The core shack was the only building in camp with a bolt on the inside of the door.
Thorsen noticed it on Sunday morning, because the door was shut and he could hear the bolt go back when he knocked. It was a heavy barrel bolt, newer than the door, screwed on with long screws by somebody who had meant it. Imogen Oakes opened the door a hand’s width and looked at him, and past him, at the camp: the drillers’ tents, the drying room, the cook tent with Doyle’s helper up a ladder stitching its far wall with a sail needle and Bernie at the bottom of the ladder telling him he was doing it wrong.
Before that, at six, the whole camp had turned out in the cold to drag the cook tent’s benches into the open and scrape the flour off them, with sleeves pushed up and radios on every belt. “Channel two, people,” Rennick said, going down the line. “Repeater’s back up. Best money this outfit ever spent: the repeater on the ridge carries all over that mountain, every pad we’ve got, so I want every crew checking in by eight and no excuses.” Everybody’s arms were out and wet. Doyle’s big fingers, white-seamed from wire rope. A fish-hook scar like a comma in the web of Tanner’s thumb. Bernie’s oven burns, a ladder of them up one wrist. Old pale marks on the inside of Celia’s left forearm as she went past him with the driller’s helper on the other end of a bench. Oakes in gloves, saying nothing.
Rainy had come in at seven under a lifted grey sky and taken Celia Harker away, with her coolers, waving from the float. The dog had spent the morning round the back of the cook tent, where Bernie’s scraps went, and was lying in the doorway of Thorsen’s tent now, watching the shack.
“Ten minutes,” Oakes said. “Don’t touch anything.”
Inside it was cold and bright, with a smell of wet stone. Racks went the length of the building, and on the racks were shallow wooden boxes, hundreds of them, holding cylinders of rock as thick as a broom handle, laid in rows like loaves. A camera on a stand looked down at a box on a bench under a white light, and beside it was a laptop, a small whiteboard and a yellow instrument the size of a hair dryer, ticking to itself, slowly, like a clock with a bad heart.
“That’s what we do here,” she said. “Drill, pull it up, put it in boxes, look at it. Log it. Photograph every box, wet. Cut it in half, bag one half, send it to the lab. Keep the other half for ever.” She picked a length of core out of a box on the bench with both hands, carefully, as you would lift a baby that was asleep, and turned it under the light. It was buff, the colour of old bone, shot through with veins of violet, and in places there was something else in it: small grains of honey-brown, waxy, like brown sugar pressed into the stone.
“Fluorite,” she said, touching the violet with a fingernail. “Pretty. That’s where the fluoride in the creek comes from. That’s not why we’re here.” She touched the brown. “Bastnäsite. Rare-earth fluorocarbonate. Neodymium, praseodymium, the magnet metals. In those grades, at that width, in this part of the world, it’s not supposed to exist.”
She brought the core down beside the yellow instrument, and the ticking quickened to a patter.
“Thorium. Always comes with them. It’s how I found it: two summers on that ridge with this and a hammer. Nobody thought it was here. I did. I wrote the proposal, and they gave me three holes to shut me up. The third hole went through forty-two metres at three and a half per cent.”
He looked at it. He could see nothing in it but pale rock with brown specks, and he could see that she could see a great deal more.
“Magnets,” he said.
“That’s what the press release says. The people in Vancouver love that word.” She put the core back in its slot exactly, and the ticking slowed. “It’s the first thing I’ve ever found. I’m thirty-nine. Most geologists never find anything. They spend their whole lives drilling other people’s ideas.” She looked at the box. “I’m not going to apologise for it.”
“Nobody asked you to.”
“Everybody asks me to. Half of Nesvik. Half the village. Ellie’s mother wrote to me personally.” She turned and leaned against the bench and folded her arms. “You want to ask about Sindre.”
“Where were you that Sunday?”
“Up on the ridge with Corey for an hour in the morning, looking at outcrop. It’s on the ticket. After lunch he put me down on KR-27 for an inspection, and came back for me before four. That’s on the ticket too.” She said it at once.
“Two and a half hours on a pad alone.”
“It’s a big pad. I’m a geologist. I look at things.” She held his eye, and he let her, and she did not tell him what she had looked at. “I know what Tanner told you. Let me deal with it. He came to me at lunch about the sump. He wanted it reported to Caldera, properly, in writing, not just in the camp book. He thought Doug was sitting on it. I said I’d deal with it. I meant it. I wrote the email on Monday morning, while they were all out searching. I’ve got it if you want it. It’s very dull.”
“I’d like it.”
“Fine.” She looked at the laptop, and then at the door, and he followed her eyes to the bolt.
“New,” he said.
