They Saw Me

Chapter One: The Drop

The floatplane smelled of hot oil, wet wool, and coffee gone cold in a thermos, and Tyson Burrard had decided somewhere over the last hundred miles that he liked the smell.

It was the smell of a thing being finished. He had spent seven months in an office in Prince George with a window that looked out on a parking lot, filling out habitat assessments and pretending not to notice how conversations changed pitch when he walked into the lunchroom. Now he was four thousand feet above the Kechika drainage in a de Havilland Beaver older than he was, and every mile the plane covered was a mile of that parking lot falling away behind him.

"You've got that look," Dana Kittson said. She said it loudly, over the engine, without turning her head. "That first-timer look. Like a kid on the way to summer camp."

"I'm thirty-four."

"Doesn't matter. I've flown sixty-year-old men out here with that exact look on their face." She banked the Beaver gently, following the silver thread of the river below. "Some of them still had it when I picked them up. Most didn't."

Tyson looked down. Early November had already drained the color out of the country. The spruce were black-green and the poplars were bare and the muskeg between them was the color of a dead fire. Snow lay in the north-facing folds of the mountains like white grouting between tiles. The river ran through it all, braided and shallow and pale, with skims of ice already forming at the margins where the current slowed.

No roads. That was the part he kept returning to. Not a road, not a cutline, not a power line, not a fence. He had grown up in the Fraser Valley where you could not stand anywhere without hearing a truck, and he had studied in Vancouver where you could not stand anywhere without hearing ten thousand of them, and he had worked six seasons in country that was wild enough to write papers about but always, always had a logging road within a day's walk.

This had nothing. He had read the numbers in the briefing package. Nearest year-round road access: two hundred and ten miles. Nearest RCMP detachment: the same. Nearest settlement of any kind: a Kaska Dena village on the Liard, a hundred and forty miles northeast as the raven flies, and no raven flew straight in these mountains.

"How long have you been flying this drainage?" he asked.

"Nineteen years." Dana was maybe fifty, built compact and square, with gray hair cut short enough that she probably did it herself with a mirror and a pair of scissors. She wore a down vest over a wool shirt and had a habit of chewing the inside of her cheek when she looked at weather. She had been chewing it for the last twenty minutes. "My dad flew it before me. Freight, hunters, government types like you. Trappers, back when there were still trappers making a living up here."

"There aren't?"

"There's a few. Fur price collapsed in the eighties and never came back proper. What's left is guys who'd do it for nothing because they can't imagine doing anything else." She tipped her chin at the windscreen. "There's your lake."

It came into view around the shoulder of a mountain: a long, narrow lake maybe two miles end to end, bent like a crooked finger, lying in a basin of timber with a creek feeding it at the north end and a creek draining it at the south. The water was the flat pewter gray of water about to freeze. Near the outlet, on a low bench above a gravel beach, Tyson could see the cabin—a small dark rectangle with a stovepipe, and behind it a shed, and a clearing where somebody had once cut wood.

"Sikanni Lake," Dana said. "Not the official name. That's on the map as an unnamed water body, which is what half of everything is out here. Sikanni's what my dad called it."

"It's beautiful."

"It's a lake." She began her descent. "Listen to me for a minute, because on the ground I'll be busy and then I'll be gone."

"Okay."

"Freeze-up. That lake will skin over in ten days, two weeks. After that I can't land on floats and it won't hold skis for another month. So there's a window, three to five weeks, where nobody comes for you. Not me, not a helicopter unless it's an emergency and the weather's perfect, which it won't be. You understand what I'm telling you?"

"That I'm on my own."

"You're on your own from the second my floats leave the water. But there's alone and there's *alone*." She checked something on the panel. "Second thing. Your radio is a single-sideband set that was old when I was young. Some nights it'll talk to Fort Nelson like the operator's in the next room. Some weeks you'll get nothing but hiss. Don't panic when it goes quiet. Do panic if you break your leg."

"Noted."

"Third thing." The chewing again, at the inside of her cheek. "The fellow who had that cabin before you. Scott Oberlin. You know about him?"

Tyson had heard a version. Patrick Noland had mentioned it in the interview, in the careful, flattened voice managers used when they were telling you something they'd rather not put in writing. "I know he left the post early."

