High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  ‘Why did he say that?’ Brian didn’t take it in and I had to repeat the question. ‘Why would Wolchak be so sure your father would sign the agreement? And sign it today?’

  ‘Miriam,’ he said. ‘They’ll get hold of Tom …’ He shrugged, watching as Jim Edmundson got into the cab and the pick-up drove off. ‘They’ll get at him. Maybe not today. But sooner or later. Meanwhile, your friend there will write a report some time during the next few days and it’ll go the round of departments, everybody initialling it and passing it on. It could be a month before anything is actually done about it.’ He looked back at the forest behind us. ‘A few more fellers and it could all be down inside a month.’

  The pick-up went to the office first. The pilot was already down at the Cessna standing impatiently on one of the floats. Then, as soon as he saw Jim come out with his bag and his briefcase, he swung the prop. The engine started immediately, the prop idling as the pick-up stopped alongside, Jim went straight from truck to float and he didn’t look back as he climbed into the cabin, though Wolchak had got out and was standing there on the quay. No handshake, no farewell word;

  I thought that unusual for such a friendly man.

  The clouds were right down on the mountain now, the walls of the inlet shrouded, light fading as the Cessna taxied out and took off, flying straight and low down the waterway. The time was eleven-thirty. Another tree crashed down. The crawler went by again trailing four logs this time. And close under the cliff the great boom crane was lifting the butt of another log, a small winch on the clifftop drawing a hawser tight to hold it into a niche in the rock face, the drilling rig climbing back up the road to the top. We watched as it backed up over a wooden platform erected above the niche, put down pads to hold it in position, then raised the A-frame that had been folded over the cab until it was erect and ready for the drilling pipe. Down on the ground two more men were now working on the log that had been lowered into chocks, manhandling with the aid of a chain purchase what appeared to be a butt-end section of the tree back into position.

  I only had a quick look at this work through the glasses, and Brian couldn’t tell me what they were doing. His only concern seemed to be Wolchak and he kept the glasses glued on the office. It was about ten minutes later, when the pipe suspended from the mobile rig’s A-frame tower was turning, the bit drilling down into the butt of the log up-ended in its niche, that a door of the office opened and two men came out, both carrying rifles slung over their shoulders, rucksacks on their backs. They stood there for a moment, waiting beside the pick-up. Then Wolchak came out and they all climbed in.

  Seeing them like that, armed, had taken my mind right back to Ice Cold and Tom, high on snorts of coke, trying to get them to say where Miriam was being held. I watched as the truck began to move, coming straight down the road towards us. The thought that had been lurking at the back of my mind was suddenly there with a blinding clarity. ‘The hut!’ I moved across to Brian, shaking him by the arm. That dinghy. They’re going up there.’

  ‘So what?’ He was staring at me uncomprehending, and I didn’t understand because now it seemed so obvious to me.

  ‘The hut!’ I repeated. ‘That’s where they’ve got Miriam. Camargo and Lopez, they’re going up there.’ Now that it was out, now that I’d said it, it seemed clearer than ever - the dogs, the guard, that Mexican Rodrigo taking in stores. And Tarasconi — it would explain why he’d told Tom he would soon know where Miriam was.

  The pick-up went past us, Camargo’s bearded face clearly visible as he looked over the tops of the trees at the heights above. ‘They’re going up there.’ I still had hold of Brian’s arm, desperately trying to get through to him. ‘Suppose Tom contacted Rodrigo after we left? He could be up there now.’ But he shook his head, still watching the camp through the glasses. ‘What are you looking at?’ I demanded. ‘Whatever you think of him, he’s still your father.’

