When Is a Man Read online

  “Branch 65,” Paul said as they neared a fork in the road. The signpost, painted in white, hung from a broken-topped cedar.

  “What about it? Keep left.”

  “A work crew. I met the camp cook. I think she invited me for lunch.” Paul frowned, thinking he wouldn’t take her up on the offer, and maybe it was too late anyway. “Kind of a bumpy drive just to get a meal and some company.”

  “It gets worse farther up,” Jory said. “The road turns to absolute shit. You need an ATV and a jockstrap. Take a left down there.”

  Tree branches scraped the window, and twigs snapped under the tires as he negotiated the narrow trail’s steep descent. A hairpin switchback spat them onto a clearing, a bench of land fifty metres above the river. On the far side of the bench, a forest of hemlock and fir dipped into a small, narrow ravine, where a fast-moving stream cascaded through the woods and met the river. He stepped out, stretched, and smelled rotten wood warming in the sun. Among the dried grasses, fireweed, and thistle, bits of rusted metal peeked out, the iron spokes and rim of a wagon wheel, a corroded chassis.

  “What’s all this?”

  Jory pulled the kayak from the back of Paul’s vehicle. He glanced around. “The junk? Part of an old sawmill, I think.”

  “Hence the name? The Flumes?”

  “I guess.”

  Paul waded through the grass and inspected the metal scraps—an axle attached to a gear the size of a truck tire, the corroded skeletal hoops of an old waterline, the wooden slats long gone into the earth, corroded tin sheets from the remains of a sluice or drum. He tripped over the remnants of concrete foundations at his feet, the faint traces of vanished walls.

  “Little help here?” said Jory behind him.

  Paul stood up. “Sorry.”

  “I’m joking.” He’d stripped down to his underwear. From a duffle bag, he pulled out a neoprene wetsuit and hood and tugged it over his muscular, mostly hairless frame and finally zipped up a sporty-looking yellow lifejacket. “I’m going to roast if I don’t get in the water. You know, if you like old stuff, you’re going to love living in the valley.”

  “Don’t plan on living here,” Paul said, but Jory had already slung the kayak under one arm and grasped his paddle and helmet in the other hand. As they walked through the field, the young man rattled off a list of local antiquities: trappers’ cabins in the woods, cemeteries in the middle of nowhere, mineshafts, abandoned logging equipment. They reached the edge of the bench, which dropped off steeply. A well-worn goat trail led down the slope. Below them, the river roiled and surged between narrow channels of boulders, each the size of a small car, breaking the current into pockets of white froth where the water turned back on itself, all noise and chaos. Compared with this, the stretch of river running past his camp was as placid as a pond.

  “The Flumes,” Jory said proudly.

  “Are you for real?”

  Jory was already halfway down, negotiating the trail with ease. Skidding on his heels, Paul followed him down to a rocky beach beside a narrow strip of relatively calm water sheltered from the rapids.

  “There’s no way you paddle this,” Paul said.

  “Fucking rights we do. Some big holes, stoppers, and some pour-overs. You go through that chute”—Jory pointed out a spot between boulders—“and play in those waves for a while, then shoot downstream.”

  “You’ve done this a lot?”

  “Oh, fuck yeah,” said the young man. He hesitated. “Well, Cordell usually takes us through the tricky spots. He’s our guide.”

  Paul shuddered and shook his head emphatically. “You know, I’m the only guy up here and I really, really don’t want to see a body floating past my camp. They already fished one out of the river last week.”

  Jory snorted. He was stretching his arms above his head, limbering his wrists by turning them in circles. “Heard about that. Probably some douchebag looking to rip off someone’s patch o’ weed.”

  “He was an old man.”

  Jory edged the front of the kayak into the water and lowered himself into the seat. “See you back at camp.” He laughed again as he dug one end of the paddle into the gravel. “You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.”

  “That’s why I brought you,” Paul said. Jory pushed off, pointing the kayak’s nose upstream. He tucked in with a few hard paddles until he hit the main current. Just as quickly, he spun to face downstream and slipped between the largest of the boulders.

