2. Shaw
two
Shaw
I'm out before dawn.
That's how it always starts; the thermos filled in the dark, the truck rumbling down the gravel track before the sky has decided on a color.
The blind I set overnight is forty minutes up the trail, tucked into a stand of spruce above a meadow where I've been watching a pair of great grey owls for the better part of a week.
Patient work. The kind most people can't do.
I've never had trouble being patient.
I check the blind, swap the memory card, and sit for two hours in the early grey light waiting for the female to return to the nest. She doesn't. I'm not frustrated.
She'll come when she comes and not before, and there's no amount of wanting that changes that.
I eat the sandwich I brought, drink half the thermos, watch a red squirrel work through the spruce boughs overhead with furious efficiency.
By mid-morning I'm on my way back down, the trail familiar under my boots in the way that only comes from years of the same route in all weathers.
I round the bend above the lower meadow and stop.
There's a woman sitting on the flat rock I use as a rest point. She's facing away from me, toward the open sky above the valley, watching something. No pack. No map visible. Just sitting, both hands loose in her lap, completely still.
My first instinct is mild irritation. Strangers on this trail are usually lost or loud or both. I wait for her to hear me and startle.
She doesn't.
I follow her line of sight. Hawk up high, working a thermal in long, slow circles. Red-tailed. Male, by the size. She's tracking it the way I'd track a shot — not watching so much as reading, anticipating the turn before it happens.
I stand there longer than I mean to. Long enough to notice that her hair is loose down her back and the morning light is doing something particular to it, the kind of particular I'd normally be reaching for my camera for.
Long enough to register that she has the posture of someone who is genuinely, completely at rest.
I've photographed wildlife for fifteen years. I know the difference between an animal that knows it's being watched and one that doesn't. She knows. She just doesn't care.
When I finally move forward she says, without turning: "Morning."
"Morning," I say.
She keeps her eyes on the hawk. I keep walking and then she says, still watching the sky: "Nice shot. By the creek, maybe twenty minutes back. The light came through the canopy just right."
I stop.
She'd heard my shutter. Through dense spruce, at a hundred metres minimum, she'd heard a single frame fire and knew exactly what it meant.
I turn and look at her properly. She's turned to look at me too, and up close she's beautiful.
Dark eyes, direct. A mouth that looks like it's got something wry waiting behind it.
She's watching me the way I was watching her a minute ago and then she turns back to the hawk like neither of us did anything remarkable.
I walk the rest of the trail with that sitting in my chest like a splinter. The kind of thing you keep touching to see if it's still there.
I don't think about her again. Or I try not to.
I develop the creek shots in the afternoon, standing in the red dark of the back room with the smell of fixer sharp in the air.
The light had been better than good. A barn swallow cutting through a shaft of sunlight between the firs, wings half-folded, the kind of image that takes days of waiting and one-fortieth of a second to catch.
I review it on the screen and it's not what I was looking for.
I'm not sure what I'm looking for lately. That's been true for a while.
I eat supper on the porch and watch the valley go from gold to purple below. This is the part of the day I like best. The town down there, small and lit, going about its business without requiring anything from me. The trail dark above. The ridge to myself.
Complete. That's the word for it. My life is complete.
I go inside, review the owl shots from the morning blind, find nothing worth keeping, and go to bed.
I'm back on the trail before dawn.
She's there again.
Further up this time, on a section of trail that veers close to the north-facing slope where the wildflowers have been going all month. She's crouched down looking at something in the undergrowth and again she hears me before I get close enough to announce myself, and again she doesn't startle.
"There's a nest," she says, without preamble. "Low in the huckleberry. Song sparrow, I think. Three eggs."
I slow. Crouch beside her without quite deciding to.
She's right — the nest is there, tucked neat and deep, the female settled on it watching us with furious black eyes.
We're close enough that I can smell whatever she's using in her hair, something clean and faintly herbal, and I'm aware of the warmth coming off her in the cool morning air. I look at the nest.
"Song sparrow," I confirm.
We stay there for a moment, neither of us moving. When I stand she stands too, and we walk the same direction because there's only one trail and it would be strange to pretend otherwise.
She doesn't fill the silence. That's the thing I notice first and then keep noticing.
Most people, alone with someone they've just met, generate noise — questions, comments, the anxious paving-over of empty space.
She just walks. Looks at the mountain. Occasionally says something short and accurate about what she's seeing.
I find myself looking at her sideways when she's not watching me.
The way she moves through terrain — easy and unhurried, like she grew up near country like this, like her feet know what to do with uneven ground.
There's a small scar at her jaw, barely visible.
Her hands when she points out a hawk feather caught in a branch are capable-looking, no-nonsense. I have a habit of noticing hands.
I ask where she's from. Prince George, she says. Originally. Vancouver most recently, though that part's over now.
I don't ask what that means. Not my business.
But the particular quality of the way she says over — not sad, not bitter, just factual in the way of someone who has processed a thing fully and set it down — I hear that clearly. I respect it more than I know what to do with.
We reach the junction where the trail splits. Upper fork goes toward my property. Lower fork goes back toward town.
She pauses at the junction, looking up the upper trail.
The morning light is full now and it catches the side of her face and I think, involuntarily, about aperture and angle and what the spruce behind her would do for a background.
I don't photograph people. Never have. I'm thinking about it anyway.
"Is that private?" she asks.
"My land starts about half a kilometre up."
She nods. Looks at the lower trail. Back up. Her profile is — I look away.
I should keep going. Memory card to swap, lens to clean, three weeks of field notes to sort.
"Diner's good for lunch," I hear myself say.
She looks at me. I keep my face neutral. She has the kind of direct gaze that most people flinch from and she doesn't even seem to notice she's doing it.
"I know," she says. "I've been twice."
"Right."
A pause.
"I could go a third time," she says.
We sit across from each other in the back booth at Juniper's for two hours.
She tells me about the land-use work. I tell her about the grizzly — eleven days in the backcountry last October, tracking a male across three drainages, sleeping rough, waiting.
She listens without interrupting. When I get to the shot she asks: "What did you do after? "
"Sat there for a while."
She nods. Like that's the right answer.
Across the table she's got both hands wrapped around her mug and she's watching me with that same quality of attention she'd given the hawk — like I'm something worth looking at and she's in no hurry to look away.
I can't remember the last time someone looked at me like that.
Like I was interesting. Like there was something here worth the patience.
It does something to me that I don't have a name for yet.
Walking back up Main Street she's not asking anything from me. No questions about the ridge or whether I get lonely. Just beside me, easy, going back to her afternoon.
At the corner where we diverge I stop. She stops. There's a beat that goes a second longer than it needs to, and I'm standing close enough to see that the directness in her eyes isn't a performance. It's just how she's built.
"I'll be on the trail tomorrow," I say.
The corner of her mouth moves. "I know where it is."
She goes left. I go straight.
I drive back up the ridge thinking about a woman who heard my shutter through a hundred metres of bush and knew exactly what it was. Who crouched next to me over a sparrow's nest and didn't fill the quiet. Who looked at me across a diner table like she was in no rush to stop.
I review the day's shots that evening and don't find what I'm looking for in any of them.
I used to be sure what I was looking for. I'm not sure anymore.
That's new.