She was quiet. Then she said, in a different voice, flatter: “There was a camp in the Yukon. Years ago. I was twenty-six. A man came into my tent in the night who shouldn’t have.” She did not elaborate and he did not ask her to. “Since then I put a bolt on whatever door I’ve got. I don’t drink with drillers. I don’t walk round camp after dark without Bernie. I keep the spray by the bed. It’s not personal. Mitch Doyle’s never done a thing to me in his life except shout.” She unfolded her arms. “That’s ten minutes, Mr. Thorsen. I’ve got to ring my mother.”
He went. Behind him the bolt went across.
At eleven, from his tent, he heard her through two layers of canvas, because the only place in camp with a signal good enough for a video call was the bench outside the core shack.
“Hello, Mum. It’s Imogen. It’s Sunday.” A pause, and a thin voice from Sheffield. “No, Imogen. Your daughter. I’m in Canada. With the rocks.” A long pause. “No, Dad’s not here, Mum. Shall I tell you about the bear?”
She made it funny. She did Bernie with the frying pan and Doyle in his shorts, and this big American policeman sitting in the mud in his socks, and the thin voice in Sheffield laughed at that, really laughed.
When he came out of his tent half an hour later she was still on the bench with the laptop shut on her knees, looking at the lake.
“She laughed,” she said, without looking round. “She hasn’t laughed since Christmas. She thought it was my father in the mud.” She stood up and tucked the laptop under her arm. “Thank you for falling over, Mr. Thorsen. I’ll send you that email.”
Doug Rennick carved birds in the drying room.
He sat in the corner by the stove with a block of basswood and a short knife, among the hanging rows of wet rain gear: dozens of yellow jackets and bib pants on hooks, Caldera issue, all the same, dripping on the floor. Thorsen sat on the bench opposite, under the jackets.
“Thirty-one years of running camps,” Rennick said, without looking up. “One I didn’t send home.”
“The morning. The ticket has two drillers going up to KR-22 at twenty to eight. He told his grandmother he was flying to a drill rig.”
“He was meant to.” The knife went on, steady. “I took him off it. They had enough hands, it was his day off, and I’m the one who explains to the agency why a camp helper’s on a drill pad. The boy was disappointed, he’d wanted the cash. Imogen paid him something anyway, I think, out of her own pocket, because she’s soft. He hung around camp. After lunch he went down for Gordie’s freight with his rod.” He stopped the knife and looked at Thorsen over the top of his glasses, for the first time. “You know what happens after a death in a camp, Mr. Thorsen? The crew closes up like a fist, and you let it. You’d do anything for a crew, after enough years. Anything. You stand between them and everything that comes up that river. That’s the trouble with it.” He bent his head again.
Thorsen sat a moment longer under the dripping row of yellow jackets, and then went out, and the knife went on behind him, small and steady, like a clock.
In the evening Doyle played the guitar in the drying room, because the cook tent was still full of flour. The crew sat on the benches under the steaming gear with their socks on the stove rail and drank tea and one beer each, which was the camp rule. Doyle’s helper sat on the floor with his paperback. Tanner sat by the door with his knees up. Bernie came in with a tray of cookies and stayed.
The dog had come as far as the step and lain down on it, with the door open a crack and his nose in the gap.
“Look at him,” somebody said. “Butter wouldn’t melt.”
“You should’ve seen him in July,” Tanner said. “With the hook in his lip, at the landing. Sindre holding his head and me sitting on him and him going like a chainsaw, and the lady with the pliers going good boy, good boy while he tried to eat her. And then Sindre was so sorry he nearly cried, and the dog was so sorry he lay on Sindre’s feet all night.” Everybody laughed, Bernie too, and the dog put his chin down on the step as though he had heard it before.
Doyle played sitting on an upturned bucket, with the guitar on his knee and his big scarred fingers moving on the neck with a delicacy that did not belong to the rest of him. Country songs, mostly, old ones, and one in French that made the helper look up from his book and sing the chorus under his breath without seeming to know he was doing it. Doyle had a voice like gravel in a bucket, and he did not care, and it was good.
When he stopped he sat with his hand over the strings.
“She’s nine tomorrow,” he said, to nobody. “My kid. In Prince George.” He looked at the stove. “Victoria Day. Long weekend. Her mom’s taking her to the pool, and I’m on a drill on a mountain a day from a road. Third birthday in a row.” He put the guitar down against the wall. “I’m going to call her. If the internet holds. Then I’m going to bed.”
“That Sunday in August,” Thorsen said. “The afternoon. Where were you?”
The room went quiet. The helper’s page stopped turning.
Doyle looked at him. His face went slowly red under the beard.
“Asleep,” he said. “In my tent. My helper too. We’d had a couple at lunch, which we shouldn’t, and Doug knows it, and he wrote us up for it.” He stood up. “You want to know about the sump. Everybody wants to know about the sump. The kid wrote me up in July. My sump went over. I had grey water all down the ridge into a creek, and he walked up there with his phone and took twenty pictures and put it in the camp book with the time and the date, like a little cop.” He picked up the guitar by the neck. “And he was right. That’s what pissed me off. I hated him for a week. Then I fixed it, and he came up and looked at it and said, That is better, Mitch, in that voice, like a teacher. And I bought him a beer.” His voice had gone up. “That’s me and Sindre. That’s all of it. Write it down.”
