High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  I was still thinking about that when he suddenly sat up, his eyes wide open. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘The Haines Road,’ I said.

  ‘I know, I know — but how far have we come? Have we passed Million Dollar Falls, the campground?’ He shook his head, looking suddenly confused. ‘No, of course, that’s back towards Haines.’ He was leaning forward, watching for the next distance marker. It came up, a white post with the figures on it in black - 172. ‘Thirty kilometres to Lakeside. We’ll stop at Kevin’s for breakfast. You’ve got a cabin there, I take it… ? Good. We can have breakfast in your room then.’ And he added, ‘Kevin’s been a good friend to me. I’ll tell him what’s happened. Then afterwards, if you drive as far as Kathleen Lake, I’ll take over for the long haul to Whitehorse. I’ll be okay by then. Right now I don’t feel so good.’ He leaned back, closing his eyes again. ‘It takes me like this sometimes now. Old age creeping on, I guess. I’ll have a little nap … Be all right by the time we get to Lakeside. Wake me - when we get there …’ His voice faded, sleep closing in, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the grey curved hump of the road stretching ahead.

  It was 07.37 when we rolled into Lakeside Lodge, a mist on the water and the sun just risen above the black rim of the eastern mountains. I remember the time because, after I had stopped the truck, I just sat there, too tired to move, and there was somebody’s watch on the top of the fascia board straight in front of me. Tom didn’t stir either. He was slumped in his corner fast asleep. We stayed like that for several minutes, my mind trying to assemble things in some semblance of order so that I could get my priorities right.

  I could, of course, have packed it in right then, phoned Jean Edmundson and asked her to drive over and fetch me. I suppose the reason it crossed my mind to phone her, rather than try to hitch a ride, was that she represented ordinary Canadian life and her humdrum sanity was just what I needed to counteract the crazy world in which I had suddenly become involved. A local Sussex solicitor specializing in testaments and executor estates, and here I was in the Yukon within an ace of getting myself gunned down by hoodlums from Bogota, stealing trucks… I was looking across at Tom then, his chin sunk on his chest, the heavy nostrils trembling to the sibilant sound of his snores. God! He looked at least ten years older than he was, and I remembered how Miriam had talked about him that Sunday when we had lunched together after I had seen that newspaper story. He didn’t look in the least like a real life Peter Pan now. And remembering her, the animation of her face, the way her eyes had shone as she described the excitement and fascination this man had had for the inexperienced daughter of an archaeologist, I felt a longing and a fear for her … It was so ridiculous, getting excited and full of a passionate desire, sitting there in the cab of a truck by a log-cabin motel on the edge of a lake in the Yukon with her husband snoring beside me. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Only that I couldn’t go home, not till I knew what had happened to her.

  As though my thoughts had somehow communicated themselves to him, he stirred, his eyes slitted against the sun. ‘Where are we?’ ‘At the Lodge.’

  He sat up then, very abruptly, his eyes wide open. ‘Breakfast,’ he said, his voice sounding wide awake and full of vigour. ‘Which is your cabin unit?’ I pointed to the last in the line. ‘Okay. You get the key and ask Kevin to come and see us there. Tell him to bring the case I left with him. And order us some breakfast.’ I asked him what he would like and he laughed. ‘Anything, so long as there’s a lot of it - bacon, eggs, sausages, toast, and coffee, plenty of coffee. Jeez, I’m hungry.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better tell me what this is all about?’ ‘Later,’ he said. ‘Later. We got to get moving.’ We were there at the Lodge for less than an hour, and in that time we had the truck filled with gas, ate a huge breakfast, and Kevin lent us some money. Tom didn’t have to ask for it. Kevin simply assumed he would be short of cash, said there was something around a thousand dollars in the office strong box and if that was any help we were welcome to it. He didn’t ask for any security, not even a chit. He simply went and got it, dumping the wad of notes on the breakfast tray.

  I don’t know how much Kevin knew. I got the impression he thought ‘For n had got himself deep in debt with some very dangerous people and was hiding out from them, pretending to be dead. It was as good an explanation as any and Kevin’s generosity, his involvement in Tom’s affairs, could be motivated by hope of another gold strike in the Ice Cold area. The only question he asked, at least in my presence, was about Tony and the two men left up at the Squaw Creek camp. ‘Do you want me to go up there and truck them down? I could drive them to the US border. It’s only fifty miles from the Dalton’ Post turn-off.’

