High Stand

2

Ocean Falls was little more than thirty miles away, about 2l/2 hours at 1500 revs, which was our economical cruising speed of 12 knots. By the time we had finished lunch we were back in the Fisher Channel, just passing the entrance to Lama Passage. We continued northwards past Evans Inlet and into the narrows by Bold Point. I was standing on the starb’d platform to the wheelhouse looking at the mountains reared well over two thousand feet above us, bare ice-scoured rock visible on the tops but all the lower slopes clothed in forest trees, their roots bedded into fissures and crevices in the strata. Ahead of us loomed a bald, glaciated mountain, glimpses of snowfields beyond. I was thinking then about Ocean Falls, a dead town they said and the area beyond all high land thrusting deep into the Rockies.

I had caught a glimpse of what it could be like on that walk at Namu with Cornish and his Chief Engineer. It was only a short walk, less than a mile, and all of it along a narrow, raised boardwalk of red cedar planks, and when we had reached the lake there had been a bridge over a torrent outspill and after that we had scrambled along the water’s edge. Fish had been rising and there was a bald eagle. Mosquitoes, too. And the going had been rough, patches of swamp, boulders and the roots of trees interlaced — red cedar, hemlock and balsam, a few Douglas fir.

Now the mountains above us were bleak as we followed the King Island shore until we came to the Dean Channel junction and headed up Cousins Inlet. Mackenzie Rock lay only a dozen miles up Dean Channel and I wished I had read his book — the first white man to cross the Rockies and, looking up at the appalling tree-clad loneliness of it all, I wondered how he had had the nerve, what had kept him going.

It was 14.40 when Captain Cornish put Tom Halliday and myself ashore at Ocean Falls. He didn’t tie up, simply going alongside the jetty so that we could step onto the wooden planks, then the Kelsey was full astern on both engines, and I only just had time to call good luck and goodbye to Jim Edmundson before the cutter was swinging round and heading back down the inlet. By the time Tom and I had humped our bags to the end of the jetty and were walking into the town, the Coastguard cutter looked very small in the giant V of the inlet’s rock walls. Soon she would turn north-east up the Dean Channel to pass Elcho Harbour and Mackenzie Rock and on towards Kimsquit until they opened Cascade Inlet and reached the Halliday Arm of it.

‘A house called Halcyon Days, and it’s got a blue door, that’s what he said.’ Tom had stopped and was staring about him. Compressed by the mountains, the houses climbing steeply over the rock remains of a giant slide that had gashed the mountain above us, the pale brown bulk of a hotel and the pulp mill sprawled over the narrow flats of the river silt — it all looked much bigger than I had expected. There was a river and we could see its outfall under a bridge, hear the sound of it cascading down from the high lip of the valley.

‘You ever been here before?’ I asked.

‘Once, that’s all. BC Ferries called here regularly then. But other times when visiting the Cascades I flew straight in to the Halliday Arm by floatplane from Bella Bella.’

It was mid-afternoon, the streets empty, hardly a soul about, and a cold breeze coming down off the mountains from the north.

‘There’s a lake up there, about ten miles long. A dam, too, and a hydro-electric power station that once drove the pulp mill. I think I can hear the dynamo. Sounds like it’s still running.’ There were lights burning, street lights even in daylight — lights, too, on the verandahs of empty houses. ‘What was that about Halcyon Days?’ I asked.

‘It’s Brian’s address. A friend’s place. That’s the message he gave Steve Davis, the floatplane pilot at Bella Bella. He’d wait for us there. Trouble is, the launch operator couldn’t remember the name of the street. Said we couldn’t miss it because it was the board road down from the lake.’ By then we were into the town, looking ahead up an asphalt road that climbed beside a tumbling cascade of water. ‘Guess we’d better go up to the dam. Should be easy then to find where the board road starts. He said the house was somewhere about the middle of it.’

We dumped our bags on the verandah of an empty house beneath the dull glare of a naked electric light bulb. Clouds had come down and it was starting to drizzle, the cutter gone now and the whole narrow fjord empty of anything but the lowering clouds and the mist. ‘Always rains here,’ he muttered as we began to walk up the hill. There were hydrangeas blooming and mountain ash bright with berries, and walnut trees — I hadn’t expected walnut trees. The higher we climbed the more the noise of rushing water filled our ears, filling the whole narrow cleft of the valley with sound, just as the monstrous ochre-coloured block of the hotel filled it visually — that and the mill, and the little terraced wooden houses clinging to the valley side, bright with peeling ribbons of paint, flowers and lights. And nobody living there, only a few remaining, enough to keep the pulp mill machinery and essential services ticking over.

The dam stood massive, a straight concrete face wedged in the narrow cliffs, a blind wall poised above the town and white with the water streaming down it. Tom went as far as the locked gates that led onto the top of it, a broad dam-top walkway with the iron sluice controls at intervals and a marvellous view down the inlet, half-obscured by cloud mist. The rock-scoured mountain that overhung the town gleamed wet and wicked where the great slide had gashed it, tumbling millions of tons of debris down into the waters of the loch to form the hard standing that reached back from the quay.

But Tom wasn’t looking at the slide, or down the inlet. He had his back to the town, staring out across the endless expanse of the lake. ‘I went fishing up here once. Seven or eight years ago it must have been. There’s a torrent runs into it from another, higher lake. The Halliday Arm and the Cascades almost reach right back to it. In fact, it’s from the end of that lake that the water originates to form the falls that give the place its name. The Bella Bella Indians had a log cabin up there, a sort of boathouse for their canoes. A good position with a great rock platform we called the Pulpit. From the top there you could look right down the mountainside a thousand feet or so to the arm of water coming in from Cascade Inlet, the logging camp and the booming-ground.’ And he added almost wistfully, The cabin was still there when Thor took over as forestry manager and he made it into quite a nice bunk-cum-boathouse for fishing. There’s some trout in that lake so big and pink-fleshed I reckon they must be land-locked salmon left over from the last ice age.’

A wind swirled the cloud drizzle round us, suddenly tearing it apart, so that the sun shone and it was momentarily quite warm. The whole head of Tom’s hair became silvered with moisture, his features no longer haggard but smoothed out as he looked at the lake, smiling to himself. He seemed suddenly fit and well. I was amazed how quickly he could recover with a little sleep. The weeks spent working in Stone Slide Gully must have hardened him up, for he was a man who lived very close to the limits of his nervous system.

‘Let’s go and see if we can find Brian.’ But even as he spoke we both turned our heads to the sound of an engine far across the lake. Mist still clung to the surface of the water, so that we didn’t see it for several minutes, though the sound of it grew quite rapidly. Then suddenly it was there, on the edge of visibility, a rubber inflatable with an outboard engine and a lone man with long, dark hair huddled over it. He ran the inflatable up onto the coarse gravel of the lake edge and a moment later was coming towards us, a rucksack on his back and dragging a little sleigh with two plastic containers on it and a filler can that looked as though it had been used for kerosene. He was flat-featured, his eyes bulging above high cheekbones and broken teeth showing yellow-stained below the black droop of his moustache. If he saw us he didn’t show it. He was whistling softly to himself and he went down into the town by another road, the sleigh scraping along behind him.

‘One of the squatters, I suppose,’ Tom said. ‘The cutter’s cook told me about the only people here, apart from the mill maintenance men, were hippies up from Vancouver and other ports.’

He had turned and was moving to the bend where the lank-haired man had disappeared. The road looped, swinging down by a different route, the surface of it changed to great planks of cedar, slippery after the rain. There were small verandahed houses beside it, the broad driveway slaloming down in a great curve. God knows how many magnificent trees had been felled to build that road, for it was wide enough for two vehicles to pass, but I suppose with the mountains so full of timber it was cheaper to bridge the tumbled rock slope with sleeper-like planks than to find the infill material to build an ordinary road.

We found the house, the light on over the door and the blue paint peeling. There.was a bell, but it didn’t work. We knocked. Nobody came and nobody looked out of the windows of the nearby houses; the road, everything, very still, and the only sound the whisper of the water pouring down from the lake above. ‘He’s not here.’ My voice sounded loud, a little strange. ‘There’s nobody here.’ It was like being a visitor from outer space, looking in on a world from which all human life had been expunged. ‘Try the door,’ I breathed.

It wasn’t locked, its hinges creaking with the damp as it swung wide to show the interior of an ordinary little house, everything in place as though the occupant had gone to the post or to the shops and would be back at any moment. We hesitated, both of us standing there, staring at the open door. ‘You’re right,’ Tom muttered. ‘He’s not here.’

‘Maybe there’s a message.’

He nodded, but he didn’t move. ‘Odd, isn’t it?’ His voice was a little high, a slight tremor in it. ‘I don’t like it,’ he whispered. ‘And the town, the emptiness — it’s like a ghost town.’

