High Stand

1

That drive down the Ice Cold track was in keeping with all the rest of the night, a nightmare ride that in the final stages required all my powers of concentration to stay awake and keep driving. Tom led the way in Tarasconi’s old Ford. For the first ten miles or so I can’t remember anything very much other than the track and the rear lights of the truck ahead bucking and swerving, and myself fighting the gears of the big Chevrolet I had been landed with, bouncing up and down, the front wheels slithering wildly in the ruts, juddering and grinding against the mudguards in the rough stony sections. I was dimly aware that Tom was driving hellishly fast; conscious, too, of the heat in the cab and myself sweating with the effort of keeping up with him in a strange vehicle, but it didn’t occur to me that there was anything odd about it. I just put his speed down to the fact that he was a very accomplished driver.

But then, after he had dropped Tarasconi off, telling him he could either walk back up to Ice Cold and set the two gunmen free or walk out to the highway and thumb a ride up to the Lodge — ‘I advise the Lodge. You’ll find your truck there and you can get some food and think out what you’re going to do about your friends at the mine.’ This was shouted at Tarasconi. ‘But I tell you this, you’ll never get the Gully. Not now.’ And he slammed the truck into gear and went careering off down the track.

I remember Tarasconi’s face, caught in the glare of my headlights, a look of confusion, fear, and hate — yes, hate. It was there in his eyes, glimpsed for a moment. He yelled something as I passed him, and then he was gone, a lonely, pathetic-looking figure swallowed by the night.

It was after that I began to notice the erratic behaviour of the truck ahead. By then I think I was becoming accustomed to the vehicle I was driving so could spare a thought for what was happening in front of me; also, of course, Tom was now on his own. The track became steeper. It was the section where it looked like the bed of a stream, all stone with a drop to the left that was covered with scrub. I had closed up and my headlights showed the whole rear of the pick-up, so that I could follow its course as it meandered from side to side. Tom’s driving was like that of a man half-asleep. My own eyes had felt heavy-lidded, but now I was wide awake. Stones and boulders gave way to mud, my wheels locking as I braked. I changed down quickly and an instant later I saw the truck ahead slithering almost sideways. He got it under control, but then it happened again, and he didn’t correct in time. The left front wheel mounted the edge of the track, careered along it for a moment, then slipped over onto the slope, the cab tilting, the chassis bellying down, tipping slowly over onto its side.

I had stopped by then and I sat watching it slide and crash down into some stunted aspen, snapping the thin boles until finally it came to rest, hanging there.

It didn’t catch fire, and after a moment Tom clambered out, apparently unhurt. He called to me, but the sound of my engine drowned his words. He staggered around for a moment like a man drunk, then he stood still, staring up at me, his face pale and his hair, almost white, standing up in a thick brush. Finally he clambered up onto the side of the cab, yanked open the door again and reached in for his things.

It was some time before I realized he was suffering from shock as well as the after-effects of drugs. Fatigue probably came into it as well. He had been so hipped-up and excited when confronting those men, no wonder his driving had been erratic. I had to help him up the slope, he was so weak. And when I had got him into the cab of my vehicle, he went out like a light, his face so pale I thought at first he had fainted.

In fact, he was asleep, and he didn’t wake up until we reached the lower ford across the Squaw. Dawn was showing a faint glimmer above Dalton’s Post, the trees black in silhouette beyond the creek, the water and the banks of stone and silt no more than a grey blur. I had to shake him really hard before he was conscious enough to guide me across the fording place, and he was asleep again before I had reached the further bank, his head rolling and nodding like some broken doll as my wheels ground their way over the rocks and boulders of the river bed and the water swirled up to the bonnet, seeping under the door and sloshing around the floor of the cab.

He didn’t wake again until I had made the highway and we were several miles on our way to the Lodge. In fact, I didn’t realize he was awake until I heard an odd snuffling and saw he was sitting slumped forward with his head in his hands. What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘You all right?’

He nodded slowly.

‘You’re not hurt?’

‘No.’ He sat back, feeling in the pockets of his anorak. It was only then I realized he was crying. He produced a dirty-looking handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘I have to thank you,’ he murmured. And then, after a while, he said, ‘Everything’s gone wrong.’ He seemed to pull himself together. ‘I’ve had a marvellous life — then suddenly…’ Silence again. I didn’t say anything, thinking he was running back over his life, but then he leaned forward and gripped my arm, his mouth trembling. ‘You saw the deeds, did you? That plantation — my father’s trees. You saw what he wrote?’

‘Yes,’ I said, preparing myself for what he would ask next.

‘The mine I could stand. I could live with that. But now… now I wish to God I were dead.’ He gave a sort of laugh, self-mocking. ‘But I couldn’t do it. When it came to the point — well, it was just a sham. I couldn’t do it, not properly.’ His grip on my arm tightened. ‘Do you believe a man’s spirit can come out of his grave to defend something he created when he was alive? Do you believe that?’

‘It’s more a question whether you believe it,’ I answered him, and he nodded.

‘It was only when I had signed that agreement and I went up there and saw them felling — it was only then… Odd, isn’t it?’ He took his hand away. ‘Damn frightening.’ He had his handkerchief to his face then and he was crying again, a soft, gurgling sound.

‘Did Miriam know?’

