While there was still a signal, Thorsen sent Claire one word.
On.
It went. Then the signal went too, and Revell Island went down behind them into the haze.
The flats were forty kilometres of water that was not quite sea and not yet river, and at half past five in the morning they lay so flat and pale that the boat seemed to be running across the sky. Gordie ran them by the stakes, spruce poles with a rag of orange tape on top marking a channel that moved every spring, and on either side of the stakes there was a hand’s depth of water over sand. He ran straight over the silt line, and the hull went from a slap to a hiss in the length of the boat.
Ellie Bourque had been asleep in the cabin with her head on her duffel and her boots on the yellow case. She opened her eyes at the change in the sound and looked out at the colour of the water.
“Home,” she said, to nobody, and went back to sleep.
By the middle of the morning the river had become a country. It came down out of the mountains a kilometre wide and not deep anywhere, split round long islands of grey gravel and driftwood and young willow, and Gordie read the channels under his breath. Where the surface was smooth as oil the water was deep. Where it boiled, he said, you went somewhere else.
They passed the hot springs a little after ten: a plank boardwalk going up into the trees from a gravel landing, steam rising out of the forest into the cold air.
“That’s where I turned round,” Gordie said, without looking at it. “Last August. According to me.”
An hour above the springs, on the right bank, a straight line ran up the mountainside through the forest from the water to the snow, without a bend in it, as though somebody had taken a razor to the trees. Ellie came out with a thermos and handed Thorsen the lid of it full of coffee and said that was the border, and the river didn’t notice it. Above the line the glacier came down to the water, a wall of broken ice a kilometre wide between two black ridges, blue in its cracks like a gas flame, and the air off it came across the river as cold as a cellar.
While they were looking at it a long low aluminium freighter went past them upriver with a load of blue fuel drums under a net amidships and three men aboard. The one at the tiller was young and bareheaded and stood up to drive, and he grinned at Ellie as he went by and opened the throttle.
“My cousin,” Ellie said. “Hauls Caldera’s diesel in summer and counts goats for us in winter. Old Albert Kane’s with him, and a kid from Terrace. Albert’s not wearing his jacket. Albert’s never worn his jacket.”
It happened at twenty to eight in the evening, a long way above the glacier, on a bend Gordie said he had run three days before.
The river came round to the left under a high cutbank of grey silt, and the deep fast water ran along the outside of the bend, under the bank. Ellie’s cousin’s freighter was four hundred metres ahead, running the outside, fast.
Thorsen saw the tree before he understood it. A big spruce lying out from the foot of the cutbank, its root ball still on the bank under a raw scar of fresh silt, its crown out in the main current with the branches combing the surface.
The cousin saw it late. The freighter swerved, and for a second she was nearly clear, and then her hull hit the trunk broadside a metre from the crown and stopped, and the whole weight of the river came onto her upstream side. She went over slowly and then all at once. The upstream gunwale went down and the grey water came over it in a sheet, and the drums broke loose and went over the side one after another, and the men went with them.
Gordie had the throttle back before anybody spoke. Ellie was out of the cabin before the hull settled.
She did not run. She went forward along the side deck fast and low with one hand on the rail, and at the bow she came up with the coiled bow line in one hand and the long aluminium pike pole from its clips in the other.
“Gordie. Below the tree. Hold her nose-up twenty metres off the crown, not closer. Don’t let me near the branches.” Her voice was not loud. It carried. “Thorsen. Make that fast. Bow cleat.”
He knew what to do with a cleat. He had known since he was nine, with an old fisherman’s big hands over his on the dock at the Point. Round the base, across the top, a twist and over. His hands were cold and wet and the boat was moving under him, and the line went across when it should have gone round, and he tried again and made it worse, and what he looked down at was not a knot. It was a tangle on a cleat, and the men in the river were coming.
Ellie pulled it off in one movement, took a turn, crossed it, dropped a hitch on the horn with a flick of her wrist, and was coiling the rest of the line in big loose loops across her left hand before he had taken his own hands away.
The freighter was pinned against the tree on her side with the grey water piling up white against her bottom. Ellie’s cousin was still with her, on his knees on her upturned side with both arms round the trunk. The other two were gone.
Then they came out through the crown of the tree. First an orange life jacket bobbing up below the branches with a white face in the top of it: the kid. Then, lower in the water, no orange, only a grey head going under and coming up. Albert Kane. Both coming down on Gordie’s bow at the speed of a man running.
