Chapter 3
They stood on the ridge above the valley, gathered in a semicircle. It was noon and they were soaked with sweat, their shirts darkened all the way through. Jake could remember only a few days warmer in his time in this area, and none this late in the summer. That has to be the reason, he thought. This much warmth, this much moisture, things are going to happen that normally don’t.
Before them, in a broken circle of brush, a fuzzy mass pushed up from the ground. Cameron Fairchild squatted next to it, head cocked, his lanky frame less than two feet from the mold-covered mass. It had structure under the growth, perhaps something that had once been alive. Hard to say what that might be except . . . except it wasn’t alive anymore. The material covering it was thick, a sickly whitish-gray color, like congealed wax or animal fat. Cameron reached out and then pulled his hand back, wiping his fingers on his pants even though he hadn’t actually touched it.
“Rachel?” Warren said. “Is it from the . . . ?”
“The reaction?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
She stepped forward, plucking a branch out of the pine needles and prodding the mass with the stick. It dimpled under the pressure, and when she pushed harder the end of the stick broke through. She levered the stick upward, trying to break off a piece of the moldy exterior, and the wood snapped. She leaned in closer, using the butt end of the stick, and pushed harder. The material parted around the stick, but did not break off.
“There’s something in there,” she said. “Looks like fabric of some kind.” She poked again. “The biological material grew around it, so it’s some kind of saprobe.”
Warren tapped her on the shoulder. “Plain English.”
“Just a mold,” she said. “Typically these kind are black in color, and we call them sooty molds. They form a carpet over the material, like this one did, and break it down for the nutrients. But this is white, like a Penicillium genus, which are dry molds. This is a wet one. Gelatinous.” She dropped the stick and stood. “It’s nothing. Nature’s Jell-O.”
“You said there was fabric inside it?” Cameron asked.
“Hard to tell,” she said, then suddenly became aware everyone was looking at her, waiting for more. She blushed. “Relax, guys. Something died here, and this fungus is breaking it down. Happens all the time.”
“But there’s fabric inside,” Jaimie said. “That means—”
“Nothing,” Jake said. He could feel the tension ratcheting up, and he wondered if it was because they were out here, finally, at their destination and hadn’t found the gear, or if it was due to some other reason. He did know that they were on edge as a group, and a panic could start as easily as a brush fire in an old pine forest—and would be just as hard to put out. “It’s a gutpile,” he said. “Somebody put on gloves to keep their hands clean, then threw them on top when they were done.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Jaimie asked, eyebrows furrowed.
“All the time,” Jake lied. “I’m going to go look up top again.”
Jake left the small copse of alder and walked to the top of the ridge. The X on Warren’s laminated map led to an open patch of rocky ground. There was nothing there but stray lichens and long inch-deep furrows where glaciers had scraped over the rock surface millennia ago. They had been searching in concentric circles since the previous evening, combing the brush along the ridgeline. From what Jake understood, the equipment should have been easy to spot: a diesel-powered Geocore pneumatic drilling rig, ten six-gallon fuel containers filled with stabilized diesel, a bundle of ten-foot-long core tubes, and seven diamond-tipped drill bits encased in plastic sheaths; $2.3 million of equipment, according to Warren. And Jake’s own worth, according to Warren, was less than two shits if he couldn’t find something that big in this little patch of godforsaken wilderness.
Jake looked around the woods, a mixed stand of mature hardwoods and pine with narrow stands of alder and poplars running down the drainages. Open country, at least for this area of the bush. Warren was right. He should have been able to find the rig within an hour.
“Someone took it,” Warren said. He had joined Jake on the ridgeline and stood looking at the woods and brush with an expression of barely controlled fury.
“Who?” Jake said. “Why?”
Warren turned to look at him, his face smoothing out, becoming unreadable. “Who knows?” He looked down at his rolled-up cuffs, frowned, and rolled them back down to cover up his wrists, taking time to button each cuff before turning back to Jake. “The world is full of people who don’t like explorations of any kind.”
“Maybe,” Jake said. “Who was the pilot, again?”
“The pilot?”
“The one who took a round through his hand.”
Warren studied Jake for a moment, impassive. “Who told you that?”