‘What-the deeds?’

‘That, and about your selling those two hectares.’

‘No. She didn’t know anything. The only people who knew the mine was finished were here, people like Jonny and Kevin — Tony, too.’

‘What about Stone Slide?’

The Gully? Yes, I could have sold the Gully. Or leased the claim. But not for much, and it would have been only a drop in the ocean of what I was beginning to owe.’ And he added, ‘But it’s been a good life. Trouble is, that doesn’t solve the problem of today, let alone the future, and looking back… I never was one for looking back.’ He was silent then, not crying, just deadly silent as dawn broke, the grey slash of the highway between walls of spruce becoming clearer every minute, my headlights fainter.

I thought he was asleep again, his head back against the rear of the seat, his eyes closed. His face looked lined and tired, his mouth beneath the thick flared nostrils a tight gap that bared his teeth in a grimace. He had always looked so young, but he seemed to have aged in the last few months. I knew his age, of course — he was fifty-seven. But now he looked a lot older.

I was thinking about his father then, about that curse he had written into the deeds. Obviously he had seen his son for the sort of man he would grow up to be and had done his best to prevent him taking the easy way out of any financial difficulty. He may even have known the mine would run out of gold in a few years. At least he had anticipated it. And now Tom had done what old Josh Halliday had feared, he had started cutting into High Stand. But I couldn’t see that cutting those trees could be the cause of his wife being seized and South American gunmen hired to keep watch over his movements. But perhaps he had sold the whole lot on a word of mouth deal and then refused to deliver the deeds? Or more likely, far more likely, it concerned Ice Cold, or maybe the Gully — it had to be gold surely.

I was still thinking about that when he suddenly sat up, his eyes wide open. ‘Where are we?’

‘The Haines Road,’ I said.

‘I know, I know — but how far have we come? Have we passed Million Dollar Falls, the campground?’ He shook his head, looking suddenly confused. ‘No, of course, that’s back towards Haines.’ He was leaning forward, watching for the next distance marker. It came up, a white post with the figures on it in black — 172. ‘Thirty kilometres to Lakeside. We’ll stop at Kevin’s for breakfast. You’ve got a cabin there, I take it…? Good. We can have breakfast in your room then.’ And he added, ‘Kevin’s been a good friend to me. I’ll tell him what’s happened. Then afterwards, if you drive as far as Kathleen Lake, I’ll take over for the long haul to Whitehorse. I’ll be okay by then. Right now I don’t feel so good.’ He leaned back, closing his eyes again. ‘It takes me like this sometimes now. Old age creeping on, I guess. I’ll have a little nap … Be all right by the time we get to Lakeside. Wake me — when we get there …’ His voice faded, sleep closing in, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the grey curved hump of the road stretching ahead.

It was 07.37 when we rolled into Lakeside Lodge, a mist on the water and the sun just risen above the black rim of the eastern mountains. I remember the time because, after I had stopped the truck, I just sat there, too tired to move, and there was somebody’s watch on the top of the fascia board straight in front of me. Tom didn’t stir either. He was slumped in his corner fast asleep. We stayed like that for several minutes, my mind trying to assemble things in some semblance of order so that I could get my priorities right.

I could, of course, have packed it in right then, phoned Jean Edmundson and asked her to drive over and fetch me. I suppose the reason it crossed my mind to phone her, rather than try to hitch a ride, was that she represented ordinary Canadian life and her humdrum sanity was just what I needed to counteract the crazy world in which I had suddenly become involved. A local Sussex solicitor specializing in testaments and executor estates, and here I was in the Yukon within an ace of getting myself gunned down by hoodlums from Bogota, stealing trucks… I was looking across at Tom then, his chin sunk on his chest, the heavy nostrils trembling to the sibilant sound of his snores. God! He looked at least ten years older than he was, and I remembered how Miriam had talked about him that Sunday when we had lunched together after I had seen that newspaper story. He didn’t look in the least like a real life Peter Pan now. And remembering her, the animation of her face, the way her eyes had shone as she described the excitement and fascination this man had had for the inexperienced daughter of an archaeologist, I felt a longing and a fear for her … It was so ridiculous, getting excited and full of a passionate desire, sitting there in the cab of a truck by a log-cabin motel on the edge of a lake in the Yukon with her husband snoring beside me. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Only that I couldn’t go home, not till I knew what had happened to her.

As though my thoughts had somehow communicated themselves to him, he stirred, his eyes slitted against the sun. ‘Where are we?’ ‘At the Lodge.’

He sat up then, very abruptly, his eyes wide open. ‘Breakfast,’ he said, his voice sounding wide awake and full of vigour. ‘Which is your cabin unit?’ I pointed to the last in the line. ‘Okay. You get the key and ask Kevin to come and see us there. Tell him to bring the case I left with him. And order us some breakfast.’ I asked him what he would like and he laughed. ‘Anything, so long as there’s a lot of it — bacon, eggs, sausages, toast, and coffee, plenty of coffee. Jeez, I’m hungry.’

‘Hadn’t you better tell me what this is all about?’ ‘Later,’ he said. ‘Later. We got to get moving.’ We were there at the Lodge for less than an hour, and in that time we had the truck filled with gas, ate a huge breakfast, and Kevin lent us some money. Tom didn’t have to ask for it. Kevin simply assumed he would be short of cash, said there was something around a thousand dollars in the office strong box and if that was any help we were welcome to it. He didn’t ask for any security, not even a chit. He simply went and got it, dumping the wad of notes on the breakfast tray.