“The kid first,” Ellie said, and to Gordie, “hold,” and threw.
The coil went out over the water in a long flat loop and landed across the kid’s shoulders a metre upstream of him, exactly where he would be a second later. He got an arm over it and then a hand round it, and the current swung him on the end of it in an arc towards the side of the boat.
She had dropped the line and picked up the pole. Albert went past the bow two metres off, face down, then face up. She leaned out over the gunwale with one foot hooked under the rail, and the hook went into the back of his collar and caught, and she braced against the bending pole with her whole small body and walked him along the hull towards the stern, where the freeboard was lowest, like a heavy fish to the net.
The kid had fetched up against the side amidships, holding the line with both hands. Thorsen got down on his knees and reached over and took him by the shoulder straps of the life jacket and pulled.
The boat heeled. The whole side went down under him towards the river, and grey water slopped in over the gunwale onto his knees, and the kid came up a few centimetres and went down again.
“No,” Ellie said. “You’re a hundred kilos. Go and be a hundred kilos on the other side.”
He went. He sat on the far gunwale with his boots hooked under the rail and leaned out backwards over the river until he could feel the cold coming up off the water onto the back of his neck, and the boat came up level under him. That was all he was. Weight.
Ellie did not try to lift the kid. She took the straps as Thorsen had, and pushed him straight down into the water a full arm’s length, and on the rebound, as the jacket brought him up fast, she threw herself backwards, and the kid came out of the river to the waist and over the gunwale on his stomach in a rush of grey water and lay on the deck coughing. She had him up on his knees in a second, shaking so hard his teeth were audible across the boat, and the two of them got hold of Albert, who was big and old and blue at the lips and not helping. They got his arms over the gunwale and could not get the rest.
Then Gordie, who had put the boat into the slack below a bar and left her at idle, came down the side deck in three strides and got a fist in the back of Albert’s belt and said “Now,” and Albert Kane came over the side all at once like a sack of wet sand and lay in the bilge beside the kid, and began, very slowly, to shake.
The freighter broke off the tree with a long screech of aluminium and came down the current upside down with Ellie’s cousin spread flat on her hull. Gordie brought them alongside as gently as a man parking a car, and the cousin let go of his boat and came across on his belly, and Ellie and Gordie pulled him in while Thorsen sat on the far side and was a hundred kilos.
The freighter went on without him, turning slowly, with the blue drums bobbing away ahead of her like a string of beads.
“Thirty-two drums,” her cousin said from the deck, with the water running out of his hair. “Of Caldera’s diesel.”
“Going to Alaska without reporting,” said Ellie. She knelt and put two fingers on his neck. Her hands, Thorsen saw, had begun to shake now that there was nothing for them to do, and she put them under her arms and held them there. “Cabin. All of you. Clothes off. Gordie, turn the heater up till it smokes.”
They stripped the three of them to the skin and put them in every sleeping bag on the boat, and the windows ran with water on the inside. Ellie got the nursing station at the Landing on the satellite phone. Three adults, in the water eight minutes, maybe ten. One aged sixty-eight, no flotation, shivering hard. Two hours out.
Albert was the worst. He lay on the cabin bench with his eyes shut, shaking in long spasms, and his skin when Thorsen touched it was the temperature of a fish.
“Shirt off,” Ellie said. “Get in with him. Chest to his back. Don’t rub him. You’re good at being large.”
So Thorsen lay on the narrow bench in a sleeping bag that smelled of dog food and diesel, with his bare chest against the old man’s cold back and his arms round him, and Albert Kane shook against him like a dog that has been in a lake. After a long while, without opening his eyes, Albert spoke in a voice like a rusty gate.
“Third time in the river. Still doesn’t want me.” A shudder went through him and his teeth went. “First time I was fourteen. Under a sweeper. You know what I learned?”
“No.”
“Get over the log. Never under. Belly on it and kick your feet up behind you.” He breathed. “Your legs go under, it keeps you. Nobody listens to that. You listen to it.”
On the floor, wrapped in a bag with a mug of Gordie’s coffee, Ellie’s cousin looked up at her.
“Mom wanted me to drive for the fish people,” he said. “I said the fish people don’t pay. She said the fish people don’t drown you.” He held up a hand. “Don’t.”
“I’m saving it,” Ellie said. “For Christmas.”
