5. Erin
ERIN
It takes two days to rebuild my database from paper, and two weeks later, on Wednesday night my kitchen table looks like a crime board put together by a person with excellent handwriting and a deteriorating grip on their weekend.
Everything I lost off the laptop I had in field notebooks, because my father was a fisherman who didn't trust anything with a battery and I inherited the neurosis.
So I plot it all by hand. Fish kill sites in blue.
Missing bird colonies in green. Every mammal mortality or disappearance since November in red, plus the two collared wolves, and the moose cow nobody's seen since the thaw.
Then I sit back with my cold coffee and look at what I've made, and my stomach drops out of me.
It's a ring, every single point sits inside a band roughly two miles wide that runs around the lake, and the band tightens on the eastern side.
The wetlands, the old mine cuts, the exact ground Nash told me to stay out of on my first afternoon.
Nothing is missing from the outer forest. The species that live entirely away from the water are fine.
Whatever this is, it isn't a disease and it isn't a food-web collapse and it certainly isn't a bad cycle.
It's proximity, it's radius, and radii have centers. The next morning I head out with the loaner cameras and I find the drill cores instead.
They're in a slump at the foot of the east ridge where a bank has sheared off after the rains.
At first I think it's fence post, cut and stacked.
Then I get down in the mud and pull one out and it's stone, a cylinder of it, two inches across, sawn flat at both ends, with a machine-polished skin and a spiral of hairline scoring down its length.
There are forty or fifty of them in the slump. Somebody dumped a core library.
I've handled cores before, at a hydrology field school in Wisconsin that felt very far away at the time and feels like another planet now. These are lakebed. Laminated silt, then a band of organic mud, then a hard gray section shot through with pale threads I can't identify at all.
The last twelve inches of one core doesn't behave.
I hold it up to the light and the fractured face has a faint sheen, like oil on water, and it moves when I turn it.
Not a reflection, the sheen moves against the tilt, sliding the wrong direction.
I turn it four times to be sure. It does it four times.
I sit with a rock and hear myself say, out loud, "That's not a thing rocks do."
I send Nash a picture of the fractured core and tell him I need to see where it came from. He calls less than a minute later.
"I need access to the east cuts," I tell him.
Nash says no twice before he says yes.
"The east cuts are three miles of collapse hazard and no road out."
"Then you'll be very useful."
"Erin."
He's never used my first name before, and my pulse spikes ridiculously, but I keep my face professionally bland.
"The cores came from beneath the lakebed.
There is no legal drilling permit on this lake.
I checked with the state, the county, I even checked with the Army Corps because I was feeling thorough.
Someone drilled a protected waterbody, hauled out fifty cores, analyzed them, and dumped them in a ravine.
I need to find the collar of that hole. If I can put a coordinate on it I can put a federal agency on it. "
He's quiet, working his jaw. Behind him the water is doing its flat gray impression of innocence.
"Monday," he says. "First light. You wear what I recommend, you walk where I do, and when I say we're done, we're done. No negotiation on the last one."
"Deal."
"You agreed to that too fast."
"I'm agreeing in principle," I say. "The implementation is going to be a conversation."
He mutters something that might be a laugh.
On Monday we go in at five-forty in the morning and it's the best one I've had in a year, which says a great deal about the last twelve months.
He moves through the country like he belongs.
No wasted steps, no crashing, and he keeps putting his hand back for the steep bits without looking to see if I've taken it.
He knows the name of everything. Not the field-guide names, the local ones, the ones you only get from someone whose grandfather also walked here.
"That's a witch's broom," I say, pointing at a pine.
"It's not, it's Wyatt's fault. He climbed it at fourteen and broke the leader."
"How is that a real memory you have?"
"Small county," he says, which I'm starting to recognize as his entire personality compressed into two words.
We hit the old timber bridge at nine. It spans a gorge over Cutter Creek, fifty feet of gap and maybe thirty down onto rock, decked in ancient planking with a handrail that's more suggestion than structure. Nash steps on and off the first plank twice, testing.
"It held last October," he says. "Single file. Stay on the…"
And then he stops talking and his head comes up. I don't hear anything. There's water below us and wind in the pines and nothing else. But he is still in a manner I've only seen in animals, entirely committed, weight already shifting backward.
"Off," he says. "Now."
I'm four steps out on the wooden planks and as I turn, a plank under my boot lets go with a crack like a rifle shot.
I drop, and my arms fly outward. My ribs slam the stringer and my legs are hanging over thirty feet of creek boulder, and I'm scrabbling at wet timber with fingers that have suddenly forgotten their purpose.
His hand closes around my wrist, and he hauls me up the entire length of my body one-handed and gets me flat on the decking, and we lie there while the bridge groans and sheds planks into the gorge one at a time like it's counting.
"Don't move," he says. His voice is absolutely level. His heart, under my ear, is not.
We crawl sixteen feet on our stomachs to the far anchor, and I'm looking down the whole time through the gaps at white water, and when we roll off onto solid ground I laugh until I nearly throw up. Then I go back and look at the stringer.
"Nash." My hands have start shaking. "Come here."
The break isn't normal. There's a saw kerf running two-thirds through the beam, clean and square, and the remaining third is fresh splintered wood. Somebody cut it and left exactly enough to hold up a person standing still and not a person walking.
"That's a trap," I say. "That's not sabotage, someone with a handsaw and altered it…"
"I know."
"You knew before it went." I turn on him. "You said off before the wood made a sound. I was watching you. There was nothing to hear."
He holds my eyes, he could lie. I can see him considering it, but he chooses against it, and what he says instead is worse and better both.
"I won't insult you," he says quietly. "I'd like to be honest with you. I just can't yet. Can you give me time?"
Two weeks ago I'd have burned the forest down over an answer like that.
I pick up my pack instead. "You pulled me up one-handed."
"You held on."
"I did." I look at the gorge, then at him. "You'd have gone in with me if I hadn't. You were already leaning."
He doesn't deny it. We walk out the long way, four extra miles, and he takes half my gear without discussing it, and I let him.