Page 2 of True North Mountain Man

"That road, every morning?”

I nod. No amount of mud was going to stop me from getting this job done.

He looks at me properly then, for the first time since I got out of the truck. He has a way of doing it that isn't a sweep — it's the same look he gave the map, one thing at a time, all the way through, and it lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there.

"All right," he says.

I want to say it: we met, you won't remember, it was five years ago at the Marine Building and you told me something about scale that I've never stopped using. I have my mouth open to say it, and what comes out instead is: "What time do you start?"

"First light. Six-forty, this week."

"I'll be here at six-thirty."

He picks up his pencil. Puts it back behind his ear, which seems to be where it lives. "Bring better boots."

The wind comes up off the ridge and takes the corner of the map again and we both put a hand down on it at the same time, and my fingers land across the back of his hand, and neither of us moves for the length of time it takes the gust to pass.

He moves first. Sets the wrench on the corner. Says nothing at all about it.

I drive back down the fire road in the last of the light with both hands on the wheel and my heart doing something ridiculous, and I tell myself the thing I am going to keep telling myself: it doesn't matter. He doesn't remember a twenty-minute conversation from five years ago. Nobody would. Bringing it up would only make it strange, and I need eight days of not-strange, and anyway...

Anyway, it was nice.

It was nice to be looked at like a person he was meeting for the first time. Nothing owed. Nothing waited for. Even if my heart wishes he remembered me like I did him.

two

Creed

The benchmark pin at the creek is eleven centimetres out from where the 1978 survey put it, but it’s the 1978 survey that is wrong, not the creek.

"Bank's migrated," Nadia says, from twenty feet up the cut with the rod on her shoulder like she's been carrying rods her whole life. "Look at the alder age classes. That whole terrace is—"

"Younger than the pin."

She comes down the bank in three steps, boots new and already ruined, and stands looking at the water with her hands in her jacket pockets. "So the 'seventy-eight guy set it on a bank that isn't there anymore and everyone since has been correcting to a ghost."

I write terrace migration, alder ~20 yr, benchmark unreliable, see sketch in the field book and turn it so she can see, because she'll want to see, and she does, leaning in over my arm with her hair against my jacket sleeve.

It’s the third day of this.

I've worked with people before. Ministry techs, mostly, kids on their first contract who talk the whole way up the trail because the quiet unnerves them. I've learned to let it wash past. What I haven't done in a long time is work with someone who arrives at the same place I'm arriving at, half a second ahead, and then waits there without making anything of it.

She does it eight or nine times a day. I'll be reaching for a word and she'll set it down in front of me — attenuates, aspect, pinch point, the exact one, not the near one. It should grate. Being finished is a thing I've never liked. It doesn't grate.

"Good instincts," I said.

"I have those," she said, and drank hers sitting down.

It's been nine years since I ran a season with anybody in it. The last was a summer placement who quit in August because the silence got into him — he told me that to my face, at the trailhead, like it was my fault, and he wasn't entirely wrong. People are either loud in the bush or nervous in it. Loud I can manage. Nervous is contagious.

She's neither. She goes quiet on the climbs and talks on the flats, which is what a person works out for themselves after enough time in the country, and nobody taught her because nobody in her line of work is out here long enough to need teaching. On the second afternoon she stops dead on the trail and holds a hand up without turning around, and I stop too, and forty seconds later a cow moose crosses the cut sixty metres ahead of us with a calf behind her.

We work the northwest block through the middle of the week. The transects run four hundred metres apiece, up through second-growth spruce so thick the light comes down green, and the work is slow and dull and requires the whole of you — chain, pin, note, sketch, move.

She keeps up. Better than keeps up.

By the second afternoon she's calling out habitat features before I've turned my head, and by the third she's running my raw numbers into her corridor model on a laptop that lives in a dry bag, and every evening the map on my table gets a little more true.