He went out. The door banged behind him. The yellow jackets swayed on their hooks.
His helper looked at the door, and then at Thorsen, and said, mildly, in careful, unhurried English: “He bought him two beers. I was there. He’s not good at counting.” He went back to his book.
On Monday a big grey welded hull came up from the village with drill rods and diesel and a pallet of tinned tomatoes, and Tanner and the boatman swapped the drums at the landing with a hand truck and a lot of swearing. The dog lay on the scarf by the container and watched, and when the boat had gone Tanner sat on the edge of the cargo box with his hands between his knees.
“I came down for him,” he said. “When he didn’t come up for supper. Doug and me came down in the helicopter, quarter past seven.” He looked at the bar. “The machine was here. Right there. His rod was down there on the stones by the water, with the line still on it. His pack. Gordie’s parcel paper. The river was up to there.” He pointed at the wrack line of driftwood at the top of the bar, where the willows began. “The water was up to the logs. It was all brown. It was making this noise.” He stopped. “I shouted till I couldn’t. Doug was on the sat phone to the Mounties before I’d stopped shouting.”
The dog had lifted his head at Tanner’s voice.
“He was going to go home in September,” Tanner said. “He was going to finish his degree and come back next summer and do it properly. Fish. He wanted to work on fish, on the river. He said there’s more salmon in the Dalgleish than people in Norway.” He laughed, wetly. “That’s not even true. I looked it up.”
Thorsen put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and took it off.
“Show me the path up the creek,” he said. “To the lower station.”
It was not much of a path. It left the back of the bar by the container and went up the east side of Mink Creek, close above the water, through willow and alder, and in a hundred metres the canyon walls came in on either side, dark grey rock, wet, streaked with green, and the roar of the creek rose until he could not hear his own boots.
The path went round a bend in the canyon on a shelf of silt and gravel above the water, and the river and the bar and the landing went out of sight behind the rock.
He stopped and looked back. Rock, and the creek coming down past it. He could not see the bar. He could not hear the river.
Six hundred metres up, the canyon opened a little, and there was a flat place on the east bank, a cutbank of grey silt standing two metres above the water, undercut by the current so that its lip hung out over the creek like the edge of a roof. A rebar stake had been driven into the top of it, with a strip of pink flagging tape on it, faded nearly white, and MC-1 written on the flagging in black marker. Below the stake, bolted to a boulder at the water’s edge, was a staff gauge, a long white board marked off in red and black like a giant ruler, with the water halfway up it, foaming.
Above the station, on the east side, a narrower trail went up the slope through the alder, steeply, a game trail, beaten down to the soil, and he could see a scrap of orange somewhere high up through the leaves, which might have been a marker for the helicopter. On the far side of the creek the canyon wall went straight up.
He took his phone out and found the photograph Ingrid had forwarded him in April, the one from the twenty-second of July. Helping the water lady today. A yellow back, bent over water. A hood up. An amber bottle standing on a rock in the foreground, out of focus. He held the phone up against the creek. It was the boulder with the staff gauge on it. The same lichen, the same crack across its face like a hand. Whoever the water lady had been, she had stood where he was standing.
He put the phone away and went to the edge of the cutbank and looked down.
The water was a metre and a half below him, going past with a long tearing hiss. He could see stones the size of footballs in it, moving, rolling along the bottom. He could feel the cold coming up off it into his face. He put a foot on the lip of the silt, near the edge, and felt it give a little, the way wet sugar gives, and took his foot back.
In August, Tanner said, the creek had been up with a day’s rain and the afternoon melt, loud and brown, the gravel half under. The river’s flood was out at the mouth.
Anybody who came up here, he thought, came up here out of sight of the landing. Anybody who went in here was at the landing a minute later, and past it, and gone. And nobody standing on the bar with a fishing rod would have seen a thing.
Tanner was standing behind him on the path, back from the edge, with his hands in his hoodie pocket.
“He came up here all the time,” he said. “With the samplers. With Paige.” He was looking at the water. “He loved it up here. He said it was the loudest place he’d ever been.” He kicked a stone off the path into the creek, and it went without a sound. “Mitch came up here too. Couple of times, end of the summer, I saw him from the trail. With a bottle on a pole, like he was one of them.” He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. You don’t ask Mitch things.”
The radio on Tanner’s belt hissed and spoke.
“Kestrel camp, Kestrel camp, Guardian One.” Ellie’s voice, small and flat under the roar of the creek. “Tanner, is Thorsen with you?”
Tanner unclipped it. “Yeah. We’re at MC-1.”
“Get him to the landing tomorrow morning. Nine. Tell him to bring the dog.” A hiss. “Tell him I’ve been counting goats.”