by Pam Withers
She laughs lightly.
“So this place we’re going is good for flying drones?” I ask.
“It’s Forest Service land that some lumber company just finished cutting. So there won’t be many trees to deal with, and no one around for miles. Means we’re not likely to get in trouble.”
“Sounds good.”
“No flying our UAVs over the water, though,” she reminds me as we slide around a point and gaze at a steep hillside of ugly stumps and brush.
“For sure,” I say. “Not interested in losing any equipment that hasn’t been stolen already.”
“We also agreed to stick to this clear-cut and not fly over private property, and to bring the drones back if any people are around.”
“For real. Hey, there’s that old cannery.” I point beyond our intended landing site at the derelict orange-red set of buildings on old log pilings. “The one below where we were camping on the Outdoors Club trip.”
“Yeah, what a mess, eh? They should take it down before it totally collapses.”
I study the giant two-storey warehouse that dominates the site. It’s clad in well-weathered wood and leans to one side. From the tidewater to high up on the bank, it’s supported by log legs wearing barnacle-encrusted knee socks. More pilings with moss growing out of their tops no longer hold up anything. They simply march into the bay in neat columns, like wooden soldiers with punk haircuts.
Uphill of the warehouse, a bunkhouse with a rust-streaked corrugated tin roof seems to be sliding down the bank, while even farther up, trees are bursting out of a row of roofless cottages. Throughout the property, coils of rope and tangles of fish netting intermingle with bricks from fallen chimneys and with piles of reddish boards studded by rusty nails. Broken windowpanes wink at us, backed by dark interiors, while a family of otters scurries along a warped weed-infested boardwalk that resembles a roller coaster. Ravens croak and flap as they watch us from the remains of a glass phone booth that is history frozen in time.
“Cool. We could sneak in there and explore it,” I suggest.
Dorothy’s paddle pauses, and she shakes her head. “My great-grandmother used to clean fish there back in the 1950s, just before it shut down. But it’s falling to pieces now. Not safe to go anywhere near it. Besides, rumours are it’s haunted.”
She says the last few words so soberly, I have to hoot with laughter. “Of course it is!”
Her body tenses, making me wonder if she really believes in haunted cannery ruins.
She points her paddle toward barbed-wire fencing between the cannery property and our clear-cut. “Just to remind you, no letting our drones cross that line.”
“Why? Who’d see them?” I tease.
“Private property. We agreed.”
“Who owns it?”
“No idea. Who cares?” She shrugs.
“Okay, we agreed,” I echo, thinking her tone is way too serious. Our canoe squishes into the mudbank of the Forest Service land, startling a fawn just up the ridge. Its spotted sides and tiny rump blur as it bounds away. Dorothy leaps out and ties the canoe’s rope around a spindly tree beneath a house-sized boulder, then accepts the cooler and drones I hand her.
When she extends her hand to help me ashore, I keep hold of it longer than I need to, and feel tingling up and down my body when she doesn’t pull away.
“Nice picnic spot,” I say, pointing to a flat ledge in the sun above the giant boulder. When she nods, I lay out a blanket there and set out our sandwiches, carrot sticks, apples, drinks, and slightly squashed pieces of Mom’s foil-wrapped New York cheesecake.
“Pastrami and rye, a Manhattan specialty,” I boast, offering her half of mine.
“Salmon in a bun, Bella Coola specialty,” she counters with a grin, offering me half of hers.
We munch and listen to birds and the lapping of waves. A white jet passes so far overhead that it’s almost noiseless, coming from and going to another world. An eagle soars closer to earth, oblivious of the white curl of the jet’s stream above it. The smell of cedar, salt, and moist earth swirls in the air, relaxing me, enveloping me, accepting me in my granddad’s world, the place my father was born, a community now working its way into my blood. Who’d have believed I’d ever think that? I wrinkle my nose at the inlet’s fishy smell, but I know better than to complain about that to a Bella Coola girl. My Bella Coola girl?
“Any bears likely to visit us here?” I ask lightly.
“This is the Great Bear Rainforest. We’re surrounded by them. Just keep alert. We can always jump back into the canoe and get away.”
