Page 3 of True North Mountain Man

I've been talking more this week than I have in three years. I'm aware of it the way you're aware of using a muscle you've let go. It's not effort exactly. It's the surprise of the thing still working.

Thursday, Nadia gets her hand caught in a coil of chain and swears in a way that would strip paint, and I unwind it and hold her wrist longer than the injury requires, turning it to the light. No cut. A red line across the knuckles that'll bruise.

"You'll want gloves," I say.

"I have gloves. They're in the truck. That's a whole other conversation about who I am as a person."

Her wrist is warm and she hasn't taken it back. Rain in her eyelashes. Mud on her cheekbone in the shape of her own thumbprint.

I've been managing this since Tuesday, and I stop managing it for about four seconds.

Her pulse is going under my thumb, faster than the chain accounts for. She's looking at my mouth. She's close enough that I can feel the heat coming off her collar where the jacket's open, and my whole body has arrived at a decision without consulting me — I want her against the nearest tree with her legs around my waist and I want it so specifically and so immediately that the wanting has weather in it, rain and cold and the smell of her hair, all of it welded to the one idea.

She turns her hand over in mine. Palm up. Doesn't say anything.

Forty-one years old and I've got no plan for this at all.

I let go. I pick up the chain.

"Creed."

"Light's going," I say, which is true, and cowardly, and she lets me have it.

We walk the last of it out in the dark, headlamps on, and at the trucks she stands with her hand on her door and says, "Same time," and I say, "Same time," and then she's two red lights going down the fire road and I'm standing in a clearing I've stood alone in for twenty Octobers, listening to it get quiet again.

Inside, I bank the stove and open the field book to log the day, and I sit for a while without writing anything.

There's a category for this. Field work is full of it. You get a reading that doesn't fit the model and you don't throw it out and you don't force it — you write it down with a question mark and you keep walking, because either the next reading explains it or it doesn't, and forcing a conclusion before the evidence supports it is how a man ends up in front of a review board with his licence on the table.

I can’t write her down. She’s a question mark. A question I am going to find the answer to.

three

Nadia

"Have we—"

I hear how much of it is already out, and I turn the sentence in the air like a truck on ice.

"—got the 'seventy-eight aerials? The originals. I want the north end at full size."

Creed doesn't look up from the stove. He's crouched there feeding in split fir, and the light is doing something to the side of his face that I'm going to have to stop looking at.

"Roll behind the door," he says. "Bottom one."

It's Saturday. The rain that started Wednesday never properly stopped, and at four the fire road ran two inches of water and he said the thing he says instead of asking — you're not driving that tonight — and I said okay before I'd decided to.

So now there's a stew that came out of a can and got improved with an onion, one lamp, the 1978 aerials unrolled under the wrench and the rock and the compass, and the specific quiet of a place forty kilometres from anything.

We talk about my thesis. We talk about his award year, sideways.

"There's a year I can't tell you much about," he says. "Five, six back. I signed an easement survey that went to court — a boundary I'd got right and couldn't prove I'd got right, because the original monument was in a river by then. Two years of litigation, my licence under review the whole time." He squares the aerial to the table edge. "I worked straight through it. I had to. And there's a stretch in there where I went to things — meetings, ceremonies — and I couldn't tell you now who was in the room."

I look very hard at the North Ridge at 1:20,000.

It was me. I was in the room.

Twelve words. I have them lined up and ready and I don't spend them, and the not-spending has a taste to it now, metallic, like biting a spoon.