I fingered the note. Who do you think this is? And why is he doing it?
Its no one out of your past, thats 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. Theyre not usually as big as this nor so specific, but the money comes in. Its 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. Ill 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. Ill leave as soon as I can get some equipment together.
Susskind said, Its been nice having you around, Bob. Youre 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 youll make out all right. If you dont youre liable to explode like a bomb. And Id like to hear how youre 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
The helicopter hovered just above treetop height and I shouted to the pilot, Thatll 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 didnt 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 didnt 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, Youll 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 wasnt 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 days work, but Ive always found that it pays not to run headlong into a job.
A lot of men especially city men live like pigs when theyre camping. They stop shaving, they dont 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 youre 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 dont have to eat all of an egg to know its rotten and you dont have to pound every foot of land to know what youll find in it and what you wont 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 Id 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 Id seen from the air, was probably palaeozoic, mostly sedimentary. I doubted if Id 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 its 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 wasnt more than a mile long and was fed by a biggish stream which came in from the north. Id 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 dont like tents theyre no warmer inside than out and they tend to leak if you dont coddle them. In good weather all a man needs is a windbreak, which is easily assembled from materials at hand which dont 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 Id 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 Id had all the meat I needed in Fort Farrell and the idea of lake trout sizzling in a skillet felt good. But next day Id see if I could get me some venison, if I didnt 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. Id 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 couldnt leave it alone. It was like when you accidentally bite the inside of your cheek and you find you cant 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 couldnt remember anything about it, and whats more, didnt 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 didnt 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 wasnt 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 oclock 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 Im a bigger man than most and it doesnt show much on me. However, it still makes a sizeable load to tote, so you can see why I dont like tents.
I made certain that the big yellow circle on the back of the pack was clearly visible. Thats something I consider really important. Anywhere you walk in the woods on the North American continent youre likely to find fool hunters wholl 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 wouldnt 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 wasnt 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 doesnt the Government do a real geological survey and get the job done once and for all? All I can say is that those people dont understand anything about the problems. It would take an army of geologists a hundred years to check every square mile of Canada, and then theyd 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 couldnt give away uranium in the 1930s. Therell 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 Id made pretty certain that the Matterson Corporation wasnt 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 wasnt much to show that this was so, but there was enough; a scrap of wool caught on a twig near the camp which hadnt been there twelve hours earlier, a fresh scrape on the bark of a tree which I hadnt 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 its downright discourteous to come within spitting distance of a mans camp and not make yourself known, and anyone who hadnt secrecy on his mind wouldnt do it. I dont particularly mind a man having his secrets Ive got some of my own but if a mans secrets involve me then I dont like it and Im apt to go off pop. Still, there wasnt 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 youre 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 wasnt pointing right at me; on the other hand, it wasnt 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 didnt care to make an issue of it right then it wouldnt have been the right time. I just said, Hi! Where did you spring from?
His jaw tightened and I saw he wasnt very old, maybe in his early twenties. He said, You havent answered my question.
I didnt like that tightening jaw and I hoped his trigger finger wasnt 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 dont know what business it is of yours, buster, but Im doing a survey for the Matterson Corporation.
No, youre 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 hadnt spotted it before. It would have been pretty invisible from the other side. I looked at my young friend. So?
So thats where Matterson land stops. He grinned, but there was no humour in him. I was hoping youd come this way the marker makes explanations easier.