Page 6 of True North Mountain Man

She keeps going. I write down chain distances and don't hear a word of it.

Monday. Two days since the storm, and the storm is in the room with us in a way neither of us has put language to.

We're on the last of the northwest block now, high enough that the spruce thins and you can see the whole valley folded up below with the town's smoke lying flat in it. Cold and clear. The kind of day the survey needs and doesn't often get.

Here's the thing about a reading that doesn't fit.

You don't chase it. Chase it and you'll make it fit — a man can make anything fit if he wants it badly enough, and that's the whole lesson of the two years I spent proving a boundary I already knew was right. Every night of it I went back through the same file looking for the thing that would end it, and every night I found something that looked like the thing, and none of them were, because I was reading with an outcome in mind. You leave it alone instead. You keep taking readings. You let the pattern come to you, and if it doesn't come, you write down that it didn't.

So I keep taking readings.

Monday afternoon: she starts a sentence — if you want the model to hold — and I have the end of it before she gets there. That's the reverse of what's been happening all week and it unsettles me more than the rest of it put together.

Monday, last light: she laughs at something the raven does on the ridge pole, head right back, loud, entirely unembarrassed.

I know that laugh. I don't know where from. It's the feeling of finding your own handwriting in a book you don't remember owning.

Tuesday, hauling the rod up the second-last transect, I get eight seconds of something — a window, a great deal of glass, harbour lights coming on past it, and a woman talking to me about what isn't there. Nothing else. No face. A room I can't place, out of forty rooms I can't place from that year.

I have been careful about memory for a long time, because mine is a professional instrument and I know exactly which stretch of it is unreliable. Two years of litigation will do that. You spend that long being told in a courtroom that your recollection is not evidence and you stop treating it like evidence anywhere else. Somewhere in the middle of that stretch I collected an award in a rented suit three days after a deposition, and I could not tell you now how I got home from it.

Tuesday evening she stays for supper and we eat sitting on the step in our coats because the cabin's too warm, and she tells me about a client meeting in Prince George where a man doubted her qualifications and she answered by walking him through the algorithm until he begged her to stop.

"You enjoyed that."

"I enjoyed it enormously. That's the part they don't warn you about." She knocks her shoulder into mine. "You get so good at the armour you start looking forward to putting it on."

"You're not wearing it up here."

She goes quiet. It lasts long enough that I turn my head.

"No," she says. "I'm not."

Wednesday, at the truck, I ask her.

"Osei." She turns with the dry bag half over her shoulder, evening coming down blue behind her. "Have we met before? Before this month."

Everything about her stops.

It's brief. Less than a second, and if I hadn't spent thirty days a year for twenty years watching a bubble settle in a vial I'd have missed it. But I've done nothing else with my life, and I see it.

"Before this month?"

"Conference, maybe. Ministry thing. I've done a lot of those and I'm no good at faces."

She adjusts the strap on her shoulder. "You've got a distinctive face, Creed. I think I'd remember."

Which is not an answer to the question I asked.

It's a good answer. It would work on almost anyone. If I hadn't spent thirty days a year for twenty years watching a bubble settle I'd have taken it and said goodnight, and the difference between a man who takes it and a man who doesn't is nothing more impressive than practice.

"Right," I say.

"Creed." She has one hand on the door frame. Her mouth opens.

The wind comes across the clearing and takes the snow that isn't snow yet, the hard grains of it, and rattles them off the hood.

"It's nothing," she says.