His words, the empty stillness of the place; I didn’t like it either, but we couldn’t stand there for ever thinking about the strangeness of it. ‘There’ll be a message,’ I said again, and I pushed past him, going first into the front room, which was lounge and dining-room combined, then through to the kitchen. There was no message, but the remains of a meal still lay on the table, there was food in the fridge, which was working, and in the front bedroom the bed was unmade, clothes scattered around, his grip on the floor.

I called to Tom. ‘Looks like he’ll be back soon.’

He came in, looked at the bed and the clothes, then rummaged around in the grip. ‘It’s Brian all right. Blast the boy! I was relying on him…’ He didn’t say what it was he was relying on him for, but I could guess.

We went back into the kitchen. The wind had risen, tapping the branches of a small rowan against the window, and it was drizzling again. Above us the sliced rocks of the great slide hung raw and wet out of the low cloud base. ‘Gloomy sort of place.’ Tom switched on the kitchen light, then went to the store cupboard and began going through the tins. ‘Beans!’ he muttered. ‘Reminds me of those weeks I spent up at Ice Cold. Baked beans! And peaches, canned peaches!’ He gave a snorting laugh. ‘Which do you want, beans or sardines — or corned beef?’

‘Any bread?’ But I knew it was a forlorn hope.

‘Biscuits,’ he said. ‘And there’s coffee, a big jar of instant coffee.’

‘No tea?’

He shook his head. ‘You’re being difficult.’ I settled in the end for coffee and baked beans. ‘A beanfeast,’ he said and gave a laugh that was more like a giggle. ‘Can’t call it high tea — no tea. And high coffee, that sounds daft. So a beanfeast it is.’ And he filled the kettle at the sink, the handle rattling against the tap. ‘Where the hell is the boy? Why isn’t he here?’

Darkness came early in the narrow, fjord-like cleft into which the town and the pulp mill were clamped, mountain and cloud cutting out the light. I was glad I had had the sense to get spare batteries for my torch on the ferry, remembering the Mate of the cutter saying it rained 370 days of the year at Ocean Falls, and Cornish adding that in winter gusts of 100 mph hit the water from the mountains above, that once he had had a foot-thick coating of ice on all the metalwork on deck, the whole crew out hacking away at it with axes for fear the ship would capsize with the weight of it.

We had our meal, and when we had cleared it up, we dossed down in the lounge. It was still drizzling, so no point in going down into the town; anyway, I was too tired. I was on the floor, wrapped in blankets and an old sleeping bag, Tom snoring on the settee. Some time later he got up and went out of the front door. It was the coffee, I suppose, and when he came back I asked him whether it was still raining. ‘Don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t notice.’ And he went to sleep again immediately. It was cold now and I wrapped the blankets close around me, but it was no good. I had to get rid of some of that coffee and when I went out the clouds were broken and lifting, patches of starlight and the wind thrashing in the trees.

I was just zipping up my flies before going into the house when a movement on the road caught my eye, somebody coming up from the town. There was a dark shadow and the scuff of soft shoes on the wet planks. I thought perhaps it was Brian and I was on the point of calling out when the man moved into the pale light from our verandah and I froze, clinging to the shadows beside the house. I couldn’t believe it. But there he was, his aquiline features and dark hair clear in the light, his face half-turned towards me, and that same bearskin poncho.

I nearly called his name, but then I remembered how I had last seen him, the anger and the hate in his eyes as Tom had left him beside the mine track. Then he was past me, a shadow moving into shadow, and while I stood there, wondering why he was in Ocean Falls and how he had got there, I saw there was somebody else on the road, a figure slinking along without a sound.

I didn’t move and as he passed me I saw it was the same dark, lank-haired man we had seen earlier coming from the inflatable up on the lake. The way he moved, his total concentration on the figure ahead of him, there was no question in my mind — he was following Tarasconi.

I waited till he was well up the hill, almost at the bend, then I went back into the house, grabbed my deck shoes, calling to Tom as I slipped them on, ‘Tarasconi just went by. Tony Tarasconi. He’s being followed.’ Tom grunted as I filled in the details, adding, ‘He must have taken the ferry the day before us. He said he was planning to go to Haines.’ I had my shoes on then, grabbing up my torch and my anorak. ‘I’ll just go as far as the lake.’

‘What for?’ He was still half asleep.

‘To see where they go, of course.’

I left him then, slipping out onto the planks of the roadway and moving upwards, keeping to the shadows and half running, my deck shoes making little sound. Blasts of cold air swept down from the mountains, the cloud ragged and edged with moonlight, rents of bright starlight showing. Round the bend the boardway straightened and for an instant I saw both figures. Then Tarasconi disappeared in the brush that bordered the lake. The man following him slipped away to the left, climbing in great leaps till he, too, disappeared, obviously intent on circling his quarry. But why?

I moved up the last of the boardway with extreme caution, keeping all the time to the shadows, and then making a quick dash for it when I reached the open area of rough ground that led to the gate guarding the entrance to the dam-top. There were some bushes and, crouched in their shadow, I had a view along the margin of the lake. The moon was still behind cloud, or maybe it had not risen above the high ranges to the east, but there was enough light from its reflection on the cloud edges, and from the stars, for me to see several hundred yards, as far at least as the point where the inflatable was concealed. I was certain by then that it was the inflatable Tarasconi was after. To steal it, or puncture its fat, inflated sides, or was there something hidden in it, something he needed to find out about?

Crouched there, waiting, my eyes fixed on the spot where I thought the inflatable was hauled out, time passed slowly, the light coming and going with the passage of the clouds, and my eyes straining. Sounds were impossible to hear, even the sound of the wind, my ears full of the roar of water pouring white over the lip of the dam and on down the steep rock-strewn valley to the fjord below. I saw a figure moving along the water’s edge in a crouching run, but only for a moment and then it vanished, merging into some bushes, so that I thought perhaps I’d been mistaken. Then I saw it again, but in a different position. The light brightened momentarily. There were two figures. They seemed to be facing each other and at their feet a dark shadow that could have been the inflatable.

They might have been arguing over it, but the light was so uncertain, everything so indistinct, the hands flung up, the step backwards, the splash, all more likely in my imagination for the wind was blowing a veil of cloud across the sky, my eyes peering helplessly as the dark increased.

Had there been two? Had one of them knocked the other into the lake? I looked at the clouds racing across the sky, their passage marked by glimpses of stars. I couldn’t be certain what I had seen. Crouched there, close above the lake, the night filled with the roar of water, I began to doubt whether it was really Tarasconi I had seen hurrying up the board road.

I suppose it was only a minute or two, though it seemed much longer, before the clouds were blown away, and then, suddenly, I could see the inflatable. It was afloat and there was a figure crouched over the stern of it. He was working at something, the outboard presumably, and then he was paddling. I could even see the water dripping from the paddle blade as he worked the boat away from the shore, and when he was clear he crouched over the stern again, his arm flashing and a froth of water thrusting him away from me; then more cloud and suddenly the man and the inflatable had vanished, swallowed in the dark waters of the lake.

I was so urgent by then to check what I thought I had seen that I didn’t hesitate. I switched on my torch and went running along the path that twisted and turned through the lakeside scrub until I had reached the point where I thought I had seen them. But there was nothing there, nobody, nothing lying in the water. I found the marks of the inflatable, could see where the tipped-up prop of the outboard motor had made a furrow in the black silt of the shore, and there were the marks of feet, but the coarse sand was so loose that there was no knowing whether they had been made by one person or two. It looked like more, for of course, to manoeuvre an inflatable into the water with its outboard engine attached would have been something of a struggle, certainly for one man.

There was a piece of rag there and a short length of nylon fishing line with a knot in it, also a dark stain in the coarse silt that looked as though oil had leaked out from the outboard engine. That was all I could find, though I probed around for some time in the bushes. I even called Tarasconi’s name, but my voice was lost in the sound of the wind and the water, not just the dam now, but waves breaking out in the middle of the lake. Nobody answered, so that I was forced to the conclusion that both of them had left m the boat. But where would they go, and why, in the dark with half a gale blowing up on the lake?

I went back to the road then, the wind a little easier as I started down it, and when I reached the house, the verandah door was ajar and I could hear voices raised in argument: ‘All right then, there is one guy — probably more. But if you want a fix that bad you do your own haggling, buggered if I will.’

They were in the lounge, Tom still on the couch, his son standing over him. ‘… Mexican, I think,’ Brian was saying as I pushed open the door. ‘His name’s Rodrigo, a gone-to-seed, Che Guevara type with a drooping black moustache and a slinking sort of truculence.’ He was wearing an old camouflage jacket and a green baseball hat, and at my entrance he turned quickly, his strange face set, his eyes glaring at me, almost black with anger. ‘So you found him in the Yukon and you brought him down here to see the damage he’s been doing. Good on you, mate. But now they want to cut more timber, he tells me, and they’re using Miriam as a lever.’

‘I think, in the circumstances,’ I murmured soothingly, ‘it would be better if you just sat down, relaxed and we discussed the situation. What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘None of your business. And I’m hungry. I’ve spent the better part of twenty-four hours sitting under a rock halfway up the mountainside.’ He had turned and was walking into the kitchen.