  He shook his head again, and I saw the glasses were fixed on the boom crane that was now manoeuvring the log out of its niche and lowering it to where the two men were rolling another butt-end to the chain purchase. ‘I must find out,’ he muttered.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Why they want a log boom. You only need that if you’re floating logs down or holding them penned up in a booming ground. But loading them dry, straight off the quay… I can’t see the point of it.’ And he added, ‘Tonight. I’ll get into the camp tonight.’ He lowered the glasses, passing a hand over his face. ‘It’s the only way. Then maybe I’ll have something that’ll force the authorities to act.’ He yawned. ‘You go back up to the top if you want to. See what those two are being sent up there for. I’m going to curl up somewhere, get some sleep, then, when it’s dark - well, we’ll see …’

  I argued with him, scared I think to go back on my own, scared of the loneliness - just myself and those two hoodlums, both of them armed. But nothing would shift him. His father, he said, could fend for himself. As for Miriam, if I were right and she was being held in the hut, he didn’t see that I’d be much use to her up there on the lake on my own. ‘You’d be better employed getting some sleep, then seeing if you can discover something that will stop them pirating a stand of timber that doesn’t belong to them and never will.’

  In the end I left him, knowing I had no time to lose if I were to get up the lake ahead of the two South Americans. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But watch it, mate. Wolchak, and the boys he fronts for, aren’t playing for plastic counters. They’ll cut you to pieces without a thought.’ Those were his last words to me as I turned and started back through the timber at a steady trot. I looked back once, but I couldn’t see him. The trees had closed ranks, the great boles a solid wall blocking out even a glimmer of daylight from the open ground.

  The saws had stopped again. It was very quiet as I doubled back, searching for the track, starkly conscious that I was alone now, nobody to lead me on, nobody to talk to. High Stand seemed suddenly a hostile place, the tree roots tripping me, the boles hemming me in, and everything very dark.

  I found the track and started up the slope of it, the murmur of the torrent a little nearer. It was raining now. I could hear it in the trees, but no rain fell, the canopy shutting it out. Then the saws started up again, the sound faint and far behind me, and I knew Camargo and Lopez had ceased talking to the fellers and were on their way up the track behind me.

  In my haste to get back up to the lake ahead of them I barely noticed the increasing dark. It was uphill all the way, my breath labouring. I had nothing to carry, but even so I was exhausted by the time the boles became smaller, faint glimmers of daylight showing through the tops. The rain had thinned to a light drizzle, wisps of white cloud vapour trickling between the trees. And then I was out into the old felled area, the track climbing more steeply, my breath coming in great gasps, and nothing ahead of me, just the mist hanging white and heavy, so that I moved in a pale void where every leaf and twig, every bush glimmered with moisture. I looked back and High Stand had gone, swallowed up in the cloud.

  That was when the loneliness really hit. I was slowed to a walk that gradually became a desperate trudge. A lawyer’s desk and a small sailing boat were no training for a hike in the Rockies and I hadn’t slept for what seemed a lifetime. Every now and then I stopped for breath, eyes and ears reaching back into the grey fog behind me, seeing shadows on the edge of visibility, the rustle of air currents through birch leaves making my heart pump harder. No sound of the saws now, only the growing murmur of the cascades above me.

  Noon by my watch and I was back at the hairpin bend, standing at the end of the mountain spur where we had looked down onto the camp and the inlet, and across to the green sea of the forest top. Now there was nothing. I was in a world apart, just myself and cloud vapour. And then I heard a voice.

  It came from below me, from back down the track, a voice calling to somebody, faint above the sound of water falling. There was an answer, fainter still. Then silence.

  I went
on then, climbing the back of the steeply sloping spur, forcing the pace, fear driving me and giving me strength. My shoes squelched in the mud as I forced my way through the thickness of new growth that had seemed so much easier on the way down, my body sodden below the waist, steaming with sweat under my anorak, and nothing to show me how near I was to the top, the clouds solid and all-pervading, but white now, a glimmering iridescence as though I was beginning to climb through it to the sun.

  The track, or what remained of it, came to an abrupt end. I turned back then, searching for footprints, found a patch of soft earth fifty yards back and clawed my way up through a mass of alder and some rowans until I was on level ground that sloped away to the invisible edge of the lake. I found the canoe and wasted precious moments trying to right it. It had seemed so easy when there were two of us. Then I remembered the boat hauled out on the sloping rock where we had landed. I grabbed the paddles and the rucksack that contained our food, voices sounding on the track below as I stumbled through the trees to the rock.

