The Missing One (33 page)

As they motored up the coast one day, they came across an old claw-foot tub that had been abandoned on a shingle beach. The three of them hauled it into the boat, then squashed themselves around it and motored back to base.

They pushed, dragged and heaved it up the steep path to the campfire. There was a mound, overlooking the bay, over to the left of the fire, surrounded by tall, skinny pines. ‘Bathroom with a view,' said Dean.

The guys got shovels and began digging a fire pit, where they planned to put the bath. Elena went and got firewood from the tarp on deck, lugging it up in three loads – one to them, two to the main firepit, where that morning's embers were still glowing beneath the green branches Jonas had put over them. She crouched down to try to revive them, blowing at an angle as the guys had shown her. None of them had eaten anything since a peanut-butter sandwich at lunch. Her arms and legs felt stringy, and each time she turned her head it was as if the world took a second or two to catch up.

The sun began lowering itself towards the horizon. Jonas and Dean were like kids, messing around together in the dirt.

Elena took Jonas's sharp, curved fish-cleaning knife and sliced into the Chinook's belly. She tugged the blade along in a swooping motion, the way he showed her, and opened the fish up. Then she scraped out dark, twisted, fish-stinking entrails into a bag before cleaning out the cavity with patient strokes. She tied the guts tightly in their bag. Then she made her incisions under the pectoral fin, and snapped off the fish's injured head. When she looked up, the men had heaved the bath over the pit, and were filling it up by lugging buckets of seawater from the shore. She went back to the salmon, drawing the knife along its spinal column, concentrating hard to keep her hand steady.

She washed the heavy salmon fillets down and laid them on the cedar plank as Jonas had shown her – the Native Canadian way. She had watched him spear the fish with a Swiss army knife corded onto a branch that afternoon in a stream that was teeming with Chinook. He stood very still on a rock, halfway out in the rushing water, holding the spear point below the surface. After a bit, he eased the knife towards a fish and then, with a sharp downward stab, he pinned it there. But he didn't lift it out right away – he went into the freezing water, up to his thighs, and dug down with one hand to grab it. He came wading out of the water with an enormous salmon on the end of his spear. His eyes shone and were deep blue, like the sky behind him. She saw his Viking ancestors in his broad shoulders, the big fish in
his hands and his solid, wet thighs coming over the rocks towards her.

He slapped the fish down, heavily, then eased the spear out of its neck. The fish was the length of her forearm, a shimmering mixture of silvers, and she felt suddenly sorry that it had to die for them.

‘It must be cold in that water,' she said.

‘If you lift the spear up,' he said, ‘she slips off and she's gone.' The fish was still impaled on his knife. The blade had gone into its skull from above, right through its brain. Death, at least, would have been instant.

‘How do you know how to do all this?' she said. ‘Who taught you this stuff?'

‘Various people. Myself. When I was eighteen,' he said, ‘I decided to come up here and survive a month with nothing – in the end I was up here three months. I didn't want to go back.'

‘Don't listen to his wild man routine. He looked like a skeleton.' Dean was lying on a rock, just above them. She'd forgotten he was there. He spoke from under his baseball cap. ‘We all thought he'd died up here.'

‘Your poor mother.'

A shadow fell across Jonas's face, and he knelt down to the salmon, ducking his head as he tugged the blade out of its skull. It made a crackling, suctioning sound. From under his cap Dean said, ‘His mom had just died.'

*

She flattened out the burning logs and balanced the ends of the plank on stones on either side of the fire.

Jonas's reaction to his mother's death seemed, in some way, to demonstrate the essential difference between men and women. When her mother died, she had frozen. For a long time, she was afraid to go to school, or to leave the house. But when his mother died, he had headed out into the wilderness. Then again, perhaps the two reactions weren't so different – they had both retreated. And she was only eight years old. The only wilderness she could find was inside herself.

She wondered what losing someone she loved would do to her now – would she freeze and become afraid again? She didn't think so. But it was hard to imagine what it would be like to experience that level of pain again.

