High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  Jim came back with two more cans of beer and as he lowered himself into his seat again he said, ‘Something I want to ask you - something that arises from my perusal of the information sent me by the forestry people. My remit, you understand, is to report on the extent to which the environment may be damaged by Halliday signing away more hectares of his father’s plantation for clear felling — I take it, with die mine yielding what amounts to a nil return, or what has probably already happened, becoming a drain on his resources, I take it he is now more or less living off the BC forestry land. That right?’

  I hesitated, considering how much I ought to tell him. He was no longer a chance-met Canadian being friendly and helpful to a stranger; he was an official asking questions about a client of mine and the answers I gave he would regard as being given in my official capacity as Tom’s lawyer and could well go into his report.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think you could say that until a new gold yielding area is opened up at Ice Cold he is quite probably living off the sale of timber he made to the SVL Company in Seattle.’

  He nodded, raising his glass and emptying almost half of it. ‘As I understand it, he’s cut through all the natural growth up on the slopes and what he’s left with now is a fully stocked plantation of some four hundred hectares in the bottom. That’s not far short of a thousand acres. And this is something I find hard to believe, but it’s there in my notes —’ he slapped his briefcase - ‘it was planted about seventy years ago.’

  ‘Why do you find that hard to believe?’ I asked.

  ‘Because here in BC we only started planting trees in World War II. Before that we relied on natural regeneration. I guess there was some experimental hand planting before then, but if Halliday’s father was planting back at the end of World War I, and on the scale of a thousand acres, then he was way ahead of his time. Maybe he was over in England and got the idea from your Forestry Commission. It was around then that Britain started hand planting. And another thing I don’t understand - why are the trees being harvested now? We wouldn’t normally fell western red cedar under about a hundred and twenty years.’

  ‘I see.’ I stared at my drink, thinking about that. ‘How much do you reckon the plantation is worth with the trees at their present age?’

  He shrugged. ‘Difficult to say till I see them, but the timber industry is currently operating on minimum stumpage, so I guess the price would be around five dollars a cube. Say there’s two hundred, three hundred cubic metres per hectare, that would make each hectare, which is about 1.4 acres, worth somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars. That’s the value standing. Of course,’ he added, ‘the timber would be worth a lot more by the time it gets to market, but even so I find it difficult to understand why it’s being cut at this age. They’d be about a hundred feet now and twelve inches diameter at breast height. Leave them another fifty years and they’d be a hundred and fifty feet with the diameter doubled, the yield too, so that the value per hectare would be around two thousand dollars at present prices.’

  So the whole property, all the four hundred hectares Tom’s father had planted, was currently worth about half a million dollars, and once it was cut, that would be the end of it, his last source of income gone. I checked the figure with Jim and he nodded. ‘So why does he disappear?’ He stared at me. ‘Why go missing as though he were in some kind of trouble — or afraid of something?’ And he added, ‘Why is he on drugs?’

  I had given him the answer to his first query, but now he was asking questions I had no right to answer. Not yet. And in any case, I didn’t know the answers, not for sure. It went on like that, Jim putting questions to me and myself parrying them as best I could, until I got us another drink. A dark shoreline was sliding by on either side and the sun was no longer shining as I returned to the table. ‘Your drink,’ I said, standing beside the table. ‘Now look,’ I told him, ‘either you stop trying to pump information out of me that I’m not entitled to give you, or I leave you to drink on your own. Mostly I’m as puzzled about certain aspects of the situation as you are.’

  ‘Oh, sit down, Philip, sit down.’ His face was lit by that large friendly grin of his. ‘I understand your situation. But I’m curious, so you can’t blame me for trying to get a little nearer the core of the matter.’

  ‘You get us aboard that Coastguard cutter you say is meeting you and I think maybe when Tom sees the search operation …’ I shrugged and sat down. ‘I don’t know. I wish I did. But it’s just possible he might decide to open up a bit.’

  ‘I take it he’s already opened up to you?’

  To some extent,’ I said.

  ‘And if he was present when the cutter stands by the tug and its tow, you think it might make him more communicative?’

  I nodded. ‘He needs help.’

  His eyebrows lifted.

