High Stand

1

It’s an odd feeling sitting with earphones on and a drink in one’s hand listening to a symphony concert and looking down through drifting cloud to a scattering of growlers so far below that the sea appears dusted with salt, the pack-ice beyond and an occasional berg. Tim Severin would have been glad of this aerial view when his leather hide boat was caught in the ice, for it showed St Brendan was right. Even now, almost fifteen hundred years after that Irish saint recorded the details of his voyage to North America, there was still the ice-clear gap between the pack and the coast of Greenland. It showed quite clearly from where I sat, 37,000 feet above sea level, a dark lane of water, and beyond it great rivers of snow and ice sweeping down between the black mouths of overlapping craters, and then the white blank-out of age-old, depthless snow as we whispered our way across the Greenland icecap. Baffin Island for lunch, the sun standing still as we flew almost as fast as the earth was spinning with bergs like ships between dark-coloured outbreaks of land. Black, black mountains, sheer cliffs, everything brittle-bright, the clarity of the air unbelievable.

The man next to me leaned across. ‘Don’t want to drop into that lot, eh?’ It was the first time he had said a word. ‘Guess we must be just about over the spot where Franklin and all those others wintered and died.’ He looked at me hard, steel-grey eyes and a baldish head. ‘First time you bin on this run?’

I nodded.

‘Thought so. I do it three, four times a year. Always Wardair.’ He nodded emphatically. ‘I got contracts to supply you people with fruit, apples mainly.’ He smiled a hard, tight-lipped smile. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but we grow them right in the middle of the Rockies. Grapes, too. You should take a trip up and see for yourself. And this is the right time, Indian summer weather, real warm.’ He reached into his jacket pocket, produced a business card and placed it on my meal tray. ‘Be happy to show you around.’ He nodded, pushed his earphones back in place and was lost to the world again.

We crossed Slave Lake, the Rockies looming ahead, the murmur of the engines barely audible as we began to slide down the sky towards a world of jagged peaks and the dirty yellow of snow that had lain exposed all summer. On and off I had been thinking of Miriam. Almost a month ago she had come this way, maybe in this very seat since she, too, had flown Wardair. Had the sky been as clear as it was now? Had she sat there looking down on the barren, ice-scarred land below, thinking of her destination, knowing the Yukon border was only a few hundred miles away to starb’d? And not a word since that postcard.

It had seemed strange enough back in England, but now that the wild bleakness of northern Canada was spread out below me, the vastness of it and the loneliness, it seemed stranger still. To have reached out to somebody as she had — never mind the reason — and then to cut the contact as though it didn’t matter any more. All that space, a wilderness of mountain, lake and scrub just beginning to take on an autumn blaze on the heights below the snow line, and in the Yukon, on the ground, it would still be a vastness of space full of rock and trees, the humans few and strange. Surely in the remoteness of that glacial national park, having penetrated to Ice Cold Creek, she would have come back urgent to tell me about it, about the mine, about what she had found. It didn’t seem natural that she should suddenly have gone silent on me, not now that I, too, was conscious of the vastness, experiencing that sense of smallness and loneliness that she must have felt.

There was a marvellous view of Vancouver sitting like a miniature Manhattan surrounded by vast expanses of sun-bright water as we came in to land. Ships, and tugs with long trams of barges, some with log rafts, the Strait of Juan de Fuca reaching out to the American mainland and the distant shapes of snow-clad mountains. It was for this, and the sight of the Arctic Ocean, that I had flown the northern route instead of the more prosaic and slightly cheaper route via Edmonton. As soon as I had settled into my hotel, which was in the rather congested eastern part of Vancouver known as Gas Town, I took a taxi across town to the Bayshore Hotel. It was right on the water, close against the old wharfs and boatyards of Coal Harbour.

At reception I was able to confirm that Miriam had in fact spent three nights at the hotel the previous month, but she had left no forwarding address and had not booked in again. Presumably while staying at the Bayshore she had made contact with friends, or people her husband had known, and had been invited to stay on with them on her return from Whitehorse. It was something I had expected, but it still came as a disappointment. At the back of my mind, I suppose, I had been hoping to have her company for the evening. Instead, I walked through Stanley Park as far as the light on Brockton Point with its view of the First Narrows and the Lions Gate Bridge, then dined at a restaurant in Coal Harbour.

This half-derelict area between the Canadian Pacific railway tracks and the waterfront is almost the last remaining relic of the old part of Vancouver, and after my meal I wandered round the whole complex of crumbling boatyards, half-collapsed wharfs and charter boat offices. The air was very still, a warm, balmy night, the water dead calm and the only sound the slap of wavelets against the wooden piers as the wash of the occasional yacht or motor cruiser reached the shore. It was a late night tour of one of the most atmospheric parts of the city that was later to save my life. But I didn’t know that at the time, of course, and spent several minutes at the end of a tumbledown jetty looking enviously across the water to that extraordinary marina of timber housings over towards Deadman’s Island that shelters the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club’s motor cruiser fleet. I would dearly have liked to ‘borrow’ one of those craft to explore the waters between Vancouver Island and the mainland. At least it would be nice to be staying here at the Bayshore with that magnificent view across to the lights of the North Shore with the Rockies beyond. So much to see, so much of grandeur and beauty, and neither the time nor the money.

Next morning the sun shone out of a clear blue sky and I strolled up Cordova Street, Granville and Dunsmuir and south down Burrard as far as Robson’s Square. It was on Robson Street that the solicitors who had drawn up the timber agreements had their offices, on the twenty-first floor of a tall glass building with a view past the green copper summit of the Hotel Vancouver to the BC Ferries’ jetty and the CPR tracks running towards Coal Harbour. By comparison with my small set-up at Ditchling their premises were palatial. I had no appointment and was quite prepared to arrange for a meeting either the following morning before my plane left for Whitehorse or on my return. However, the partner who had looked after Halliday’s Canadian affairs was available and after only a short wait I was shown into his office. His name was Roy McLaren, a paunchy, heavily built man of about fifty with thick gold-rimmed glasses which gave his round, rather boyish face a look of enquiring wonder. Yes, Mrs Halliday had been in to see him — he reached for his diary, turning back the pages — ‘I think I gave you the date in my letter.’

I nodded. ‘And you haven’t seen her since?’

‘That also I said in my letter. Neither her nor her husband.’ He looked across at me from behind his glasses. ‘Did you know Tom well?’

I had to explain then that I had only acted for him in the matter of his Will and had known him for no more than three years. ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘we’ve been acting for him since his father died. And the firm, of course, acted for his father before then. I’m afraid I never knew Josh Halliday. A great character by all accounts. My uncle was the one who dealt with him.’ He put his hands together, the fingers forming a steeple, pressing them hard as he stared at me enquiringly, an expression of large-eyed innocence. ‘When Tom inherited my uncle handed him over to my father. This is a very inbred firm, you see. Even my eldest sister is a partner. Damn good lawyer, too.’ He relaxed his fingers, smiling. ‘I took over Tom’s affairs here when my father retired about six years ago.’

‘About the time the output from the Yukon mine was beginning to decline.’

‘I didn’t know anything about that. There was some talk about it later, of course, but at the time all I was concerned with was drawing up the agreements for the sale of timber on that property of his up north along the coast. He was acting on the advice of a forestry man named Hugh Ringstrop over by Campbell River.’

‘Did Ringstrop negotiate the price?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. And he marked out the areas. He was Tom’s forestry adviser.’

‘And that last sale agreement?’ I asked. ‘Did he negotiate me price for that too?’

The fingers pressed tight again. ‘Not sure, but I think so. I remember he said it would be difficult to get an export licence, and anyway the stand was really too young. “Hadn’t reached maturity” was one way he put it.’

