Tanner was on wood on Tuesday, so it was Doyle who drove him down, because there were drill rods in the container from Monday’s boat and the drill above camp was waiting for them.
He drove the way he played the guitar, better than the rest of him suggested. The dog went down the trail ahead of them as before, but further ahead, and when the Polaris stopped at the washout he did not sit and look back. He went on round the bend and out of sight.
“Did you get through to her?” Thorsen said.
“Forty seconds. She was at the pool with her goggles on. Looked like a bug.” The beard moved. “She says she’s going to be a pilot. Not a driller. I said good.”
They came down the last steep pitch onto the bar. Doyle swung the machine round by the container and cut the engine, and in the quiet the creek came up loud.
“Last summer,” Thorsen said, “you were seen going down the creek with a bottle on a pole.”
Doyle sat with his hands on the wheel.
“Who says?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah. It matters.” The red was coming up his neck into the beard. “I drill holes. I don’t carry bottles for anybody. I’ve never been down that creek with anything but a fishing rod, and not often with that.” He got out. “You’ve had the sump, and you’ve had where was I that Sunday. Now it’s bottles. Go and make a story out of somebody else.” He dragged the container door open with one pull, and it banged back against the steel. “I’ve got rods to load.”
The dog had come back out of the willows at the far end of the bar. He watched Doyle load, and kept the whole length of the gravel between them.
Ellie had the laptop in a dry bag on the console of the Guardian boat, and she did not take it out until Doyle’s machine had gone back up the trail and the sound of it had gone into the roar of the creek. The boat radio was muttering beside it, camp traffic, Rennick on channel two asking the drill crew how many rods they wanted on the next boat.
“If I left that on all day I’d know what every man up there had for lunch,” Ellie said, and turned it down. “Sit down. On the cooler. Put your back to the camp.”
He sat. The dog lay on the float beside the boat with his chin on the planks, watching them both. It was a quarter to nine on Tuesday morning, bright and cold, with new snow on the tops from the weekend.
She opened the laptop on her knees and turned it to him.
“One of the goat cameras,” she said. “On the west ridge above Otter Lake, looking into the Goat Creek basin, where the nannies go to kid.” She touched the trackpad. “This is the sixteenth of August.”
A photograph filled the screen. A long slope of grey talus and green heather, falling away into a hanging valley. A creek at the bottom of it, a thread of white. Cloud above, but high; a ceiling of grey with light under it. Along the top of the frame a black strip of data in small white letters: the camera’s name, the temperature, the moon, the date and the time. 08/16/2026 07:50:00: ten to eight on the morning of the sixteenth.
She pressed the arrow key.
07:51:00. The same slope.
07:52:00.
In the upper left of the frame, against the grey under the cloud, there was a helicopter. Small, but there was no mistaking it: red and white, side on, nose down, going away into the basin. Beneath it, on a line so thin it was nearly invisible, hung a dark angular shape like a section of scaffolding, swinging a little out of true.
07:53:00. Slope. Cloud. Nothing.
Ellie went back to 07:52 and left it there, and they both looked at it.
“That’s a drill,” she said. “The mast and the frame of a portable rig. They fly them in in pieces. That’s the biggest piece. That’s the only red-and-white machine on this project. That’s Corey Batt. And that’s the Goat Creek basin, in the green on my map, where nobody drills, nobody builds, nobody so much as parks a helicopter.”
“The time.”
“Forty seconds fast. I check the clocks against a GPS when I service them. The software called it aircraft, not person, so it was never sealed. It’s been sitting with eleven thousand pictures of goats, waiting for me.”
He thought about the message at a quarter past seven, sent from the camp over the Starlink to a woman in a kitchen in Norway. A drill rig. Extra money.
“The ticket has Batt slinging rods and a pump to KR-22 all morning,” he said. “Rennick says he took the boy off the job.”
“That pad’s on the east ridge. Above camp. You can see it from the cook tent.” Ellie pointed at the frame, at the hanging valley and the white thread of creek. “This is west of Mink Creek. This is the green on my map.” She shut the laptop, slowly. “The ticket says east. The camp says the boy hung about till lunch. Five of them told Amrit Dhillon the same thing.”
She put the laptop back in the dry bag and rolled the top down three times and clipped it, with a care that was nearly violent. “He wasn’t fishing that morning. He was up there. With a rig, in the one place on this whole mountain they promised my grandmother’s council they’d never touch. And at lunch he came back and said something to Imogen Oakes, and she said, Let me deal with it.”
Thorsen sat on the cooler and looked at the water going past.
The sump and some pad. Now he knew where the pad was.
“Who knows you’ve got this?” he said.
“You. Now.” Ellie looked at him. “And next it’s Amrit. This afternoon. Then my council, tomorrow night, because it’s their land and their agreement and it’s not mine to sit on, and it’s sure as hell not yours. Then the EAO. Then the Mines inspector.” She untied the stern line. “Half my council is going to want to bury it, because it’s the end of the benefits agreement and the jobs. The other half is going to want to set fire to the camp. My uncle’s going to stop speaking to me. I don’t care.” She threw the line in the boat. “Get in.”
He got in. The dog did not.
The dog stood on the float with his feet planted and his head low, looking at the boat and the water and the canyon mouth. Ellie waited with her hand on the throttle. Thorsen did not call him. He sat down on the deck of the boat, on the wet aluminium, with his back to the console and his legs out, and took the grey cap out of his pocket and laid it on the deck beside his knee, and looked at the mountains.
