The dog was lying on the scarf.
He was there when Ellie’s boat came round the bend at half past eight on Friday morning, a black shape on the pale bar with his head up, and he stood when the engine dropped to idle, and backed off to the willows as they came in to the float, and sat. Beside the green container a mud-coloured Polaris side-by-side was parked, and a young man in a Caldera hoodie sat on its roll bar eating a granola bar.
“Mr. Thorsen,” Tanner Kovac said. “Holy. You actually came.”
“I said I would.”
“People say.” Tanner jumped down. He looked past Thorsen at the willows. “He let you near him? Ellie said on the radio. I didn’t believe her.”
“He let the hat near him.”
Tanner looked at the grey cap in Thorsen’s hand for a second too long, and turned round and started loading Ellie’s cooler into the cargo box.
Ellie stood on the float with her line in her hand. “He’ll follow you up,” she said. “Don’t call him. Don’t feed him with your fingers. Tell Bernie I want my thermos back. And don’t go in the creek. Nobody listened last year either.”
The trail went up the east bank of Mink Creek through spruce and cottonwood, two ruts of grey mud with roots across them like the rungs of a ladder, and the Polaris went up it at a brisk walk, rocking and slithering. The creek was a roar below them through the trees, louder than the engine: grey-green water in standing waves, with no slack anywhere.
The dog came. He did not come close. He came out of the willows when the machine started and went up the trail ahead of them at a trot, thirty metres in front, and when the Polaris stopped at a washout he stopped, and sat, and looked back.
“He used to ride in the back,” Tanner said. “On the freight. Feet on the side like a figurehead.”
“On the car deck,” Thorsen said. “You told the pilot you never met him.”
Tanner drove for a while. “Anybody in town asks about Sindre, we didn’t know him. That’s what the company lawyer told us. Rainy talks to everybody.” He swung them round a root. “You heard about the sump?”
“A little.”
Mitch Doyle’s sump, Tanner said, had gone over into a creek on the ridge in July, and Sindre had photographed it and written it in the camp book, and Mitch had gone mental and then fixed it. Mitch was also the driller who had thrown the rock, and the dog growled at him now. “But it wasn’t just the sump. He had two things on. The sump and some pad. He wouldn’t say what pad, not till he’d talked to the person. The drillers used to joke there’s a pad up the Goat side they don’t put on the board.”
“Who did he talk to?”
“Dr. Oakes. Lunch, on the Sunday. She said, Let me deal with it. Tomorrow.” He did a fair Yorkshire voice, and did not seem to enjoy it. “She told Dhillon it was the sump. Maybe it was. There wasn’t a tomorrow. Not for him.”
“And that morning?”
“Sleeping in, I thought. I was on wood.” Tanner kept his eyes on the trail. “He came in at lunch, and took the machine down for Gordie’s freight, with his rod. And he didn’t come up for supper.”
Ahead of them the dog had stopped in the middle of the trail with his head up, listening to something in the creek. Then he went on.
Kestrel Ridge camp stood on a bench above the creek, where the valley opened out round a long lake the colour of milky jade. Twenty sleep shacks in two rows, plywood to shoulder height and canvas above; a long white dome that was the cook tent; a plywood drying room with the generator thumping behind it; a core shack. Round all of it ran two strands of white electric tape on fibreglass posts, ticking faintly. On the lakeshore was a float dock, and on a gravel pad above it a red-and-white helicopter sat with its blades tied down.
Doug Rennick met him at the gap in the fence with a clipboard and a manila envelope. He was fifty-eight, grey-bearded, in a quilted vest, with the composure of a man who has been surprised by nothing on three continents.
“Couple of rules, and I give them to everybody. That fence is live. Don’t touch it. You walk anywhere outside it, you carry spray and you tell me where you’re going. You don’t feed the dog.”
“Ellie said the same.”
“Ellie and I agree about the dog. It’s the only thing.” Rennick looked at the dog, sitting outside the fence thirty metres off, watching the cook tent. “He came back to us once, in August. Three days after. Wouldn’t let anybody near except Ellie. Then he went.” He held out the envelope. “The port director in Nesvik does our community stuff. He put this together for the town. Every flight on the day. We’ve nothing to hide, Mr. Thorsen, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but I’ll ask you one thing. These are people who lost a friend. Go easy.”
“I always go easy.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
His tent was at the end of the second row, nearest the cook tent: a cot, a drum stove, a shelf. He read the envelope on the cot with his jacket still on.
Caldera’s chronology was two pages long and written in the voice of a company that had been advised by a lawyer to feel deeply. Departed camp at approximately 13:10 by side-by-side to collect freight, taking his fishing rod. RCMP notified at 19:42. The camp extends its deepest sympathies. The sign-out board was a photograph of a whiteboard, and against SINDRE someone had written Landing — freight and nothing in the other column, and nobody had rubbed it out.
