High Stand

2

Skagway in the late afternoon of that dismal day was as near to the Styx as I shall probably ever get in this lifetime. The rail tracks, depot and sheds, the quay and the waiting ferry, all lay close under beetling cliffs, the bare rock black with the drizzle that was falling, and beyond was the water of Chilkoot Inlet, grey and flat as polished steel, low cloud cutting everything off, a grey curtain that made it seem the end of the world. And Skagway itself, built on the silt flats of the river and hemmed in by the damp slopes on the far side, was a somewhat phoney version of a gold rush town in limbo, boarded sidewalks and wooden buildings that belonged to the dead world of Soapy Smith.

Since we were booked on the ferry to Prince Rupert, and only in transit through Alaska, customs and immigration clearance was little more than a formality. We dumped our bags at an Edwardian hotel and walked along the Broadway until we ran out of shops and houses. The cloud and the damp were all-pervading and our two friends watched us from the shelter of a doorway. Whether they still had the guns Tom had handed back to them I don’t know. He had disposed of the magazines somewhere along the track where the train had crossed a small torrent that ran in from Mount Hefty and the Denver Glacier. Back at the hotel we had a very expensive beer, then went on board, the ferry sailing promptly at 19.45 local time. It was almost dark then and by the time we had had a meal we were docking at Haines, first of the five ports of call on the Panhandle route south.

We had cabins booked and by the time we left, Tom had already turned in. Throughout our cafeteria meal he had seemed to withdraw deeper and deeper into himself so that I was quite glad to be left on my own to wander round the ship. The vehicle deck was still barely half full and the big lounges that would have been crowded in the season looked almost deserted, row upon row of empty seats and only here and there the poorer passengers settling down for the night, our two followers among them. The throb of the engines, the beat of them against the soles of my feet, the knowledge that next day, and the day after, we would be moving through coastal passages that Cook, and later Vancouver who had sailed with him, had first explored — it was all tremendously exciting, and it would probably have remained so all the way to Prince Rupert and on down to Bella Bella if I hadn’t chanced on something that virtually forced Tom Halliday to open up and tell me the whole pitiful and appalling story.

Some time in the early hours of Sunday morning we reached Juneau. We left at five-thirty and when I surfaced a couple of hours later I found many more people in the lounges, Indians as well as Americans in every sort of dress, a queue forming in the cafeteria. We were in fog, the air on deck cold and clammy, the sound of the foghorn echoing back from the shore on either side and occasional glimpses of rock and trees, dark walls on the edge of visibility. Tom stayed in his cabin, and when I went to check that he was all right I found the door locked. He was taking it easy, he said. He had a book and he didn’t want any breakfast. He sounded half asleep, so I left him to it and spent a pleasant day talking to a variety of passengers: a driller from the oil rigs of the North Slope, two loggers from the Charlottes, a citrus fruit farmer from down near Sacramento, California, and a man who had lived half his life on the slopes of Mount St Helens and had been there during the eruption when it had covered half the state of Washington in a grey pall of ash. By lunchtime we were in Petersburg, the fog thinning and the sun breaking through, so that going through the narrows between Mitkof and Kupreanof Islands we were in a milky haze with the forests on either side glimmering almost silver with the moisture that clung to the needles of the trees. Three hours later we were at Wrangell, and at each of the day’s stops one of our South American friends would be watching the passageway that led from Tom’s cabin, the other keeping an eye on me.

It was an eerie feeling, not being able to move anywhere on the ship without being watched. Twice I talked to Tom, but only through the door. He seemed to have sunk into a sort of torpor, his voice muffled and surly like a bear disturbed in the middle of its hibernation. Night fell on the 150-mile passage to Ketchikan and he again refused to join me for the evening meal. I had left it till late and after I had finished, when we were already docking at the last Alaskan port, I went down once more to his cabin with the intention of insisting that I brought him something from the cafeteria before it became crowded with new arrivals.

His door was still shut and there was no answer. In sudden panic I beat upon it. A voice behind me said, ‘Is all right your friend.’ It was Lopez lurking in a doorway further down the passageway. He smiled. ‘He is going to the toilet.’ And he added, still showing his teeth below the little down-drooped moustache, ‘You see for yourself. The door is open.’

I stared at him a moment, then I turned the handle and went in. The reading light was on, clothes piled on the foot of the bunk, the blankets thrown back, no sign of a book and his rucksack on the floor with the contents spilling out, some papers tucked into a plastic folder, letters from Miriam — I recognized the writing — some newspaper cuttings … A headline caught my eye:

TEENAGE DRUG MAYHEM‹.i›

Cheap Coke Floods In

It was from a Chicago paper, the cutting two months old and faded. Another from the same paper was a few days later Violence Hits the Streets — Kids Go Crazy for Drug Money I sat down on the bunk, wondering why he should have kept the cuttings, carrying them about with him along with Miriam’s letters…

Chicago police appear totally baffled by the sudden rush of coke onto the City streets. It’s plentiful and it’s cheap — cheaper than it has ever been before. And the pushers are everywhere. Samples analyzed show that basically it is good quality, but it has been mixed or cut with anything from amphetamines to borax or even talcum powder. ‘You cut coke with speed, which is amphetamines, and you have a killer,’ says the eminent toxicologist, Professor … ‘What the hell do you think you’re up to?’ Tom reached forward, snatching the cuttings from my hand. ‘Searching my things …’ He opened the door wide. ‘Get out! Get out, do you hear?’

