High Citadel / Landslide (46 page)

We dickered a bit and then finally settled on a price—a shade more than I had intended to pay and a shade less than he had intended to get, which made both of us moderately unhappy. I paid him the money and decided I might as well start here as anywhere else. ‘Do you remember a man called Trinavant—John Trinavant?’

He scratched his head. ‘Say, yes; of course I remember old John. Funny—I haven’t thought of him in years. Was he a friend of yours?’

‘Can’t say I remember meeting him,’ I said. ‘Did he live round here?’

‘Live round here? Mister, he
was
Fort Farrell!’

‘I thought that was Matterson.’

A gobbet of spit just missed my foot. ‘Matterson!’ The tone of voice told me what he thought of that.

I said, ‘I hear he was killed in an auto accident. Is that right?’

‘Yeah. And his son and wife both. On the road to Edmonton. Must be over ten years ago now. A mighty nasty thing, that was.’

‘What kind of a car was he driving?’

He looked at me with speculative eyes. ‘You got any special interest, Mister…?’

‘The name’s Boyd,’ I said. ‘Bob Boyd. Someone asked me to check if I was in these parts. It seems as though Trinavant did my friend a good turn years ago—there was some money involved, I believe.’

‘I can believe that of John Trinavant; he was a pretty good guy. My name’s Summerskill.’

I grinned at him. ‘Glad to meet you, Mr Summerskill. Did Trinavant buy his car from you?’

Summerskill laughed uproariously, ‘Hell, no! I don’t have that class. Old John was a Cadillac man, and, anyway, he owned his own place up the road a piece—Fort Farrell Motors. It belongs to Matterson now.’

I looked up the street. ‘Must make pretty tough competition for you,’ I said.

‘Some,’ he agreed. ‘But I do all right, Mr Boyd.’

‘Come to think of it,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen nothing else but the name of Matterson since I’ve been here, Mr Summerskill. The Matterson Bank, Matterson House Hotel—and I believe there’s a Matterson Corporation. What did he do—buy out Trinavant?’

Summerskill grimaced. ‘What you’ve seen is the tip of the iceberg. Matterson pretty near owns this part of the country—logging operations, sawmills, pulp mills. He’s bigger than old John ever was—in power, that is. But not in heart, no, sir! No one had a bigger heart than John Trinavant. As for Matterson buying out Mr Trinavant—well, I could tell you a thing or two about that. But it’s an old story and better forgotten.’

‘Looks as though I came too late.’

‘Yeah, you tell your friend he was ten years too late. If he owed old John any dough it’s too late to pay it back now.’

‘I don’t think it was the money,’ I said. ‘My friend just wanted to make contact again.’

Summerskill nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s like that. I was born in Hazelton and I went away just as soon as I could, but of course I had a hankering to go back, so I did after five years. And you know what? The first two guys I went to see had
died—the first two guys on my list. Things change around a place, they certainly do.’

I stuck my hand out. ‘Well, it’s been nice doing business with you, Mr Summerskill.’

‘Any time, Mr Boyd.’ We shook hands. ‘You want any spares, you come right back.’

I climbed up into the cab and leaned out of the window. ‘If the engine drops out of this heap in the next couple of days you’ll be seeing me soon enough,’ I promised, softening it with a grin.

He laughed and waved me away, and as I drove down King Street I thought that the memory of John Trinavant had been replanted in at least one mind. With a bit of luck Summerskill would mention it to his wife and a couple of his buddies.
You know what? Me and a stranger had a chat about a guy I haven’t thought of in years. You must remember old John Trinavant. Remember when he started the Recorder and everyone thought it would go bust?

So it would go, I hoped; and the ripples would go wider and wider, especially if I dropped some more rocks into this stagnant pool. Sooner or later the ripples would reach the ferocious old pike who ruled the pool, and I hoped he would take action.

I pulled up in front of the Forestry Service office and went inside. The Forestry Officer was called Tanner and he was cordial if not hopeful. I told him I was passing through and that I was interested in tree-farm licences.

‘Not a chance, Mr Boyd,’ he said. ‘The Matterson Corporation has licensed nearly all the Crown lands round here. There are one or two pockets left but they’re so small you could spit across them.’