Dhillon had already told him what the flight ticket left out. He read it anyway: a photocopy of a printed form with boxes along the top, filled in by hand in neat block capitals.
COASTAL RIDGE HELICOPTERS LTD. — DAILY FLIGHT TICKET. 16 AUG 26. AS350. PILOT: C. BATT. CLIENT: CALDERA NORTH — KESTREL RIDGE.
0735 — Daily insp., fuel. Camp. 0740 – 0812 — Camp to KR-22. Sling, drill rods. 2 pax (Doyle, Pelletier). 0820 – 0905 — Camp to KR-22. Sling, pump and hose. 0915 – 1010 — Recon, ridge traverse. 1 pax (Oakes). 1020 – 1105 — Camp to KR-22. Sling, fuel x2. 1115 – 1200 — KR-22 to Camp. 2 pax. 1200 – 1320 — Standby. 1320 – 1335 — Camp to KR-27 and return. Drop 1 pax (Oakes) 1330. Inspection. 1400 – 1410 — Camp to MC-3 and return. Drop 1 pax (Harker) 1405. Sampling. 1410 – 1550 — Standby. Camp. 1550 – 1600 — Camp to KR-27 and return. P/u 1 pax (Oakes) 1555. 1635 – 1645 — Camp to MC-3 and return. P/u 1 pax (Harker) 1640. 1700 — Fuel. 1915 – 2150 — SAR. Mink Ck mouth, Dalgleish R. 2 pax (Rennick, Kovac).
He read it three times. Fourteen lines, in pilots’ shorthand, pax for passengers. A working Sunday for a helicopter at a drill camp: rods, a pump, fuel, a geologist looking at a ridge in the morning and at a pad in the afternoon, the consultant to one of her water stations and back, and in the evening, too late, the search. The afternoon came down to two people. The geologist, Dr. Oakes, set down on her pad at half past one and picked up at five to four. Dr. Harker, the water consultant, dropped at the top water station at five past two and picked up there at twenty to five.
He took a pen out of his shirt pocket and drew a line under the morning.
The message at a quarter past seven. Ingrid had read it to him in April: working on his day off, flying to a drill rig, extra money. Twenty-five minutes later, by this ticket, the helicopter had taken two drillers to a pad called KR-22, and gone back and forth to it all morning. Nowhere on the page was a camp helper on his day off who had been told he was flying to a drill rig to earn some extra money.
Either a boy of twenty-two had been excited about a job he never went to, and had not said so to his grandmother at lunchtime when he had written to her again, or the camp had flown him somewhere that morning and left him off its paperwork. Somebody up there had decided what this page would say about the morning. Rennick ran the camp. Batt, the pilot, had signed it.
When he came out a woman of about forty was standing by the corner of the core shack with a phone in her hand, looking at the snow on the far side of the lake. She was small, sunburnt across the nose, in a fleece with the sleeves pushed up and a hand lens on a cord round her neck. She saw him, and went still.
“You’re the detective,” Imogen Oakes said. “I’ve got core to log.” And went inside.
The cook tent was warm and smelled of bread.
There were long tables with oilcloth, a coffee urn the size of a hot-water tank, and behind a steel counter at the back a woman of sixty with her grey hair up in a bandana rolling pastry with a wine bottle. The cook from Quebec, from the letters.
“Enfin,” she said. “The Norwegian’s cousin. Sit. You haven’t eaten. Nobody who comes up that trail has eaten.” She put a bowl of soup in front of him and a slab of bread. “Bernie Lavoie. I cook, I do the first aid, I am the mother of everybody here whether they like it or not. Mostly not. He came up with you? The dog?”
“He’s outside the fence.”
“Pauvre bête.” She looked out through the plastic window at the black shape sitting in the moss. “He used to lie there, under the counter, on my feet, while Sindre washed up. Never a sound.” She turned the pastry a quarter turn and rolled again. “I put out a plate tonight. Don’t tell Doug.”
“Was everybody here that Sunday?”
“Everybody but Paige.” Bernie did not ask which Sunday. “She went out on the floatplane the Friday, four days off. She was going on the river with her cousins, she said. Lucky girl.” The rolling pin stopped. “The rest of us, we were all here.”
Two men came in in coveralls stiff with grey mud, smelling of diesel and hydraulic oil, and sat down at the far end without taking off their hard hats. The bigger one had a red beard and a face that looked as if it had been left out in the weather; he glanced at Thorsen once, hard, and then away. His helper was thin and dark, with a French paperback in the leg pocket of his coveralls, and said something to Bernie in a French so fast and flat that Thorsen caught only café and tabarnak, and Bernie answered him in the same and pointed at the urn with the rolling pin.