I had stood up, facing him. ‘I think you’d better tell me now.’

‘Tell you what?’ His eyes were very wide, an almost frightened look. ‘Why should I t-tell you?’

I reached past him and shut the door. ‘Sit down,’ I told him. He was bare-legged, his anorak covering his bare chest, his hair standing on end, an unwashed smell and his face looking drawn, almost haggard. ‘Sit down,’ I said again. ‘You’ve got to tell me now.’ And I added, ‘If you don’t, then I’ll go to the police as soon as we get to Prince Rupert. I have to know what it is you’ve got yourself involved in.’ I pointed to the cuttings in his hand. ‘What’s the connection?’

For a moment I thought he was going to lash out at me, his face gone pale and a wild, violent look in his eyes. But then he discarded his anorak and subsided onto the bunk. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose you’d b-better know.’ He nodded slowly to himself. ‘I’ve been thinking about that all day, reading those cuttings, lying here thinking about them.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t have to read them. I know them by heart, you see.’ And after that I didn’t have to drag it out of him.

It had all begun very innocently. Almost a decade ago Jonny Epinard had warned him the Ice Cold mine was showing signs of reaching the end of its life. For one thing, starting from the lowest point, they were washing silt at least three quarters of the way up the claim. The yield per ton of silt washed was still very little changed from the first records kept by Tom’s father, but the percentage of nuggets, or indeed of anything larger than straightforward dust, had abruptly declined. At first he hadn’t taken this seriously, but when the six-monthly profit cheques paid through the Swiss bank had begun to decline, then he had started to take a much closer interest in what was happening up in the Yukon.

This was about the time he had married Miriam, and after a couple of years of unusually heavy expenditure — ‘travelling, racing, a plane of my own, parties, concerts — she’s very musical, you know — well, it was either cut back or find some additional source of income.’ He had started playing the market, with a certain amount of success at first, and gambling, with rather less success. Finally, he had decided to take a look at the BC property. ‘I knew nothing about trees, but you didn’t have to be a forester to know that there was money standing there in the Cascades, not just in that High Stand down in the bottom along the Snakeskin River, but up on the slopes of the mountains.’

The trees there had never been cut over and some of them were big. ‘A lot of scrub, of course, goat’s beard, devil’s club, teaberry, huckleberry and bilberry, but all through it there was hemlock, cedar and fir that just had to be worth something whatever the problems of getting it out.’

It was the problem of extraction, of course, that had caused the original owners to concentrate on the bottom land and leave the slopes alone. But that had been back in the days of steam-powered saws, traction engines, man-built roads and primitive extraction aids. He had been put in touch with Ringstrop by one of Crown Forest’s logging-camp managers and on the basis of the forestry consultant’s report he had accepted his advice to sell the timber standing under separate agreements as and when he needed money.

In this way he had been able to control the amount cut, so that the resulting income would roughly match the shortfall from the Yukon mine. But inside of four years the yield from Ice Cold had fallen so low that he was practically dependent on timber for his whole income, so that it wasn’t long before virtually everything, other than the High Stand his father had planted, had been clear-felled.

By then several things had happened that were to have a bearing on future events. To increase profits he had agreed with Ringstrop two years before to put Thor Olsen in as manager and instead of selling the timber standing, to sell it felled and delivered. One of the big west coast towing companies was contracted to do the haulage. A year later the towing agreement was with a different company. By then Olsen had informed him that they had virtually run out of all the profitable areas, apart from High Stand, and it was at that point that Barony of SVL had offered to buy it standing, get their own people to do the felling and Angeles Georgia Towing the haulage. The price was a lot higher than any Canadian company had been able to offer and Ringstrop had advised acceptance, Angeles Georgia being a small one-tug company tied to SVL and operating close to cost.

That was when he had begun selling his inessential assets. ‘N-nothing would induce me to sell — the old man on my back, his words in my ears.’ The flat in Belgravia and the villa in Monaco had already gone. His plane and his stable of old cars, pictures and the best of the silver, that was what they had lived on for the next year. Finally, he had said to hell with it and sold off the first two hectares of High Stand. ‘I thought it was the t-timber they wanted. I’d no idea …’ He sat there, crouched on the edge of his bunk in nothing but his pants, his head in his hands. ‘Dad — if he could see me now… Christ, what a mess!’

