He shrugged. ‘Brian’s probably right in thinking they’re constructing a booming pen. They’ll need it if they’re planning to shift the whole stand out in a hurry. There isn’t storage space on the quay and the poorer logs they’ll probably raft out anyway.’ He had been speaking slowly, as though by putting it into words he could convince himself that Brian’s explanation was the right one. ‘Why else would they be drilling the butts of selected logs?’
He looked at me then, his eyes staring, his shoulders sagging. There was a weariness about him that I found disturbing, and my mind flashed back to that lunch at a place near Lewes — it seemed a whole world away now — and Miriam telling me how one minute he’d be on top of the world — ‘the stars in my lap’, I remembered her words — and the next nothing, a bundle of nerves and temperament, full of insecurity. ‘It’ll sort itself out, I suppose.’ He said it wearily and I saw Miriam watching him, a frown on her face, and there were lines, so that she looked suddenly older, and the expression in her eyes — I think it was pity.
His gaze lifted. They stood looking at each other for a moment and I sensed something pass between them. And then he straightened up, pushing his hand through the wet brush of his hair and squaring his shoulders. ‘Let’s get on, shall we?’
He gave one final glance down at the camp below, then continued on round the hairpin bend, moving fast. I caught up with him in the first salmonberry thicket. ‘What are you planning to do when you get down there?’ I asked him.
‘See what Brian’s up to. Try and stop them if I can.’ He shook his head, clearly irritated by my question. ‘I don’t know. We’ll just have to see.’
Miriam caught up with me then, her hand grasping mine, her fingers fastening tight as she held me back. ‘Watch him,’ she whispered. ‘Please. I don’t know how much of the stuff he’s had. But I know this mood.’ She half slipped on a patch of mud, and then she muttered something about his being unpredictable.
‘Unpredictable?’ I repeated, and she nodded: ‘He could do something stupid, so please — keep an eye on him.’
We were glimpsing the cascades up on the rim of the lake above, the murmur of water filling the horseshoe basin with gentle sound and, below us, the green vista of the cedar tops silvered with moisture, the cloud-topped gut of the inlet beyond. Then the cloud came down again and for a time we could see nothing but the down-slope of the track ahead disappearing into vapour that the breeze rolled around as though it were smoke.
We must have been quite close to the upper edge of High Stand when I thought I saw movement. Tom had seen it, too, for he was suddenly standing very still, his head stretched forward, peering into the mist. Slowly he unslung the rifle from his shoulder, his thumb on the safety catch as he held it poised in both his hands. Faint from below came the sound of a power saw muffled by the trees.
I still held the gun he had snatched from Camargo and then passed to me. I looked down at it, finding the safety catch and wondering whether it was loaded. I’d never fired a rifle in my life. He moved forward in a crouch, and I followed, and then a voice called up to us.
It was Brian.
He didn’t look at his father, walking straight past him, his eyes on Miriam. ‘So you found her,’ he said to me, his face lit by a smile. And then they were hugging each other, and Miriam crooning over him as though she really were his mother. Her reaction, the sudden outpouring of pent-up emotion, was a reminder of the long period of uncertainty and fear she had suffered up there in that hut.
‘I told you not to go looking for Rodrigo.’ He had turned to face his father, hot anger blazing in his dark eyes. ‘I warned you.’ He swung round on me. ‘What happened?’ And when I had told him, he turned on Tom again. ‘God, Jesus! You bloody fool! You could have had Miriam maimed for life and those bastards with an agreement signed that gave them the right to do what they’re doing. You played right into their hands. Don’t you realize there’s anything up to a million dollars in the forest your father planted?’
‘It’s not the trees,’ Tom said. That’s just a cover.’
Thunder rolled down from invisible mountains, a flash of lightning.
Brian shook his head. ‘I warned you, and bloody hell, you took no notice.’ The sky had taken on a livid hue, the head of the inlet blocked out. ‘All you care about is yourself and getting enough coke to keep you high, just so you don’t have to face up to the reality of what you’ve done, letting these people in.’
‘I tell you, it’s just a c-cover.’ Tom’s voice was taut as though on the edge of losing control himself.
‘Listen!’ And Brian went straight on, ignoring his father’s attempt to tell him something, ‘Do you hear it — those chain-saws?’
They stood facing each other, the echoes of the thunder dying away across the peaks. ‘Listen!’ he said again. ‘Now do you hear it?’ And he seized hold of his father’s arm and dragged him down the slope of the track. ‘Come on, I’ll show you. We’ll go down through the timber and you can see for yourself.’ Miriam tried to stop him, but he waved her away. ‘It’s time he realized just what he’s doing. Once he’s seen it, maybe he’ll understand.’
The single-purposedness of the man was quite extraordinary. He must have been as tired as I was, and yet he could still radiate a sort of demonic energy, his obsession with trees filling his mind to the exclusion of anything else, so that I felt it was a sort of madness that had taken hold of him. And Tom went unresisting, a dazed expression on his face as though he were in the grip of Fate and had no volition of his own.
Only once did he break away. ‘Must have a pee,’ he murmured. And it was the same as it had been up near Ice Cold. I heard him snorting the stuff up his nose, and as we went on down into the forest, he developed a spring to his step, something near to a swagger in his walk. Miriam was by my side and she said, ‘Stop them, can’t you? They’re so — explosive. The two of them together.’ She was very tense herself. ‘They’ve always had this effect on each other.’
I shook my head. It wasn’t for me to interfere, and anyway we were nearing the end of the track, light showing through the tree boles and the sound of the saws getting louder every moment.
We came to the edge of the clear-felled area, the time 15.55 and the only difference from when I had been there in the morning was that the two fellers had moved half a dozen trees or more northwards, so that our view of the camp was partly obscured by the piled-up brash of lopped branches. Also the thunder was nearer, a closeness in the air and the lowering cloud base getting darker. The sound of the saws was loud here, a small wind carrying it towards us, one man working his way along the bole of a newly fallen tree, snicking branches off with the tip of his saw, the other bent over a standing giant that already had a gaping wedge sawn out of its base to guide the fall.
Brian had hold of his father’s arm again, moving him forward under cover of the standing stems. He was talking all the time, but the sound of the chainsaws was so loud I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then timber splintering and the man nearest us looked up from the fallen tree, his chainsaw idling, the other man stepping back from the base of the stem he had been cutting into.
‘… Stop them.’
‘How?’
‘For God’s sake, you’ve got a gun.’
Both saws idling now, the top of the tree beginning to move, branches snapping and the three of us staring as the tree slowly toppled forward, the green top of it arcing down across the backcloth of cloud-filled mountainside, black rock and the pale gun-metal flatness of the water… Then the splintering crash of the branches, the thud of the stem hitting the ground, an explosion of dust and debris. ‘That must be about the tenth I’ve seen felled today — ten in the few hours I’ve been here.’ Brian’s voice was harsh with anger. ‘You watch — he’ll move straight onto the next in line.’ And suddenly he swung Tom round, facing him. ‘Remember what you told me, all those years ago — about your father, what he’d written in the deeds. Remember? And now I’ve read it. And if you won’t stop them…’