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I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so – not just yet. I want to get some field experience.’
He nodded approvingly. ‘Got any ideas about that?’
I said, ‘I don’t think I want to be a company man; I’d rather work for myself. I reckon the North-West Territories are bursting with opportunities for a freelance geologist.’
Susskind was doubtful. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing.’ He looked across at me and smiled. ‘A mite self-conscious about your face, are you? And you want to get away from people – go into the desert – is that it?’
‘There’s a little of that in it,’ I said unwillingly. ‘But I meant what I said. I think I’ll make out in the north.’
‘You’ve been in hospitals for a year and a half,’ said Susskind. ‘And you don’t know many people. What you should do is to go out, get drunk, make friends – maybe get yourself a wife.’
‘Good God!’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get married.’
He waved his tankard. ‘Why not? You find yourself a really good girl and tell her the whole story. It won’t make any difference to her if she loves you.’
‘So you’re turning into a marriage counsellor,’ I said. ‘Why have you never got married?’
‘Who’d marry a cantankerous bastard like me?’ He moved restlessly and spilled ash down his shirt-front. ‘I’ve been holding out on you, bud. You’ve been a pretty expensive proposition, you know. You don’t think a thousand bucks a month has paid for what you’ve had? Roberts doesn’t come cheap and there were the tutors, too – not to mention my own ludicrously expensive services.’
I said, ‘What are you getting at, Susskind?’
‘When the first envelope came with its cargo of a thousand dollars, this was in it.’
He handed me a slip of paper. There was the line of typing: FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT. Underneath was another sentence: IN THE EVENT OF THESE FUNDS BEING INSUFFICIENT, PLEASE INSERT THE FOLLOWING AD IN THE PERSONAL COLUMN OF THE VANCOUVER SUN – R.B.G. WANTS MORE.
Susskind said, ‘When you came up to Montreal I decided it was time for more money so I put the ad. in the paper. Whoever is printing this money doubled the ante. In the last year and a half you’ve had thirty-six thousand dollars; there are nearly four thousand bucks left in the kitty – what do you want to do with it?’
‘Give it to some charity,’ I said.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Susskind. ‘You’ll need a stake if you’re setting off into the wide blue yonder. Pocket your pride and take it.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
‘I don’t see what else you can do but take it,’ he observed; ‘You haven’t a cent otherwise.’
I fingered the note. ‘Who do you think this is? And why is he doing it?’
‘It’s no one out of your past, that’s for sure,’ said Susskind. ‘The gang that Grant was running with could hardly scratch up ten dollars between them. All hospitals get these anonymous donations. They’re not usually as big as this nor so specific, but the money comes in. It’s probably some eccentric millionaire who read about you in the paper and decided to do something about it.’ He shrugged. ‘There are two thousand bucks a month still coming in. What do we do about that?’
I scribbled on the note and tossed it back to him. He read it and laughed. ‘“R.B.G. SAYS STOP.” I’ll put it in the personal column and see what happens.’ He poured us more beer. ‘When are you taking off for the icy wastes?’
I said, ‘I guess I will use the balance of the money. I’ll leave as soon as I can get some equipment together.’
Susskind said, ‘It’s been nice having you around, Bob. You’re quite a nice guy. Remember to keep it that way, do you hear? No poking and prying – keep your face to the future and forget the past and you’ll make out all right. If you don’t you’re liable to explode like a bomb. And I’d like to hear how you’re getting on from time to time.’
Two weeks later I left Montreal and headed north-west. I suppose if anyone was my father it was Susskind, the man with the tough, ruthless, kindly mind. He gave me a taste for tobacco in the form of cigarettes, although I never got around to smoking as many as he did. He also gave me my life and sanity.
His full name was Abraham Isaac Susskind.
I always called him Susskind.
THREE (#ulink_91259d60-2f45-5986-9818-c2b610f2bf97)
The helicopter hovered just above treetop height and I shouted to the pilot, ‘That’ll do it; just over there in the clearing by the lake.’