‘Are you saying they didn’t want the timber?’ Even then I didn’t connect, didn’t see what he was driving at. And his only answer was to turn his head so that his eyes were on the cuttings which I had placed on the top of his rucksack. And when I repeated the question, asking him what they had done with the timber, he said sharply, Towed it down to Seattle, you know that.’

‘Well then…?’

‘God Almighty, man — don’t you see?’ He was staring at me wildly. ‘SVL, the towing company, those do-it-yourself and garden shed outfits in Chicago, they’re all linked. And that’s how the drugs get into the States. Somewhere along the tow route from the Halliday Arm to Seattle, some ship, a cargo vessel, a floatplane maybe — I don’t know — but somewhere along the route a consignment of coke brought up from South America is trans-shipped. In Puget Sound a barge-load of logs is a common enough sight, and then, on the long road haul to Mandola’s company depot in Chicago, who would think of unloading a great timber truck stacked high with massive tree logs to check what’s underneath? An officer would have to be damn sure before he ordered a thing like that.’

He gave a slight shrug, leaning forward, his head in his hands like a man praying. ‘Now perhaps you understand. That’s what I’ve been living with. Not just my father’s curse. Not just that — but all those kids, all the people who are being sold the stuff. God knows what it’s like by the time it reaches them. Something innocent like borax or talcum, that’s not so bad, but if it’s amphetamines, if it’s being mixed with speed, then G-God help them — speed is the killer — the fastest…’ His voice tailed away.

I asked him how long he had known all this, how he had found out. ‘Was it Wolchak?’

He shook his head impatiently, locked in on his own thoughts and too tense to answer to questions. Suddenly he looked at me, his face strained and that nerve ticking away on the line of his jaw, the hesitancy in his speech more pronounced. ‘God help me, too,’ he breathed. ‘Me — me — I’m involved, you see. That’s why they sent me those c-cuttings, so that I’d know… I can’t go to the police, to anyone. And now they want the land, the trees, everything. They want me to sign… and if I don’t, then they’ve got Miriam. And if I go to the police, if I blow the whole d-dirty racket wide open — ’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t do it, can I? Not now. And they know it.’

And then suddenly he was half down on his knees, looking up at me, imploring. ‘What am I g-going to do?’ And he repeated it, tears in his eyes. ‘Help me, for God’s sake. Do I ignore Miriam, stop the whole thing …?’

I didn’t answer and he shook his head again. ‘I can’t, can I? I can’t ignore her. The poor kid’s down there somewhere and if I d-don’t d-do what they ask …’

Even then I didn’t believe it. Terrorism, yes — that was something we in Britain had considerable experience of. But drugs … If it had been pushers, or smuggling, the sort of smuggling haul that the customs periodically unearth, but regular consignments, and on this sort of scale … ‘Who’s organizing it, do you know?’ I was thinking of Wolchak, dancing into my office with that set smile of his, and trying to visualize him as a big-time smuggler setting up a drug line that would net millions and millions over the years, destroy thousands of innocent, unsuspecting people, kids a lot of them. But he didn’t seem to fit. And the whole thing blown up too big. If it hadn’t been for that note, for the fact that both her husband and I had recognized it as her writing, then I’d have thought he had made it all up, an appalling piece of fantasizing to satisfy some psychological need. At least I could have brushed it off as wild exaggeration, the two South Americans and the cuttings from the Chicago press a coincidental basis for wild imagining.

‘We’ll see what your son thinks about it,’ I said.

‘Brian?’ He laughed and the sound of it was again that snorting neigh. ‘Brian is a son of embodiment of the Old Man’s curse, isn’t he? That picture you showed me — Man of the Trees, Greenpeace — our friends of the forest killed in action. Self-dramatizing, He sees himself as a sort of Don Quixote.’ His voice shook, but whether with anger or despair I wasn’t quite sure. And he went on, ‘Brian’s no use. Trees, whales, seals, the rain forests — that’s what he believes in, not people. Me, his mother, Miriam, anybody, we mean n-nothing to him, nothing at all.’

It was at that point that the ship began to tremble, faint shouts and the beat of the engines increasing. Feet sounded on the deck, the thud of a heavy rope against the hull, the blare of a siren. ‘The last leg,’ he muttered. ‘In the morning we’ll be at Prince Rupert with Bella Bella only hours away. I’ve got to make up my mind.’

The anguish in his voice was so real I wished I was out of the stuffy, sick atmosphere of the cabin, out on deck in the cool of the night air watching the Alaska shoreline and the dark of the spruce slide by under the moon, the lights of Ketchikan fading astern. What the hell could I say to the man, what advice could I possibly give him? If he’d read it right, if all that he had said was true — but it couldn’t be, surely. Surely what he had been saying of his son was true of himself. He was blowing the whole situation up out of all proportion, dramatizing it so that I would sympathize, so that Brian, when we met up with him, would sympathize. He wanted us to feel sorry for him, to take notice of him… He was the little boy Miriam had described, not Peter Pan, but an immature male desperately needing to hold the centre of the stage. Attention, affection, self-importance … And then the juddering of the engines caused the cuttings to slip off the rucksack and I was leaning down to pick them up, we were both leaning down, and because they were spread out across the floor we found ourselves staring down at a sort of montage of headlines, and all of them screamed the dreadful toll taken on kids who were becoming hooked, the terrible things they would do to get hold of the money to buy their fixes.

‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said wearily, and began picking them up and stuffing them into the old suitcase he had slung on the rack.

Perhaps he was right. Outside, in the passageway, I could hear people moving about, the sound of voices against the background hum of the engines and the faint murmur of water slipping along the hull. We had increased to passage speed and the normality of it all made Tom’s situation seem utterly incongruous, locked in on himself in that stuffy little cabin, a man with a problem no one could solve for him, feeling isolated, utterly alone.

I left him then and went up on deck. Lopez had been standing at the end of the passageway. He had smiled at me, a quick flash of tobacco-browned teeth below the drooping moustache. ‘Your friend all right?’ And I had nodded, pushing past him and moving quickly, in a hurry to get out into the clean, wholesome air. Just the South American watching, not doing anything, and the gun under his arm without ammunition, and yet it scared me, the present manifestation of a looming menace that was growing larger and larger in my imagination. I was thinking of Miriam, against the background of those newspaper cuttings — the money and the violence — and wondering where she was.

I suppose I got some sleep, but it didn’t feel like it as I stumbled out of my bunk at the sound of the ship docking. It was 05.45 hours. Prince Rupert, and we were on time. I shaved and dressed, then went on deck where the glare of arc lights was paling to the first silvery glimmer of dawn.

The BC Ferries vessel was already there with cars waiting on the dock to go aboard. It was scheduled to leave at nine, so we had almost three hours to get through the formalities of re-entering Canada and settle in for a daylight passage that would get us to Bella Bella at eight in the evening. I hoped Brian Halliday would be there to meet us. I desperately needed somebody other than Tom to discuss things with, even though he was probably not the sort of person who would have anything helpful to contribute.

The day dawned sunless and with a low cloud base, so that all but the base of the mountains that rose beyond the flats on which the town was built was obscured. Seaward the port was almost totally locked in by the offshore island of Digby. I don’t know why, but I didn’t wait for Tom. Just after seven I got my bags and transferred to the other ship. By eight I was breakfasting in the cafeteria, having left my things on a seat up for’ard where I would have the best view of the Inside Passage as we steamed down the BC coast, provided, of course, the clouds lifted.

I was sitting having a cigarette with my second cup of coffee, wondering whether I shouldn’t have gone along to Tom’s cabin to check that he was awake, and idly watching the trickle of people in the coffee queue, a mixture that I don’t think you would see anywhere but in this change-over port between Alaska and British Columbia, when my eyes became fixed on the back of a big, heavily-built man in an olive-khaki shirt and trousers. It was the fact that he was standing with his tray at the cash desk with a little Eskimo woman in front of him and what looked like a Japanese couple behind, though they may have been Filipinos or even from somewhere further south in Asia. He looked so huge by comparison, and something about the way he held his head, the set of his shoulders … Then he turned and I called to him.

It was Jim Edmundson. He came over, his tray gripped in his large hands, a brown briefcase under his arm. ‘Well, well — how was the mine, eh?’ I forgot about Tom then, so glad was I to have somebody to talk to, even if I couldn’t tell him the whole story.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Most interesting.’ And then, as he put his tray down, and the briefcase, and lowered himself into the chair opposite me, I asked him what he was doing, here on a ferry that only went as far as Port Hardy at the northern rip of Vancouver Island. ‘You weren’t on the American boat.’

‘No, I drove down.’ He looked so relaxed, so normal, as he tucked hungrily into his breakfast, and in my mind I was comparing him with Tom and the South Americans, the whole background of unreality I had lived with these past few days. Road conditions not bad, nor weather, considering the time of year.’ His mouth was already full, his jaws working, and he held his fork fisted in his right hand. ‘Dumped the car in the parking lot here. From Bella Bella I was expecting to get one of the floatplanes, but now — ‘

‘Where are you going?’ I was thinking that perhaps I could hitch a ride if he was headed up the long fjord arms that run into the Rockies in that part of BC. ‘Funny thing,’ he went on, ‘meeting you here. I bin borrowed by the forestry people.’ He gulped some coffee, fisted more food into his mouth, the plateful of sausages, eggs and fried potatoes disappearing at a rate of knots. They’ve done it before … ‘count of the book, I s’pose. I told you, didn’t!?…! was trained in forestry.’

‘Jean said you’d worked for the Forestry Service.’

That’s right.’ He nodded, swallowing hard. ‘Well, the guy who should investigate anything in that region… he’s had si;-m

an accident… went in with a helicopter fighting a fire over beyond that copper mine inshore of Hardy… What’s odd, meeting you, is that it’s the Halliday property. Didn’t you tell me something about his son doing a Greenpeace act before the cameras on a bargeful of logs going down to Seattle?’

