Part 3
Dana came down the path in her unlaced boots and knelt beside him. She looked into the hole for a long time.
“It froze to the bottom,” she said.
“It’s spring water. It’s never frozen.”
“Everything freezes at thirty below.”
“Then where’s the ice?” He pointed the light down again. There were stones, frost, and a hanging shelf above an empty bed. “If it froze to the bottom, the hole would be full of ice. It’s empty. The water quit coming.”
She sat back on her heels. He watched her follow it through, the way she would follow a load chart or a road report, and he saw the moment she reached the part that mattered to her.
“If something up there is holding it back,” she said slowly.
“Then it’s holding it back above your camp.”
She pulled the satellite messenger out of her coat and typed with her thumbs, fast. Lyle read over her shoulder: Creek dry at uncles. Check bridge culvert. The answer came back from Hollis. Culverts froze like every Jan. You back today or what.
“I’m going up to look,” Lyle said.
“Fine. We’ll go up and look.”
“You’ve got a camp to run.”
“I’ve got a camp that sits on the low side of this creek.” She stood and brushed off her knees. “Get your coat on.”
They took her machine, with Lyle riding behind her and Sadie in the freight sled. The old mining road climbed the east side of the valley on a gravel bench, high above the creek, and the trail held well under the wind-packed snow. Dana rode it fast and clean. Lyle found that he didn’t mind holding on.
They passed the slope below the dam where Ruth had picked blueberries every August. The bushes were buried now, with only a few red stems showing through the drifts. One summer Ruth had climbed onto the old spillway box to get at a patch of berries along its edge, and her boot had gone straight through a rotten plank. She’d sat in the bushes afterward, laughing and pulling splinters out of her wool sock. Lyle had told her to stay off that thing, and she had told him that a box that old deserved to be stood on once in a while.
The creek bed below the dam was dry, a white groove full of stones. Dana parked at the foot of the face. They climbed it on foot, kicking steps into the hard snow, with Sadie scrambling behind.
At the top, Dana stopped so suddenly that Lyle nearly walked into her.
The pond should have been a flat white field. Instead the ice had heaved up in the middle like the lid of a pot about to boil over. It had broken into tilted plates, and across the plates ran layer on layer of gray-green ice, stepped like terraces. Water had come up through the cracks, spread out, frozen, and come up again, over and over. Steam rose from a dozen seams. At the outlet end, the timber spillway box was gone under a mound of ice. Its mouth had caved in and its throat was packed solid.
“Oh, no,” Dana said.
The ice answered her. A crack started at the far shore and ran toward them across the pond with a sound like rifle shots fired one after another. A plate the size of a truck bed lifted, tipped, and settled, and black water welled up along its edge and smoked in the cold. The boom came last. It thudded up through the dam and into Lyle’s knees.
Dana had his arm. He didn’t remember her taking it. Sadie had flattened herself in the snow.
“Twelve-forty,” Lyle said, mostly to himself. He would write it down later.
They went along the crest, keeping to the downstream side, until Sadie stopped and growled at a spot near the top of the face. Lyle saw it a second later. It was a dark mouth in the bank, about the width of a man’s shoulders, with its rim gouged and churned and frozen hard. Tufts of silver-brown fur were frozen into the clay around it. Something big had come out of that hole in a hurry, and it had come out wet.
Lyle got down on his knees and shone the headlamp in. The tunnel ran back and down into a chamber. The chamber’s floor was water, gray and still, with a skin of new ice across it.
“His den,” Dana said behind him.
“His bed. Flooded from underneath.”
He stayed on his knees longer than he needed to. Lyle thought of the old bear waking in the dark with cold water rising around him, after thirty winters of digging into this bank. He thought of Bishop clawing his way out of it into thirty below, with nowhere left to go but down the valley, toward the only other living thing he knew there.
“Uncle Lyle.” Dana had worked her way partway down the face and was standing near its foot. “There’s water coming out of the bottom.”
He came down carefully, sideways, the way his knees insisted on. At the base of the dam, a little to one side of the old channel, a trickle ran out of the clay. It steamed in the air and had already built a fan of ice across the snow below it. He unscrewed the cup from his thermos, dipped it into the trickle, and held it up to the light.
The water wasn’t clear. It was clouded and gray, and as he watched, a fine silt began to settle in the bottom of the cup.
Lyle had spent nineteen years running dozers and scrapers before he and Ruth came up this creek. He knew what it meant when the water coming through a dam began to carry the dam out with it…
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