Edge of Survival

by Toni Anderson

  He flew slower now and licked his dry lips. Then he pulled a bottle of water from his pack and started chugging. When he finished the first one, he took out a second and started drinking that too. It was time to wise up. His old life was dead, but there was no excuse for wallowing in self-pity. Not anymore. Not unless he wanted to lose everything he’d built for himself in the past twenty-three months and two weeks.

  And if the nightmares and flashbacks still interfered with his job?

  He’d deal with that on an if and when basis.

  Thanks to Tooly’s expertise, Cam’s study was finally underway. They were on their second sampling site and she’d inserted eight transmitters into the corpulent, brightly colored bodies of Salvelinus alpinus down at the counting fence. Now, a few miles upstream, they were beside a crystal-clear pool below a ten-foot waterfall. The waterfall was the only major obstacle for fish along the course of this brook—until the mine company built the dam.

  She’d set up holding nets and the surgery table, and now they just needed to catch a few more fish for this to qualify as a really good day. Cam smiled. The feeling of success was so heady she bounced on the balls of her feet, impatient to grab the euphoria by the throat and hogtie it so it didn’t get away.

  The water felt icy against her waders, but she loved standing in a river, hundreds of miles from the nearest mall, catching fish that probably hadn’t seen a human before. It felt real—as if her work actually meant something. And fish didn’t care that her pancreas wasn’t in full working order.

  Summer had a solid grip on the land. Flowers popped everywhere, irises and buttercups dotting the landscape, cotton grass puffing along the riverbanks. Birds sang and insects hunted and fish migrated in a fierce rush of activity, taking advantage of this short, much-needed break from ice and snow. It was glorious, and as long as she concentrated on the job, she didn’t have to remember that a woman had been brutalized just a couple of days ago.

  Tooly, Vikki and Tommy—an unlikely combination—pulled the ends of a seine net toward shore. Katie stood with a dip-net ready to catch the gravid char that splashed and struggled in the shallows.

  Arctic char were anadromous, shifting seasonally between fresh and seawater to breed and eat. They grew slowly but, unlike Pacific salmon, they didn’t necessarily die after they spawned. Cam’s tags would tell them the location of vital spawning and overwintering areas in this river system and which areas needed protecting.

  The species was highly sensitive to environmental disturbances. Not only was the threat of pollution a problem, but if combined with rising temperatures as a result of climate change, the effects could be made worse by increased natural mineral runoff. The precarious equilibrium between man’s needs and nature reminded Cam of her own daily battle with diabetes. The key to success was about getting the balance right, and she wanted to help make that happen.

  She wiped the sweat from her eyes, then filled a red cooler with fresh water and dragged it to the shore. She scooped in a couple more buckets of water before adding a vial of pre-measured clove oil, a natural anesthetic.

  It stank.

  “We’ve got seven fish here, Dr. Young,” Katie shouted excitedly, getting splashed in the face by an irritated tail for her enthusiasm.

  “That’s great, guys. And call me Cam. Dr. Young is my mother.” Cam flicked on the battery-operated bubblers that aerated the anesthetic bath. She opened a number-10 scalpel blade, attached it to the holder and set it to the side of her über-sophisticated washing-up-bowl surgery table.

  “Put a fish in the cooler, Katie. Vikki, I need you to record data.”

  Her friend sauntered over and took up the notebook and pen Cam had laid out. The hot weather had Vikki wearing a sheer bug jacket over a black sports bra.

  “When can I start taking biological samples?” Vikki asked.

  “Tomorrow, if we catch the same number of fish as we did today.” Cam glanced away from the fish, who was about to turn belly up. “You enjoying your first adventure in the field?”

  Vikki pouted then grinned. “Let’s just say wilderness sounds just fine until you have to pee behind a rock.” They laughed. Despite their different personalities, they’d been friends for a long time. Vikki slapped a blackfly crawling up her neck, blood dribbling over her perfect skin. This wasn’t an easy environment to work in. “I’m better in the lab, honey, and right now I’d swap places with George in a heartbeat.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Two broken ankles would be worth an exit pass,” Vikki admitted. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a pink scrunchie, while Cam’s was escaping her ball cap like damaged clock springs.

