Hammond Innes - High Stand

I stared at him blankly, seeing the rain streaming down his face, his black hair plastered to his head. ‘Where?’ Just opening my mouth to say that one word filled it with water, the fresh sweet taste of rainwater on my tongue.

‘The barge. It’s our chance now — to get aboard — unseen.’ He passed me the handset and turned to Miriam. I thought she would refuse, that he would have to waste time arguing with her. But she nodded and went with him without question, out into the rain, as though, like me, she had realized the logic of his suggestion. If we were ever to get away from the Cascades and the Halliday Arm of the Cascade Inlet our only hope was the barge, and to get on board without being seen we had to do it now while the whole place was awash with rain.

We ran. We ran blindly through the storm, our clothing soaked, water streaming down our bodies. I could feel it cold on my skin, my trousers clinging and my anorak getting heavier by the minute. But somehow we made it, reaching the drowned quay only yards away from the shadowy bulk of the barge. It looked huge close-to; I had never seen such a giant of a barge in my life, not even on the Dutch waterways.

Then our feet were squelching on its wet steel deck plates as we stepped aboard, over mooring lines and the hose of a pump, hurrying aft along the narrow sidedeck to the wheel-house. It was a small place, the paint flaking and very dirty, sliding wooden doors at each side. There was a wheel and below the windows a shelf with some mugs, a tobacco tin half full of cigarette stubs, an oily rag, some matches, and in the corner a VHP radio, the sort of set used by small boats. It was wired to a battery clamped to the wooden flooring below the shelf, and I presumed it was there to enable tug and barge to keep in contact.

‘You reckon it works?’ Brian reached forward and switched it on. A little dot glowed red in the gloom and it began to crackle at us. His hand strayed to the mike on its rest at the side of the set, but I stopped him.

‘You won’t contact anybody,’ I said. ‘Not in the middle of the mountains here.’

He nodded and switched off. ‘At least it’s alive and it works.’ He ducked his head, disappearing down the near-vertical ladder that led through a trap door to the shelter and comparative warmth of a sort of cuddy. Miriam and I followed him.

The time was 16.39. Another twenty-four hours and with luck we would be out into the Inside Passage headed towards Vancouver. The rain stopped abruptly, footsteps sounded on the deck plates overhead and a voice shouted instructions. They had begun to load another log.

That first night we spent on the barge I couldn’t stop shivering. It wasn’t so much the cold — the temperature was nowhere near freezing — but the damp ate into one’s bones. Fear had something to do with it, too. At times the whole thing seemed so utterly crazy that, remembering Wolchak seated in the client’s chair back in my office in Ditchling, I felt I had only to clamber up to the quay and walk across to his office and the whole thing could be resolved over a cup of coffee. But then the memory of Tom’s body cradled in Miriam’s arms, her blood-stained hands, and Olsen lying dead in the bunk up at the hut on the lake, and Miriam herself, shut in that room … it seemed so impossible, so utterly divorced from real life. My life, at any rate. I’d only read about such things. And now …

Listening to Miriam as she went over, slowly and painfully, the eighteen days she had spent in that hut — the loneliness, the fear, the visits from Wolchak, the threats, above all the loneliness, the feeling of being utterly at the mercy of the men who took it in turns to guard and feed her — and the way she told it, in that husky, very matter-of-fact voice of hers. Like us, she had taken a train from Whitehorse to join the ferry at Skagway, determined to have a look at the Cascades before going on to Vancouver. At Bella Bella she had planned to get one of the floatplanes to fly her in, but Lorient had been waiting for her with a boat, Tarasconi having apparently notified the camp of her intentions. He had booked a room for her at the Fisherman’s Inn over at Shearwater and would take her on to the Cascades in the morning. Everybody, she thought, was being so kind and thoughtful, but of course, she never reached the Fisherman’s Inn. Lorient had given her a drink as they had motored out into the dark waters that led towards Gunboat Passage and that was the last she remembered until she came to in that little room in the log hut on the lake above the Cascades.

As she talked the reality of her ordeal gradually sank in, and with it an acceptance of the fact that I had got myself caught up in something that few lawyers, even criminal lawyers, have to face, other than in the courts.

And for Brian, as well as for myself, what drove it home to us was the realization that a big search was being mounted and they hadn’t waited for daylight. Before it was fully dark Wolchak had brought one of the dogs down from the hut. From the wheelhouse we watched the men come out of the dining hut after their evening meal and gather outside the office, a dozen or more of them. Then Wolchak arrived in the pick-up with the dog and the two fellers. Lopez was also with him, which meant presumably that both of them had managed to swim ashore. It also meant that Camargo had been left up at the hut with Aleksis, so that any possibility of our making it down to the lower lake and Ocean Falls was blocked. The floodlights were on, the camp, the quay, the great tree trunk boom-crane, everything brilliantly lit and the hum of the big generator away to our right drowning all other sounds.

Oddly enough, it was the fact that Wolchak had left a wounded employee up at the hut with Camargo to plug that exit from the Cascades that finally convinced me of the urgency and deadly seriousness of the operation.

We watched as he briefed the men, all of them dispersing quickly, the dog and the handler with half a dozen of them being driven off in the truck, back to the spot where Tom had been killed. The rest got on with the job of loading the barge. There were now some twenty or more logs lying stacked at the back of the quay. These looked to be larger stems and they were the ones whose butts had been up-ended and drilled. Now, instead of holding them back to be chained together and launched into the inlet to act as a booming pen, they began to load them. I knew then that Wolchak was pulling out, that this barge would be the last load. To that extent Tom had won. High Stand was safe for the time being. No more trees would be felled.

With the recommencement of loading two men came on board to position the logs. Spiked boots gave them a secure stance on the stacked load as the boom-crane lifted the trunks from the quay and swung them down to be grappled by the curved steel spikes each man held like a deadly extension of the right arm. It was dangerous, difficult work requiring great concentration.

The clouds lifted and the stars showed; a wavering curtain of light above the black outline of the mountains might have been the northern lights. A seal or a whale, something big, splashed a great circle of ripples in the middle of the inlet. And then I saw the dog appear at the edge of the forest, at the very point where we had started our dash through the rain. I watched, appalled, as it sniffed around, searching for a continuation of our scent. But I suppose the rain had been so heavy it had washed away all trace of it once we were in the open. At any rate, after circling around for about ten minutes, sniffing inside and outside the timber, both dog and handler retreated back into the forest. ‘The dog knows, but the human doesn’t,’ Brian whispered in my ear. ‘He can’t believe we would have left the security of the trees and headed into the camp.’