Hammond Innes - High Stand

Suddenly we were on our own, the police hurrying back to their car, which had a radio, the customs officers heading towards the pier where the Coastguard cutter was now the only vessel. ‘I need a drink,’ Miriam said in a small voice. ‘I feel slightly sick.’ And I heard her murmur to herself, ‘Tom was right all along.’

There wasn’t anywhere to get a drink. We stood around for a while. Then more police arrived to mount guard over the High Stand logs and it began to rain again. We were finally given a meal in the mill canteen and shortly afterwards a police car arrived to whisk us half across Vancouver Island, through Campbell River and down the coastal highway to Victoria, where Brian and I were put up at that lovely creeper-clad relic of Victorian days, the Empress Hotel. It faced the inner harbour and the BC Parliament Building and was conveniently close to the Provincial Courts.

Miriam, after throwing a fit of temperament that was more than justified in the circumstances, was allowed to go out to Oak Bay with the Canadian family she had stayed with before, while Brian and I settled down to drink ourselves into a more relaxed frame of mind. It had been a long journey from Ocean Falls, longer still from the Yukon, and now we were being told we had to wait in case further evidence was required from us when those on the tug, who had now been arrested and charged with drug smuggling, made their first appearance in court.

That might have been the end of it if the authorities, both in Canada and the States, had not decided to go for Wolchak. It was a mark of the size of the operation that he had been on the spot and running it himself, and as a result he was more exposed than he had probably ever been before. He was arrested at his home in Chicago the day after we reached Victoria, but despite pressure from the public and the media, the courts released him on bail of half a million dollars pending extradition proceedings. Roy McLaren, when I saw him in his office in Vancouver two days later, told me proceedings of that sort could drag on for months. Meanwhile, Barony had already successfully avoided arrest, the SVL Timber lawyers pleading that neither he nor the company was responsible for anything that had been done in the remoteness of the Halliday Arm of Cascade Inlet. The company had purchased the trees, that was all. The felling had been arranged through the owner’s representative and delivery through Angeles Georgia Towing.

I was booked out the next day on the Wardair flight back to Gatwick, and feeling I owed myself the luxury of a view over the water, I was staying the night at the Bayshore. Brian had already left for the north again, back to Ocean Falls. That evening, after lazing for an hour in the circular pool beside the parked charter cruisers, I stood in my room with just a towel round my waist, smoking a cigarette and watching the lights come on along the North Shore. I had two windows to my room, one facing across Coal Harbour and Burrard Inlet, the other towards the city where the glass of Vancouver’s mini-Manhattan was reflecting the last of the sunset glow. A cargo ship disappeared slowly beyond Deadman’s Island and the black silhouette of the trees of Stanley Park.

It was all so beautiful, a floatplane landing, a yacht going alongside the refuelling raft and the lights twinkling right up the slopes to the ski-lift high above the First Narrows. All that was missing was somebody to share it with and my thoughts turned to Miriam, wondering what she was doing tonight, whether to ring her. And then, just as I had seated myself on the bed and started to look up the Oak Bay number of her Canadian friends, the phone rang.

Later, of course, we said it must have been telepathy. She was downstairs and wanted me to have dinner with her. ‘Something very exciting. I must tell you.’ And she added, her voice bubbling with it, ‘You’re not doing anything, are you? I must talk it over, and now Brian’s gone there’s nobody — nobody who knows it all and how Tom would feel. Can you come? Can you join me for a sort of quiet celebration?’

‘Of course,’ I told her. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘Later.’ And almost in the same breath she muttered, ‘It’s all so ironic. I’ll wait for you in the Verandah Room.’ And she rang off.