Jake turned away, moving to a slightly higher point to survey the valley. Far below them, the slow, tannin-stained water reflected the granite outcroppings on the far side of the river. The ground leading up to the river was fairly open, pockets of wetlands mixed with granite outcroppings. The only tall vegetation was along the fringes of the river, a dense stand of sedge grass and cattails.
“I hired him out of Vancouver,” Warren said from behind him. “He has a reputation for discreet work.” He paused. “And it was a piece of shrapnel, not a bullet.”
Jake turned. “How shaken up was he? After he took fire, I mean?”
“Plenty,” Warren said. He was watching Jake closely. “What is it?”
“Let me see one of your maps.”
Warren shrugged his backpack off his shoulder, rifled through several scrolls of laminated paper, and selected one. He unrolled the map, revealing a multicolored contour map. Warren placed a finger—no dirt under the fingernails, Jake noted, the cuticles neatly trimmed—on a location that Jake understood to be the spot where they were standing. The landscape around them was shown in a series of lines, evenly spaced to the south, then changing direction in the area around Resurrection Valley, switching direction to run north and south, then breaking off the linear lines into strange swirls. To Jake it looked like someone had stuck a giant spoon in the earth and done some mixing.
Warren saw him squint. “It shows geomagnetic signatures,” he said. “Not topography. Lots of people think the underlying rocks follow the same pattern as what we see up here. Not necessarily so.”
“We’re here?”
“Yes.” Warren removed a pen from his backpack and carefully placed an X on the map. “You want the flight path, don’t you?” Without waiting for an answer he drew a dashed line to the southeast. Jake and Warren turned in unison to the direction that the helicopter had taken into—and presumably out of—the coordinates they had been given. Jake oriented himself along the line, then looked up. The vector Warren had drawn on the map led to a dense tangle of brush, then more woods. Beyond that was a small, flat-topped hill, perhaps a quarter mile away. It was rocky and barren, with only a few wispy cedars clinging to the edges
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Warren said.
“He wasn’t shot at on the way out,” Jake murmured. “He took fire on the way here.”
Warren nodded, excited, but for a moment Jake had seen something flash through his eyes. A recalculation, perhaps—Jake not quite the simple-minded country Indian Warren thought he had hired. “You military?” he asked. “Putting that government training to good use?”
Jake looked back at him. “What reaction were you talking about, earlier?”
Warren cocked his head, smiled, then shouted out for the group to stay where they were. Jake was already moving, and Warren followed him. They found a game trail and wove through the brush, not talking, Jake caught up in the same excitement as Warren: the pure pleasure of seeing the mystery, any mystery, dissolve before your own reasoning.
Yeah, yeah, Jake thought, as they climbed the hill. We get on top, there’ll be nothing but some lichen-covered rocks and a strong breeze.
He heard the flapping before he crested the hill, and quickened his pace until he and Warren were nearly running up the incline. Jake pulled himself up the last ten feet and stood on top of the rock outcropping, panting and happy. The ground in front of him was about a thousand square feet of basalt rock, with a large, tarped bundle smack dab in the middle. The bundle had been covered in a heavy-gauge camouflage tarp, but one of the stones used to weigh it down had rolled off, and the corner of the tarp was snapping in the stiff southwesterly breeze. He turned and held out a hand for Warren, pulling him over the last lip of rock.
Warren took a moment to get his breath, then walked over to the bundle. He stood for a while, as if afraid to look underneath, and then peeled back the rest of the tarp. The rocks slid off the other corners, and Warren let the breeze carry the tarp across the rock face until it wrapped around a cedar tree. He ran a hand lightly over the equipment, spending more time on the cans of diesel fuel than anything else, tipping them up to check the seals. Gradually, his shoulders relaxed, and he turned to Jake.
“That short-dropping son of a bitch,” he said. “How’d you figure it out?”
Jake shrugged. The pilot had done what any smart man might do after taking fire. Stop a little ways off from the preset delivery location—four, five hundred yards. Not an impossible shot if there were other guys waiting, but most guys up here typically carried brush guns designed to hit their targets at under a hundred yards. Maybe the pilot knew that. He sure as hell knew he wouldn’t get paid if he returned with the equipment still in the cargo bay, so he dropped the equipment close enough to call it an honest mistake, and walked away.
