Page 5 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

I've never once asked anybody to come see it.

three

Anaya

The fire road does genuine harm to my suspension, and I don't care, because at kilometre four the trees change.

They get older. That's the only way I know how to say it. The second-growth stuff along the bottom is all the same height, planted the same year by the same crew, and then you come around the culvert and take the left fork and the forest goes ragged — big spruce with dead tops, deadfall, moss hanging off branches in beards. Light comes down through it in shafts you could put your hand in.

His gate is a length of pipe on a hinge, open, hooked back with wire.

The cabin sits on a bench of flat ground with the slope falling away south. Small. Squared logs, metal roof, a porch with a chair on it and a chair's worth of space beside it where another one isn't. A woodshed stacked to the rafters. Two trucks — one that runs, one that's being kept for parts and isn't being subtle about it.

And below the cabin, down the slope in the sun, the hives.

I've seen apiaries. I did a whole piece on an urban rooftop operation in Burnaby, and I've stood in a field of two hundred boxes in the Okanagan. That was agriculture. This is something else. They're set in the natural clearings between trees, in rows of eight and ten, painted every colour that was ever on sale — sage, faded blue, oxblood, one that used to be yellow — and the whole slope hums.

I get out of the car and stand with my hand on the door and let it come up at me.

A very large dog with a very grey face comes off the porch at a dignified pace and puts his head against my thigh without a single preliminary.

"That's Moss," Heath says from the woodshed. "He's got no boundaries and no teeth to speak of. You're fine."

"Hi, Moss."

"He'll follow you all day if you let him. He's twelve."

"He's magnificent."

Heath comes out of the shed with a smoker in one hand and a bee suit over his shoulder, and he stops when I say it, and he looks at his dog like he's checking the assessment against his own records.

"He is," he says.

The suit's too big.

He doesn't hand it to me and tell me to sort it out. He rolls the cuffs himself, one wrist and then the other, standing close enough that I can smell woodsmoke and something green off his jacket, and he turns each sleeve twice and presses the fold flat with his thumb.

His thumb goes across the inside of my wrist doing it. Both times. He doesn't notice. I notice enough for the pair of us — I stand in a bee suit on a mountain with my pulse going somewhere unhelpful while a thirty-eight-year-old man methodically fixes my sleeves, and I look at the top of his bent head and think about how long it's been since anyone touched me with that much attention and that little agenda.

His knuckles are scarred across the back. There's propolis under his nails, brown-red, worked into the creases the way I saw it at the stall.

"There," he says, and steps back, and has no idea.

"Rule one," he says. "Slow. Everything. You lift a lid slowly, you set it down slowly, you walk past the front of a hive slowly or better yet you don't walk past the front at all. That's their highway. You stand in it, you're a wall."

"Slow. Got it."

"You don't got it yet." He says it without heat, the way you'd correct someone's grip on a knife. "Everybody says it. Then a bee gets in the veil and they find out."

"Does that happen?"

"It'll happen today."

Heath lights the smoker with dry needles and a handful of burlap and gets it going till the smoke comes out cool and white, and then he shows me the thing that undoes me. He crouches at the side of the box with his ear eight inches off the wood, and he listens.

"Hear that?"

I crouch too. Under the general hum there's a texture — a low steady rolling sound, like a bag of dried beans being turned over slowly.