‘But you still drew up the agreement.’

‘Yes.’

‘Knowing about the curse.’

‘Ah!’ The fingers pressed very tight, the eyes wide and innocent behind the thick glasses. ‘Yes, of course — we sent the deeds over to his bank in London above five years ago. That was after the divorce had gone through and he remarried.’ He smiled. ‘You never met his first wife, of course.’ The hands fell suddenly flat on the desk. ‘A very beautiful, very terrible woman. I think he might have killed her if she hadn’t gone off with another man. Martina. They had two sons. Which brings me to something else. There has been one small development since I replied to your original letter.’ He pressed a bell on his desk and a very severe-looking woman in a bright pink cotton dress came in and handed him a folder. The younger of those two sons — do you know him?’

‘Brian?’

He nodded. The woman went out, closing the door without a sound.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen him, have you?’

He was smiling again, the eyes slitted now and wrinkles showing. He opened the folder. It contained a single sheet of typing and some newspaper cuttings. ‘He came to see me — week before last. His father has left him the Cascades, is that right?’ And when I nodded, he went on, ‘I didn’t altogether approve of his manner, or his dress for that matter, so I taped the whole interview. It didn’t last long. Five or six minutes, that’s all. Then he was gone.’

‘It was about the Cascades he came to see you, was it? An area of timber he calls High Stand.’

‘That’s it. Four hundred hectares of what Ringstrop describes as the finest plantation of western red cedar he has ever seen.’ And he added, ‘I’ve written to you, giving the gist of our conversation, but my letter probably arrived after you’d left. I was on holiday last week, fishing up the coast by Kelsey Bay.’ He picked up the largest of the newspaper cuttings, unfolded it and passed it across the desk to me. ‘This appeared while I was up the coast. Recognize anyone?’

It was a full page of the Vancouver Sun, half of it taken up with a picture of a huge barge under tow. The barge was piled high with the rounded trunks of large trees and below the steel hawsers of the towing bridle, riding the barge’s bow wave, was a man in an inflatable holding aloft a banner. He wore a baseball hat and a T-shirt with Greenpeace on it, and the words on the banner were the same as the headline that flared across the page:

GREEN SOLDIERS AGAINST POLLUTION Killed in Action Below were three smaller pictures, one of a tree falling in a clear-felled section of forest land and under it a quote — An unknown soldier of the forest. The middle picture showed a close-up of the man holding the banner. The long face, prominent nose and high cheekbones, the black hair showing beneath the cap and the way the ears stood out, even the same T-shirt. The third showed the inflatable, one side collapsed, the man with the banner diving over the side, and above him a man leaning over the bows of the barge with a boathook in his hand.

I looked across at McLaren. ‘Brian Halliday?’ He nodded. Taken last Wednesday. I’m told the silly fool nearly lost his life. But he had it all organized and was intent on causing the SVL Timber Company and the towing people as much hostile publicity as possible. There were film cameras out there and he deliberately let himself be run down. He dived overboard, as you see, just as the inflatable was trampled under by the bows of that tow. Damn lucky, if you ask me. He was picked up by a salmon fisher. By then he was half full of water, but uninjured except for a few bruises and abrasions. It was all on TV that same night. And the next day Greenpeace disowned him. Said it was nothing to do with them. They’re concentrated on whaling again, not running a West Coast save-the-trees campaign. Without their backing the story had a quick death, but he certainly made an impact. I watched the TV film of it on a friend’s boat and it was quite an action spectacular.’

‘The logs were presumably from the Cascades property.’ He nodded. ‘From the plantation he calls High Stand. It’s all there in the caption story at the bottom of the page.’ He rang the bell again and the woman in the pink dress appeared. ‘Copy these cuttings for Mr Redfern, will you.’ He handed her the file. ‘Then you can look them through at your leisure. Not that they’ll tell you anything you don’t already know.’ He glanced at his watch.

I apologized again for interrupting him and he smiled and shrugged and said, ‘Not to worry, but it is Monday, and that’s never a good day. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘Just one thing,’ I said. ‘That sale agreement dated 20 September of last year. I take it that was the only one you drew up for Tom Halliday covering the western red cedar down by the river, the High Stand area?’

He nodded, smiling, his hands forming a steeple of his fingers again. ‘I know what you’re going to ask. I phoned the office the very next day and had my son get on the phone to SVL Timber in Seattle. He was informed that they were still working to the agreement covering the two hectares. The logs were of exceptional quality and because of that they would be kept clear of the water, no rafting or parking them in a booming ground the way they do pulp. Instead, they were bringing them down by barge and, again because of the quality, had spaced the delivery dates. Last week’s tow was the second of three separate deliveries to be made to the mill.’

‘And they won’t be cutting any more trees?’

‘Definitely not. Hugh Ringstrop made that quite clear to them — no trees could be felled, outside of the original two-hectare lot, until a new sale agreement had been negotiated and signed.’ The fingers pressed hard together and he added, ‘And, of course, nothing can be signed until Mr Halliday is found. That they understand and accept.’

I wasn’t sure about that and I wondered how forcibly his son had made the point. But when I told him about Wolchak’s offer, he nodded. They made similar approaches, first through Ringstrop, then direct to us. That was just after Tom was reported missing.’

‘You didn’t say anything about that in your letter to me.’

‘No?’ He hesitated. ‘No, you’re right. I thought about it, but it didn’t seem relevant. Not then. If Tom Halliday was dead, then of course I would have let you know. But right now any sale of the property is legally out of the question.’

I had a few other queries, small points of law mainly concerned with Tom Halliday’s position as a Canadian citizen and how the estate would stand from a tax point of view if that proved to be the basis on which we had to operate. Then I left him with the assurance that I would see him again before leaving for England if my visits to either the mine or the forestry area raised any further queries. To my surprise he had not been to either of the properties himself. ‘Our business is very much centred on Vancouver, companies chiefly.’ This as he rose to see me to the door. ‘My father and my uncle had a great many personal clients, but most of them are dead how and times have changed. The sons have tended to move into companies. It’s just the way we have expanded.’

I picked up the copies of the press cuttings from the pink dress, now looking even more severe with her glasses on the end of her nose and seated behind a word processor.

I lunched later that morning at a fish restaurant virtually under the high span of Granville Bridge, reading carefully through the press cuttings as I ate.

One of the cuttings had given the names of the towing company as Angeles Georgia Towing of Port Angeles, which my map showed to be just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Victoria and the south end of Vancouver Island, an ideal position for a tugboat company. I phoned them as soon as I got back to my hotel and when I said I had a query about the Cascades I was put straight through to Mr Stutz who sounded gruff and very Scandinavian. What I wanted to confirm, of course, was whether this was the second of three barge-loads and that there had not been any further felling of timber. ‘Ja,’ he answered immediately, ‘I think you are informed correctly, there is vun more tow to make.’

‘Only one?’ I asked.

‘Ja, vun only.’

‘When will you be towing it down?’

‘I dunno. No orders yet.’

‘But there are definitely some more logs to bring down?’

He didn’t answer that and when I asked him exactly how much timber was allowed for in the export licence, he said, ‘Look, who are you? A newspaper man, no?’

‘The owner’s English solicitor,’ I said and he closed up on me, referring me to SVL Timber. ‘Ve just tow. I know nothing about the ownership of timber, nothing about legislation. Okay?’

I had a thought then. ‘How many tugs do you operate?’ I asked him.

‘What you say? — how many tugs I got? None of your business. You talk to SVL, okay?’ And he put the phone down.

