The sound of a chainsaw came to us faintly in the wind.
‘Can you see where they’re cutting?’
‘No,’ I said.
He reached for the glasses. ‘That barge there. Looks like an old cement barge.’ It was large and rusty with a little wheelhouse aft. ‘And they’re loading it dry,’ he added, staring down at it. ‘That shows what they think of those trees.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, they’re not going for pulp, are they? If it was pulp-wood they’d send up one of those self-loading barges, a real big monster with a couple of built-in cranes, and they’d be deck-loading the timber crossways. Then all they do when it arrives at the pulp mill is flood port or starb’d ballast tanks, heel the barge over and slide the whole lot into the water, straight into the logging pen. But instead of that, here they are, loading the timber dry into a barge so that it’ll stay dry, and they’ll unload it the same way, straight onto the sawmill’s quay.’
‘Your father is convinced — ‘
He swung round on me then. ‘You don’t believe him, do you? He’s just trying to convince himself that he isn’t responsible for what’s going on down there.’ And he added in a quieter tone, ‘Whatever he thinks they’re up to I can tell you this, they’re treating those trees as though they’re gold. And that’s just about what they are.’ The buzzing sound was louder now and he swung the glasses towards High Stand, searching along the edge of the clear-felled area. But it wasn’t a chainsaw. It was a steadier drone, and suddenly I could see it, low down over the water, a floatplane flying up the inlet. We watched it as it landed in a burst of spray and taxied in towards the quay, cutting a broad curving line through the still water. The pilot jumped out onto a float, leaping ashore with a line and fending off. There were two passengers, one short, the other taller and heavier, and something in the way they walked, their baggage too … I got hold of the glasses again and then I knew I was right. ‘Camargo and Lopez,’ I said.
‘The two South Americans?’
I nodded, wondering why they were here. ‘They’re the hunters who brought that note from Miriam up to the mine. Just left it there for Tom to find.’
‘So he told me, but he didn’t say anything about hunters. He said they were gunmen, hoodlums in fact.’ He had a look at them through the glasses. ‘Could be right. They look mean enough.’
‘But what are they doing here?’
‘What do you think?’ He turned on me angrily. ‘Can’t you get it into your head that that stand of trees down there is worth a fortune. It’s thuya, virtually all of it, and red cedar, with its high oil content, is a timber that’s in great demand in all countries where the humidity is high — outdoor sheds, greenhouses, window frames, any construction where weather is a problem. Come on! Let’s take a closer look.’
He moved off round the bend, starting down the slope into the great basin that looked like the half of a crater, white streams of water falling from the lip and in the bottom that green sea of feathery tree crowns. ‘I’m dam’ sure,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘that Wolchak’s plan is to fell the whole stand. If he can satisfy the Government, and a clear undertaking to replant would probably be enough, then all he needs is Tom’s signature. And if he’s got Miriam tucked away somewhere, he’s got a hell of a bargaining counter. Tom would do anything for that woman.’ And he added, ‘Oh, I know he breaks out sometimes — mostly when he’s high. Always has done. Except when my mother was around. She kept him fully occupied.’ He gave a short laugh as he pushed through a thicket of salmonberry that had invaded the track where water, seeping from the slopes above, had turned it into a quagmire.
In the wet spots, where there was mud or coarse gravel, we saw the marks of rib-soled boots, footprints that pointed both up and down. At intervals other, smaller extraction tracks ran off along the contour lines of the slope. There were no footprints on these side tracks and with the main track getting progressively better we lost them altogether. The scrub growth here was smaller, for we were moving down into the more recently felled areas. Soon we were hearing the murmur of the cascades from the lake above. A power saw started up, sounding like the floatplane taking off, but intermittent, and there was the crash and thud of a tree going down. As the track improved we moved faster, but even so it took us well over half an hour to reach the edge of the high timber.
By then I was hot, tired and very sleepy, stumbling along with my eyes half-closed, my mind worrying only vaguely now about those footprints and the reason for a rowing boat up there on the lake above. Brian still thought it just a recreational facility, the hut too. ‘Hunting. Fishing. You got to occupy your spare time somehow, and there’s nothing else to do in a place like this.’ But why didn’t they fish the shores of the Halliday Arm and hunt the flats where the torrent ran out from the big trees? Why climb a thousand feet up an increasingly overgrown track? And those dogs? It was the dogs that worried me more than anything else, my tired brain groping for something that I knew was there at the back of my mind, something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about. God! I was sleepy.
And then we were into High Stand, the air quite still. The humidity was higher here, the cool of a forest, with great trunks, some of them almost two feet across, and rising, rising like the fluted columns of a cathedral, rising up until the branches, like the start of medieval vaulting, fanned out, cutting off the daylight, feathery needles aglint with a diamond splatter of moisture droplets, catching the sunlight that came and went with the passage of the clouds. It was stupendous, magnificent. I’d never been in such a place before, the track we were following all carpeted thickly with the brown softness of dead needles, the quiet almost awe-inspiring, all sound deadened so that the rush of water and the buzz of the chainsaw were reduced to a gentle murmur.
I think that was it — the gentleness. Those huge trees, those giants, were gentle giants. It was a place of peace and my tired brain, grasping that essential, began to understand and appreciate Brian’s deep-seated anger at the deadly intrusion of a logging company and its power saws. Every now and then he paused, gazing upwards, an expression of awe. ‘Once, when I was going out into the Karakoram,’ he said, turning to me, ‘I saw something like this. Not far from the base of Nanga Parbat on the way to Gilgit. A forest of great stems that had been planted. That was the only time, but the trees not as big nor as uniform.’ And then the chainsaw had started up again and a moment later we heard the crash and thud of another tree going down. ‘God! How could he do it?’ His voice was trembling and I had the feeling that if Tom had been standing where I was Brian would have gone for him.
He hurried on then, the buzz of chainsaws growing. And then he began moving from bole to bole, the noise louder as we worked our way towards it until we could see the flash of blades backed by the yellow streamer of sawdust and two men bent forward, blades in constant motion as they moved up the long stem deftly lopping off the branches till it lay there, its naked trunk just a piece of raw material for some far-off factory.
The men straightened up, a pause while they talked, the saws silent. One of them laughed, the other smiling as he lit a cigarette. And then they were moving onto the next stem. An arm swung upwards, pulling on the starter cord, the right hand thrusting the saw downwards. It started with a roar, then quietened, the chain still as its operator bent to the base of the tree, turning the blade and checking the angle. Then abruptly he revved the engine to full power, the muscles of his arm flexing as he thrust the blade home, the tortured wood streaming out from the base of the blade like a gout of yellow blood from some great artery of the tree.