THE FOREST SWALLOWED the world. It spread on either side of the road like the jaws of a great green whale, filter-feeding on sojourners foolhardy enough to drive into its impossible expanse. Outcrops of limestone poked tiny carbuncles into its flank, and a network of varicose rivers pumped through the overgrowth. The highway sloped into a valley where the trees rose up and eclipsed the view. After that initial glimpse, the forest’s immensity could no longer be seen but only felt, the crushing weight of timber squeezing in on them like deep water against a submarine’s hull. Iman put a hand to the cold window, her face close enough to paint splotches of fog on the glass.
“Jesus,” she said. “How the hell are we going to even find this place?”
“The GPS’ll get us close,” David said, tapping the unit suctioned to the windshield. “But according to it, a few of the roads we need to take don’t actually exist. So from there we follow the ordinance maps I printed out. You’ll see ‘em in the glove compartment.”
Iman pulled out a piece of glossy accordion-folded paper, unfolding a section and spreading it out flat against her lap. Blue highlighter zigzagged over a network of thin black lines. A few bits of road had been circled, question marks scrawled next to the indicated area.
“I tried to verify the path as much as possible using Google Earth. The images this far north are pretty low-res, though, so not everything could be scouted out that well. The circles are the bits that looked sketchiest to me. Roads that might be washed out or have grown over or just don’t exist at all.”
Iman bit her lip. “That’s a lot of places to get stuck.”
“True, but I tried to be cautious. Plus a lot of those are pretty deep into the bush. As long as we get the car farther than the first few, we should have enough time to go on foot from there.”
Overgrowth whittled the road down to a single lane, its shorn edges ragged with cattails and Queen Anne’s lace. A dusting of snow bleached the foliage white and lent a physical character to the wind, its myriad fingers stirring up road dust and ruffling the trees. The car rounded a bend and nearly collided with the trunk of a toppled cedar.
David slammed on the brakes. A rush of expletive-tinged air wheezed through his lips. Tires squealed over gravelly asphalt. The car lurched to a halt inches from the mangled branches, their ends snapped into caltrops keen to puncture a tire. The seatbelt bit into Iman’s chest. She worked a hand into the gap between the belt and her. When it gave a little, she undid the clasp. The nylon strip retracted with a prim whizz!
“Well, shit,” David said. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, primed a cigarette, and took a drag, exhaling as he stepped outside to keep the smoke from backdrafting into the cab. Particles of fine powdery snow piled on the windshield, giving the world outside a faint and ghostly appearance. David pondered the tree, hands on hips, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He paced its length, hunkered down, stared for some time at a spot beyond the treeline. The cigarette jigged from one side of his mouth to the other, trailing a thin filament of smoke. He ventured into the trees, vanishing from sight for a few endless minutes, leaving Iman alone to concoct various horror movie plots in her head until he re-emerged, wiping pine needles from the shoulder of his jacket. A gust of chilled air probed its fingers into the car as David slipped back inside. He severed them with a brisk tug on the handle and snubbed out his cigarette, half-smoked, in the ashtray.
“That tree’s no accident. Someone dragged it across the road. Several someones, judging by the size of it.”
Iman peered over the dashboard at the felled cedar. It stretched well past the shoulders of the road in both directions, its trunk too wide for her to wrap her arms around. “Are you sure it didn’t just fall over? It looks too big for people to move it by hand.”
David shook his head. “There’s drag marks. Subtle, but they’re there. Also, there’s no stump matching where the tree was cut. Whoever moved it dragged it a long way, likely through bush as thick as this, or thicker.”
“So what do we do?”
“Well, we can’t move the thing. And the angle’s all wrong for a winch, even if we managed to rig one up.”
David blew air through both nostrils. He pulled his phone out of his jacket. “At least I’ve got some signal, gods be praised.” He dialled a number. Iman heard a voice answer, its words too muffled to make out. David and the speaker had a terse exchange, of which Iman only caught David’s half. “The road’s blocked. Logging route off the 63. Too damn far. I’m gonna try another route, but I’m not optimistic. We may need to walk in. Meet-up’s the same, but we may not have as much buffer as I’d hoped. Right.” David pocketed the phone. He hooked one arm over his seat’s headrest and backed up for the better part of a kilometre. Eventually the road widened enough to allow a three-point—or in this case, more like a seven-point—turn.
They retraced their steps for half an hour while Iman scouted possible alternate routes on the ordinance map. A left turn led to a gravel road that bounced them up a steep incline and down a furrowed cleft in the rocky soil. The suspension bobbed and trembled like a punch-drunk boxer as the chassis caught potholes on its chin. They bottomed out on several occasions with a sickening scrape of gravel against the car’s undercarriage, but the road was wide and cut a true and fairly straight line north towards an old quarry, which gaped like a giant pockmark on the cheek of the Boreal Shield. The road skirted around the quarry and narrowed to a logging route cut into the forest floor. They followed it for half an hour until another felled tree once again blocked their path. David chewed the corner of his mouth. He checked the time on his phone and looked up to the sun. Blowing snow draped the sky in an albino haze.
“What now?” Iman asked.
David shrugged. “Now we walk.”