Now the diesel train wound down, shuddered, and stopped. Tom and Matt woke up those who were sleeping. The planters climbed wearily off the train and threw their bags clear of the tracks. They spent the next two hours unloading the seedlings and covering the cache securely with tarps. The conductor popped the whistle and wished them good luck, and as the train grumbled away they shouldered their bags and humped the few hundred meters into Camp Minaret.
The logging camp, in a dusty, rocky clearing, was small and functional; five long boxcars coupled together in a row, elevated on concrete blocks. A mesh steel gangway ran the length of the boxcars, accessed by a set of stairs at each end, with another set midway. From the other side of the cars came the powerful hum of a large generator. No one came to greet them. Accustomed to waiting, the planters dropped their bags to the ground, sat against them, and smoked. Someone strummed a guitar. Three mud-splattered trucks pulled into camp and parked side by side. These were the loggers, back from a day of felling on the high slopes of the mountain. With heavy boots they climbed down from the cabs and the flatbeds and crossed the clearing to the boxcars, glancing at the planters without much interest. They clanged up the stairs to the gangway and headed to their bunks, the showers. Tom climbed the stairs after them and walked toward the front car, past yellow bunk doors, the shower and toilet block, the mess. He found the manager’s office, a stuffy room off the back of the kitchen, with a small window that looked to the rear of camp and, beyond that, a gentle, snow-brushed peak. From here he could see the manager standing by the tree line, hands on his hips, peering into the bush.
Small and sinewy, the manager smoked hard on a roll-up and spit into the dirt as Tom approached him. He looked at Tom and then looked back into the trees.
“I thought,” he said, squinting into the green, “that you guys were coming two days ago. Don’t know why I expected things to go as planned, but there you go. I’ve got thirteen steaks that need to be eaten tonight before they turn. I hope your tree huggers eat meat.”
“Most of them do and they’ll be glad to eat the share of those who don’t,” said Tom.
The manager cocked his head and put up his palm for silence. He and Tom listened. The manager ran a ropey hand through his hair, through to the ducktail at the back—molded most likely from decades of wearing a cap. His blue eyes were smiling even though his mouth wasn’t.
“What’s going on?” asked Tom, his voice low.
“Gray water,” the manager said. He gestured for Tom to follow him and they walked to the back of the mess car, where in the dirt was a large puddle, a skin of grease on its surface pocked with gobs of food and dish soap. The puddle was fed by a plastic pipe coming from the kitchen.
“Can’t you cover it?” asked Tom. “Barrel it?”
The manager rubbed his stubbled chin. “We covered it with sheet metal, weighted it with breeze blocks, and she tore that off like it was paper. We could barrel it, but then where do we empty the barrel? Thing is, it hasn’t really been a problem so we just let her eat as much as she wanted. Bear’s been coming early in the morning and then again after dinner. The boys call her Old Mrs. They stand out there on the gangway after dinner and watch her through the couplings. Few days ago, though, one of the boys opens his door up first thing, up there at the far end of the bunks, and Old Mrs. nearly falls into his room. She must’ve climbed them steps looking for more food and got comfortable and fell asleep right there against the door. Made herself right at home. She took off pretty quick but then she came back and pulled the same stunt this morning. She skedaddled again but not before she hissed at him for a good long while.”
“She’s getting too comfortable.”
“Fucken right she is. No one here’s got a bear tag. They’re telling me we’re going to have to helicopter someone in.”
“I’ve got one,” said Tom. “Didn’t apply for it but I got it in the lottery with my deer tag.”
The manager smiled broadly. “Well isn’t that tidy? You can shoot her for us tomorrow.”
“What kind of hardware have you got?”
“Ruger M77 okay?”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“That’s it.”
The manager assigned their rooms and then they gathered in the mess car to eat. The loggers filled half the tables, talking quietly over steaks and boiled vegetables and coffee. By their elbows were stacks of white sliced bread on plates, dishes of butter. Powdery gray pepper in plastic shakers.