It took four minutes. Then there were claws on aluminium, scrabbling, and the boat dipped, and the dog was lying flat on the deck along Thorsen’s leg with his chin on the cap, shaking from his nose to his tail.
“Go slow,” Thorsen said.
“I was always going to go slow,” Ellie said, and did.
Corporal Dhillon looked at the frame on Ellie’s laptop without touching anything.
He went back one, and forward one. He made her show him the time-check photograph from the camera service, her hand holding a GPS unit in front of the lens, and he wrote down the drift and the coordinates. Then he sat back in his chair.
“That ticket’s signed by the pilot,” he said. “The morning is rods and a pump and fuel to the east ridge, and a recon for Dr. Oakes. I have it in a press pack.” He looked at the frame. “And Dr. Oakes told me she was on her own up at her pad all afternoon, and that the boy came to her at lunch about a sump. I asked them both twice.”
“She didn’t tell me what she was doing up there.”
“She didn’t tell me either. The afternoon can wait. The afternoon isn’t what this is.” Dhillon turned the laptop gently back to Ellie. “Can you send me that, with the metadata, the original file, not a copy of a copy?”
“After my council meets. Tomorrow night.”
He looked at her, and let it go. He turned to Thorsen. “You’re going back down.”
“Thursday. Gordie’s going down with an empty boat.”
“Don’t tell anybody in Nesvik about this.” Dhillon stood up. “Not the port director. Not the Herald. Not your landlady. If it’s in the paper before I’ve talked to the pilot I’ll get a story from a man who’s had a week’s warning.” He went to the door, and stopped with his hand on it, and turned round.
“Five of them, Mr. Thorsen,” he said. “Same questions, different order. Same answers, different words. I wrote in my report that they were consistent and credible.” He opened the door. “I’ll be going up to Kestrel Ridge.”
The dog would not go into the nursing station, so the nurse came to Ruth’s kitchen with a microchip from the vet’s box, because Alaska would want one. The dog had walked in behind Thorsen on Tuesday night and lain down under the table as though he had lived there all his life. Ruth, who had never once touched him all winter, got down on her knees on the linoleum, one knee and then the other, and held out her hand palm down under the table, and after a long moment he let her put it on his neck.
“Nine months,” she said, to nobody.
“Don’t make it a song,” Thorsen said.
She looked up at him sharply from the floor, and then laughed, a short dry bark, and wiped her eyes with the back of her other hand. “You’ve got a mouth on you for an American. You and Ed Harker. He comes up every August to help Albert Kane put up his fish, and talks the whole month. Do it now, while the dog’s soft.”
The nurse did it.
On Wednesday night the council sat four hours in the band office with the door shut, and once a chair went over, and at eleven Ellie came out and said it was going to the EAO and the Mines inspector, and Amrit had his file.
Gordie came for them at six on Thursday morning, in the orange boat.
The dog saw it come round the bend below the village. He stood up on Ruth’s float with his ears forward and his tail up, and when the boat came in alongside he jumped down into it before it had stopped, without being asked, and went forward and stood in the bow with his front feet on the gunwale.
Gordie looked at him from the wheel.
“He knows the boat,” he said finally. “He used to stand like that on the freight.” He looked away. “I’ll put a pad down.”
They went down the river all morning, with the bars standing out of the dropped water pale and steaming in the sun. The dog stood in the bow the whole way and did not once look back. Below the hot springs Gordie throttled back on a long smooth reach and stood looking at the bank, and Thorsen understood that it was the bar where they had found the boy in September. Gordie did not say so. He opened the throttle again.
At Nesvik a woman in a US Customs jacket was waiting on the harbour float, because Gordie had rung ahead from the sat phone.
“Mr. Marsh,” she said. “Reporting. I may frame this.”
She read the nurse’s printed microchip receipt, and ran a scanner over the dog’s shoulders, and compared the numbers. “The state has its own ideas,” she said. “Rabies shot and a health certificate. The state’s lay vaccinator’s at the clinic Fridays.” She looked at the dog in the bow, still with his front feet on the gunwale, looking up at the town. “Welcome to the United States,” she said to the dog, and went back up the ramp.
Marj was on her porch.
She was sitting in the cane chair by the door in her coat, with her hands in her lap, as if she had been there since he left, and she stood up when she heard the gate and came to the top of the steps. He could see her looking down at him, and past him, and he could see her not seeing. The middle of things had gone grey for her; he had known that since his first evening at her table. She saw round the edges.
“Daniel?”
“It’s me.”
“Is he —”
“He’s here.”
The dog had stopped at the bottom of the steps. He was looking up at her with his head on one side, and his nose working. Marj came down the steps one at a time with a hand on the rail. At the bottom she stood still, and then she bent down, slowly, and held out both hands, palms up, in front of her, into the air.
The dog smelled them. Then he put his head into them.
She held his face. She held it in her two hands, and moved her thumbs over it, over the brow and the muzzle and the white blaze on his chest, the way somebody reads a face who cannot see it. Her mouth moved, and nothing came.
“Which one is it?” she said at last. “Which eye? He told me at this table. The blue one is the left, and then the next day it was the right, and then he said he couldn’t remember either, he had to look in the mirror with him.” She laughed, and it broke in the middle. “I can’t see it, Daniel. Tell me which.”
Thorsen crouched down beside her on the path.
“The left,” he said. “His left.”
Marj moved her thumb, very gently, to the edge of the dog’s left eye, and kept it there.
“There you are,” she said to the dog. “There you are, then. He wrote me about you every week.”