The Mountain Can Wait (8 page)

A fickle
wind off Takla Lake blew Tom's trailer most of the night, and in the early morning he climbed out of sleep on the contrail of a familiar dream: Erin, mother to her own kids. They follow her like ducklings and she waits for them to catch up with her, scrabbling one by one out of shallow green water. And when one of them turns its head, the smallest one at the back of the line, it is Erin, her duck feet webbed and pink and unstable. She slips back into the water and when she emerges she is nubile, a princess. Her period has started and he can't help her. He turns his face away because he knows she's bleeding and naked and shows the first small buds of new breasts, and she needs someone to teach her how to manage the blood. He wraps her in a towel and she molds perfectly in his arms. She is weightless, awkward, fragile as an egg. He holds her in the palm of his hand and she is the size of a mango, a plum, a peanut. Shrinking until she falls through his fingers to the floor.

He sat up wearily in his bunk and pulled on his t-shirt, and over that a fleece sweater. He slipped his feet into his jeans, pulled the cold, stiff denim up over his knees. If he had had this dream at home, he would have gone to her room now and listened at the door for the sounds of her sleeping.

Outside the day was bright, and the trill of herons blew across the water like wind through a train trestle. The previous night's fire smoked weakly from a pile of white ash. Beer bottles lay scattered like teeth around the fire pit, chip bags fluttered low to the ground. At his feet: an empty vodka bottle, half a sandwich, orange peels. Tom stood very still, taking stock of each piece of garbage. Leaving food out was a stupid thing to do; it was negligent. He swore, kicked at the ash, crushing the black embers that still pulsed weakly under its blanket. He picked up the sandwich and stuffed it in one of the chip bags, collected a bottle with each finger. He put all this in one of the secure, bearproof garbage bins at the back of the cook van, letting its heavy lid fall with a boom. He'd had a good time with these people the night before, but he should have said something when he turned in. People needed reminding of details that out in the world amounted to not a lot but here in the bush meant everything.

He wiped his hands on his jeans and stood silently, regarding the camp. A gray wool sweater, heavy and dark with dew, lay curled in the dirt. By the water, the planters' brightly colored tents dotted the trees at the edge of the clearing, like a handful of dropped candies. For extra protection from the rain they had suspended bright blue tarpaulins over their tents by tying them to the trees. The light wind lifted the tarpaulins quietly, in a rhythm not dissimilar to that of footsteps, or the deep breath of sleep. Because of their day off, most of them wouldn't wake for hours. But Tom had a long list of things he needed to do. Matt's crew van was already falling apart, and Tom had to readjust the ground pipe that supplied the showers and fix the pressure. If he managed his day right, there would also be enough time to make the trip to the outpost for a supply of cooking oil and bog paper. He looked across the lake at the mountains, tempted by their peaks. Only two or three hours of good, hard climbing to get to the top.

There was movement in the mess tent, a dry shuffle of cardboard. The flap was open. Maybe it was Nix, setting up for breakfast. But the door to the cook van was closed, the hatch battened down. “Someone in there?” he called.

Something brushed against the inside of the tent. Tom walked slowly to the open flap, his arms testing the way ahead as if he were making his way in the dark. If it was a cornered bear, he would have to go for his rifle. And wouldn't that, he thought, be a hell of a way for his planters to wake up. A cry—
Kak-kak! Kak-kak!
—hammered dully against the heavy canvas walls of the tent. A hawk.

Inside the tent, the light through the canvas a yellow haze, Tom moved slowly across the beaten grass. There was a deck of cards on one of the long wooden tables, candles wedged in wine bottles, a few abandoned coffee mugs. More food left out thoughtlessly—an apple core on the ground, a bag of salted nuts sliced open. The animal was injured. A light stroke of blood was feathered across one wall of the tent. A swish and a flap by a stack of boxes at the back. One box fell over and the bird flew up to the tent's apex and hovered for two flaps of wing, and then glided back down and rested on top of the boxes. It was a goshawk and, judging by its size, a female. Blue gray along her back and the top of her wings, underbelly striped black and white. Her stark, white brow a warning over deep, sunset-orange eyes. Her long tail feathers were bent at wrong angles, as if she had been in a fight.

Tom pulled out a chair and sat, looking up at the bird thoughtfully. The hawk regarded him with superiority, her chest heaving. Her sharp black talons clicked against the cardboard.

