High Stand

by Hammond Innes

‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Nor have I.’ He grinned at me. ‘Just don’t rock the boat, that’s all.’

  It turned out he had taken a kayak out in the ice when taking pictures of the slaughter of the harp seal pups on the .east coast of Canada. But this was an open Indian-type canoe and though we hugged the shore as close as we dared, we were soon taking in water, for the lake ran north and the wind was veering all the time towards north-east. ‘We’d be better on the other shore,’ I told him.

  ‘Of course we would, but how do we get there?’

  The wind was definitely lighter, but the moon, now clear of the clouds, showed the dark of waves out in the centre of the lake.

  We made it across the first shallow bay, but when we rounded the next headland we had to turn back and paddle into the shelter of some rocks. Portaging, or even dragging the canoe, was out of the question, the shallows littered with rock and boulders and the lake edge thick with the roots of small trees and shrubs. We rolled ourselves in our sleeping bags and lay listening to the wind and the murmur of the waves.

  The surface of the lake gradually quietened, but it took time, so that it was past three before we were able to get going again. By then I had learned enough about Brian’s attitude and intentions to have a certain respect for the man, the aggressive, bulldozer approach to any difficulty something of a relief after having spent several days in his father’s company. He was a doer, not a worrier, one of those people whose instinct is for action without hesitation. He didn’t plan ahead. He hadn’t a clear idea of what he’d do when we got down to the logging camp. ‘Just have to see, won’t we? Maybe if you talk to this guy Edmundson, tell him they’re cutting illegally…’

  ‘You don’t know it’s illegal,’ I said.

  ‘I saw what they’d cut. I know what two hectares looks like and there was a clearing there full of stumps that was a dam’ sight more than that.’

  ‘If you can see it, so can Edmundson.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So he sends in a report and by the time the government gets around to doing anything about it, the timber will have all been cut and shipped. And Wolchak or Mandola, or Barony, whoever is SVL Timber’s front man, shrugs his shoulders, says of course they’re replanting and everybody’s happy — ‘cept old Josh Halliday and people like me.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t know yet. But if I get my hands on one of those power saws - I’m pretty good with a chainsaw.’ I caught the gleam of his eyes in the dark. He was grinning at me, and at that moment I sensed something of his father in him, the braggadocio, that devil-may-care sense of the dramatic, and the irresponsible disregard for the consequences.

  The wind dropped right away as soon as we reached the point where the lake turned west of north. By then the moon was down behind the mountains and it was very dark when we finally reached the end of the lake, so we had great difficulty working our way up the torrent of water pouring down from above to the point where the portage began, the canoe half full of water and ourselves very wet. The time was 04.10 and we had at least four hundred feet to climb with the canoe hefted on our shoulders. There was a track of sorts, in places more like a rock staircase, the undergrowth all wet and the going slippery. Brian went ahead, probing with his torch. Neither of us spoke, the noise of the water cascading down from the lake above drowning all other sound.

  It took us almost an hour to make the top where the water poured in a smooth black rush over a lip of rock and the lake ran away like a pale still path. We could see the outline of the higher peaks of the Rockies black against the stars. No wind now, no clouds and everything very still and quiet, except for the sound of the cascade, which gradually faded to a murmur as we followed a path round to the right, searching for a place where we could safely launch the canoe.

  The stars were starting to fade, the first glimmer of dawn beginning to show where the black mass of the mountains rose above the end of the lake. ‘Looks like a hell of a lot of water comes into this lake,’ Brian said, working his shoulders as he stood staring at the great half circle of peaks. We had stopped for a breather, the canoe resting on a rock slab. ‘I’ll .go on a bit, see how much further we’ve got to carry the thing.’

  He moved off, his torch probing the steep rock slope down to the lake, and I followed. The path dropped down across some tree roots that were like wooden steps and came to a little beach of coarse sand overhung with trees. ‘We can launch from here,’ I said with a feeling of intense relief, my body under my anorak soaked with sweat, my shoulders already stiffening. And at that moment there was something like a growl or a snarl.

