High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  I said I would, and the Chief also volunteered. His engines were shut down, the crew told they were clear of duty until we sailed at noon. Perhaps I should have slept, like Tom who was flat out, propped against the deckhousing aft, his mouth open and snoring loudly as he lay in the sunshine, his anorak bundled up under his head as a pillow. If I had known … But writing about it afterwards one always has the advantage of hindsight. At the time all is in the future and one has no idea what lies in store - otherwise, fortune-tellers, star-gazers and entrail inspectors would be out of business.

  2

  Ocean Falls was little more than thirty miles away, about 2l/2 hours at 1500 revs, which was our economical cruising speed of 12 knots. By the time we had finished lunch we were back in the Fisher Channel, just passing the entrance to Lama Passage. We continued northwards past Evans Inlet and into the narrows by Bold Point. I was standing on the starb’d platform to the wheelhouse looking at the mountains reared well over two thousand feet above us, bare ice-scoured rock visible on the tops but all the lower slopes clothed in forest trees, their roots bedded into fissures and crevices in the strata. Ahead of us loomed a bald, glaciated mountain, glimpses of snowfields beyond. I was thinking then about Ocean Falls, a dead town they said and the area beyond all high land thrusting deep into the Rockies.

  I had caught a glimpse of what it could be like on that walk at Namu with Cornish and his Chief Engineer. It was only a short walk, less than a mile, and all of it along a narrow, raised boardwalk of red cedar planks, and when we had reached the lake there had been a bridge over a torrent outspill and after that we had scrambled along the water’s edge. Fish had been rising and there was a bald eagle. Mosquitoes, too. And the going had been rough, patches of swamp, boulders and the roots of trees interlaced - red cedar, hemlock and balsam, a few Douglas fir.

  Now the mountains above us were bleak as we followed the King Island shore until we came to the Dean Channel junction and headed up Cousins Inlet. Mackenzie Rock lay only a dozen miles up Dean Channel and I wished I had read his book - the first white man to cross the Rockies and, looking up at the appalling tree-clad loneliness of it all, I wondered how he had had the nerve, what had kept him going.

  It was 14.40 when Captain Cornish put Tom Halliday and myself ashore at Ocean Falls. He didn’t tie up, simply going alongside the jetty so that we could step onto the wooden planks, then the Kelsey was full astern on both engines, and I only just had time to call good luck and goodbye to Jim Edmundson before the cutter was swinging round and heading back down the inlet. By the time Tom and I had humped our bags to the end of the jetty and were walking into the town, the Coastguard cutter looked very small in the giant V of the inlet’s rock walls. Soon she would turn north-east up the Dean Channel to pass Elcho Harbour and Mackenzie Rock and on towards Kimsquit until they opened Cascade Inlet and reached the Halliday Arm of it.

  ‘A house called Halcyon Days, and it’s got a blue door, that’s what he said.’ Tom had stopped and was staring about him. Compressed by the mountains, the houses climbing steeply over the rock remains of a giant slide that had gashed the mountain above us, the pale brown bulk of a hotel and the pulp mill sprawled over the narrow flats of the river silt - it all looked much bigger than I had expected. There was a river and we could see its outfall under a bridge, hear the sound of it cascading down from the high lip of the valley.

  ‘You ever been here before?’ I asked.

  ‘Once, that’s all. BC Ferries called here regularly then. But other times when visiting the Cascades I flew straight in to the Halliday Arm by floatplane from Bella Bella.’

  It was mid-afternoon, the streets empty, hardly a soul about, and a cold breeze coming down off the mountains from the north.

  ‘There’s a lake up there, about ten miles long. A dam, too, and a hydro-electric power station that once drove the pulp mill. I think I can hear the dynamo. Sounds like it’s still running.’ There were lights burning, street lights even in daylight - lights, too, on the verandahs of empty houses. ‘What was that about Halcyon Days?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s Brian’s address. A friend’s place. That’s the message he gave Steve Davis, the floatplane pilot at Bella Bella. He’d wait for us there. Trouble is, the launch operator couldn’t remember the name of the street. Said we couldn’t miss it because it was the board road down from the lake.’ By then we were into the town, looking ahead up an asphalt road that climbed beside a tumbling cascade of water. ‘Guess we’d better go up to the dam. Should be easy then to find where the board road starts. He said the house was somewhere about the middle of it.’