  ‘You think they’d cross?’

  ‘They might.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I doubt it. And anyway you’ve done enough to help me already. Some time this morning either that little bastard Tarasconi will walk back to his claim and release them, or they’ll manage to release themselves. If they turn up here asking about their truck, tell them I’ll be dumping it in Whitehorse, probably in the airport parking lot.’

  ‘And where will you be?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘It’s best I keep that to myself.’

  Kevin nodded. ‘I guess you’re right.’ He hesitated, then got up from his seat on the bed. ‘Well, I’ll leave you now. I got work to do anyway.’ He held out his hand. ‘Good luck, Tom.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He was on his feet, seizing Kevin’s hand in both of his. ‘I don’t know how I can ever repay you.’ He looked across at me and grinned. ‘I’ll give instructions to my lawyer, of course. But a hell of a lot of good that will be - in the circumstances.’ The grin faded as he said that. ‘If I were to tell you…’ But he shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t believe me. Nobody would believe me.’ He wasn’t speaking to Kevin then. He wasn’t speaking to anyone, only himself.

  We left shortly afterwards. I drove as far as Kathleen Lodge, where we had some more coffee, then Tom took over. He had had a good sleep and looked a lot better. But he wouldn’t answer my questions. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ He said that several times, a sort of refrain, but he wouldn’t say what it was I wouldn’t believe. In the end I dozed off. I remember Haines Junction, the RCMP post and then turning east, away from the Front Ranges and the great white wall of the mountains. After that I slept most of the ninety-eight miles to Whitehorse.

  He drove straight to the airport, where he parked between another pick-up and an empty mobile home so that we were screened as we collected our things. We got a taxi at the terminal and drove down Two Mile Hill, past the shopping mall and a gaggle of gas stations to Fourth Avenue and Wood Street where we booked into the Sheffield House for the night. There was a letter waiting for me, an airmail letter with a typewritten address and postmarked Worthing. It was from my partner, who hoped it would reach me in time and that I was enjoying the trip. He enclosed a letter from Brian Halliday - / thought it important you should have this as you may wish to contact him or see for yourself what is going on at the Halliday forest property in BC.

  Brian Halliday had written from a place called Bella Coola in BC, a brief scrawl on a Canadian airmail letter card to inform me that there were several men at the old logging camp up the Halliday Arm, two of them cutting into High Stand using big high-powered chainsaws. He thought they had already felled more than the two hectares allowed for in the sale agreement, but he couldn’t be sure as he had not been allowed to check the clear-felled area. In fact, as soon as he had challenged their right to continue felling they had called up a man named Lorient, who claimed to be the manager but looked more like a security guard. He told me the property was licensed for felling by an American timber company and would I please get the hell out. The American company was, of course, SVL Timber. He had asked for Thor Olsen, his father’s manager, but Lorient had told him there was no caretaker, that the camp had been deserted when they had arrived.

  The letter ended wi
th a request that I cable the police to check the whereabouts of Thor Olsen, and the final paragraph asked two questions: What is my legal position? Can I have the law throw them off my land? Please advise. Also confirm that any felling additional to the two hectares covered by the sale agreement signed by my father is illegal. Kindly cable your reply to these questions soonest possible. And he gave a post office box number at Bella Coola.

  The letter was dated 20 September, two days after he had let the barge load of logs be towed over his inflatable for the benefit of the TV cameras. It seemed odd that he should write to me for legal advice when he was on the BC coast and could have obtained much better advice from his father’s Canadian solicitors. And why hadn’t he contacted the RCMP himself about Olsen? Also, the information about felling activity in the Cascades was in direct conflict with the assurances given me over the phone by Barony of SVL Timber.

  I took the letter to Tom in his room down the corridor. He was having a shower and he read it with the water pouring down his back and his naked body dripping in a haze of steam. His eyes seemed slightly dilated. ‘Always the same with that boy.’ He handed the limp scrawl back to me. ‘Why the hell can’t he leave things alone?’