I looked across at Tom, sitting slumped on the couch, his eyes half-closed. Clearly he had no intention of standing up to his son. ‘He’s been down to the Cascades, but they threw him out. Now he’s planning to get in by the back door, across the lake.’ Tom gave a little shrug. ‘He’ll only make things worse.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know, Brian’s always been like that. Puts his head down and charges, no thought for the consequences. His mother was the same. Whatever she wanted she had to have, never mind anybody else. Ruthless,’ he muttered. There’s a ruthless streak.’ Apparently Brian had arrived back a few minutes after I had left, coming down off the slope of the mountain above. ‘I woke to find him standing over me and you weren’t there. Where were you? You were gone a long time.’

I told him where I had been and what I thought I had seen up there at the lakeside. ‘What’s that?’ Brian was framed in the kitchen doorway, a packet of biscuits and some cheese in his hand, his mouth full, ‘A struggle, you say?’

‘I can’t be certain. The light coming and going, everything …’

‘I know, I know — I was coming down off the mountain. But if there was a struggle, who won — Rodrigo?’

I shook my head. The light was too dim.’

‘And afterwards?’ He wolfed down the rest of the biscuit and cheese. ‘Did he go off in that inflatable?’

‘I think so.’

‘Which way — down the lake, northwards?’

I nodded. ‘He kept close to the shore.’

‘Yes, of course. He couldn’t go out into the middle. Too much wind. You’re certain there was only one of them in the boat?’

‘I can’t be sure, of course,’ I said. ‘It looked like that.’

‘Okay, let me get some food inside me, then we’ll go up there again, see if he comes back. And some coffee,’ he added, turning back into the kitchen. ‘I need coffee if I’m to keep awake. I’ve got a boat up there, an old canoe I borrowed.’ He pulled another can of beans from the cupboard. ‘Beans! Windy things and I’ve had a bellyful of them. But sustaining.’ I had followed him into the kitchen and was filling the kettle while he set the beans on to heat. ‘You willing to paddle a canoe with me? Ten miles, a short steep portage, then another mile or so on a smaller lake. Have to make it before dawn.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We got just over five hours. That should be enough if the wind goes down.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’ I could hear it thrashing in the trees still.

Then we’ll have to hide up.’ I asked him why and he looked at me as though I were being particularly stupid. ‘A boat, any sort of a boat, sticks out on a lake like a fly on white paper, we’d be visible for miles as soon as dawn broke.’

‘And you don’t want to be seen. Who would be there?’ I asked. ‘Who are you afraid might see you?’

That’s one of the things I mean to find out. There’s that Mexican — why’s he suddenly headed down the lake at night?’

‘It could be Tarasconi,’ I said.

Tarasconi!’ He laughed. ‘Not a chance. You said only one and he wouldn’t stand a chance against a guy like Rodrigo.’ He took the beans off the stove and poured them onto a soup plate, then sat down at the kitchen table, eating them with a spoon. ‘Help yourself. You’ll need something hot inside you.’ He reached for another spoon and thrust it into my hand as I sat down opposite him.

‘You knew Tarasconi was here, then?’

He nodded, his mouth full. ‘That’s why he came here — to see me. Flew into Bella Bella by plane from Rupert. Found out from Steve Davis I was up here and he airlifted him in in his Cessna. A nasty little man. Walked in here just as I was having a late breakfast, sat where you’re sitting now — said a South American named Lopez had told him Miriam was being held hostage. Wouldn’t say by who, and I didn’t believe him. He wanted to trade a half share of a gully named Stone Slide up near the Ice Cold mine for information about where she was being held.’

‘And where is she being held?’ I asked. ‘Did you get it out of him?’

He shook his head. ‘No. He admitted in the end he didn’t yet know for sure. It was dangerous, he said, but if I made it worth his while …’ He waved his spoon at me. ‘Tuck in, it’s the last hot food you’ll get for a while if you’re coming down the lake with me.’ He pushed the plate of beans towards me. ‘Anyway, like I said, I didn’t believe him. And then he said, did I know my father was alive?’ He nodded, smiling. ‘I believed that all right. So I kept an eye on the little bugger after that, and when he started moving into positions where he could watch Rodrigo launching that inflatable to go down the lake, I began to think maybe there was something in what he’d told me. Now, for God’s sake, Tom says it’s true, about Miriam.’ He leaned suddenly forward, his face thrust close to mine across the table, his eyes staring. ‘Is it true?’

I told him briefly what I knew, then asked him about the man I had seen following Tarasconi up to the lake. ‘A dropout,’ he said. ‘One of the toughest. Likes a fight, so long as he’s got the knife. A Mexican or Honduran.’ We had finished the beans by then and he slid the biscuits and cheese over to me. ‘Middle American anyway, squats in somebody’s apartment in a block of flats down by the swimming pool.’

‘What’s his background?’ I asked. ‘What’s he do for a living?’

Brian shrugged. ‘Lives off the other squatters, picks up anything he can. I don’t know for sure what he’s up to, but he’ll sell you beer or hard liquor any time of the day or night, whenever the government liquor store is shut, that is. Drugs, too, if you want them. And he’s not a man to cross, very quick with the knife.’ He grinned and gave a little shrug. ‘That’s what I’m told, anyway.’

‘By the swimming pool, you say?’

Brian looked up, staring at his father in the doorway. ‘Right.’

‘What’s the number of the apartment?’

His son hesitated. ‘Number fifteen. On the third floor. But if you’d been listening to what your legal adviser has been saying you’d realize your pusher has gone off down the lake in his inflatable.’ And he added with a little twisted smile, ‘Why not break down the door and help yourself?’

I didn’t find Brian any more likeable now than I had on the previous occasion when I had seen him in my office. The abrasive energy of the man, the way he assumed I was willing to follow his lead as he rose to his feet and said, ‘Well, you coming?’ made me want to tell him to go to hell. Instead, I found myself explaining to him in reasoned tones how Jim Edmundson had been sent in by the government to report on the situation.

‘What’s he going to say in his report?’

I told him I didn’t know, that Edmundson would only just have arrived at the Cascades logging camp. And I added, ‘The fact that he’s been sent there to report indicates that you’ve made your point and the authorities are now monitoring the situation.’

But he brushed that aside. ‘A forestry man, employed by government — he’ll look at those trees, work out the value on his little calculator and that’ll be that. So long as the land is replanted the government is covered.’ He was in the bedroom now, putting his things together. ‘Here’s a spare sleeping bag.’ He tossed a waterproof hold-all across to me. ‘We’ll need some food, too. You got sweater and anorak? It’ll be cold up there — wet and cold, and you’ll need a torch.’

‘It’s still blowing,’ I said.

Thought you were a sailing man.’ He said it with a lift of his brows and a little smile, going back into the kitchen and thrusting an assortment of tins and cartons into a plastic bag. ‘Okay?’

I hesitated. Tom was back on the couch, his eyes closed, but I don’t think he was asleep. ‘You staying here?’ His eyes flipped open. ‘You’re not coming?’

‘I’m tired,’ he murmured.

‘A chance to have a look at the Cascades, check that logging camp — just in case your wife…’

He shook his head. ‘Edmundson’s there now. See what he discovers. No need for me to stick my neck out. Not yet.’ His eyes flickered to his son. ‘Apartment fifteen, you said?’ And when Brian nodded, he smiled and said, ‘Maybe in the morning then …’ He sank back, his eyes closing.

I tucked the hold-all under my arm, picked up the things I needed and followed Brian to the door. ‘Is it all right,’ I asked as we went out into the night, ‘leaving him there on his own? He needs a fix and he might go looking for that Mexican.’

His son shrugged. ‘My guess is Rodrigo is down the far end of the lake by now.’ And when I reminded him again that it could just as well have been Tarasconi who had gone off in the inflatable he shook his head. ‘It’ll be Rod, and if he’s gone to the end of the lake he won’t be back tonight.’

But when we had climbed to the dam and were following our torches along the lakeside path we found the inflatable drawn up among some shrubs well clear of the water, the outboard padlocked into the tipped-up position. ‘Where’s Tarasconi?’ Brian asked, looking up at me, his fingers still feeling the chain of the padlock.

‘How the hell do I know?’ I was gazing out over the black waters, the two figures blurred in my mind and trying to sort out what I really had seen and what I had imagined. ‘Wind’s dropped a bit,’ I murmured, and then I began searching in the dark silt for the mark where the oil had been spilled, a sudden terrible thought in my mind, but it was all trampled over where the inflatable had been pulled up the steep shore, and anyway I couldn’t be sure it had been returned to the same spot.

‘Can’t do anything about the padlock,’ Brian said, straightening up. ‘Anyway, there probably isn’t enough petrol. We’ll take the canoe. Paddling it close along the shore we’ll be out of the wind, for the first part at any rate.’

‘You’re going into the Cascades from the top, is that it?’