He nodded, and the machine moved sideways slowly and settled by the lakeside, the downdraught sending ripples bouncing over the quiet water. There was the usual soggy feeling on touchdown as the weight came on to the hydraulic suspension and then all was still save for the engine vibrations as the rotor slowly flapped around.
The pilot didn’t switch off. I slammed the door open and began to pitch out my gear – the unbreakable stuff that would survive the slight fall. Then I climbed down and began to take out the cases of instruments. The pilot didn’t help at all; he just sat in the driving seat and watched me work. I suppose it was against his union rules to lug baggage.
When I had got everything out I shouted to him, ‘You’ll be back a week tomorrow?’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘About eleven in the morning.’
I stood back and watched him take off and the helicopter disappeared over the trees like a big ungainly grasshopper. Then I set about making camp. I wasn’t going to do anything more that day except make camp and, maybe, do a little fishing. That might sound as though I was cheating the Matterson Corporation out of the best part of a day’s work, but I’ve always found that it pays not to run headlong into a job.
A lot of men – especially city men – live like pigs when they’re camping. They stop shaving, they don’t dig a proper latrine, and they live exclusively on a diet of beans. I like to make myself comfortable, and that takes time. Another thing is that you can do an awful lot of work when just loafing around camp. When you’re waiting for the fish to bite your eye is taking in the lie of the land and that can tell an experienced field geologist a hell of a lot. You don’t have to eat all of an egg to know it’s rotten and you don’t have to pound every foot of land to know what you’ll find in it and what you won’t find.
So I made camp. I dug the latrine and used it because I needed to. I got some dry driftwood from the shore and built a fire, then dug out the coffee-pot and set some water to boil. By the time I’d gathered enough spruce boughs to make a bed it was time to have coffee, so I sat with my back against a rock and looked over the lake speculatively.
From what I could see the lake lay slap-bang on a discontinuity. This side of the lake was almost certainly mesozoic, a mixture of sedimentary and volcanic rocks – good prospecting country. The other side, by the lie of the land and what I’d seen from the air, was probably palaeozoic, mostly sedimentary. I doubted if I’d find much over there, but I had to go and look.
I took a sip of the scalding coffee and scooped up a handful of pebbles to examine them. Idly I let them fall from my hand one at a time, then threw the last one into the lake where it made a small ‘plop’ and sent out a widening circle of ripples. The lake itself was a product of the last ice age. The ice had pushed its way all over the land, the tongues of glaciers carving valleys through solid rock. It lay on the land for a long time and then, as quickly as it had come, so it departed.
Speed is a relative term. To a watching man a glacier moves slowly but it’s the equivalent of a hundred yards’ sprint when compared to other geological processes. Anyway, the glaciers retreated, dropping the rock fragments they had fractured and splintered from the bedrock. When that happened a rock wall was formed called a moraine, a natural dam behind which a lake or pond can form. Canada is full of them, and a large part of Canadian geology is trying to think like a piece of ice, trying to figure which way the ice moved so many thousands of years ago so that you can account for the rocks which are otherwise unaccountably out of place.
This lake was more of a large pond. It wasn’t more than a mile long and was fed by a biggish stream which came in from the north. I’d seen the moraine from the air and traced the stream flowing south from the lake to where it tumbled over the escarpment and where the Matterson Corporation was going to build a dam.
I threw out the dregs of coffee and washed the pot and the enamel cup, then set to and built a windbreak. I don’t like tents – they’re no warmer inside than out and they tend to leak if you don’t coddle them. In good weather all a man needs is a windbreak, which is easily assembled from materials at hand which don’t have to be back-packed like a tent, and in bad weather you can make a waterproof roof if you have the know-how. But it took me quite a long time in the North-West Territories to get that know-how.