I don’t know how much Kevin knew. I got the impression he thought ‘For n had got himself deep in debt with some very dangerous people and was hiding out from them, pretending to be dead. It was as good an explanation as any and Kevin’s generosity, his involvement in Tom’s affairs, could be motivated by hope of another gold strike in the Ice Cold area. The only question he asked, at least in my presence, was about Tony and the two men left up at the Squaw Creek camp. ‘Do you want me to go up there and truck them down? I could drive them to the US border. It’s only fifty miles from the Dalton’ Post turn-off.’

‘You think they’d cross?’

‘They might.’

Tom shook his head. ‘I doubt it. And anyway you’ve done enough to help me already. Some time this morning either that little bastard Tarasconi will walk back to his claim and release them, or they’ll manage to release themselves. If they turn up here asking about their truck, tell them I’ll be dumping it in Whitehorse, probably in the airport parking lot.’

‘And where will you be?’

Tom shook his head. ‘It’s best I keep that to myself.’

Kevin nodded. ‘I guess you’re right.’ He hesitated, then got up from his seat on the bed. ‘Well, I’ll leave you now. I got work to do anyway.’ He held out his hand. ‘Good luck, Tom.’

‘Thanks.’ He was on his feet, seizing Kevin’s hand in both of his. ‘I don’t know how I can ever repay you.’ He looked across at me and grinned. ‘I’ll give instructions to my lawyer, of course. But a hell of a lot of good that will be — in the circumstances.’ The grin faded as he said that. ‘If I were to tell you…’ But he shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t believe me. Nobody would believe me.’ He wasn’t speaking to Kevin then. He wasn’t speaking to anyone, only himself.

We left shortly afterwards. I drove as far as Kathleen Lodge, where we had some more coffee, then Tom took over. He had had a good sleep and looked a lot better. But he wouldn’t answer my questions. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ He said that several times, a sort of refrain, but he wouldn’t say what it was I wouldn’t believe. In the end I dozed off. I remember Haines Junction, the RCMP post and then turning east, away from the Front Ranges and the great white wall of the mountains. After that I slept most of the ninety-eight miles to Whitehorse.

He drove straight to the airport, where he parked between another pick-up and an empty mobile home so that we were screened as we collected our things. We got a taxi at the terminal and drove down Two Mile Hill, past the shopping mall and a gaggle of gas stations to Fourth Avenue and Wood Street where we booked into the Sheffield House for the night. There was a letter waiting for me, an airmail letter with a typewritten address and postmarked Worthing. It was from my partner, who hoped it would reach me in time and that I was enjoying the trip. He enclosed a letter from Brian Halliday — / thought it important you should have this as you may wish to contact him or see for yourself what is going on at the Halliday forest property in BC.

Brian Halliday had written from a place called Bella Coola in BC, a brief scrawl on a Canadian airmail letter card to inform me that there were several men at the old logging camp up the Halliday Arm, two of them cutting into High Stand using big high-powered chainsaws. He thought they had already felled more than the two hectares allowed for in the sale agreement, but he couldn’t be sure as he had not been allowed to check the clear-felled area. In fact, as soon as he had challenged their right to continue felling they had called up a man named Lorient, who claimed to be the manager but looked more like a security guard. He told me the property was licensed for felling by an American timber company and would I please get the hell out. The American company was, of course, SVL Timber. He had asked for Thor Olsen, his father’s manager, but Lorient had told him there was no caretaker, that the camp had been deserted when they had arrived.

The letter ended with a request that I cable the police to check the whereabouts of Thor Olsen, and the final paragraph asked two questions: What is my legal position? Can I have the law throw them off my land? Please advise. Also confirm that any felling additional to the two hectares covered by the sale agreement signed by my father is illegal. Kindly cable your reply to these questions soonest possible. And he gave a post office box number at Bella Coola.

The letter was dated 20 September, two days after he had let the barge load of logs be towed over his inflatable for the benefit of the TV cameras. It seemed odd that he should write to me for legal advice when he was on the BC coast and could have obtained much better advice from his father’s Canadian solicitors. And why hadn’t he contacted the RCMP himself about Olsen? Also, the information about felling activity in the Cascades was in direct conflict with the assurances given me over the phone by Barony of SVL Timber.

I took the letter to Tom in his room down the corridor. He was having a shower and he read it with the water pouring down his back and his naked body dripping in a haze of steam. His eyes seemed slightly dilated. ‘Always the same with that boy.’ He handed the limp scrawl back to me. ‘Why the hell can’t he leave things alone?’

‘Is it true?’ I asked.

‘What’s that?’ He stepped out of the shower and began towelling himself down. ‘Is what true?’

That they’re still cutting those trees? Did you sign anything — apart from the sale agreement with SVL Timber covering those two hectares?’

He stopped towelling, standing there stark naked, the towel across his shoulders. ‘You know about that?’

‘The agreement was in your desk.’

‘I see.’

‘Have you signed any other agreement?’