  We froze, standing there quite still. ‘What is it?’ I whispered, remembering Tom telling me how the one thing he’d always feared when out hunting in the Rockies was accidentally getting between a grizzly and her cubs. The snarl came again and there was the clink of a chain, so that I wondered if it was an animal caught in a trap. Then it began barking. Another joined in, their barks rattling round the rocks.

  Brian cursed, seizing my arm and pulling me back along the path, the dogs ripping the stillness apart with their barking and the rattle of their chains. ‘It’s the hut. It must be occupied.’ I could see it then, a dark shape that I had taken for the rock Tom had referred to as the Pulpit. The beam of a torch lit the square of a window as we ducked back the way we had come, the trees closing round us. The casement slammed open and the beam of the torch stabbed the path behind us, a man’s voice calling into the night- ‘Who’s there?’ The torch swung across the little beach and out over the water, searching.

  By then we were back at the canoe. ‘What were they, hunting dogs?’ I was thinking we had to get out onto the water before they were loosed to track us down.

  ‘Huskies most like. They sounded like huskies.’

  Behind us, and fainter now, we heard the man yelling at the dogs. The barking stopped and suddenly all was quiet again except for the sound of water spilling over the rock sill down into the lake below.

  ‘I hadn’t expected them to maintain a watch up here.’ Brian had leaned his head so close his cap brushed my ear. ‘What do you reckon the depth over that sill? We’ve got to get to the other side of the lake.’

  I shook my head, the water dark and no way of knowing for sure. ‘With both of us in the canoe we might just be able to push ourselves across with the paddle.’

  I don’t think he heard, for he was already working his way along the steep drop to the lake, probing with his torch for a place to manhandle the canoe down into the water. In the end, the only possibility was a shoulder of rock within a few yards of the smooth run of the water over the sill. Somehow we managed to get the canoe safely down to a point where he could slide it over the rock into the water and hold it there. ‘You take the bow,’ he shouted at me, ‘and be prepared to lean right down with your paddle and keep us from going over.’ He was up to his knees in the swirling current, the noise of the water deafening.

  Somehow I got myself into the bows. Ahead of me was a small jut of rock, and beyond that the dark rush of the spilling lake. ‘Ready?’ I nodded as he swung the bows so that we faced out into the centre of the lake. ‘Now paddle like hell!’ he screamed and I felt the stern go down, the frail craft rocking crazily as he clambered in.

  I started paddling. There was no time to feel scared. I could feel his paddle dipping with mine as the bows shot out beyond the jut of rock, swinging wildly in the current. ‘Hold her!’ he yelled and I kept the bows headed down the lake; the canoe swept first sideways, then backwards, the two of us flailing the water with our paddles, heading diagonally across the spill. Suddenly the stern touched rock, the bows swinging out of control, water pouring under us and both of us reaching down with our paddles, pushing the canoe across the face of the lake’s outlet, the tug of the water and the noise of it thundering down filling our whole world as we struggled frantically to make the bastion of rock on the far side where a rowan hung a delicate branch
towards the water’s edge.

  Without that branch I don’t think we would have made it. I had to stand up in order to reach it and somehow I preserved my balance, pulling us in until we had our hands on the rock itself. Brian passed me a line and I managed to pull myself up onto a wet, sloping ledge. Fortunately the rock was rough and my deck shoes held. Brian followed, and with the canoe riding light and bobbing around in the current, we managed to work it round the shoulder into the quiet of a little inlet that had a bottom of dark silt. It was not much more than a crevice in the rocks, but it was safe.

  That was when the reaction set in. My body began to shake uncontrollably and I felt desperately cold. ‘We’ve got to get moving,’ Brian said. Dawn was beginning to lighten the tops of the eastern peaks, but I shook my head. At that moment nothing would induce me to get back into that frail craft, not even the fact that I thought I could just make out the dark square block of the hut some two or three hundred yards across the lake, beyond the rush of its waters towards the outlet.

  ‘Come on, for God’s sake!’

  Again I shook my head, unable to speak.

