Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

They carried Faucher away. Briggs ran alongside in an L.L. Bean bathrobe pouring out offers of help, but Erik waved him off like a man shooing flies.

The weather began to change, and the high white clouds that had remained at their stations for so long moved across the horizon, leaving ghostly streaks in their place. One quiet afternoon, while John looked at the casework that was to follow the demise of the town in Delaware and the new prosperity of the town in North Carolina — mine mitigation in Manitoba, bike paths, a public swimming pool, a library wing in exchange for ground permanently poisoned by cyanide — the phone rang. It was Carol, bringing news that Erik was going to prison. He had been ruinously disagreeable in court, which inflated the sentences to which his crimes had given rise. She aired this as another grievance, as though little good could be extracted from Faucher now. “You were with him, John, why didn’t you help him?”

“I didn’t know how to help him. We were just spending time together.”

“You were just spending time together?”

“I’m afraid that’s it. I feel I wasn’t very perceptive.”

“You have my agreement on that,” said Carol. “He left you literally eager for imprisonment. You had a chance to put him back on his feet, and you let him fall.”

“Well, I don’t know the facts. I—”

“You don’t need to know the facts. You need to listen to what I’m telling you.”

“Carol, I don’t think you understand how tiresome you’ve become.”

“Is that your way of commiserating with me?”

“Yes,” Briggs said simply. “Yes, Carol, it is.”

At times, John worried there was something he should have done. The whole experience had been like missing a catch on the high trapeze: the acrobat is pulling away from you, falling into the distance. Or perhaps the acrobat is pulling you off your own trapeze. Neither thought was pleasant.

It was inevitable that he would get worked once more for the newsletter. Hoyt wanted to know how Briggs had found Faucher.

“Breathing,” Briggs said.

“You’ve got good air out there,” said Hoyt. “I’ll give you that.”

In November, on his way to the town in North Carolina he had saved from oblivion, he stopped in Boston, rented a car, and drove to the prison at Walpole but Faucher refused to see him. Sitting in his topcoat in the pale-green meeting room, Briggs rose slowly to acknowledge the uniformed custodian who bore his rejection. He was furious.

But once he was seated on the plane, drink in hand, looking out on the runway at men pushing carts, a forklift wheeling along a train of red lights, a neighboring jet pushing back, he felt a little better. His second drink was delivered reluctantly by a harried stewardess — only because Briggs told her he was on his way to his mother’s funeral. At this point, a glow seemed to form around Briggs’s seatmate, and Briggs struck up a conversation, ordering drinks for both of them as soon as the plane was airborne. The seatmate, an unfriendly black man who worked for Prudential Insurance, actually was going to a funeral, the funeral of a friend, and this revelation triggered a slightly euphoric summary of Briggs’s friendship with Faucher, delivered in remarkable detail, considering that Briggs’s companion was trying to read. Briggs concluded his description of his visit to the prison by raising his arms in the air and crying, “Hallelujah!” a gesture that made him realize, instantly, that he had had enough to drink. The seatmate narrowed his eyes, and when Briggs explained that, at long last, a chapter of his life was over, the man, turning back to his open book, said wearily, “Do you actually believe that?”

Austin was the more obviously vigilant as they made their way under the canopy of the ancient climax forest, the overgrowth of low alders and ferns towering over him and Ruth. They both had huge canisters of bear spray they’d bought in New Hazelton, but only Austin had ever had to use it — an experience that gave him no confidence since the bear stopped only feet away as the can emptied, and seemingly thanks to mature reflection rather than violent arrest. As he shook the nearly weightless can, the bear, on its hind legs, elevated its nose and just chose not to maul him. He told Ruth the spray worked great. “Point and shoot,” he said. “Nothing to it.”

They followed a game trail paralleling an unnamed creek that emptied a long way to the south into the main stem of the Skeena River, nearly a hundred miles from its debouchment into the North Pacific. It was mostly forest of cedars and hemlocks, silent except for the small dark winter wrens and the many generations of ravens, the young who squawked and the bearded old with their ominous kraah and an inclination to follow the intruders.

This was a world Austin knew. Bearing his heavy pack, he moved with the rocking gait of a Sherpa while Ruth, equally fit, found the near-rain-forest conditions almost impossible. She studied Austin’s measured stride and tried to emulate his concentration on the space in front of him, his alertness to the least resistance, and the continuous reference to an objective he somehow kept clear in his head.

Both were in their late twenties. Austin kept his auburn hair cropped close and, combined with the rapier sideburns he affected, the look strengthened his somewhat arranged individualism. He had made a sort of sub rosa living near wild places since his late teens, guiding hikers and heli-skiers around Revelstoke; and he’d helped mining companies search for metallurgical-grade coal in the high country on the Montana — British Columbia border, where from time to time a dope plane flying right on the deck soared down the alpine valleys into the United States. His mother, a Canadian nurse who married an American merchant mariner, had given him half his nationality. He was either a dual citizen or stateless, depending on whom you talked to or, rather, how he felt. When the subjects of religion, nationality, and race came up, he said, “I don’t believe in that stuff,” and he didn’t. What he believed in was money, but he never had enough for his problems — or for Ruth’s either.

Ruth came from Burnaby, British Columbia, a tough town whose greatest product was Joe Sakic, the Avalanche center. Her mother left her and her father, a millwright, when Ruth was just a child and Sakic was still playing for Lethbridge. Her father admitted that he didn’t know quite what to do with her, and she moved out at fourteen to skateboard, then waitress at Revelstoke, and finally develop her skiing to instructor competency, which provided a seasonal living yet made each year an uncertainty.

Ruth, like Austin, was a heroin user; both would have been more entrenched if their income had been predictable. Their love of the outdoors and great physical enthusiasm sustained the long dry spells; but these always contained some component that led back to using, and that led back to Vancouver, that phenomenal aperture to the drugs of Asia.

Their most reliable connection was a Sikh gallery owner, Sadhu Dhaliwal, who specialized in North Coast art above the table, drugs and protected antiquities under, the most honest junk dealer in Van with a clean business mind under his made-to-measure five-yard muslin turban. Ruth had put Austin on to him: you got a better shot with East Asians who were utterly paranoid about the immigration service and played it straight, at least in the details. There was nothing straight in the big picture, of course, but the big picture always spoiled everything for everybody.

And they were wise; they never went to Vancouver unless, as a kind of enfranchisement, they were prepared to use. To land in that town with empty pockets hoping to improvise your way onto the golden thoroughfare was to risk terrible consequences, and they were far too smart for that. Hence this trip through a primeval forest known with surprising intimacy by Austin. In certain respects, it was a perfect life: you descended from some of the wildest country left on the planet, sunburned and hardmuscled after a season of gazing upon creation, straight down into the city of man where bliss came in a blue Pacific wave and the most beautiful hookers lined up around the cruise-ship terminals and chatted about the future.