As for the rest of the Marines, what struck Bushell like a blow was how young they were. Had the soldiers he’d commanded as a lieutenant been that young? Very likely, but he’d been young in those days, too. Now he felt almost grandfatherly. He saw the Marines studying him, too. Wondering if I can keep up on a hike through the woods, he thought. He wondered the same thing. One way or the other, he’d find out.
“No sense standing around here making chitchat,” Commander Hairston said. “You have your job to do, and I wish you only success with it.”
Lieutenant Green waved at the Marines, who swarmed aboard the lorries. Those were troop transporters identical to the ones the army used, with six inward-facing seats on each side of the bed. With the drivers and two more men on each front seat, there was room and to spare for the twenty Marines, their four leaders, and the three RAMs.
“Good luck,” Hairston called. As if that were a signal, the lorries rolled away. They seemed to have no dampers; whenever a tyre went over a stone or into a pothole, everybody aboard felt it. The kidney-shaking ride took Bushell back across half a lifetime. By the way Samuel Stanley smiled to himself, he was remembering long-ago lorry trips, too.
The few civilians up and about in Skidegate didn’t give the lorries a second glance. They were used to military vehicles passing through for one reason or another. From Skidegate, the road swung north along the eastern coast of Graham Island through the Haida town of Skidegate Village and then up toward Tlell.
Bushell, Crooke, and Stanley, having got on last, had seats near their lorry’s rear gate and could see, if not where they were going, at least where they’d been. Bushell had noticed the totem poles of Skidegate Village as the ferry came in to Skidegate itself. Now he got a better look at the houses those poles fronted.
Some were of various imperial styles, like those the British had built in Skidegate. Others, though, preserved the native Haida way of doing things: long houses built of red cedar and roofed with cedar bark. The beams of the roofs - there always seemed to be seven - projected out several feet from the walls at front and rear, perhaps to offer space where people could get dry before going inside. A couple of the long houses had smoke rising from a vent hole in the center of the roof, an arrangement the Haida Lounge must have borrowed along with its name.
Skidegate Village was no larger than its name implied. In moments it fell away behind the lorries. The road ran north just inland from the beach, against which the waters of the Hecate Strait slapped gently. The beach was strewn with driftwood. Along with the wood, Bushell spied a couple of large glass globes that puzzled him until he realized they were floats for fishing nets. He wondered how many miles and how many years they had drifted before finally washing ashore. Gulls and other shorebirds flew up in squawking clouds when the lorries went by.
“They don’t seem used to having people about,” Felix Crooke said. “I wonder how much traffic this road gets.”
“Not much, by the look of it,” Bushell answered. “Haven’t seen any steamers behind us since we got out of Skidegate Village, and I haven’t noticed any coming southbound past us, either.”
He looked inland. Every so often, a dirt trail would join the north-south road. Most of those trails were overgrown, and a lot of the buildings to which they led were weathered and abandoned, their broken-out windows staring like blind eyes. Making a go of it here on the edge of nowhere was anything but easy. Every so often, though, someone managed it. A couple of farms looked prosperous, with shaggy cattle grazing in the meadows. Bushell pointed to one of them. “There you go, Sam. That’s probably where last night’s venison came from.”
“Colonel, you have a low, nasty, suspicious mind, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bloody bit if you were right,” Stanley said.
“We’ve spare water bottles for you and your friends, Colonel,” Lieutenant Green said, “and St. Mary’s Spring is a good place to fill them. The water’s always good there, and you can’t say the same for the streams running into Masset Inlet. It’ll be coming up in a couple of minutes, if you’d like me to stop the lorry for you.”
“Yes, do that, please,” Bushell answered. No tea, he thought with a mental sigh. “Could we beg some rations from you, too? We left the hotel without breakfast.”
“I expect we can do something about that, sir,” Morton Green said. The Marines donated tins of stew, some hard crackers, and a jar of jam that smelled something like pineapple and something like methylated spirit. Felix Crooke sniffed at it and shook his head; like the jouncing ride of the lorry, it took Bushell back to his younger days.
St. Mary’s Spring ran cold and clear. Bushell filled his bottle, screwed on the top. Then he dug into a hasty breakfast. The stew would have been better hot (it wouldn’t have been good no matter what anyone did to it), but he could eat it cold, and he didn’t have time to waste. Along with Stanley and Crooke, he chucked the empty container into a rubbish bin by the spring and climbed back into the lorry. They got into Tlell about forty-five minutes after they’d left the Skidegate naval base. The little town lay between tree-covered dunes and the Tlell River. The lorries didn’t stop, but rolled over the Tlell River Bridge. The road swung inland after that, running northwest toward Port Clements. About halfway to the town on Masset Inlet lay Mayer Lake, not quite a mile north of the road. As the gulls on the coast had done, loons and other water birds flew up in alarm when the lorries went past. Port Clements was bigger than Tlell, though Bushell doubted it held as many as five hundred people. It boasted a doctor’s office, but not a post office. A sawmill was much the largest building in town. A couple of men - loggers, by the look of them - glanced curiously at the lorries as they headed for the wharf. “Except for the cutter crew, we don’t - the Navy doesn’t, I mean - come here all that often,” Lieutenant Green said.
“That’s not so good,” Sam Stanley said quietly. “We’re liable to be blowing our cover.”
“I thought of that, too, but I’m not going to worry about it,” Bushell answered. “If Buckley Bay’s been abandoned for the past sixty years, our chums over there aren’t likely to have a telephone to let someone here ring them up and warn them we’re on the way. As long as the Navy keeps boats here tied up at the wharf for a couple of hours after we leave, we should be all right.”
“Good enough,” Stanley said, and leaned back in his hard, uncomfortable seat. Bushell, the other RAMs, and the Royal Marines scrambled out of the lorries as soon as they stopped moving. The cutter, the HMS Grampus - a miniature corvette about seventy feet long, with a two-pounder for a deck gun - already had her engine running; stinking fuel-oil fumes fouled the cool, damp air.
“Permission to come aboard?” Lieutenant Green called at the foot of the gangplank.
“Granted,” said the lieutenant commander who looked to command the cutter. “You’ve given the lads and me something out of the ordinary to do with our morning, I’ll say that much for you.”
“How far is it across the inlet, Captain?” Bushell asked the officer in charge of the cutter. He peered west himself, but mist and cloud obscured the far shore.
The naval officer beamed at having his functional title given rather than the rank he wore on his cuffs and shoulder boards. “It’s about ten miles to where Commander Hairston told me you want to be left off.”
He stuck out his hand. “I’m Edward Woodbridge, by the way.”
“Tom Bushell.” Bushell introduced Crooke and Stanley.
“Pleased to meet you, gentlemen,” Woodbridge said. “I’m told this has somewhat to do with The Two Georges’ going missing. Never would have expected any such thing here - the Queen Charlottes are mostly quiet as the tomb, not to put too fine a point on it - but we’ll do everything we can to help you get it back. Love that painting, I do.” He looked around. “Are you all aboard? Yes? We’ll cast off, then.”