‘No, of course not.’ And he added, ‘You’ve seen the deeds, I suppose? You’ve read what the Old Man wrote. Nobody in their right mind …’ He dropped the towel, turning away and reaching for his pants.

‘What about Miriam? Did you give her power of attorney, anything like that?’

‘No.’ He pulled on his pants, then swung back towards me. ‘If Miriam’s signed anything…’ He smiled at me. ‘It’s your problem. You look after it.’ He was staring at me, his body hard and brown with high-altitude labour in the wind and the sun. ‘If Miriam has signed anything — even if she claimed she was acting as executor… it wouldn’t count, would it?’

‘No.’

He was trembling slightly. ‘If I’m dead the forest belongs to Brian. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what the Will says.’ He waited until I had nodded my agreement, and then he added, ‘And if I’m not dead, it still belongs to me.’

‘And you’ve signed nothing?’

‘No, I refused. That’s what it’s all about.’ He was still staring at me, his eyes wide, a frightened look on his face. ‘I wouldn’t sign.’ Then abruptly he seemed to pull himself together. ‘Forget it. That’s why I willed it to Brian. Let him cope with the bastards. It’s Miriam I’m worried about.’ He went to his case and rummaged for a clean shirt. ‘More than a month’s dirt and sweat I’ve just run down that plug’ole and not a dam’ thing to show for it. Nothing changed — only Miriam, she was on the verge of clinching a deal that would have got me the gear I needed to prove the Gully.’ He shrugged. ‘Oh well — you cable Brian. Tell him we’ll be at Bella Bella in three days’ time. Well, three and a half. That’ll be Tuesday. If he can meet us there …’ He crossed to the bed where his clothes lay in a heap. ‘As soon as I’m dressed I’ll arrange train and ferry bookings, then I’ll have a word with Jonny and after that we’ll go out on the town for the evening, eh? Do us both good.’ He said it with sudden cheerfulness — a determined cheerfulness that he managed to sustain throughout the evening.

The place he chose was what looked to me like the most expensive restaurant in Whitehorse, a red plush copy of the rich sourdough establishments of the Edwardian era, full of engraved glass mirrors with pictures of Diamond Lil and all the other gold rush characters staring at us from the walls, and we ate lobster claws and Alaska giant crabs and drank a great deal of wine and quite a lot of whisky. God knows what the bill came to, but somehow I didn’t care. Everything had become so mad that all my training as a solicitor, all my natural caution seemed to have disappeared, Tom Halliday talking and talking — about odd places he had been, odd scrapes he had been in, small planes and forced landings, guerrillas on the border of Peru and Ecuador, the Le Mans and before that stock racing as a kid in old bangers, the crashes he had had. It was as though he needed to run through his whole life in that one evening — almost as though he were trying to justify it; to me, to himself, I am not certain which.

He was high, of course. God knows where he had got the stuff. Presumably there were drug pushers in Whitehorse same as in other towns, or maybe he had kept a little in reserve at Lakeside and had got it from Kevin. He just couldn’t stop talking. Except towards the end. Towards the end, drinking Scotch, his mood had changed.

Afterwards, lying in my bed in the overheated room with its plain wood walls, my impression of him was of a man cast in the mould of the prodigal son. It didn’t matter that he’d borrowed a thousand dollars and that he’d probably never be able to repay it, he had money in his pocket and money was for spending. And in the setting of that 19005 restaurant he had seemed so like the men of the period, the money easily got out of a good claim and easily spent in the honky-tonks of Dawson City, the main street of which was reproduced almost everywhere in Whitehorse.

There were bits and pieces of the gold rush still visible in the town. We had walked back, the night full of stars and our breath smoking, ice skimming the puddles. He had taken me along Fourth Avenue, past the old log church and the wooden skyscraper building on Third, then out to the solid mass of the Territorial Government Building and across the railway track to the road bridge over the Yukon where the SS Klondike lay with her keel on the grass of the bank, her wooden hull and towering superstructure glimmering white like a ghost ship.

He had leaned on the parapet of the bridge, staring down into the dark gurgling current of the river. ‘Almost a century ago,’ he had murmured. ‘This is the way my father came — just a kid, fresh out of school and green as a cucumber. Up White Pass to Lindeman and Bennett — you’ll see Bennett Lake tomorrow — then down the river and through the canyon to Laberge riding a raft with half a dozen horses, a big stove and a grand piano. By the time he reached Dawson he ought to have known what sort of a man Despera was. Twenty-five thousand of them came down the river in that one year, and everywhere the con men and the grafters. He should have known.’ He had laughed then. ‘And so should I! Tarasconi, I mean. Like grandfather, like grandson, eh?’ It was a laugh without any humour. ‘Later they had steamships like the old Klondike there, but when he came down the river he was rafted down … just a bundle of logs.,’ He had straightened up, stretching himself and yawning. ‘That’s how they get the timber out of places like the Halliday Arm — rafting it out, or using scows. That’s what you told me, wasn’t it —?’

‘A barge,’ I said. That’s what the caption to the newspaper picture called it.’

But he had taken no notice of that. ‘That’s how they got the first load out. By scow. Two months ago it must have been. No, more.’ And then, his voice trembling slightly, ‘I wonder what’s happened to Olsen. Hope he’s not dead. Well, a few more days and we’ll know the answer — to that and other things.’ He had turned away. ‘Better go back to the hotel now and get some sleep. God, I’m tired!’