But when I got through to SVL Timber I found myself dealing with a Mr Barony who was as smooth as the towing company man had been gruff. There was one more load to be towed down under the existing agreement. It hadn’t yet been decided when. ‘I guess you’ve seen the reports of young Halliday putting himself under the barge. Well, we don’t want a repetition of that, do we, whether he’s a Greenpeace man or not, so you’ll appreciate when we do decide on a date for the tow we won’t be announcing it to the press.’ And he gave a gentle, conspiratorial chuckle.

He was not quite so forthcoming, however, when I asked him whether they were negotiating a new sales agreement. ‘We would like to, but as you will know, Mr Redfern, there are certain difficulties at the moment.’ He was referring, of course, to Halliday’s disappearance, and when I asked him how long it was since he had seen Mr Halliday he said, ‘I have never seen him. All our business has been through Ringstrop, his forestry man, and McLarens, the solicitors. If you know where he is please tell me.’ And when I said I didn’t know and that was the reason I was in Canada, he sighed gently and said that was a pity. ‘If you find him please contact us immediately.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Meantime, have I your assurance that no more than two hectares of High Stand has so far been felled?’

The loggers cut only the area Mr Ringstrop marks out. That I promise. It is all being done through Mr Ringstrop, you understand.’

‘And you’ve no plans to fell any additional area?’

‘We would like to. That is why we need Mr Halliday — or perhaps you or his wife. If he is dead we are informed from London that you are the executors, not that son of his. Maybe soon we have to deal with you. Let me know, Mr Redfern. Let me know as soon as we can negotiate a purchase. Okay?’

‘One final question,’ I said. ‘Mrs Halliday was in Vancouver some three weeks ago. You didn’t see her?’

‘No. No, I didn’t see her.’

‘And she didn’t phone you?’

‘No, Mr Redfern. No, she don’t phone. So — I wait to hear from you, or from Mr McLaren, yes?’

That was that, and the rest of the afternoon I spent in Stanley Park, part of it watching the antics of the dolphins and the large black and white Orca and all-white beluga whales in their very restricted public display pool. While at the hotel I had, of course, phoned Ringstrop, but he was not in the office that day and the girl who answered the phone said he would be at the Crown Forest logging camp at Beaver Cove. I could ring him there. I had explained who I was and had asked her to tell him I would be visiting the Cascades in a few days’ time and if there was anything he wanted to tell me to ring me that evening at my hotel, otherwise I would contact him on my return to Vancouver.

Back at my hotel, I went through the press cuttings again. One piece of information was new to me — the weight and size of the logs. From my pocket calculator I worked it out that each tree contained something like a cubic metre of timber, the logs measuring upwards of 36 metres with a butt diameter of about 15 centimetres. Maybe they had got it wrong. The Sun reporter had presumably been looking at the top layer of logs, measuring them by eye and probably exaggerating, but even allowing for that it suggested High Stand as a whole was worth more than Brian Halliday had indicated, or that his father had been paid less than the true value. I couldn’t be sure of that since I was merely multiplying by the market value per cube for cedar that the girl at Campbell River had given me, and that was a figure she admitted was the going rate at waterside for Vancouver Island timber. As Brian had said, it was a long way from the Cascades to Seattle and the value depended very much on the price of the tow.

I walked down to the Canadian National Railway pier, watched a big rust-coloured bulk carrier come into Burrard Inlet from the Narrows, pick up its tugs and berth at the pier. Then I walked along Main to Hastings and strolled through the bright lights of Chinatown where I had an excellent meal in a little restaurant patronized by Chinese rather than tourists, mostly shopkeepers and local businessmen, I guessed by their appearance. I was reading a paperback history of the Yukon gold rush I had picked up at a nearby bookshop.

Next day I checked out of my hotel and caught the bus that runs across False Creek and south down Granville to the international airport stuck out on Sea Island, which is little more than a silt bank on the North Arm of the Fraser River delta. I had to wait there for the Whitehorse flight to come in from Victoria, and when we finally took off the sky was clouding over so that I only had a momentary view of Vancouver and the Fraser, with the treed humps of the Gulf Islands merging into the bulk of Vancouver Island as we banked, the Strait of Georgia running north-west between the islands and the mainland, the pewter calm of its waters criss-crossed with the wakes of ferries, coasters, fishing vessels and motor cruisers — also one or two yachts under power, their sails hanging limp. Then we were into cloud as we climbed across the Rockies to meet up with an Edmonton plane at Fort St John, and we stayed in cloud until we were dropping down into the province of Alberta, where in an instant the air cleared to reveal a brown and arid world with splashes of poplar green relieving the dark monotony of spruce, and the Peace River a snaking ribbon of water between clay-coloured banks.

The heat, when they opened the door, was tinder-dry, and in place of the pale-suited businessmen who had flown up to Fort St John, the passengers joining us from the Edmonton plane were from a different world — men in faded bush shirts, broad-brimmed cowboy hats and braces, girls with glistening black hair and dark, high-cheeked, slightly flattened faces, and full-blooded Indians moving as though nobody had told them about the force of gravity, the whole plane suddenly full of a frontier atmosphere.

We flew north-west now, cutting obliquely across a series of high, jagged ranges, clouds piling up to the west. The man in the seat next to me, who was dressed in a greenish uniform, proved to be one of the Kluane Park wardens. His name was Jim Edmundson, and without any prodding from me he began talking about the wildlife and describing the way the Indians had lived in the days when Mackenzie and the North-Westers had first opened up the country trapping beaver. ‘Now we keep the Indians on a welfare state basis, the Eskimo, too, and the beaver are protected.’ He had a slow, very Canadian voice, almost a drawl. ‘But we dam’ near killed them off one rime, the beaver I mean.’ The resulting decline in beaver dams had meant there was nothing to stop the run-off of rainwater from the mountains. ‘Soon there was drought and Alberta became a dust-bowl.’

He was so easy and friendly I didn’t resent it when he asked me straight out the purpose of my trip to Whitehorse. My briefcase, and the sort of questions I was asking, must have made it clear I wasn’t just a tourist. He had never met Tom Halliday but he knew the history of the mine and was able to tell me a lot about the area. He talked about the gold rush, too. But it was the mountains, the whole environment, and the balance of nature that he talked about most, and also the forests. He had trained as a forester. He had even written a book about forestry developments on Vancouver Island and the Charlottes. A large man with battered features like a boxer who was wholly absorbed in his work.

The clouds had thickened below us, and soon after starting the approach run to Whitehorse, we were into them and flying blind in a grey, ghostly world.

‘You headed straight for the Kluane?’ he asked me, his pronunciation confirming Miriam’s impression of it as Klewarny. ‘I never bin to the mine, but the Noisy Range I know, and if it’s near the Noisy…’ He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t advise going in behind the Front Ranges in this weather.’

‘I’ll probably stay the night in Whitehorse and leave in the morning,’ I said.

‘Who’s meeting you?’

‘Nobody,’ I told him. ‘But I’ve got the mine manager’s address. Takhini Trailer Court. That’s near Whitehorse, isn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘Bout a mile down the highway from the airport.’

‘Any difficulty about hiring a car?’ I asked him.

‘Not this time of year. Tourist season’s just about over.

But if you’re planning a trip out to that mine, you’ll need a four-by-four, that’s for sure.’ He nodded to the grey swirl of cloud skimming past the wings. ‘Be raining on the ground. Might even be sleeting in the mountains over towards Haines Junction. Looks like winter’s starting early this year.’

We broke out of the cloud into driving rain, Whitehorse a rectangular grid of wide, blackly shining streets laid out flat in the elbow of a river. ‘The Yukon,’ he said. ‘One of the few rivers that runs north then south.’ I traced the course of it on the map spread out on my briefcase. It started in BC, almost reached the sea at White Pass above Skagway, ran north to Dawson City, then west almost to the Bering Strait before turning south and ending up after two thousand miles in Norton Sound.

