The Ghost Herd

Chapter One: The Machine on the Ice

The helicopter came down the river the way a hand comes down a page, left to right, reading.

Sergeant Patrick Vardy sat behind the pilot with his forehead against the cold plexiglass and a paper map on his knees, though the map was mostly a courtesy. Forty kilometres inland from the coast, northern Labrador in March is a white sentence with no punctuation. Frozen river, frozen barren, spruce in the low places like stitches in a torn sheet, and everywhere the wind's long grain, combed and combed again.

"There," the pilot said.

Vardy did not see it at first. Then he did, and once seen it could not be unseen, because it was the only vertical thing in ninety square kilometres.

A snowmobile. Standing upright in the middle of the river flat, nose slightly downhill, tilted maybe five degrees, its windshield glazed with a skin of ice so that it looked frosted rather than abandoned. Around it, the overflow had come up and frozen and come up and frozen again, so the machine sat in a low grey pedestal of its own, like a monument someone had ordered and never collected.

They landed a hundred metres off. The cold took Vardy's breath out of him in a physical way, a hand pressed flat against his chest. Minus thirty-one with a wind. He walked to the machine and stood looking at it for a long moment before he touched anything, because you learn, in his job, that the first thirty seconds of a scene tell you more than the next thirty hours.

What the first thirty seconds told him made no sense.

The fuel can strapped to the back rack was full. He rocked it and heard the dull, heavy slosh of twenty litres. The key was in the ignition, turned to off. The handlebar mitts were still on the bars. In the storage compartment: a spare belt, a wrench, a partial roll of duct tape, a paperback with the cover torn off, half a bag of trail mix with the raisins picked out.

No pack. No sled. No rifle. No body.

"Ran out of gas?" the pilot called.

"Full can."

"Broke down?"

Vardy put his thumb on the starter. The battery was long dead, but he pulled the cord anyway, three times, four, and on the fifth the engine coughed, caught, and idled — rough, blue smoke curling off the exhaust, a stupid loud animal noise in all that silence. He shut it off and stood there with his hand on the cowling, and something crawled up the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the temperature.

The machine worked. The machine had always worked.

Jonah Nash, twenty-four years old, of no fixed address that anyone could pin down, last seen buying fuel and instant noodles at the coastal store on the second of March. His mother had reported him overdue on the fourteenth. Vardy had opened the file on the fifteenth. It was now the twenty-second.

Eleven days of grid searching followed. Vardy ran it properly; he wanted that on the record and in his own head, for later, for the nights. Two aircraft, then one, then one every other day as the weather closed. Ground teams on snowmobiles from the village, twenty-two volunteers at the peak, Christine Pokue among them, who knew the valley better than anyone and who went out four days running without being asked. They searched down-river and up-river. They probed the overflow. They flew the tributaries. They found, on the sixth day, a boot.

One boot, a size ten pac boot with a felt liner still inside it, forty metres from the water's edge in willow scrub, six kilometres downstream. The liner was dry. That detail bothered Vardy for a year afterward. A dry liner means the foot came out of the boot somewhere that was not the water.

On the ninth day, in a stand of black spruce, a searcher found a page. A single leaf torn from a notebook, folded twice, driven into a crack in the bark of a tree at chest height, the way you'd leave a message for someone following. The cold and the wind had gotten at it. What survived was pencil in a small, tight, careful hand:

— west of the second notch, gravel esker running NNW, tracks everywhere, thousands of

And then the tear.

Vardy photographed it, bagged it, and put it in the file. He asked the family about it. The mother, Louise Nash, on a bad phone line from her kitchen eight hundred kilometres south, said, "Thousands of what?" and then, before he could answer, started crying in a way that made him take the phone away from his ear.

On the eleventh day the weather shut down for six days, and when it opened again a warm spell had come through and the river had jumped its ice in two places and there was nothing left to search that had not been searched twice. Vardy flew it one more time on his own time. He put the file in front of his inspector on the fourth of April with a recommendation, and the recommendation was signed off, and that was that.

The language of the file was as careful as he could make it. Presumed deceased. Probable drowning in overflow or hypothermic exposure. Contributing factors: solo travel, inadequate communications discipline, unfamiliarity with local conditions.

What he said out loud, once, in the detachment kitchen, to a constable who had not asked, was shorter.

"He went into country he didn't respect. It doesn't care how much you love it. It only asks whether you know it."

He believed that. He had reasons to believe it, twelve years' worth, some of them with names.

He was also wrong, and it would take him fourteen months to find out, and the finding out would cost him a great deal more sleep than the closing of the file ever had.

Because a snowmobile that starts on the fifth pull has not been abandoned.

It has been left.