Behind them, the tarp flapped in the wind.
“You play it close to the vest, huh?” Warren said.
“Just glad we found it, Boss.”
“There’ll be a bonus for this, you know. And you don’t have to play Tonto.”
Jake walked over to the tarp and pulled it loose from the tree. He shook it out, letting it unfold in the breeze. Warren joined him, and they worked together to fold the tarp into a square bundle. It was an oddly intimate exercise, coming together to join the ends, flipping it over, and then coming together again. Jake noticed that Warren’s eyes never left him while they were folding and refolding, studying Jake with the same type of expression he’d had when inspecting the equipment and the fuel tanks. Making sure that the tools he had purchased were in the expected condition.
Jake almost laughed at the thought, because that’s what he was, a tool. No matter what he did with the money—and it was more money than he could make in five years up here, guiding or trapping—that fact would remain. He was a tool, and his master was right here, wielding him as he saw fit. Perhaps it was not such a big deal.
“Something funny?” Warren asked.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “A saying from moose camp.”
“What’s that?”
Jake motioned at the equipment, then at the valley below them. They could see the rest of the group through the treetops, watching them. Jaimie’s tall, broad-shouldered form stood out in front, her short dark hair contrasting with her pale skin. He studied the route back down to them, the steep slope followed by the thick brush, a route that was difficult enough without carrying long core tubes, drill bits, or, god forbid, a small diesel engine. “He who finds the moose gets the lightest load home.”
“That’s a good one,” Warren said. “Too bad this isn’t moose camp.”
* * *
He woke in the predawn gray of the following morning and knew immediately what kind of day it was going to be. He could feel the pain forming in his body like a thunderstorm, throbbing but not yet fully awake. Stirring, pacing, winding around his elbows and knees and shoulders, around the sockets of hips, deep in his core. It was not the ache of sore muscles, although there was plenty of that as well. This was the other, the sporadic and malicious visitor, the one that came and went . . . and sometimes came and stayed. It was in his chest, too, wrapping around his ribs and spine, and causing his heart to hammer. He could almost taste it, a bitter presence running through blood and lymph.
He had brought himself to this point, pushing his body too far and too fast. Moderate exercise was okay—was good—but exhaustion could trigger an episode. And he was exhausted, exhausted from hauling the heavy equipment down all day long and into the twilight hours, exhausted from the pace and the load on the trip in, and more than a little worn out from biting his tongue in the presence of strangers. Add in lying on the cold, hard ground for three nights—he had not made a browse bed from balsam branches as he normally would, because they had not camped in areas where there were enough balsam boughs for everyone—and waking up to this state of the body was not unexpected.
He reached out, stifling a groan, and felt inside his canvas Duluth Pack. From a side compartment he withdrew three pill bottles, shaking out two capsules from the largest and singles from the others. He dry-swallowed the pills, feeling them make their slow way down his esophagus. There was a thermos of water a few feet away, but it may as well have been a hundred miles. He worked his throat, forcing the pills down. He knew it was silly to swallow the prescription pills before the others, the ones he bought from a friend of a friend. Eventually he would abandon this self-imposed policy, as he had so many others, but for now it held. Prescriptions first, then the others; the ones that actually did something.
He waited. His temples were throbbing, and it took some time for him to realize that there was another noise to the morning; the low rumble of the Geocore’s diesel engine. It ran for a moment, then stopped. Nobody tried to restart it. A test run. That was good. The first drilling location was only a few hundred yards down, in the valley, where the steep sides mellowed out into the floodplain along the river. The rest of the crew would be able to move the drill cores down there, along with the remaining gear, by themselves. Perhaps the other pill could wait.
It was the only real self-delusion he allowed himself, that the other pill, or pills, could wait. It was part of his policy too, he supposed—not only waiting for them to be the last ones he took, but pretending they might not even be needed.
Five long minutes later he reached out again, this time unzipping a separate side compartment. Inside was a small generic aspirin bottle with the cap’s plastic safety mechanism long since carved away. He untwisted it and laid there with his eyes closed, and tried to remove any emotion from his self-assessment. Was it a three-pill day? No; three-pill days were the kind that made carving away the safety latch on the pill bottle a necessity, and he had opened the container easily enough.