They came into Dalgleish Landing at a quarter to ten in the long blue dusk.
The village stood along the top of a high bank: frame houses and log houses, a white church, a store with a fuel pump. Below it a long float lay in the eddy, and at the top of the ramp, on a post, stood a grey metal box with a hood over it. A pickup had backed down the ramp with its headlights on and a nurse in scrubs standing in the lights with blankets. They got Albert into the bed of the truck on a mattress and Ellie’s cousin and the kid into the cab, and half the village had come down to watch. A woman in a parka pushed through, took one look at her son in the cab, and hit him on the shoulder through the open window, hard, twice, and then put her face against the glass. The truck went up the bank with its lights swinging across the houses.
Gordie had not got off the boat.
He stood in the stern among the freight with his hands in his float-coat pockets, looking up at the grey box. Then he took his hands out, climbed onto the float, and walked up the ramp to it the way a man walks up to a door he has walked past for thirty years. He lifted the hood and took out the handset on its steel cord.
“Yeah. Good evening. I’m calling to report an arrival by boat at Dalgleish Landing.” A pause. “Marsh. Gordon Marsh.” A longer one. “Three persons. Me and a passenger, both US citizens, and Ellie Bourque, she’s from here. And, ma’am, three more persons. Canadian. I’m not sure how you want these. They came off a freighter that swamped below here, and I fished them out of the river.”
Thorsen gave a polite woman a very long way away his date of birth and an address with Ruth Bourque’s name in it. Two weeks, perhaps more. A family matter.
Gordie hung up the handset and closed the hood and stood with his hand flat on top of the box. Two hundred metres along the bank, past the store, a light was on in the window of a low prefabricated building with a blue roof and a flag outside it, hanging limp.
“Mountie’s still up,” Ellie said.
“Mountie’s got three wet men and a nurse tonight.” Gordie took his hand off the box. “I’ll go in properly. Across a table. Not at ten at night with the river in my boots.”
He came back down the ramp past them and stopped on the float and looked at Thorsen.
“You were weight.”
“I was weight.”
“Good weight,” said Gordie, and climbed back into his boat.
The clock over Ruth’s stove said seven. Thorsen’s watch said six. Somewhere above the hot springs the river had carried him into British Columbia and an hour later in the day, and he had not felt it go.
“Fix that,” Ruth said, putting a plate in front of him, “or you’ll be an hour late for everything, like the police.”
She was eighty-two, small and square, in a man’s cardigan with the elbows gone, and she had looked at him on her doorstep the night before, all of him, like a second-hand stove she was thinking of buying, and said, “You’ll do,” and given him a towel. Her kitchen had a woodstove and a radio reading out who was flying where, and a long window over the sink that looked down on the float and the grey box on its post. The plate had two eggs on it and a slab of fried bannock. She stood by the stove with her mug and did not sit.
The dog had come to the dump at the end of August, she said. You could count him: every rib, and that blue eye, so you knew which one he was. Everybody tried to catch him. The boys went down with a rope. Somebody’s uncle went down with a moose leg, and the dog took the leg and the uncle came home. Ruth had not tried. She had put food on the ground and gone home, every day: fish heads in the fall, then the dry stuff from the store, twenty kilos at a time, on her pension.
“Why?”
“Somebody had to.” She looked at him as though he were slow. “It went to minus thirty-eight in January. I’d go down in the dark with the bag on the sled and he’d be lying on the burn pile, where it was warm from underneath. Never once let me touch him. Then the first boat came up from your side in May, and he was gone the next morning. Ellie says he’s on the bar at the creek mouth. Where the boy used to bring the freight.”
“Waiting.”
“He’s a dog. He’s sitting where the food used to come from.” She drank her coffee. “Don’t make it a song.”
The RCMP office had two desks, a coffee machine, a map of the Dalgleish on the wall from the border to the canyon, and a holding cell with its door open and a bicycle in it. The bicycle, Corporal Dhillon said, belonged to his constable, who was away on a course.
He was thirty-three, slim and neat, in a navy fleece with the sleeves pushed up, two years into a posting six hundred kilometres from the nearest traffic light. He had a file out on the desk before Thorsen came in, and he did not open it.
“I’ve had letters from Norway. I’ve had the boy’s messages, translated, and I’ve read them a good many times. I’m not offended that she sent you.” He put his hand on the file. “But the coroner’s closed it. Search and rescue flew four days. I walked that bar myself with the river still coming up.”