Word of the bear had gotten around, and when they finished eating, the planters went outside to watch for her, or they crowded the windows of the rec car, where there was a mini pool table and a shelf of old puzzles and board games. A television that received four stormy channels.
Tom’s small box room was exactly like the one he’d stayed in when he logged. Fabricated white board walls, a desk and chair, a mirror. One very small window, a thin yellow curtain on a plastic rail. He took off his watch and put it on the shelf under the mirror, unrolled his sleeping bag, and laid it on the cot. He sat on the edge of the cot and stretched his neck and rubbed his hands up and down the back of it. From outside came the vibrations of people walking up and down the gangway, the sound of heavy boots on the mesh. He shifted back and leaned against the cold wall, closed his eyes to the room, and saw again small details of Nix: scabbed blackfly bites on her neck and the backs of her knees, the burns on the insides of her wrists, the fine hair on her legs. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the cot, and held his head in his hands. There was no real need for him to be here. He pinched the bottom edge of the thin curtain and held it up, peered out the window. A half-moon shone brilliantly out of a clear evening sky, darkening blue.
Since it was too early to sleep, he left his small room and went down the gangway. Matt was there with some of the planters, watching the bear as she lapped at the grease in the puddle. Her coat was light brown and mangy. She was skinny, which explained her daring, her desperation for food. She looked old. Aware of the people watching her, and completely uninterested, she tongued up gulps of the rank water, swinging her great head and eyeing them occasionally down her long, dripping snout.
None of this was her fault; he didn’t want to kill her.
One of the planters frowned. “He looks depressed,” he said.
“It’s a she,” Tom said.
“Can’t they just fly it somewhere?”
“She’s no fool,” he said. “She’d find her way back.”
15
Early in the morning, when the camp was empty and only Tom, the two cooks, and the manager remained, Tom went to meet the manager in his office and get the Ruger and a box of .223s. Tom balanced the rifle in his palms and felt the weight of it. Held it up to his eye and pressed his cheek against the cold stock, pointed it toward the window, and looked through the sight. He laid the rifle on the manager’s desk and went back to the window and scanned the tree line. He wasn’t confident in the rifle, and the caliber was hardly enough to safely take down a deer. He turned back into the room and put one finger on the barrel. “This gun had any intervention?”
“Few years back I bedded the action, floated the barrel. It’s no tack driver but it shoots good enough.”
“Okay, then.” He slid the bolt and checked the magazine and loaded three cartridges.
Tom sat on the hood of the manager’s truck, eyeing the tree line, with the rifle resting across his knees. The manager stood with him, eager to see the job done. He wore a trucker’s cap that may have been blue once and kept taking it off, smoothing his hair and putting the cap back on again. The air was dry and warm, the morning sky white. The faces of the two cooks appeared at their small boxcar window and it seemed that the whole world was waiting to hear the crack of this shot. The manager took out a packet of tobacco from his back pocket and put it on the hood of the truck, and proceeded to roll a cigarette. He offered the tobacco to Tom.
Nothing about this was fair. By all rights they were trespassi
ng on her land, and it was their waste that drew her. There wasn’t even a need to hide, or mask his scent. She was habituated; she would come. He would shoot her because it needed to be done, and this was the way of men working the bush and he believed in the virtue of that, but he felt uneasy. They’d been irresponsible, had wronged her, and they couldn’t take it back.
