Nadia
One Year Later...
The plaque is smaller than I expected and it's screwed to a post at the trailhead where nobody will ever read it, and I love it beyond all reason.
NORTH RIDGE WILDLIFE CORRIDOR — PROTECTED UNDER THE LAND ACT.
And underneath, in letters you'd need to crouch for: the assessment, the year, the two names of the people whose data made the case.
Sixty-two metres at the creek. The narrowest point in the whole eleven thousand hectares, and the entire file turned on it, and when the decision came down in March I was on a video call with the regional office and had to mute myself and put my head on the desk.
There's a version of my career where that report gets filed in November with a hole in it where the ridge should be, and the corridor gets called two populations instead of one, and in fifteen years there's a highway through the neck of it and nothing crossing.
That version was real until the fifteenth of October last year.
I think about it more than is good for me.
I'm at the gate on the Kestrel fire road at seven in the morning on the fourth of October with the truck loaded and a thermos on the seat, and I have his key to the padlock, because I've had his key to the padlock since June.
He hasn't radioed. He hasn't even got up there yet — he's a day behind because the ferry terminal survey in Powell River ran long — and that's the entire point of me being here first. Last year I came up this road furious, with a folder of unanswered emails and a name I'd been carrying for five years like a stone in my shoe.
There's smoke coming out of the cabin stovepipe by the time I hear his truck on the last bend, mud to the door handles on that 4Runner he refuses to trade in.
I've got the folding table up on the porch, the map already down, the rock and the compass and the wrench holding three corners. I leave the fourth for the mug.
"You're late," I say.
"Powell River ran—"
"Long, I know. The terminal survey." I hand him the coffee, half full, blue enamel, the one that fits his hand. "Your messages sync at the repeater on Sundays and it's Tuesday, so I made an educated—"
"Guess."
"Inference." I look at him a while, which I've stopped pretending is about the map. He's got two days of stubble and sawdust ground into the knees of his jeans and he still, after a year, makes my chest go tight when he ducks under the porch beam like it might catch him if he doesn't watch it.
Ring on my left hand since the twelfth of June — small, plain, the one I picked myself, because when he offered to do it properly I told him I'd rather have the field books. He'd looked so offended on behalf of jewelry everywhere that I'd had to kiss him just to make him stop.
Two months a year up here. The rest of it in the house in Kamloops with furniture in it now, a garden I'm losing a war with, and a monitoring contract on the wall by the door that runs to 2031 with both our names on the cover.
Some mornings I still catch myself looking at that and forgetting to breathe for a second.
He talks more than he used to. Not a great deal more — I've told him the improvement is measurable and unspectacular, which might be the most accurate thing I've ever said about him — but he goes to the market in town now on the closing weekend, and last fall I watched him stand by the bonfire with a cider in his hand and talk to four separate people about weather. On purpose. For no reason at all.
I clocked it from thirty feet away and didn't say a word until we were in the truck, when I told him I was proud of him and he went so quiet I thought I'd broken something. Then he pulled over on the shoulder and kissed me like the last five miles had been an emergency.
"The pin at the creek's moved again," he says, setting the mug down and setting his other hand on my hip like it's just where his hand lives now.
"The bank's still migrating. I told you in April."
"You did."
"I said the whole terrace would keep—"
"Walking." He says it against my temple, low, and it isn't about the terrace anymore and we both know it.
"Walking." I grin at him over the top of my cup and don't move away. "Sorry. You had it."
"I had it." He takes the coffee back off the fourth corner of the map, unhurried, like the valley's not going anywhere and neither is he. "Take your time. I've got about thirty years."
I look at the valley — sixty-two metres of it, saved, mine in the only way that matters. Then I look at him.
Neither of us minds anymore.