"I know.”
"Festival's in better shape than when you left. Expanded the competition events. New chainsaw carving stage. We get people coming from Kamloops now, Kelowna."
"That's good," I say, and then — I'm not sure why, tiredness or the August heat or the specific exhaustion of two days of being on guard — "You sound like a press release."
He goes quiet. "You sound like someone who left.”
I look at him.
"I mean that."
"I know you mean it."
He doesn't let it go. That's the thing about Owen — he never pushed, but when he had something, he held it. "You built a whole life to prove you made the right call," he continues. "And you've been away long enough that you don't have to ask yourself if you did."
"Don't," I say. My clipboard is very tight in my hands. "Don't do the thing where you're reasonable. I can't have that conversation here."
"Where can you have it?"
Nowhere. Everywhere.Not on a festival grounds with Donna twenty meters away and half the town walking past. Not with ten years packed into four days and a Saturday morning departure flight.
"Tell me where your barrier ends and I'll note it on the grid," I change the subject.
His jaw tightens. He walks me to the perimeter of the barrier in silence, calling out measurements that I write down, and his voice is exactly flat and professional and I hate it more than I would have hated the argument. We're done in six minutes. He goes back to his crew. I go back to my table.
I write up the revised layout with completely steady hands and give it to Donna who is very pleased with my organization skills. Then, I take my clipboard and stand at the edge of the groundsfor a moment looking at the mountains going white at the top where the snow never fully melts.
You built a whole life to prove you made the right call.
The thing I haven't let myself notice until right this minute is that he doesn't sound wrong.
four
Owen
Thursdaymorning.Festivaldayone.
I'm at the axe-throwing lane before the grounds open, while the air is still cool and the light is coming in low from the east. This is the best part of competition morning: the quiet, the lane empty, the targets fresh-set and waiting. I throw twenty axes before anyone else arrives. I find my rhythm in about the fourth throw and it's there after that, the stillness you develop in the shoulders, the unhurried precision of a motion you've done ten thousand times.
Axe-throwing is about patience. You don't hurl the thing. You release it — controlled, deliberate, the handle leaving your hands at the right moment in the rotation so the blade arrives flat. It requires stillness in the body even while the arm is moving. Every time I've had a bad competition it's been because I was rushing, because something in the morning made me want to get to the end faster instead of staying inside the throw.
I throw five more. All in the red. I rack the axes, cover the lane, and go to find coffee before the crowds arrive.
The festival opens at ten and by noon the grounds are full — families, older couples, groups of young men who have driven up from the valley to compete. The chainsaw carving demo draws a crowd. The log-rolling tank is packed four deep with spectators. The vendor alley smells of pulled pork and pine resin and something sweet from the jam table near the north entrance.
The axe-throwing competition starts at two.
I'm warming up on the practice lane at one-thirty when she comes through the gate.
She's with Donna Marsh, the festival chair, the two of them walking the grounds with clipboards, and they stop at several vendor stalls and at the log-rolling barrier and then they're moving toward the competition area. I see her spot the axe-throwing lane and track across to find me.
I don't break the warm-up. I keep throwing. But I feel the back of my neck prickling, the way it always did when she was watching me in a crowd. She had this quality even when we were twenty: she paid full attention.
I throw four in a row into the red. The fifth drifts an inch.
The competition runs for two hours, eight competitors, three rounds of elimination. I've thrown against most of these men before. Brody from my crew enters and does respectably — gets through the third round, which I didn't expect. The man from Kamloops who's won the last two years is here, a big quiet guy named Rourke who throws clean and keeps his nerves off his face.
I beat Rourke in the final by three points. It's not the cleanest competition I've thrown but it's solid, and when it's done there's applause from the crowd and Donna Marsh hands me the ribbon and I shake Rourke's hand.