“That’s reassuring,” I joke, eyeing the stump-dotted terrain that disappears up the hill. The clearing’s lack of tall, dark trees means I’m less nervous than I usually am outdoors.
I watch her finish off her bun, take a long sip of her soda, and study the slope above us. She reaches for her drone, the cherry-red midsize quadcopter sparkling in the sun. She pops in one of her custom batteries, flicks on the drone, and turns to me with shining eyes. Eyes that make me want to reach out, cup her face, and kiss her. Nope. Not yet, Ray.
I return her smile and pick up my slick graphite quadcopter, Bug. Lined up on a crazy-big stump, the drones look like they were meant to be a pair.
Dorothy gives me a playful shove to throw me off and zips her drone up and away. Controller in hand, I run over to get my quad in the air next to hers. Our soaring drones seem as good at surfing the air currents as the elegant eagles above them.
“Watch out for the eagles,” Dorothy says. “They’ve been known to dive down and grab small drones.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, the army even trains some for that purpose.”
“Cool. What kind of birds are the ugly black ones over there above the cannery?”
“Turkey vultures. They just feed on dead stuff. Won’t mess with our birds.”
“Huh,” I say, eyeing the dark flock. “Never seen eagles or vultures in New York City. Just boring seagulls and pigeons. Whoa, there’s like a dozen of those black vulture-things circling, Dorothy. Like they’ve got some prey they’re about to pounce on.”
“Yeah, I notice they haven’t swooped in. Maybe whatever they’re after is injured, not dead yet.”
“You mean a suffering animal,” I say grimly, steering my drone toward the hefty vultures.
“Ray! You’re going over the fence! Get that thing back here!”
“Just having a quick look.” I manoeuvre my baby beneath the flapping birds to see what they’re eyeing. “Hey! It’s a dog! Its leash is caught around a bush. It’s trapped there!”
I quickly bring my drone home, and the second it lands, I sprint toward the barbed-wire fence and dive to roll under it.
“Ray!” comes Dorothy’s panicked voice. “That’s private property! We agreed —”
The young black Doberman, lying still on his side, has a matted coat and lesions on his throat from where he has tried to pull free of his leash. His eyes are open but half clouded over, and he flicks his paws every few seconds, as if trying to delay the moment his tormenters will drop down to push their beaks into his soft pink stomach. The leather leash is well chewed below the dog’s snout, but clearly he wasn’t able to work his incisors all the way through before he weakened. I unwind the leash’s end from where it is caught on a thorny bush.
“Hey, boy,” I say, approaching cautiously and speaking gently. He’s a Doberman and he doesn’t know me, so this is dangerous, I tell myself. But I also know he’s basically too far gone to hurt me, and anyway, I’m the animal whisperer. I raise one of his ear flaps, inspect his ears, and feel behind and below them. Instinctively, I also lift his lip folds to check the colour of his gums and the condition of his teeth, jaw, and mouth.
“Gums are so dry,” I mutter. I eye the bloody wounds under his collar. The poor dog’s collar must have almost strangled him as he tried to free himself. “And I’m guessing blood loss leading to shock, too. Some damage to throat and trachea, per
haps? You’ve been here a while, haven’t you? Couple of days? You look seriously dehydrated. It’s okay. I’m here to help you.”
I inspect the tag on his worn leather collar. Chief, it reads, with a local phone number. I snap a photo of it.
Dorothy’s shouts fade from my awareness as I pull out my water bottle and dribble drops into the dog’s parched-looking mouth. His dry tongue moves and his head stirs. Eyes as desperate as I’ve ever seen gaze at me in appreciation.
“Easy, Chief,” I say, continuing to squirt water in his mouth as I check over his body. His eyes aren’t red, I note, and the nose has no discharge, but there are lumps, bumps, and scabs on his body. “You weren’t well cared for even before you escaped on your leash. And no one searched very hard for you after you disappeared.” I shake my head sadly. “How dare they. Only uncaring a-holes would leave you to this.”
I look up at the circling turkey vultures, black outlines with ugly red heads against the blue sky, and raise my fist at them. “Get lost!” I shout.
