He stopped suddenly, turned to me and said, ‘I wish to God I’d known old Josh Halliday. He was so far ahead of his time — planting trees like that. Nobody in Canada thought of it then, not for a long time, not out here on the west coast. It’s the most magnificent memorial to a man I ever saw, and if this dirty, money-grubbing crowd think they’re going to run big chainsaws through it — Christ! I’ll get hold of a gun and shoot them down myself.’ He laughed then. ‘Forgot you were a lawyer, mate. But you wait! Wait till you see those trees. Then you’ll understand — something worth fighting for.’
We went on then, the track becoming so overgrown it almost disappeared. A few more yards and he stopped, the beam of his torch thrusting into some bushes to reveal the patched bows of a very battered-looking canoe. We dragged it down to the water’s edge where wavelets made little hissing sounds as they broke on an outcrop of rock. It floated buoyant as a cork. ‘Ever handled one of these before?’ he asked as he stowed the bag of food and the hold-alls.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Nor have I.’ He grinned at me. ‘Just don’t rock the boat, that’s all.’
It turned out he had taken a kayak out in the ice when taking pictures of the slaughter of the harp seal pups on the.east coast of Canada. But this was an open Indian-type canoe and though we hugged the shore as close as we dared, we were soon taking in water, for the lake ran north and the wind was veering all the time towards north-east. ‘We’d be better on the other shore,’ I told him.
‘Of course we would, but how do we get there?’
The wind was definitely lighter, but the moon, now clear of the clouds, showed the dark of waves out in the centre of the lake.
We made it across the first shallow bay, but when we rounded the next headland we had to turn back and paddle into the shelter of some rocks. Portaging, or even dragging the canoe, was out of the question, the shallows littered with rock and boulders and the lake edge thick with the roots of small trees and shrubs. We rolled ourselves in our sleeping bags and lay listening to the wind and the murmur of the waves.
The surface of the lake gradually quietened, but it took time, so that it was past three before we were able to get going again. By then I had learned enough about Brian’s attitude and intentions to have a certain respect for the man, the aggressive, bulldozer approach to any difficulty something of a relief after having spent several days in his father’s company. He was a doer, not a worrier, one of those people whose instinct is for action without hesitation. He didn’t plan ahead. He hadn’t a clear idea of what he’d do when we got down to the logging camp. ‘Just have to see, won’t we? Maybe if you talk to this guy Edmundson, tell him they’re cutting illegally…’
‘You don’t know it’s illegal,’ I said.
‘I saw what they’d cut. I know what two hectares looks like and there was a clearing there full of stumps that was a dam’ sight more than that.’
‘If you can see it, so can Edmundson.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘So he sends in a report and by the time the government gets around to doing anything about it, the timber will have all been cut and shipped. And Wolchak or Mandola, or Barony, whoever is SVL Timber’s front man, shrugs his shoulders, says of course they’re replanting and everybody’s happy — ‘cept old Josh Halliday and people like me.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t know yet. But if I get my hands on one of those power saws — I’m pretty good with a chainsaw.’ I caught the gleam of his eyes in the dark. He was grinning at me, and at that moment I sensed something of his father in him, the braggadocio, that devil-may-care sense of the dramatic, and the irresponsible disregard for the consequences.
The wind dropped right away as soon as we reached the point where the lake turned west of north. By then the moon was down behind the mountains and it was very dark when we finally reached the end of the lake, so we had great difficulty working our way up the torrent of water pouring down from above to the point where the portage began, the canoe half full of water and ourselves very wet. The time was 04.10 and we had at least four hundred feet to climb with the canoe hefted on our shoulders. There was a track of sorts, in places more like a rock staircase, the undergrowth all wet and the going slippery. Brian went ahead, probing with his torch. Neither of us spoke, the noise of the water cascading down from the lake above drowning all other sound.
It took us almost an hour to make the top where the water poured in a smooth black rush over a lip of rock and the lake ran away like a pale still path. We could see the outline of the higher peaks of the Rockies black against the stars. No wind now, no clouds and everything very still and quiet, except for the sound of the cascade, which gradually faded to a murmur as we followed a path round to the right, searching for a place where we could safely launch the canoe.
The stars were starting to fade, the first glimmer of dawn beginning to show where the black mass of the mountains rose above the end of the lake. ‘Looks like a hell of a lot of water comes into this lake,’ Brian said, working his shoulders as he stood staring at the great half circle of peaks. We had stopped for a breather, the canoe resting on a rock slab. ‘I’ll.go on a bit, see how much further we’ve got to carry the thing.’
He moved off, his torch probing the steep rock slope down to the lake, and I followed. The path dropped down across some tree roots that were like wooden steps and came to a little beach of coarse sand overhung with trees. ‘We can launch from here,’ I said with a feeling of intense relief, my body under my anorak soaked with sweat, my shoulders already stiffening. And at that moment there was something like a growl or a snarl.
We froze, standing there quite still. ‘What is it?’ I whispered, remembering Tom telling me how the one thing he’d always feared when out hunting in the Rockies was accidentally getting between a grizzly and her cubs. The snarl came again and there was the clink of a chain, so that I wondered if it was an animal caught in a trap. Then it began barking. Another joined in, their barks rattling round the rocks.
Brian cursed, seizing my arm and pulling me back along the path, the dogs ripping the stillness apart with their barking and the rattle of their chains. ‘It’s the hut. It must be occupied.’ I could see it then, a dark shape that I had taken for the rock Tom had referred to as the Pulpit. The beam of a torch lit the square of a window as we ducked back the way we had come, the trees closing round us. The casement slammed open and the beam of the torch stabbed the path behind us, a man’s voice calling into the night- ‘Who’s there?’ The torch swung across the little beach and out over the water, searching.
By then we were back at the canoe. ‘What were they, hunting dogs?’ I was thinking we had to get out onto the water before they were loosed to track us down.
‘Huskies most like. They sounded like huskies.’
Behind us, and fainter now, we heard the man yelling at the dogs. The barking stopped and suddenly all was quiet again except for the sound of water spilling over the rock sill down into the lake below.
‘I hadn’t expected them to maintain a watch up here.’ Brian had leaned his head so close his cap brushed my ear. ‘What do you reckon the depth over that sill? We’ve got to get to the other side of the lake.’