  ‘Is it true?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s that?’ He stepped out of the shower and began towelling himself down. ‘Is what true?’

  That they’re still cutting those trees? Did you sign anything - apart from the sale agreement with SVL Timber covering those two hectares?’

  He stopped towelling, standing there stark naked, the towel across his shoulders. ‘You know about that?’

  ‘The agreement was in your desk.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Have you signed any other agreement?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ And he added, ‘You’ve seen the deeds, I suppose? You’ve read what the Old Man wrote. Nobody in their right mind …’ He dropped the towel, turning away and reaching for his pants.

  ‘What about Miriam? Did you give her power of attorney, anything like that?’

  ‘No.’ He pulled on his pants, then swung back towards me. ‘If Miriam’s signed anything…’ He smiled at me. ‘It’s your problem. You look after it.’ He was staring at me, his body hard and brown with high-altitude labour in the wind and the sun. ‘If Miriam has signed anything - even if she claimed she was acting as executor… it wouldn’t count, would it?’

  ‘No.’

  He was trembling slightly. ‘If I’m dead the forest belongs to Brian. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what the Will says.’ He waited until I had nodded my agreement, and then he added, ‘And if I’m not dead, it still belongs to me.’

  ‘And you’ve signed nothing?’

  ‘No, I refused. That’s what it’s all about.’ He was still staring at me, his eyes wide, a frightened look on his face. ‘I wouldn’t sign.’ Then abruptly he seemed to pull himself together. ‘Forget it. That’s why I willed it to Brian. Let him cope with the bastards. It’s Miriam I’m worried about.’ He went to his case and rummaged for a clean shirt. ‘More than a month’s dirt and sweat I’ve just run down that plug’ole and not a dam’ thing to show for it. Nothing changed - only Miriam, she was on the verge of clinching a deal that would have got me the gear I needed to prove the Gully.’ He shrugged. ‘Oh well - you cable Brian. Tell him we’ll be at Bella Bella in three days’ time. Well, three and a half. That’ll be Tuesday. If he can meet us there …’ He crossed to the bed where his clothes lay in a heap. ‘As soon as I’m dressed I’ll arrange train and ferry bookings, then I’ll have a word with Jonny and after that we’ll go out on the town for the evening, eh? Do us both good.’ He said it with sudden cheerfulness - a determined cheerfulness that he managed to sustain throughout the evening.

  The place he chose was what looked to me like the most expensive restaurant in Whitehorse, a red plush copy of the rich sourdough establishments of the Edwardian era, full of engraved glass mirrors with pictures of Diamond Lil and all the other gold rush characters staring at us from the walls, and we ate lobster claws and Alaska giant crabs and drank a great deal of wine and quite a lot of whisky. God knows what the bill came to, but somehow I didn’t care. Everything had become so mad that all my training as a solicitor, all my natural caution seemed to have disappeared, Tom Halliday talking and talking - about odd places he had been, odd scrapes he had been in, small planes and forced landings, guerrillas on the border of Peru and Ecuador, the Le Mans and before that stock racing as a kid in old bangers, the crashes he had had. It was as though he needed to run through his whole life in that one evening - almost as though he were trying to justify it; to me, to himself, I am not certain which.

  He was high, of course. God knows where he had got the stuff. Presumably there were drug pushers in Whitehorse same as in other towns, or maybe he had kept a little in reserve at Lakeside and had got it from Kevin. He just couldn’t stop talking. Except towards the end. Towards the end, drinking Scotch, his mood had changed.

  Afterwards, lying in my bed in the overheated room with its plain wood walls, my impression of him was of a man cast in the mould of the prodigal son. It didn’t matter that he’d borrowed a thousand dollars and that he’d probably never be able to repay it, he had money in his pocket and money was for spending. And in the setting of that 19005 restaurant he had seemed so like the men of the period, the money easily got out of a good claim and easily spent in the honky-tonks of Dawson City, the main street of which was reproduced almost everywhere in Whitehorse.

  There were bits and pieces of the gold rush still visible in the town. We had walked back, the night full of stars and our breath smoking, ice skimming the puddles. He had taken me along Fourth Avenue, past the old log church and the wooden skyscraper building on Third, then out to the solid mass of the Territorial Government Building and across the railway track to the road bridge over the Yukon where the SS Klondike lay with her keel on the grass of the bank, her wooden hull and towering superstructure glimmering white like a ghost ship.