  ‘It’s his wife,’ I said. ‘She’s disappeared.’

  ‘Left him?’

  I shook my head, unwilling to add anything to what I had blurted out. Somebody, sooner or later, would have to hand the whole thing over to the proper authorities, and that person I guessed would have to be me. I had made the first tentative move, but I was unwilling to give any details. The nature of that note of hers had left me with the very real fear that if the matter were handled clumsily it could cost Miriam her life. ‘Let’s see what happens when you meet up with the tug. When will that be?’

  But he couldn’t tell me. All he knew about the operation was what the radio message had told him. ‘The cutter’s skipper will presumably have all the details.’ And he added, ‘I’ll see what I can do about getting you on board. Seeing that the tow comes from Halliday’s property Captain Cornish might feel it was better he was in on the operation.’

  We went along to the cafeteria for lunch then, sitting at a table with an Eskimo, his wife, who was a half-black Amer ican schoolteacher, and their enchanting little five-year-old daughter who had pigtails of black, coarse hair, and eyes that shone blue through the puffy almond slits of coffee-coloured skin.

  I could have been happy on that trip down the coast. The sun had broken through at last, glimmering in a milky haze, the Grenville Channel walls spruce-clothed in sombre green, glimpses of small boats, log rafts where there was a timber-loading cove, and here and there on the flats rough timber bunkhouses or dwellings, some on wooden stilts, others rafted so that they looked like the North American version of the ark. And all the time Jim talking, about the country, the people, and occasionally he would turn to the Eskimo, saying a few words to him in his own language, so that the flat smooth swarthy face split in a wide smile, great teeth like gravestones flashing out, the colour of old walrus ivory. The atmosphere was so Robert Service that I almost expected the great characters of the gold rush to come rolling in.

  Instead it was Camargo - a quick flash of the dark eyes, and then he was making for the service counter.

  ‘Somebody you know?’ Jim asked.

  I hesitated. ‘Just a hunter. He was up at Ice Cold. South American.’

  He nodded. ‘We get lots of them. They come for the hunting.’ The words came out angrily, between his teeth. ‘They enjoy killing. Machismo, I guess — a sort of vicarious orgasm they get out of death. So long as they’re at the right end of the gun. Point it at them and I guess machismo gets a little jaded.’ I kept my eyes on Camargo’s table, expecting Lopez to join him. But nobody joined him. He sat alone, and I guessed that Lopez had been left to watch Tom.

  But why? Each night in the passageway outside his cabin, they had taken it in turn. And then, towards the end of lunch, when Jim was talking about the great forest valleys that lay between the ranges of the Rockies and how they had been raped of all the big timber in the early days of the century and right through to pretty near the present time, how the country had only just begun to get to grips with the enormous.

  costly and lengthy problem of replacement planting, it came to me. They were afraid he’d commit
suicide. That’s why Camargo and Lopez were watching him turn and turn about. Dead he was no use to them. Dead he couldn’t sign the documents they needed that would give them the legal right to harvest the timber on that land.

  But still the same question in my mind. Why the hell was the Halliday timber so important to them? If all they needed was an excuse to make towing runs from up north of Vancouver Island to Seattle, then any logging contract would surely do? Or was it because the Halliday Arm was particularly isolated?

  In the end I gave up. Jim was talking about Alexander Mackenzie and the rock where he had scratched his name as the first to reach the Pacific overland. ‘I never saw it when I was working down south in Vancouver Island. Now maybe I will. The place where he reached salt water after crossing the Rockies isn’t very far from the Cascades. In fact, from Ocean Falls it’s not more than half a day’s run in a canoe with an outboard, or in one of those inflatables. There’s hot springs right there, in the Halliday Arm, somebody once told me. Now, you wouldn’t think there’d be hot springs down beside an arm of the Pacific with the Rocky Mountains literally standing on top of you.’