I nodded. ‘And that’s why you’re here? You mean you’re actually going to the Halliday Arm to investigate timber felling in the Cascades?’

He was nodding his head all the time I was putting the question. ‘That’s what’s odd, meeting you here.’

Odd it certainly was, the country so vast. And yet I suppose it wasn’t so odd really. BC, the Yukon, Alaska — it was only vast when you were travelling the country. When you wanted something done, though communications were fast and efficient, the people to do the job were desperately thin on the ground; one regional forestry officer injured and who was there close at hand to take over from him?

‘They want a full report. Something the media will accept. Just because I had a book published…’ He shrugged. ‘Christ!’ he said, ‘that was ten years ago. But my bosses agreed…. So!’ He laughed, and I remembered how the sound of his laughter had boomed in that wet, snowy drive from Whitehorse across to Haines Junction, how his teeth had shown white against the black of the forest streaming by. ‘Jean’s hopping mad. I’d be nursemaid to the children if she had her way, and she don’t like sleeping alone.’ He grinned, and at that moment Tom came in looking vague, his eyes flicking quickly over the tables. Then he saw me and his face lit up, as though he’d been scared he’d lost me.

He went over to the service counter then and I watched as he got a tray and joined the queue. When he came over to the table all he had on the tray was a glass of orange juice and coffee. I half stood up, uncertain what to do. This is Jim Edmundson,’ I said. ‘You remember I told you how helpful he was after I got to Whitehorse, and then his wife driving me…’

Tom Halliday.’ He had set his tray down and was holding out his hand to Edmundson. It surprised me, the first indication that he might now be willing to talk to the Canadian authorities.

Tom — Halliday?’ Jim Edmundson was lumbering awkwardly to his feet, his mouth fallen half open with surprise. The Halliday that owns Ice Cold, right?’ He gripped Tom’s hand as though he were a long-lost friend he’d known all his life. There’s some people thought you were dead.’

‘Well, there’s times I’m not sure that wouldn’t be a good idea.’ Tom managed some sort of a smile and the two of them sat down, Jim Edmundson explaining again why he was on the boat, and Tom staring at him as though fascinated by the way he was being carried along.

‘You mean tomorrow y-you’ll be f-flying into the Halliday Arm.’ The stutter was suddenly quite marked. ‘An official visit, as f-forestry adviser — to inspect, then write a report. An of-ficial report?’

‘That’s right.’ Tom leaned back, his eyes closed. He might have been praying, but I thought it more likely he was on the verge of passing out. It must have come as a shock. And then, suddenly, his eyes flicked open. ‘I’m going there myself. Philip and I are going there, and Brian — my son — is meeting us at Bella Bella. Can you give us a lift in your plane? No, of course — three is too many probably. But me. I must get there. It’s my wife, you see…’ And then his voice stuttered into incomprehensibility as he saw the other shake his head.

‘I won’t be flying in,’ Edmundson said. ‘Not unless the cutter’s gone off on a search and rescue.’ And he added by way of explanation, They’re having a Coastguard cutter meet me at Bella Bella.’

‘A ship — well, that’s better …’

But again the big Canadian was shaking his head. ‘They don’t take passengers, not normally. I guess they’re a bit like a navy ship. You’ll need to charter one of the floatplanes.’

The engines started up under our feet, a sudden murmur that had the deck, the whole ship, our coffee cups vibrating. Everywhere in the cafeteria people were draining their glasses or their cups, gathering up their things and moving towards the stairs or the glassed-in front of the big saloon to watch our departure. It was one minute to nine and the thump of the first warp coming on board was followed by an increase in the revs and the swish of swirling water as the thrusters came into operation.

‘Sometime in the course of the voyage I’d like to put a few questions to you, Mr Halliday, if I may.’ Jim Edmundson’s voice sounded suddenly remote and impersonal, his formal mode of address very different from the easy sliding into Christian names that was his customary approach to other men. ‘Could we have a drink before the midday meal, say about noon. Okay?’

Tom nodded, his eyes flickering uneasily from Jim to me and back to Jim Edmundson. ‘What do you want to know?’

Edmundson laughed. ‘Don’t know yet, do I? Heard so much about you, I’m only just recovering from the surprise of running into you like this. Small world.’ He nodded to himself as though he had said something profound. ‘Very small world. But that’s Canada, eh? Korea. Were you in Korea?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Last time I was on the Inside Passage run there was a fellow on board — came from a little place up the coast from Ketchikan. An American — Alaskan rather. They like to be called Alaskan. His name was Moses Jallopi. Odd name; odd little guy, too. But there he was and I hadn’t seen him since we shared a muddy little slit trench that was more of a shell crater than anything else. We were there two nights, one whole day, not another of our buddies anywhere in sight and the North Koreans, or the Chinese, I never knew which, not fifty metres away, guns banging and shells landing.’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘Seems like another world now. It’s like I say, a small world once you start using our transportation system.’ He smiled again, gathering up his briefcase, and at that moment the PA system broke in, loud and metallic. It was a call for passenger James Robert Edmundson to go to the Purser’s office and he got to his feet. ‘See you in the bar then, around noon.’