I scratched my jaw. ‘Perhaps if I could see a map?’ I suggested.

‘Sure,’ he said promptly, and quickly produced a largescale map of the area which he spread on his desk. ‘There
you have it in a nutshell.’ His finger traced a wide sweep. ‘All this is the holding of the Matterson Corporation—privately owned. And this here…’ a much larger sweep this time…‘is Crown land franchised to the Matterson Corporation under tree-farm licences.’

I looked closely at the map, which made very interesting viewing. To divert Tanner from what I was really after, I said, ‘What about public sustained-yield units?’ Those were areas where the Forestry Service did all the work but let the felling franchises out on short-term contracts.

‘None of those round here, Mr Boyd. We’re too far off the beaten track for the Forestry Service to run tree farms. Most of the sustained-yield units are down south.’

‘It certainly looks like a closed shop,’ I commented. ‘Any truth in what I hear that the Matterson Corporation got into trouble for over-felling?’

Tanner looked at me warily. Over-felling is the most heinous crime in the Forestry Service book. ‘I couldn’t say about that,’ he said stiffly.

I wondered if he had been bought by Matterson, but on second thoughts I didn’t think so. Buying a forestry officer in British Columbia would be like buying a Cardinal of the Church—just about impossible. Fifty per cent of the province’s revenue comes from timber and conservation is the great god. To come out against conservation is like coming out against motherhood.

I checked the map again. ‘Thanks for your trouble, Mr Tanner,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very obliging, but there seems precious little for me here. Any of these tree-farm licences likely to fall vacant?’

‘Not for a long time, Mr Boyd. The Matterson Corporation has put in a lot of capital in sawmills and pulp mills; they insisted on long-term licences.’

I nodded. ‘Very wise; I’d want the same. Well, thanks again, Mr Tanner.’

I left him without satisfying the wondering look in his eye and drove down to the depot where I picked up a lot of geological gear that I had sent in advance. The fat depot superintendent helped me load the Land-Rover, and said, ‘You figuring on staying?’

‘For a while,’ I said. ‘Just for a while. You can call me Trinavant’s last hope.’

A salacious leer spread over his face. ‘Clare Trinavant? You want to watch out for Howard Matterson.’

I suppressed the desire to push his face in. ‘Not Clare Trinavant,’ I said gently. ‘John Trinavant. And I can take care of Howard Matterson, too, if he interferes. Have you got a phone anywhere?’

He still wore the surprised look as he said abstractedly, ‘In the hall.’

I strode past him and he came pattering after me. ‘Hey, mister, John Trinavant is dead—he’s been dead for over ten years.’

I stopped. ‘I know he’s dead. That’s the point. Don’t you get it? Now beat it. This is a private telephone call.’

He turned away with a baffled shrug and a muttered, ‘Aw, nuts!’ I smiled because another rock had been thrown into the pool and another set of ripples started to affright the hungry pike.

Did you hear about that crazy man that just blew into town? Said he was Trinavant’s last hope. I thought he meant Clare; you know, Clare Trinavant, but he said he meant John. Can you beat that, with old John been dead for ten—no, twelve—years! This guy was here a couple of years back and had words with Howard Matterson about Clare Trinavant. How do I know? Because Maggie Hope told me—she was Howard’s secretary then. I warned her not to shoot her mouth off but it was no good. Howard fired her. But this guy is crazy, for sure. I
mean,
John Trinavant—he’s
dead.

I phoned the
Recorder
office and got hold of Mac. ‘Do you know of a good lawyer?’ I asked.

‘I might,’ he said cautiously. ‘What do you want a lawyer for?’

‘I want a lawyer who isn’t afraid of bucking Matterson. I know the land laws but I want a lawyer who can give legal punch to what I know—dress the stuff up in that scary legal language.’

‘There’s old Fraser—he’s retired now but he’s a friend of mine and he doesn’t like Matterson one little bit. Would he do?’

‘He’ll do,’ I said. ‘As long as he’s not too old to go into court if necessary.’

‘Oh, Fraser can go into court. What are you up to, Bob?’

