WOLF AT THE DOOR
by
VICTORIA GORDON
© Victoria Gordon 1981
For Valerie Hook … who has always loved the Kakwa region as I do.
CHAPTER ONE
Kelly Barnes stood at the rear of the school auditorium, idly wishing as she sometimes did that she hadn’t ceased growing at five foot three. At times like this, her slight, small stature was a distinct nuisance, and one that grew worse as more and more people crowded in around her. She could no longer see the stage or the speakers with their huge maps and diagrams, and the growing rumble of discontented voices around her made it increasingly difficult even to hear.
All she could see, in fact, was a jumble of bush shirts and blue jeans that seemed to be the uniform of the scruffy crowd of students around her. They were all bigger than Kelly, and she was mildly disconcerted that most looked older as well, although none of them were anywhere near her own twenty-four years, she thought. Her small size, long, wavy carrot-coloured hair and masses of freckles all contributed to make Kelly look about seventeen, no matter how often she strove never to act that age.
As the restlessness of the crowd intensified, she gave up all hope of following the address from the stage, and began shifting her way through the massed bodies in a bid to reach the foyer and gain breathing space. She was nearly at the exit when the first egg was thrown, and the next few moments passed in a horrifying blur of frightening panic.
Hemmed in by the angry, chanting students with their barrage of missiles, Kelly lost all interest in the Kakwa Wilderness she had come to learn about. Her only interest was in getting out of that room with its building potential for violence. She struggled against the throng, cursing her small size even more than usual as she kicked at shins and stamped on insteps in her desperation to fight clear of the mob. She heard only dimly the banshee wail of the approaching police sirens, but the mob of protesters had also heard, and the students’ reaction was quicker than her own.
Wheeling with unexpected precision, the mob bolted for the exits, carrying Kelly along like a water-borne leaf. Someone thrust a bundle of leaflets into her hands as they passed, only seconds before somebody else rammed her in the back, throwing her forward and down beneath the trampling boots of the fleeing students.
Kelly curled instinctively as she struck the floor, but her fear-widened eyes squeezed shut defensively at the sight of what seemed like hundreds of stampeding feet. Her scream of terror was lost in the cries of the mob, and as the first foot struck her she clenched her hands convulsively on both her handbag strap and the leaflets she still held. She felt the pain of that first kick, but the next one awaited by her shuddering body never arrived. Instead, she was plucked from the parquet floor by a pair of huge hands that held her with a curiously gentle firmness as their owner fought through the tide of human panic towards the doorway.
Kelly was flung across her rescuer’s shoulder like a sack of meal, and she opened her eyes to find with some amazement that she was looking down at the surging throng of frantic students that divided around her position like water around a rock. Beneath her stomach she could feel the flex of powerful muscles as her rescuer fought to keep his balance in the press, and the arm around her middle was rigid as an iron bar.
Still, they made progress, and after a minute that seemed to take forever, Kelly and her steed turned out of the crowd and into the relative open of the foyer. It was then, with a pair of hands firm at her waist as she was hoisted from the man’s shoulder, that she got her first look at him.
Grey hair, not steel-grey but a silver still laced with traces of black, curled thickly above a square-cut, handsome, sun-burned face. The hair was misleading; meeting his eyes from only inches away as the man held Kelly before setting her on her feet, she could see that he was not old, but prematurely grey. He was still in his thirties, she guessed, before her brown eyes locked with a pair of icy grey ones that froze her with their intensity.
As her feet touched the floor, she had to look up quite severely to maintain contact with those eyes, and she was struck by the pale anger that blazed from them.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ashamed immediately of her hesitant whisper, but unable to command any more force into her voice.
Her tremulous smile had no effect on the sternly handsome face above her, except perhaps to make it even more stern.
‘Don’t bother,’ growled a voice that rasped with throaty anger. ‘Just be glad you’ve got more luck than brains.’
The man’s haughty anger and obvious contempt fired the temper that Kelly knew so well and usually managed to control, and with the fright she had just had, control was easier to think about than manage.
‘Well pardon me,’ she said with an angry shake of her head. ‘If it was going to upset you so much to help me, I can’t imagine why you bothered.’
‘I hope it’s because I’m a little more tolerant than that bunch of hoodlums you associate with,’ he replied coldly, his eyes straying down to glare at the bundle of leaflets Kelly still had in her trembling fingers.
Her glance followed his, and she looked up to meet his eyes with abrupt surprise. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but I ...’ She had intended to deny any association with the throng of angry students, but he gave her no chance at all.
‘But nothing,’ he said curtly, reaching out with one hand to wrench the leaflets from her hand and fling them on to an adjacent window ledge. ‘Children like you give me a royal pain with your senseless violence and protests against things you know absolutely nothing about.’
Kelly tried again to interject, but he continued as if she hadn’t opened her mouth, and his own anger seemed to grow with every word he uttered.
