Ten days after the dog came down the river, Ed Harker had a new engine in the Kittiwake and a deckhand with a broken wrist, and at half past four on Sunday morning, the first opener in three seasons, he had Thorsen on the stern instead.
“You sat at Bev’s counter in May and didn’t talk,” he had said on Marj’s porch the day before. “I need a man who’ll do what he’s told and not talk.”
He had the hatch up when Thorsen came down the float, and was kneeling over a block of white paint and blue hoses and bright steel, the way other men look into a cradle. “Two hundred and ninety horse,” he said. “You can’t hear it.” He shut the hatch. “Mind the drum.”
They ran the forty kilometres to the mouth of the Dalgleish on the last of the ebb in a fleet of thirty boats, and Ed read the channels between the bars from the colour of the water and did not look at the sounder once.
On the fleet channel everybody was talking, and none of them was talking about fish.
“— that’s the Otter Lake creeks, that’s the sockeye lake, they swore on a stack of Bibles —”
“— Kehoe was on the radio at seven. Rogue employees. One hole. Without the knowledge of senior management —”
Ed reached over and turned it down.
“I read it,” he said. “Last night. Twice.” He did not look round. “Your doing?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. You’ve got a face like a man that keeps things.” He looked at the water. “The Herald kid came round to my house at eleven last night with his laptop to show me before it went up, because he’s a decent kid and his grandmother knew my wife. A picture off one of the Nation’s goat cameras. And a picture of a pad up in the Goat Creek basin, plain as day, with a capped hole in the middle of it and a sump under a green tarp, that the Guardians walked in and found on Tuesday. Caldera put a statement out at midnight.” He made a sound in his nose, and recited it. “A single exploration hole, designated KR-31, was drilled in August 2026 outside the permitted area. The company is taking this matter extremely seriously.” He turned the wheel a little. “The company drilled in the creek that feeds the lake my father fished the mouth of. In the one place they promised. And they lied to the police about where the boy was all morning.”
He let it lie there, and Thorsen left it.
The silt line was where the river met the sea.
On one side, the sea: dark green, cold, the colour of a bottle. On the other, the river: grey-brown, opaque, pouring out over the top of the salt water in a sheet that spread for kilometres. And between them, a line as sharp as if it had been drawn, wandering across the water from horizon to horizon, marked by a lace of brown foam and sticks and feathers where the two waters met and would not mix, and gulls sat on it in hundreds, picking.
“Fish come up the line,” Ed said. “They smell the river and they come up along the edge of it, trying to make up their minds. You set across the line and you catch the ones that can’t decide.”
He had a flask of coffee and two sandwiches in waxed paper, and he gave Thorsen one of each, and they sat in the wheelhouse door with the engine off and the boat drifting, in a quiet so complete he could hear the gulls’ feet on the water. All along the line the fleet lay drifting too, thirty boats, white and blue and green, waiting.
“Fish and Game shut us two years running,” Ed said. “Not enough fish. Kings were bad, and the sockeye were bad, and the eggheads in Juneau said they didn’t know why. Ocean conditions, they said.” He drank his coffee. “That’s what everybody says when they don’t know. Ocean conditions.” He looked at the grey water pouring out from the river. “If that mine goes in, and in thirty years the fish don’t come back, they’ll say ocean conditions again, and I’ll be dead, and there’ll be nobody to say different. That’s what I’m for. That’s what the table at Bev’s is for. Somebody’s got to be there with the numbers, saying different.”
“And the numbers are Celia’s.”
“The numbers are Celia’s.” He said it with satisfaction. “Every bottle she takes, that’s the river before they touched it, and when they’ve touched it and the fish are gone, her numbers are what’ll hang them.” He looked at Thorsen sideways. “Both tables trust her. You know that? Kehoe’s lot and mine. She’s the only person in Nesvik that both tables’ll listen to. She can explain it so a fisherman understands it. I’m proud of her.”
“You should be.”
“I am.” He screwed the top back on the flask. “She’s like her mother.” He stood up. “Ten to twelve. Get on the stern.”
At noon Thorsen threw the buoy, and the net went off the drum across the line between the river and the sea, and by the time the tide turned he had learned to pick a sockeye without losing it over the side, mostly, and they had thirty-one of them in the slush.
The town had exploded while they were out.
They knew it at the cannery float, where Ed sold the fish to a young woman with a clipboard who did not look at the fish, because she was looking up the ramp at the street, where somebody had hung a bedsheet off the balcony of the Sons of Norway hall with GOAT CREEK = LIARS painted on it in red. Up the street, in the Herald‘s window, the black box in the corner of the front page said 40 DAYS, and for once nobody was looking at it. They knew it at the harbour float, where a man in a Caldera fleece was standing at the top of the ramp with his phone in his hand and his face the colour of putty, talking to five fishermen who were not listening to him. It was Jim Kehoe, the port director, who had drawn a second salary from Caldera for three years.