  We dumped our bags on the verandah of an empty house beneath the dull glare of a naked electric light bulb. Clouds had come down and it was starting to drizzle, the cutter gone now and the whole narrow fjord empty of anything but the lowering clouds and the mist. ‘Always rains here,’ he muttered as we began to walk up the hill. There were hydrangeas blooming and mountain ash bright with berries, and walnut trees - I hadn’t expected walnut trees. The higher we climbed the more the noise of rushing water filled our ears, filling the whole narrow cleft of the valley with sound, just as the monstrous ochre-coloured block of the hotel filled it visually — that and the mill, and the little terraced wooden houses clinging to the valley side, bright with peeling ribbons of paint, flowers and lights. And nobody living there, only a few remaining, enough to keep the pulp mill machinery and essential services ticking over.

  The dam stood massive, a straight concrete face wedged in the narrow cliffs, a blind wall poised above the town and white with the water streaming down it. Tom went as far as the locked gates that led onto the top of it, a broad dam-top walkway with the iron sluice controls at intervals and a marvellous view down the inlet, half-obscured by cloud mist. The rock-scoured mountain that overhung the town gleamed wet and wicked where the great slide had gashed it, tumbling millions of tons of debris down into the waters of the loch to form the hard standing that reached back from the quay.

  But Tom wasn’t looking at the slide, or down the inlet. He had his back to the town, staring out across the endless expanse of the lake. ‘I went fishing up here once. Seven or eight years ago it must have been. There’s a torrent runs into it from another, higher lake. The Halliday Arm and the Cascades almost reach right back to it. In fact, it’s from the end of that lake that the water originates to form the falls that give the place its name. The Bella Bella Indians had a log cabin up there, a sort of boathouse for their canoes. A good position with a great rock platform we called the Pulpit. From the top there you could look right down the mountainside a thousand feet or so to the arm of water coming in from Cascade Inlet, the logging camp and the booming-ground.’ And he added almost wistfully, The cabin was still there when Thor took over as forestry manager and he made it into quite a nice bunk-cum-boathouse for fishing. There’s some trout in that lake so big and pink-fleshed I reckon they must be land-locked salmon left over from the last ice age.’

  A wind swirled the cloud drizzle round us, suddenly tearing it apart, so that the sun shone and it was momentarily quite warm. The whole head of Tom’s hair became silvered with moisture, his features no longer haggard but smoothed out as he looked at the lake, smiling to himself. He seemed suddenly fit and well. I was amazed how quickly he could recover with a little sleep. The weeks spent working in Stone Slide Gully must have hardened him up, for he was a man who lived very close to the limits of his nervous system.

  ‘Let’s go and see if we can find Brian.’ But even as he spoke we both turned our heads to the sound of an engine far across the lake. Mist still clung to the surface of the water, so that we didn’t see it for several minutes, though the sound of it grew quite rapidly. Then suddenly it was there, on the edge of visibility, a rubber inflatable with an outboard engine and a lone man with long, dark hair huddled over it. He ran the inflatable up onto the coarse gravel of the lake edge and a moment later was coming towards us, a rucksack on his back and dragging a little sleigh w
ith two plastic containers on it and a filler can that looked as though it had been used for kerosene. He was flat-featured, his eyes bulging above high cheekbones and broken teeth showing yellow-stained below the black droop of his moustache. If he saw us he didn’t show it. He was whistling softly to himself and he went down into the town by another road, the sleigh scraping along behind him.

  ‘One of the squatters, I suppose,’ Tom said. ‘The cutter’s cook told me about the only people here, apart from the mill maintenance men, were hippies up from Vancouver and other ports.’