  Katie came over to watch the surgery while Tommy and Tooly laid out the net to dry in the sun. Cam lifted the drugged fish out of the cooler, weighed it, measured its length, calling out the results to Vikki, who recorded everything in the log.

  Cam laid the fish on the bed of foam, adjusted glass tubes so that water pumped directly across the gills, and then she picked up her scalpel. “It’s a male, you can tell from the intense coloration and the kype—the hook—developing on the lower jaw.”

  “I’m not an idiot, Cam,” Vikki snapped.

  Cam blinked. “I was talking to Katie.”

  Vikki blushed. “Oh, sorry.”

  Cam made a small incision in the fish’s belly. “Is that why you decided to come back and do a Ph.D. after all these years? To prove you’re not an idiot?”

  One side of Vikki’s mouth tugged into a wry smile. “I got tired of people assuming my bra size was bigger than my IQ. Plus, modeling isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Cam wanted to ask why she slept around so much but didn’t want to jinx the newfound harmony. Instead she picked up a radio tag, its long coiled antennae sticking out of one end. She removed the attached magnet and explained to Katie, “The tag works on a mercury switch that the magnet turns on and off. The magnet saves the battery when it’s not in operation, so the tags last longer.”

  Telemetry equipment was expensive, so the longer tags lasted, and the more information they got out of each transmitter, the better. She pushed it gently into the fish’s body then inserted a hypodermic needle through the body wall to thread a short bit of antenna outside. She sutured the incision with dissolvable sutures, and the fish was in the recovery pool when the next fish turned belly-up in the anesthetic. It wasn’t difficult work once you were organized. Catching fish was the limiting factor.

  Tooly came to stand watch as she did the next surgery. He didn’t say much but she was reassured by his presence. There was a rustle in the undergrowth and Cam gave a squeak as a rabbit hopped out of a bush. She grinned sheepishly. “Thought it might be a bear.”

  “Bear?” Vikki swiveled to face the bush and bumped up against Cam. “I do not want to meet a bear.”

  “Don’t panic,” Cam laughed. “We have Tooly to save us. Right, Tooly?”

  The old man nodded, those black unfathomable eyes staring off into the bush.

  “And I have a whistle and pepper spray in my pocket, and some bear bangers in my pack, thanks to Daniel.”

  Vikki muttered something uncomplimentary under her breath that sounded like, “Freak.”

  “Hey, you were all over him when we first arrived. What’d he do?” Cam could have bitten off her tongue for asking.

  Vikki shot her a glare. “Nothing. And he’ll never get the chance to do nothing ever again. Jerk.”

  Did that mean they hadn’t slept together? Cam quirked a brow and Vikki’s lips sank at the corners. They made a beautiful couple, and despite Vikki’s protests they were very much alike—maybe too alike.

  “Believe me, despite the dreamy exterior? Daniel Fox isn’t worth it.” Vikki wrote down the next tag number.

  Cam’s stomach hurt. She concentrated on the surgery, but she wouldn’t be honest if she didn’t admit to a large dose of disappointment—not that she’d ever sleep with him, but…

  A red admiral butterf
ly danced through the air and landed on a purple thistle nearby. She closed a suture and snipped it off with her surgical hemostats. Then she took the fish over to the recovery area and saw the first one beginning to swim around the enclosure, groggily bumping into rocks. She gave the second fish to Katie to revive, and netted the first fish and released it into the river. It wove its way clumsily to the shelter of the deeper pools on the other side of the river. Tooly came to stand beside her and they watched the expensive equipment swim away.

  “How do you know it won’t die?” the old man asked. He’d taken a keen interest in their study.

  “I don’t. Not until I track it swimming up and down the brook.” She gave the old man a smile and hoped she didn’t smell as bad as he did.

  Actually, given the clove oil, she probably smelled worse. She needed a long bath and a big dose of Happy perfume.