  He stared at me, his head thrust forward. ‘Get in!’ he hissed. ‘If you don’t, I warn you - I’ll knock you cold and dump you in.’ He seized hold of my arm, shaking me. ‘D’you want to get shot?’

  I shook my head dumbly, not believing him, my teeth chattering.

  He slapped me then. Twice, with his open palm, each side of my face, so hard he almost knocked me off my feet. ‘Get in!’ And this time I did as he said, my cheeks burning, the shakes suddenly gone - only a sense of unreality so that I knelt there in a sort of daze. He thrust my paddle into my hand and the next thing I knew he was in the canoe and we were both of us paddling, thrusting against the current and driving ourselves along the western shore of the lake.

  As daylight grew in the sky beyond the mountains, spreading almost reluctantly down into the basin of the lake, Brian stopped paddling and pulled a pair of very small bird-watching binoculars from the waterproof covering to his sleeping bag. We were then about halfway down the lake. ‘We’ll have to take a chance on it,’ he said, his body swivelled round so that he could train the binoculars on the hut, just visible now in the growing light. ‘Can’t see a soul. Nothing stirring and the two dogs asleep.’

  ‘You can see the dogs, can you?’

  ‘Sure. You might not think it, but these have a magnification of ten.’ He stared through the glasses for a moment, then put them down. ‘Yes, they’re huskies all right, but cross-bred by the look of them.’ He picked up his paddle. ‘Okay, we’ll chance it.’ He drove the paddle in deep, thrusting the bows round until they pointed towards a clump of trees on the far side. ‘Make for those cedars, and use only your arm — don’t move your body, and no splashes.’

  The canoe glided out from the shelter of the bank, the light strengthening all the time so that we seemed suddenly very exposed. Every now and then I felt Brian put down his paddle and examine the hut through his glasses, and each time he reported no movement. It was almost five-thirty and we were now right in the middle of the lake, no cloud and the sky turning from green to orange. The cold numbed my fingers, my legs wrapped in the chill, wet compress of my socks and trousers.

  ‘Why are we crossing over?’ I asked him. ‘We’d have been much safer on the side we were on. We could have laid up there during the day and crossed over after dark tonight.’

  ‘They’ve got a boat. I saw it, on that little beach below the hut. A boat with an outboard.’

  ‘You say they - is there more than one of them?’

  ‘I don’t know. But they’ll have radio contact with the camp below. It wouldn’t take long to rustle up a search party, and once the dogs picked up our scent…’

  They’re more likely to pick it up on the side we’re headed for.’

  But he didn’t agree, arguing that the cascades were from a series of lake outlets that would make it difficult to search along the shore we were heading for. ‘When I landed at the logging camp I counted at least half a dozen cascades. This lake lips over a sort of rim of rock a mile or more long, some of it sheer cliff. But at the northern end the cliffs give way to a much easier slope. I could see the line of a road running-up towards it.’ He thought it was probably no more than a rough extraction track. ‘Just what we want if we can clamber down to it.’

  We were almost across the lake now, the clump of trees growing tall and the sound of cascade water beginning to fill the still morning air with a soft murmur. A small headland of rock began reaching out towards the hut, now clearly visible in the strengthening light. An optical illusion, of course, but it looked as though the hut itself was moving, so quietly were we gliding over the mirror-flat surface of the water. And then suddenly it was gone, lost to view behind the low line of rocks. We had heard no sound of barking, seen no sign of any human. Then the bows touched and we were splashing ashore.

  The clump of trees stood on a rocky knoll and from the top of it we looked out across a vista of mountains — snow and rock and the green of trees with giant peaks reaching up to a thin layer of cloud, the dawn already reddening to the sunrise. Water cascaded down on either side of us and far below we could see the inlet that had become known as the Halliday Arm, a dog-leg of leaden water thrusting into the wildness of the mountains, curving past a small area of flat land away to our left. There were huts there, the remains of a logging pen, a narrow track snaking up to the top of a low cliff with a truck poised on the edge of it, and immediately below a huge great pole of a tree trunk up-ended to form a primitive crane, another jammed hard against the cliff, and below that a large barge moored against a log-pile jetty. There was no sign of the Coastguard cutter. The barge was already half loaded with timber, the rest of its cargo piled on the quay close beside it.