  For a split second he vanished, then shot over the ridge and into the waves. The kayak wrenched around, and then the front end plunged straight down in a pirouette. Jory arched his body until his head touched the back of the kayak, and the boat popped out and then surfed across the length of the wave. Every time the river threatened to topple the small craft, Jory would thrust his paddle down, lean in toward the ridge and vortex of the stopper, and launch back into the waves. He could have been a bit of spray, a droplet of dyed water, the way he crested and spun and cartwheeled, airborne. Paul shifted from foot to foot, and his hands and shoulders flexed and flinched at each of Jory’s twists and spirals. He felt sick with how useless he would be if anything went wrong.

  He paced the shore, angling for a better view, but there was no imagining the rapids from Jory’s perspective. Certain features of the river obviously required specific techniques—the way a bouldering problem or parkour route was solved by a particular sequence of moves. In those sports, your body worked directly with static things, a type of conversation between your limbs and a climbing hold or structure. Kayaking looked far more complex and dynamic. The river was always moving and changing, dangerously influenced by things hidden below the surface. Within the deafening pandemonium, a frenetic dialogue was taking place between water, rock, and gravity, which produced currents and forces that spoke to the kayak with their pummelling and pulling, their suctions and expulsions. And these wordless signals reverberated through the fibreglass shell and into the paddler, who reacted. Or if he had some mastery—and Jory did—he could accomplish more than basic survival, just getting through the rapids. He could choose his course, take pleasure in his technique. He recreated, he played. Always on the edge of disaster.

  Suddenly and inexplicably frustrated, Paul turned and climbed up the trail, panting and sweating at the top. Hands on his hips, he sucked in a huge breath and then wandered into the clearing to slow his heart.

  He parted the tall weeds, prodded and nudged bolts and rivets embedded in the ground, cleared away brush from wire coils and decayed wood. A set of cogs and gears, caked with clay and attached by an axle to an empty metal drum, bore serial numbers on their corroded sides. The white ceramic emblems and metalwork of an old stove peeked out at him from under a clump of yews at the edge of the forest. An Adanac, the wooden handle on the main oven door rotted away. He tried to pull open the smaller compartments, but some had rusted shut, while the rest were filled with collections of leaves, twigs, and moss, the nests of packrats or squirrels. The date on the upper ledge above the iron top read 1930. They were strangely compelling and peaceful, these old and inert things, like artifacts carefully placed in an open-air museum.

  With a shock of guilt, he remembered the young man on the water and ran back to the edge. The Flumes churned and roiled, empty—but there, downstream, a flash of red, then the yellow blade of the paddle, the kayak and paddler cutting through the smaller rapids, around the bend and out of sight. The river must get easier from there, Jory would be safe enough. But what did he know? The Immitoin was a mystery to him.

  The Jeep still sat in the middle of the site when he returned, but the kayak, dripping wet, had been bungeed back on top. Jory was here somewhere. Trusting his gut, he ducked inside his camper and grabbed a beer Tanner had left in the fridge. He walked through the woods and found the young man sitting on the bank, his elbows resting on his knees, and his fingers kneading his temples.

  “I had to sit and get the shakes out,” Jory said with a laugh. His hands tr
embled slightly, and he looked a little stunned.

  “Hit a rough patch? Rougher than the Flumes?”

  “Let’s just say the river’s full of surprises.”

  Paul nodded. “Split a beer?”

  Jory took one long drink, head back, then rose to his feet and handed the half-empty bottle back to Paul. “Hey,” he said. “I have something for you. To say thanks.”

  “No need.”

  “Seriously. I know what I did was stupid. Like, really fucking stupid. You didn’t have to give me a ride up.”

  “Guess I didn’t feel it was my job to say so—I mean, I’m like a guest here.”

  Jory laughed. “Counting a few hundred trout’ll make you feel right at home.”

  When they returned to camp, Jory pulled a metre-long piece of broad PVC pipe from the back of his Jeep. He grinned. “It’s like a scope. For spotting fish. Dad made it. See? He glued a circle of Plexiglas on one end here, and the handles he salvaged off old cupboards.”

  Paul rolled the pipe in his hands. The handles were brass, almost dainty. One end of the pipe had been carved to rest against a person’s forehead and chin. At the other end, a crust of yellow epoxy fringed the Plexiglas like icing. “I don’t get it.”

