because on the day itself a helicopter would be heard from one end of the valley to the other. “We should be in the trees at the hut by half past four. Then we sit.”
“How long?” said the big constable. It was the first thing he had said that was not to Ruth.
“Until she’s been and gone, or until she does something. If she does something, we let her finish doing it.” Fraser looked round the table. “I want to be clear about this, because it’s the part that’ll feel wrong. If she opens that barrel and starts burning things, nobody stops her. Nobody so much as coughs. We have the copies. We have the photographs. What we don’t have is her, doing it. The cameras get her doing it, and we get her doing it, and then we get her.”
“And if she doesn’t do anything?” said Dhillon.
“Then she’s a scientist visiting her own station three days before an inspection, and she flies home to Alaska, and I go back to Prince George and explain to Leah Mandel why I spent somebody else’s national holiday sitting in a bush.” He said it without any expression at all. “So let’s hope she does something.”
Ruth put another bowl in front of the constable. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and Ellie’s cousin on the wood box put his head down so that nobody could see his face.
Fraser turned to the window end of the room.
“Ellie. You’re the radio. When the Beaver ties up you tell us. When she’s at the post you tell us who’s with her, if anybody, and what she’s carrying. Long gun, bag, cooler. When she’s off the water you tell us that. Three calls.” He held up three fingers. “Nothing else on the air unless the sky falls.”
“And Auntie and I bring him up after,” Ellie said. It was not quite a question.
Fraser looked at Thorsen then, for the first time since he had started talking.
“When she’s off the water, and not before, Ellie and her aunt bring you up the same way. Boat to the mouth, then the line. You’ll be a long way behind her. That’s the point.” He put his finger on the map at the south end of Otter Lake, where the lake narrowed into its outlet and the outlet went away down the hill towards Mink Creek. “You stop here. At the outlet. There’s a rock above it where the line comes out of the trees. You stop at that rock. Not one step past it, whatever you see or hear. If you can see me, you’re too close. If you can hear me, you’re much too close.”
“All right.”
Fraser turned back to the map. “Why does he come at all, Corporal, you’re about to ask.”
“I wasn’t, Sarge.”
“Because if anything goes wrong at that hut I want the man who stood in it eight days ago to tell me what’s been moved. Because that dog won’t stay here without him, and I’m not having a dog loose on my operation.” He did not look at the dog. “And because the Guardians asked.”
“We asked,” said Ellie’s aunt.
It was the first thing she had said all night, and she did not add anything to it.
The rest was small things, a shopping list. The shotgun, for bears: the constable. Bear spray: everybody. If Rainy came up to the hut with her: nothing; Rainy had no idea, and somebody would be kind to her afterwards, and it would not be Fraser. If Batt was aboard: he would not be.
Dhillon had checked his fleece for his notebook twice. Ellie had cleaned the same thumbnail for twenty minutes.
Thorsen’s own stomach had gone small and hard under his ribs an hour ago. He had felt it outside a house in Boyle Heights at four in the morning with a warrant in his jacket. It was the body getting ready for something it had not been told about.
The difference was that this time nobody was going to let it do anything.
At ten to two they went down the bank in single file, with nobody talking, through the wet willow and out onto the float.
The river was loud in the half-light. It had come up again in the warm week, and it ran past the end of the float in a long grey slope, smooth and fast and sure of itself. Ellie’s cousin stood in the Guardian boat with the engine already ticking over, and took the gear as it was handed down to him: two packs, the shotgun in its soft case, a long black waterproof bag that the constable handled like a baby.
Dhillon stepped down into the boat. The constable stepped down after him, and the boat went down fifteen centimetres. Fraser stayed on the float, pulling on a pair of thin gloves.
“Thorsen.”
“Sergeant.”
“In plain terms,” Fraser said, “what’s the worst thing that happens today?”
“She doesn’t come.”
“No. That’s only disappointing.” Fraser finished with the gloves. “The worst thing is she comes and does it, and we get her, and in a year a judge throws the lot out because some civilian walked into the middle of it and touched something. Then she goes back to Alaska and nobody ever gets her again. That’s the worst thing.”
He nodded once, and stepped down into the boat, and Ellie’s cousin backed it off into the current and swung the bow upstream, and the sound of the engine went on long after the boat had gone round the bend.
The dog stood at the very end of the float with his front feet on the edge and watched until there was nothing to watch. Then he came back and sat down on Thorsen’s left boot.
He did not sleep. Nobody had expected him to.
He sat at Ruth’s table with a cup of coffee going cold in front of him and watched the light come up into the cloud on the mountains across the river. At ten to three Ellie’s radio clicked twice, which was her cousin at the creek mouth. At twenty past four it clicked three times. Ellie looked at it and put it back in her lap.