  And in from the quay, filling all the valley right up to the lower slopes, was High Stand, a sea of dark green tops stretching without a break till, just back of the huts, it ceased, the land suddenly bare and dotted with stumps.

  ‘He shouldn’t have done it,’ Brian said, his teeth clenched. And he added, ‘It looks so much worse from up here. Bigger. Much bigger. It’s a lot more than two hectares.’ He was almost beside himself with sudden anger. ‘How could he do it — and with that curse hanging over him?’ He turned abruptly. ‘Let’s see if we can find a way down on to that track.’

  The track was away to our left, a rough ribbon of mud, half overgrown and reaching up through rocky slopes of new growth, most of it scrub. To our right was sheer cliff with waterfalls cascading down from the rim of the lake like lace streamers to join up and form a torrent that disappeared into the great stand of trees in the bottom. This main torrent finally emerged as a white froth of fast-flowing water that fed into the inlet over a flat waste littered with the debris of broken trees.

  ‘Come on! No point in standing looking down at what they’ve done to it.’ There was cold anger in his voice, a note of violence. ‘Somehow I’m going to stop the bastards.’ He had turned and was facing me. Finally he said, speaking slowly, ‘What you’re seeing down there in the valley bottom has taken over half a century to grow, and look what they’ve done! Ten minutes with a big chainsaw and … crash! Another of them gone.’ He swung round, hurrying back down towards the water and calling over his shoulder, ‘Come on or not as you like, but I’m going down there. Now!’

  When I caught up with him he already had the canoe launched and was clambering in. I followed, not saying anything. I had no desire to be stranded up there on my own. We pushed off, shoes full of ice-cold water, trousers wet to the knees. There were clouds forming on the mountains as we paddled past the last of the cascade spills, keeping close along the shore and heading towards a gloomy little beach that marked the north end of the lake. A little huddle of cottonwoods ringed the edge of it, most of them dead of age or some disease, the bare trunks and branches covered with a grey lichen. And perched on the tops of two of the tallest were a pair of bald-he
aded eagles, pale heads above large grey-black bodies.

  There’s a boat.’ Brian pointed away to our left, and at the sound of his voice the two birds took off, their flight heavy and ponderous, and so quiet they might have been owls. The boat was a semi-inflatable drawn up on the smooth, grey surface of a rock outcrop. We landed at the edge of it, the rock making it possible to scramble ashore without splashing around in the cold lake water.

  The boat had no outboard, just a pair of oars, and like the inflatable parked on the big lake by the Ocean Falls dam it looked quite new. There was nothing in it except the oars, a plastic baler and an air pump. I stood there for a moment, looking down at it and wondering about the hut. There was nothing else on the lake that the men in the logging camp below needed a boat to reach, for if they were going in to Ocean Falls the obvious way was by boat direct from the logging camp, not by climbing a thousand feet, then rowing a couple of miles across a lake, scrambling down a portage and hoping there would be somebody at the bottom to ferry them the ten miles to the dam.

  ‘Come on!’ Brian was impatient to get the canoe away under cover and start down to the camp.

  ‘What’s it for?’ I said.

  The boat? Fishing. Or hunting maybe. There’s a bit of swamp land over the other side might be good for the occasional moose.’ He lifted his end of the canoe, nodding to me to take up mine.

  ‘And the hut?’ I murmured, thinking about how we had come upon it suddenly in the night, the dogs barking and the rattle of their chains, the torchlight in the window. Two guard dogs and at least one man there - why?’

  He didn’t answer for a moment as we hefted the canoe up the rock slope. From the top we could see a well-beaten trail leading down through the trees. ‘If you’d seen some of the dropouts that squat down in Ocean Falls,’ he said, ‘and you’d got a fishing lodge up there at the end of this lake, you’d make dam’ sure there was some sort of a guard on it. Besides, out here in the west they’re most of them hunting mad, particularly townspeople. Hunting is their sport, the outback and all the life that’s in it at their disposal, to kill at will.’