Ruth’s late husband’s boat was five and a half metres of riveted aluminium painted a green that had mostly come off, with a jet unit that Ellie said was older than she was and better behaved. Ellie’s cousin had filled it at seven, because Ruth had told him to, twice.
Ellie ran it up the river standing, with her weight back and one hand on the top of the windscreen. Ellie’s aunt sat in the bow on a cooler with her vest zipped to her chin and her handbag between her boots, facing forward, like a woman on a bus. Thorsen sat on the middle thwart with the dog pressed against his shins and his bad foot braced on a fuel can, and held on.
Spray came over the bow in sheets, and the woman on the cooler did not turn her head.
Above the third bend he heard the Beaver again.
It was somewhere up in the cloud ahead and to the left, where Mink Creek came down out of its valley: a long drone that went away, and came back, and went away again. Ellie heard it too. She looked up once, at the grey, and back at the water.
“She’s going round,” she shouted over the engine. “Fog’s sitting on the lake. Rainy won’t go down through it. She’ll wait for a hole.”
“How long?”
“As long as it takes. Rainy’s careful. It’s the only reason she’s still alive.”
They came into the Mink Creek mouth at twelve minutes past nine, on the west side, the side he had come down eight days before.
The log jam was still there across the mouth, a grey tangle of spruce and cottonwood with the creek coming through it in a brown roar, and he looked at the log that had rolled, and then away. On the far side, across the creek, was the landing: the float, the freight cache under its tarp, the Caldera sign on its post, and the gravel bar where a helicopter had put down at half past nine on a Sunday night. Nothing on it now. Nobody.
The Guardian boat was pulled up in a back eddy under the willows. Ellie put Ruth’s in beside it, and Ellie’s aunt was over the bow before it had stopped, with the line round the same root in a hitch Thorsen did not know.
The Beaver went over while they were tying up. They did not see it. They heard it go across above the cloud, low, and then they heard the engine note change, and drop, and drop again, and go on dropping, and stop.
Ellie looked at her watch.
“Twenty past,” she said. “She’s down.”
The line went up from the eddy into the trees and kept going up.
He had come down this hillside on the twenty-seventh, at creek level, in slide alder and devil’s club and mud. Up here on the bench it was old spruce with a floor of moss and the pink tape going away between the trunks as neat as a hotel corridor. If he had climbed a hundred metres to his left that day he would have walked out of the bush in an hour.
Half an hour up, the line crossed the side creek, high, where it ran white in a bedrock slot a long stride wide. Ellie’s aunt stepped over without looking at it. Three hundred metres below, out of sight in the alder, was the place where he had waded it to the thighs at four in the morning with a fistful of dog. It was louder today. He stepped across, and the dog jumped it after him.
He did not keep up. Ellie’s aunt went first, at a pace that did not look fast and was, with her handbag over her shoulder on its strap; then Ellie, with the radio; then Thorsen and the dog. The gap opened on every slope, and once Ellie looked back and waited without saying anything, and he hated it, and went faster, and his ankle told him exactly what it thought.
At the top of the second rise the aunt stopped and waited for them. She was not out of breath. She looked at Thorsen’s boot, and at the pharmacy cane from Nesvik, which skated on the moss.
“That’s for sidewalks,” she said. It was the first thing she had said to him alone. She went to the side of the line and found a stick, a straight dead length of alder, and broke the top off it against a tree and handed it to him. “My father walked to Otter Lake every September with one leg shorter than the other. He said the stick was the other leg.”
“Thank you.”
“He counted the fish in. Before there were Guardians. Before there were counters. He sat on a rock at the outlet with a notebook and a pencil.” She looked up the line between the trees. “That’s your rock. His rock. A man with a stick on it again. He’d laugh.”
She turned and went on up the hill.
It took them forty-five minutes. At two minutes past ten the trees thinned in front of them and there was light, and water, and Ellie put her hand out flat behind her without turning round, and Thorsen stopped.
The rock was where Fraser had said: a grey shoulder of granite as big as a car, standing out of the moss above the place where the lake narrowed into its outlet. The outlet ran out under them, clear and quick and loud over its stones, going away down through the trees towards Mink Creek. Beyond the rock, the lake.