He nodded. ‘From where I was holed up on the side of the mountain I could see right down the lake as far as the portage, to the point where the falls pour down from the upper lake. I’m told that lake is the water source of the Cascades. There’s a hut there, an old Indian hut, and a timber extraction road somewhere below it.’ He stood for a moment to look north across the black waters of the lake. ‘I don’t like being barred entry to my own property,’ he said softly. ‘And those trees … I only saw just the edge of them — ’

They’re not your trees,’ I reminded him. ‘As long as your father’s alive — ‘

‘Okay, but it could have been the same if he’d tried to walk round the plantation.’

‘Who stopped you?’

‘A couple of hulking foresters. They had a power saw with a blade on it as long as your arm. You don’t try conclusions with that sort of a weapon.’

They threatened you?’

‘Oh sure, and they’d have used it all right.’ He laughed. ‘Afterwards they could always say I just walked into it. Wasn’t anyone else there to say I didn’t.’

I stared at him. ‘But surely there must have been somebody in charge. You said in your letter — the one that was forwarded to me in Whitehorse — you said there was a man named Lorient in charge.’

That’s right. The manager, they said. When they saw I was determined to walk down the logging road to High Stand, they called him out of his office back of the quay where I’d parked my boat. He said he didn’t care what my name was or who had planted those trees, the whole stand had been sold to an American company and would be felled and shipped over the next few months. I don’t know whether he was French Canadian — could be with a name like that. He was a mean-looking bastard and when he realized I wasn’t the sort to take orders, that was when they began to get tough. By then, of course, he had figured out just who I was — I mean that I was the guy who had tried to stop a barge-load of High Stand logs in the Georgia Strait. You heard about that, did you?’

And when I told him the Canadian lawyers had given me copies of the press cuttings, he went on, ‘Okay, but what you didn’t see — what I didn’t tell the press, because I knew they wouldn’t believe me — and this is just to show how vicious men motivated by greed can be…’ He stopped there, turning and facing me. ‘You saw that picture where the bargeman is leaning over the bows with a boathook in his hands. Looks as though he’s trying to fish me out, doesn’t it? A kindly seaman trying to save a foolish demonstrator!’ The corners of his lips lifted in the little smile that was without humour. ‘What in fact he was doing was using it like the Indians used to use whale spears. That boathook had a point on the end and he was thrusting it down to puncture the inflatable, and then to puncture me. That doesn’t show either in the TV film or the press pictures, but it’s true. That’s when I dived into the water. That,’ he added, ‘was why I didn’t argue with Lorient and those two fellows at the Cascades.’

‘What about Olsen?’ I asked. ‘Have you discovered where he is?’

‘Bought off,’ he said. ‘What else? Did the police come up with anything?’ And when I didn’t answer, he said, ‘You lawyers! You want everything cut and dried, a black and white situation before you’ll take action. Well, now perhaps you’ll see for yourself. Come on!’ He turned and started off along the path. ‘If you’re coming with me I aim to be off the lake and into cover before dawn, so let’s get moving.’ And as we started off along the path he began talking about the trees. ‘You’ve been to Cathedral Grove, the red cedar and Douglas showplace on the Port Alberni road on Vancouver Island, have you? No? Well, the trees I glimpsed in High Stand will be as big one day. But they’re not old primeval forest. They’re not museum trees. They were planted this century and there’s acres of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder, great stems rising a hundred and twenty, maybe a hundred and fifty feet, rank upon rank, all exactly spaced. They’re like giant soldiers stood there on parade.’

He stopped suddenly, turned to me and said, ‘I wish to God I’d known old Josh Halliday. He was so far ahead of his time — planting trees like that. Nobody in Canada thought of it then, not for a long time, not out here on the west coast. It’s the most magnificent memorial to a man I ever saw, and if this dirty, money-grubbing crowd think they’re going to run big chainsaws through it — Christ! I’ll get hold of a gun and shoot them down myself.’ He laughed then. ‘Forgot you were a lawyer, mate. But you wait! Wait till you see those trees. Then you’ll understand — something worth fighting for.’

We went on then, the track becoming so overgrown it almost disappeared. A few more yards and he stopped, the beam of his torch thrusting into some bushes to reveal the patched bows of a very battered-looking canoe. We dragged it down to the water’s edge where wavelets made little hissing sounds as they broke on an outcrop of rock. It floated buoyant as a cork. ‘Ever handled one of these before?’ he asked as he stowed the bag of food and the hold-alls.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Nor have I.’ He grinned at me. ‘Just don’t rock the boat, that’s all.’

It turned out he had taken a kayak out in the ice when taking pictures of the slaughter of the harp seal pups on the.east coast of Canada. But this was an open Indian-type canoe and though we hugged the shore as close as we dared, we were soon taking in water, for the lake ran north and the wind was veering all the time towards north-east. ‘We’d be better on the other shore,’ I told him.

‘Of course we would, but how do we get there?’

The wind was definitely lighter, but the moon, now clear of the clouds, showed the dark of waves out in the centre of the lake.

We made it across the first shallow bay, but when we rounded the next headland we had to turn back and paddle into the shelter of some rocks. Portaging, or even dragging the canoe, was out of the question, the shallows littered with rock and boulders and the lake edge thick with the roots of small trees and shrubs. We rolled ourselves in our sleeping bags and lay listening to the wind and the murmur of the waves.

The surface of the lake gradually quietened, but it took time, so that it was past three before we were able to get going again. By then I had learned enough about Brian’s attitude and intentions to have a certain respect for the man, the aggressive, bulldozer approach to any difficulty something of a relief after having spent several days in his father’s company. He was a doer, not a worrier, one of those people whose instinct is for action without hesitation. He didn’t plan ahead. He hadn’t a clear idea of what he’d do when we got down to the logging camp. ‘Just have to see, won’t we? Maybe if you talk to this guy Edmundson, tell him they’re cutting illegally…’

‘You don’t know it’s illegal,’ I said.

‘I saw what they’d cut. I know what two hectares looks like and there was a clearing there full of stumps that was a dam’ sight more than that.’

‘If you can see it, so can Edmundson.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘So he sends in a report and by the time the government gets around to doing anything about it, the timber will have all been cut and shipped. And Wolchak or Mandola, or Barony, whoever is SVL Timber’s front man, shrugs his shoulders, says of course they’re replanting and everybody’s happy — ‘cept old Josh Halliday and people like me.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t know yet. But if I get my hands on one of those power saws — I’m pretty good with a chainsaw.’ I caught the gleam of his eyes in the dark. He was grinning at me, and at that moment I sensed something of his father in him, the braggadocio, that devil-may-care sense of the dramatic, and the irresponsible disregard for the consequences.

The wind dropped right away as soon as we reached the point where the lake turned west of north. By then the moon was down behind the mountains and it was very dark when we finally reached the end of the lake, so we had great difficulty working our way up the torrent of water pouring down from above to the point where the portage began, the canoe half full of water and ourselves very wet. The time was 04.10 and we had at least four hundred feet to climb with the canoe hefted on our shoulders. There was a track of sorts, in places more like a rock staircase, the undergrowth all wet and the going slippery. Brian went ahead, probing with his torch. Neither of us spoke, the noise of the water cascading down from the lake above drowning all other sound.

It took us almost an hour to make the top where the water poured in a smooth black rush over a lip of rock and the lake ran away like a pale still path. We could see the outline of the higher peaks of the Rockies black against the stars. No wind now, no clouds and everything very still and quiet, except for the sound of the cascade, which gradually faded to a murmur as we followed a path round to the right, searching for a place where we could safely launch the canoe.

The stars were starting to fade, the first glimmer of dawn beginning to show where the black mass of the mountains rose above the end of the lake. ‘Looks like a hell of a lot of water comes into this lake,’ Brian said, working his shoulders as he stood staring at the great half circle of peaks. We had stopped for a breather, the canoe resting on a rock slab. ‘I’ll.go on a bit, see how much further we’ve got to carry the thing.’

He moved off, his torch probing the steep rock slope down to the lake, and I followed. The path dropped down across some tree roots that were like wooden steps and came to a little beach of coarse sand overhung with trees. ‘We can launch from here,’ I said with a feeling of intense relief, my body under my anorak soaked with sweat, my shoulders already stiffening. And at that moment there was something like a growl or a snarl.

We froze, standing there quite still. ‘What is it?’ I whispered, remembering Tom telling me how the one thing he’d always feared when out hunting in the Rockies was accidentally getting between a grizzly and her cubs. The snarl came again and there was the clink of a chain, so that I wondered if it was an animal caught in a trap. Then it began barking. Another joined in, their barks rattling round the rocks.

Brian cursed, seizing my arm and pulling me back along the path, the dogs ripping the stillness apart with their barking and the rattle of their chains. ‘It’s the hut. It must be occupied.’ I could see it then, a dark shape that I had taken for the rock Tom had referred to as the Pulpit. The beam of a torch lit the square of a window as we ducked back the way we had come, the trees closing round us. The casement slammed open and the beam of the torch stabbed the path behind us, a man’s voice calling into the night- ‘Who’s there?’ The torch swung across the little beach and out over the water, searching.