Dana laughed once, without much humor. "He walked off the job in February. Middle of winter, minus thirty-something, and he just—wasn't there. Patrick had me fly in when the weather let up in March. Cabin was open. Stove cold. His snowshoes were gone and one pack and his rifle. Everything else still sitting there, including a mostly full can of coffee, and I'll tell you what, Tyson, a man out here does not leave coffee behind."

"They searched?"

"Two days, a helicopter and a plane. It snowed the whole second day. There's ten thousand square miles out there and any one of them will take a body and never give it back." She leveled the Beaver a hundred feet above the lake and swung wide to line up her landing run. "They decided he'd broken down. Mentally. It happens. Fellow gets in his own head all winter and one morning he just starts walking. Coroner's inquest thing, presumed deceased, and Patrick got a memo about it and now the cabin's yours."

"Did you know him?"

"Flew him in and out three times. Skinny, careful, wore glasses with a bit of tape on one hinge. Talked about badgers a lot for a man in wolverine country." She said it lightly, but her hands on the yoke were not light. "He wasn't crazy. That's my opinion and nobody asked for it. He was one of the sanest men I ever hauled."

The floats kissed the water and then bit it, and the world became noise and spray for fifteen seconds, and then the Beaver was a boat, taxiing toward the gravel beach with the engine burbling.

Tyson's five months came out of the plane in armloads.

It took an hour and a half. Eighteen cardboard cases of freeze-dried rations and dry goods, double-bagged against mice. Forty pounds of rice, thirty of flour, a bucket of lard, coffee, salt, powdered milk, a case of canned peaches he had bought with his own money because a man needed something to look forward to. Two propane cylinders for the single-burner. A new airtight woodstove in three pieces, which nearly finished them both getting it up the bench. Stovepipe. Chimney brush. Twelve motion-sensor camera units in padded cases, with mounts and cable locks and enough lithium batteries to run a small town. A GPS unit and spares. Forty-eight D-cells for the radio. Two boxes of .308 cartridges and a bolt-action rifle in a soft case, which Tyson carried up personally and leaned in the corner of the cabin. Snowshoes, two pairs. An axe, a splitting maul, a bow saw, files, a whetstone. A medical kit the size of a briefcase. A satellite messenger unit that Patrick had described, with disarming honesty, as "probably going to disappoint you."

The cabin disappointed him first.

It was twelve feet by sixteen, built of squared logs in some year nobody had bothered to record, sheathed inside with plywood and pink fiberglass insulation that had gone gray with age. A single window faced the lake, double-paned, with a crack running corner to corner in the outer sheet. A bunk frame, a plank table, two shelves, a counter with a hand pump that Tyson tried and found dry. A hole in the roof for the stovepipe, and around the hole a stain of old creosote and rain.

And the east wall bulged. Not a little. It leaned inward at the base like something outside was pressing patiently against it, and when Tyson set his palm on the plywood he could feel the give.

"Permafrost," Dana said from the doorway. "Ground heaves, sill logs move. You'll want to shore that before it gets cold, because once it's cold it'll be cold in *here*."

"Patrick said the cabin was in good repair."

"Patrick's in Fort Nelson." She looked around once more, and Tyson saw her eyes stop for a half second on the corner where the bunk met the east wall, and then move on. "Mice have been in the pantry. You'll want traps. There's some in the shed, if Scott didn't use them all."

They walked back down to the beach together. The clouds had come in while they worked, low and gray, sitting on the shoulders of the mountains, and the air had the particular dead stillness that meant snow within hours.

"I need to go," Dana said. "That's coming down the valley faster than I like."

"Thank you. For the ride and the lecture."

"You'll get another lecture in five months." She held out her hand and he took it. Her grip was dry and hard. "Radio Wednesdays. Patrick's expecting you Wednesdays at seven, and if you miss one he'll fret and if you miss two he'll call me and I'll have to fly up here and be annoyed at you."

"Wednesdays at seven."

She was already turning away when she stopped and turned back, and this was the part he would think about for the next four days, lying in the bunk listening to the wall creak.

"If you find anything of his," she said. "Scott's. Notes, gear, whatever. Don't sit on it. Get it on the radio to Patrick."

"Why would I sit on it?"

"Because out here a man gets to thinking a thing is his business," Dana said. "And it isn't. Not always."

