‘He shouldn’t have done it,’ Brian said, his teeth clenched. And he added, ‘It looks so much worse from up here. Bigger. Much bigger. It’s a lot more than two hectares.’ He was almost beside himself with sudden anger. ‘How could he do it — and with that curse hanging over him?’ He turned abruptly. ‘Let’s see if we can find a way down on to that track.’
The track was away to our left, a rough ribbon of mud, half overgrown and reaching up through rocky slopes of new growth, most of it scrub. To our right was sheer cliff with waterfalls cascading down from the rim of the lake like lace streamers to join up and form a torrent that disappeared into the great stand of trees in the bottom. This main torrent finally emerged as a white froth of fast-flowing water that fed into the inlet over a flat waste littered with the debris of broken trees.
‘Come on! No point in standing looking down at what they’ve done to it.’ There was cold anger in his voice, a note of violence. ‘Somehow I’m going to stop the bastards.’ He had turned and was facing me. Finally he said, speaking slowly, ‘What you’re seeing down there in the valley bottom has taken over half a century to grow, and look what they’ve done! Ten minutes with a big chainsaw and … crash! Another of them gone.’ He swung round, hurrying back down towards the water and calling over his shoulder, ‘Come on or not as you like, but I’m going down there. Now!’
When I caught up with him he already had the canoe launched and was clambering in. I followed, not saying anything. I had no desire to be stranded up there on my own. We pushed off, shoes full of ice-cold water, trousers wet to the knees. There were clouds forming on the mountains as we paddled past the last of the cascade spills, keeping close along the shore and heading towards a gloomy little beach that marked the north end of the lake. A little huddle of cottonwoods ringed the edge of it, most of them dead of age or some disease, the bare trunks and branches covered with a grey lichen. And perched on the tops of two of the tallest were a pair of bald-headed eagles, pale heads above large grey-black bodies.
There’s a boat.’ Brian pointed away to our left, and at the sound of his voice the two birds took off, their flight heavy and ponderous, and so quiet they might have been owls. The boat was a semi-inflatable drawn up on the smooth, grey surface of a rock outcrop. We landed at the edge of it, the rock making it possible to scramble ashore without splashing around in the cold lake water.
The boat had no outboard, just a pair of oars, and like the inflatable parked on the big lake by the Ocean Falls dam it looked quite new. There was nothing in it except the oars, a plastic baler and an air pump. I stood there for a moment, looking down at it and wondering about the hut. There was nothing else on the lake that the men in the logging camp below needed a boat to reach, for if they were going in to Ocean Falls the obvious way was by boat direct from the logging camp, not by climbing a thousand feet, then rowing a couple of miles across a lake, scrambling down a portage and hoping there would be somebody at the bottom to ferry them the ten miles to the dam.
‘Come on!’ Brian was impatient to get the canoe away under cover and start down to the camp.
‘What’s it for?’ I said.
The boat? Fishing. Or hunting maybe. There’s a bit of swamp land over the other side might be good for the occasional moose.’ He lifted his end of the canoe, nodding to me to take up mine.
‘And the hut?’ I murmured, thinking about how we had come upon it suddenly in the night, the dogs barking and the rattle of their chains, the torchlight in the window. Two guard dogs and at least one man there — why?’
He didn’t answer for a moment as we hefted the canoe up the rock slope. From the top we could see a well-beaten trail leading down through the trees. ‘If you’d seen some of the dropouts that squat down in Ocean Falls,’ he said, ‘and you’d got a fishing lodge up there at the end of this lake, you’d make dam’ sure there was some sort of a guard on it. Besides, out here in the west they’re most of them hunting mad, particularly townspeople. Hunting is their sport, the outback and all the life that’s in it at their disposal, to kill at will.’
We pushed our way into a tangle of what he said was Sitka alder and scrub birch, up-ended the canoe and stuffed our things underneath it. There are laws,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Laws! Of course there are laws. But who cares about laws up here in the mountains? You try and haul a moose home in your pick-up or go off with a trophy of antlers without a licence, then the Mounties or the Park Wardens will get you, but up here’ — he looked back at me — ‘up here, deep in the Rockies — ‘ He shook his head. ‘The law is down there.’ He waved a hand south towards Vancouver. ‘Not up here. There’s nobody to enforce it here.’
He pointed to the logging camp just becoming visible across the little clearing, the dull, blade-like gash of the inlet beyond. ‘Even down there, those loggers — they’re a law to themselves. Oh, your friend Edmundson, coming in on a Coastguard cutter, may cause a little flutter of anxiety — the long arm of government — but soon as he’s gone …’ He laughed again, and then we were onto the old extraction road, wishing we had gumboots instead of canvas shoes for there was a lot of mud in places and it was heavily overgrown, sloping steeply down along a spur of the mountains.
There was no big timber anywhere, everything felled and only the scrub of new growth — birch and mountain ash and alder, goat’s beard, devil’s club, and beside the track a trailing evergreen that Brian said was kinnikinick. This was the area Tom Halliday had clear-felled, this was what he had been living on as the Ice Cold mine faded.
The spur stopped abruptly, the track swinging away to the right in a hairpin bend and slanting down towards the green sea of the High Stand tops. At this point the mountainside fell away steeply, the camp and the quay with the barge alongside almost directly below us, the layout, every detail of it crystal clear. It was like seeing it all in an aerial photograph, and away to the right was the bald, stony patch full of brash and debris where a near-rectangle of Josh Halliday’s great plantation had been newly felled. The picture was one of utter devastation with the torrent reaching into the inlet from the far side of it.
A broad haulage road ran close alongside the waters of the inlet straight to the quay. A big crawler was moving along it, trailing three of the High Stand stems hoisted by their butts with their tail ends chained to a set of bogies. And right below us a truck was backing off the cliff-edge above the boom crane and starting down the bright gash of that newly bulldozed track to the camp.
Brian was muttering to himself, cursing under his breath. We had both of us stopped, the bend and the drop such a superb vantage point. ‘Isn’t that Wolchak?’ He was staring down at the camp through his binoculars. ‘Talking to a big man with a bit of a beard. Could be Edmundson. Have a look.’ He passed me the glasses. ‘Down there by the mess hut. They’re just walking across to the office.’
The magnification was incredible, the camp leaping towards me and so clear I could see individual stones in the dirt road, the red glint of a Coca-Cola tin, and a small cinnamon-coloured bear digging around in a trash can quite regardless of the two men walking past. ‘That’s Jim Edmund £
son,’ I said. They reached the office, Wolchak talking all the time, quick gestures of the hands, Jim nodding. They paused a moment, looking back towards the clear-felled area. Then they passed through the door of a hut that had a notice on the outside of it.
The camp was deserted then, the only movements the bear still foraging and that truck grinding slowly down the bright yellow gash of the track just above the camp.
It was an odd-looking truck with a lot of piping in it and a big gantry folded down across the cab and protruding way beyond the blunt engine cover. ‘It’s our mobile drilling-rig,’ Brian said when I asked him what it was. ‘My father had it brought in when Ice Cold began to peter out. Thought he’d strike oil here.’ His grandfather had apparently talked about a bit of a seep he had found at the upper end of High Stand. ‘But old Josh, he wasn’t interested in oil. He just thought it a joke that he could have planted one hell of a forest on top of an oilfield.’ Tom, of course, had seen it as the perfect solution to his growing financial problems. Another gamble that hadn’t come off.