I shook my head, the water dark and no way of knowing for sure. ‘With both of us in the canoe we might just be able to push ourselves across with the paddle.’
I don’t think he heard, for he was already working his way along the steep drop to the lake, probing with his torch for a place to manhandle the canoe down into the water. In the end, the only possibility was a shoulder of rock within a few yards of the smooth run of the water over the sill. Somehow we managed to get the canoe safely down to a point where he could slide it over the rock into the water and hold it there. ‘You take the bow,’ he shouted at me, ‘and be prepared to lean right down with your paddle and keep us from going over.’ He was up to his knees in the swirling current, the noise of the water deafening.
Somehow I got myself into the bows. Ahead of me was a small jut of rock, and beyond that the dark rush of the spilling lake. ‘Ready?’ I nodded as he swung the bows so that we faced out into the centre of the lake. ‘Now paddle like hell!’ he screamed and I felt the stern go down, the frail craft rocking crazily as he clambered in.
I started paddling. There was no time to feel scared. I could feel his paddle dipping with mine as the bows shot out beyond the jut of rock, swinging wildly in the current. ‘Hold her!’ he yelled and I kept the bows headed down the lake; the canoe swept first sideways, then backwards, the two of us flailing the water with our paddles, heading diagonally across the spill. Suddenly the stern touched rock, the bows swinging out of control, water pouring under us and both of us reaching down with our paddles, pushing the canoe across the face of the lake’s outlet, the tug of the water and the noise of it thundering down filling our whole world as we struggled frantically to make the bastion of rock on the far side where a rowan hung a delicate branch towards the water’s edge.
Without that branch I don’t think we would have made it. I had to stand up in order to reach it and somehow I preserved my balance, pulling us in until we had our hands on the rock itself. Brian passed me a line and I managed to pull myself up onto a wet, sloping ledge. Fortunately the rock was rough and my deck shoes held. Brian followed, and with the canoe riding light and bobbing around in the current, we managed to work it round the shoulder into the quiet of a little inlet that had a bottom of dark silt. It was not much more than a crevice in the rocks, but it was safe.
That was when the reaction set in. My body began to shake uncontrollably and I felt desperately cold. ‘We’ve got to get moving,’ Brian said. Dawn was beginning to lighten the tops of the eastern peaks, but I shook my head. At that moment nothing would induce me to get back into that frail craft, not even the fact that I thought I could just make out the dark square block of the hut some two or three hundred yards across the lake, beyond the rush of its waters towards the outlet.
‘Come on, for God’s sake!’
Again I shook my head, unable to speak.
He stared at me, his head thrust forward. ‘Get in!’ he hissed. ‘If you don’t, I warn you — I’ll knock you cold and dump you in.’ He seized hold of my arm, shaking me. ‘D’you want to get shot?’
I shook my head dumbly, not believing him, my teeth chattering.
He slapped me then. Twice, with his open palm, each side of my face, so hard he almost knocked me off my feet. ‘Get in!’ And this time I did as he said, my cheeks burning, the shakes suddenly gone — only a sense of unreality so that I knelt there in a sort of daze. He thrust my paddle into my hand and the next thing I knew he was in the canoe and we were both of us paddling, thrusting against the current and driving ourselves along the western shore of the lake.
As daylight grew in the sky beyond the mountains, spreading almost reluctantly down into the basin of the lake, Brian stopped paddling and pulled a pair of very small bird-watching binoculars from the waterproof covering to his sleeping bag. We were then about halfway down the lake. ‘We’ll have to take a chance on it,’ he said, his body swivelled round so that he could train the binoculars on the hut, just visible now in the growing light. ‘Can’t see a soul. Nothing stirring and the two dogs asleep.’
‘You can see the dogs, can you?’
‘Sure. You might not think it, but these have a magnification of ten.’ He stared through the glasses for a moment, then put them down. ‘Yes, they’re huskies all right, but cross-bred by the look of them.’ He picked up his paddle. ‘Okay, we’ll chance it.’ He drove the paddle in deep, thrusting the bows round until they pointed towards a clump of trees on the far side. ‘Make for those cedars, and use only your arm — don’t move your body, and no splashes.’
The canoe glided out from the shelter of the bank, the light strengthening all the time so that we seemed suddenly very exposed. Every now and then I felt Brian put down his paddle and examine the hut through his glasses, and each time he reported no movement. It was almost five-thirty and we were now right in the middle of the lake, no cloud and the sky turning from green to orange. The cold numbed my fingers, my legs wrapped in the chill, wet compress of my socks and trousers.
‘Why are we crossing over?’ I asked him. ‘We’d have been much safer on the side we were on. We could have laid up there during the day and crossed over after dark tonight.’
‘They’ve got a boat. I saw it, on that little beach below the hut. A boat with an outboard.’
‘You say they — is there more than one of them?’
‘I don’t know. But they’ll have radio contact with the camp below. It wouldn’t take long to rustle up a search party, and once the dogs picked up our scent…’
They’re more likely to pick it up on the side we’re headed for.’
But he didn’t agree, arguing that the cascades were from a series of lake outlets that would make it difficult to search along the shore we were heading for. ‘When I landed at the logging camp I counted at least half a dozen cascades. This lake lips over a sort of rim of rock a mile or more long, some of it sheer cliff. But at the northern end the cliffs give way to a much easier slope. I could see the line of a road running-up towards it.’ He thought it was probably no more than a rough extraction track. ‘Just what we want if we can clamber down to it.’
We were almost across the lake now, the clump of trees growing tall and the sound of cascade water beginning to fill the still morning air with a soft murmur. A small headland of rock began reaching out towards the hut, now clearly visible in the strengthening light. An optical illusion, of course, but it looked as though the hut itself was moving, so quietly were we gliding over the mirror-flat surface of the water. And then suddenly it was gone, lost to view behind the low line of rocks. We had heard no sound of barking, seen no sign of any human. Then the bows touched and we were splashing ashore.
The clump of trees stood on a rocky knoll and from the top of it we looked out across a vista of mountains — snow and rock and the green of trees with giant peaks reaching up to a thin layer of cloud, the dawn already reddening to the sunrise. Water cascaded down on either side of us and far below we could see the inlet that had become known as the Halliday Arm, a dog-leg of leaden water thrusting into the wildness of the mountains, curving past a small area of flat land away to our left. There were huts there, the remains of a logging pen, a narrow track snaking up to the top of a low cliff with a truck poised on the edge of it, and immediately below a huge great pole of a tree trunk up-ended to form a primitive crane, another jammed hard against the cliff, and below that a large barge moored against a log-pile jetty. There was no sign of the Coastguard cutter. The barge was already half loaded with timber, the rest of its cargo piled on the quay close beside it.
And in from the quay, filling all the valley right up to the lower slopes, was High Stand, a sea of dark green tops stretching without a break till, just back of the huts, it ceased, the land suddenly bare and dotted with stumps.