Part 4
“It’s eating itself,” he said.
Dana looked at the cup, then at him.
“Summer of seventy-nine, on the haul road, we built a fill across a creek and buried a culvert in it. Water found a way along the outside of the pipe. For a week it seeped out clear. Then one morning it came out brown.” He tipped the cup and watched the silt slide. “Three days after that you could have driven a pickup through the hole.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“A guess.”
“I don’t know, Dana. It could hold for a week. It could go tonight.” He held her eyes. “Anybody who gives you a number is lying to you.”
She already had the messenger out. Her thumbs were fast, but she stopped twice to start over. Old dam above uncles failing. Lots of water behind it. Start moving crew + equipment to pit bench. Calling district.
Hollis answered within a minute. On whose say. District know?
She sent a second message to district dispatch in Fairbanks. They stood at the foot of the dam in the wind for eleven minutes before the answer came. Geotech can fly at first light, weather permitting. Use your judgment re: camp.
Dana read it twice and then laughed once, without humor. “That means it’s on me.”
“That’s what it means.”
“The pit bench again. At night, at thirty-some below.” She put the device away. “You know the first word out of Hollis’s mouth is going to be March.”
“Then let him say it,” Lyle said. “Let’s go.”
Another boom caught them halfway down the bench road, at two-thirty by Lyle’s watch. Dana didn’t slow down.
At the cabin she left the machine running. “Sleeping bags, the dog, your meds, the messenger, the rifle. Five minutes.”
Lyle went inside and stopped at the bookshelf.
The ledgers stood in a single row along the second shelf, thirty-one of them, green cloth gone gray at the spines where hands had pulled them out. Each had a year inked on its spine in Ruth’s square printing, up through the year she died. After that the dates were in Lyle’s hand. He pulled down a cardboard box from beside the stove, the one his last case of lamp oil had come in, and began to fill it.
“No,” Dana said from the doorway.
“It’s the record. Thirty-one years of readings. The weather service uses—”
“The weather service will survive.”
“There’s nobody else keeping a station within sixty miles of—”
“Uncle Lyle.” She came in and put her hand flat on the box. “There’s no room. The sled’s got the dog and the bags and the gas can, and it’s going to be dark in an hour on a trail I’ve never ridden at night. That box doesn’t fit. Nothing that size fits.”
“Your aunt—” he began, and stopped.
The room was quiet except for the idling engine outside. Dana’s hand stayed on the box, but her face changed.
“I know,” she said. “I know whose writing it is.” She let out a breath. “One. You can carry one inside your coat. I’m sorry. One.”
Lyle turned back to the shelf.
The first ledger was at the far left, and he knew without opening it what was on its first page. Moved in. Stove smokes. L. says it’ll quit. He put his hand on its spine. Then he took his hand away and crossed to the table, where this year’s ledger lay open. It was the thinnest book in the house, with seventeen days of readings in it and a column of times in pencil down the right-hand side.
“That one’s got nothing in it,” Dana said.
“It’s got the times in it.” He closed the ledger and buttoned it inside his coat, flat against his chest. “Your people are going to want to know why they’re sleeping on a gravel pile tonight. They won’t take my word for it. They might take this.”
Before he followed her out, he went back to the shelf and pushed the first ledger flush with the others, so the row was even.
Sadie rode in the sled behind them, and the rifle lay across Lyle’s knees. He looked back once, at the dark cabin, the shelter, and the rain gauge with its frosted cap. Dana got off the machine to check the hitch, which she had already checked twice, and stayed bent over it until he faced forward again.
The creek road ran six miles down to the highway. Two miles along, where the valley widened, the headlight swept across the rock shoulder above them and caught something moving on it, high up and well clear of the timber. Lyle tapped Dana’s shoulder, and she let the machine roll to a stop.
It was Bishop. He was climbing the bare scree of the east shoulder, steadily, with no hurry and no hesitation, and he didn’t look down at them. They watched until the torn ear went over a ledge and was gone.
The camp floodlights showed through the spruce a little after five. The shop doors were shut. The loader and the graders stood in their row by the fuel tanks with tarps over their engines, and yellow light glowed in the cookhouse windows. Nothing had been moved.
A big man in coveralls came out onto the cookhouse steps with a mug in his hand. He had a gray beard and a face that looked as though it had been out in the wind for all of his twenty-six winters on the road.
“District says sit tight till the geotech flies,” Hollis said. “I’m not putting eight people on that bench at thirty-four below because of a hunch from a man who talks to bears.”
Behind him, through the steamed glass, faces had turned toward the door. Dana looked at Lyle. Lyle unbuttoned his coat and took out the ledger…
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