Page 7 of True North Mountain Man

I hold the door while she gets in. She starts the truck and the engine noise gives us both somewhere to put the next four seconds.

I watch the tail lights all the way to the bend, and then a while longer, because the bend is where the sound goes and the sound takes about ninety seconds more.

Inside, I bank the stove and open the field book, and under the entry from the first week — under Osei — anticipates and the question mark — I write one more line.

Asked her directly. She answered a different question.

Then I sit there with the pencil in my hand and think about what I actually have. A word said with the stress in a particular place. A laugh I've heard before. Eight seconds of glass and harbour. A woman who came four hundred kilometres up a road nobody drives for a signature, who has been half a step ahead of me since the morning she arrived, and who has now declined, twice in ninety seconds, to say a sentence she was holding.

None of that is proof. Any three of those readings on their own I'd throw out.

But I've never had readings agree with each other like this and been wrong about what it meant, and by the time the stove is down to coals I'm no longer pretending I haven't understood something.

I don't force it. Forcing it would be the same mistake in a different jacket.

I let it stand overnight, and in the morning I take the long way up to the repeater.

But the readings are starting to agree with each other, and I've never once in my life had that happen and been wrong about what it meant.

five

Nadia

I'm rolling the mylar overlay when the cabin door opens.

Creed comes in with his satellite unit in his hand and stands with his back against the door. He went up to the shoulder before first light, alone, and told me he'd meet me at the north pins, and he did not meet me at the north pins.

Thursday, the twenty-fourth. Two days from the end of his contract. Seven from my filing deadline. Nine days since I got out of my truck in the mud at the bottom of those steps and decided that twelve words weren't worth the trouble.

"I pulled an email," he says. "Up at the repeater. Old one, from the society — they send a delegate list out after every event and I never delete anything."

I keep my eyes on the Mylar.

"The Marine Building," he says. "Five years ago this month. There's an N. Osei on the student list, poster session, ecological corridors, northern BC." He sets the unit down on the table. "I stood by the window with a woman for about twenty minutes and she told me she wasn't mapping what was there. She was mapping what wasn't."

"Creed—"

"Was that you?"

"Yes."

The stove ticks. He doesn't move off the door.

"How long have you known?"

"Since the second I got out of the truck."

He takes that the way he takes everything, all the way in, without visible motion. Then he crosses to the table and sits down across from me, which is somehow worse than if he'd shouted.

"Explain it to me," he says. "I'm not angry. I want that on the record, because I can hear how this sounds." He turns his hand over on the table. "It's the nine days." He looks at his own hands on the table. "Every hour of the nine days, you knew something about the two of us that I didn't, and you let me keep not knowing it. I've been walking around inside a version of this where I'm the one who found something unusual. Where the strange part — the ease of it, how fast — was mine to be surprised by. You watched me be surprised by it. That's what I can't get level."

And there it is, said plainly, without one cruel word in it, which is so much harder to hear than cruelty.

So I tell him. All of it.

I tell him about the borrowed shoes and the poster tube and how the entire room had spent two hours looking at my badge and then over my shoulder, and how he took his award lanyard off and put it in his pocket and asked me what I was mapping and then didn't interrupt me once. Twenty minutes. I tell him I went home and wrote down the thing he said about scale so I wouldn't lose it, and that I've used it in every project I've run since, and that I could never once say where I got it because I couldn't find him again — no profile, no site, a business line that rolled to a service, a P.O. box in Kamloops. Six weeks of looking. Then eleven years of good work in a city forty minutes from wherever he was, and never once a room with both of us in it, because he signs field books and I sign reports and they don't route through the same desk. My contracts come through regional planning. His come through inventory and tenure. Meridian even subcontracts the survey work through a broker, so I have never in my career seen a surveyor's name on my own file until this one, when the Ministry wanted a wet signature and Ravi Bhatt read me a name over the phone and I sat down on the edge of my desk.

"I got to the top of that fire road," I say, "and you didn't know me. And it was — Creed, it was such a relief."