Otter Lake was not big: six hundred metres long, perhaps, a grey-green oval in a bowl of spruce, with a last rag of the fog that had kept Rainy circling still lying on the water at the far end. The near shore curved away to the left in a long arm. And at the end of the arm, two hundred and fifty metres off across the water, on a flat place above a shingle beach, was the hut.
It was smaller than he remembered: a plywood box with a tin stovepipe and a solar panel, its door on the lake side standing open.
Thirty metres out from the beach the Beaver lay at anchor with its tail to the shore, yellow and white, rocking very slightly. Rainy sat on the left float with her back against the strut and her legs out in front of her and her glasses on the end of her nose, reading a paperback.
Nothing else moved.
Ellie got down on her stomach on the moss behind the rock, and her aunt sat down beside her with her back against it, facing the other way, up the outlet, as if she were keeping watch on the trees behind them. Thorsen lowered himself on his good knee and his stick and lay down at the end of the rock with the binoculars, and the dog lay down against his left side and put his chin on Thorsen’s forearm.
He put the glasses up.
The hut came up at him, grey-green and plywood and close. Through the open door there was a shape moving in the dark inside, and a small blue-white light on a level with its hands.
“Laptop,” Ellie breathed beside him. “She’s downloading the logger. There’s a sonde in the lake off the beach, on a cable. Conductivity, turbidity, temperature, every fifteen minutes. She’d want that off before Thursday.” A pause. “She’d want Rainy to see her doing it.”
The blue light stayed where it was. Rainy turned a page. A pair of mergansers came round the end of the arm, saw the Beaver, thought about it and went back. His elbows began to hurt, and he did not move them.
At thirteen minutes past ten the blue light went out.
The shape in the hut stood up. It was yellow now: she had put the rain jacket on, against the wet off the cloud, and in the dark of the doorway it was a yellow smear with a head on it. It went to the bench along the back wall, where he knew the barrel was, under the bench, because he had knelt in front of it at one in the morning with a rock in his hand. It went down out of sight, kneeling.
Then it did not do anything at all.
He watched it not do anything. He watched the place in the dark where the yellow had gone down, and nothing came up out of it, and the outlet ran under the rock, and Rainy turned another page, and the second hand went round on his watch. Once round. Twice. He could feel the dog’s breathing against his side, and his own heart going in his elbows on the rock, and Ellie beside him not breathing at all.
Down there under the bench her key would have gone into a brass padlock that he had broken with a stone eight days ago, and turned in it as sweetly as on the day she bought it. Then the lid, and the jacket, and the bag, and under the bag the place where a dropper bottle should have been.
He knew what it was. He had seen people find things gone: a wife in Sherman Oaks at the drawer where the gun had been. For as long as they did not move, the thing had not happened yet.
Four minutes. Five.
At a little after twenty past ten the yellow came up again, slowly, and stood in the dark of the hut with its back to the door. Once the head tipped back, towards the stovepipe where it went up through the roof; and stayed like that a moment; and came down. Afterwards, on the hut camera’s footage, it was the damper she had been looking at, and whether the pipe would draw. Her eyes never went to the beam.
“Okay,” Ellie said, very quietly, to nobody. “Okay.”
The smoke came at half past.
It came out of the stovepipe first as a waver in the air, then grey, then a thick white plume that went straight up for ten metres and bent over and lay down along the water. The smell got to them five minutes later: woodsmoke, and under it something sharp and chemical.
“Fire-starter,” Ellie’s aunt said, without turning round. She had smelled it before he had. “And paper.”
Rainy sat up on the float and looked at the stovepipe and called something across the water. A voice from the hut called something back, light, ordinary, and Rainy lifted a hand and picked up the book again.
The smoke thinned, and thickened again, as it does when somebody is feeding a stove a little at a time. The field book did not want to burn; it had been made by people who had thought very carefully about paper that would not die in the rain. He could see the yellow of her low down in the doorway, tearing the pages out one at a time, and feeding them in, and waiting.
He wanted very much to stand up.