Then she was in the plane, and the engine turned over and caught with a bang and a plume of blue smoke, and the Beaver came around and ran down the lake trailing a long white wake. It lifted off just before the north end and climbed steeply over the timber, banked once—a wing dipped, deliberately, at him—and disappeared into the gray.

The sound went last. Tyson stood on the gravel and listened to it thin out and thin out until he could no longer tell whether he was hearing an airplane or the memory of one.

Then there was nothing.

He had experienced quiet before. He had done a summer on a research vessel and thought that was quiet, and two weeks in a fire tower, and a month in a cabin on Vancouver Island where the surf never stopped. This was different. This was a quiet with a floor to it. He could hear his own blood. He could hear the small tick of the water shifting the gravel at his boots, and somewhere far off a raven making one dry syllable, and beyond those two things there was nothing in any direction for two hundred miles.

He found that he was smiling, and that his hands were shaking slightly, and he could not have said which of those was more honest.

"All right," he said out loud, to the mountains. His voice sounded ridiculous. "All right."

He went up the bench and started carrying boxes inside.

The first snow came at dusk, small dry flakes drifting straight down out of a windless sky, and by then he had the new stove set on its pad of sand and flat rock, the pipe run out through the roof jack with the joints sealed as well as he could manage, and a fire going. The stove made a sound he had not heard since childhood, a soft roaring intake, and the plywood walls began to give off the smell of warmed dust.

He ate rice and dehydrated chili out of the pot and drank coffee and wrote the first page of his own field book by the light of a candle lantern, because he had decided in advance to be strict about the batteries.

*Nov 3. Insertion complete 1540 hrs. Kittson departed 1610. Cabin structurally compromised, east wall, will begin repair tomorrow. Stove operational. No large mammal sign in immediate vicinity of station. First snow 1730 hrs, approx 3 cm at time of writing. Alone.*

He looked at that last word for a while, and thought about crossing it out, and didn't.

He was thirty-four years old and eleven months ago he had been on track. That was the way people had said it: *Tyson's on track.* Six years of good work in caribou and grizzly, two co-authored papers, a reputation for being careful, patient, willing to do the miserable parts. And then last spring, on a slope above the Halfway River, he had rushed a capture.

He could still take the whole thing apart move by move. He had done it a thousand times. A sow grizzly, nine years old, two yearlings on the mountain above her. A drug dose he had calculated correctly and administered at the wrong moment—the animal was already stressed, already moving, and he had known it and he had made the shot anyway because the helicopter had eleven minutes of fuel margin left and the alternative was coming back another day, another twelve thousand dollars of flight time, another form explaining himself. She had gone down in a creek. In eleven inches of water, on her side, and by the time they got to her she had aspirated and by the time Tyson had her airway clear she was gone.

The yearlings had lived. He had checked. He had spent his own money on a survey flight in August just to see if they were on that mountain, and they were, both of them, fat on soapberries, and it had not helped at all.

The review had cleared him of misconduct and found "a failure of judgment under self-imposed time pressure." Fourteen words. He had them memorized. Nobody had fired him. Nobody would look at him either.

When Patrick Noland had called him into the Fort Nelson office in September and slid a posting across the desk—five months, solo, twelve square miles of denning habitat, camera maintenance and wolverine occupancy data, no supervision and no company—Tyson had understood exactly what it was. It was a place to put a man. It was also, if he wanted it to be, a place to become someone who could be trusted again.

"You'll hate it in January," Patrick had said. He was sixty, heavy through the shoulders, with a gray brush cut and reading glasses he never remembered he was wearing. "Everybody hates it in January."

"I know."

"You don't, but you will." Patrick had taken the glasses off then and looked at him properly. "Tyson. This isn't a punishment. I want to be clear, because I know what it looks like on paper. I've got a hole in the data and a budget line and a biologist who needs a winter where nobody's watching him. Those things fit together. That's all this is."

"Somebody's always watching."

"Not out there," Patrick had said. "Out there it's just you and whether you do the work."

Tyson blew out the candle at nine o'clock and lay in the bunk with the stove ticking and the snow whispering on the roof, and the east wall groaned once in the dark, a long low sound like a man turning over in his sleep.

He thought: *nobody is watching.*

He found the thought comforting for about four seconds. Then he found it something else, and it took him a long time to sleep.