  “He cheats. We go fly-fishing and he makes me wade to the edge of pools and eddies to scout for cutthroat. Pretty hilarious. A real fisherman would shit if he heard that.”

  “If I meet one, I won’t tell him.”

  “Guess that was it for the year.” Jory had opened his truck door and leaned on it, his eyes toward the river. He sighed. “Fucking summer clearance sales.”

  “What do you do, exactly?”

  “Me and a couple of buddies have a little shop. Skis, bikes, boards, all that.”

  “Should have guessed.” He saw the young man a little differently. If he could run a shop, there must be more to him than a simple adrenalin junkie.

  “Catch you in town soon?”

  “Of course. I have to get this back to you, don’t I?” Paul held up the scope.

  “No rush. Enjoy.” Jory tilted his head and sniffed the air. “It’s going to be a cold fall.”

  “Really?” The air was dead, and sweat trickled down Paul’s back.

  “Yup. Hope you got some decent porn on your laptop, because you’ll be cooped up in that trailer before long.” He hopped into the driver’s seat. “Later.”

  That evening Paul was wondering about the old mill site at the Flumes and remembered the musty book Tanner had left behind. He dug it out of the cupboard: Dixon’s Gold: The Pioneer Years of the Immitoin Valley. He thumbed through the chapters, but the book’s mildewy smell drove him outdoors. Light shone dimly through the trees, the sun’s last rays banking off the tops of the mountains to the south. He thought it a strange juxtaposition, to read of the Immitoin’s first white explorers while he sat on the same banks a century and a half later, similarly lost and disoriented in his own, modern way.

  Dixon arrives in Shellycoat.

  The town of Shellycoat was named for a sturgeon. 1857: Bruce Dixon, a flame-haired and rangy man who’d once travelled from the mouth of the Columbia as far north as Kootanae House and Boat Encampment, finds himself in a hellish portage up the Immitoin. He and his expedition seek easy passages west, to the coast. It’s late spring, and while the journey down the Columbia was tumultuous and deadly (a fatal capsizing at the appropriately named Death Rapids), the gruelling nature of their journey threatens to wear their spirits down entirely. The river is less majestic than the Columbia or even McGillivray’s (later called the Kootenay), but equally savage: a younger, yet more primitive cousin of those greater rivers. Along the shores of McGillivray’s, there existed pools, meanders, and braided channels that gave the explorers respite from the undertows and whirlpools. Here, the Immitoin gibbers in lunatic fashion across its entire width, and if it pauses for a breath, it is a space too short in which to launch boats.

  He and his men have come upon a place where the land forms a long bench at the base of steep hills. Between forests of slender lodgepole pine and lush bracken fern are copses of trembling aspen and meadows saturated by ephemeral streams and two substantial creeks. On the face of each surrounding hill, at least one waterfall can be seen cascading through the blue trees. Kekulis and the charcoal remains of fire pits mark the camps of native fishermen, but the Sinixt and the other tribes will not arrive until autumn, when the salmon are running.

  Twilight approaches. The older men rub Balm of Gilead into their palms and wrists and tell stories around the fire while the youngest ones groan from the day’s labours. On the pretext of washing his tin plate and mug, Dixon has gone down to the river to watch the bats and hovering caddis flies, and to think. He knows that before the end of tomorrow, they will reach the place where the river widens into the first lake, and they will be blessed with a full day of easy paddling before the short portage to the second lake. Where they are now is a habitable place. He wonders if they would be derelict in their duties to not explore some of the small creeks here for minerals. There have been tentative explorations by others before him; but while otter, beaver, and fox pelts were harvested from the valley, no claims have been struck.

  As he squats at the water’s edge and dips his plate into the steely rapids, he feels a cold upwelling in his stomach and knows something is about to rise from the water, and then, less than twenty feet from where his heels dig into the sand, something does. The rattle of shells and coins accompanies the figure that launches itself above the spray and surging currents. A Shellycoat, Dixon thinks in horror. The bogeyman of the rivers in Scottish lore. The creature, the size of a young man, beckons once with a splayed hand as it arcs, naked and grey in the pale orange light of sunset. It holds itself in the air long enough to wrench Dixon’s fate away from other explorations or, more precisely, to fix his fate to this particular place.