Then, sliding my hands beneath the big dog, I pick him up. He’s heavy — I figure he weighs more than fifty pounds — but he’s much lighter than he should be. He lies limp in my arms, doesn’t fight me. I’m about to head back to the fence, calculating how to slide my patient under, when a spooky wail sounds from somewhere in the cannery buildings below me. The sound gets louder till I shiver involuntarily. It’s a wail so pitiful and primitive and heartbreaking, I nearly drop poor Chief. I look around and register that Dorothy is out of sight and no longer calling to me.
I pause and listen hard. But now the only sounds are the breeze, seagulls calling nearby, swaying trees, and Chief ’s laboured breathing. There’s no one and nothing else around. Even the vultures have disappeared from overhead.
“Dorothy?” I call out, my voice wavering a little.
That’s when I hear the buzz of a drone directly overhead, hovering like a queen bee intent on stinging. I recognize it immediately, the same custom night-vision one that was spying on Min-jun and me when he was sleepwalking. It’s yellow, it’s mad, and it’s big.
I run, dog bundled in my arms, till I reach the barbed wire. Gently, I kneel down, roll my patient under the fence, then press my back into the dirt to make it out after him.
Dog back in my arms, Yellow Drone retreating, I stumble downhill. When I reach our picnic site, I halt and look around in confusion. Our drones are gone, the cooler remains, I can’t see Dorothy, and Granddad’s canoe is no longer where we left it.
“Dorothy! Dorothy! Where are you?” I call out in panic.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHEN I REACH the tree around which our canoe was tied, I breathe a sigh of relief. The boat has moved several feet to rest in the boulder’s far shadow, and it’s now upside down, but it’s still on the beach and tied up. Could the tide have done all that?
I set Chief down. He watches, blinking, as I sprint up to our picnic ledge to grab the cooler and pull out my second sandwich to feed him. He snaps up the food like he hasn’t eaten in days.
Looking left and right along the beach, then up-slope to the maze of stumps, I see no sign of Dorothy. Something clearly spooked her, but how far could she have gone in the short time I was away?
“Dorothy?” I shout again — and nearly soil my brand-new sweatpants as a corner of the canoe appears to lift up on its own in front of me. She’s crouched beneath it.
“I’m here,” she half whispers, eyes wide.
“Okay,” I say, trying to calm my voice. “Did you know our drones are missing?”
“I’ve got them.” She glances down the shoreline toward the cannery, then hands them out from under the canoe. “You brought back a dog?”
“I had to,” I say. “He needs rehydrating and care at our clinic.”
Dorothy shakes her head like I’m crazy but reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “You’re so … you’re so Ray.”
She crawls out from under the canoe, but I notice her trembling a little as she moves to where the boulder blocks any view of the cannery, as if she’s trying to hide in the stone’s shadow.
Hide from Yellow Drone, the ghost wail, or something else?
“Are you okay?” I hope my voice doesn’t reveal I’m still spooked, too.
Pressing herself back into the sculpted side of the boulder, she looks at me with eyes resembling Chief’s: in need of comfort, somehow. I move in and wrap my arms around her, pressing my face to her neck. She returns the hug in a fierce way, clinging to me for a full minute before taking a deep breath. “Sorry, sorry,” she whispers.
Sorry for what? I’m not about to ask.
Our lips find each other’s, and with a surge of warmth, my fear melts away and exhilaration seems to ride the air currents. Crickets chorus in the grass, and seawater laps joyfully at our feet. In that moment, I open myself more fully to Bella Coola.
“Hey,” I say, stroking her face.
“Hey,” she says, smiling and patting Chief ’s head as he pushes his nose between us.
Her fingers trace my jawline, then rise to my left ear. She leans in and kisses it tenderly. “Will you ever tell me the real story of your ear?”
I sigh. “I was camping with my granddad and one of his friends. I did something really stupid, and it has made me afraid of … I’ve never admitted this to anyone before, Dorothy, especially not to anyone in Bella Coola.”
“Go on,” she says, stroking that side of my head, then leaning in to offer a delicious French kiss. I’m melting into the side of the boulder, into her, but I need to finish my confession.