I turned to the window again, the river below me, a broad brown ribbon of water running fast all along one side of the town, paralleling the railway line, and on the other side the airport spread out along the top of a brown escarpment. ‘Depends how long it’s been raining whether you get through to your mine, but in any case it’ll be rough going …’ He looked at me, frowning. ‘Guess you wouldn’t have much experience of four-wheel-drive trucks in the old country.’

‘I’ll manage,’ I told him.

‘Sure. But this is bad country to get bogged down in. Half my time is spent helping men get out of trouble they could have avoided if they’d had the sense to realize what they were up against. Tell you what, Philip’ — right from the start he had been using my Christian name — ‘I’ve got my truck parked at the airport. Why don’t I run you out to Takhini? It won’t take me five minutes and I’ve got to see the Parks man at the Government Building, also the Met. people. I’ll be about an hour in town, then I’ll pick you up and we’ll drive to Haines Junction. That’s where our HQ is, and it puts you almost a hundred miles on your way, right against the Front Ranges of the Kluane.’

I told him I wouldn’t wish to put him to so much trouble, but I was into a country now where helping others was a part of living. A friend of his might even lend me his four-by-four if it was only for a couple of days, and there was a reasonably comfortable lodge just outside Haines Junction. ‘Food’s okay, too,’ he said. ‘And maybe in the morning the rain will have stopped.’

We landed in a downpour, spray flung up higher than the wings, the wheels skimming the surface water, and since he wouldn’t take no for an answer, even saying if there was no room at the lodge his wife would make up a bed for me in what they called the nursery, I accepted his offer of a lift. The prospect of company on the drive to Haines Junction was too good to refuse.

We hurried across the wet concrete, flung our cases into the big Parks vehicle and piled in. The interior of the truck was damp and cold, the surrounding country lost in the driving rain and the flat rectangle of Whitehorse only just visible like a toy town below us. The Alaska Highway,’ he said, as we swung north out of the airport, the asphalt road gleaming, the black of spruce closing in. Almost immediately we were into the settlement of Takhini and he turned right, down a dirt road that forced him into four-wheel drive. The surface was some sort of boulder clay. ‘Slippery as hell soon as there’s any rain.’ Ahead of us the river expanded into a small lake. Spruce everywhere. White spruce, he said, though the forest it made was funeral black.

The trailer court was wet and sticky with mud, nobody about, so I had a miserable time finding someone to direct me. The man I had come to see lived at the far end, a large home on wheels with the name Jonny Epinard painted on the door. A red Dodge pick-up stood beside it almost completely coated with a glistening layer of mud. Maybe it was the rain, or the fact that his wife was in hospital, but he was there, the door opening almost as soon as I banged on it. He was a wiry little man, rather Irish-looking, with a dark, screwed-up face. He hadn’t shaved that morning, the stubble showing grey, though his hair was black, jet black and very straight. In his faded bush shirt, open at the neck, and mud-stained jeans held up by braces as well as a thick leather belt, he had a wild, outlandish look.

His dark eyes switched from me to the Park warden, then back to me again. ‘Who are you?’ His grip on the door had tightened, his voice a little high. ‘What d’you want?’

‘Answers,’ I said. ‘To a few questions.’ I could hear the suck of his breath as I told him who I was and got my briefcase from the truck. I think he would have liked to close the door on me then, but Jim Edmundson called, ‘Back in about an hour, okay?’ and without waiting for an answer drove off. The man had no alternative then: ‘You’d better come in,’ he said, his voice reluctant.

The rear of the trailer was fitted out as a sitting-room, chintz curtains, imitation-leather chairs, pale wood cupboards and shelves. He waved me to a seat, but then remained standing, staring at the floor as though he didn’t know what to do about me. I let the silence run on until finally he said, ‘Well?’ The question hung in the air. He was nervous and I wondered why. ‘You like a beer?’

I shook my head.

His eyes darted about the room as though seeking some way of escape. Then abruptly he sat down. ‘You’re Tom Halliday’s lawyer, you say.’ His eyes fastened on the briefcase. I opened it and showed him copies of several letters that gave my firm’s address, but I could see he had already accepted my identity. ‘What do you want to know?’ His tongue flicked across his lips. ‘Sure you won’t have a beer?’

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I had a drink on the plane.’

He nodded, then got suddenly to his feet again. ‘Well, I think I will. Don’t mind, do you?’ He opened a cupboard, busying himself searching among the bottles and cans. ‘You come all the way from England?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

To see me? Or to see the mine? You going there?’ He looked round at me. There’s nothing to see. The mine’s finished.’ He had a can in his hand and he snapped the ring. ‘It ran out years back. But you know that, don’t you?’

‘How many years back?’

He stared at me, his eyes probing as though he was trying to decide whether the question was some sort of a trap. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’ I waited, and at last he sat down again, taking a swig direct from the can. ‘It didn’t happen all at once. The pay dirt just thinned out, yielding less and less each year.’

‘When did you first realize the gold was petering out?’

‘Hard to say exactly, but about seven years ago, I guess. Why? What do you want to know for? Because Tom’s broke, is that it?’

‘Did Mrs Halliday tell you that?’ I was thinking of her description of the man watching from across the road. ‘You spoke to her in the end, did you?’

But he was still thinking of Tom. ‘He’s been a good guy to work for.’ He was suddenly smiling. ‘Used to come out about once a year. Wasn’t much interested in mining, only the machinery — he liked that. What he really came for was the fishing. And camera stalking. Didn’t want to shoot anything. But if he could get a close-up with his camera, moose in part’c’lar — he’d stalk moose all day down in the swampland below Nine Mile Falls.’ He shook his head, still smiling — a slightly crooked, slightly uncertain smile.

‘You kept the mine running.’

That’s right.’

‘Why did you do that? It was losing money.’

‘He wanted it kept running, that’s why. Not flat out like it used to be, but ticking over.’

‘Why?’ I repeated.

He shrugged. ‘Why does any man do anything if he’s got the money? He liked it, liked the idea of being a mine owner, that’s what he told me. It was in the blood, I guess, his father finding gold there when everyone told him he’d been sold a dud. Reck’n Tom didn’t want anybody to know the gold had run out.’

‘It must have cost him quite a bit.’

‘Sure, but a rich man like him — ‘ He laughed. ‘Wish I were rich enough to run a mine just for the hell of it, just to keep up appearances. That’s what he was doing. Keeping up appearances. And now what?’ His eyes darted at me, anxious now and worried about the future. This was a young man’s country and he was certainly the wrong side of fifty. He leaned forward, ‘You’re his lawyer. If it turns out he’s dead, then what happens about the mine? There’s only myself and a young half-breed Indian, Jack McDonald, now, but we need to know.’

I didn’t answer him for a moment, wondering what line to take. ‘You’ll have to ask Mrs Halliday about that,’ I said. ‘In the event you speak of, the mine will belong to her.’

‘Mrs Halliday?’ He seemed suddenly confused.

‘You saw her here in Whitehorse, didn’t you? When she was staying at the Sheffield.’ Or had it been the half-breed Indian who had followed her? It had to be one of them. ‘She hired a car and drove down to a lake called Dezadeash.’

‘Dezdeesh.’ From the way he said it I knew his correction of my pronunciation was to give him time to think. ‘She stayed at Kevin McKie’s place — Lakeside.’

‘You spoke to her just as she was driving off, is that it?’

‘No.’

‘But you were watching her from across the road.’

He didn’t answer.

‘She said she was being followed when she was staying at the hotel. Was that you?’

He stared at me blankly, his face gone sullen, and in that moment he looked part Indian himself.