  His broad, bland face was concentrated on his memories. ‘I saw Ocean Falls once. Went in from Shearwater, which isn’t far from Bella Bella, through Gunboat Passage, up the Fisher Channel and Cousins Inlet. There’s a dam at Ocean Falls to feed electricity to the pulp mill, but now I’m told it’s all closed down, finished, most of the people gone. There were some eight thousand when I was there, the rain streaming down and everyone with umbrellas.’ He laughed. ‘I guess it rains there about 370 days a year. I was there one night and it never stopped, the rock cliffs black and glistening with it, the timber-laid road down from the dam running with water and the clouds so low you felt you couldn’t breathe. Now, I suppose, there’s hardly anyone there, as the BC Ferries don’t go there any more.’

  I was trying to follow him on the BC ‘Super Natural’ road map. ‘Where do you reckon your Coastguard boat will pick up the tug?’

  But he had no idea. ‘Could be right of Waglisia Island -that’s the old Indian name for Bella Bella.’

  We talked until we had finished our meal and then he excused himself. ‘I got to catch up on some background notes. Trouble with driving down from the Yukon like that you can’t read at the same time.’ Camargo had left by then, and it was Lopez who was sitting alone with a coffee and some food. He stared at Jim curiously as we passed his table. Up for’ard in the saloon it was Camargo who now sat three rows back from us, keeping an eye on Tom who was slumped in his seat, fast asleep.

  He didn’t stir as I sat down beside him and after reading for a bit I went outside. We were in open water then, the entrance to Princess Royal Channel over the bows, and it had started to rain, big, heavy drops that produced little rings like fish jumping on the flat, leaden-smooth surface of the water.

  It rained like that all afternoon, heavy, thundery rain with thunder grumbling over the veiled mountains and occasional flashes of lightning. And then, after an early meal, it suddenly cleared to a brilliant sunset as we turned the winking light on Mclnnes Island and entered the Seaforth Channel on the run up to Bella Bella. Tom was awake then, his face haggard, and not saying anything. Even when I told him about the radio message Jim had received he made no comment, sitting there watching the approach to our final destination in a state of what appeared to be complete apathy. And then, when the engines slowed, the ship turning and Bella Bella in sight, he suddenly said, ‘Did he say when it would be, this operation - tonight?’

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ I told him.

  He turned on me, his eyes staring, his mouth twitching.

  ‘You r-realize, don’t you, if it’s successful - what it means to Miriam. They’ll k-kill her.’

  PART IV

  Ocean Falls

  1

  The cutter lay alongside the quay at Bella Bella. It wasn’t at all the sort of vessel I had expected. It looked more like a miniature warship with its sharp upthrust bow, rakish black hull and the white-painted bridge structure rising abruptly to the spear-like thrust of the whip aerials either side of the mast, lights, radar, a tangle of high-tech equipment that gave her a very purposeful appearance. And the quay and the village behind sprawled on the hill, houses glimmering in the last of the day and the first of the moon; that, too, wasn’t what I had expected of an Indian reserve area. True, I couldn’t see any whites on the quay. The few people lounging around, and the little group slinging a baseball, were all dark-skinned. But the quay was solidly timbered, a large area with storage sheds, all of it looking very modern, and the houses behind ill modern and quite substantially built.

  ‘You got any place to stay?’ Jim asked me as we stood waiting to disembark. I told him I was relying on Halliday’s son, and if he didn’t turn up, then at least Tom Halliday knew one of the pilots. There was a little floatplane lying moored to a pontoon buoyed up with empty oil drums. Tom joined as, his gaze fixed on the quay. ‘Don’t see Brian there,’ he muttered.

  I, too, had been searching the shoreline. A launch came in from old Bella Bella, arrowing sharp lines across the mirror-still water, its engines breaking the stillness. ‘If you do get stuck,’ Jim said, ‘you can take the launch over to Shearwater, which is round the promontory just east of here. There’s a hotel there, and now the main fishing season’s over there should be no problem about getting a room.’

  ‘Where the hell’s Brian?’ There was a nervous edge to Tom’s voice and I realized that, like me, he had been relying on his son being at Bella Bella to meet him. ‘You sent that cable, didn’t you? From Whitehorse? You told him when we’d be here?’

  ‘I said we were catching the ferry from Skagway the next night.’

  ‘Well then — where the hell is he?’ And he turned towards the shore again, muttering something about it being typical - ‘just typical of the boy’.

