Page 10 of True North Mountain Man

I get a hand up around her throat, thumb under her jaw, no weight in it, and she leans into the hand and closes her eyes. I get both hands on her and let her. She leans down until her hair is around my face and says something filthy about the table into my ear, and laughs, and the laugh is what finishes me.

I hold her down hard by the hips and go with my teeth set and her name somewhere in it.

She collapses onto my chest. Stays there.

Her heartbeat, the stove, the wind on the north wall.

seven

Nadia

The last field book goes into the case at eleven in the morning, and the certification page goes on top of it, and Creed's signature is on the certification page in fountain pen because of course it is.

He takes a long time over it. Reads the whole page first, which he does not need to do, having written it. Then he uncaps the pen, signs, puts the date under it, and turns the page around to face me with two fingers — the way you hand somebody a tool by the handle.

"There," he says. "Now go be right in front of a committee."

Eleven days ago that signature was the only thing in the province I wanted.

October twenty-sixth. Day twenty-one of twenty-one. There's snow on the northwest block, four inches of it since Friday, and we walked the last transect yesterday in it with the light going flat and blue and my model finally, finally closing.

The corridor is continuous. Narrow at the creek — sixty-two metres at the pinch, which is thin but it isn't broken — and continuous all the way to the provincial boundary. Twelve days of ground truth says so, with a wet signature under it, and on Monday it goes to the regional office with my name on the report and his on the data.

Sixty-two. Two metres above the number that would have split one population into two. I ran the final surface at eleven o'clock last night on the cabin table with him asleep four feet away, and when it resolved I sat with my hand over my mouth in the dark like a lunatic.

"That's it," I say.

"That's it."

We pack the cabin out together. It takes two hours and it's oddly formal — the stove swept and the flue closed, the bunk stripped, the propane off, the shutters over the windows and screwed down, the folding table collapsed and hung on its nail. He does it in an order he clearly does not deviate from. I hand him things. He tells me where they go.

"Dry goods in the tin, not the cupboard. Mice."

"Mice."

"They've had twenty years to work out where the cupboard is." He wedges the tin under the bunk frame. "There's a fellow comes up in February to check the roof and I like him to find it the way I left it."

"You've never met him."

"I've met his handwriting."

That's the whole man in four words, and I have to go outside and pretend to be looking at the truck.

The map is the last thing. He rolls it and holds it out.

I put it in the truck so I don't have to have a face for a minute.

When I come back he's standing at the top of the steps looking at the clearing, which is what he does instead of a ceremony, and there's a thing coming and we both know it.

"Nadia."

"Yeah."

"I've been fine up here for twenty years." He says it flatly, the way he says all the things that have taken effort. "I want to be clear that that’s the truth. I liked it. I'd have kept liking it. I'm not going to stand here and tell you I've been suffering, because I haven't, and you'd know."

"I would know."

"But I don't want the handoff to be the end of this." He comes down one step. "You give the Ministry the data on Monday and your reason to be within four hundred kilometres of me is finished, and I've been carrying that around for three days like a stone in my boot. So I'm saying it out loud instead. I'd like there to be a next thing. I'd like a lot of next things."