“They’re in,” she said.
Ellie’s aunt had gone to sleep sitting up in the good chair with her handbag on her lap, and did not wake when the radio spoke, or at five when Ruth came back in a dressing gown and started the stove up again without a word.
Ruth put bread and butter in front of him, and he ate it.
“You fed him all winter,” he said.
She came and put the pot on the table. “Ellie said I should have caught him and taken him to the vet in Smithers. I said you try. He wasn’t anybody’s dog. He was that boy’s dog, and the boy wasn’t coming. Now he’s yours,” she said, as if he had argued. “So that’s done.”
She put the lid on the pot.
“Eat that,” she said. “You’ll be walking.”
At eight o’clock Ellie got off the counter and pulled the curtain across the window, all but the last hand’s width at the side, and moved Ruth’s two chairs back from the glass into the room, where it was darker.
“She’s got eyes like a hawk,” she said. “I’ve watched her pick a bottle cap out of a gravel bar at forty metres.”
Thorsen sat three metres back from the window with Ellie’s binoculars on his knee and looked at the gap. It showed him the whole length of the float, and the post with the grey box, and the RCMP office along the bank with its blind down.
At twenty-five past eight he heard it.
He heard it before Ellie did, or thought he did: a drone under the noise of the river, coming up from the south, getting louder in steps, the way an aeroplane does in mountains, as the valley walls passed it from one to the next. Bamse heard it and stood up in the hall doorway with his ears forward. Ellie put her hand on the radio.
Then it was there, yellow and white, coming up the middle of the river with its floats hanging under it like a pair of boots. It went past the village without turning, and for three seconds Thorsen knew it was going straight on to the lake and he had got all of it wrong. Then it banked across the far side of the valley, and came back down the river into the wind, and put its floats on the grey water with two long white feathers of spray.
Rainy brought it in sideways and slow and exactly, and got out in her ball cap and made fast fore and aft. Then the passenger door opened.
“Beaver’s in,” Ellie said into the radio. Her voice was perfectly ordinary. “Twenty to nine.”
Celia Harker got down onto the float and stood stretching her back with both hands, like anybody who has sat for an hour in a Beaver.
She was in a dark fleece and a cap and jeans, and the brown rubber boots that half of Nesvik wore. A small daypack on one shoulder, with a yellow rain jacket rolled and strapped under it, the way everybody on the river carried one. She said something to Rainy and laughed, and Rainy laughed, and got down on her knees at the float’s edge with a hand pump and began to pump out the left float, a chore she had done ten thousand times.
Thorsen put the binoculars up.
Her face jumped at him. She looked well. She looked like a woman who had slept, and eaten, and had a pleasant flight up the river on a fine morning, and had a dull job to do at the end of it. She turned her head and looked along the bank towards the village, at the store, at the houses on the bench, at Ruth’s house. He had the binoculars on her eyes. For the length of a breath he looked straight into them, and they came across the curtain and the window and the dark room without stopping and went on, and she turned away.
“Alone,” Ellie said into the radio. “Daypack. No long gun. She’s going to the post.”
She walked up the float to the post and opened the grey box and took out the receiver and put it to her ear, and leaned her shoulder against the post, and waited.
She stood easily. She waited with her eyes on the river. When they answered she straightened a little and said her name. He could see her say it. He could see her give her date of birth, and spell something, and smile at the river while she did it, the smile you use on a telephone for a person you will never meet. She took a card out of the back pocket of her jeans and read a number off it. She said something that made her laugh. She looked at her watch.
She did not look at the RCMP office once.
It took six minutes.
At the end of it she said thank you, he could see her say it, and put the receiver back and shut the grey box, and stood with her hand on the box a second, looking at nothing. Then she walked back down the float. Rainy pointed up the river with her chin, at the cloud on the mountains, and Celia shook her head and said something short, and Rainy shrugged and climbed up into the cockpit, and Celia climbed in after her.
The engine coughed and caught in a gout of blue smoke. The Beaver swung out into the river and taxied down a long way, and turned, and came back up into the wind with all its noise, throwing spray, and lifted. He watched it climb, and turn, and go away up the valley, small and yellow against the grey, towards the mouth of Mink Creek and the lake above it, until it went into the bottom of the cloud and the cloud took it.
Ellie had already got off her chair. She had the radio in one hand and her pack in the other.
“She’s off the water,” she said into it. “Ten to nine. Coming to you.”
Behind them Ellie’s aunt opened her eyes in the good chair, and looked at the clock, and stood up, and put her handbag on the table, and took her Guardian vest off the back of the chair and put it on.
“Well,” she said. “Come on, then.”