Page 10 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

My editor emails Tuesday. Lock final scope by the 30th? Studio dates in Vancouver are Nov 3–7 and we can't move them.

My flight out of Kamloops is the 28th. It's been sitting in my inbox like a stone in a shoe and I've been walking on it.

Thursday I'm up at the yard and the light does its four o'clock thing — low and sideways through the spruce onto the boxes, and the old sage-green one at the end of the second row goes luminous.

And I take out my phone and photograph it.

Then I move two steps left and photograph it again.

Then I crouch to get the blur of the entrance in the foreground and think caption: the last warm hour of a season that's ending, and think about which frame crops square, and somewhere in the middle of that I hear the shed door.

He's standing there with a stack of empty frames on his shoulder. He isn't angry — that would be easier. He's got the look of a man checking a forecast he already suspected.

"Good light," he says.

"Heath—"

"It is. I'm not being smart with you." He puts the frames in the truck bed without looking back at me. "Best light of the year, that hour. I've watched it hit that hive for eleven seasons."

"And you've never photographed it."

"No."

He goes back in the shed.

I stand in the good light by myself and feel the ground tilt under the last twelve days.

This isn't content, this is different, I've stopped narrating my every move and just started to… live.

He's different for the rest of the day.

He does the wintering work with his back to me, and when I laugh at something Moss does he doesn't look over to see what it was.

Friday's the same, and at eight I get my coat and say I should sleep at the motel, and he says okay.

That's all. Okay. He doesn't walk me to the car.

I drive down in the dark with my headlights making a tunnel out of the spruce, and by the culvert I'm crying, which is humiliating and takes me completely by surprise.

I don't go back on Saturday.

I tell myself it's because of work. Laptop on the motel bed, heater rattling, four hundred words by noon and every one of them bad in a way I can feel without rereading.

I've done twelve-day trips before. Haida Gwaii, the Peace, a salmon camp on the Skeena. I've always liked the last day. There's a clean feeling to closing a notebook and driving away with the thing you came for in the passenger seat.

I don't have that clean feeling. I have an ache under my sternum, low and constant, because there is a man forty minutes up a fire road who spent nine days letting me into the only thing he's ever fully owned and who has now, correctly, begun closing the door.

I don't call him. There's no signal up there and no phone in the cabin. I never asked about it, not once, because it never came up — because I never thought about how you'd reach him if you needed to.

Sunday morning I drive back up.

He's at the woodshed when I come through the gate. He stops with an armload of split fir and watches me park.

He doesn't say you came back. Doesn't say anything about it at all — carries the wood in, comes out and looks at me.

"Do you want me to leave?"

"No."