We were under way then and within an hour the sun was burning up the clouds so that the islands and tops of the coast mountains gradually emerged, vistas of tree and rock and water, the sun a luminous glow in the shimmering haze. Noon found us entering the narrowest part of the Grenville Channel, still steaming at something around 18 knots as far as I could guess. I came in from the deck to see Camargo and Lopez sitting three rows back from where I had put my bag. One had a newspaper, the other a magazine. Tom appeared to be asleep, but when I told him it was time we joined Jim Edmundson in the bar his eyes opened slowly, the pupils strangely enlarged, his gaze uncertain.

‘You see him.’ His voice was a little slurred.

‘But he wants to talk to you. A few questions.’

‘Tell him I don’t like drink, an’ I don’t answer, questions. Tell him anything you dam’ well like. I don’t wanta be bothered with it. Unless we can hitch a ride on that cutter that’s meeting him. If we can do that, then okay — ‘ His lips were spread in a sly smile as though he thought the decision he had made was a clever one. ‘If he’ll get us all to the Cascades, then I’ll tell him — whatever he wants to know. If he can find Miriam — part’c’ly if he can locate Miriam… You think he carries that much weight, enough to get things moving — well, do you?’

‘I don’t know.’

He sighed, his shoulders lifting in a slight shrug, his head drooping, his eyes closing.

In the end I was on my own when I joined Jim at the bar. He didn’t seem surprised. That man’s on drugs, isn’t he?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said guardedly.

Takes me back.’ He was smiling quietly, his hands still gripped round the beer in front of him. ‘Don’t know where those Yanks were getting it from. I never enquired. But they were sure getting it from somewhere. You ever tried it, Philip?’

I shook my head.

‘Me neither. I’m an open air man. It’s city boys mostly take to the stuff. I suppose you need a kick if you live in a concrete ghetto. And in war you need to forget. But a man like Halliday…’ He shrugged. ‘Had everything he wants, I suppose, an’ got bored. Now…’ He opened his briefcase. ‘Maybe it’s a good thing he isn’t here. Much better I show it to his lawyer.’ He pulled out a sheet of flimsy paper and passed it across to me. ‘Radio message. It was waiting for me when I came on board.’

It announced that the Kelsey had orders to pick up an American tug bound for Seattle towing a barge loaded with logs and stand by while customs officers carried out a routine inspection. You are to proceed on board Kelsey with the utmost speed on arrival Bella Bella. Capt. Cornish will brief you to the extent that it may concern your forestry inspection. I handed it back to him. ‘Well…?’ I was wondering why he had shown me what was a fairly confidential document.

‘Obviously this is another load of timber coming down from your client’s Cascades plantation. When the skipper knows you two are landing at Bella Bella with me it’s just possible he may want Halliday or both of you with him when he rendezvous with the tug- just in case there is any question of the logs themselves being held for examination.’

‘Do you know what it’s about?’ I asked.

‘No. Could be just a question of the export licence. They aren’t all that easy to get, all timber having to be offered to Canadian pulp and saw mills first. But a customs inspection of an American tug sounds to me more like a narcotics operation. Last night in the hotel there was some talk in the bar about ferries being gone over for drugs, particularly the American ships coming down from Alaska. At any rate, officers of the narcotics division of the FBI, the Federal Drugs Enforcement Administration, had been staying in the hotel for several weeks.’ He lumbered to his feet. ‘What can I get you?’

I would have liked a straight malt, something with a kick in it that would steady me up, but I didn’t think they’d have a malt. ‘Same as you,’ I said, my nerves tense, and then, as he went to the bar, I sat back, consciously trying to relax. But I couldn’t, my mind overwhelmed by what he had told me, thinking of the tug, which might already have left the Halliday Arm towing that barge piled with felled trees, and wondering when the operation would take place, whether the tug would stop, and if not … Anything seemed possible, remembering that note from Miriam and all that Tom had told me at Ketchikan in that sick little cabin of his. I hadn’t any doubt, you see. None at all. This was the drug route, though how they got the drugs on board the tow I couldn’t guess. But on board either the tug or the barge they would certainly be. That was why Brian Halliday’s protest hadn’t stopped them, why they had nearly run him down.

Jim came back with two more cans of beer and as he lowered himself into his seat again he said, ‘Something I want to ask you — something that arises from my perusal of the information sent me by the forestry people. My remit, you understand, is to report on the extent to which the environment may be damaged by Halliday signing away more hectares of his father’s plantation for clear felling — I take it, with die mine yielding what amounts to a nil return, or what has probably already happened, becoming a drain on his resources, I take it he is now more or less living off the BC forestry land. That right?’