‘You sit in some classroom on your saucy little butt and plot how to run the world, too stupid to realise you don’t have the experience to run a bath for yourself,’ he snarled. ‘And you’re probably worse than the rest; judging from that accent you haven’t been in this country long enough to know which way is up, but you’re just so ready to throw eggs and abuse at the people who work to develop the country so that maybe you’ll have a job to go to when you’re old enough …’
His gravelly voice continued its tirade, but Kelly lost the train of his remarks in her own battle to keep her temper. Around them, uniformed policemen were busily rounding up the unruly crowd of students, indifferent to the obscene shouts and taunts that heralded their task. But for Kelly it was as if she was alone in the world with this pale-eyed, angry man who seemed determined to vent his anger upon her. She was only vaguely aware of the approaching uniform until a new voice halted the man’s assault.
‘You saving this one for yourself, Grey? Or can we dump her in with the others?’
Kelly looked up at the tall policeman who approached them, instinctively moving toward him until an iron hand clamped on to her shoulder. She swung her head around to see her rescuer’s curt nod of dismissal, then back to catch the policeman’s wry expression as he turned away to join his colleagues.
Angered, Kelly twisted in a bid for freedom, but she was only pulled closer to the grey-eyed stranger whose voice rumbled in her ear.
‘Stand still and shut up! You’re too young to go to jail.’
The wisdom of the statement struck through Kelly’s own indignation. If this man thought she was one of the demonstrators, and certainly the policeman had thought so, jail seemed a very plausible possibility, she realised. And that shock, combined with her earlier fear of being trampled, struck shivers through her slender frame. Her knees turned to jelly and she reached up to brush ineffectually at the tears she felt gathering on her eyelashes. She stumbled slightly, and would have collapsed but for the firm hand that remained clamped about her shoulder.
/> The man called Grey didn’t return to his verbal assault, and the two of them stood in silence as the police rounded up the last of the demonstrators and departed. Only when the last police vehicle had departed the school parking lot did the hand remove itself from Kelly’s shoulder.
She turned to meet those harsh grey eyes once again, and despite her own anger at the misconception she faced, she managed to stammer out a second thanks. It was brusquely ignored.
‘Just let it be a lesson to you,’ the man said harshly. ‘If I were you, I’d go back to England where you belong. It’s obvious you’re not going to fit in very damned well here.’
And before Kelly could muster the words to explain anything to him, he turned on his heel and strode away, leaving her alone in the school foyer with a burgeoning anger and nowhere to release it.
‘You arrogant ... insufferable ... detestable ...!’ Her rage expanded beyond adjectives as she struggled with the unfamiliar gears of her father’s large pick-up truck, cautiously wending her way through the crowded Grande Prairie streets towards the small house where Geoff Barnes lived when he was in town.
Throughout the drive, she composed haughty responses to the now-absent man who had so sternly reprimanded her in the mistaken belief that she was one of those ratbag students. He’d been right about one thing, and one thing only, and it had nothing to do with the rest of his assumptions, she decided. Kelly was, admittedly, a newcomer to Canada. She had been there only three days, in fact, and she had seen nothing of the country at all except two airports and portions of the north-western Alberta city of Grande Prairie.
Sneering as she glanced into the wide rear-view mirror, she wondered how he would react if he knew that she wasn’t a student, at least not any more, but was actually a graduate catering economist and a Cordon Bleu chef in the bargain. Not to mention the fact that she had attended that night’s meeting about the Kakwa Wilderness not to throw eggs or abuse, but to learn something about the area where she would be working for the next year or so.
She shook her head angrily. At least, she thought, she had been able to gain some information before the meeting degenerated into a small-scale riot. Just how significant that information would be, she didn’t yet know.
But at least she now knew, from studying the maps and displays before the meeting had started, that the Kakwa Wilderness was nearly a hundred air miles south-west of Grande Prairie, near the northern limit of where the Rocky Mountains formed the Alberta-British Columbia border. The scenic highlight of the region was Kakwa Falls, a spectacular waterfall on the high Kakwa River, which flowed east and north to join first the Smoky and then the mighty Peace River as the mountain waters flowed north and east towards the high Arctic.
The region around the Kakwa was significant for more than scenery, however. The increased world-wide search for fossil fuels had brought increasing oil and gas exploration to the region, with Grande Prairie as a major supply centre. Also, there were immense coal deposits and timber resources, all open to eventual exploitation.
It was this search for resources that was responsible for Kelly’s father’s presence. He was a specialist, not in exploration, but in the service area that was linked to it. His camp catering operation provided the housing, food and amenities for a number of exploration and development teams in several locations throughout northern Alberta and British Columbia, although the small camp in the Kakwa region had significance far beyond its size.
The Kakwa camp was the first that Barnes Catering had provided for a massive consortium headed by a man named Scofield, and Geoff Barnes had made it his own personal project until a mysterious illness had landed him in Grande Prairie hospital only the day before Kelly’s arrival from England.
His confinement, expected to last at least another month, had severely blighted his daughter’s planned reunion with the father she had known only as an infrequent visitor to the home she shared in England with a mother who’d divorced Geoff Barnes when Kelly was still a baby. Mrs Barnes had been unable to cope with the isolation and the rigours of developing a then tiny catering concern in the rugged Canadian north country, but her bitterness and disillusionment hadn’t thwarted Kelly’s lifetime dream of joining her father in the business.
