IT WAS ABE LAMONT’S LAST NIGHT in town before flying back to Toronto. Harry had arranged to join him in the Gold Range, and he found him there, soused and voluble, bending Dido’s ear about the old days when thousands of geese shot in the Mackenzie River Delta were piled high on barges and shipped south. Travelling the other way by barge came Pete, the Lebanese peddler from Alberta, selling oranges at every stop for a dollar apiece.

Dido was wearing a necklace of red coral beads, and in Harry’s mind the colours took over, the creamy-grey breasts of the geese, the precious oranges, the reddish beads. Eddy wasn’t with her and Harry took heart: perhaps she wasn’t so attached to him, after all. He kept looking at her, but she was having none of his glances, none of his big, obvious, smitten heart. He felt old and raw with wanting her and not having her. A few weeks ago he’d invited her to a cabin on Prosperous Lake for a day of what he imagined might be seclusion, confessions, concerted wooing, but she had declined to go.

“Then have dinner with me in town. I’ll cook for you.”

“If you insist.”

“Oh, I never insist.”

That made her smile. “All right, then.”

He’d made his signature dish, cauliflower soup so delicious (a touch of curry powder, and thick cream) that Dido had a second helping. “You’re young,” he’d said, looking at her but speaking of himself, “you’re doing something really interesting, you think your future holds more of the same, but better. Then you discover that the highlight of your working life occurred at the beginning. And you can’t go back.”

Dido had laughed his comments away. “You want me to believe the best is now, things will never be better than this. Of course they’ll be better. Of course I’ll try television if I get a chance. Who wouldn’t?”

“Let me see your palm.” He’d stroked her palm with his fingertips. “Is television in Dido Paris’s future? I see mansions, tropical trees. A lot of water.”

“Swimming pools.”

“A flood.”

“You can’t drown me just for wanting to go into television, Harry.”

She’d spoken from a mocking distance that kept him very effectively at bay.

Now he watched, bemused, as she chummed up to the man she’d derided earlier in the week. She was plying Abe Lamont with questions about the legendary lost valley of orange trees in the Arctic. Abe the windbag, he thought indulgently, Abe the big tub of talent gone awry; no wonder the two of us get on so well: we could have set the world on fire, but neither of us is going to.

“Lamont! You’re full of shit!”

Abe made a show of glowering back. “I feel sorry for you,” he said to Dido (who seemed to like nothing better than the blood sport of male one-upmanship, the fondly savage insults). “I pity you having the great Harry Boyd as your boss. As I was saying,” and he deepened his studio voice in order to mock himself and amuse her, “explorers found the tropical valley but couldn’t relocate it. There’s an old trapper, Gus Kraus, he lived on the Nahanni River for years, and in the summer he grew melons and in the winter he walked across his cabin floor in bare feet, that’s how warm it was from the hot springs below. I expect the Nahanni gave rise to the legend.”

“Or it could have been the place where Hornby died,” she said. “The Thelon River.”

“It could have been,” agreed Abe.

He’d made peace with her the day before. She was the equal of any announcer on the national network, he’d told her in the end, and he’d offered to recommend her to a producer he knew in Toronto.

That same night, much later and on the spur of the drunken moment, Harry hammered on the door of Eleanor’s trailer, hoping Dido would be there. He was lucky. She opened the door, a glow of white nightgown and loose hair.

“Save me from my insanity,” he pleaded.

Inside, he fell into an armchair and she curled up on the sofa.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “I worry about you, I want you to know that.”

“I was asleep,” she said.

His face looked hollowed out, she thought, as though he had false teeth and they weren’t in. His glasses had slid down his nose.

She said, “You should worry about Eleanor. You probably woke her up.”

“Shhhh.” Finger to his lips. “Sorry.” He took out his unfiltered cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head, then changed her mind.

“I almost killed myself twice,” he said, “I want you to know that.”

She held the cigarette between her fingers. His accent was different when he was drunk. It went Irish, maudlin. His face reminded her of an open book that’s fallen into a puddle.

“Why do you want me to know that, Harry?”

“The first time I saw you,” he said, and he fumbled for words, “the first time I heard you, you made such an impression on me. I felt such a connection.” He heard his voice, the pleading, but couldn’t help himself. “Was it only me?”

She gazed at this man, who sat in a cloud of smoke. He made her feel tired and cruel. Vulnerable men didn’t appeal to her, they never had.