By then we were back at the canoe. ‘What were they, hunting dogs?’ I was thinking we had to get out onto the water before they were loosed to track us down.

‘Huskies most like. They sounded like huskies.’

Behind us, and fainter now, we heard the man yelling at the dogs. The barking stopped and suddenly all was quiet again except for the sound of water spilling over the rock sill down into the lake below.

‘I hadn’t expected them to maintain a watch up here.’ Brian had leaned his head so close his cap brushed my ear. ‘What do you reckon the depth over that sill? We’ve got to get to the other side of the lake.’

I shook my head, the water dark and no way of knowing for sure. ‘With both of us in the canoe we might just be able to push ourselves across with the paddle.’

I don’t think he heard, for he was already working his way along the steep drop to the lake, probing with his torch for a place to manhandle the canoe down into the water. In the end, the only possibility was a shoulder of rock within a few yards of the smooth run of the water over the sill. Somehow we managed to get the canoe safely down to a point where he could slide it over the rock into the water and hold it there. ‘You take the bow,’ he shouted at me, ‘and be prepared to lean right down with your paddle and keep us from going over.’ He was up to his knees in the swirling current, the noise of the water deafening.

Somehow I got myself into the bows. Ahead of me was a small jut of rock, and beyond that the dark rush of the spilling lake. ‘Ready?’ I nodded as he swung the bows so that we faced out into the centre of the lake. ‘Now paddle like hell!’ he screamed and I felt the stern go down, the frail craft rocking crazily as he clambered in.

I started paddling. There was no time to feel scared. I could feel his paddle dipping with mine as the bows shot out beyond the jut of rock, swinging wildly in the current. ‘Hold her!’ he yelled and I kept the bows headed down the lake; the canoe swept first sideways, then backwards, the two of us flailing the water with our paddles, heading diagonally across the spill. Suddenly the stern touched rock, the bows swinging out of control, water pouring under us and both of us reaching down with our paddles, pushing the canoe across the face of the lake’s outlet, the tug of the water and the noise of it thundering down filling our whole world as we struggled frantically to make the bastion of rock on the far side where a rowan hung a delicate branch towards the water’s edge.

Without that branch I don’t think we would have made it. I had to stand up in order to reach it and somehow I preserved my balance, pulling us in until we had our hands on the rock itself. Brian passed me a line and I managed to pull myself up onto a wet, sloping ledge. Fortunately the rock was rough and my deck shoes held. Brian followed, and with the canoe riding light and bobbing around in the current, we managed to work it round the shoulder into the quiet of a little inlet that had a bottom of dark silt. It was not much more than a crevice in the rocks, but it was safe.

That was when the reaction set in. My body began to shake uncontrollably and I felt desperately cold. ‘We’ve got to get moving,’ Brian said. Dawn was beginning to lighten the tops of the eastern peaks, but I shook my head. At that moment nothing would induce me to get back into that frail craft, not even the fact that I thought I could just make out the dark square block of the hut some two or three hundred yards across the lake, beyond the rush of its waters towards the outlet.

‘Come on, for God’s sake!’

Again I shook my head, unable to speak.

He stared at me, his head thrust forward. ‘Get in!’ he hissed. ‘If you don’t, I warn you — I’ll knock you cold and dump you in.’ He seized hold of my arm, shaking me. ‘D’you want to get shot?’

I shook my head dumbly, not believing him, my teeth chattering.

He slapped me then. Twice, with his open palm, each side of my face, so hard he almost knocked me off my feet. ‘Get in!’ And this time I did as he said, my cheeks burning, the shakes suddenly gone — only a sense of unreality so that I knelt there in a sort of daze. He thrust my paddle into my hand and the next thing I knew he was in the canoe and we were both of us paddling, thrusting against the current and driving ourselves along the western shore of the lake.

As daylight grew in the sky beyond the mountains, spreading almost reluctantly down into the basin of the lake, Brian stopped paddling and pulled a pair of very small bird-watching binoculars from the waterproof covering to his sleeping bag. We were then about halfway down the lake. ‘We’ll have to take a chance on it,’ he said, his body swivelled round so that he could train the binoculars on the hut, just visible now in the growing light. ‘Can’t see a soul. Nothing stirring and the two dogs asleep.’

‘You can see the dogs, can you?’

‘Sure. You might not think it, but these have a magnification of ten.’ He stared through the glasses for a moment, then put them down. ‘Yes, they’re huskies all right, but cross-bred by the look of them.’ He picked up his paddle. ‘Okay, we’ll chance it.’ He drove the paddle in deep, thrusting the bows round until they pointed towards a clump of trees on the far side. ‘Make for those cedars, and use only your arm — don’t move your body, and no splashes.’

The canoe glided out from the shelter of the bank, the light strengthening all the time so that we seemed suddenly very exposed. Every now and then I felt Brian put down his paddle and examine the hut through his glasses, and each time he reported no movement. It was almost five-thirty and we were now right in the middle of the lake, no cloud and the sky turning from green to orange. The cold numbed my fingers, my legs wrapped in the chill, wet compress of my socks and trousers.

‘Why are we crossing over?’ I asked him. ‘We’d have been much safer on the side we were on. We could have laid up there during the day and crossed over after dark tonight.’

‘They’ve got a boat. I saw it, on that little beach below the hut. A boat with an outboard.’

‘You say they — is there more than one of them?’

‘I don’t know. But they’ll have radio contact with the camp below. It wouldn’t take long to rustle up a search party, and once the dogs picked up our scent…’

They’re more likely to pick it up on the side we’re headed for.’

But he didn’t agree, arguing that the cascades were from a series of lake outlets that would make it difficult to search along the shore we were heading for. ‘When I landed at the logging camp I counted at least half a dozen cascades. This lake lips over a sort of rim of rock a mile or more long, some of it sheer cliff. But at the northern end the cliffs give way to a much easier slope. I could see the line of a road running-up towards it.’ He thought it was probably no more than a rough extraction track. ‘Just what we want if we can clamber down to it.’

We were almost across the lake now, the clump of trees growing tall and the sound of cascade water beginning to fill the still morning air with a soft murmur. A small headland of rock began reaching out towards the hut, now clearly visible in the strengthening light. An optical illusion, of course, but it looked as though the hut itself was moving, so quietly were we gliding over the mirror-flat surface of the water. And then suddenly it was gone, lost to view behind the low line of rocks. We had heard no sound of barking, seen no sign of any human. Then the bows touched and we were splashing ashore.

The clump of trees stood on a rocky knoll and from the top of it we looked out across a vista of mountains — snow and rock and the green of trees with giant peaks reaching up to a thin layer of cloud, the dawn already reddening to the sunrise. Water cascaded down on either side of us and far below we could see the inlet that had become known as the Halliday Arm, a dog-leg of leaden water thrusting into the wildness of the mountains, curving past a small area of flat land away to our left. There were huts there, the remains of a logging pen, a narrow track snaking up to the top of a low cliff with a truck poised on the edge of it, and immediately below a huge great pole of a tree trunk up-ended to form a primitive crane, another jammed hard against the cliff, and below that a large barge moored against a log-pile jetty. There was no sign of the Coastguard cutter. The barge was already half loaded with timber, the rest of its cargo piled on the quay close beside it.

And in from the quay, filling all the valley right up to the lower slopes, was High Stand, a sea of dark green tops stretching without a break till, just back of the huts, it ceased, the land suddenly bare and dotted with stumps.

‘He shouldn’t have done it,’ Brian said, his teeth clenched. And he added, ‘It looks so much worse from up here. Bigger. Much bigger. It’s a lot more than two hectares.’ He was almost beside himself with sudden anger. ‘How could he do it — and with that curse hanging over him?’ He turned abruptly. ‘Let’s see if we can find a way down on to that track.’

The track was away to our left, a rough ribbon of mud, half overgrown and reaching up through rocky slopes of new growth, most of it scrub. To our right was sheer cliff with waterfalls cascading down from the rim of the lake like lace streamers to join up and form a torrent that disappeared into the great stand of trees in the bottom. This main torrent finally emerged as a white froth of fast-flowing water that fed into the inlet over a flat waste littered with the debris of broken trees.

‘Come on! No point in standing looking down at what they’ve done to it.’ There was cold anger in his voice, a note of violence. ‘Somehow I’m going to stop the bastards.’ He had turned and was facing me. Finally he said, speaking slowly, ‘What you’re seeing down there in the valley bottom has taken over half a century to grow, and look what they’ve done! Ten minutes with a big chainsaw and … crash! Another of them gone.’ He swung round, hurrying back down towards the water and calling over his shoulder, ‘Come on or not as you like, but I’m going down there. Now!’