I hesitated, considering how much I ought to tell him. He was no longer a chance-met Canadian being friendly and helpful to a stranger; he was an official asking questions about a client of mine and the answers I gave he would regard as being given in my official capacity as Tom’s lawyer and could well go into his report.

‘Well?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think you could say that until a new gold yielding area is opened up at Ice Cold he is quite probably living off the sale of timber he made to the SVL Company in Seattle.’

He nodded, raising his glass and emptying almost half of it. ‘As I understand it, he’s cut through all the natural growth up on the slopes and what he’s left with now is a fully stocked plantation of some four hundred hectares in the bottom. That’s not far short of a thousand acres. And this is something I find hard to believe, but it’s there in my notes — ’ he slapped his briefcase — ‘it was planted about seventy years ago.’

‘Why do you find that hard to believe?’ I asked.

‘Because here in BC we only started planting trees in World War II. Before that we relied on natural regeneration. I guess there was some experimental hand planting before then, but if Halliday’s father was planting back at the end of World War I, and on the scale of a thousand acres, then he was way ahead of his time. Maybe he was over in England and got the idea from your Forestry Commission. It was around then that Britain started hand planting. And another thing I don’t understand — why are the trees being harvested now? We wouldn’t normally fell western red cedar under about a hundred and twenty years.’

‘I see.’ I stared at my drink, thinking about that. ‘How much do you reckon the plantation is worth with the trees at their present age?’

He shrugged. ‘Difficult to say till I see them, but the timber industry is currently operating on minimum stumpage, so I guess the price would be around five dollars a cube. Say there’s two hundred, three hundred cubic metres per hectare, that would make each hectare, which is about 1.4 acres, worth somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars. That’s the value standing. Of course,’ he added, ‘the timber would be worth a lot more by the time it gets to market, but even so I find it difficult to understand why it’s being cut at this age. They’d be about a hundred feet now and twelve inches diameter at breast height. Leave them another fifty years and they’d be a hundred and fifty feet with the diameter doubled, the yield too, so that the value per hectare would be around two thousand dollars at present prices.’

So the whole property, all the four hundred hectares Tom’s father had planted, was currently worth about half a million dollars, and once it was cut, that would be the end of it, his last source of income gone. I checked the figure with Jim and he nodded. ‘So why does he disappear?’ He stared at me. ‘Why go missing as though he were in some kind of trouble — or afraid of something?’ And he added, ‘Why is he on drugs?’

I had given him the answer to his first query, but now he was asking questions I had no right to answer. Not yet. And in any case, I didn’t know the answers, not for sure. It went on like that, Jim putting questions to me and myself parrying them as best I could, until I got us another drink. A dark shoreline was sliding by on either side and the sun was no longer shining as I returned to the table. ‘Your drink,’ I said, standing beside the table. ‘Now look,’ I told him, ‘either you stop trying to pump information out of me that I’m not entitled to give you, or I leave you to drink on your own. Mostly I’m as puzzled about certain aspects of the situation as you are.’

‘Oh, sit down, Philip, sit down.’ His face was lit by that large friendly grin of his. ‘I understand your situation. But I’m curious, so you can’t blame me for trying to get a little nearer the core of the matter.’

‘You get us aboard that Coastguard cutter you say is meeting you and I think maybe when Tom sees the search operation …’ I shrugged and sat down. ‘I don’t know. I wish I did. But it’s just possible he might decide to open up a bit.’

‘I take it he’s already opened up to you?’

To some extent,’ I said.

‘And if he was present when the cutter stands by the tug and its tow, you think it might make him more communicative?’

I nodded. ‘He needs help.’

His eyebrows lifted.

‘It’s his wife,’ I said. ‘She’s disappeared.’

‘Left him?’

I shook my head, unwilling to add anything to what I had blurted out. Somebody, sooner or later, would have to hand the whole thing over to the proper authorities, and that person I guessed would have to be me. I had made the first tentative move, but I was unwilling to give any details. The nature of that note of hers had left me with the very real fear that if the matter were handled clumsily it could cost Miriam her life. ‘Let’s see what happens when you meet up with the tug. When will that be?’

But he couldn’t tell me. All he knew about the operation was what the radio message had told him. ‘The cutter’s skipper will presumably have all the details.’ And he added, ‘I’ll see what I can do about getting you on board. Seeing that the tow comes from Halliday’s property Captain Cornish might feel it was better he was in on the operation.’

We went along to the cafeteria for lunch then, sitting at a table with an Eskimo, his wife, who was a half-black Amer ican schoolteacher, and their enchanting little five-year-old daughter who had pigtails of black, coarse hair, and eyes that shone blue through the puffy almond slits of coffee-coloured skin.