*

The art was to cook the fish through without setting fire to the plank, which they left soaking at night in seawater. You had to find the exact right spot on the fire: too hot and the whole thing would go up in flames; too cold and the fish would be raw. Just right and the cedar smoke infused the fish, bringing out its most delicate flavours.

Jonas and Dean had finished filling the bath now. They'd got the fire going under it and smoke drifted around them, obscuring their faces. They were talking about the orcas, something about charts for tomorrow, but she couldn't hear what. The clearing was saturated with rich golden light, but the evening chill made her wish for another, warmer pullover. She was dog-tired now and couldn't bring herself to go to the boat and get one.

Every single thing she owned was damp anyway – every
piece of clothing, even the pillows and the sleeping bags. The inside of her backpack felt as if a family of sea slugs had recently crawled through it. The pages of the books and journals she'd bought in Victoria – anything she could find about orcas – were already sticking together. And now the stove in the boat was broken so they had to build up the fire at dawn just in order to fill the thermoses of coffee for the day.

The smell of the cedar-roasting salmon made her stomach growl, but at the same time she felt slightly sick. In fact, she'd felt off-colour a lot recently, probably because, when they weren't eating salmon, they were eating peanut butter. She craved collard greens and kiwifruit.

At night she dreamed of black Californian grapes. Jonas and Dean assured her that vitamin C sources were abundant up here; they spent one long, irritating afternoon on the Zodiac outdoing one another with plant names. The berries alone had gone on for a good hour – fairy bell, cloudberry, bear berry, hairy manzanita, Indian strawberry, chokeberry – until Elena was sure they were just making words up. ‘There's a whole grocery out there,' Jonas said. ‘Burdock leaves, nettles, wild ginger and garlic, nuts, licorice.' But they never seemed to be on dry land long enough to forage. Dean's wife had packed him a big bottle of multivitamins to ward off scurvy, and when they remembered, they each swallowed one. But Elena was dying for a good crisp apple.

‘Ladies first then.' She looked up. Jonas was grinning down at her. ‘The water will be warm.' The sleeves of his checked shirt were rolled to the elbow, showing strong,
tanned forearms. He still had oil smears on his arms from fixing the Zodiac's outboard when it broke that morning. His jeans – which had never really dried from the river – were soaked down the thighs again, from carrying buckets of seawater. They were smeared with dirt from the earth and the tin bath. For a moment or two, she just gazed at him.

Then Dean came over to the fire and poked at it with a stick. He was filthy and bedraggled too; the dirt had darkened his hair from flame to gingerbread. She couldn't see his eyes but his mouth looked sad. Sparks flew up around the salmon. Jonas went off to throw the fish guts out to sea.

Dean must be missing his wife and baby. She wondered what his wife thought of him coming up here with his old high school buddy to spend two months chasing orcas – his second summer in a row. He wrote her letters most evenings, which he'd send back to Victoria with passing kayakers or any fishermen who happened to be headed south. She wondered what proportion of the letters actually made it home.

On the journey from Victoria, Dean had told her that his wife was a UBC anthropologist. Her specialism was First Nations oral storytelling traditions. It was her passion, he said, but she stopped six months ago when their son, Daniel, was born. Elena imagined a woman with Inuit-style hair, baking bread and telling her baby stories in a sing-song voice.

‘So, does your wife go back to work this fall?' she asked him now.

He turned his head. His face was tired, but placid. It was just in profile that his mouth looked sad. ‘Nah. Her job
involved field trips half the year – and mine involves field trips half the year – and they're not always different halves of the year. So, she's at home now with Danny.'

It took a moment for Elena to realize that he meant his wife had quit her job permanently.

Jonas came back, wiping his hands down his jeans. ‘OK, so – I'm serious – you want to get in that bath first, Elle? That water's not going to be pretty after it's had me then Deano in it.'

She glanced from one filthy man to the other, and got up.

‘Just be sure to sit on the wood planks,' Dean said. ‘You don't want to scorch your butt.'

