Page 11 of True North Mountain Man

The wind comes across the clearing and moves the snow around on the steps.

"I've turned down two flight changes," I say.

He stops.

"WestJet has emailed me twice about a seat on the eighteenth and again on the twenty-fourth. Ninety-four dollars, both times. I let them both expire." I put my hands in my pockets because otherwise they're going to do something undignified. "I've had a bag in the back of that truck since the second week that I didn't need for a day trip. I've been telling myself it was for weather."

"It wasn't for weather."

"It was not for weather."

Creed comes down the last two steps and stands in front of me.

"I'm not asking you to move to a cabin," he says. "I'd never ask that and you'd never do it and you'd be right not to. But I've got a house in Kamloops that I use like a storage unit, and you've got a firm that lets you file from anywhere with a scanner, and the North Ridge decision is going to generate three years of monitoring work that somebody has to do the ground for."

"Somebody."

"I'm available."

"Are you." I take a handful of his jacket. "What are your rates."

"Steep." He puts his hands on my waist. "I'll want it in writing."

"You'll want everything in writing, it's a pathology."

"It's a profession." His thumbs move once on either side of my spine. "Nadia. I need to say the part underneath, because if I don't say it now I'll say it badly in November over a phone that keeps cutting out. I'm not proposing a monitoring contract. I'm using a monitoring contract as scaffolding, because I've been out of practice at this for so long that I need something to hold on to while I say it."

"Say it, then."

"I want you where I am." He gets it out flat and level, the way he says the things that cost him. "Not for the season. Not while the file's open. I'm forty-one and I've been perfectly content and I'd have gone on being perfectly content for another twenty years, and then you came up that road, and now content is the worst word in the language."

The wind takes the top off a drift by the steps and puts it in the air between us.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay."

"Yes. To all of it — the next thing and the things after." I get up on my toes and kiss him, and his hands come around my back and lift me clean off the snow, and I say the rest of it against his mouth because it's easier there. "I'm not doing another five years of wondering. I'd genuinely rather be hit by a truck."

"That's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."

"I'm a professional communicator."

He kisses me against the side of my own truck with the door still open and the cold coming down off the ridge, and it goes on long enough that my back ends up flat against the panel and his hand ends up inside my collar, and when he finally lifts his head we're both breathing like we've come up a grade.

He carries the last case down the steps and sets it in my back seat, and then opens my door for me, which he has never once done, and it undoes me more than the speech did.

We drive down the fire road in two trucks, mine first, his headlights in my mirror the whole fourteen kilometres. At the gate he gets out and swings it shut and locks it for the season, and the sound it makes is the season ending.

Then he gets back in and follows me into town.

Nadia

One Year Later...

The plaque is smaller than I expected and it's screwed to a post at the trailhead where nobody will ever read it, and I love it beyond all reason.

NORTH RIDGE WILDLIFE CORRIDOR — PROTECTED UNDER THE LAND ACT.