Without answering his question, she got up and went into the kitchen, which was an extension of the living room. Harry stayed where he was. When she came back with a mug of coffee for him, he said, “I was watching you.”

“That’s new.”

“Ah, Dido. Be kind to an old man.”

She sat beside him and straightened the collar of his shirt as if he were an old man. “So what did you see when you were watching me?”

“A bird hunting for a worm. A woman looking this way and that for a coffee cup.” He paused. “A beautiful woman.”

But she had been called beautiful before.

“It’s time for you to go,” she said after he took a few sips and set down the mug.

“You’re right.”

He stood up and looked around him, patting his pockets, and that’s when he saw Eddy’s leather jacket hanging over a chair in the corner. Then he sagged.

“I’m too old for you, aren’t I?”

“You’re not too old, Harry. You’re too needy.”

Eddy picked up his leather jacket in the morning, and in the afternoon he and Dido were on the hill near School Draw watching immense clouds roll in from the north. Below them lay Old Town, glittering in the low-flung light like an inviting bed of nails. Dido wanted to take cover, but Eddy put his arm around her and held her in place. Eddy, so relaxed, talked about being a kid when it seemed every time he and his brothers climbed Blueberry Hill the sky churned up a wild and violent storm. They played chicken with the elements, their fingers going after the blue, almost-black berries on the open hillside until the first close CRACK sent them skidding down to lower ground, laughing like fools. Beautiful berries, hanging full and ripe and surprisingly heavy on the underside of bushes as low as these ones. And he bent down and with his pocket knife hacked off the tip of an arctic willow and put the willow twig in Dido’s hand.

That morning they’d driven to the Yellowknife River, and once they were well underway, miles from town, he said casually that the gas tank was empty and smiled at her alarm. Eddy always knew what he could get away with. That was the lesson of the drive, and of his lingering now on the exposed hilltop, his arm around her as the first strokes of lightning flashed across the sky and she trembled. “Loon at three o’clock,” he said.

A moment later, when he looked into her face, she seemed a million miles away. He asked her what she was thinking, and she said the North Sea.

She said, “My mother. I think she’s losing her memory.”

“She’s old.”

“Sixty- one.”

“Well, that’s too young.”

Dido turned to look at Eddy’s hard, steady face. “Why didn’t she phone me when my father died? I have this terrible feeling she forgot.”

“To phone you?”

“Forgot she hadn’t phoned me. Her letters are full of half-explained things she expects me to know about, but there’s no way I could know about them.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, his arm firmly around her, his response practical, definitive. “There’s nothing you can do from here.”

After the wind fell away, and just before the rain began, they came down off the hilltop and saw Gwen hurrying home. So they swept her up with them into Eddy’s small truck and he drove her to her door.

Later, out of curiosity not unmixed with jealousy, Gwen said to Dido, “Well, I can see what you’ll bring to him. But what will he bring to you?”

Dido didn’t answer, stung by the very question that was in the back of her own mind, and irked by Gwen’s presumption. She thought fiercely, defensively, about Eddy’s kindness to his motherless niece, how he phoned her every week and was sending her gifts of toy animals, a seal, an ookpik, a polar bear, a caribou, one at a time, until soon the little girl would have a complete northern menagerie. Ordinary people had no idea how attentive Eddy could be.

“She’s so judgmental,” Dido complained to Eleanor during a quiet moment at the station several days later.

“She’s young.”

“She’s not much younger than I am.” Dido was making herself a cup of instant coffee, and Harry walked in to do the same. “She’ll be twenty-five tomorrow. You heard her say it the other day.”

“I know all that. But compared to you she’s inexperienced and unsure of herself. She’s shy.”

“Is she? Or is she perfectly sure of herself?”

Harry lifted his head. “There’s something to that.” Gwen could be surprisingly self-possessed, an odd mixture of crippling modesty and immodest determination. “She’s improved a lot since she began.”

Dido said, “I think she knows it. I think she knows exactly how good she is.”

In the hallway Gwen had stopped a few feet from the door, brought up short. Her arms were full of record albums.

To hear herself spoken of disparagingly—it hadn’t happened since she was a child at camp. At the age of ten she’d stormed into the tent with her objections: I heard you. I heard what you said. And all the other girls looked at her, embarrassed, but also sorry for her. And what had come after the anger? More anger, but in a different form. Anger with herself for having spoken out, and with the situation that goaded her into speaking. After the illicit blaze of indignation, there was the long, dark walk to the shore.