  Then it vanishes, and he finds himself sprawled on the ground, terrified and struck by a newfound sense of purpose. Some men might have taken the creature as a bad omen, but he knows, even as his jellied arms and legs refuse to lift him, that he and his men cannot simply pass through here. Nothing like this would have occurred in a place that didn’t hold great promise. They say a Shellycoat is a joker as much as a demon, and likes a good song as much as a drowning.

  A year later he will wonder if the wind had displaced the rattling sounds from their true source, or if the gesturing limb was only the combination of skutes and jaw and fleshy whiskers—by then, he will have seen men haul one of the great fish onto their boats. It won’t matter. He will already be building what will become a trading post and, in another twenty years, a prosperous mining town. For the time being, it will remain a desolate outpost waiting for the first prospectors to arrive.

  9

  The job’s repetitiveness began to overwhelm him, the thousand identical twists of arms and shoulders and hips from weir to cooler, cooler to measuring table, table to river. Kipes and mossy scales, pale bellies, the fluttering gills beneath the bony operculum. The slight give of fish flesh against his latex gloves, fish smells, clove oil. The night, full of eerie sound and cold silence. When he tried to fall asleep, the same motions played out over and over against the back of his eyelids.

  Deep down he’d expected the work to transform him physically back to what he had been, or something even more lean and rugged. He’d grown stronger—not enough—from constantly netting fish and scrubbing the fence, and could wade through the creek for longer periods of time before growing tired. But his beard made him look older and dishevelled, not rugged and manly, and his returning strength was overshadowed by soreness. His elbows, wrists, and fingers began to ache and seize from the cold water.

  And yet he spent his afternoons in pursuit of the trout. At first, he hadn’t understood what the scope actually did, as simple as it sounded. One morning after breakfast, he went down to Basket Creek to maintain the traps and fence. As he scooped a handful of twigs and leaves off the wir
e mesh, he suddenly realized he could use the scope to check for holes and damage underwater. Returning from his quick march to the trailer, he plunged the fish scope into the middle of the channel. The sudden clarity surprised and delighted him, and for a split second he remembered (or imagined) snorkelling in a lake as a boy. What water did to light, and what light did to rock, looked almost artificial, like a digitally enhanced photo. Near the vivid orange and white of larger stones lay pebbles flecked with red and black glitter, or streaked with cheerful jades and pinks, the subtle varieties of colour and grain magnified. Flakes of bark slipped through the gaps in the wire, the current tumbled pebbles downstream. A tiny stonefly nymph clung to the underside of a rock near the toes of his waders.

  Stooped over the scope’s eyepiece, he worked his way along the length of the fence and then upstream, sinking into the type of reverie a silent film can induce. Things drifted past the narrow circumference of his view. He even heard the creek differently, as though his ears had become more invested in the polyphonic roar of the stream, more receptive to sounds occurring beneath the surface.

  He reached the bridge that crossed Basket Creek and kept going. At the edge of a pool, he spotted a flash of movement. He crouched and angled the scope until he saw a broader portion of the creek. Cutthroat hovered close to the surface, their small, football-shaped bodies dwarfed by the bull trout staging below them. The bellies of the male bulls blazed, iridescent and molten. In the shallower water, a female trout with one of his new, bright blue tags scraped the gravel with industrious flicks of her tail. As she dug her redd, the finer sands rose and glittered. Diffused, refracted light in the floating sediment created a distorted world—each pebble, each blue-tinged halo on the trout’s flank, preternaturally glorious.

  No one had come by the camp since Jory, and he finally felt alone—felt it too keenly, choked up by certain sights: the silver flash and distant rumble of a jet passing overhead, a satellite breaking loose from the static cluster of stars to continue its monotonous loop. Clouds blew in toward the end of the week, and the night air grew colder. Huckleberries ripened by the paths down to the water, and the leaves of the ash and willow began to turn. Sometimes a mist rose in the early mornings and filled the river valley, the landscape showing the grey face of its isolation.