It was in his legs, not his head: two hundred and fifty metres along the shore, four minutes on a bad ankle, and be in that doorway. He had been the one in the doorway his whole life, on the stairs and on the ladder of a ship, alone, because there was never anybody else he trusted to do it right.
He lay on the rock and did not stand up.
Somewhere across the water in the trees behind the hut there were three police officers and a Guardian lying in the moss as he was lying, and had been since half past four. He put his hand in the dog’s ruff and held on.
At ten to eleven the smoke from the stovepipe had gone thin and blue, and the yellow came out of the doorway into the daylight.
She had something in her hand. She walked down the shingle to the edge of the water, in no hurry, and crouched there at the lake’s edge, and he put the glasses on her hands. A bottle. Amber, larger than the dropper, the one that had still been sealed. She broke the band with her thumbnail and unscrewed the cap and put it carefully in her jacket pocket. Then she held the bottle out over the lake and turned it over, and something poured out of it into the water, clear, a thin bright string in the grey light, and stopped.
She did not stand up. She dipped the empty bottle in the lake and filled it, and shook it, and poured it out. Then she did it again. And a third time.
“She’s rinsing it,” Ellie said. Her voice had gone very flat. “Triple rinse. Standard protocol. So it’s clean for the waste stream. That’s two hundred and fifty mils of four metals into six hundred metres of lake. It won’t show. It won’t even show on my meter. The thorium’ll be in the mud by tonight, under the fry.” She lay with her chin on her fists on the moss and looked at the woman crouched at the water. “It’s my lake.”
Her aunt, behind them, said a word Thorsen did not know, very softly, and Ellie, without turning her head, said, “Auntie.”
Celia stood up. She put the cap back on the empty bottle and put it in her other pocket. And she stood there at the edge of Otter Lake with her hands in the pockets of the yellow jacket and looked out at the water, at the last of the fog going away at the far end and the cloud coming up off the hills and the mergansers coming back round the arm, as if she were waiting for something to come up out of it.
She took a step into the lake. Then another, to her knees, in her rubber boots, the cold water going up the yellow, and stood there with her hands in her pockets and the deep water a body’s length in front of her.
He was on his good knee before he knew it, and his bad ankle went under him and he did not feel it. A woman at the edge of cold water, and nobody near her. He had seen it on a creek bank in his head every night since April, the other way round: somebody standing on the stones, and somebody in the water, and nobody coming.
Ellie’s hand closed on his sleeve. She did not look at him.
Two hundred and fifty metres. He could not have got there. He knew that, and his legs did not, and for as long as she stood in the lake he knelt on the moss with Ellie’s hand on his arm and let her stand there. It was the longest minute of the summer, and he spent it on his knees.
She did not go any further. She stood in the lake to her knees and looked at it.
They came out of the trees behind her.
Fraser first, and Dhillon to his left, and on the right the big constable with the shotgun pointed at the ground. No hurry. They walked out of the spruce onto the shingle as if they had been out for a stroll and had come down to look at the lake, and Fraser said something, not loudly, and it came across the water to the rock a moment after his mouth moved, too far away to have words in it.
She turned round, and came up out of the water onto the shingle.
She did not run. There was nowhere to run that was not lake or bush or Rainy’s aeroplane, and she was not a woman who did stupid things in a hurry. She stood quite still on the shingle with her hands in her pockets, and Fraser said something else, and she took them out of her pockets, slowly, empty, and held them a little away from her sides.
Rainy was on her feet on the float. The paperback had gone into the water. She stood with one hand on the strut and stared.
Dhillon went forward and turned Celia round by the elbow, quite gently, and Thorsen saw him take her wrists behind her one at a time and the small bright flash of the steel. Then Fraser was talking, steadily, with his notebook open, and she stood with her back to him and her face to the lake, and nodded, once, and again.
Ellie’s radio clicked against the moss.
“In custody,” said her cousin’s voice, very low. “Ten fifty-four.”
Thorsen lay on the rock with the glasses on his eyes and did not take them away. He found that his hand was still in the dog’s ruff, and that he had been holding it hard enough to hurt, and that the dog had let him.
They brought her along the shore twenty minutes later.