So was I, and very glad to get into pyjamas and relax between sheets. But sleep wasn’t that easy, my mind going over and over the events of the last twenty-four hours. I had told him about his son, how he was trying to raise a public outcry against an American company felling a cedar forest planted by a Canadian who had made his money in the Klondike, but all he had said was, ‘A lot of good that is, the silly fool. He doesn’t know what he’s up against.’

Maybe it was the coffee or the chill of the night air, or the fact my room was cold because I had turned off the heat before going out, but I seemed wider awake than ever, worrying about what I should do. I didn’t have to go along with him, down to Skagway and the ferry. Instead of the train, I could take a plane from the airport, change at Fort St John and pick up a Wardair flight out of Edmonton direct to Gatwick. Another twenty-four hours and I could be home. But there was Miriam. And Tom — whatever he had done, I couldn’t just leave him.

For a man to be under such pressure that he vanishes almost without trace, dropping out of his whole previous existence and disappearing into an isolated and abandoned mine in the Yukon … I was still thinking it was gold, you see, and over dinner I had asked him about the rock slide, whether it had been done deliberately. Yes, he said, he had done it himself. He had got Kevin to bring up a drill and some dynamite, and when I expressed surprise that he could carry out a rock-blasting operation on his own, he had laughed and said quite casually, ‘Though my father lived in Vancouver Island he boarded me out, as it were, with an impecunious aunt in Edinburgh. Thought I’d get a better education in Scotland. I went to Gordonstoun and each year, in the long summer hols, I flew back to that big ranch-style house he had just north of Duncan — it had a bit of a beach, a wooden jetty and a fabulous view out beyond the Gulf Islands to the Strait of Georgia and the Rockies beyond. Fishing, water skiing, and sometimes we’d go over to the west coast, the area round Nootka Sound and Friendly Cove where Cook put in on his last voyage.’ And he had gone on to talk about surf-boarding among the rocks, nude parties on a rockbound coast where the Pacific rollers swept in from the China Sea five thousand miles and more away, fishing and hunting and camping on the shores of lonely inlets. ‘Guess I went pretty wild back there, so Gordonstoun was good for me. And then after Gordonstoun, no university nonsense for this boy, but there was a thing called National Service. ‘Course, I could have pleaded Canadian citizenship, but having both, nobody asked any questions when I reported in and signed the form. Can’t remember what I had to sign, but something; the whole thing was a bit of a dare as far as I was concerned, and since I was already hooked on stock racing and pretty mad about any bit of machinery that went fast, they put me in the REs and instead of vehicles they gave me explosives to play with.’

He had laughed then and said, ‘You mentioned terrorists, back there at the mine. I’d have made one hell of a good terrorist. Anyway, that’s how I knew about laying a charge in a rock face. Bringing down that fall was a piece of cake once Kevin had got me the tools. It kept that little bastard Tarasconi out, and anybody else who was just curious to know what was going on. Another week or so …’

I don’t know whether it was the drink or the coke that made him fantasize so wildly, but somehow he seemed to have convinced himself that, given another month or so, he and that Indian would have opened up a new mine — just the two of them working with that one tractor and the wooden rocker and sluice box he had constructed with his own hands. ‘I’d’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I know dam’ well I would. But for the onset of winter we’d have got down to bedrock and that’s where the heavy stuff is. Winter, and Tarasconi putting the finger on me, and those two bastards. I could have broken their necks, just like that — ‘ He had snapped his fingers. ‘But I wanted them to talk. And then to find they were just a couple of hit men hired to deliver that note and keep tabs on me. They didn’t know where she was.’ And he had suddenly seized hold of my arm, his face thrust close to mine, the pupils of his eyes looking very odd and his hand trembling. ‘Don’t you know? You’ve just come up here from Vancouver, you’ve seen Roy, you’ve talked to Barony over in Seattle — you must know something.’ And when I hadn’t answered — I think I just shook my head — he said, ‘For God’s sake, haven’t you any idea where she might be?’

He had stared at me then for a long time, as though he were in a trance, and when he’d snapped out of it he had seized hold of the bottle and slopped some more whisky into our glasses. And because I had thought he was drunk enough now to tell me what it was all about, I had begun questioning him again. And instead of answering my questions, he had flown into a rage, telling me I was bloody useless and to mind my own business. After that he had gone suddenly quiet, closing up on me, silent and morose, his head in his hands. Once he had muttered, ‘I don’t know what it’s all about and I don’t want to know. They’re bastards, the whole lot of them. They should be put down, like you put down dogs that have got that rabies disease.’

And then suddenly he had looked up at me. ‘Philip. If I don’t do what they tell me, they’ll kill her. I know they will. There’s a lot of money involved, and she and I, we’re just pawns. God in heaven! What the hell can I do?’ And he had beat his fists against his forehead. But he wouldn’t say what it was he had been told to do, and when I asked him if it was a question of the Canadian trees and SVL Timber trying to get him to sell, he’d burst out laughing. ‘If it was as simple as that… Christ! I’d make my peace with the Old Man and sign the whole thing away just to be rid of them. But it isn’t, is it?’ And he had reached for his glass and downed the whole of his whisky in one gulp, and then he had sat there staring at me with a vacant look, sad-eyed and his mind locked away in some dark cavern of its own.