When I caught up with him he already had the canoe launched and was clambering in. I followed, not saying anything. I had no desire to be stranded up there on my own. We pushed off, shoes full of ice-cold water, trousers wet to the knees. There were clouds forming on the mountains as we paddled past the last of the cascade spills, keeping close along the shore and heading towards a gloomy little beach that marked the north end of the lake. A little huddle of cottonwoods ringed the edge of it, most of them dead of age or some disease, the bare trunks and branches covered with a grey lichen. And perched on the tops of two of the tallest were a pair of bald-headed eagles, pale heads above large grey-black bodies.

There’s a boat.’ Brian pointed away to our left, and at the sound of his voice the two birds took off, their flight heavy and ponderous, and so quiet they might have been owls. The boat was a semi-inflatable drawn up on the smooth, grey surface of a rock outcrop. We landed at the edge of it, the rock making it possible to scramble ashore without splashing around in the cold lake water.

The boat had no outboard, just a pair of oars, and like the inflatable parked on the big lake by the Ocean Falls dam it looked quite new. There was nothing in it except the oars, a plastic baler and an air pump. I stood there for a moment, looking down at it and wondering about the hut. There was nothing else on the lake that the men in the logging camp below needed a boat to reach, for if they were going in to Ocean Falls the obvious way was by boat direct from the logging camp, not by climbing a thousand feet, then rowing a couple of miles across a lake, scrambling down a portage and hoping there would be somebody at the bottom to ferry them the ten miles to the dam.

‘Come on!’ Brian was impatient to get the canoe away under cover and start down to the camp.

‘What’s it for?’ I said.

The boat? Fishing. Or hunting maybe. There’s a bit of swamp land over the other side might be good for the occasional moose.’ He lifted his end of the canoe, nodding to me to take up mine.

‘And the hut?’ I murmured, thinking about how we had come upon it suddenly in the night, the dogs barking and the rattle of their chains, the torchlight in the window. Two guard dogs and at least one man there — why?’

He didn’t answer for a moment as we hefted the canoe up the rock slope. From the top we could see a well-beaten trail leading down through the trees. ‘If you’d seen some of the dropouts that squat down in Ocean Falls,’ he said, ‘and you’d got a fishing lodge up there at the end of this lake, you’d make dam’ sure there was some sort of a guard on it. Besides, out here in the west they’re most of them hunting mad, particularly townspeople. Hunting is their sport, the outback and all the life that’s in it at their disposal, to kill at will.’

We pushed our way into a tangle of what he said was Sitka alder and scrub birch, up-ended the canoe and stuffed our things underneath it. There are laws,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Laws! Of course there are laws. But who cares about laws up here in the mountains? You try and haul a moose home in your pick-up or go off with a trophy of antlers without a licence, then the Mounties or the Park Wardens will get you, but up here’ — he looked back at me — ‘up here, deep in the Rockies — ‘ He shook his head. ‘The law is down there.’ He waved a hand south towards Vancouver. ‘Not up here. There’s nobody to enforce it here.’

He pointed to the logging camp just becoming visible across the little clearing, the dull, blade-like gash of the inlet beyond. ‘Even down there, those loggers — they’re a law to themselves. Oh, your friend Edmundson, coming in on a Coastguard cutter, may cause a little flutter of anxiety — the long arm of government — but soon as he’s gone …’ He laughed again, and then we were onto the old extraction road, wishing we had gumboots instead of canvas shoes for there was a lot of mud in places and it was heavily overgrown, sloping steeply down along a spur of the mountains.

There was no big timber anywhere, everything felled and only the scrub of new growth — birch and mountain ash and alder, goat’s beard, devil’s club, and beside the track a trailing evergreen that Brian said was kinnikinick. This was the area Tom Halliday had clear-felled, this was what he had been living on as the Ice Cold mine faded.

The spur stopped abruptly, the track swinging away to the right in a hairpin bend and slanting down towards the green sea of the High Stand tops. At this point the mountainside fell away steeply, the camp and the quay with the barge alongside almost directly below us, the layout, every detail of it crystal clear. It was like seeing it all in an aerial photograph, and away to the right was the bald, stony patch full of brash and debris where a near-rectangle of Josh Halliday’s great plantation had been newly felled. The picture was one of utter devastation with the torrent reaching into the inlet from the far side of it.

A broad haulage road ran close alongside the waters of the inlet straight to the quay. A big crawler was moving along it, trailing three of the High Stand stems hoisted by their butts with their tail ends chained to a set of bogies. And right below us a truck was backing off the cliff-edge above the boom crane and starting down the bright gash of that newly bulldozed track to the camp.

Brian was muttering to himself, cursing under his breath. We had both of us stopped, the bend and the drop such a superb vantage point. ‘Isn’t that Wolchak?’ He was staring down at the camp through his binoculars. ‘Talking to a big man with a bit of a beard. Could be Edmundson. Have a look.’ He passed me the glasses. ‘Down there by the mess hut. They’re just walking across to the office.’

The magnification was incredible, the camp leaping towards me and so clear I could see individual stones in the dirt road, the red glint of a Coca-Cola tin, and a small cinnamon-coloured bear digging around in a trash can quite regardless of the two men walking past. ‘That’s Jim Edmund £

son,’ I said. They reached the office, Wolchak talking all the time, quick gestures of the hands, Jim nodding. They paused a moment, looking back towards the clear-felled area. Then they passed through the door of a hut that had a notice on the outside of it.

The camp was deserted then, the only movements the bear still foraging and that truck grinding slowly down the bright yellow gash of the track just above the camp.

It was an odd-looking truck with a lot of piping in it and a big gantry folded down across the cab and protruding way beyond the blunt engine cover. ‘It’s our mobile drilling-rig,’ Brian said when I asked him what it was. ‘My father had it brought in when Ice Cold began to peter out. Thought he’d strike oil here.’ His grandfather had apparently talked about a bit of a seep he had found at the upper end of High Stand. ‘But old Josh, he wasn’t interested in oil. He just thought it a joke that he could have planted one hell of a forest on top of an oilfield.’ Tom, of course, had seen it as the perfect solution to his growing financial problems. Another gamble that hadn’t come off.

The sound of a chainsaw came to us faintly in the wind.

‘Can you see where they’re cutting?’

‘No,’ I said.

He reached for the glasses. ‘That barge there. Looks like an old cement barge.’ It was large and rusty with a little wheelhouse aft. ‘And they’re loading it dry,’ he added, staring down at it. ‘That shows what they think of those trees.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, they’re not going for pulp, are they? If it was pulp-wood they’d send up one of those self-loading barges, a real big monster with a couple of built-in cranes, and they’d be deck-loading the timber crossways. Then all they do when it arrives at the pulp mill is flood port or starb’d ballast tanks, heel the barge over and slide the whole lot into the water, straight into the logging pen. But instead of that, here they are, loading the timber dry into a barge so that it’ll stay dry, and they’ll unload it the same way, straight onto the sawmill’s quay.’

‘Your father is convinced — ‘

He swung round on me then. ‘You don’t believe him, do you? He’s just trying to convince himself that he isn’t responsible for what’s going on down there.’ And he added in a quieter tone, ‘Whatever he thinks they’re up to I can tell you this, they’re treating those trees as though they’re gold. And that’s just about what they are.’ The buzzing sound was louder now and he swung the glasses towards High Stand, searching along the edge of the clear-felled area. But it wasn’t a chainsaw. It was a steadier drone, and suddenly I could see it, low down over the water, a floatplane flying up the inlet. We watched it as it landed in a burst of spray and taxied in towards the quay, cutting a broad curving line through the still water. The pilot jumped out onto a float, leaping ashore with a line and fending off. There were two passengers, one short, the other taller and heavier, and something in the way they walked, their baggage too … I got hold of the glasses again and then I knew I was right. ‘Camargo and Lopez,’ I said.

‘The two South Americans?’

I nodded, wondering why they were here. ‘They’re the hunters who brought that note from Miriam up to the mine. Just left it there for Tom to find.’

‘So he told me, but he didn’t say anything about hunters. He said they were gunmen, hoodlums in fact.’ He had a look at them through the glasses. ‘Could be right. They look mean enough.’

‘But what are they doing here?’

‘What do you think?’ He turned on me angrily. ‘Can’t you get it into your head that that stand of trees down there is worth a fortune. It’s thuya, virtually all of it, and red cedar, with its high oil content, is a timber that’s in great demand in all countries where the humidity is high — outdoor sheds, greenhouses, window frames, any construction where weather is a problem. Come on! Let’s take a closer look.’

He moved off round the bend, starting down the slope into the great basin that looked like the half of a crater, white streams of water falling from the lip and in the bottom that green sea of feathery tree crowns. ‘I’m dam’ sure,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘that Wolchak’s plan is to fell the whole stand. If he can satisfy the Government, and a clear undertaking to replant would probably be enough, then all he needs is Tom’s signature. And if he’s got Miriam tucked away somewhere, he’s got a hell of a bargaining counter. Tom would do anything for that woman.’ And he added, ‘Oh, I know he breaks out sometimes — mostly when he’s high. Always has done. Except when my mother was around. She kept him fully occupied.’ He gave a short laugh as he pushed through a thicket of salmonberry that had invaded the track where water, seeping from the slopes above, had turned it into a quagmire.