“He wrote at a quarter past seven that he was flying to a drill rig.”
“I asked. Mr. Rennick told me the boy was offered a day carrying lines on a drill move and then taken off it. Enough hands, and it was his day off.” The colour had come up in his face. “The boy isn’t on the flight ticket. Caldera put it in a press pack. Five people told me separately that he hung about camp and went down to the landing after lunch with his rod.”
“Five people telling you the same thing is either the truth or a meeting.”
Dhillon looked at him. “I heard that one at Depot, in training. Week three. I took them apart one at a time. Same answers, different words.”
Thorsen let that stand. It was the same morning he had found his watch an hour wrong, and he had not yet thought about what else might be. He told Dhillon what was coming. Gordie Marsh was going to amend his statement. He had gone up to the creek landing with paying passengers and a parcel from Norway, about half past one, going by the family’s video, and the boy had met the freight and was alive and waving when Gordie left, a bit after two. Gordie had reported at the box last night for the first time in his life.
“Border Services will be thrilled.” Dhillon wrote it down. “So the boy goes down after lunch for freight, Marsh brings it, the boy’s alive at two, and the river’s in flood.” He looked up. “Do you hear anything in that except a river?”
It was a fair question. “No.”
“There was the second message. The two things.” He turned his pen over. “The camp says he’d written up a drillers’ sump in July. It overflowed into a creek and the driller was annoyed with him.” He hesitated, for the first time. “That’s not nothing. But it’s not a reason anybody goes in a river. You’re going up to the camp?”
“Friday. Rennick’s sending the side-by-side down for me. Caldera has nothing to hide.”
“Caldera has a press officer.” He held the door. “If something happens to you up there, it’s me who comes, in a boat, on my own. Tell me before you do anything clever.”
“After.”
“Before,” said Dhillon, and shut the door.
Ellie spent Wednesday on the ridges with her cameras and came back after dark with snow in her braid. On Thursday morning she took him up to the creek mouth in the Guardian boat, a welded aluminium jet boat smaller than Gordie’s with a cooler strapped down in the bow, and drove it standing up, and talked about the river the way other people talk about a relative who drinks.
Sweepers on the outside of every bend: he had seen what one did. The water was the colour of wet cement and it hissed on the hull like sand poured on a tin roof, and it was sand, rock ground so fine by the ice that it never settled. Mink Creek was four or five degrees; it came out from under a glacier. She looked at him sideways.
“Don’t go in Mink Creek.”
“If you ever have to cross one of these side creeks on foot,” she said, “and you won’t, you do it first thing in the morning. They come up all day as the ice melts and go down all night. Dawn’s lowest. At four in the afternoon a creek you could walk across at breakfast will take your legs away.”
She said it like the safety card on an aircraft, and he remembered it the way you remember the safety card.
Eleven kilometres above the village the canyon came in sight round a bend, a dark notch in the right bank with Mink Creek pouring out of it in a grey-green tongue that ran beside the brown river for two hundred metres before the brown swallowed it. Ellie throttled back and pointed with one hand off the wheel. The camp was five kilometres up on its bench, and the water stations went up the creek in order: MC-1 just round the first bend of the canyon, MC-2 at a hut on Otter Lake behind the west ridge, MC-3 at the top, behind the ridge above camp, where the creek came out from under the ice.
She swung her arm to the west, to a hanging valley high above the water with snow still in its gullies.
“Goat Creek. It feeds Otter Lake, and sockeye rear in Otter Lake. Everything in that basin, nobody drills, nobody builds, nobody so much as parks a helicopter. It’s in the agreement.”
The Guardians’ cameras had come out of the snow last week, she said: trail cameras up the creek on motion, two on the ridges taking a frame a minute for the goat count. Anything the software took for a person went into a sealed folder that only the council could open.
“Our land, our rules about who looks at who.” She eased the throttle. “I’m three weeks behind on the goats. I’ll get to August.”
“Gordie said you sample the water.”
“Alongside the company. It’s normal. Every river that crosses that border, there’s somebody from your side and somebody from the province and somebody from the Nation, all dipping bottles in the same water and sending them to different labs.” She shrugged. “Glacier rivers make it worse. A morning bottle and an afternoon bottle off the same rock can be miles apart. Pick your hour, pick your filter, and a creek’ll tell you nearly anything. So you want three people’s bottles.”