  There weren’t many people going ashore at Bella Bella - a few Indians, the Eskimo and his family, and a young nurse and her husband who was a doctor, both of them working at the hospital. That was all. The Coastguard Captain was on the quay to meet Jim, a short man in black trousers and white shirt with a peaked cap and a beard that was just beginning to show signs of grey. Jim introduced us. His name was Doug Cornish.

  An Indian called out, ‘Hi!’ He was pot-bellied and had a sort of swagger to him, and he stopped to add with a grin, ‘Yu, Mustache - yu no like razor eh?’ And before the skipper could think of a suitable reply the man was off up the slope to the village with a cheerful wave of his hand.

  A young Indian girl standing near moved delicately forward. ‘Your name not Mustache.’

  ‘No.’ Cornish smiled at her.

  ‘Yu captain of that little boat?’ She nodded to the Coastguard cutter, gold earrings dancing to the movement of her head. She had a mass of black hair, breasts just beginning to bud under the red of her T-shirt and she wore a worldly little smile.

  Cornish nodded. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Your balls, Captain.’ And the smile broadened to a grin, the eyes coquettish as she whisked around with a toss of her black hair and went dancing away to join the youths practising with the baseball. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

  Cornish shook his head, his cheeks red under his beard. ‘That’s the Indian for you.’ He grinned. ‘Never could get used to their uninhibited view of the human body.’ He glanced at his watch and then at Jim. ‘Shall we go on board? I’m all ready to slip.’

  ‘I’d like a word with you first.’ He took the Captain by the arm and walked him along the quay past a refuelling pump where they stood in conversation while we waited. Tom was staring down at the launch just mooring at the pontoon. There was a white man at the tiller and Tom called down to him, asking about Brian. ‘You seen him?’

  ‘A few days back,’ the man shouted back. ‘He was here at Bella Bella. Then he got young Steve to fly him up to Ocean Falls. You remember Steve, Tom — he just got in from Bella Coola
, said to give you a message if you turned up. Your son’s in Ocean Falls and says to meet him there. Okay?’

  Tom had moved to the edge of the quay. ‘Steve up at his place?’ he called down. ‘I’d like to talk to him.’

  ‘Reckon so,’ the man replied.

  It was annoying, Brian not being there. I’d been relying on him, not only for additional information, but to support me in the decision I was gradually coming to and which could not be put off much longer. I was still a long way from the sort of RCMP post where I could get the appropriate high-level action I needed if I was to give the authorities the gist of that note from Miriam. Not any policeman could handle a thing like that, and I still needed Tom’s cooperation. That, above all, was where I had been relying on Brian.

  My thoughts were interrupted by Jim’s voice calling us to get on board right away. The cutter’s Captain was already there, hurrying up the ladder to the bridge-housing. ‘It’s all fixed,’ Jim added as he came back for his bag and his briefcase. ‘He’s taking you both on his own responsibility, and when the operation is over he’ll drop you off at Ocean Falls.’

  I called to Tom who was still talking to the launch operator. He turned, frowning. ‘He’ll take us? Why?’ He came back, looking dazed. His eyes had a hunted look as they searched my face. ‘Why?’

  In telling Tom about the operation I hadn’t said anything about drug smuggling. I’d repeated exactly the words of the radio message, a routine search operation. But I could see he had put two and two together. Like me, he had guessed it was drugs the customs officers would be searching for. He stood there for a moment, uncertain what to do. But Jim was already moving away towards the cutter. I had my bags in my hands and could hear the explosive snort of the engine starting up, one of the crew already on the quay moving to throw the bow warp off. The Captain put his head out of the sliding wheelhouse door - ‘Hurry up, or I’ll leave without you.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing for you here. Let’s get to Ocean Falls and see if Brian can help.’ And I turned, half running across the quay, not waiting for him, but sensing that he was following. The beat of the engines was loud as I tossed my bags onto the deck and hauled myself aboard. Tom was close behind me, the bow warp already gone, the props beating the water to a froth as a gap began to open up between the hull and the quay. The stern warp went slack, the bows swinging out and the stern in, and the man on the quay slipped the rope off its bollard and leapt aboard with it. The bows were steadying then, the vessel digging its stern deeper into the water as she picked up speed.