By mid-afternoon I had the camp ship-shape. Everything was where I wanted it and where I could get at it quickly if I needed it. It was a standard set-up I’d worked out over the years. The Polar Eskimos have carried that principle to a fine art; a stranger can drop into an unknown igloo, put out his hand in the dark and be certain of finding the oil-lamp or the bone fish-hooks. Armies use it, too; a man transferred to a strange camp still knows where to find the paymaster without half trying. I suppose it can be defined as good housekeeping.
The plop of a fish in the lake made me realize I was hungry, so I decided to find out how good the trout were. Fish is no good for a sustained diet in a cold climate – for that you need good fat meat – but I’d had all the meat I needed in Fort Farrell and the idea of lake trout sizzling in a skillet felt good. But next day I’d see if I could get me some venison, if I didn’t have to go too far out of my way for it.
That evening, lying on the springy spruce and looking up at a sky full of diamonds, I thought about the Trinavants. I’d deliberately put the thing out of my mind because I was a little scared of monkeying around with it in view of what Susskind had said, but I found I couldn’t leave it alone. It was like when you accidentally bite the inside of your cheek and you find you can’t stop tongueing the sore place.
It certainly was a strange story. Why in hell should Matterson want to erase the name and memory of John Trinavant? I drew on a cigarette thoughtfully and watched the dull red eye of the dying embers on the fire. I was more and more certain that whatever was going on was centred on that auto accident. But three of the participants were dead, and the fourth couldn’t remember anything about it, and what’s more, didn’t want to. So that seemed a dead end.
Who profited from the Trinavants’ death? Certainly Bull Matterson had profited. With that option agreement he had the whole commercial empire in his fist – and all to himself. A motive for murder? Certainly Bull Matterson ran his business hard on cruel lines if McDougall was to be believed. But not every tight-fisted businessman was a murderer.
Item: Where was Bull Matterson at the time of the accident?
Who else profited? Obviously Clare Trinavant. And where was she at the time of the accident? In Switzerland, you damn’ fool, and she was a chit of a schoolgirl at that. Delete Clare Trinavant.
Who else?
Apparently no one else profited – not in money, anyway. Could there be a way to profit other than in money? I didn’t know enough about the personalities involved even to speculate, so that was another dead end – for the time being.
I jerked myself from the doze. What the hell was I thinking of? I wasn’t going to get mixed up in this thing. It was too dangerous for me personally.
I was even more sure of that when I woke up at two o’clock in the morning drenched with sweat and quivering with nerves. I had had the Dream again.
II
Things seemed brighter in the light of the dawn, but then they always do. I cooked breakfast – beans, bacon and fried eggs – and wolfed it down hungrily, then picked up the pack I had assembled the night before. A backwoods geologist on the move resembles a perambulating Christmas tree more than anything else, but I’m a bigger man than most and it doesn’t show much on me. However, it still makes a sizeable load to tote, so you can see why I don’t like tents.
I made certain that the big yellow circle on the back of the pack was clearly visible. That’s something I consider really important. Anywhere you walk in the woods on the North American continent you’re likely to find fool hunters who’ll let loose a 30.30 at anything that moves. That big yellow circle was just to make them pause before they squeezed the trigger, just time enough for them to figure that there are no yellow-spotted animals haunting the woods. For the same reason I wore a yellow-and-red checkered mackinaw that a drunken Indian wouldn’t be seen dead in, and a woollen cap with a big red bobble on the top. I was a real colourful character.
I checked the breech of my rifle to make sure there wasn’t one up the spout, slipped on the safety-catch and set off, heading south along the lake shore. I had established my base and I was ready to do the southern end of the survey. In one week the helicopter would pick me up and take me north, ready to cover the northern end. This valley was going to get a thorough going-over.
At the end of the first day I checked my findings against the Government geological map which was, to say the best of it, sketchy; in fact, in parts it was downright blank. People sometimes ask me: ‘Why doesn’t the Government do a real geological survey and get the job done once and for all?’ All I can say is that those people don’t understand anything about the problems. It would take an army of geologists a hundred years to check every square mile of Canada, and then they’d have to do it again because some joker would have invented a gadget to see metals five hundred feet underground; or, maybe, someone else would find a need for some esoteric metal hitherto useless. Alumina ores were pretty useless in 1900 and you couldn’t give away uranium in the 1930s. There’ll still be jobs for a guy like me for many years to come.