‘She wrote to me,’ I said. ‘Somebody was following her about, watching her. That was you, wasn’t it?’

He nodded, slowly ‘and reluctantly.

‘Why?’

He hesitated, shaking his head. And then suddenly he blurted out, ‘I was scared, you see. I couldn’t make up my mind.’ And he went on, the words coming in a rush, ‘Tom had talked of her like she was a princess. Not often, but sometimes — over the camp fire, when he was lonely. And the way he spoke of her …’ He paused, his mind remembering. ‘She never came out here with him, you see. I’d never met her, and when I saw her… well, I guess there was something about her — ’ He leaned suddenly forward, both hands clasped rightly round the beer can. ‘What would you have done? She looked so beautiful, and at the same time so remote — like ice, or a sunset seen across a frozen lake. I knew she must be here to find out about the mine — the same questions you bin asking. Was I to go right up to her and say What about my job — my wife’s sick and I haven’t had any money for over six months? Could I go right up to her and say that? Would you, if you were me?’

He was staring at me, his gaze urgent, his eyes almost pleading. It was obvious what he wanted, what any man would want who’d held an apparently safe job for years and now didn’t know whether it would continue, or even if he’d get the money he was owed. And I couldn’t help. Also, there was something that puzzled me. ‘How did you know Mrs Halliday was staying at the Sheffield? You say she’d never been out here before, yet you were there waiting for her, following her about.’

He didn’t say anything, and his eyes dropped, one hand under his arm abstractedly scratching himself.

‘Did she write you she was coming?’

He shook his head, his eyes shifting to the window.

‘But you knew she was coming.’

‘Yes.’ He finished his drink and got slowly to his feet, putting the empty can down and reaching into a drawer stuffed with papers. She hadn’t written to him. She had cabled him. He handed me the flimsy. It was addressed to a box number in Whitehorse. It gave her date of arrival and flight number and asked him to meet her either at the airport or the Sheffield. PLEASE ARRANGE VISIT ICE COLD MINE. MIRIAM HALLIDAY. ‘That’s when I first saw her, at the airport.’

‘But you didn’t talk to her then.’

‘No.’

‘What about the visit to the mine — did you fix that?’

‘Yep. She went in with a guy who works a claim on a neighbouring creek. I fixed that for her at the airport. Bit of luck, he was there to pick up some radio spares.’

‘An Italian.’

He nodded. Tony Tarasconi. She was staying at Lakeside Lodge. He picked her up from there and took her in.’

‘You fixed that for her, at the airport. But you didn’t make yourself known to her, though you were there and she had asked you to meet her. What were you afraid of?’

‘Nothing.’ He said it quickly, his eyes darting. ‘I told you — I was worried about the future. I couldn’t face it, not then.’

‘So when did you finally talk with her?’

‘Later. I spoke to her later.’

‘After she’d been to the mine?’

‘Yep.’

I handed back the cable slip, wondering what had made him change his mind. ‘I’ll be going up to the mine myself,’ I said and an expression almost of hostility showed for an instant in his dark eyes.

‘What for?’ He stared at me. ‘There’s nobody there, nothing — only the equipment. Anything you want to know I can tell you right here. Any questions about production, how much it would cost to move the screening plant and have a try up the Stone Slide Gully.’ It was clear he didn’t want me there. But why? ‘I tried to persuade Tom to have a go at Stone Slide, but he wouldn’t. I guess he was finding things difficult by then. Financially, I mean. We’ve cut right back. Everything we can, so no point your going there.’ And he added, ‘It’s bad going at any time, but after all the rain we’ve had — ‘

‘It’s not the rain,’ I said. ‘It’s something else.’ He shook his head, his face taking on that sullen look, his hands clasped very tight as I told him I was determined to see the mine now that I was here. In the end he agreed to contact the Italian for me. He couldn’t drive me in himself because of his wife. Just why he had been willing to talk to Miriam after she had been to the mine, when he wouldn’t speak to her before, I couldn’t discover. And after she had been to the mine Miriam had only stayed one night at the Sheffield, then in the morning she had taken the train down to Skagway in Alaska.

‘And after that?’ I asked. ‘Where was she going after Skagway?’

He gave a little shrug and shook his head. ‘Vancouver, I guess.’ It wasn’t for him to ask her where she was going, and he added that people who went down to Skagway on the old Yukon and White Pass Route railway were usually headed back to Vancouver by the sea route, in which case she would have been taking one of the American ships as far as Prince Rupert, then changing to the BC Ferries service. I suggested she might not have gone straight back to Vancouver. ‘Did she give any indication she wanted to see the forest land her husband had inherited on the west coast of BC?’

He didn’t say anything, a slight shake of the head, that was all.

I asked him then about Brian, whether he had ever met him. ‘No,’ he said. And then, after a pause: ‘Tom wanted him to come out. He said so several times. But Brian never came. First he was in Peru, then India, I think.’ The eagerness of his reply made it obvious he was glad my questioning had switched away from Miriam. Tom thought he’d be interested in the spruce forests here, but I got the impression that what his son was really interested in was people — people in trouble, I mean. Like the Peruvian Indians, or those being exterminated by the destruction of the Amazon rain forest.’ He saw I was surprised and quick as a flash he said, ‘You see, Mr Redfern, we’re not ignorant of what goes on in the world even if we are just a handful of people on the edge of the North Polar Sea. There’s plenty of magazines and we’ve all the time in the world to read — a good library, too.’ He was smiling then and for a fleeting moment he seemed suddenly more relaxed as I asked him about Tom Halliday’s interest in the forestry land. ‘Did he talk about it?’

‘He may have done.’ And he added, ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

‘Did he ever go down there? Before coming to see you at the mine, or after?’

‘He may have done.’ He gave a quick little laugh. ‘Not much interested myself, you see. Trees are all right for shoring and sluicing, building a log cabin. But if you’re a mining man like me you tend to think of them as something that’s got to be cleared out of the way before you start shovelling the dirt.’

‘You don’t think he was paying for the continued operation of the mine out of the sale of timber?’

‘I wouldn’t know — about his business affairs, I mean.’ He said it quickly, getting up and going to the cupboard for another beer. ‘Sure you won’t change your mind?’

I shook my head, watching him and wondering why he was suddenly nervous again.

He snapped the ring seal and took a pull at the can, standing in front of the window, his feet apart, one hand clasped on the bright red elastic of his braces, staring out at the rain. ‘He was a rich man, wasn’t he?’ He looked at me then, his eyes brown and worried under the dark puckers of his brow. I realized then that he wanted confirmation of that. ‘He was rich, wasn’t he? I mean, when he came up here, he’d hire planes, anything he wanted, throwing money about…’ His voice trailed away.

‘He was broke,’ I said, thinking it best to tell him the worst straight out. ‘When he disappeared — ‘ I stopped. ‘You do know that he’s disappeared, don’t you?’

He had sat down again, his hands clutching at the beer as though he desperately needed something to hold on to. ‘Yes,’ he muttered, his voice so muted I hardly heard his reply. But of course Miriam would have told him. And then he said, ‘I heard it on the radio. Late one night. It was on television, too. Just the announcement that he’d gone missing. Didn’t see it myself, but the radio said something about financial trouble. It was a hell of a shock, I can tell you, always thinking of him as being so rich — until these last few months, that is.’

‘And it was on the media.’ I hadn’t expected the man’s disappearance to be news up here in the far north.

‘The mine, you see. Anything to do with mining is news here and he was quite a guy. You talk to the fellers up at the airport who fly the Kluane, they thought the world of him, so did Kevin McKie and some of the others around Dezadeash and the Lakeside Lodge.’