“Mitch,” Bernie said, without looking round. “This is Mr. Thorsen. Be nice.”
“I’m always nice,” said Mitch Doyle, to his coffee.
“You are nice like a bear is nice,” Bernie said. “From far away.”
The groceries came in on Saturday at ten, on a yellow Beaver floatplane, and Thorsen was on the dock with Bernie’s hand cart, and Tanner, who had been told to carry, when it taxied in. Corey Batt, the helicopter pilot, leaned on a dock post with a coffee: forty-four, tanned, curly-haired, with the easy grin of a man who has never had to work at being liked.
The dog was on the bank above the dock, in the moss. He had come inside the fence in the night, and nobody knew how. When Batt ran the helicopter up at seven for a test, with the turbine screaming, the dog had gone off to the far end of the fence and lain flat with his ears back until it stopped. In Sindre’s letters he had lain down on the pad and the pilot had had to shout at him.
“He’s been like that since the search,” Tanner said, when Thorsen asked. “Four days of helicopters, low over the creek, all day, ours and the Coast Guard’s and the military one out of Comox. He won’t go near the pad now. Can’t stand the noise.” He watched the Beaver come round. “Can’t say I liked it much myself.”
The pilot’s door opened and a woman in a ball cap leaned out and shouted, “Morning, Bern. I’ve got your lettuces and your lady,” and threw Tanner a line. Thorsen knew the cap and the voice. She was the woman who had leaned on the Nesvik Air van on the car deck in Nesvik and asked Tanner about the Norwegian kid.
“Rainy,” Tanner said, catching the line, without being asked. “She flies everybody.”
Her passenger climbed down onto the float. She was in Caldera yellow rain gear over a fleece, with a pack on her back and two hard-sided coolers that she handed down to Batt one at a time, and she was laughing at something the pilot had said.
“Mr. Thorsen,” said Celia Harker. “You made it up the river. Gordie says you’re a natural, apart from the knots.”
“Gordie’s generous.”
“Gordie’s never been generous in his life. He must like you.” She looked at Bernie’s cart. “Are those eggs mine or yours, Bern? I’ve got a cooler of ice packs here that wants the shade.”
The weather came down at three.
The far shore of the lake went grey, then the near shore, and then the cloud was in the tops of the spruce. Celia and Batt had been out round her stations since eleven, and had come back in at half past two, low, under it.
At four Rainy came up on the camp radio from somewhere a long way off, crackling.
“Kestrel, Nesvik Air. I’m not coming in there, Doug. I can’t see my own floats. Tell Celia I’m sorry. First thing tomorrow if it lifts.”
“Story of my life,” Celia said, and went to borrow a sleeping bag from Rennick.
At supper she sat with Oakes and talked about rock. She was good at everything Thorsen saw her do: she got Doyle to talk about his daughter’s hockey, and gave Bernie’s tourtière the kind of praise that is specific enough to be believed.
Thorsen went to bed at eleven, in daylight the colour of dishwater, and lay listening to the generator and the rain on the canvas.
The dog woke him.
He came awake all at once, as he had learned to on night shifts, into a grey half-dark full of noise. A dog barking, close, outside the fence, high and frantic, over and over, the barks running into each other. Then a crash. Then a sound he had never heard before and knew at once: a deep coughing huff, like a man blowing into a bottle, very close, on the other side of a sheet of canvas.
He was out of the tent before he had thought about it, in long johns and socks. The mud took his left foot to the ankle, cold as iron.
The cook tent was ten metres away. Its door was open, the plastic window beside it pushed in, and something was moving among the benches with a noise of breaking. He could see it through the doorway: a brown hump, a lot of loose fur, a head the size of a bucket going down into a bin. Not huge. Young. It looked almost like a big dog. Then it lifted its head with a sack of flour in its mouth, and shook the sack, and the flour went up in a cloud, and he saw the hump on its shoulders and the claws on the hand that held the bin down, and it was not like a dog at all.
“Allez! Allez! Va-t’en!”
Bernie came round the end of the cook tent in a nightdress and rubber boots, hammering a cast-iron frying pan with a steel ladle. The bear’s head came up out of the flour. It took one step towards her.
A man’s voice behind Thorsen: “Bernie. Back.”
Doyle came past Thorsen at a walk, in boxer shorts and a Carhartt jacket and nothing else, with a canister air horn in one fist and a pen launcher in the other. He did not run. He walked straight across the mud to the place between Bernie and the doorway, and stopped there, with his back to her and his face to the bear, and held the horn up over his head like a trophy and let it go.
The blast went off the far side of the lake and came back. The bear dropped the flour.