“What am I going to do with you, bird?”

He went to the tent flap and opened it wider, called for the bird to come, but it didn't. He was going to have to catch her, and he needed some kind of protection.

The door to the cook van was locked and Nix had the only key. Tom didn't know which tent was hers so he picked his way through the blue tarpaulins calling her name softly, tripping and cursing over tree roots and taut ropes. He was only a few meters into the trees when mosquitoes found him. First one, then like rain, countless, indivisible. In his eyes, his nose. Finally he stood in one place and called angrily, “Nix, which tent are you?”

Someone called out, “Fuck off.” Sleeping bags shifted. A snore sputtered and then died midstroke.

A zipper zipped farther into the bush. Nix's voice croaked echoey through the trees. “Who is that?”

“I need you to open the van. It's Tom.”

He waited for her by the van door, watching the open flap of the mess tent, hoping the hawk would find its own way out. Nix was wearing the clothes she had been wearing hours before, when he had turned her away at his trailer. Her eyes were sleep-swollen; her short hair was flattened to her head on one side, and he was, unexpectedly, embarrassed to see her.

“What the fuck, Tom? It's seven thirty in the morning. Day off?”

“I need towels and gloves. The gloves you use for the oven. Have you got stuff like that?”

She glared at him and put her key in the door. When she came back out she handed him quilted gloves and a handful of rags. “What's it for?” she asked. She stretched her arms up behind her head and yawned. Her black sweatshirt lifted to reveal a crescent of pale skin at the top of her jeans.

“There's a hawk in the mess tent. You want to help me get her out?”

“Won't it just find its own way out?”

“She's injured.”

“So?”

It was quiet in the tent now, and he thought maybe she had gone until he heard a sucking sound and a whip of air. The bird flew from behind the boxes to a stack of chairs at the far corner, where she seemed to fight with herself. A downy white feather rose up and was carried by a current of air.

“What are you going to do?” Nix asked. She stood by the open flap. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and hugged her arms stubbornly around her small frame.

“I need you to help me corner her.”

“What kind of bird is it again?”

“A hawk. Big one too. Looks like about five pounds.”

“Do they bite?”

“Yup.”

“People?”

“She's a hunter. She preys on little guys like squirrels and rabbits. Other birds. I've heard wolverines too. If she takes a nip at you it'll hurt, but you'll live.” He offered her back the gloves.

She came toward him, scowling, and put on the gloves. She feebly kicked her leg at him, catching him on the rear. “I was having a good dream,” she said. “You ruined it.”

“Listen, just come forward with me, really slowly. When we get close, you go that way, make your body as big as you can. I'll try and grab her.”

As they approached, the hawk seemed to transform herself into stone under the stack of chairs, her body pulsing. Her head was cocked down and at an angle away from them, reminiscent of Curtis when he was a kid, averting his eyes from the attention of some new adult, because, he seemed to believe, if he refused to acknowledge that the person was standing there, that person would no longer exist. Tom crouched low and motioned to Nix to move toward the left side of the stack, blocking the hawk's exit. Swiftly, the bird opened her body and flew out from under the chairs. A wing whomped past Tom's face and a talon scraped his right cheekbone. He pressed the thin wet cut. The bird flew erratically above their heads, screaming. She charged at Nix, stopping just above her head, before landing back on the boxes.

“Screw it, Tom. Stupid bird nearly took my eye out.” She pulled her hood more tightly around her face.

“Not even close.”

The hawk wasn't scared anymore. She puffed up her chest and
kak
ed.

“I don't want to do this, chief.”

“Didn't your mother ever tell you that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do?”

“Fuck off.”

“All you need to do is stand there. Be present.”

“You're going to have to think of something pretty special to make this up to me,” she muttered. She pulled the ties of her hood so tightly that only her eyes and nose were exposed.

“Make yourself big,” Tom said.