The manager finished rolling his cigarette and looked once more to see if Tom was going to help himself, and then folded the packet and put it in his pocket. He spun his thumb on a plastic lighter three times before it took and he lit the cigarette in a cupped hand, and began to speak. “I was surveying, me and this guy Gerry, way up near Liard River? Close enough to Alaska you could of crossed the border without knowing it. Come across a bear like this one, about fifteen years back. He was a grizzly, but he was skinny and mean, just like Old Mrs. We come up on him one morning—he was on high ground, other side of a meadow—he sees us and takes off fast as a shot. Few hours later, we’re in thick bush, at the bottom of a draw, flagging a line with tape. We notice this same bear following us—we seen him up the side of the draw. He’s keeping his distance but you can be sure he’s stalking us. Gerry throws a rock up toward him and he takes off again. Later we’re heading back to our truck and we come up to this boulder, size of a small house, and Gerry goes around one side of it and I go around the other. It’s real thick bush and I’m ripping my way through some pretty thorny shit and I realize, eh, it’s going to be easier to climb on top of this mother than try and get around it. So I grab on and I’m kind of hugging the thing, trying to find some kind of purchase for my foot. And then I hear this high hell—I don’t know what kind of animal it is, right? Something screeching. But then it calls my name, and I realize it’s Gerry screaming, other side of the rock. I figure the best thing to do is carry on up and over and when I get to the top, I kind of scramble to the far edge and look over and there’s Gerry, hugging this big old fir, doing some kind of hokey pokey around it. The grizzly’s on the other side and they’re feinting each other out, eh, either side of the tree. Gerry’s face is covered in blood, so I know the bear’s already got a good swipe on him. I don’t know how the hell he got on the other side of that tree and to this day, he doesn’t know either.” He looked at Tom as if Tom might know how he did it.
“Self-preservation is a powerful thing.”
“Damn right it is. So you can imagine. I’m lying there holding on to this boulder for dear life and I look around me—what can I find, you know? From my vantage point I can see the white flag tape we tied at the beginning of our line, so I know the truck, the fucken road, is only about a hundred meters away. I can smell the bear; I can hear the sonofabitch breathing. Gerry is screaming the air blue and the bear takes another swipe and this one lands on Gerry’s shoulder, rips half of it away, some of his back too.” He stopped talking and drew on the stub of his cigarette, then held it away from his face and studied it as if he were deciding whether or not there was any puff left in it. He took another sharp hoot and ground the thing into the dirt. “Thoughts come to you in times like this that you’re not expecting. Okay, I was looking for some kind of a weapon, I was screaming my head off, but really I was thinking how easy it would be to climb down off that boulder and get to the truck. Maybe I can rev the engine and scare him off, and I know there’s a toolbox in the back full of shit that can do a lot of damage to a bear, but really, these are just lies I’m telling myself. If I can just get to the truck, I don’t have to watch while my friend is ripped to shreds. And I know my ass is safe.”
“None of us know what we’ll do in these situations.”
The manager nodded. “By this time, bear’s got Gerry’s head in his jaw and he’s trying to drag him away. But Gerry’s legs are wrapped in the underbrush and the bear can’t get him out. There’s some good-sized rocks on top of this boulder so I get one and chuck it. Miss the bear by miles. Get another one, a good ten-pounder, and hurl it and this time it bounces off his shoulder. He drops Gerry and goes up on his hind legs and huffs at me. That’s when I see how skinny and mangy he is. And I can see Gerry’s eyes are open; he’s alive but he’s playing dead. While the bear’s upright I get another rock, and another. The rock that sent him running got him right in the nose.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Eh?”
“You said you thought about making a run for the truck.”
The manager shrugged. “I guess my ass wouldn’t of been worth much to me if I hadn’t saved his first.”
He set to rolling another cigarette and Tom turned his attention to the tree line, a hundred and fifty meters away. The sun climbed higher and beat down on them where they waited. One of the cooks brought mugs of coffee and asked Tom if he thought Old Mrs. could sense what was going on, because, he said, she was late.
“If she doesn’t come this morning, we’ll try again tomorrow,” he said.
A snap resonated from somewhere close within the tree line, then another. Tom slid off the truck’s hood and clicked the safety off the rifle and squinted into the trees. The dark mounds of her shoulders and haunch moved visibly in a stand of white alders, slowly rolling. The bear came to the edge of the trees and stopped, sniffing down her speckled snout, and then stepped out onto the clearing. Tom raised the rifle and secured it against his shoulder and rested his cheek against the stock.