  It took me only a moment to toss the things into the boat, slide it down the slope into the water and jump in. White cloud vapour clung to the trees, dripped from the branches, the edge of the lake disappearing into nothingness. I rowed quietly, slipping the boat through the water, the rock fading. Suddenly it was gone and I stopped rowing. I could hear the crash of branches, loud above the murmur of water falling away to my right. Then voices. They were talking in Spanish, searching along the lake edge. There was a splash and a curse.

  I wondered what they would do, what I was going to do, alone on the lake in thick cloud mist. I was thinking of the hut then, wondering vaguely what would happen when I reached it, my brain grappling wearily with the problem of how to check that Miriam really was being held there. . An exclamation, a stream of half-audible words, the voice harsh and flowing. Lopez. And he had found the canoe.

  I began to row again.

  PART V

  Fishing the Spider

  1

  Following the shore, it was the dark grit of the little beach that I saw first, a scuffed drag-line leading across it to the pale tin gleam of the boat hauled up close to the bushes and tree roots of the bank. I turned my head and there was the hut, a dark shadow in the cloud mist that looked surprisingly large, like a small castle on its rocky mound. The dogs were quiet, the door shut. I back-paddled, dipping the oars with care. The log-built shape faded and was suddenly gone, swallowed so completely by the mist it might never have been there.

  I rowed gently to some rocks, found a place where the boat would be partially concealed, leaving it there, half-in, half-out of the water, and making my way cautiously through the trees until I could see the hut again. The trees hung heavy with moisture, no breath of air, everything very still except for the all-pervading sound of water falling.

  I don’t know how long I crouched there, my legs cramped, my trousers clinging wetly, eyes straining and the minutes passing. I thought I heard the rattle of a chain, and once I imagined the sound of voices, but nothing moved, the world in limbo, and the boat so near I could have reached out and touched its outboard engine. It was an aluminium boat with a flat ribbed bottom and a bow like a punt. A bald-headed eagle swooped on a fish and I began to shiver.

  I couldn’t stay there indefinitely. If Camargo and Lopez had been coming up to the hut they’d have launched the canoe by now, and with branches as paddles, or with just their hands, it wouldn’t be long before they were here. I rose, trembling, and started cautiously forward. The hut had windows either side of the door that gave it the appearance of a wood-brown Indian face peering out over the lake, the glass of the eyes glinting with the water’s pale reflection. There was a side window too, but that seemed boarded up. If I could look in through the windows facing the lake without disturbing the dogs …

  As though they had sensed my thoughts, the sound of chains dragging was suddenly quite distinct. I froze as one of them gave a little bark that was half-enquiring. At the same instant the door of the hut opened and a man came out, tall’ and gangling with big ears either side of a long, battered face. I suppose I was within fifty feet of him as he turned and said in English, ‘No sign of them yet. They must have missed their way.’ He was speaking to the man I had last seen in the early hours of the morning following Tarasconi up the wet curve of the wooden highway in Ocean Falls.

  The dogs barked as Rodrigo moved towards the path that led to the portage. ‘Ah got two guys expecting me. Canadian whites.’ He hawked and spat in the direction of the dogs. ‘Remember. You tell that boss o’ yours Ah need double, an’ Ah need it reg’lar. The market down there’s growing fast. Okay?’ He looked at the dogs and spat again. ‘You got all the protection you need, eh?’

  ‘I guess so,’ the other replied, and then I couldn’t hear them any more, the two of them moving off into the trees, the mist swallowing them.

  My head turned to the hut and the open door, the dark rectangle of it holding my gaze, seeming to beckon. I moved on the instant, almost running. It wasn’t a conscious action, my feet moving of their own accord, a reflex action. The dogs began barking as I reached the door. Inside there was a table, chairs, a sort of dresser with crockery, a kerosene stove and a two-tier bunk against the far wall, a walkie-talkie, aerial extended, hanging on a nail on the wall and below it a rifle propped against a small cupboard that had a pressure lamp on it, keys and a powerful torch. There were two doors leading off the central room, both of them held securely shut with heavy double bars of fresh-sawn timber slotted into clumsy wooden brackets.