I dressed quickly and went down to find her with a tall glass in front of her frosted with ice and eating roasted nuts as though she hadn’t had a meal for weeks. I don’t know what she was wearing, trousers I think and a light woollen top, a very ordinary outfit, but she looked radiant. She had another drink with me and then we left the hotel and strolled across the lit driveway to the dim, mysterious labyrinth of the old Coal Harbour quay. She had booked a table at the Keg where I had dined the night I arrived in Vancouver. ‘We’ll have fish and lots of wine — a lovely, simple atmosphere. Then I’ll tell you.’ We passed the broken sleeper palings of the old boatyard and went round by a lot of parked cars and the entrance to the marina, laughing at the tow-away signs, her arm linked in mine. I could feel the movement of her hips against me and I was filled with a warm glow, sensing that we would sleep together in my room overlooking the harbour and that it would be a night to remember.

We stood for a time looking down at the boats lying white and deserted against the floating wooden arms of the marina. ‘I wouldn’t mind living somewhere out here,’ she said, the huskiness in her voice more pronounced. ‘A boat, a house by the shore, and the world — the European world of demos, unions, terrorism, all the mayhem of politics — a million miles away. Or would one find it too peaceful, too removed — too dull?’ She looked up at me, smiling.

The Keg, like the ships’ chandlery nearby, was a disused boathouse, all wood and bare simplicity. We had another drink, a salad, some fish and a couple of bottles of Californian wine, and we talked — about everything except what she’d come to tell me. It wasn’t until the coffee arrived, and with it the two large brandies she had ordered, that she suddenly blurted it out: ‘Stone Slide Gully,’ she said, taking a telex out and passing it across to me. ‘Jonny Epinard — he sent that from Whitehorse.’ And she went on, her words coming so fast I could barely follow her — ‘You remember that Indian, Jack McDonald — you said you’d been through the gully into that grim, volcanic-looking crater beyond — the time I saw it I thought it looked like an old-fashioned lavatory pan, the mountains rising up round it at roughly the same angle. It was always subject to rock slides — not so much where Tom and the Indian were beavering away with their tractor and sluice box, but on the opposite slope. It’s very sheer there.’ Her hand reached over, gripping hold of mine. ‘You see what he says. There’s been a slide.’

I nodded, my eyes on the telex text: … closing down for winter. Jack had look at new slide. Picked up 23 nuggets in under an hour, largest 0.4 oz. Looks promising subject evaluation next season. Sorry Tom won’t know. Jonny Epinard. Her grip on my hand tightened. ‘Gold!’ she said. ‘And even if it’s nothing big it would have got Tom out of the mess he was in. He’d have been able to tell those bastards in Chicago to go to hell.’ I could feel her nails biting into my flesh. ‘Why didn’t it happen when he was up there? Why now — when it’s too late?’

She went on talking about that for some time, what it would have meant to Tom, how, if it had only happened the previous year, or better still two years ago, he would never have got in hock to the bank, would never have considered selling even an acre of High Stand. And then abruptly she veered away from that line of thought and began talking about the future, her future — ‘Me, a gold-miner — just think of it!’ Her eyes were sparkling, her face flushed and that Titian hair shining softly in the dim light. She looked just wonderful as she went on, ‘The hours I’ve listened to Tom talking about his father, about the Klondike and the fever that gripped them all when the Bonanza was discovered. And now, here I am with nuggets in the bank. Not a Bonanza. Of course not. But another Ice Cold perhaps. That would be enough. And when spring comes we can go up there, see if it really is a new placer mine. Would that make me a sourdough?’ She drained the last of her brandy, giggling to herself. ‘Me, a sourdough!’ And she shook her head, adding in a subdued voice, ‘I’m glad about High Stand, that I shan’t be concerned with those trees. Tom was right — Brian will appreciate them. He understands about trees, and after what happened there …’ She leaned across the table to me. ‘You will handle the legal side for me, won’t you? Ice Cold, I mean — you’ll come up there with me?’ And then on a lighter note: ‘I can manage a mine. At least, I think I can,’ she added with a grin. ‘But it’ll mean a company, accounts, a lot of paperwork.’ She laughed. ‘I never was any good at that sort of thing.’