‘Do you mean he impressed them, or was he a popular figure up here?’

‘Oh, he was real popular — everyone he met, they liked him.’

‘So if he’d come over here he would have been recognized instantly.’

He hesitated, the dark eyes suddenly wary. ‘Sure. If he’d flown in to Whitehorse, the buzz would have been half over town in no rime. Most of them up at the airport knew him.’

So he wasn’t here. I had vaguely hoped… but the RCMP would have known and they would have notified our local police. Perhaps his son was right and he was dead. ‘Has Brian Halliday been in touch with you?’ I asked, thinking that perhaps he hadn’t headed for the Cascades, but had come up here, as Miriam had done, to see the mine for himself.

‘No.’

‘He’s not in the Yukon?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘And he hasn’t written to you?’

‘No.’

All the time I had been talking to him, from the moment I had knocked on the door of his trailer, I had been conscious of a block, a lack of openness. He hadn’t volunteered anything. Maybe it was the north. I was used to a different kind of people. If he were part Indian, that might account for the secretiveness. But not the nervousness. Human nature couldn’t be all that different up here, even allowing for a racial mix. The man was on edge. And yet he had been perfectly open about the mine. He’d answered my questions about that quite freely, but he hadn’t wanted me to go there. Why? What had he got to hide? ‘You mentioned a gully,’ I said. ‘Stone Slide.’

He nodded.

‘You think there’s gold there?’

‘There’s traces. That’s all I know.’ And then his eyes suddenly brightened, his voice rising on a note of excitement as he said, ‘But there’s gold there, sure.’ And he went on to explain how the bed of Ice Cold Creek swung away into a narrow valley with benched sides, and at the point where it swung away an old stream bed came in from the right that was all boulders, the mountain beyond gashed by a slide that had opened up a gully big as Hastings Street in the middle of Vancouver… ‘I’ve panned there, in a silted pool after heavy rain brought water flooding through the gully. There’s gold there all right. Now, if you could persuade — ‘ He stopped there, a sudden wary look. That’s the way we should have gone. The mountain above is heavily benched, the slide cutting right across the benches. Seven, eight years ago, that’s when we reached the Stone Slide junction, but the consultant Tom called in said the prospect was too small. He advised continuing on up the main valley, so we kept to the Creek and in no time at all we were screening double the amount of rock and silt for the same yield.’ He hesitated, staring past me to the window. ‘We got most all of a million dollars’ worth of equipment up there, just rotting its guts out. Now if you were to talk somebody into moving the screening plant back down to the junction with Stone Slide — Mrs Halliday, whoever it is that’s got the necessary cash …’

He was still talking about his dream of taking a ‘flyer’, as he put it, at the gully area when Jim Edmundson came back for me. He didn’t get out of the cab, just wound down his window. ‘Hey, Jonny,’ he called, ‘you got a caretaker up at that mine of yours?’

‘Caretaker? How d’you mean?’ He looked startled. ‘Who says I got a caretaker up there?’

‘Matt Lloyd. He was down at Dezadeash a few days back.’

‘What for?’

‘Two men from across the border. They spent a night at Lakeside Lodge. Hunters, they said, but Kevin didn’t like the look of them, so he phoned the RCMP post at Haines Junction. Mart’s report says they had game licences and one of our people went up the Ice Cold and Squaw Creeks to check they hadn’t been hunting inside of Kluane National Park.’

‘Ice Cold is just outside the Kluane boundary.’

‘Sure. But he thought they might be shacked up there as a convenient stepping-off point for hunting expeditions into Park territory. In fact, as he drove past your screening plant he thought he saw somebody moving up by the hut where you have the table that does the final screening. Nobody answered his calls but there were fresh footprints in the mud by the latrine, and by the doorway of the bunk hut.’

‘The huts are all locked,’ Epinard said quickly.

‘Yes, they were locked.’

‘You say he thought he saw somebody. If he caught only a glimpse, then it could have been a trick of the light, a bird or a deer. We get deer up there.’

‘That doesn’t explain the footprints.’

‘Could have been those hunters.’

Edmundson nodded. ‘Could be.’ He turned to me. ‘You ready? As it is, it’ll be just about dark before we get in.’

I suggested to Epinard that he get the Italian to take me up to the mine. He said he’d try, but he didn’t sound very sure. ‘If not, I’ll drive in on my own,’ I told him as I climbed into the Parks truck.

He stepped out into the rain then. ‘I wouldn’t do that. The track will be thick with mud, very tricky. Some nasty drops, and after all this rain …’ His voice was lost in the roar of the engine. ‘I’ll be at the Lodge tomorrow night,’ I yelled to him as we pulled away, leaving him standing there in the rain, his eyes wide, his mouth open as though shouting something.

A few miles and we were at the junction of the Klondike Highway where it follows the Yukon River north to Dawson. We headed west past the tiny settlement of Takhini Crossing. We were on dirt then, the tyres thrumming on the hard, impacted surface, the windscreen wipers flicking back and forth. Ahead of us, the Alaska Highway ran like a great swordthrust, the spruce a black wall on either side, the occasional log cabin surrounded by wheel tracks in a muddy clearing, a horse or two grazing on the broad road verge, that was all, the telegraph poles either fallen or leaning drunkenly without wires, the glimpse of reflector dishes at intervals marking the microwave technology that had superseded them, and the rain incessant.

Hardly a vehicle passed us, the clouds low and driving curtains of cloud mist blotting everything out except the endless black of the spruce on either side. The truck’s cabinet was overheated and my eyes became heavy with staring into the void ahead, the white posts of the distance markers sliding past, the emptiness and the loneliness of the country taking hold. I began to have an odd feeling that Tom Halliday was with me, that we were in some way linked together. He would have come down this road, heading for Dezadeach and Dalton’s Post, going up to the mine to fish the Creek or stalk moose in the flats.

He may have been a bit of a playboy, but he was still a part of this country. Epinard had made that clear, so now did Jim Edmundson: ‘Most everybody around here knows about Josh Halliday and the Ice Cold mine.’ And he had told me something then that Tom had never mentioned. A few years after his father had struck gold at Ice Cold Creek he had started taking it out through Dawson instead of Haines. This was when Silver City, the trading post at the head of Lake Kluane, was booming on the back of the placer gold fields of the Kluane Lake district. ‘You can still see the log buildings,’ he said, ‘the old smithy, the lines of stabling, the roadhouse, and the barracks of the North West Mounted Police, which was what the Mounties were called then.’ It was just north of Silver City that he’d run across Lucky Carlos Despera again. There’d been a fight and he had left him lying unconscious where the trail ran close above the lake. Later he had gone back with some friends and found Despera’s body lying in the water.

‘Dead?’ I asked him.

‘Yup. And the story is Despera had a daughter, by some Indian woman he’d been going with. She was born after his death and Josh Halliday sent the two of them down to Vancouver.’ He looked at me then, a sideways glance — ‘She married an Italian.’ And he had added, very quickly, ‘We got an awful mixture of races out here. There’s Indians, of course, and Scots.’ He laughed. ‘BC was practically run by Scotsmen in the early days. When the Canadian Pacific and the National were pushed through the Rockies — Italians, Poles, Germans, Irish, all sorts of refugees helped to build those railways. Then the mines brought Cornishmen from England, Welsh miners, too.’

He had already told me that in the plane as we had been coming in to Whitehorse, but it hadn’t meant very much to me then, my mind concentrated on how I was going to handle the mine manager and where I would find him. But now it added to the picture I had of Tom Halliday’s father, so that Tom himself seemed to take on a new dimension.

I must have dozed off, for my eyes suddenly opened to the sound of Jim’s voice saying something about Champagne. ‘You want to stop for a beer or something? We’re about halfway.’