“Sindre wrote home that he helped the water lady.”
“Could be anyone, the water lady. The consultant. Her techs. Paige Dolan, mostly.” She turned them in towards the bank. “He liked it better than the woodpile.”
The bar ran out wide and pale from the east side of the mouth, with driftwood piled along the top of it taller than a man. Across the creek mouth itself the floods of other years had stacked a jam of grey trunks to a bar in mid-stream, and the creek went under the jam with a sound like breath. A float was chained in the eddy below. At the back of the bar, where the willows began, stood a green steel container with CALDERA NORTH stencilled down its side, and two wheel-ruts of grey mud going up into the trees beside it, and a sign on a post. KESTREL RIDGE PROJECT — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He had seen it before, on a girl’s phone on the steps of a hall.
Ellie brought them in to the float without seeming to steer, and made fast, and he got off after her with the care of a man who has recently been near a river.
Nothing moved on the bar.
She took the cooler and a long pole with a bottle clamped to its end down to the edge of the creek. “Stand there and look like furniture.” He stood. She waded in to her knees and leaned out with the pole, and he watched her rinse the bottle three times downstream of herself, and fill it, and tip two drops into it from a small amber dropper bottle out of her vest pocket, and cap it, and write on the label with the pen cap in her teeth.
“Nitric,” she said, when she saw where he was looking. “Keeps the metals in the water till the lab gets it. Every kit on this river’s got one of those, the Guardians’ too.”
He had carried the cap upriver in its freezer bag, because some police habit told him that if it was going to mean anything to anybody, it should mean it as little changed as possible. He took it out of the bag now and held it.
Ellie came back up the gravel with the bottle in the cooler, and stopped, and looked past him at the willows.
“There,” she said softly.
The dog came out at the back of the bar, beside the container, and stood. Black, with a white chest. Big in the shoulder, narrow in the flank, a husky’s thick ruff and a Labrador’s head. Thinner than the print on Marj’s refrigerator. One eye brown, and the left, even at forty metres, pale as ice.
He did not come to Thorsen. He came to Ellie. He came down the gravel at a low trot with his head down and his tail going slowly, the whole back half of him going with it, and pushed his head against her knees, and she put the cooler down and knelt on the stones and took his face in both hands and said something to him that was not in English and not meant for anybody else. He leaned on her. She held him.
Then his head came up, and his nose went up, and he looked at Thorsen. Not at Thorsen. At his hand.
He came across the gravel slowly, one step and stop, one step and stop, with his head stretched out low and his nose working. Thorsen stood like furniture. He held the cap a little way out from his body, at the height of his own knee, and the dog came the last two metres almost on his belly and put his nose into the grey wool and breathed in.
He breathed it for a long time. His sides went in and out. Then he made a sound Thorsen had never heard a dog make, not a whine and not a bark, something low and broken in the chest, like a man clearing his throat who cannot. And he lay down on the stones with his chin on Thorsen’s boot and his nose in the cap, and closed his eyes.
Ellie had not moved.
“He’s never done that,” she said. “Not with anybody. Not with me.”
“It’s not me. It’s the hat.”
“I know it’s the hat.” She picked up the cooler. Her voice was not quite steady, and she did something about that, briskly, with her sleeve. “Doesn’t matter. He’ll follow the hat. And the hat’s going up to camp on Friday, isn’t it?”
The dog would not get in the boat.
They tried for twenty minutes. Ellie put the cap on the deck, and the dog came to the edge of the float and lay down. When Thorsen stepped aboard, the dog looked at the boat, and at the river, and at the canyon mouth where Mink Creek came out loud and grey, and backed up the ramp onto the gravel and sat.
“Not today,” Ellie said. “Can’t say I blame him. Leave him something of yours. You smell of the hat now.”
Thorsen took off his scarf, a cheap fleece thing from a gas station in Bellingham, and laid it on the stones by the container. By the time he was back on the float the dog was lying on it, chin on his paws, watching the boat.
Ellie backed them out into the current. Thorsen looked back once: the pale bar, the sign, the green box, and beside it a black shape lying very still, with one eye that caught the light.
“He’s not waiting for me,” he said.
“No.” Ellie opened the throttle, and the hull lifted, and the hiss came up through the soles of his boots. “But you’re the first thing in nine months that’s come up that river smelling right.”