I might be his solicitor and out here of my own free will, but if you’ve rogered a man’s wife and been rumbled, it’s always there, a barrier between you that crops up at odd, unexpected moments. He had just looked at me, not saying a word, then abruptly got to his feet, heading for the gents. After a moment I had followed to find him standing, his tie loosened and holding in his hand a little gold spoon that was hung about his neck on a slender gold chain. He had taken a pouch from his pocket and was dipping the spoon into it, peering forward to see how much he had scooped up, then putting it to his left nostril and snorting it up. He had done it again with the other nostril, then seeing me his eyes had snapped wide open and he had breathed out a deep, contented Aaah! ‘Just to keep me on top, eh?’

‘You don’t need it, surely.’ My voice had sounded very prim.

‘No.’ By then he had been reaching down to unzip his flies.

‘A one-and-one, that’s not very much, but if it holds the high — I just like to keep it going, you see, an’ because I’ve not had any for a couple of months, a one-and-one will do it. Christ!’ He was staring down at himself. ‘And it’ll do that too!’ And he had added, ‘One time Miriam and I used it as an aphrodisiac, but it doesn’t work once you’re snorting regularly.’ He grinned at me over his shoulder. ‘Pity Miriam isn’t here now…’ But then he was concentrating and a moment later he was passing water so it hadn’t lasted long. And afterwards, while he was washing his hands, he had said, ‘Lucky you don’t snort. That’s all I’ve got now, just a few grams to last me till my ship comes in.’ And he had burst into that high-pitched laugh of his, as though he’d said something funny.

I wondered whether he had got himself involved with some dope pushers, but he shook his head. ‘Pushers?’ His eyes had sprung very wide as he stared at me in the mirror, all the time running a comb through his bushy mop of grey-white hair. ‘No, no. I buy higher up. It’s like the difference between always having to drop into the local for a packet of fags and ordering your Havanas in boxes from one of those places in St James’s. Only now things are a little changed.’ And he had neighed at me again, his teeth showing. ‘I need some more, and pretty soon now. I can’t face these bastards without it. And Miriam — what have they done with Miriam? All this time…’ He had been pulling open the door then. ‘I’ll murder the buggers,’ he had hissed in my ear, his breath hot on my cheek as he lurched out into the dining-room.

Back at the table he had gradually simmered down, the rush already dying. ‘Maybe Brian will be able to get me some more. Has Brian got any money, do you know?’

‘I think so.’ But I hadn’t told him his son had done what Miriam had done, borrowing things from the house to raise enough to get to Canada. Instead, I had asked him how much it cost to buy cocaine out here. He had shrugged, saying it depended on the quality, didn’t it? ‘The price has been falling recently. Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, they’re all flogging the stuff as hard as they can. They make it up in the mountains, little family labs, but the total of what those peasants produce often provides the bulk of the government’s income. It’s like those wine lakes m France and Italy. You can buy it cheap if you have to, but the good stuff — that always costs money. And if you don’t use good stuff, and you don’t cut it right, then you can do yourself a lot of damage. Pure cocaine — that crystalline rock stuff — it’s too strong, bad for the membranes of the nose, bad for the gums if you’re taking it orally. I always cut my own if I can.’ And when I had asked him if Brian was using it, he had shaken his head. ‘No, no. He’s tried it, but he has his own built-in high. Father to world causes, that’s Brian. But he always knows lots of people. Wherever he is he’s got contacts. He’ll know where to get it. Indians at Bella Bella probably, or further south at Alert Bay. They’re flush with money at the moment. Land sales. So there’s sure to be a pusher in Bella Bella, certainly at Bella Coola — that’s at the end of the road running in from Williams Lake and the white spruce country, along the Chilanko valley…’

They were just names, and thinking about them I fell asleep, having decided to go along with him as far as Skagway and the ship to Prince Rupert. I could always go on then to Vancouver. And in the morning the sun was shining, the river marked by the white of steam rising from the water.

By the time we reached the railway depot the coaches were already waiting, three of them, all rather elderly with little steel platforms at each end and wood-burning stoves. There was a party of Americans with a courier who wore a hat and looked harassed, a small group of Canadian schoolboys humping bagged-up inflatables, and individual travellers kept arriving in cars and taxis, some on foot. A general air of excitement pervaded the area between the depot buildings and the coaches, for there was a small camera crew of three taking close-ups of an actor making his way from one coach to the next.

We found seats and stowed our gear. Tom was travelling very light with the result that the rifle was even more conspicuous than it would have been otherwise. ‘What are you going to do about that?’ I asked him, suddenly conscious, now that we were in an organized system of transport, that there were such things as customs checks. Skagway was in Alaska, and Alaska was a part of the United States.

‘I’ve got a permit,’ he said.

‘Under your own name?’

‘Of course.’ He laughed, a tense, slightly nervous laugh. ‘The Americans don’t get fussed over guns the way the Canadians do. I remember my father telling me how Sam Steele and twenty Mounties made the Yanks coming up from Skagway hand in their guns. They didn’t like it, but that’s the way it was up there at that improvised customs post, and the con men sent up by Soapy Smith, the boss man of Skagway, to fleece the thousands staggering up that twelve-mile pass, they got short shrift. Now it’s just a train ride,’ he added and then fell silent. He was much less talkative now, almost morose.