She heard Dido’s damning, dismissive voice. “I think she’s the type that gets called shy and isn’t shy at all.”

She heard Harry clear his throat, then say, “Well, most of us don’t have your confidence and poise.” Ingratiating himself with Dido, not coming to her defence at all.

One of the albums slipped out of her grasp and hit the floor with a bang. She swooped to pick it up—aware of the sudden, awful silence.

“Shit.” Dido drew her head in from the open doorway. She’d glimpsed the back of Gwen beetling into the record library.

“Did she hear us?” whispered Eleanor.

She must have. She must have heard every word.

In the record library Gwen’s eyes smarted, a wounded bear with voices in her head, she knows exactly how good she is … The voices lifted her up off her chair and out of the station and into the low wide town. They transported her over rocky ground, but not high enough to avoid the rocks. So bang and drag and jostle and bump she went on her way through Old Town, which was barely older than she was. She passed the vagabond-like disarray that was Peace River Flats on the left and Willow Flats on the right, then made her way around the base of the Rock to the causeway to Latham Island. On the island she walked past Harry’s house and came to the little dirt road on the left that led to the shore of Back Bay.

Agitated, she went down to the water.

And there she saw a vision of happiness. A young woman with her hair in a braid was throwing a stick for a big, handsome dog. He tore back and forth on the narrow shore, bounding and leaping with pleasure. Stan, the woman called. Good dog, she praised.

Not far away from the woman and her dog was Ralph Cody. Once again, he had his tripod set up at the water’s edge, and when he saw her, he waved. Her grateful heart propelled her feet. She went over to him.

“They’re always changing,” he said of the watery weeds he was enamoured of. “The light, the current, the wind, the way they float and move. I’ve taken dozens of pictures and each one is subtly different.”

The events of the following summer would make these pictures of Ralph’s almost intolerably moving. But Gwen couldn’t know that now. The two of them stood together on the strip of sandy shore under high clouds, white and grey, feathering across a blue sky.

Ralph manoeuvred to get another angle and she asked him what he was looking for and he considered for a moment. “Energy. I recognize energy when I see it. It’s more than just the scene in front of the camera,” he said, peering through the lens. “It’s a kind of electric connection. Almost a union between your intuitive side and your rational side.” He looked up from his Nikon. “I heard Abe Lamont talking about how to shape an interview and write for radio. It’s not so different, is it? One thought in each sentence. Not too many adjectives. Simplicity. Intimacy. Directness. That’s what I’m after too.”

She nodded and heard Abe’s commanding voice in her head: “It’s not about you, it’s about the script, the story; think of that.” And thinking of that, what did she see? Dido. Something the matter between Dido and her, something she didn’t understand. What Abe had dinned into her over the course of the week was the need for excellence, the need to take risks to get excellence. She’d felt excited, raised up, inspired. Maybe she’d even seemed sure of herself. Maybe that’s what Dido was talking about. And Gwen felt lost in the enormous gap between how she felt inside and what others thought of her. Dido was wrong. Wrong about her. Unless, of course, she was right.

On the way back to the station, she made a detour to the Explorer Hotel. Teresa had mentioned that the formal hearings of the Berger Inquiry were instructive and more interesting than you might expect. She went whenever she could to sit in the audience and listen. Now Gwen made her way through the hotel lobby and down the hall to the big meeting room, and Teresa was there, in one of the chairs set out for the public. Gwen sat down next to her. A lawyer for one of the pipeline companies was talking, a large man in a perfect suit and tie. “Arctic Gas,” whispered Teresa with a grin. “Watch out.” He was cross-examining an expert witness, an engineer employed by his own oil and gas consortium, to explain and defend what they were proposing—a pipeline that would be bigger in diameter than any existing gas pipeline in North America, that would be operated at a maximum pressure of 1,680 pounds per square inch, and designed to withstand this pressure, and reinforced, besides, with steel bands or “crack arrestors,” meaning it couldn’t ever crack, rupture, burst. “Ha, ha,” said Teresa, loud enough to turn a few heads.