What little was on the Government map checked with what I had, but I had it in more detail. A few traces of molybdenum and a little zinc and lead, but nothing to get the Matterson Corporation in an uproar about. When a geologist speaks of a trace, he means just that.
I carried on the next day, and the day after that, and by the end of the week I’d made pretty certain that the Matterson Corporation wasn’t going to get rich mining the southern end of the Kinoxi Valley. I had everything packed back at the camp and was sitting twiddling my thumbs when the helicopter arrived, and I must say he was dead on time.
This time he dropped me in the northern area by a stream, and again I spent the day making camp. The next day I was off once more in the usual routine, just putting one foot in front of the other and keeping my eyes open.
On the third day I realized I was being watched. There wasn’t much to show that this was so, but there was enough; a scrap of wool caught on a twig near the camp which hadn’t been there twelve hours earlier, a fresh scrape on the bark of a tree which I hadn’t made and, once only, a wink of light from a distant hillside to show that someone had incautiously exposed binoculars to direct sunlight.
Now, in the north woods it’s downright discourteous to come within spitting distance of a man’s camp and not make yourself known, and anyone who hadn’t secrecy on his mind wouldn’t do it. I don’t particularly mind a man having his secrets – I’ve got some of my own – but if a man’s secrets involve me then I don’t like it and I’m apt to go off pop. Still, there wasn’t much I could do about it except carry on and hope to surprise this snoopy character somehow.
On the fifth day I had just the far northern part of the valley to inspect, so I decided to go right as far as I had to and make an overnight camp at the top of the valley. I was walking by the stream, trudging along, when a voice behind me said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
I froze, then turned round carefully. A tall man in a red mackinaw was standing just off the trail casually holding a hunting rifle. The rifle wasn’t pointing right at me; on the other hand, it wasn’t pointing very far away. In fact, it was a moot point whether I was being held up at gun-point or not. Since this guy had just stepped out from behind a tree he had deliberately ambushed me, so I didn’t care to make an issue of it right then – it wouldn’t have been the right time. I just said, ‘Hi! Where did you spring from?’
His jaw tightened and I saw he wasn’t very old, maybe in his early twenties. He said, ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
I didn’t like that tightening jaw and I hoped his trigger finger wasn’t tightening too. Young fellows his age can go off at half-cock awfully easily. I shifted the pack on my back. ‘Just going up to the head of the valley.’
‘Doing what?’
I said evenly, ‘I don’t know what business it is of yours, buster, but I’m doing a survey for the Matterson Corporation.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘Not on this land.’ He jerked his head down the valley. ‘See that marker?’
I looked in the direction he indicated and saw a small cairn of stones, much overgrown, which is why I hadn’t spotted it before. It would have been pretty invisible from the other side. I looked at my young friend. ‘So?’
‘So that’s where Matterson land stops.’ He grinned, but there was no humour in him. ‘I was hoping you’d come this way – the marker makes explanations easier.’
I walked back and looked at the cairn, then glanced at him to find he had followed me with the rifle still held easily in his hands. We had the cairn between us, so I said, ‘It’s all right if I stand here?’
‘Sure,’ he said airily. ‘You can stand there. No law against it.’
‘And you don’t mind me taking off my pack?’
‘Not so long as you don’t put it this side of the marker.’ He grinned and I could see he was enjoying himself. I was prepared to let him – for the moment – so I said nothing, swung the pack to the ground and flexed my shoulders. He didn’t like that – he could see how big I was, and the rifle swung towards me, so there was no question now about being held up.
I pulled the maps out of a side pocket of the pack and consulted them. ‘There’s nothing here about this,’ I said mildly.