  “It’s the best option we have for studying migration.” She wanted to ask him about the fauna and flora in this region but it felt hypocritical for her to marvel at his expertise and then help destroy it. “You could fight this, you know,” she muttered under her breath. “You could protest to the Nunatsiavut government, persuade the mine company to use the next river valley over. I could help.”

  Tooly stared at the water, a stoic expression of ancient wisdom on his face. Cam felt like an ignorant child.

  “A long time ago, when my mother died, I fought with my brother over this land and I won. He was sent south to be educated by the government because they thought they knew best.” Tooly spat on the ground. “I was full of piss and vinegar. I thought one day he would return and we’d be brothers again. But he never came home.” He spread his arms wide to encompass the land, the sky, the river.

  The gentle flow of water over rocks and heat of the sun penetrated Cam. Birds sang in the trees, the smell of pollen ripe on the breeze. Tommy and Katie moved in closer to listen. Vikki checked her watch.

  “Now my brother has money, lives in a nice house, and his grandchildren go to school to learn the old ways.” Tooly shook his head, opaque eyes trying to conceal pain. “The old ways are dead except in books. So maybe all these years later, I realize it was my brother who won. More than fifty years ago I’d already lost this land, but I was too stubborn to know it.”

  Daniel threw rocks in the harbor and watched the ripples fan out and then fade into the surface of the water. He’d taken the urine test, and the nurse had told him to wait about an hour for the results. If he failed, the inference was that he’d be on the next flight south and his stuff would follow ASAP.

  His mouth felt like cotton wool and he didn’t know why he gave a damn. There were plenty of other flying jobs.

  The Doc’s face flashed through his mind, and a wave of regret washed over him. That knowledge sat in the pit of his stomach like an IED because no matter how hard he’d tried to avoid emotional entanglement, somehow, that cute-as-a-button, pain-in-the-ass academic had gotten under his skin.

  Maybe getting fired would be for the best. Tooly would keep her safe in the bush for the next few months. Daniel would submerge himself in some other remote community, where he could find a woman and a drink without worrying about the consequences. And now he was thinking about sex and alcohol again.

  “Shit.” He threw another stone across the bay, gulls eyeing the splashes with avarice.

  Ever since he’d told himself he couldn’t have a beer, he’d hungered after it. He couldn’t stop thinking about having one last drink. The same way he wanted sex. He threw another rock far out to sea. And rather than remembering any of the women he’d been with over the years, he kept picturing the cheeky smile on a fully clad fish biologist—who he would never go near—and that pissed him off.

  So now he had another thing he desperately wanted to forget, and like everything else, the harder he tried to forget, the more it hammered his brain. He didn’t realize he was moving toward the bar until he was halfway there. A dog barked, a humongous husky chained outside a house that needed a new deck and a paint job. A woman with no front teeth tripped out the front door and down onto the gravel road. Daniel recognized her jaundiced, emaciated face. She was a local who was usually pie-eyed by lunch. Bile rose in his throat and he had to stop to spit it out behind the building. He wiped his mouth and tried to steady his breathing.

  Great self-control, mate. Sterling character trait, following the drunk to the bar.

  Perhaps it was time to admit he definitely had a problem. He started back toward the clinic. Plenty of ex-SAS boys turned to drink when they left the Regiment. Alcohol softened the blow of not knowing what to do with yourself, but all too often the alcohol gained control. Daniel did not want to turn into one of those sad, pathetic bastards who drowned themselves in Johnnie Walker and glory days. He’d rather plow into a cliff face or shoot himself in the head than end up a drooling, incoherent has-been.

  As if he wasn’t already…

  He marched up the steps and into the clinic just as the nurse came through from one of the rooms in the back.

  “Well?” he demanded. The overhead strip light blinked once like a reprimand. “Do you have the results?” He wanted this finished.

  She adjusted both her cuffs before she answered. “You’re clean.”

  “What?” He jerked back, eyebrows jumping. “Really?”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.” For the first time, her dark eyes twinkled in her serious round face.

