Hammond Innes - High Stand

I stared down at it, too surprised to say anything. It was on the notepaper of a hotel named the Sheffield, the address Whitehorse, Yukon: My dear Philip — I feel suddenly very lonely here and turn to you for reasons I’m not quite sure about, only that I know writing to you will somehow help. Silly, isn’t it — I don’t know your home address, or if you told me I’ve forgotten it, so I’ll send it to your office. But please don’t charge for the time it takes to read it! There’s no money. That was a shock — first Tom disappearing, then the bank phoning to say I couldn’t cash any cheques. It was a joint account, as you know. Tom was good that way. He always trusted me. God! ‘What a mess!.. There were five pages of it, on thin airmail paper, the ink tending to run and her scrawl not easy to read. I folded it carefully and slipped it back into its envelope. If she had discovered anything new it would surely have been referred to in that first paragraph. I stuffed it in my pocket to read later and told my secretary to show the man in.

That evening I slipped my moorings and headed out through the harbour entrance as the sun set and the downs darkened to merge with a line of cloud coming in from the north-west. It was a downhill sail, no engine and everything very quiet as I slipped south at about 5 knots, the little boat rolling gently to the long swell coming in from the west. By dawn, if the wind held, I would be in France.

It was past midnight before I was across the westbound shipping lane and content to leave it to the windvane steering and go below. It was then, in the lamplit warmth of the saloon, with my pipe and a malt whisky, that I read the rest of Miriam’s letter. It was an unusual letter because it was full of description, and what she was describing was a very strange part of the world. And I’m being followed. That was on page 2, the words leaping out at me. You’ll think I’m crazy, but it’s true. Every time I leave the hotel, he’s there, dogging my footsteps. And it’s not my imagination. I’ve checked, by doubling back through the hotel. It has two entrances, the front on Wood Street, and the back down a long corridor, past a shop full of lovely Arctic prints and out onto Steele Street, which is where the travel agents all seem to hang out. He’s a very small man with a lined, craggy face, high cheek- bones and puffed eyelids, very black, straight hair-not unlike some of the Indians that hang about the streets here. Perhaps it’s just that a woman walking around this northern frontier ‘own on her own is a bit of an oddity. Talking of Steele Street, wasn’t Steele the Mountie Tom used to talk about, the man who ran the North virtually singlehanded back in ‘98? And then she was describing Whitehorse, the frontier atmosphere of it, the grid pattern of dirt-impacted streets, the fine government building down by the Yukon River within tight of the old white wooden steamboat that lies like a stranded whale on the far side of the bridge, the mixture of gold rush and modern buildings, the bellow of the train coming in from Skagway in Alaska. It’s all so strange, so exciting. I’m sleepy now. It’s the dry air. Tomorrow I have a hire car and will be driving the Alaska Highway to Haines Junction, then down the Haines Highway to Lakeside Lodge, which is beside a lake called Dezadeash. After that I’m told I’ll need a four-by-four, which is what they call a four-wheel-drive truck. Looks like I’ll have to see if I can charm one of the locals. Bumming a ride from Dalton’s Post up to Ice Cold will be quite something. It’s right on the edge of the Kluane, which according to my lodge brochure is an tee wonderland of 8500 sq. miles that includes the highest mountain range in North America, icefields that are the largest anywhere in the world outside of polar regions, masses of glaciers and one that ‘gallops’. Half the men around here seem to be Indians and the whites wear braces and coloured shirts and wide-brimmed sweat-stained hats. Getting one of them to drive me into the Noisy Range area should exercise my talents’ Anyway, you can imagine how excited I am about tomorrow. I’ll be right under the ‘Front Ranges’ of the Kluane (they pronounce it Klewarny).. Then she had scribbled: I’ve got the car, I’m on my way. I’ll leave this at the desk. If you don’t hear from me you’ll know I’m lost in the Kluane. I can see my ‘follower’ watching from across the road. Do you think he’ll jump into a pick-up and follow me when I drive off down the Alaska Highway in my little Ford? Love. M. I didn’t give much thought to her claim that she was being followed. Her description of Whitehorse, stuck out there in a dark wilderness of spruce with the Yukon flowing deep and fast alongside the railroad track, would presumably make any visitor an object of curiosity, particularly a lone woman. In any case, Miriam was not above a little sex play, even in present circumstances. What interested me far more was the fact that she had written to me — and the effect it had on me, which my secretary had noticed. I had seen her recognition of it reflected in her eyes, and now, still in my oilskins, slumped on my bunk, the sound of water moving along the skin of the hull and the lift and fall of the westerly swell making me sleepy, I could see her face so clearly, the casual way she tied the scarf at her throat, the hair glinting with that Titian warmth in the sunlight of my office, the large, almost greenish-blue eyes…

I stuffed the letter back into the old briefcase I had propped at the rear of the fold-down shelf that was both eating surface and chart table and poked my head up into the plastic observation dome. A cluster of lights on the port bow, probably fishing vessels trawling one of the banks, the lighthouse on Dungeness blinking clear and bright to the east, and my mind still on Miriam driving the Alaska Highway, enticing some wild stranger to take her up the track from Dalton’s Post to the mine on the upper reaches of Ice Cold Creek.

She was with me all that night, which was a very broken one, the alarm waking me every twenty minutes. There is too much traffic in the Channel for a lone sailor to risk much in the way of sleep and the thought of Miriam, going up into the arctic north of Canada on her own to find out what the hell had happened to that mine… to go off like that, pinching the silver to pay for the trip, and here was I, bumbling across to Fecamp, never having been further afield than Europe in my life. Quite a girl, I thought, knowing that I was half in love with her and that if I let it take hold I’d be in trouble. Miriam was too hot a property for me to handle. I was smiling to myself, a sort of fixed grin — I could feel the muscles of my mouth creased up as I savoured the word ‘property’, thinking of that night on the downs, the urgency of her. It was just past three, the eastern sky paling to the first breath of dawn, and I was tired.

When the sun rose I could see the coast of France, and by midday my little boat was lying snug in Fecamp and I was sitting alone at a cafe eating a croissant and drinking a cognac with my coffee, the first single-handed sail in my own boat completed. I should have felt excited, filled with a sense of achievement, but in fact I felt nothing. If I had had somebody to share it with …

I went back on board and lay on my bunk, too tired, and my nerves still too tense, for sleep, my mind groping with a feeling of emptiness — a house, an office, clients, and now a boat. It was quite an achievement, starting from nothing, and yet it seemed so hollow, lying there alone on my bunk, the sound of French voices all around me, families arguing and the laughter of youngsters. Was that what life was about, the shared happiness of the smallest and most basic of tribal units? And I dealt in death and family disaster, sordid squabbles over money.