  He had turned and was moving to the bend where the lank-haired man had disappeared. The road looped, swinging down by a different route, the surface of it changed to great planks of cedar, slippery after the rain. There were small verandahed houses beside it, the broad driveway slaloming down in a great curve. God knows how many magnificent trees had been felled to build that road, for it was wide enough for two vehicles to pass, but I suppose with the mountains so full of timber it was cheaper to bridge the tumbled rock slope with sleeper-like planks than to find the infill material to build an ordinary road.

  We found the house, the light on over the door and the blue paint peeling. There .was a bell, but it didn’t work. We knocked. Nobody came and nobody looked out of the windows of the nearby houses; the road, everything, very still, and the only sound the whisper of the water pouring down from the lake above. ‘He’s not here.’ My voice sounded loud, a little strange. ‘There’s nobody here.’ It was like being a visitor from outer space, looking in on a world from which all human life had been expunged. ‘Try the door,’ I breathed.

  It wasn’t locked, its hinges creaking with the damp as it swung wide to show the interior of an ordinary little house, everything in place as though the occupant had gone to the post or to the shops and would be back at any moment. We hesitated, both of us standing there, staring at the open door. ‘You’re right,’ Tom muttered. ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a message.’

  He nodded, but he didn’t move. ‘Odd, isn’t it?’ His voice was a little high, a slight tremor in it. ‘I don’t like it,’ he whispered. ‘And the town, the emptiness - it’s like a ghost town.’

  His words, the empty stillness of the place; I didn’t like it either, but we couldn’t stand there for ever thinking about the strangeness of it. ‘There’ll be a message,’ I said again, and I pushed past him, going first into the front room, which was lounge and dining-room combined, then through to the kitchen. There was no message, but the remains of a meal still lay on the table, there was food in the fridge, which was working, and in the front bedroom the bed was unmade, clothes scattered around, his grip on the floor.

  I called to Tom. ‘Looks like he’ll be back soon.’

  He came in, looked at the bed and the clothes, then rummaged around in the grip. ‘It’s Brian all right. Blast the boy! I was relying on him…’ He didn’t say what it was he was relying on him for, but I could guess.

  We went back into the kitchen. The wind had risen, tapping the branches of a small rowan against the window, and it was drizzling again. Above us the sliced rocks of the great slide hung raw and wet out of the low cloud base. ‘Gloomy sort of place.’ Tom switched on the kitchen light, then went to the store cupboard and began going through the tins. ‘Beans!’ he muttered. ‘Reminds me of those weeks I spent up at Ice Cold. Baked beans! And peaches, canned peaches!’ He gave a snorting laugh. ‘Which do you want, beans or sardines - or corned beef?’

  ‘Any bread?’ But I knew it was a forlorn hope.

  ‘Biscuits,’ he said. ‘And there’s coffee, a big jar of instant coffee.’

  ‘No tea?’

  He shook his head. ‘You’re being difficult.’ I settled in the end for coffee and baked beans. ‘A beanfeast,’ he said and gave a laugh that was more like a giggle. ‘Can’t call it high tea - no tea. And high coffee, that sounds daft. So a beanfeast it is.’ And he filled the kettle at the sink, the handle rattling against the tap. ‘Where the hell is the boy? Why isn’t he here?’

  Darkness came early in the narrow, fjord-like cleft into which the town and the pulp mill were clamped, mountain and cloud cutting out the light. I was glad I had had the sense to get spare batteries for my torch on the ferry, remembering the Mate of the cutter saying it rained 370 days of the year at Ocean Falls, and Cornish adding that in winter gusts of 100 mph hit the water from the mountains above, that once he had had a foot-thick coating of ice on all the metalwork on deck, the whole crew out hacking away at it with axes for fear the ship would capsize with the weight of it.

  We had our meal, and when we had cleared it up, we dossed down in the lounge. It was still drizzling, so no point in going down into the town; anyway, I was too tired. I was on the floor, wrapped in blankets and an old sleeping bag, Tom snoring on the settee. Some time later he got up and went out of the front door. It was the coffee, I suppose, and when he came back I asked him whether it was still raining. ‘Don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t notice.’ And he went to sleep again immediately. It was cold now and I wrapped the blankets close around me, but it was no good. I had to get rid of some of that coffee and when I went out the clouds were broken and lifting, patches of starlight and the wind thrashing in the trees.