She walked, with as much dignity as she could muster, up the little slope to the tin bath. Below them, she could see Dean's big long boat, and the Zodiac next to it. Dean's boat was their base for the next two months. It was huge and cumbersome, stank of oil and mildew and, faintly, of fish. The engine had broken several times on the journey north from Victoria, but each time, the guys fixed it after only a short battle. It guzzled oil and left trails of inky smoke against the sky, but it was warm inside, with narrow cabin beds, a rudimentary toilet, and most importantly, no rain. Jonas's Zodiac was their daytime home – just twelve foot long, inflatable, with an outboard and no shelter – a boat to chase whales in.

Beyond the boats the ocean glowed in the last light. The waves, which had been choppy and unsettled all day, were calmer now, as if someone had soothed them with the promise
of a goodnight's rest. The sun had swollen into a fat gold orb and was easing itself behind the shadowy islands that lay between the bay and the open sea.

She glanced around. The little clearing where they'd built the main fire was hugged on all sides by tall firs, spruce and pines. There was no need to feel exposed here. The tiny canning town was filled with commercial fishing boats, but it was right round the headland. The fishermen, many of them Native Canadians, would be sitting on the dock, chewing the honeyed strips of sockeye they called ‘Indian candy' or throwing back beers in the shack bar – but they were half a mile away. Nobody could see her here, except the two men by the fire. And only one of them was looking.

She peeled off her damp pullover, then her T-shirt. Goose-bumps sprang up on her skin. She glanced over her shoulder again. Dean, a gentleman, had turned his back, and was crouched on his heels over the salmon. Jonas looked steadily across at her. She felt blood rush to her cheeks. She turned her back again, tugging at her jeans. She touched the water with her fingertips. It was murky, salty, but perfect – almost hot from the fire beneath – but not boiling. They'd put two planks along the base of the bath. She stuck her hand in and prodded them. They seemed secure enough.

Taking a breath, she eased her underwear off, and, feeling his eyes on her body – the sensation as vivid as any touch – she lowered herself into the water. She closed her eyes as the heat eased her tired, chilly limbs. She leaned her head back and let out the long breath that had been coiled inside her.

The last time she'd sat in a claw-foot bath like this was in Seattle as a child. She could picture the white hexagonal tiles on the bathroom floor – the grout was always dark – and the greying walls, the brass sconce lights, the single window with the blind always down. Just visualizing the bathroom made her feel hollow. Bathtimes were the worst at first because her mother always used to help her wash her hair. She wished that she could go back, and tell her sad childhood self that it would all work out because, one day, when she grew up, she'd find herself in another claw-foot tub, but this time it would be perched over an ocean full of whales – all waiting to tell her their secrets.

She moved her hands slowly through the water, and despite the tiredness, she felt herself grow full again, just at the thought of the whales, as if someone had turned on the heat and lights inside her.

It had been a long, damp, chilly day; the third in a row with no sightings. They'd slept by the campfire last night – too despondent and tired to bother climbing down to the boat – and she'd woken that morning, freezing and stiff, in a drizzle, with her eyes sealed shut. There had been a moment of exquisite panic as she realized that her eyelids weren't working – she probed the sockets with her fingertips, feeling a strange, marshmallow puffiness. She scrambled up and felt her way to the water container, hunching down to splash handfuls of cold water on her face. This allowed her to open her eyes into slits. She grabbed the speckled mirror from her pack and in the dim first light, she could just make out her reflection: she let out a strangled scream.

Dean sat up, took one look at her and laughed. His ginger hair stuck up at all angles, like a madman.

‘No-see-ums.'

‘See what? What the hell's wrong with me? Jesus Christ! My eyes!'

‘No-see-ums – invisible bugs, gnats. They can get you in the night if you aren't close enough to the fire.'

Jonas turned over, opened his eyes slowly and peered at her. He gave a throaty morning laugh. ‘Holy shit, you've been mauled.'

While Dean built up the fire for coffee, Jonas fetched a small bottle from the boat. He knelt in front of her and dabbed at her eyelids very gently with the pad of his finger. The lotion smelled strongly of pine, mixed with lavender, and something else that she didn't recognize. ‘I get it from my friend, Thayer,' he said. ‘She's lived up here all her life, three generations of her family – she makes it herself. It's better than hydrocortisone.'