In the wet spots, where there was mud or coarse gravel, we saw the marks of rib-soled boots, footprints that pointed both up and down. At intervals other, smaller extraction tracks ran off along the contour lines of the slope. There were no footprints on these side tracks and with the main track getting progressively better we lost them altogether. The scrub growth here was smaller, for we were moving down into the more recently felled areas. Soon we were hearing the murmur of the cascades from the lake above. A power saw started up, sounding like the floatplane taking off, but intermittent, and there was the crash and thud of a tree going down. As the track improved we moved faster, but even so it took us well over half an hour to reach the edge of the high timber.

By then I was hot, tired and very sleepy, stumbling along with my eyes half-closed, my mind worrying only vaguely now about those footprints and the reason for a rowing boat up there on the lake above. Brian still thought it just a recreational facility, the hut too. ‘Hunting. Fishing. You got to occupy your spare time somehow, and there’s nothing else to do in a place like this.’ But why didn’t they fish the shores of the Halliday Arm and hunt the flats where the torrent ran out from the big trees? Why climb a thousand feet up an increasingly overgrown track? And those dogs? It was the dogs that worried me more than anything else, my tired brain groping for something that I knew was there at the back of my mind, something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about. God! I was sleepy.

And then we were into High Stand, the air quite still. The humidity was higher here, the cool of a forest, with great trunks, some of them almost two feet across, and rising, rising like the fluted columns of a cathedral, rising up until the branches, like the start of medieval vaulting, fanned out, cutting off the daylight, feathery needles aglint with a diamond splatter of moisture droplets, catching the sunlight that came and went with the passage of the clouds. It was stupendous, magnificent. I’d never been in such a place before, the track we were following all carpeted thickly with the brown softness of dead needles, the quiet almost awe-inspiring, all sound deadened so that the rush of water and the buzz of the chainsaw were reduced to a gentle murmur.

I think that was it — the gentleness. Those huge trees, those giants, were gentle giants. It was a place of peace and my tired brain, grasping that essential, began to understand and appreciate Brian’s deep-seated anger at the deadly intrusion of a logging company and its power saws. Every now and then he paused, gazing upwards, an expression of awe. ‘Once, when I was going out into the Karakoram,’ he said, turning to me, ‘I saw something like this. Not far from the base of Nanga Parbat on the way to Gilgit. A forest of great stems that had been planted. That was the only time, but the trees not as big nor as uniform.’ And then the chainsaw had started up again and a moment later we heard the crash and thud of another tree going down. ‘God! How could he do it?’ His voice was trembling and I had the feeling that if Tom had been standing where I was Brian would have gone for him.

He hurried on then, the buzz of chainsaws growing. And then he began moving from bole to bole, the noise louder as we worked our way towards it until we could see the flash of blades backed by the yellow streamer of sawdust and two men bent forward, blades in constant motion as they moved up the long stem deftly lopping off the branches till it lay there, its naked trunk just a piece of raw material for some far-off factory.

The men straightened up, a pause while they talked, the saws silent. One of them laughed, the other smiling as he lit a cigarette. And then they were moving onto the next stem. An arm swung upwards, pulling on the starter cord, the right hand thrusting the saw downwards. It started with a roar, then quietened, the chain still as its operator bent to the base of the tree, turning the blade and checking the angle. Then abruptly he revved the engine to full power, the muscles of his arm flexing as he thrust the blade home, the tortured wood streaming out from the base of the blade like a gout of yellow blood from some great artery of the tree.

‘I wish to God I’d got a rifle.’

I was standing right beside Brian and I knew from the expression on his face that if I could have passed him a gun there and then he would have shot them down in cold blood without any compunction at all — an executioner dealing out retribution to a couple of murderers. ‘Are those the two that turned you back when you landed at the quay?’ I was wondering how many men Wolchak had at the camp.

‘They didn’t just turn me back. They threatened to take a saw to me.’

We were whispering to each other, but if we had shouted they wouldn’t have heard, the sound of the saw so loud and the two so concentrated on what they were doing.

‘It was the thin one. The bastard working the saw now — a head like the blade of an axe, dark mahogany features and two fingers missing from the right hand, the white blaze of a saw scar across his forearm. That’s the man I’m going to get — somehow.’ The anger, the hurt and the hot Peruvian blood …

The high pitch of the saw’s engine dropped to a faint stutter, the chain still as the blade was withdrawn. A great wedge of timber fell out of the base of the tree, the two inside edges showing the yellow of the wood’s cut cells as the feller straightened his thin, tight-muscled body, drew on his cigarette and then moved round to the other side, bracing his legs wide and falling easily into the right stance as he bent down, the blade horizontal and close to the ground. The engine screamed, then slowed as the blade bit, the bright yellow flow of the sawdust streaming between his legs; we just stopped there, rooted to the spot.

I don’t know what it was — a sort of fascination, I suppose. To stand there beside Brian watching a tree that had been planted by his grandfather as a small seedling that he had held in his hand, stooping to plant it in the ground, and now it was a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty feet high, and a man bending to fell it to the ground. The saw was slowing, the engine note deepening as the cut moved in to the full diameter of the butt, the yellow of the sawn wood streaming slower as the engine laboured. A pause, and the second man standing with his hand on the trunk, leaning his weight against it almost nonchalantly.

There was a sudden crack, and looking up I saw the top of the tree sway. A final burst from the feller’s saw, then both men were standing slightly back, their hands pressed against the bark as though to push the whole towering weight of the trunk away from them, and the tree moving, moving faster and faster with a great ripping of branches high up. Then it was in the clear, falling away from the men and the uncut forest into the open devastation of clear-felled land.

A thud, a great cloud of dust and debris. Then it was there, on the ground, felled and finished, everything suddenly very quiet, both saws cut out and only the sound of two men talking and the distant murmur of the cascades, the rush of water through the forest.

We watched three trees like that one felled, and then we moved into the timber, working our way towards the camp with the glimmer of daylight that marked the felled area and the inlet just visible away to our right. It was the sound of the crawler’s engine that warned us we were getting close. The boles thinned, a breeze stirring as daylight showed ahead, and then we were at the edge of High Stand, the extraction road only a few yards away and the crawler already past on its way to pick up the three felled trees, now trimmed and ready for haulage.

It stopped and I saw Jim Edmundson there, talking to the driver. And when it had gone on Jim continued with his work, pacing out the land, notebook open in his hand. I wanted him to know we were there. I wanted to tell him about the hut, about Tarasconi and the Mexican. God knows what was in my mind. But as I moved out from the brown fluted bark of the tree behind which I’d been standing, Brian hissed at me, ‘Wait! There’s a truck.’

It was a pick-up, coming fast from the direction of the office. It pulled up not fifty yards from us, Wolchak leaning out from behind the wheel, a battered hat on his head, his glasses glistening. ‘Edmundson! Pilot says he can’t wait for you any longer.’

Jim had stopped and was making a note. ‘Another few minutes. I’m almost through.’

Wolchak jumped out of the cab. ‘He’s due to pick up some fishermen at Bella Coola midday. He has to leave now.’ Even though the ground was rough Wolchak still managed to move over it like a rubber ball, his rotund body conveying an impression of boundless energy. ‘I’ll drive you back. He’s in a hurry now.’ He had reached Jim, standing there in front of him with an odd urgency. ‘Otherwise it could be a day or so. There’s a lot of cloud coming in.’

Jim nodded, staring down at his notebook. Then he closed it, slowly. ‘You’ve felled by my reckoning over four hectares. And you’re still felling.’

‘We have the owner’s agreement.’ Wolchak’s voice, high-pitched, came to me very distinctly.

‘Have you?’ Jim looked at the man as he slipped the notebook inside his anorak. ‘I asked for it last night. I could see at a glance you’d cut more than the two hectares the forestry people had been notified. You couldn’t produce it.’

‘No. I said the lawyers had it and we’d send it on. In fact, I’ve just learned it won’t be signed until some time today.’

‘You were felling without the owner’s agreement then?’

‘We had a letter of intent. I told you.’

‘But you couldn’t produce it.’

‘Of course not. It’s at our Seattle office. I explained…’

The saws had started up again, and at the same time the two of them turned away towards the pick-up. It was then, with Edmundson there, a government-chartered floatplane at the quay, and Wolchak already being questioned, that I started forward. This was the moment to face him with Miriam’s disappearance, to find out whether SVL Timber were in any way responsible. That was my reasoning, and I was on the point of calling out to Jim Edmundson when Brian grabbed hold of me.