“I’m afraid of being alone in the woods. I’m afraid of forests, trees, wild animals. I thought maybe joining the Outdoors Club would … My granddad is always …”
“Mmm. And the something stupid was?”
I try to see it. I try to make the film advance another frame before it melts on me. “I woke up all alone in the middle of the night, in our tent. No Granddad or his friend there to protect me. There was a noise outside. I came out of the tent, and —”
“And what?”
“It’s no good. It has gone all white.”
“A snowstorm. They left you in a snowstorm, and you woke up and went looking for them.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I pause and think really hard till a new picture comes to me. “The next thing I remember, I’m lying on the ground with a horrible pain on the side of my head, waiting to die.”
Dorothy’s eyes go large, and she sits up straight. “You tried to find your granddad and his friend, who’d left you alone. You got lost and finally lay down in the snow, and your ear froze.”
“I don’t know,” I say, exhausted from trying to access that part of my memory.
“Your grandfather and his friend found you before you froze to death?”
“Yes. Granddad found me, picked me up, and took me to the hospital.”
“He must have been so relieved you were still alive!”
“Relieved?” I shake my head in confusion. “He was furious I’d come out of the tent. Told me I was useless as an outdoorsman.” I take a deep breath. “Useless, Dorothy. It’s why I don’t fit in here. And why my granddad puts me down all the time, still.”
Dorothy says, “Ray McLellan. How old were you when this happened?”
Wishing I hadn’t spilled the story, I press my lips together for a moment, then go on, avoiding her question. “Don’t tell Cole, Dorothy. Don’t tell anyone. People already think I’m a loser. It’ll be worse if they know I’m scared of the woods. That I have none of my granddad’s genes. Or respect.”
“Ray, answer my question. How old were you?”
“Five.”
Her mouth widens. “He left you alone in a tent in a snowstorm, obviously for too long. You naturally went looking for him, and when you were nearly dead, he shouted at you for walking out to find him? You were doing what you had to. You were following survival instincts. He was the irresponsible one! He should’ve been a
rrested for child neglect! He was angry because he was ashamed, Ray. Probably out of his mind worried you’d tell your parents it was his fault. So he hammered in to you that it was —”
“— my fault.” I shake my head. “You don’t know my granddad, Dorothy. He was teaching me to be an outdoorsman. I knew better than to disobey him. Even at that age I could gather wood, start a fire, and read a compass. I wanted so much to be like him. Wanted him to respect me. Still do.” Are those tears pushing against my eyelids? And a worried black dog pushing his nose into me? What happened to our romantic moment? I’ve ruined everything.
I look down at my feet. My socks and silver shoes are wet. The hem of my sweatpants is wicking water up my calves. Chief ’s tail is wet. I soften my voice. “The tide’s coming in, Dorothy. We’d better go.” I pull her close again, let my fingers run through her thick, smooth hair. “Or it will carry us away. Should we let it?”
“I’d say yes, except I’m supposed to be studying at the library.”
“Um, yeah. Okay. And we have to get Chief to the clinic.”
Disentangling ourselves, we right the canoe, then lift Chief inside and load up our few belongings, lashing our precious drones on top of the cooler once again.
“Nice picnic,” I say.
“Yes,” she says in almost a whisper, eyes reflecting the sparkle of the sun. “But we’ll fly our drones somewhere else next time.” She hops into the bow and waits till I shove us off before saying, “You do know that your dog stinks?”
“Our dog stinks,” I say.
Chief ’s tail thumps on the aluminum bottom as I point us toward home. Dorothy and I slice our paddles through the water like we were born to it. Forty minutes? No problem with a strong girl inspiring me on — and a hostile drone behind us. Besides, I had the best two canoe instructors in the world: Granddad and Dad. So what if I’ll have sore muscles tomorrow?
The smell of salt water and manky dog accompanies us all the way back to town, where Dorothy helps me lift the dog into the Jeep and the canoe on top of it. She gives me a deep kiss before springing away, saying, “I’ll walk, so I can hit the library on the way home.”