”— a serious breach, and the company’s taking it seriously, and the people responsible —”
“The people responsible are your people, Jim.”
“The people responsible are a project geologist and a contractor who acted without authorisation, and they will be —”
“You stood on this ramp in May,” Ed said, coming up it with his oilskins over his arm, “and said Caldera had nothing to hide. You said transparency. You sent a package up that river with a flight ticket in it.”
Kehoe turned and saw him. “Ed.”
“You put a lie in a package and handed it round my town. And a boy’s dead, and his grandmother in Norway was told he went fishing.”
“Nobody’s saying —”
“I’m saying.” Ed walked past him. At the top of the ramp he stopped, and turned, and looked back at Kehoe, and his voice dropped. “My daughter vouched for you people. She put her name on your baseline and told my town it’d be done right. You’ve made a fool of her. I won’t forgive you for that.”
He went up the street. The fishermen looked at Kehoe, and Kehoe looked at the water.
At seven Ollie Grant found Thorsen outside Marj’s. He was a young man with a pencil behind his ear, and he was the whole of the Herald. He had not shaved, and he looked happy in the way of a young man who has just done the thing he went into a trade for.
“It wasn’t you,” he said at once. “I want you to know I know that. You never said a word.”
“I know.”
“I got it from someone who was in a room in the village when a chair went over.” Ollie grinned. “That’s all I’m saying. I’m a newspaper. We have sources.” Then the grin went. “There’s an inspector going in on Tuesday. Mines Act, from Smithers. The RCMP corporal’s going in with her. The pad’s taped off. It’s evidence now.” He looked down the street at the bedsheet on the hall. “The whole town’s going to read about this in the Herald on Thursday. In print. In my paper.” He sounded as though he did not quite believe it.
Ellie rang at nine, on a line full of hiss, from the village.
“If you’re wondering who gave Ollie the pad, it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Amrit. Half a council and two families knew. It doesn’t matter now.” She sounded tired. “Amrit talked to Batt on Friday. Batt says he flies where he’s told and writes what he’s told, and he’s very sorry about the paperwork. Transport Canada’s got his journey log now, which he’s less happy about. Oakes says she’ll talk to Amrit again with a lawyer present.” A pause. “Amrit says she actually said solicitor.”
“Who told Batt what to write?”
“That’s Amrit’s question. I’ve got a different one.” The hiss rose and fell. “I’ve been sitting here all night with two years of zinc and uranium. Our lab and the consultant’s lab. Same creek, same day, a few metres apart, and at the two lower stations ours comes back lower than theirs. Manganese too. And a high baseline is money in the bank for Caldera, because the limits a mine has to meet get set off the baseline: the dirtier the creek looks before they start, the dirtier they’re allowed to make it for sixty years. I wrote to the EAO about it in March and got eleven pages back about flow and silt and methods, and it’s all true, and I believed it.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve watched that company lie to a dead boy’s grandmother for nine months.” Something clicked on her end, a pen or a lighter. “Those bottles don’t go from the creek to the lab. They go through camp, and at camp they go through Imogen Oakes. She signs them into her core shack, they sit there overnight with her, and she signs them out onto the plane. Caldera ships them and Caldera pays the lab. Every cooler that comes off that mountain has been in Oakes’s hands for a night, and Oakes has got a deposit and a financing riding on what’s in them.” She breathed out. “It’s probably methods. It usually is. But I’m going to stop saying probably to my council until I know.”
His mother rang at a quarter to eleven.
He was on Marj’s porch in the long light with the dog asleep across his feet and his hands still stinging from the mesh. When he saw the number he knew before he answered.
“Daniel.” Her voice was perfectly steady, which was how he knew. “Your father is in the hospital. He’s all right. Listen to me first. He’s all right.”
The cup had gone out of his father’s right hand in the kitchen in San Pedro, and the words had come out in the wrong order for twenty minutes, and then come back. A TIA, she said. Nothing on the scan. “He wants you.”
A clatter, and a voice a little thick at the edges.
“Danny. A warning, they call it. I have given that speech four hundred times. Now I have heard it from a very nice young man who used the word journey.” Something that was nearly a laugh. “Don’t come down. Ingrid’s boy. Have you found out?”
“Not yet.”
“She has nobody else to ask, Danny. She asked you.” He breathed. “Then finish it. And then come home and tell me.”