  ‘Miriam!’

  There was no answer, everything very still, except those damn dogs, barking madly now, leaping at the full stretch of their chains.

  ‘Miriam!’ I called again and a man’s voice answered. He was behind the door to my left. I started towards it with the intention of lifting the bars, but there was a shout from the direction of the lake and I stopped, turning to the open door and the figure of a man running towards it.

  I slammed it shut. There was a big key in a lock and I turned it. Seconds later fists pounded on the door’s wooden boards, a voice shouting at me to open up and not play bloody stupid games. He thought I was Camargo or Lopez. ‘Don’t fool around, the High Stand owner is there and he’s high as a kite. Don’t let him out.’

  The dogs had stopped barking, but they were leaping and growling at the full stretch of their chains as the man’s face appeared at one of the windows, the two of us staring at each other. Then I had turned and was wrestling with the timber bars to the door, a voice calling from the inside something that sounded like ‘shoot the bastard’ followed by a string of obscenities. The bars were swollen with damp. I reached for a chair, knocking them up as a rock smashed the glass of the nearest window.

  The room door crashed open, Tom standing there, his eyes wild, his face flushed, that muscle twitching at the line of his mouth. ‘Where’s that fucking Mexican? Where’s Rodrigo?’ His eyes, searching madly, fastened on the rifle propped against the cupboard. He lunged for it as a dead branch began to demolish the rest of the window, the man wielding it yelling for the door to be opened.

  The room from which Tom had emerged was small, no more than eight feet deep, and there was the figure of a man sprawled on a bed at the end. There was a bucket against the opposite wall, the place smelling of stale humanity and excrement. There was blood on the blankets, the man’s face swollen and bruised. He looked as though he’d been badly beaten up.

  Behind me I heard the click of a bolt. I turned and in the same instant there was the crash of a shot. Tom was at the smashed window, the rifle at his shoulder, smoke curling lazily from the barrel, and from outside the hut the shot man began to scream.

  It was a crazy thing to do. If he’d killed the man he would be on a murder charge, and God knows what that would do to him, and Miriam, all the publicity, his name blazoned across Canada and Britain, and myself a witness to it. I could see the expression on the QC’s face afte
r he’d read the brief. I can’t remember what I said, but when I seized hold of him, trying to restrain him, trying to tell him the consequences, he rounded on me, his face creased with anger, his teeth bared below the beginnings of a new moustache. ‘Murder, you say. Are you bloody crazy? That bastard out there, he’s the murderer.’ And when I stared at him unbelievingly, he said, ‘Go and look. On the bed, in there.’

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Olsen. Thor Olsen, my forest manager. And he’s dead — dead. You understand?’ He was leaning his face close to mine and screaming the words at me. ‘Dead!’ he screamed again. ‘Beaten to death to force Miriam to tell A-Aleksis there —’ he nodded to the man squirming on the ground outside, his hand grasping his left leg, moans of pain issuing from his wide-open mouth — ‘to tell him something she didn’t know. I should have killed him.’ He thrust his face right into mine, the bulging eyes lit by a curious light, violence and excitement vibrating in his voice as he repeated, ‘I should have killed him - shot him dead. Instead, I’ve shot his knee to pieces, nothing more. So don’t talk to me of murder.’

  A voice called, and he swung round. It was a woman’s voice, muffled, but with a high pitch of hysteria. She was calling his name and he lunged for the door at the other end of the hut, clawing at the wooden bars, then hammering them up with the butt of the gun he still held in his hands. The door thrust open and she was there, her arms round him, half laughing, half sobbing, her hair dishevelled, no make-up and her clothes in a mess, blood and dirt and all creased with constant wear. They didn’t kiss. They didn’t say anything. They just clung to each other, like two lost souls. Then she saw me and she smiled, looking past his shoulder. ‘Philip. It was you, wasn’t it?’