  He had leaned on the parapet of the bridge, staring down into the dark gurgling current of the river. ‘Almost a century ago,’ he had murmured. ‘This is the way my father came — just a kid, fresh out of school and green as a cucumber. Up White Pass to Lindeman and Bennett - you’ll see Bennett Lake tomorrow — then down the river and through the canyon to Laberge riding a raft with half a dozen horses, a big stove and a grand piano. By the time he reached Dawson he ought to have known what sort of a man Despera was. Twenty-five thousand of them came down the river in that one year, and everywhere the con men and the grafters. He should have known.’ He had laughed then. ‘And so should I! Tarasconi, I mean. Like grandfather, like grandson, eh?’ It was a laugh without any humour. ‘Later they had steamships like the old Klondike there, but when he came down the river he was rafted down … just a bundle of logs. .,’ He had straightened up, stretching himself and yawning. ‘That’s how they get the timber out of places like the Halliday Arm — rafting it out, or using scows. That’s what you told me, wasn’t it — ?’

  ‘A barge,’ I said. That’s what the caption to the newspaper picture called it.’

  But he had taken no notice of that. ‘That’s how they got the first load out. By scow. Two months ago it must have been. No, more.’ And then, his voice trembling slightly, ‘I wonder what’s happened to Olsen. Hope he’s not dead. Well, a few more days and we’ll know the answer - to that and other things.’ He had turned away. ‘Better go back to the hotel now and get some sleep. God, I’m tired!’

  So was I, and very glad to get into pyjamas and relax between sheets. But sleep wasn’t that easy, my mind going over and over the events of the last twenty-four hours. I had told him about his son, how he was trying to raise a public outcry against an American company felling a cedar forest planted by a Canadian who had made his money in the Klondike, but all he had said was, ‘A lot of good that is, the silly fool. He doesn’t know what he’s up against.’

  Maybe it was the co
ffee or the chill of the night air, or the fact my room was cold because I had turned off the heat before going out, but I seemed wider awake than ever, worrying about what I should do. I didn’t have to go along with him, down to Skagway and the ferry. Instead of the train, I could take a plane from the airport, change at Fort St John and pick up a Wardair flight out of Edmonton direct to Gatwick. Another twenty-four hours and I could be home. But there was Miriam. And Tom — whatever he had done, I couldn’t just leave him.

  For a man to be under such pressure that he vanishes almost without trace, dropping out of his whole previous existence and disappearing into an isolated and abandoned mine in the Yukon … I was still thinking it was gold, you see, and over dinner I had asked him about the rock slide, whether it had been done deliberately. Yes, he said, he had done it himself. He had got Kevin to bring up a drill and some dynamite, and when I expressed surprise that he could carry out a rock-blasting operation on his own, he had laughed and said quite casually, ‘Though my father lived in Vancouver Island he boarded me out, as it were, with an impecunious aunt in Edinburgh. Thought I’d get a better education in Scotland. I went to Gordonstoun and each year, in the long summer hols, I flew back to that big ranch-style house he had just north of Duncan - it had a bit of a beach, a wooden jetty and a fabulous view out beyond the Gulf Islands to the Strait of Georgia and the Rockies beyond. Fishing, water skiing, and sometimes we’d go over to the west coast, the area round Nootka Sound and Friendly Cove where Cook put in on his last voyage.’ And he had gone on to talk about surf-boarding among the rocks, nude parties on a rockbound coast where the Pacific rollers swept in from the China Sea five thousand miles and more away, fishing and hunting and camping on the shores of lonely inlets. ‘Guess I went pretty wild back there, so Gordonstoun was good for me. And then after Gordonstoun, no university nonsense for this boy, but there was a thing called National Service. ‘Course, I could have pleaded Canadian citizenship, but having both, nobody asked any questions when I reported in and signed the form. Can’t remember what I had to sign, but something; the whole thing was a bit of a dare as far as I was concerned, and since I was already hooked on stock racing and pretty mad about any bit of machinery that went fast, they put me in the REs and instead of vehicles they gave me explosives to play with.’