Part 6
Elias unfolded the map. The pencil line ran along the north slope and stopped. “If there were adits here, there should be other traces of the work.”
Owen looked into the white haze between the rocks. “After forty years?”
“Iron outlasts people.”
They worked around the east side of the slope, and half an hour later they came across what was left of an old road. Twenty minutes after that they saw a roof, or what remained of one.
The old geologists’ shack had sunk almost entirely into the snow. One wall leaned, and the window was broken out. They had to rock the door loose with a shoulder. Inside it smelled of damp, mice, and rusty iron.
Owen’s flashlight found a bench, a collapsed table, a tin stove, a few crates. A crooked metal door hung on the wall, and behind it a shallow cabinet had survived.
Elias pulled the handle. Inside lay a bundle of heavy oiled paper weighed down by a rusty plate. He carefully unrolled it on the table.
Owen came closer. “It’s them.”
It was a diagram. Several adits entered the slope from different sides, and some connected with each other. Lower down were natural caverns, the creek, and elevation marks.
“Here’s No. 4.” Owen jabbed it with a finger.
Elias traced the bottom line with his fingernail. “And this?”
Owen leaned over the paper. “Looks like an outlet.”
The old man judged the direction. “Half a mile. Maybe a bit more.”
Owen was already rolling up the paper. “So we’ve seen it. Let’s go.”
Elias didn’t move. A day earlier he’d have said the same thing. But water was coming out of the mountain, the slope was moving, and the usual way down was blocked.
“What would you say if I suggested checking the lower outlet?”
Owen straightened. “I’d say you asked me to stop you when you started doing stupid things.”
“Right.”
Relief showed on Owen’s face. Elias promptly ruined it. “We check it and come straight back.”
“Are you kidding me?”
The old man ran his thumb along the crack in the stock. “Wanted to make sure the idea really is bad.”
Owen gave a nervous laugh and turned serious at once. “Then why?”
Elias pointed at the bottom line on the diagram. “If the water comes out there, we need to know where it goes next.”
Owen looked at the map again and found it harder to argue.
The lower outlet lay farther down the draw, almost at the creek. They found it by an old metal chute. There was no tunnel to be seen. In its place stood a wall of ice.
At first Owen didn’t understand. “What is that?”
Ice filled the whole recess between the rocks. It was cloudy, gray-green, with air bubbles and frozen branches inside, and it stood several yards high. Water seeped along the edges.
Elias shone his flashlight from the side and saw old red marks painted on the rock. One, a second, a third. Levels. The highest was well below today’s waterline.
Owen saw it too. “That’s bad.”
Elias went up to the wall and laid his palm on the cold rock beside it, careful not to touch the ice itself. Somewhere beyond the barrier ran a low, steady sound. Water.
Owen’s hand stopped halfway to his sleeve. “It’s backed up in there.”
“Looks like it.”
“How much?”
“Don’t know.”
Owen looked at the old marks, then at the current wet line. “What if the ice doesn’t hold?”
He didn’t finish.
Elias looked down the draw, toward the station. Below it was the bridge, and beyond that the highway department’s maintenance camp. In summer there was hardly anyone there. In winter the crew kept a stretch of road open from it.
Owen got it at the same moment. “The camp.”
Elias nodded.
Owen pulled out his phone, though they both knew there was no service out here. He looked at the screen and put it away. “The radio at the station.”
“Yes.”
“Then we go back.”
Elias had already turned, then stopped. “My papers are there.”
“What papers?”
Elias didn’t look at him right away. “From the station. Maps, the logbook, old records.”
Owen searched his uncle’s face. “What are you talking about?”
Before Elias’s eyes rose the table by the window, June’s photograph, an old notebook, his father’s rifle that he hadn’t taken into the woods in twenty years. The box of her letters, every one she’d written him the winter before they married, when he was working the fire crews and she was still in Fairbanks. Nothing of value to anyone else.
“Uncle Eli. We’re going for the radio.”
“Yes.”
Elias could tell Owen had already guessed. “And I’ll grab a few things. Quick.”
“No.”
The answer came out hard. Elias turned. “What do you mean, no?”
“We are not packing up your house.”
The old man pressed his lips together. “Five minutes.”
Owen stepped in front of him, as if he were already blocking the way to the cabin. “Five minutes for the photos, then five more for the papers, then you’ll remember something in the shed.”
“Don’t give me orders.”
Owen yanked his left sleeve so hard the fabric stretched tight over his wrist. “I’m giving them, because right now you’re acting like a kid!”
The echo carried off into the slope. They both went quiet. Owen was breathing hard.
Elias narrowed his eyes. In all these years his nephew had almost never raised his voice to him. Owen’s ears had gone red, but he didn’t back down.
“You told me yourself that if you don’t understand what’s going on, you don’t pretend you do.”
“I never said that.”
“Pretty much said it.” Owen raised his palms before Elias could answer. “Fine, you didn’t. It doesn’t matter right now.” He jabbed a hand toward the ice wall. “We don’t know how much water is in there, we don’t know how long that thing will hold, and we don’t know if the slope’s about to slide worse. You want to hang around for some old junk?”
“It’s not junk.”
Owen went quiet. So did Elias. That one had come out honest.
Owen lowered his hand. “I know.” He said it more quietly. “But a house can be built again.”
Elias looked at him. “Not that one.”
“Not that one,” Owen agreed. “But there won’t be another you, either.”
The old man looked away, and his anger drained out of him all at once. What was left was weariness, and the knowledge that his nephew was right.
Elias had lived here more than thirty years. He had always believed he knew when to walk away: from bad weather, thin ice, a mean animal, a dangerous slope. It turned out there was one place that was hardest of all to leave. Your own home.
“All right,” he said.
Owen didn’t ask him to say it twice.
They headed back fast. By evening the weather began to turn. First the wind picked up, then the snow came fine and hard. The trees faded one by one into the white haze.
Halfway there, Minnow stopped and lifted his head. Elias stopped too.
Hump stood on the rocky ridge, high above them. The bear was looking down at the draw and paid no attention to the people.
“Him again,” Owen said.
Elias could barely make him out. Hump stood awhile, then went uphill, higher still, to where there was almost no forest.
Owen wiped snow off his face. “He’s walking away from us again.”
Elias looked down at the white line of the creek, at the slope, at the faint strip of woods in the distance with the station behind it, and understood. For four days Hump had been doing the same thing: leaving the low ground, seeking out rock, climbing higher.
“No,” Elias said.
Owen turned his head. “What?”
The old man watched the bear go. “He’s getting away from the water.”
Owen didn’t get the chance to answer. The blow came from below, stronger than any before it. The snow trembled underfoot. Far off in the draw something cracked. Hump picked up his pace at once and kept climbing.
Elias’s hands had gone cold inside his mittens. The station was still a couple of miles off, and the camp seven miles past that. And the animal that had felt every blow before they did wasn’t waiting anymore. He was already leaving…
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