‘What about the bolstered gun you took from Camargo?’ I asked.

‘Under my arm.’

‘It may be all right entering Alaska, but we’re going back into Canada — at Prince Rupert, I presume. What about the customs there?’

They’ll be so busy checking the rifle, it won’t occur to them I’ve got anything else.’ He looked at me, frowning. ‘Come to think of it, what did you do with the gun you took from that little rat Lopez?’

‘It’s in my suitcase,’ I said.

There was a sudden flurry of activity, a jolt and people boarding. ‘Maybe we better hand them in. Or toss them out as we run through the tunnel at the top of the pass. No, the ravine would be better. There’ll be a mist up there today and everybody gawping at the steel bridge.’ A lot of clanking and people shouting, then we were shunted back to finish up being hitched onto a long train of oil tankers. The diesel locomotive gave a mournful bellow, a last warning as the couplings clashed.

I was out on the iron platform then and I saw the actor in his blue jeans running as the train started into motion, a battered suitcase in his hand and the television crews filming from the rear of the last coach, the cameraman being held precariously balanced on the outside of the observation platform. Again the mournful bellow, the wheels grinding on the rails, the actor clambering in, and the camera being passed to safety.

The diesel engine was already nosing its way between the river and the government buildings, and looking back I saw somebody had missed the train, a small red car swinging into the depot and a man jumping out. He stopped suddenly, turned and dived back into the car, which swung quickly round and was lost to sight behind some buildings. I looked out the other side, and there was the bridge over the Yukon where we had stood the previous night and the SS Klondike looking like a white whale stranded on the grass of the bank, and as we crossed 2nd Avenue, the locomotive still bellowing, there was the little red car coming towards us.

I caught just a glimpse of it, and then there were houses and the steep escarpment rising above us with a small plane raking off from the airport. By air I suppose it would have been no more than a few hours to Bella Bella, but most of the coast was only covered by local floatplanes and the direct flight distance was almost 800 miles. Too far, and the terrain too rugged, the weather close in to the Rockies too chancy. And by road the distance given to Bella Coola on the map I had with me was just on 2,400 miles — ‘Rugged driving,’ Tom said. He had done it. There was, in fact, no practical alternative but to go by ferry, which meant the better part of a day on the train, two nights on the American ferry stopping at five ports down the Alaska panhandle before Prince Rupert, and finally another day on the BC ferry to Bella Bella.

My first reaction to this slow progression had been one of impatience, almost of disbelief. Tom, on the other hand, took it for granted. ‘That’s the way it is up here,’ he had said with a shrug. Travel takes time.’ He was used to the journey, had done it several times. For me, to whom the Yukon, Alaska, the Pacific, the Rockies had just been names until now, it was a wonderful experience just to be travelling through this country — except for the feeling I had of being out of my depth and involved in something I didn’t understand.

All my training — my conventional upbringing, too — prompted me to report to the authorities. But report what? — those two Colombian gunmen when I was convinced the thing was bigger than that? And there was Tom — you can’t just shop the man you represent.

Three days. Three days in close company travelling down the coast. In three days I ought to be able to get some sense out of him, persuade him to take me into his confidence and tell me what it was all about.

Spruce, endless spruce, a copper mine closed by the fall in price, glimpses of the highway and mountains closing in from the right, the train dawdling as though it too was enjoying the scenery. And then, past what is claimed as the smallest desert in the world, we crept in to Carcross at the north end of Lake Bennett where it joins the even bigger Lake Tagish. This was the old caribou crossing — hence the name of the place, Tom said, talking of the huge herds he had seen once on a flight up to the North Slope oil complex. Another of those high-structured, wooden Yukon vessels lay on the shore and one of the railway’s early tank locomotives was parked beside the track, bits and pieces of it picked out in white paint, also a freight wagon. We clanked to a stop just after we had crossed the trembling timber swing bridge that spanned the junction of the two lakes and alongside us was the weatherbeaten wood front of the Caribou Hotel with several trucks parked outside, also a small red car. Then I saw them, standing there, just clear of the hotel, outside another clapboard building, Matthew Watson’s General Store painted on the front of it, standing quite motionless, their faces without expression as they searched the carriage windows.

I had gone out to the rear platform and was just stepping down with an excited group of youngsters to take a picture when I saw them. I ducked back, but too late. They were already moving towards the coach. Those two hunters,’ I said as I sat myself down again beside Tom.

He nodded. ‘I saw them.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Nothing. They won’t trouble us until we get to Bella Bella. Then we’ll see.’

The two men were climbing into the coach, each carrying a grip, nothing else. They stood a moment on the iron platform staring at us through the glass of the rear door, the big one frowning slightly, his untidy beard and the moustache seeming blacker than ever in the sombre grey light reflected off the water, Lopez looking tense, his body like a coiled spring as though expecting us to make some hostile move. It was only a few seconds they stood there motionless, but it seemed much longer. Camargo was the first to move, reaching out and opening the door. Then he was pushing through it, and they went past us, not saying anything, not even looking at us.

‘It was only an outside chance they’d be fooled into thinking we’d left by air,’ Tom said, and he shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s better this way.’