There was nowhere else to bring her. The line out to the river began at the rock. Fraser had re-cuffed her in front for the trail, which was what you did on rough ground if you did not want to carry a prisoner out with a broken face. Ellie’s cousin walked ahead, and Dhillon beside her with a hand on her upper arm, and Fraser behind. Back at the hut the big constable stood in the doorway with his arms folded, holding the scene, like a large man waiting for a bus he had been told might be some time.
She walked well on the shingle in her rubber boots, with her head up. Her hair had come half out of its tie and there was a black smudge of soot along her jaw, and the cuffs sat on her wrists in front of her as if she had been asked to hold something.
Thorsen had stood up when Fraser lifted his arm to say they were coming. He stood beside the rock now with the stick in one hand. Ellie stood on his right, and her aunt on his left. They did not come down to the shore. They waited where they were, as they had been told.
At thirty metres the dog got up.
He had been lying at Thorsen’s feet. He got up without hurry, the way he had got up on the gravel bar at the mouth of the creek with the rotor winding down, and stood with his nose lifted into the little air that was coming along the lake from the hut, and his whole body changed. Then he walked forward three paces, onto the stones in front of Thorsen, and turned side on, between Thorsen and the shore path, and lowered his head.
The sound he made was very low. It went on, and on, without a break for breath, like a motor.
Celia stopped.
Dhillon stopped with her, his hand on her arm. Ellie’s cousin stopped, and Fraser. For a moment nobody on the shore of Otter Lake moved, and the outlet ran loud below them, and the sound went on.
She looked at the dog. Not at Thorsen. Not at Ellie, who had found her out, or at Ellie’s aunt, or at the rock. She looked at the black dog with the white chest and the one blue eye, standing between her and the man she had run down a gravel bar to eight days ago, calling his name; and she went on looking at him.
“He was right to,” she said.
She said it quietly, and quite clearly, to the dog. Then she looked away, at the trees, and Dhillon’s hand moved on her arm, and they went on, round the rock, at a little distance from the dog, and in under the spruce, and the pink tape took them away down the hill.
Fraser stopped beside Thorsen. He had his notebook out still, and his pen, and he wrote something in it, and looked at his watch, and wrote that.
“Eleven-sixteen,” he said. “Unprompted. You heard it.”
“I heard it.”
“So did I.” Fraser shut the notebook. He looked at the dog, who had sat down on the stones, and then at Thorsen, and at the stick, and the boot. “You stayed at the rock.”
“You told me to.”
“Yes,” Fraser said. “I’ve told a lot of people. Not many of them stayed.” He put the notebook in his pocket. “Both cameras got all of it. Ellie’s cousin checked the lights. Rainy’s going to fly you out, all of you. Nobody touches that stove before Ident gets here. Paper that won’t burn in the rain doesn’t burn well in a stove either. And don’t say anything to Rainy. She doesn’t know anything, and I want it to stay that way until I’ve talked to her.”
He went away down the line after the others.
Rainy flew them out at noon.
She brought the Beaver in to the beach below the rock and stood in the water to her knees holding it while they got in, Ellie in the right seat and her aunt behind with her handbag on her knees, and Thorsen in the back with the dog between his boots. She did not say anything. Her paperback was floating face down off the end of the beach. Nobody mentioned it.
She took them out through a gap in the cloud that he could not see until they were in it, and the valley of Mink Creek opened out beneath them with the creek white at the bottom, going down.
Halfway down the valley Rainy keyed the intercom. He heard it come on in his headset, a little hiss, and her breath, about to say something. Then it went off again.
She reached back over the seat without looking round, the way you reach for something on the back seat of a car, and put her hand on the dog’s head, and left it there. Then she took it back and flew the aeroplane.
The creek mouth came up under them: the brown water, the jam, the two boats in the eddy under the willows, and four small figures on the line coming down out of the trees towards them. On the far side of the creek, the landing. The float, and the freight cache under its tarp, and the long grey gravel bar.
The dog had stood up between his boots with his front feet on Thorsen’s knee to look out of the window. He looked down at it for as long as it was there. Then it went away under the wing, and he lay down again on the floor of the aeroplane, on Thorsen’s feet, and went to sleep.
There was nobody on the bar. For the first time since the boats began running in May, there was nobody waiting there at all.