I grinned. ‘I’m going prospecting on Matterson land. My guess is that Matterson isn’t going to like it.’

There was a muffled noise in the receiver and I put the phone down gently.

They had driven a new road up to the Kinoxi Valley to take care of the stream of construction trucks carrying materials for the dam and the logging trucks bringing the lumber from the valley. It was a rough road, not too well graded and being chewed to pieces by the heavy traffic. Where there was mud they had corduroyed it with ten-inch logs which made your teeth rattle, and in places they had cut through the soil down to bedrock to provide a firmer footing.

No one took any notice of me; I was merely another man driving a battered truck which looked as though it had a right to be there. The road led to the bottom of the low escarpment where they were building the generator house, a squat structure rafted on a sea of churned-up mud in which a gang of construction workers sweated and swore. Up the escarpment, by the side of the brown-running stream, ran the flume, a 36-inch pipe to bring the water to the powerhouse. The road took off on the other side of the stream and clung to a hillside, zig-zagging its way to the top and towards the dam.

I was surprised to see how far they had got with the construction. McDougall was right: the Kinoxi Valley would be under water in three months. I pulled off the road and watched them pour concrete for a few minutes and noted
the smooth way in which the sand and gravel trucks were handled. This was an efficient operation.

A big logging truck passed, going downhill like a juggernaut, and the Land-Rover rocked on its springs in the wind of its passing. There was not likely to be another close behind it so I pressed on up the road, past the dam and into the valley where I ran the Land-Rover off the road and behind trees where it was not likely to be seen. Then I went on foot away from the road, taking a slanting, climbing course across the hillside until I was high enough to get a good view of the valley.

It was a scene of desolation. The quiet valley I had known, where the fish jumped in the stream and the deer browsed in the woodlands, had been destroyed. In its place was a wilderness of jagged stumps and a tangle of felled brushwood on a ground of mud criss-crossed by the track marks of the trucks. Away up the valley, near the little lake, there was still the green of trees, but I could hear, even at that distance, the harsh scream of the power saws biting into living wood.

British Columbia is very conservation-minded where its lumber resources are concerned. Out of every dollar earned in the province fifty cents comes ultimately from the logging industry and the Government wants that happy state of affairs to continue. So the Forestry Service polices the woodlands and controls the cutting. There are an awful lot of men who get a kick out of murdering a big tree and there are a few money-greedy bastards who are willing to let them get their kicks because of the number of board-feet of manufactured lumber that the tree will provide at the sawmill. So the Forestry Service has its work cut out.

The idea is that the amount of lumber cut, expressed in cubic feet, should not exceed the natural annual growth. Now, when you start talking in cubic footage of lumber in
British Columbia you sound like an astronomer calculating the distance in miles to a pretty far star. The forest lands cover 220,000 square miles, say, four times the size of England, and the annual growth is estimated at two and a half billion cubic feet. So the annual cutting rate is limited to a little over two billion cubic feet and the result is an increasing, instead of a wasting, asset.

That is why I looked down into the Kinoxi Valley with shocked eyes. Normally, in a logging operation, only the mature trees are cut; but here they were taking
everything.
I suppose it was logical. If you are going to flood a valley there is no point in leaving the trees, but this sight offended me. This was a rape of the land, something that had not been since the bad old days before the First World War when the conservation laws came in.

I looked up the valley and did a quick calculation. The new Matterson Lake was going to cover twenty square miles, of which five square miles in the north belonged to Clare Trinavant. That meant that Matterson was cutting a solid fifteen square miles of trees and the Forestry Service was letting him do it because of the dam. That amount of lumber was enough to pay for the dam with a hell of a lot left over. It seemed to me that Matterson was a pretty sharp guy, but he was too damned ruthless for my taste.

I went back to the Land-Rover and drove back down the road and past the dam. Halfway down the escarpment I stopped and again drove off the road but I didn’t bother to hide the vehicle this time. I
wanted
to be seen. I rummaged about in my gear and found what I wanted—something to confound the ignorant—and then, in full view of the road I started to act in a suspicious manner. I took my hammer and chipped at rocks, I dug at the ground like a gopher scrabbling a hole, I looked at pebbles through a magnifying-glass and I paced out large areas gazing intently at the dial of an instrument which I held in my hand.