‘I don’t mind. It’s up to you,’ I said. ‘You’re doing the driving.’

He nodded. ‘Well, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather keep going. Be dark early tonight.’

Incredibly there really was a place called Champagne, a huddle of log huts corralled with some trucks in a sea of mud and entered by a timber archway with the name spelled out in large wooden letters. A generator must have been running for there were lights on in two of the huts. And then we were past it, the world empty again, and shortly after that the rain began to strike the windscreen in large blurred spots. It wasn’t sleet and it wasn’t snow, but the speed of our passage made the glass cold enough to freeze it for an instant.

A truck passed us going fast, four Indians in the back huddled under plastic bags. A sign with a camera design marked a bridge that was a viewpoint for visitors. The rain lifted for a moment, the shadowy shape of white-topped mountains away on either side, the highway running ahead into infinity, the black of the spruce and a solitary horse.

‘Another month and this’d be all snow.’

I nodded, seeing it in my mind, a wilderness of white. ‘Will it be snowing now up at the mine?’ I asked.

‘Could be. I don’t know what height it is, but it’s above the timber line, I know that.’

I tried to picture it deep in snow and myself handling a truck I’d never driven before. Was there really any point in my going up there? Just looking at the mine wouldn’t make any difference to the problems that faced me dealing with Halliday’s affairs.

‘That Italian who works a claim on the Squaw, his name’s Tony Tarasconi. Right?’

I nodded.

‘You’ll be going in with him, I gather.’

‘If Epinard can fix it.’

‘Something I learned in town this afternoon.’ He hesitated. ‘Maybe just coincidence, but Matt Lloyd thought there might be something in it. He’d been reading up an old police file.’ He glanced at me, then went on, ‘Remember I told you Lucky Carlos Despera’s daughter married an Italian? Well, his name was Tarasconi.’ And he added quickly, ‘Like I say, it may be just coincidence …’ He left it at that, and shortly afterwards we ran into Haines Junction. Seen in the ram and gathering dusk, with the lights glimmering on pools of water, it looked at first glance a dilapidated frontier settlement of wooden shacks and gas stations. But then we turned right, off the highway, and were into the Parks area, a neatly laid-out estate of residential and office buildings.

‘Won’t be a Jiffy,’ he said as he stopped at one of the houses and jumped out, leaving the engine running. Through the clicking wipers I could see the outline of Parks HQ, a very modern complex with an almost solid glass rotunda that had clearly been built to give a view of the mountain ranges fronting the Park. I wondered what it would look like in the morning, what the trail would be like up to the mine. I might be on my own then, the trail impassable … I suddenly felt very inadequate, sitting there in that warm cab staring out at the grey-black void that masked the mountain slopes. Time passed, the emptiness beyond the last gleam of light accentuated as the black of night descended on the land.

It was probably only about ten minutes before Jim came hurrying back through the ram, but it seemed longer. ‘Well, that’s all fixed,’ he said as he jumped in. ‘I’ll pick you up in the morning about nine. You can then have a look at the Park museum, see the film show — you ought to see that while you’re here, it’s something quite special — then about ten my wife will come for you and drive you to Lakeside.’ We were out on the Highway again, turning away from the Haines road and heading north. ‘The forecast’s good, by the way. At least for tomorrow.’ And he added, ‘I phoned the Lodge, but the Italian hasn’t been in for a couple of days. They expect him any time now, but if he doesn’t turn up they’ve got a four-by-four you can borrow, that’s if the mine road’s drive-able. Okay?’

I thanked him, still surprised that he should be taking so much trouble over a perfect stranger, and a moment later we swung right onto the gravel forecourt of a filling station, lights shining dimly on a ribbed and riveted battle-wagon of a coach nose-on to a wooden building that said it was a restaurant. ‘That’s the Greyhound bus in. This is their meal stop-over.’ He parked beside it and I saw the words Anchorage-Whitehorse.

The passengers were just starting to return to their seats as we pushed our way into the entrance, which was part shop selling souvenirs and paperbacks. They had a room spare and as soon as I was booked in Jim left me. He had two kids and he was in a hurry to get back to them. ‘See you in the morning,’ he called, and I stood there on the wooden steps, watching his tail lights disappear in the rain, American voices all around me, Anchorage just a bus ride away.

I picked up my case and hurried across to the accommodation unit. The room I had been given had the heating turned full on. The window looked out onto the gravel forecourt and the parked cars and trucks of other guests. Right below me was a truck with what looked like a snow vehicle in the back, the word SKI-DOO just visible. It also had something roped to the left front mudguard and largely hidden under a plastic sheet, only its legs showing like stiff sticks. It was the carcass of a deer, its dainty little hoofs shining blackly in the forecourt lights.

The Greyhound bus left and I had a quick shower before running back through the ram to the restaurant, where I had my meal in the company of what seemed an inordinate number of stuffed animals and head trophies. As usual when feeding out on my own I had a book with me, so that it wasn’t until a man jogged my elbow as he pushed past on his way to the toilet that I took any notice of the two seated under an elk head in the far corner. He was a small dark man in an ex-army camouflage anorak and a peaked cap. He didn’t apologize, which is perhaps why I watched for him to come out. He had the walk of a man who thought he owned any piece of ground his feet were treading on, the arrogance of his movements reflected in the hardness of his features, the unyielding set of his jaw. His eyes met mine, very briefly, then darted away to take in the whole room so that I had the impression he was constantly on the alert. His companion was bigger, burlier, his beard and moustache streaked with grey, the nose broad and flat, almost negroid, except that his colouring was lighter. He had the build, the bullet head and thick neck, and the ears of a heavy-weight boxer, and he, too, wore a camouflage anorak, but his hat was of fur with a bit of a tail. It lay on the table beside his coffee cup and his partially bald head shone in the fluorescent light.

They had already finished their meal and they left shortly afterwards. I watched them through the window as they walked across to the truck with the dead deer roped to its bonnet, got in and drove away towards Haines Junction. I finished my meal, and when I went back to my room the rain had stopped and a star or two was visible over the black outline of the mountains. Being on my own I had drunk too much coffee, so that for a long time I couldn’t get to sleep. Perhaps it wasn’t so much the coffee as the thought that I was very near now to the object of my journey. Tomorrow I would be at the Lodge where Miriam had stayed, where she had written that postcard, and the next day I’d probably be at the mine. I thought a lot about Miriam. Every now and then the headlights of a vehicle coming from Haines Junction swept across the curtained windows. For some strange reason I couldn’t get those two men out of my mind. One short and treading daintily, the other large, with a bullet head and a slow, deliberate walk, both of them sallow-skinned, almost dark, with a watchfulness that made them somehow different from any of the Canadians I had seen since arriving at Vancouver Airport.

It must have been well after midnight that the headlights of a vehicle beamed onto my window, growing so bright that the whole room was illuminated as the scrunch of tyres on gravel and the noise of an engine approached. It stopped, the engine was cut and suddenly the room was black again. The slam of doors, the sound of men’s voices gradually fading, and a moment later footsteps in the passageway outside, the fumbling of a key in a lock. They were in the room next to mine and I could hear their voices. They were blurred, of course, by the wooden partition wall, but still quite audible, and yet I couldn’t make out a word they were saying. I must have been listening to them for several minutes before I realized they weren’t speaking English, but some language that was foreign to me.

Curiosity, and the need to relieve myself, got me out of bed. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain. The truck with the dead deer was back, parked right below me, the stiff sticks with hoofs on the end looking macabre in the light of a young moon. Beyond the highway the mountains of the Front Ranges were a black wall blotting out half the sky, and high up the blackness changed abruptly to a brilliant mantle of white. I went into the toilet and shower cubicle, the voices lower now, hardly more than a murmur. And when I had flushed they ceased altogether.