‘No! Not now.’ His voice, loud in my ear, was almost drowned by the saws. ‘That’s a Park warden, not a Mountie. He isn’t going to stick his neck into this can of worms.’ He hauled me back. ‘Can’t you get it into your head, that stand of trees represents money, big money. You’re fighting greed, men who’ll do anything …’ He shook his head. ‘Just wait. Sooner or later …’ He left it at that and I stood there staring after the two of them, the moment gone. But for Wolchak to tell Jim Edmundson the agreement would be signed today …

‘Why did he say that?’ Brian didn’t take it in and I had to repeat the question. ‘Why would Wolchak be so sure your father would sign the agreement? And sign it today?’

‘Miriam,’ he said. ‘They’ll get hold of Tom …’ He shrugged, watching as Jim Edmundson got into the cab and the pick-up drove off. ‘They’ll get at him. Maybe not today. But sooner or later. Meanwhile, your friend there will write a report some time during the next few days and it’ll go the round of departments, everybody initialling it and passing it on. It could be a month before anything is actually done about it.’ He looked back at the forest behind us. ‘A few more fellers and it could all be down inside a month.’

The pick-up went to the office first. The pilot was already down at the Cessna standing impatiently on one of the floats. Then, as soon as he saw Jim come out with his bag and his briefcase, he swung the prop. The engine started immediately, the prop idling as the pick-up stopped alongside, Jim went straight from truck to float and he didn’t look back as he climbed into the cabin, though Wolchak had got out and was standing there on the quay. No handshake, no farewell word;

I thought that unusual for such a friendly man.

The clouds were right down on the mountain now, the walls of the inlet shrouded, light fading as the Cessna taxied out and took off, flying straight and low down the waterway. The time was eleven-thirty. Another tree crashed down. The crawler went by again trailing four logs this time. And close under the cliff the great boom crane was lifting the butt of another log, a small winch on the clifftop drawing a hawser tight to hold it into a niche in the rock face, the drilling rig climbing back up the road to the top. We watched as it backed up over a wooden platform erected above the niche, put down pads to hold it in position, then raised the A-frame that had been folded over the cab until it was erect and ready for the drilling pipe. Down on the ground two more men were now working on the log that had been lowered into chocks, manhandling with the aid of a chain purchase what appeared to be a butt-end section of the tree back into position.

I only had a quick look at this work through the glasses, and Brian couldn’t tell me what they were doing. His only concern seemed to be Wolchak and he kept the glasses glued on the office. It was about ten minutes later, when the pipe suspended from the mobile rig’s A-frame tower was turning, the bit drilling down into the butt of the log up-ended in its niche, that a door of the office opened and two men came out, both carrying rifles slung over their shoulders, rucksacks on their backs. They stood there for a moment, waiting beside the pick-up. Then Wolchak came out and they all climbed in.

Seeing them like that, armed, had taken my mind right back to Ice Cold and Tom, high on snorts of coke, trying to get them to say where Miriam was being held. I watched as the truck began to move, coming straight down the road towards us. The thought that had been lurking at the back of my mind was suddenly there with a blinding clarity. ‘The hut!’ I moved across to Brian, shaking him by the arm. That dinghy. They’re going up there.’

‘So what?’ He was staring at me uncomprehending, and I didn’t understand because now it seemed so obvious to me.

‘The hut!’ I repeated. ‘That’s where they’ve got Miriam. Camargo and Lopez, they’re going up there.’ Now that it was out, now that I’d said it, it seemed clearer than ever — the dogs, the guard, that Mexican Rodrigo taking in stores. And Tarasconi — it would explain why he’d told Tom he would soon know where Miriam was.

The pick-up went past us, Camargo’s bearded face clearly visible as he looked over the tops of the trees at the heights above. ‘They’re going up there.’ I still had hold of Brian’s arm, desperately trying to get through to him. ‘Suppose Tom contacted Rodrigo after we left? He could be up there now.’ But he shook his head, still watching the camp through the glasses. ‘What are you looking at?’ I demanded. ‘Whatever you think of him, he’s still your father.’

He shook his head again, and I saw the glasses were fixed on the boom crane that was now manoeuvring the log out of its niche and lowering it to where the two men were rolling another butt-end to the chain purchase. ‘I must find out,’ he muttered.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Why they want a log boom. You only need that if you’re floating logs down or holding them penned up in a booming ground. But loading them dry, straight off the quay… I can’t see the point of it.’ And he added, ‘Tonight. I’ll get into the camp tonight.’ He lowered the glasses, passing a hand over his face. ‘It’s the only way. Then maybe I’ll have something that’ll force the authorities to act.’ He yawned. ‘You go back up to the top if you want to. See what those two are being sent up there for. I’m going to curl up somewhere, get some sleep, then, when it’s dark — well, we’ll see …’

I argued with him, scared I think to go back on my own, scared of the loneliness — just myself and those two hoodlums, both of them armed. But nothing would shift him. His father, he said, could fend for himself. As for Miriam, if I were right and she was being held in the hut, he didn’t see that I’d be much use to her up there on the lake on my own. ‘You’d be better employed getting some sleep, then seeing if you can discover something that will stop them pirating a stand of timber that doesn’t belong to them and never will.’

In the end I left him, knowing I had no time to lose if I were to get up the lake ahead of the two South Americans. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But watch it, mate. Wolchak, and the boys he fronts for, aren’t playing for plastic counters. They’ll cut you to pieces without a thought.’ Those were his last words to me as I turned and started back through the timber at a steady trot. I looked back once, but I couldn’t see him. The trees had closed ranks, the great boles a solid wall blocking out even a glimmer of daylight from the open ground.

The saws had stopped again. It was very quiet as I doubled back, searching for the track, starkly conscious that I was alone now, nobody to lead me on, nobody to talk to. High Stand seemed suddenly a hostile place, the tree roots tripping me, the boles hemming me in, and everything very dark.

I found the track and started up the slope of it, the murmur of the torrent a little nearer. It was raining now. I could hear it in the trees, but no rain fell, the canopy shutting it out. Then the saws started up again, the sound faint and far behind me, and I knew Camargo and Lopez had ceased talking to the fellers and were on their way up the track behind me.

In my haste to get back up to the lake ahead of them I barely noticed the increasing dark. It was uphill all the way, my breath labouring. I had nothing to carry, but even so I was exhausted by the time the boles became smaller, faint glimmers of daylight showing through the tops. The rain had thinned to a light drizzle, wisps of white cloud vapour trickling between the trees. And then I was out into the old felled area, the track climbing more steeply, my breath coming in great gasps, and nothing ahead of me, just the mist hanging white and heavy, so that I moved in a pale void where every leaf and twig, every bush glimmered with moisture. I looked back and High Stand had gone, swallowed up in the cloud.

That was when the loneliness really hit. I was slowed to a walk that gradually became a desperate trudge. A lawyer’s desk and a small sailing boat were no training for a hike in the Rockies and I hadn’t slept for what seemed a lifetime. Every now and then I stopped for breath, eyes and ears reaching back into the grey fog behind me, seeing shadows on the edge of visibility, the rustle of air currents through birch leaves making my heart pump harder. No sound of the saws now, only the growing murmur of the cascades above me.

Noon by my watch and I was back at the hairpin bend, standing at the end of the mountain spur where we had looked down onto the camp and the inlet, and across to the green sea of the forest top. Now there was nothing. I was in a world apart, just myself and cloud vapour. And then I heard a voice.

It came from below me, from back down the track, a voice calling to somebody, faint above the sound of water falling. There was an answer, fainter still. Then silence.

I went on then, climbing the back of the steeply sloping spur, forcing the pace, fear driving me and giving me strength. My shoes squelched in the mud as I forced my way through the thickness of new growth that had seemed so much easier on the way down, my body sodden below the waist, steaming with sweat under my anorak, and nothing to show me how near I was to the top, the clouds solid and all-pervading, but white now, a glimmering iridescence as though I was beginning to climb through it to the sun.

The track, or what remained of it, came to an abrupt end. I turned back then, searching for footprints, found a patch of soft earth fifty yards back and clawed my way up through a mass of alder and some rowans until I was on level ground that sloped away to the invisible edge of the lake. I found the canoe and wasted precious moments trying to right it. It had seemed so easy when there were two of us. Then I remembered the boat hauled out on the sloping rock where we had landed. I grabbed the paddles and the rucksack that contained our food, voices sounding on the track below as I stumbled through the trees to the rock.

It took me only a moment to toss the things into the boat, slide it down the slope into the water and jump in. White cloud vapour clung to the trees, dripped from the branches, the edge of the lake disappearing into nothingness. I rowed quietly, slipping the boat through the water, the rock fading. Suddenly it was gone and I stopped rowing. I could hear the crash of branches, loud above the murmur of water falling away to my right. Then voices. They were talking in Spanish, searching along the lake edge. There was a splash and a curse.

I wondered what they would do, what I was going to do, alone on the lake in thick cloud mist. I was thinking of the hut then, wondering vaguely what would happen when I reached it, my brain grappling wearily with the problem of how to check that Miriam really was being held there. An exclamation, a stream of half-audible words, the voice harsh and flowing. Lopez. And he had found the canoe.

I began to row again.