Judge Berger sat alone at a small table at the front. He listened and made notes by hand. In keeping with the official nature of these formal sessions, he wore a navy blue pinstripe suit. Gwen was more familiar with his relaxed appearance in newspaper photographs taken at community hearings. Here, she gathered from Teresa, the expert witnesses sat at a table on his right. The reporters who covered the inquiry full-time sat on his left at an extended table that was spread, as were all the tables, with a white cloth. The lawyers—for Berger’s commission of inquiry, for the pipeline companies, for the native organizations, for environmental groups—sat at other tables, their backs to the audience. When the hearing stopped for a coffee break, Teresa said she supposed she should get herself to work. Gwen left with her, and a moment later they were outside in the afternoon light walking back to the station. “Malarkey,” Teresa said, and laughed. No purpose was served, she said, by all the malarkey that happens when people aren’t honest.

“In white culture, people are so busy lying through their teeth. So busy thinking about getting ahead and making money, so busy thinking about how they come across, that they can’t be themselves in a natural way. It builds up such a complicated and depressing web.”

Teresa wasn’t laughing any more. To Gwen she looked tired, uncharacteristically worn out.

Teresa went on, “If someone is sitting across from you and says, ‘I want your land.’ And you say no, I happen to like it here and I’ve been here forever, then they should respect what you’ve said, and that’s an end to it. They shouldn’t try to get around you. They shouldn’t read something else into what you’ve said. They should respect you.”

In the coming months, Gwen would often attend the inquiry. She noticed other townspeople who came repeatedly, a grey-haired woman who was always knitting, a wide-faced mother who breastfed her baby. They heard the native organizations push their moral high ground, and the pipeline companies don the cloak of thoughtful realism, and church and environmental groups attack the amorality of multinational oil. Of equal interest to Gwen was the science. All the types of snow, all the complications of the soil, all the varieties of wildlife she’d never given much thought to. Everyone addressed Berger when they spoke, and he guided them forward, passionate about every aspect of the issue, you could tell, but sober, balanced, Leonard Bernstein as parson, a force field of quiet attention. If something wasn’t clear he asked a question, and every single person listened.

After they realized they’d been overheard, Eleanor and Dido and Harry stood frozen in place for a moment until Dido began to laugh—embarrassed, shocked, working up a kind of carelessness to ease her guilt. Harry went over in his mind what he’d said—what the other two had said—not so bad, really, no great harm done, he hoped. But he’d better find Gwen. He went to the record library. A pile of records on a chair, but no Gwen, as he told them when he came back.

Eleanor wished that she’d nipped the whole thing in the bud. And yet she knew these regrettable conversations happened, were even necessary entertainment of a kind. Friends, good friends too, take the measure of each other behind the other’s back, pronouncing with injudicious yet satisfying finality. They do it to make themselves feel better, only to end up feeling slightly ashamed. They do it as a form of emotional release. They do it, in some way, not to bury the relationship but to keep it alive.

But there were consequences. No one who hears ill of herself quite trusts the friend again.

What were they to do? Harry said he’d talk to Gwen the next time he saw her, he’d joke her out of it. But Eleanor said some gesture of friendship was needed, and Dido was the one who suggested they celebrate Gwen’s birthday. It seemed to the others a generous thought, and Eleanor offered her place for the party.

“A surprise party,” Dido specified. “Otherwise, she’ll find an excuse not to come.”

Eleanor was dubious, but she agreed to be the one to invite Gwen home for a drink without divulging what lay in store.

Later that afternoon, when she saw her come into the station with Teresa, she called to her and Gwen came over to her desk. Eleanor searched her face and said quietly, “You’ve been gone quite a while.”

The sympathy in Eleanor’s voice picked at the thread of her self-pity, and tugged, and Gwen felt herself unravel childishly. She bit her lip.

“You overheard us talking,” said Eleanor.

Gwen looked down, her face a study in embarrassment, and a phrase came to Eleanor’s mind: proud flesh. In an old medical book of her father’s, its yellowed pages smelling of sweet dustiness, like an old church, she’d read among other things about burns and scalds, about suppuration, pain, excessive granulations or “proud flesh,” and, unless skilfully treated, ugly scars.

“People say all sorts of things, Gwen. It doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t mean they aren’t fond of the person, very fond.”

Gwen still couldn’t meet her eyes, and Eleanor reached across her desk and touched her hand. “Listen. Your birthday’s tomorrow. Let’s have a drink together.”

Gwen looked at her then, a look of gratitude. She nodded and smiled. Then, fingering some of the papers on the desk, she said, “Dido,” and stopped.

“Dido isn’t as confident as she looks. And you can seem very sure of yourself sometimes.”

Gwen stared back at her amazed. “I don’t feel sure of myself.”

“I know.”