The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger Read Free Book Online

sky happened to be, and the brown of these roads that cut their way, deeper and deeper every season, into the bush. Nothing changed here, the pines moving past kilometer after kilometer, the low-lying foliage closest to the road coated white brown with dust. Patches of dense natural forest, and then ordered, soldierlike spans of planted stock.
    The uniformity of this place had a way of lulling a person into something like a dream. Once, when Tom was working as camp manager for another outfit, he lost a spare tire along one of these roads; it had bounced off the back of his flatbed during a fuel run and he hadn’t noticed until he got back to camp. He could have lost it anywhere during the hundred-klick journey. He asked one of the planters to help him find it and they drove at a crawl, Tom looking out his window into the ditch and the other guy covering the passenger’s side. After an hour they were losing the light and the guy Tom had brought with him had given up, dozed with his head against the window. They’d been working since five in the morning and it was now coming up to ten o’clock. After a full day’s work, the road became hypnotic, nothing changing, no buildings or intersections to mark the distance. Nothing to watch out for. There was only the kilometer signage, small white signs dinged and battered, placed five kilometers apart, marking the distance from where the dirt road started so drivers could radio one another where they were on the narrow roads, heading deeper into the bush or returning with a load of timber back to the yards in town. Without this system, the only warning you’d get from an oncoming logging truck would be a rumble and a cloud of dust, and then it would be on top of you.
    It was only a tire, and they could have taken the cost of it out of his paycheck. But he couldn’t stand the waste and having made a careless mistake. The longer he drove, the harder it was to turn back, because maybe the tire would be around the next bend. Once or twice, he thought he saw a moose stepping out of the trees, but it was only his fatigue and the crawling shadow created by his headlights. The bush could play tricks like that, could easily fool you into seeing a thing that wasn’t there.
      
    He was getting closer to camp now, less than an hour away, and Carolina’s smell was still on his skin, the smoke from their fire in his hair and on his jacket. Up ahead, the hump of a black bear on all fours marked a silhouette against the road. By the time Tom got to where the bear had been, all he saw of it was its round rump bounding into the bush, disappearing like a stone into water.
    A voice he recognized called its position over the radio. “Two oh seven. Empty.”
    Tom picked up his handset. “Mr. Sweet,” he said.
    “Yes, boss,” came the lisped reply, followed by laughter.
    “See you in camp.”
    “Roger that, chief.”
      
    The approach to Takla Lake was a rough and winding trail just big enough for a vehicle to pass through, alder branches slapping the windows. Tom pulled into camp and saw that the cook van was already parked at the far end of the clearing, and there was Nix, back in camp for her second year, sitting on the tailgate, smoking. She watched him drive up and saluted with her cigarette when he rolled down his window.
    “How long you been here?” he asked. “I thought you were coming up with Matt and Roland.”
    She shrugged. “They had to sort something out. Some mix-up with a water pipe?”
    “You mean the shower pipe?” he asked.
    “Dunno, chief. Something about a pipe.” She wore sunglasses and had a red bandanna tied over her short, dark hair.
    Tom looked across the calm, black surface of Takla Lake to the Skeena Mountains on its western shore. This crooked finger of water was connected to two other lakes, Stuart and Trembleur. Two hundred years before, the mountains would have seen the first Europeans canoe up from Simon Fraser’s post on Stuart Lake to kill for