4. Creed
four
Creed
She says corridor with the weight on the front of it. CORR-idor. Slightly clipped, like the word's a piece of equipment she's carried a long way.
And something triggers deep in my memory.
"—which is why the pinch point matters more than the total area," she's saying, "you can have eleven thousand hectares of perfect habitat and if the corridor necks to sixty metres at the highway you've got two populations, not one—"
"Say that again."
"Which part?"
"Corridor."
She stops with the pencil against her lip. "Corridor."
"Hm."
"Creed."
"Nothing." I go back to the traverse. "Keep going."
She keeps going. I write down chain distances and don't hear a word of it.
Monday. Two days since the storm, and the storm is in the room with us in a way neither of us has put language to.
We're on the last of the northwest block now, high enough that the spruce thins and you can see the whole valley folded up below with the town's smoke lying flat in it. Cold and clear. The kind of day the survey needs and doesn't often get.
Here's the thing about a reading that doesn't fit.
You don't chase it. Chase it and you'll make it fit — a man can make anything fit if he wants it badly enough, and that's the whole lesson of the two years I spent proving a boundary I already knew was right.
Every night of it I went back through the same file looking for the thing that would end it, and every night I found something that looked like the thing, and none of them were, because I was reading with an outcome in mind.
You leave it alone instead. You keep taking readings.
You let the pattern come to you, and if it doesn't come, you write down that it didn't.
So I keep taking readings.
Monday afternoon: she starts a sentence — if you want the model to hold — and I have the end of it before she gets there. That's the reverse of what's been happening all week and it unsettles me more than the rest of it put together.
Monday, last light: she laughs at something the raven does on the ridge pole, head right back, loud, entirely unembarrassed.
I know that laugh. I don't know where from. It's the feeling of finding your own handwriting in a book you don't remember owning.
Tuesday, hauling the rod up the second-last transect, I get eight seconds of something — a window, a great deal of glass, harbour lights coming on past it, and a woman talking to me about what isn't there. Nothing else. No face. A room I can't place, out of forty rooms I can't place from that year.
I have been careful about memory for a long time, because mine is a professional instrument and I know exactly which stretch of it is unreliable.
Two years of litigation will do that. You spend that long being told in a courtroom that your recollection is not evidence and you stop treating it like evidence anywhere else.
Somewhere in the middle of that stretch I collected an award in a rented suit three days after a deposition, and I could not tell you now how I got home from it.
Tuesday evening she stays for supper and we eat sitting on the step in our coats because the cabin's too warm, and she tells me about a client meeting in Prince George where a man doubted her qualifications and she answered by walking him through the algorithm until he begged her to stop.
"You enjoyed that."
"I enjoyed it enormously. That's the part they don't warn you about." She knocks her shoulder into mine. "You get so good at the armour you start looking forward to putting it on."
"You're not wearing it up here."
She goes quiet. It lasts long enough that I turn my head.
"No," she says. "I'm not."
Wednesday, at the truck, I ask her.
"Osei." She turns with the dry bag half over her shoulder, evening coming down blue behind her. "Have we met before? Before this month."
Everything about her stops.
It's brief. Less than a second, and if I hadn't spent thirty days a year for twenty years watching a bubble settle in a vial I'd have missed it. But I've done nothing else with my life, and I see it.
"Before this month?"
"Conference, maybe. Ministry thing. I've done a lot of those and I'm no good at faces."
She adjusts the strap on her shoulder. "You've got a distinctive face, Creed. I think I'd remember."
Which is not an answer to the question I asked.
It's a good answer. It would work on almost anyone. If I hadn't spent thirty days a year for twenty years watching a bubble settle I'd have taken it and said goodnight, and the difference between a man who takes it and a man who doesn't is nothing more impressive than practice.
"Right," I say.
"Creed." She has one hand on the door frame. Her mouth opens.
The wind comes across the clearing and takes the snow that isn't snow yet, the hard grains of it, and rattles them off the hood.
"It's nothing," she says.
I hold the door while she gets in. She starts the truck and the engine noise gives us both somewhere to put the next four seconds.
I watch the tail lights all the way to the bend, and then a while longer, because the bend is where the sound goes and the sound takes about ninety seconds more.
Inside, I bank the stove and open the field book, and under the entry from the first week — under Osei — anticipates and the question mark — I write one more line.
Asked her directly. She answered a different question.
Then I sit there with the pencil in my hand and think about what I actually have.
A word said with the stress in a particular place.
A laugh I've heard before. Eight seconds of glass and harbour.
A woman who came four hundred kilometres up a road nobody drives for a signature, who has been half a step ahead of me since the morning she arrived, and who has now declined, twice in ninety seconds, to say a sentence she was holding.
None of that is proof. Any three of those readings on their own I'd throw out.
But I've never had readings agree with each other like this and been wrong about what it meant, and by the time the stove is down to coals I'm no longer pretending I haven't understood something.
I don't force it. Forcing it would be the same mistake in a different jacket.
I let it stand overnight, and in the morning I take the long way up to the repeater.
But the readings are starting to agree with each other, and I've never once in my life had that happen and been wrong about what it meant.