  Daniel grabbed her and, even though she yelped in surprise, he lifted her off the floor, whirling her in a circle. The other people in the waiting room giggled and pointed.

  He put her back down and kissed one smooth plump cheek. “Thank you.”

  She raised a hand to pat his face and he felt a punch in the gentle connection.

  “Don’t fall, Mr. Fox.” Her mouth was downturned and her eyes were filled with sadness. “In this part of the world, we see too many people fall.”

  Chapter Nine

  Rise Above the Rest The Royal Air Force

  Sweaty and tired, Cam stripped off her latex gloves and threw them in the garbage. “I’m going to walk upriver to check out the terrain,” she told Vikki.

  The wobbly feeling was probably from leaning over all day. They’d finished tagging, and she wanted to check out one of the locations she’d picked for her remote monitoring stations. The helicopter had to make two trips to the ship anyway, so she wouldn’t get left behind. And, as overprotective as Daniel was, there was no way he’d leave her in the bush overnight.

  “You want me to come with you?” Tooly asked.

  Vikki looked stricken, clearly wanting to keep the old man close. Cam grabbed an apple and some water from her pack, stuffed the bear bangers into the pocket of her bug jacket.

  “Nah. I’ll make sure I’m back for the second run to the ship.” She grabbed the handheld radio. “I’ll take this.” And just to reassure herself because she still felt a little dizzy, she pricked her thumb and did a quick glucose test.

  “What is that?” Tommy asked, nodding to her funky pink meter. Tooly watched too. The kid had been treating her with a little more respect since he realized she’d been the one to find Sylvie’s body. She’d gained some kind of morbid teenage cachet. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket, young eyes intent.

  “Blood sugar meter.” The reading was 94, which was fine. She was just tired after a long hard day. She shoved the device into her fanny pack and clipped it around her waist.

  “Cool.”

  She laughed. “Yeah. Glad you think so.”

  She pushed through some berry bushes and followed a path beside the rocks at the edge of the waterfall. Negotiating the smooth flat stones at the top of the falls, she broke the seal on her water bottle and sucked back a huge gulp, enjoying the clean blast to her senses, washing away the insidious odors of clove oil and bug spray and fish slime.

  She crunched on her apple. Chewed and washed down the sweetness with water. S
he sniffed the air and realized there was another smell in addition to her and the pollen. “Phew.” She wrinkled her nose at the musky odor. Maybe a skunk?

  A set of tracks were baked into the mud below and she inched down the steep rock face toward them. She started to slip, ripping out cotton grass in an effort to slow her descent, and landed with a bone-jarring thud. Ouch. Balancing against the rock, she swept the water bottle across her brow, grateful for the coolness.

  She crouched and studied the tracks. Having specialized in fish, she wasn’t much of a mammalogist. She could recognize a bear, or wolf—courtesy of the family retriever—and cat tracks. But she couldn’t distinguish between a black or polar bear, or tell the difference between a wolf and a coyote.

  Pity she hadn’t brought Tooly with her, she’d bet he’d know what it was. It was the same type of track she’d photographed that day by the pond with Daniel. She hadn’t downloaded them yet because her memory card was huge and she hadn’t wanted Daniel’s naked body on her computer. The temptation to turn him into a screensaver was too great, and that would just feed his galactic ego.

  She frowned and leaned closer. It looked a bit like a wolf track. Four visible claws, so definitely not a cat which had retractable claws—a relief considering that would be one big kitty. Kneeling on the hard-packed dirt, she let out a low whistle. It was almost the same size as her hand.

  And there were five toes, she realized suddenly. The outer one hadn’t shown up in most of the prints, but there was one distinct track that had a smaller indentation from a fifth toe.

  She frowned. What did a porcupine footprint look like? Or a badger? She straightened, rubbing her dusty palms on her thighs and decided to go get Tooly and ask him.

  The tall granite boulder she’d slid down loomed over her, making her muscles ache just looking at it. It would be easier to wade back through the brook. She pushed through the bushes to the edge of the stream. There was an ear-splitting scream from down by the falls, followed by Vikki yelling, “Caaaaaaam!”