I could have been happy on that trip down the coast. The sun had broken through at last, glimmering in a milky haze, the Grenville Channel walls spruce-clothed in sombre green, glimpses of small boats, log rafts where there was a timber-loading cove, and here and there on the flats rough timber bunkhouses or dwellings, some on wooden stilts, others rafted so that they looked like the North American version of the ark. And all the time Jim talking, about the country, the people, and occasionally he would turn to the Eskimo, saying a few words to him in his own language, so that the flat smooth swarthy face split in a wide smile, great teeth like gravestones flashing out, the colour of old walrus ivory. The atmosphere was so Robert Service that I almost expected the great characters of the gold rush to come rolling in.

Instead it was Camargo — a quick flash of the dark eyes, and then he was making for the service counter.

‘Somebody you know?’ Jim asked.

I hesitated. ‘Just a hunter. He was up at Ice Cold. South American.’

He nodded. ‘We get lots of them. They come for the hunting.’ The words came out angrily, between his teeth. ‘They enjoy killing. Machismo, I guess — a sort of vicarious orgasm they get out of death. So long as they’re at the right end of the gun. Point it at them and I guess machismo gets a little jaded.’ I kept my eyes on Camargo’s table, expecting Lopez to join him. But nobody joined him. He sat alone, and I guessed that Lopez had been left to watch Tom.

But why? Each night in the passageway outside his cabin, they had taken it in turn. And then, towards the end of lunch, when Jim was talking about the great forest valleys that lay between the ranges of the Rockies and how they had been raped of all the big timber in the early days of the century and right through to pretty near the present time, how the country had only just begun to get to grips with the enormous.

costly and lengthy problem of replacement planting, it came to me. They were afraid he’d commit suicide. That’s why Camargo and Lopez were watching him turn and turn about. Dead he was no use to them. Dead he couldn’t sign the documents they needed that would give them the legal right to harvest the timber on that land.

But still the same question in my mind. Why the hell was the Halliday timber so important to them? If all they needed was an excuse to make towing runs from up north of Vancouver Island to Seattle, then any logging contract would surely do? Or was it because the Halliday Arm was particularly isolated?

In the end I gave up. Jim was talking about Alexander Mackenzie and the rock where he had scratched his name as the first to reach the Pacific overland. ‘I never saw it when I was working down south in Vancouver Island. Now maybe I will. The place where he reached salt water after crossing the Rockies isn’t very far from the Cascades. In fact, from Ocean Falls it’s not more than half a day’s run in a canoe with an outboard, or in one of those inflatables. There’s hot springs right there, in the Halliday Arm, somebody once told me. Now, you wouldn’t think there’d be hot springs down beside an arm of the Pacific with the Rocky Mountains literally standing on top of you.’

His broad, bland face was concentrated on his memories. ‘I saw Ocean Falls once. Went in from Shearwater, which isn’t far from Bella Bella, through Gunboat Passage, up the Fisher Channel and Cousins Inlet. There’s a dam at Ocean Falls to feed electricity to the pulp mill, but now I’m told it’s all closed down, finished, most of the people gone. There were some eight thousand when I was there, the rain streaming down and everyone with umbrellas.’ He laughed. ‘I guess it rains there about 370 days a year. I was there one night and it never stopped, the rock cliffs black and glistening with it, the timber-laid road down from the dam running with water and the clouds so low you felt you couldn’t breathe. Now, I suppose, there’s hardly anyone there, as the BC Ferries don’t go there any more.’

I was trying to follow him on the BC ‘Super Natural’ road map. ‘Where do you reckon your Coastguard boat will pick up the tug?’

But he had no idea. ‘Could be right of Waglisia Island — that’s the old Indian name for Bella Bella.’

We talked until we had finished our meal and then he excused himself. ‘I got to catch up on some background notes. Trouble with driving down from the Yukon like that you can’t read at the same time.’ Camargo had left by then, and it was Lopez who was sitting alone with a coffee and some food. He stared at Jim curiously as we passed his table. Up for’ard in the saloon it was Camargo who now sat three rows back from us, keeping an eye on Tom who was slumped in his seat, fast asleep.

He didn’t stir as I sat down beside him and after reading for a bit I went outside. We were in open water then, the entrance to Princess Royal Channel over the bows, and it had started to rain, big, heavy drops that produced little rings like fish jumping on the flat, leaden-smooth surface of the water.

It rained like that all afternoon, heavy, thundery rain with thunder grumbling over the veiled mountains and occasional flashes of lightning. And then, after an early meal, it suddenly cleared to a brilliant sunset as we turned the winking light on Mclnnes Island and entered the Seaforth Channel on the run up to Bella Bella. Tom was awake then, his face haggard, and not saying anything. Even when I told him about the radio message Jim had received he made no comment, sitting there watching the approach to our final destination in a state of what appeared to be complete apathy. And then, when the engines slowed, the ship turning and Bella Bella in sight, he suddenly said, ‘Did he say when it would be, this operation — tonight?’

‘He doesn’t know,’ I told him.

He turned on me, his eyes staring, his mouth twitching.

‘You r-realize, don’t you, if it’s successful — what it means to Miriam. They’ll k-kill her.’