  I was just zipping up my flies before going into the house when a movement on the road caught my eye, somebody coming up from the town. There was a dark shadow and the scuff of soft shoes on the wet planks. I thought perhaps it was Brian and I was on the point of calling out when the man moved into the pale light from our verandah and I froze, clinging to the shadows beside the house. I couldn’t believe it. But there he was, his aquiline features and dark hair clear in the light, his face half-turned towards me, and that same bearskin poncho.

  I nearly called his name, but then I remembered how I had last seen him, the anger and the hate in his eyes as Tom had left him beside the mine track. Then he was past me, a shadow moving into shadow, and while I stood there, wondering why he was in Ocean Falls and how he had got there, I saw there was somebody else on the road, a figure slinking along without a sound.

  I didn’t move and as he passed me I saw it was the same dark, lank-haired man we had seen earlier coming from the inflatable up on the lake. The way he moved, his total concentration on the figure ahead of him, there was no question in my mind - he was following Tarasconi.

  I waited till he was well up the hill, almost at the bend, then I went back into the house, grabbed my deck shoes, calling to Tom as I slipped them on, ‘Tarasconi just went by. Tony Tarasconi. He’s being followed.’ Tom grunted as I filled in the details, adding, ‘He must have taken the ferry the day before us. He said he was planning to go to Haines.’ I had my shoes on then, grabbing up my torch and my anorak. ‘I’ll just go as far as the lake.’

  ‘What for?’ He was still half asleep.

  ‘To see where they go, of course.’

  I left him then, slipping out onto the planks of the roadway and moving upwards, keeping to the shadows and half running, my deck shoes making little sound. Blasts of cold air swept down from the mountains, the cloud ragged and edged with moonlight, rents of bright starlight showing. Round the bend the boardway straightened and for an instant I saw both figures. Then Tarasconi disappeared in the brush that bordered the lake. The man following him slipped away to the left, climbing in great leaps till he, too, disappeared, obviously intent on circling his quarry. But why?

  I moved up the last of the boardway with extreme caution, keeping all the time to the shadows, and then making a quick dash for it when I reached the open area of rough ground that led to the gate guarding the entrance to the dam-top. There were some bushes and, crouched in their shadow, I • had a view along the margin of the lake. The moon was still behind cloud, or maybe it had not risen above the high ranges to the east, but there was enough light from its reflection on the cloud edges, and from the stars, for me to see several hundred yards, as far at least as the point where the i
nflatable was concealed. I was certain by then that it was the inflatable Tarasconi was after. To steal it, or puncture its fat, inflated sides, or was there something hidden in it, something he needed to find out about?

  Crouched there, waiting, my eyes fixed on the spot where I thought the inflatable was hauled out, time passed slowly, the light coming and going with the passage of the clouds, and my eyes straining. Sounds were impossible to hear, even the sound of the wind, my ears full of the roar of water pouring white over the lip of the dam and on down the steep rock-strewn valley to the fjord below. I saw a figure moving along the water’s edge in a crouching run, but only for a moment and then it vanished, merging into some bushes, so that I thought perhaps I’d been mistaken. Then I saw it again, but in a different position. The light brightened momentarily. There were two figures. They seemed to be facing each other and at their feet a dark shadow that could have been the inflatable.

  They might have been arguing over it, but the light was so uncertain, everything so indistinct, the hands flung up, the step backwards, the splash, all more likely in my imagination for the wind was blowing a veil of cloud across the sky, my eyes peering helplessly as the dark increased.

  Had there been two? Had one of them knocked the other into the lake? I looked at the clouds racing across the sky, their passage marked by glimpses of stars. I couldn’t be certain what I had seen. Crouched there, close above the lake, the night filled with the roar of water, I began to doubt whether it was really Tarasconi I had seen hurrying up the board road.