‘There wouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘Not on Matterson maps. But this is Trinavant land.’
‘Oh! Would that be Clare Trinavant?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He shifted the rifle impatiently.
I said, ‘Is she available? I’d like to see her.’
‘She’s around, but you won’t see her – not unless she wants to see you.’ He laughed abruptly. ‘I wouldn’t stick around waiting for her; you might take root.’
I jerked my head down the valley. ‘I’ll be camped in that clearing. You push off, sonny, and tell Miss Trinavant that I know where the bodies are buried.’ I don’t know why I said it but it seemed a good thing to say at the time.
His head came up. ‘Huh?’
‘Run away and tell Miss Trinavant just that,’ I said. ‘You’re just an errand boy, you know.’ I stooped, picked up the pack, and turned away, leaving him standing there with his mouth open. By the time I reached the clearing and looked back he had gone.
The fire was going and the coffee was bubbling when I heard voices from up the valley. My friend, the young gunman, came into sight but he’d left his artillery home this time. Behind him came a woman, trimly dressed in jeans, an open-necked shirt and a mackinaw. Some women can wear jeans but not many; Ogden Nash once observed that before a woman wears pants she should see herself walking away. Miss Trinavant definitely had the kind of figure that would look well in anything, even an old burlap sack.
And she looked beautiful even when she was as mad as a hornet. She came striding over to me in a determined sort of way, and demanded, ‘What is all this? Who are you?’
‘My name’s Boyd,’ I said. ‘I’m a geologist working on contract for the Matterson Corporation. I’m …’
She held up her hand and looked at me with frosty eyes. I’d never seen green frost before. ‘That’s enough. This is as far up valley as you go, Mr Boyd. See to it, Jimmy.’
‘That’s what I told him, Miss Trinavant, but he didn’t want to believe me.’
I turned my head and looked at him. ‘Stay out of this, Jimmy boy: Miss Trinavant is on Matterson land by invitation – you’re not, so buzz off. And don’t point a gun at me again or I’ll wrap it round your neck.’
‘Miss Trinavant, that’s a lie,’ he yelled. ‘I never—’
I whirled and hit him. It’s a neat trick if you can get in the right position – you straighten your arm out stiff and pivot from the hips – your hand picks up a hell of a velocity by the time it makes contact. The back of my hand caught him under the jaw and damn’ near lifted him a foot off the ground. He landed flat on his back, flopped around a couple of times like a newly landed trout, and then lay still.
Miss Trinavant was looking at me open-mouthed – I could see her lovely tonsils quite plainly. I rubbed the back of my hand and said mildly, ‘I don’t like liars.’
‘He wasn’t lying,’ she said passionately. ‘He had no gun.’
‘I know when I’m being looked at by a 30.30,’ I said, and stabbed my finger at the prostrate figure in the pine needles. ‘That character has been snooping after me for the last three days: I don’t like that, either. He just got what was coming to him.’
By the way she bared her teeth she was getting set to bite me. ‘You didn’t give him a chance, you big barbarian.’
I let that one go. I’ve been in too many brawls to be witless enough to give the other guy a chance – I leave that to the sporting fighters who earn a living by having their brains beaten out.
She knelt down, and said, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, are you all right?’ Then she looked up. ‘You must have broken his jaw.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hit him hard enough. He’ll just be sore in body and spirit for the next few days.’ I took a pannikin and filled it with water from the stream and dumped it on Jimmy’s face. He stirred and groaned. ‘He’ll be fit to walk in a few minutes. You’d better get him back to wherever you have your camp. And you can tell him that if he comes after me with a gun again I’ll kill him.’
She breathed hard but said nothing, concentrating on arousing Jimmy. Presently he was conscious enough to stand up on groggy feet and he looked at me with undisguised hatred. I said, ‘When you’ve got him bedded down I’ll be glad to see you again, Miss Trinavant. I’ll still be camped here.’
She turned a startled face towards me. ‘What makes you think I ever want to see you again?’ she flared.