With his encouragement, she had studied extensively in both catering and cooking, and then spent some time both in England and on the Continent putting her studies to practical application, until she felt confident enough to take a full working role with her father in the business.
And when she reached home after the meeting, she suddenly realised it would be only two more days before she would have the involvement she had always wanted. She would be on her way to Kakwa camp to take full charge of the operation, replacing her father’s second-in-command so that he could reassume supervision of the many other far-flung camps in the operation.
‘I’m not all that happy at throwing you in at the deep end like this,’ Geoff Barnes had told his daughter only that morning, ‘but Marcel Leduc is needed to keep the other camps in order and there’s no way I can return to Kakwa myself. If Marcel and Scofield got along better, I’d have second thoughts, but for some reason they don’t, and that’s a complication we can do without.’
During visiting times, Geoff Barnes had been able to explain to Kelly most of what she thought was needed to help her cope with the job, and he assured her that the expertise of Marcel Leduc would always be available in any event via the radio-phone network.
‘But why don’t he and this Scofield man get along?’ she had asked with genuine concern. If maintaining Scofield’s good will was so obviously important, she wanted to know what pitfalls that she herself must avoid.
‘Too much alike in some ways, too different in others,’ was the ambiguous reply. ‘And nothing for you to worry your pretty head over. Scofield is one of the finest men I know, but he’s inclined to be a bit overbearing at times, or maybe impatient is a better word. Anyway, I’ve never had problems with him and I see no reason for you to have any. Just flash those big brown eyes at him, if all else fails. He’s not too old that a pretty girl like you won’t have some advantages.’
‘Just so long as both of you realise that I came here for a career,’ Kelly had replied with a wry grin. ‘And if that’s a matchmaking gleam I see in your eyes, it’s just as well you’re going to be stuck in this hospital. I don’t need those kind of problems on top of the ones I’ll have.’
‘You won’t need my interference that way,’ her father had assured her. ‘The man-woman ratio is so far out of balance that you’ll have to fight off the lads with a great big stick. Pretty girls are scarce up here, and brown-eyed redheads as pretty as you ... well …’
‘You almost make me think I .should dye my hair and get some really frumpy clothes,’ Kelly had replied, only slightly tongue in cheek. In her own eyes, she was still too young to want serious involvement with any man, although she wasn’t blind to her attractiveness. Even the red hair and freckles she often hated couldn’t offset a truly pretty face, tidy and sensual figure and a pleasant personality that drew far more men than it repelled.
‘Not worth the trouble,’ her father had replied. ‘Out here, you could be flat-chested, bow-legged and have false teeth and only one eye and you’d still be able to find a husband within six months. With your looks I’ll be surprised if you’re not snapped up before I get out of this damned bed. I surely won’t have to worry about Marcel keeping an eye on Kakwa camp, at any rate. One look at you and I’ll be lucky to persuade him to leave there!’
And when Marcel Leduc arrived to meet Kelly on the appointed morning, she wasn’t that sure she wanted him to leave. He was very tall, perhaps five foot eleven, and slender with that Gallic grace she had encountered during her work in France. Fair hair with a reddish tinge crowned a lean, saturnine face with piercing blue eyes and a sensuous mouth. And despite his being French-Canadian instead of the classic continental Frenchman, it was the Gallic influence she noticed most. He had an instant ch
arm that fairly oozed sexuality, and his eyes undressed her even before he opened his mouth in greeting.
‘Your pictures don’t do you justice at all,’ he remarked in flawless English, then proceeded to devour her with his eyes as she poured them each a cup of coffee. Less appreciated was the somewhat ribald comment he muttered to himself in French, although Kelly supposed it was really more complimentary than otherwise since he had presumed she couldn’t understand it.
Still, she found his attractiveness somewhat disturbing, and she wasn’t overly upset at finally being helped into her father’s pick-up truck, in which she was to follow Marcel’s vehicle on the long drive southward. It was likely to take them about four hours for the journey. Marcel told her, most of it on the last thirty miles of roughly-formed track through the mountainous terrain near the camp. Even without knowing that terrain, she didn’t envy Marcel his own task that day; he’d already driven more than a hundred road miles in from the camp to Grande Prairie, and would be coming all the way back to the city for a second time that day after getting her settled in and the week’s supplies delivered.
Kelly paid particular attention to the road, knowing that it would be her task, the following Wednesday, to make the long return trip for essential supplies. Weather permitting, of course; if rain made the road dangerous or impassable, a helicopter would be used for the trip.
Personally, she hoped that wouldn’t happen until she had managed to become totally familiar with the route, despite her father’s assurances that it was almost impossible to get lost.
The first part of the journey was certainly easy enough. They headed south on a broad, well-made road that dipped through spruce-covered sand hills before crossing the Wapiti River and rising again to the settlements on the other side. Actually, settlements was stretching a point, since for the most part they were only small, rough homesteads carved from the jungle of dark green pine and spruce forest. The settled area didn’t last long, either. Soon after they had passed the South Wapiti ranger station all evidence of human activity except the road itself disappeared.
Wolf at the Door Page 1