“Get back, Bern. Behind me. Everybody else stay in your fucking tents.” He did not turn his head. He screwed a cartridge onto the launcher with his thumb, the horn still up, and fired it at the ground two metres in front of the door, so that it went off between him and the bear and not behind it, which is how they teach it and how almost nobody does it. It went off with a bang like a shotgun and a flash. The bear swung its head, and Doyle took a step towards it, into the smoke, and roared at it. There were no words in it. It was the loudest sound Thorsen had ever heard a man make.
Thorsen had not been going anywhere himself. He was standing in the mud in his socks with nothing in his hands, and he had just understood that his bear spray was in the side pocket of his pack, on the shelf in his tent, where Rennick had told him it should never be.
Rennick came up behind them, dressed, with a shotgun held across his body, muzzle down, and did not raise it. Lights were coming on in the tents. At the end of the first row Thorsen saw Oakes’s tent door unzip a hand’s width, and a canister of bear spray come out through the gap, and nothing else.
The bear went backwards through the far wall of the cook tent, through the canvas, as though the canvas were not there.
The dog was through the fence. Thorsen saw him come under the bottom strand like a black streak and go round the end of the cook tent after the bear, barking, his voice gone high and cracked, and he understood with total clarity that the bear would turn and the dog would go in at it, and then there would be a dog with its back broken in the moss.
He went three strides in his socks across the gravel and the mud, and got a hand in the ruff as the dog went past the corner of the tent, and held on.
The dog did not stop. The dog weighed thirty kilos and was in no mood. Thorsen’s feet went out from under him in the mud and he sat down hard, and was dragged two metres on his backside through the wet, with both hands wound in the fur, saying no, no, Bamse, no, and held on.
Beyond the cook tent, through the slit in the canvas, the bear went across the bench at a heavy rolling gallop, low to the ground, through the fence like string, and the two strands of white tape snapped and whipped back, and it went into the grey and the spruce and was gone.
The dog stopped pulling. He stood over Thorsen, trembling, and barked twice more at the trees, and then stood with his sides heaving. Thorsen lay in the mud on his back with his hands in the ruff and looked up at the drizzle.
Doyle came across the gravel with the air horn and stood over them both. The dog’s lip went up off his teeth, and he growled, low and steady, straight at the man’s bare knees.
“Yeah,” Doyle said to him. “You and me both.” For a second his face was still the one he had turned on the bear, and Thorsen, flat on his back in the mud, did not like it. Then the red beard split, and he began to laugh, not unkindly, the laugh of a man who has been very frightened for a minute and a half and is no longer. “You all right, eh?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look fine.” He put out a hand, and hauled Thorsen up out of the mud with one pull, and kept clear of the dog. “Socks. Jesus. I’m going to tell my kid about you.”
The fence had been shorted. Rennick found it in ten minutes with a torch: a cottonwood branch down across both strands, grounding them on the wet moss. He looked at it with the shotgun under his arm, and said, “That’s on me,” and went to write it down.
Nobody had shot. Bernie said one thing to Doyle, in French, and patted his arm with the frying pan, and he went a dull red and went off to find his trousers. The rest of the camp came out now that it was safe to, Batt in unlaced boots from the pilot’s tent by the pad, Tanner with a pot lid, Oakes only when Bernie called her by name, with the spray still in her hand; when Doyle shouted across, “Imogen, you okay?” she answered Bernie. Celia came from the spare tent at the end of the first row in a fleece over a borrowed pair of camp sweatpants, and went straight to the cook tent, to Bernie, and from its doorway, across ten metres of mud, she looked at Thorsen, mud from the shoulders to the socks, and put her hand over her mouth.
“Oh, no. Are you all right?” she called. “You went after the dog?”
“The dog went after the bear.”
“Well, he would.” She laughed shakily. “He’s an idiot. He’s a brave idiot.” Then she went in with Bernie, and the two of them stood among the benches with a torch in the flour, counting what was left.
The dog was lying in the doorway of Thorsen’s tent, and stayed there, and watched them all go back to bed.
At half past two Bernie had the urn going again in the wreck of the cook tent, with flour over everything like snow and the far wall flapping open on the grey. She made Thorsen a tea with three sugars in it without asking and put it in his hands, and he sat on the one bench that was still the right way up, in clean dry clothes, with the dog lying on his feet.
Bernie stood at the counter with her own mug and looked down at the dog.
“Bon,” she said. “Sindre used to sit there. That bench. Every night, last, with his tea, asking me the French for things. Poêle. Louche. Frying pan, ladle.” She drank. “Tonight I think, he would have liked that. The pan and the ladle.” She put her mug down and picked up a broom.
“Drink your tea,” she said. “Then go to bed. And tomorrow, Mr. Thorsen, you keep your spray where Doug tells you. I am too old to fight bears with a pan for policemen in socks.”