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.’