“Poor fucker,” the manager said.
Tom lined her up in the crosshairs and visualized the shot, straight through the heart and lungs. He wasn’t happy with the angle. He wasn’t happy with the caliber. She took a few more steps toward the waste puddle and he lowered the rifle and walked around the side of the first boxcar and down the row to get a better line of fire. Old Mrs. stopped and sniffed the air, watching him. He continued moving down the boxcars until he was at the right angle and he got down on one knee and raised the rifle to his shoulder again. She was close enough that he could smell her. He sighted her again and nudged the trigger with the pad of his finger, and waited for her to take a step with her left front leg, and took the shot. A crack and its echo punched the empty morning. The manager whooped. Tom knew he’d missed before he even let go of the trigger. Instead of dropping, like she would have if he’d hit the right spot, she lunged to the left and rolled, and when she pulled herself up, he could see the wound in front of her back leg. She scrambled in the dust and stumbled back toward the tree line, where she disappeared, leaving a ripple of quivering branches.
Tom slung the rifle over his shoulder and ran across the clearing. Spots of red-black blood made puckered holes in the dust and glinted on the leaves where the bear had crashed into the bush. He stopped and listened to the echoing cracks and pops of the injured animal running through the underbrush until there was nothing.
The manager trotted up to him and stood at his side. “She’ll bleed out.”
“I think I got her in the gut. It could take hours, maybe even days, and it’ll hurt like a bastard.”
“You going to track her?”
“Shit.” Tom rested his hands on his knees and peered into the inky green. Several meters in, a staff of sun broke through a gap in the high pine boughs. He put the safety on the rifle, secured it over his shoulder, and stepped into the bush, into a veil of mosquitoes.
“You want a radio?”
“She’ll gain too much ground. I’ll go now.”
For three hours, he plowed deeper into the bush, following and losing and finding again the bear’s trail. She was moving clumsily because of the shot, and though they were few, her marks were obvious: leaves black and wet with blood, the vulnerable white ends of broken branches, a fresh pile of scat. The land eventually sloped down and he came to a creek, and where the sun hit the water, the creek widened to a sandy pool. By the side of the pool, a blood-filled divot in the sand where the old girl must have rubbed her wound. Tom poked a stick in the blood and drew it out, and the blood veined into the pool and stopped, a cloud. He leaned the rifle against a pine and
sat. Whatever had happened to the sow to get her to the point of scavenging the camp’s dirty dishwater—an injury or habituation or just plain old age—he’d made it even worse. He had to do right by her, but if he went much farther into the bush, he risked getting lost. Great legs of sunlight shifted delicately through the trees, playing the shadows. He mistook a black mound of dirt from an uprooted tree for the bear and had the rifle off his shoulder before he realized his mistake. The fractured shadow of some large bird swept across the ground.
He picked small stones out of the sand and tossed them underhanded into the marbled pool, cupped water in his hands and wet the back of his neck. Blackflies burrowed behind his ears and he killed them there, and flicked away their carcasses. He didn’t even need to be here, had come only because of Nix. Now that he’d had his hands on her once, he didn’t know how to stop.
Bear could be anywhere, thirsty, tired, and in pain. And even if she didn’t soon die from blood loss, or infection, she would be less able to feed herself than she had been, and an even worse death would come in weeks instead of days. A branch snapped behind him and he turned to see what animal it was but saw nothing. Mosquitoes droned in his ears. He stood and got hold of the rifle, secured it over his shoulder, and walked a few paces up the creek from where he’d seen the blood. He stopped, blew the mosquitoes from his face, and listened. Eventually he came to a wall of rock, meters high, slimy with moss, where the temperature seemed to drop by degrees. He turned and stood and listened to some kind of small bird on a high branch calling to its mate. Where the land rose slightly to his left, something jumped off a rock and darted beneath the underbrush. It could have been a marten or it could have been something else.
The Mountain Can Wait Page 10