He moved closer to where the bird was perched on the boxes, watching him with one orange eye. When he was about three feet away, he stopped. Kept his hands at his sides. There was no point trying to catch the animal; he would wait until she charged him again. She was a beautiful bird, the eye flat and geometric and uncomplicated in its singular purpose. Her weatherproof wings were folded elegantly and efficiently at the side of her body. To be fully equipped for life in body alone, autonomous, to move through this world needing nothing—that was beautiful. He regarded her and she regarded him and when at last she swooped, Tom was ready. He gripped her around her chest and by the back of her head and neck. She was knotted with strength and pressed her body against the force of his hands. Tom's left grip was full of hot, angry heartbeat; his right hand contained the skull, hard and knobbled like a walnut. Up close, her black, hooked beak appeared fiercely, flawlessly sharp. She nearly fought free a couple of times before Tom made it through the tent flap. He knelt on the ground and, before letting go, imprinted the sensation of this feather and flesh, this pulsing, fighting, wild thing, in his memory. He let her go. At first she hobbled in a stunned kind of way, taking slow, ginger steps. Tom stayed hunched to the ground. She cocked her head and wiggled, shuddered as if in disgust, and then took off in a wide, muscle-flexing arc over the mess tent and the surrounding treetops, her true wingspan now evident in a striped, fluted spread. Tom watched her until she cleared the tall pines and disappeared back to where she belonged, and in the quiet he could hear his own heart drumming behind his ears, trying to break out.

“Okeydokey, David Suzuki. I'm going back to bed,” Nix said. She had pulled back her hood and was rubbing her hair up off her forehead. She bit her lower lip and stared at him for a long time, and he knew, if he wanted to, he could go with her.

He thought about what that might be like, his mouth on that bit of skin between the bottom of her top and the waistline of her jeans. Her fingers on the back of his neck. “Thanks for your help,” he said, and watched her go.

He would deal with Matt's truck first. It was at least a three-, four-hour job. Walking back to his trailer for his tools, though, he found that the urgency of the day's work leaked away with every step. He looked again across the lake to the mountains. The light had moved and sharpened since he had woken up; the peaks shone starkly in the sun, closer. A few pieces of food and a bottle of water in his pack, a paddle across the lake. He could be back by four o'clock and still have enough daylight to do the truck. The shower pipe would have to wait. So would the trip to the outpost for toilet paper. They would have to ration their shit tickets. Served them right.

Matt's cedarwood canoe rested upside down at the end of the beach, beaded with dew. Rivulets of water sweat across the glossy surface when Tom pulled it up on its side. He flipped the canoe over his head and walked it down to the water, breathing the sappy smell of varnished cedar. A minuscule red spider oscillated on a single silk thread hanging from the bow thwart, just at Tom's eye level.

As he paddled away from the shore, the boat cleaved neatly through the water as if he were the first person ever to canoe here.

Nix was something else. She had given him a hard-on just by rubbing the hair from her face. But he wouldn't do that to Carolina. Even out here, where distance and the scarcity of hot water and electricity separated this life from that. Because if he did, he would bring it back to Carolina and she would be left with it on her skin, like oil. Even if she never knew it. He dipped the blade into the water silently, and on the recovery of each stroke, drops landed on his legs, soaking coolly into his jeans. White-blue morning sky and black water that smelled like rain, and this small cedar canoe nodding, nodding. The paddle ran smoothly along the gunnel, and he turned his thoughts to the
shuuk, shuuk
of the paddle shaft drawing against the canoe with each stroke, and the pull of the blade through deep water, and the silky, rhythmic lapping of the canoe. In the middle of the lake he stopped paddling and watched the black water breathing. The breeze, stronger here, pushed him northward. To the left of his bow, a trout broke the lake's surface with arched spine.

Tom reached the far shore and cruised the bow up onto a small, stony beach just big enough for the canoe. He pulled the canoe out of the water so that it was beached nearly to the stern, and dug his compass out of the top compartment of his pack to take a reading of where camp was across the lake in relation to where he now stood. When he made his descent, he would need to come down roughly at this spot; he didn't want to go scrambling up and down the shore looking for the canoe. He tied the painter with a bowline knot to a slender alder and hung the compass around his neck. Carolina had given it to him; it was a good, solid compass. Waterproof, smashproof. He tightened the straps on his pack so that the bag fit snugly against his body. The trees grew densely down the mountain and ended here like a wall; he pushed through a web of bushy young pines and stiff alder branches and clambered in tentatively, unsure whether or not this mountain would let him in today. The ascent began almost immediately and was so steep in some places that Tom was pulling himself upward by root and rock. The pace he set was fast, and though it hurt, and though he was tired, his breathing and the movement of his limbs arranged themselves into a solid, working rhythm that propelled him forward. This was the place.