The truck was gone in the morning and the sun shone out of a blue sky. I was packed and coping with a greasy plateful of bacon and eggs when Jim Edmundson arrived. ‘You got a nice day for your trip to Dezadeash Lake,’ he said. ‘Jean’s looking forward to it herself. And if the weather holds over tomorrow the track up to the mine should be okay.’ Later, as we drove into Parks HQ, he said, ‘Those hunters, by the way, they’re booked in again at Lakeside Lodge. I checked with Kevin while you were getting your bag. So just be careful. Some of them are a bit trigger-happy, shoot at anything that moves. Last year we had a guy from ‘For onto come through, two guns, all the right permits, and the bugger goes and shoots a pony, says he thought it was a bear coming at him out of the bush. Can you beat it?’ He didn’t like hunters. ‘If I had my way I’d ban shooting altogether. But up here game is about all we got to attract the visitors and keep the money rolling in. Still, if you’d come into the Yukon with a gun, I wouldn’t be giving you a lift, that’s for sure.’

He left me in the Exhibition Centre. ‘I got work to do.’ And he added, ‘I laid on the film presentation. The man who runs it will be with you at nine-thirty. It lasts twenty-seven minutes and by the time it’s over Jean will have the car waiting for you outside. Okay?’

That morning, with the sun shining and in the dazzling white of fresh snow spread over the tops of the mountains like sugar icing, the view from the Centre’s big windows was breathtaking. So, too, was the film show. There were perhaps a dozen tourists seeing it with me, but for the half-hour I was in that darkened room I wasn’t aware of them. The slides thrown on the wall-screen by six projectors took me into a world as remote as that which I had looked down on during the flight across the top of the North American continent. Ice and snow and glaciers, the thaw and running water, rare flowers opening with the sun, small animals rearing young, the aurora and the winter’s grip on frozen peaks — I sat transfixed by a glimpse into something so primeval, so terrible in its cold beauty, that the human race and all its problems, the reason for my own presence here at an intersection of the Alaska Highway, everything seemed of no account, as though I were at the birth pangs of the world, living the Creation.

Then suddenly it was over and the lights came on. I was back in the Parks Headquarters, the real world breaking in on me with the appearance of a small, plump woman with a smiling face. ‘You’re Philip Redfern, aren’t you?’

I nodded, my mind still dazed by the wild remoteness of what I had just been shown.

‘I’m Jean — Jean Edmundson. I’m taking you to Dezadeash, that’s right, isn’t it? Jim said to take you to the Lodge there and introduce you to Kevin McKie. He owns the place.’ And she went bubbling on about Jim having to go over to Destruction Bay, the Mounties having had a report of somebody with a gun stalking Dall sheep up on the mountains above Lake Kluane. She pushed open the doors and led me out to where her car was parked. ‘I’d have been here earlier only I have to take my little boy to school, he’s too young to go on his own yet, and then there’s the usual household chores. It’s nice to have an excuse to drive over to Dezadeash. It’s a lovely run, all along the Front Ranges.’ She flung open the car door. ‘And such a beautiful morning, too, after all that rain, and the snow on the mountains. Jim says the winter will be early this year. Jim’s usually right about the weather. Six years he’s been a warden here. Six years next March. Before that we were with the Forestry Service. We had a lovely little doll’s house of a place just out of Port Hardy on the Beaver Harbour road. Jim’s done all sorts of things, but this is the job he likes best. I guess he’ll stay with the Kluane Parks now, and I don’t mind it — as long as he’s happy …‘She prattled on as she drove out to the High way and turned left where a sign showed the Haines Highway breaking off from Alaska Highway No. i, which was the road to Anchorage.

We passed a police post and a Met. station, a few other buildings, and then there was nothing but the road stretching ahead through spruce and scrub with the Front Ranges a towering 8000-foot rampart to our right, the autumn colouring of the upper slopes gold and red in the sunlight, changing to the crystal white of new snow on the tops. I wondered what it had been like when Miriam had driven to Lakeside Lodge along this same highway — had she felt any sense of unease? I wished the woman would stop talking. I would have liked to consider whether there was any real justification for the tension that was growing in me — or was it just my imagination? Why should that slide show have affected me so? It was as though I had been given a glimpse into the cold realities of the world beyond, the things I couldn’t quite grasp — dust-to-dust, city lights and offices all transmuted into the glacial cold of life after death, a nuclear winter …

Perhaps I was tired. Perhaps it was the jet-lag that some people talk about, or was it the spirit of this far northern country entering my soul — or was it premonition?

‘Jim said to be sure and show you our rock glacier. You ever seen a rock glacier, Philip?’ The car slowed and we turned right into a parking area. ‘You can just see it above the spruce there.’ She pointed to a long brown gash in the scrub-covered slopes that looked like scree, except that it was heavier stuff, all boulder and rock. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’ She was bouncy and full of energy, her eyes alight with a girlish enjoyment of life, the whites bright with the health that radiated from her. ‘Come on, this way.’ She plunged into a forest of spruce on a beaten path that became a boardwalk where it crossed an area of swampland. Then we were climbing sharply up until we reached the edge of the slide, which towered above us like the decayed remains of a gigantic stone fortress. ‘It moves just like a glacier, very slowly, but never really stopping. I don’t understand the mechanics — boulder on an ice-polished rock surface underneath, I suppose. You must ask Jim. He’ll explain.’

The boulder and rubble ran in a long sweep high above me. ‘Is this anything like a placer mine after they’ve got the gold out?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been here six years, but all the Kluane mines are closed now. They’re not allowed to mine gold or anything else, not in the Park area.’

Feet had worn a path in the rock to a viewpoint. When I reached it I could see the road stretching away to the southeast and in the distance the gleam of water. ‘That’s Dezadeash Lake,’ she said.

Less than an hour later we were at the Lodge and Kevin McKie was telling me there was no way I could get up to the mine. ‘There’s been a slide and the track’s impassable.’ He advised me to return with Jean Edmundson to Haines Junction and forget all about Ice Cold Creek. ‘It’s finished. Tom knew that, so what’s the point?’

‘I just wanted to be sure,’ I said, watching his hands. We were in the restaurant and they were gripped tight on the edge of the long counter.

‘It surely don’t need a lawyer visiting the mine to confirm the gold’s run out. How would you know anyway? Besides,’ he added, ‘everyone from here to Whitehorse, all the way down to Haines I guess, knows Jonny hasn’t been running anything but a token mine for years.’

‘Then I’ll stay and talk to some of them.’ He didn’t want me there, and I wondered why. ‘Jim Edmundson said he’d fixed a room for me.’ He couldn’t refuse, for he still had his Vacancy sign out on the edge of the highway. ‘And if somebody would lend me a pair of boots, then drive me as far as the slide, I could walk the rest.’

He shook his head. ‘Not on your own. Too risky. Suppose you met a moose or a grizzly… Anyway, my truck’s out of action.’ He said it was probably a half-shaft gone, but I didn’t believe him.

‘Then I’ll wait for Tony Tarasconi to come in.’

He didn’t like that. ‘He has his own axe to grind.’

‘I haven’t come all this way,’ I told him, ‘to be turned back now.’

He hesitated, then shrugged. ‘As you please.’ He signed me in then and the book showed that Tarasconi was already at the Lodge. He had cabin No. 3 and had presumably arrived that morning. Two other names had also been entered for the same date — Camargo and Lopez. ‘Spanish?’ I asked. ‘No, South American,’ he replied. ‘We have quite a number of South American gentlemen come to the Yukon for the hunting.’