It was nearly an hour before I was noticed. A jeep rocketed up the hill and slammed to a stop and two men got out. As they walked over I slipped off my wrist-watch and palmed it, then stooped to pick up a large rock. Booted feet crunched nearer and I turned. The bigger of the men said, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Prospecting,’ I said nonchalantly.

‘The hell you are! This is private land.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

The other man pointed. ‘What’s that you got there?’

‘This? It’s a geiger counter.’ I moved it near to the rock I held—and nearer to the luminous dial of my watch—and it buzzed like a demented mosquito. ‘Interesting,’ I said.

The big man leaned forward. ‘What is it?’

‘Maybe uranium,’ I said. ‘But I doubt it. Could be thorium.’ I looked at the rock closely, then tossed it away casually. ‘That stuff’s not payable, but it’s an indication. It’s an interesting geological structure round here.’

They looked at each other, a little startled; then the big man said, ‘That may be, but you’re still on private land.’

I said pleasantly, ‘You can’t stop me prospecting here.’

‘Oh no?’ he said belligerently.

‘Why don’t you check with your boss? Might be better that way.’

The smaller man said, ‘Yeah, Novak, let’s check with Waystrand. I mean,
uranium
—or this other stuff—it sounds important.’

The big man hesitated, then said in a heavy tone, ‘Have you got a name, mister?’

‘The name’s Boyd,’ I said. ‘Bob Boyd.’

‘Okay, Boyd. I’ll see the boss. But I still think you’re not going to stay round here.’

I watched them go away and smiled, slipping the watch back on my wrist. So Waystrand was some kind of a boss up here. McDougall had said he’d been given a good job at the
dam. I had a score to settle with him. I glanced up at the telephone line which followed the road. The big man would tell Waystrand and Waystrand would get on the telephone to Fort Farrell and Howard Matterson’s reaction was predictable—he’d blow up.

It wasn’t ten minutes before the jeep came back followed by another. I recognized Waystrand—he’d filled out a lot in the last eighteen months; his chest was broader, he looked harder and he wasn’t so much the kid still wet behind the ears. But he still wasn’t as big as I was, and I reckoned I could take him on if I had to, although I’d have to make it quick before the other two characters could get started. Odds of three to one were not too good.

Waystrand smiled wickedly as he came up. ‘So it’s you. I wondered about that when I heard the name. Mr Matterson’s compliments and will you get the hell out of here.’

‘Which Mr Matterson?’

‘Howard Matterson.’

‘So you’re still running and telling tales to him, Jimmy,’ I said caustically.

He balled his fists. ‘Mr Matterson said I was to get you off this land nice and easy, with no trouble.’ He was holding himself in with an effort. ‘I owe you something, Boyd; and it wouldn’t take much for me to give it to you. Mr Matterson said if you
wouldn’t
go quietly I had to see that you went anyway. Now, get off this land and back to Fort Farrell. It’s up to you if you go under your own power or if you’re carried off.’

I said, ‘I have every right to be here.’

Waystrand made a quick sign. ‘Okay, boys. Take him.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ve had my say—I’ll go.’ It would be pointless to get beaten up at this stage, although I would dearly have loved to wipe the contemptuous grin off Waystrand’s face.

‘You’re not so brave, Boyd; not when you’re facing a man expecting a fight.’

‘I’ll take you on any time,’ I said. ‘When you haven’t got a gun.’

He didn’t like that, but he did nothing. They watched me pick up my gear and stow it in the Land-Rover and then Waystrand climbed into his jeep and drove slowly down the hill. I followed in the Land-Rover and the other jeep came after me. They were taking no chances of my slipping away.

We got down to the bottom of the escarpment and Waystrand slowed, waving me to a stop. He wheeled round in the jeep and came alongside. ‘Wait here, Boyd; and don’t try anything funny,’ he said, then he shot off and waved down a logging truck that had just come down the hill. He spoke to the driver for a couple of minutes and then came back. ‘Okay, big man; on your way—and don’t come back, although I’d sure like it if you did.’