The train jolted into motion, and though I tried questioning him again, he wouldn’t answer, sitting there, staring out of the window at the grey expanse of the lake, his mind apparently locked on his thoughts. And those two men with their coffee-coloured skin and black oily hair sitting impassive and silent at the other end of the coach.

At Bennett we stopped for lunch — benches and trestle tables in a bare echoing hall that was part of the depot, a full-bodied soup brought on in steaming tureens by full-bodied women, steak and bean pudding and apple pie. And when we went out to stretch our legs the mountains had gone, the cloud right down on the deck and a light drizzle blowing in our faces. Lopez and Camargo took turns to keep watch on us and a second engine was shunted on to the train for the long haul up to White Pass.

Bennett boasted the one real section of double track on the whole no miles between Skagway and Whitehorse, so we had to wait for the daily train coming in over White Pass from the other direction with another load of passengers for another ‘gold rush’ station meal. We left just after one-thirty.

By then the wind had risen almost to gale force, the rain slashing at the depot buildings, obliterating them almost instantly as we pulled out into the murk. It was like that for perhaps half an hour, then the wind dropped and the clouds thinned to reveal a desolate landscape of bare rock and stunted scrub interspersed with innumerable little lakes. The train was moving now at a snail’s pace, the diesels labouring. We stopped by a small building that was like a signal box. We had reached the summit and the border between Alaska and BC.

We were almost at three thousand feet then and through the first of the snow tunnels, an alpine maquis world where a carpet of autumn-gold growth hugged the ground, crouching for shelter amongst bare, black, ice-scarred rocks and beside small pools still skimmed with the night’s ice. It was here that Tom, who had seemed lost in a world of his own, suddenly turned to me and asked me to get Lopez’s gun from my suitcase. ‘There’s the first of the real rock tunnels coming up in a moment. You’ll be able to get it then without anybody seeing what you’re up to.’

‘What do you want it for?’ I had a sudden vision of him shooting those two down in cold blood. He had been to the lavatory quite recently and I didn’t know whether he was drugged-up or not. A man brooding like that…

But he just smiled and said, ‘You can keep the ammunition. I just want the gun.’

We clattered over a girder bridge, and as we entered the tunnel I got up. I had never handled an automatic, and fumbling in my case in almost complete darkness I couldn’t find the catch that would release the magazine. He seemed strangely relaxed when I got back to my seat, sitting there smiling to himself, and when I slipped the gun into his hand I saw him fingering it, then he passed me the magazine. ‘Put that in your pocket — for the moment, just to keep your mind at rest.’ And he patted my arm, turning and peering back down the coach. He was checking on the seating position of our two shadows and I didn’t like it.

The tourist route card we had been given indicated a view of the old steel cantilever bridge immediately after the tunnel, also Dead Horse Gulch and the original White Pass trail of ‘98. Then there was another tunnel, the original one, and after that we would be into the Glacier Loop with its series of trestles carrying the line along the mountainsides to the Skagway River crossing and Glacier Station at Mile 14, the miles measured from Skagway port where the building of the railway had begun in 1899.

We emerged into the daylight, the mountaintops lost in cloud, everything shrouded in mist, the bridge and the old track looking weird in the veiled light. A few minutes later there was a muted bellow from the engines up front, then the drum of the wheels became louder and suddenly we were into the next tunnel, the daylight abruptly cut off and Tom getting up and pushing past me. The lights were dim, almost nonexistent, so that he was little more than a shadow as he made his way down the aisle to where the two of them sat by the cast-iron stove. The big man, Camargo, was on his feet. I half rose at the same time, tense and wondering what was going to happen.

But nothing happened. Tom stood there for a moment, leaning slightly forward as though presenting them with something. Then he had turned and was coming back down the aisle. Daylight suddenly, the engines no longer labouring and the brakes hard on as the world dropped away to our right. ‘The Skagway River,’ he said as he slipped past me to his seat by the window.

I caught a glimpse of the steel bridge, an old girder contraption straddled from rock to rock across a ravine. ‘What were you doing?’ I asked.

He was smiling quietly to himself and I suddenly caught a glimpse of the man Miriam had been so attracted by. There was an almost rakish, devil-may-care look about him. ‘What were you expecting, a fight?’ I waited, knowing by the expression on his face that he couldn’t resist telling me. He looked so pleased with himself.

‘I bowed,’ he said. ‘Very formal, very Spanish. Then in their own tongue I said “Creo que estas les pertenecen.” And I handed the guns back to them, holding them by the barrels of course.’ He laughed gently — not that snorting neigh, but a real, genuine laugh of amusement. That was it. They were too surprised to do anything. And now they’re stuck with the things. They can hardly thrust them back at me in broad daylight with a bunch of tourists looking on.’ a And all the way down to Skagway, which we reached just — before four, he was in that same relaxed mood, constantly quoting from his father’s experiences as the train wound slowly down the pass, a great loop by the Denver Glacier trail that showed the track and the bridge high up above us on the mountainside, the brakes grinding all the time, and his voice going on and on about how it had been that winter with thousands of men back-packing the minimum of a ton of gear up through the snow, horses lying dead and dying on the trail, blizzards, disease and exhaustion making the climb to the pass a living hell.