2. Creed
two
Creed
"Bank's migrated," Nadia says, from twenty feet up the cut with the rod on her shoulder like she's been carrying rods her whole life. "Look at the alder age classes. That whole terrace is—"
"Younger than the pin."
She comes down the bank in three steps, boots new and already ruined, and stands looking at the water with her hands in her jacket pockets. "So the 'seventy-eight guy set it on a bank that isn't there anymore and everyone since has been correcting to a ghost."
I write terrace migration, alder ~20 yr, benchmark unreliable, see sketch in the field book and turn it so she can see, because she'll want to see, and she does, leaning in over my arm with her hair against my jacket sleeve.
It’s the third day of this.
I've worked with people before. Ministry techs, mostly, kids on their first contract who talk the whole way up the trail because the quiet unnerves them.
I've learned to let it wash past. What I haven't done in a long time is work with someone who arrives at the same place I'm arriving at, half a second ahead, and then waits there without making anything of it.
She does it eight or nine times a day. I'll be reaching for a word and she'll set it down in front of me — attenuates, aspect, pinch point, the exact one, not the near one. It should grate. Being finished is a thing I've never liked. It doesn't grate.
"Good instincts," I said.
"I have those," she said, and drank hers sitting down.
It's been nine years since I ran a season with anybody in it.
The last was a summer placement who quit in August because the silence got into him — he told me that to my face, at the trailhead, like it was my fault, and he wasn't entirely wrong.
People are either loud in the bush or nervous in it.
Loud I can manage. Nervous is contagious.
She's neither. She goes quiet on the climbs and talks on the flats, which is what a person works out for themselves after enough time in the country, and nobody taught her because nobody in her line of work is out here long enough to need teaching.
On the second afternoon she stops dead on the trail and holds a hand up without turning around, and I stop too, and forty seconds later a cow moose crosses the cut sixty metres ahead of us with a calf behind her.
We work the northwest block through the middle of the week. The transects run four hundred metres apiece, up through second-growth spruce so thick the light comes down green, and the work is slow and dull and requires the whole of you — chain, pin, note, sketch, move.
She keeps up. Better than keeps up.
By the second afternoon she's calling out habitat features before I've turned my head, and by the third she's running my raw numbers into her corridor model on a laptop that lives in a dry bag, and every evening the map on my table gets a little more true.
I've been talking more this week than I have in three years. I'm aware of it the way you're aware of using a muscle you've let go. It's not effort exactly. It's the surprise of the thing still working.
Thursday, Nadia gets her hand caught in a coil of chain and swears in a way that would strip paint, and I unwind it and hold her wrist longer than the injury requires, turning it to the light. No cut. A red line across the knuckles that'll bruise.
"You'll want gloves," I say.
"I have gloves. They're in the truck. That's a whole other conversation about who I am as a person."
Her wrist is warm and she hasn't taken it back. Rain in her eyelashes. Mud on her cheekbone in the shape of her own thumbprint.
I've been managing this since Tuesday, and I stop managing it for about four seconds.
Her pulse is going under my thumb, faster than the chain accounts for.
She's looking at my mouth. She's close enough that I can feel the heat coming off her collar where the jacket's open, and my whole body has arrived at a decision without consulting me — I want her against the nearest tree with her legs around my waist and I want it so specifically and so immediately that the wanting has weather in it, rain and cold and the smell of her hair, all of it welded to the one idea.
She turns her hand over in mine. Palm up. Doesn't say anything.
Forty-one years old and I've got no plan for this at all.
I let go. I pick up the chain.
"Creed."
"Light's going," I say, which is true, and cowardly, and she lets me have it.
We walk the last of it out in the dark, headlamps on, and at the trucks she stands with her hand on her door and says, "Same time," and I say, "Same time," and then she's two red lights going down the fire road and I'm standing in a clearing I've stood alone in for twenty Octobers, listening to it get quiet again.
Inside, I bank the stove and open the field book to log the day, and I sit for a while without writing anything.
There's a category for this. Field work is full of it.
You get a reading that doesn't fit the model and you don't throw it out and you don't force it — you write it down with a question mark and you keep walking, because either the next reading explains it or it doesn't, and forcing a conclusion before the evidence supports it is how a man ends up in front of a review board with his licence on the table.
I can’t write her down. She’s a question mark. A question I am going to find the answer to.