‘I’ll be seeing you, Jimmy,’ I said. ‘That’s for sure.’ I slammed in the gear-lever and drove on down the road, following the loaded logging truck which had gone on ahead.

It wasn’t very long before I caught up with it. It was going very slowly and I couldn’t pass because this was in one of those places where the road builders had made a cutting right down to bedrock and there were steep banks of earth on either side. I couldn’t understand why this guy was crawling, but I certainly didn’t want to take the chance of passing and being squeezed to a pulp by twenty tons of lumber and metal.

The truck slowed even more and I crawled behind at less than walking pace, fuming at the delay. You put an ordinary nice guy in an automobile and he loses all the common decency he ever had. A guy who’ll politely open a door for an old lady will damn’ near kill the same old lady by cutting across her bows at sixty miles an hour just to beat a stop light, and he’ll think nothing of it. This guy in front probably had
his troubles and must have had a good and sound reason for going so slowly. I was in no particular hurry to get back to Fort Farrell but still I sat there and cursed—such is the relationship between a man and his auto.

I glanced into the mirror and was startled. The guy in front certainly had good reasons for going slowly, for coming behind at a hell of a lick was another logging truck, an eighteen-wheeler—twenty or more tons moving at thirty miles an hour. He got so close before he slammed on anchors that I heard the piercing hiss of his air-brakes and he slowed to our crawl with the ugly square front of his truck not a foot from the rear of the Land-Rover.

I was the filling in the nasty sandwich. I could see the driver behind laughing fit to bust and I knew that if I wasn’t careful there’d be some red stuff in the sandwich which wouldn’t be ketchup. The Land-Rover lurched a little as the heavy fender of the truck rammed into the rear, and there was a crunching noise. I trod delicately on the gas pedal and inched nearer to the truck in front—I couldn’t move much nearer or else I’d have a thirty-inch log coming through the windshield. I remembered this cutting from the way in: it was a mile long and right now we were about a quarter way through. The next three-quarters of a mile was going to be tricky.

The truck behind blared its horn and a gap opened up in front as the guy ahead put on speed. I pressed on the gas but not fast enough, because the rear truck rammed me again, harder this time. This was going to be trickier than I thought; it looked as though we were going to do a speed run, and that could be goddam dangerous.

We came to a dip and the speed increased and we zoomed down at forty miles an hour, the truck behind trying to climb up the exhaust pipe of the guy in front and not worrying too much about me, caught in the middle. My hands were sweating and were slippery on the wheel, and I
had to do some tricky work with gas pedal, clutch and brake. One mistake on my part—or on theirs—and the Land-Rover would be mashed into scrap-iron and I’d have the engine in my lap.

Three more times I was rammed from behind and I hated to think what was happening to my gear. And once I was nipped, caught between the heavy steel fenders of the two trucks for a fraction of a second. I felt the compression on the chassis and I swear the Land-Rover was momentarily lifted from the ground. There was a log rubbing on the windshield and the glass starred and smashed into a misty opacity and I couldn’t see a damned thing ahead.

Fortunately the pressure released and I was running free again with my head stuck out of the side and I saw we were at the end of the cutting. One of the logs on the left side of the front truck seemed to be loaded a little higher than the others, and I judged it was high enough to clear the cab. I had to get out of this squeeze. There was very little room to manoeuvre and those sadistic bastards could hold me there until we got to the sawmill if I couldn’t figure a way out.

So I spun the wheel and chanced it and found I was wrong. The log didn’t clear the top of the cab—not by a quarter of an inch—and I heard the rending tear of sheet metal. But I couldn’t stop then; I fed gas to the engine frantically and tore free to find myself bucketing over the rough ground and heading straight for a big Douglas fir. I hauled on the wheel and swerved again and again, weaving among the trees and driving roughly parallel with the road.

I passed the front truck and saw my chance, so I rammed down hard on the gas pedal and shot ahead of it and fled down the road with that eighteen-wheel monster pounding after me, blaring its horn. I knew better than to stop and fight it out with those guys; they wouldn’t stop on the road just because I did and me and the Land-Rover would be a total loss. I had the legs of them and scooted away in front,
passing the turn-off to the sawmill and not stopping until I was a full mile the other side.