He shook out two small white tablets and opened his eyes, gazing at them blearily. He put them in his mouth and swallowed, and closed his eyes.
Two minutes later he was sleeping.
* * *
He woke to the sound of the drill rig’s engine again, coupled with a sound like sandpaper rubbing against a hard-grained wood. He straightened one leg, then the other. Pain flared and subsided. He did the same with his arms, then craned his neck from one side to the other. It was okay. Not good, but this far away from home and a warm bed, okay was perfectly acceptable. He managed to get partially up, knee-walked over to the thermos, and twisted the cap free. The lukewarm water was flat and tasted of pine needles, and he drank until the water poured down the sides of his face and soaked his collar.
He took his time getting his boots on. His job was largely over for now and there was no hurry, no need to embarrass himself by stumbling from the tent or leaning against trees. He took another drink of water. His head was fuzzy, and he felt fairly serene. Neither of the conditions were his natural state, and it was his best indication that the pills, the second set, had fully kicked in. He did not like the false sense of well-being, at least not much, but there would be a time for pain and clarity. It would come for him within twenty-four hours. For now, the boots.
He stepped from the tent and squinted into the late summer sun. Below him, the diesel engine purred. It was a strange contraption, several hundred pounds of anchoring legs and infrastructure, the engine itself another four hundred pounds, squatting over the river floodplain like a mechanical spider. They had delivered a tripod and winch with the rest of the gear, as well as an industrial-strength dolly fitted with wide, all-terrain tires. Without the winch and dolly there would have been no way to move or position the equipment. Warren had thought of everything, and the team seemed to know their exact roles and responsibilities. With the exception of Warren and a crew member named Andy Parkson, they were all younger than thirty, probably chosen for their physical stamina as much as for their technical skills.
He stood blinking outside the tent, watching the core tube slowly rotating below him, the technicians hovering nearby to monitor the gauges. Warren had said they would gather samples for two or three days, max. From what Jake could glean from the group’s conversations, the stratum they wanted to pull samples from was close to the surface.
Jake made his way down to the valley floor, the ground squelching under his boots as he descended, hopping from one island of rock to the other when he could, trying to avoid the worst of the boggy ground.
What the hell were they after?
He paused a short distance back to watch the two technicians work. Dyson Greer was the lead technician; tall, with a shaggy beard and knobby shoulders, he talked in a slow, easy tone that reminded Jake of a cross between a stoner and a Buddhist monk. Andy Parkson was the auxiliary tech, a thin and quiet man in his thirties who dry-shaved every morning and quietly pitched in to help with whatever task needed doing. They were both wearing mud-splashed hip boots, methodically drilling anchors for the rig’s legs, using a combination of the tripod, dolly, and brute strength to position the Geocore rotary rig.
They continued drilling down into the rock, a slurry of dark loam and rock chips building up at the base of the core tube. Parkson stopped the drill rig about four feet down and then pulled a lever to retract the drill bit. Once it was free of the hole, Greer swung the rig away, and Parkson threaded an anchor rod into the hole. Jake knew the rods well; he had carried four of them, each close to eighty pounds, down the hill yesterday afternoon on separate trips. Each one was fitted with an expansion tip, and now Parkson used a small sledgehammer to slam the upper end, causing the embedded tip to balloon and anchor into the rock. The hollow clangs echoed back to them from the other side of the valley.
Jake’s gaze drifted across the slow-moving boggy river fifty yards away, flanked with sedge grass, to the rock bluff that framed the north end of Resurrection Valley. The bluff was nearly vertical, except for a narrow hogback ridge that cut diagonally down across the face. A few wispy cedars clung to the lichen-encrusted rock. The valley bottom was pockmarked with strips of wetlands, low boggy stretches between the rocks. Pocket wetlands, Rachel had called them. The swampy ground grew even wetter next to the river, which lacked a defined shore. Instead, the land seemed to dissolve into water, a blurry transition between terra firma and the river.
“Strange place.” Rachel had come up behind him while he surveyed the valley, partially lost in the painkiller’s pleasant haze. She was dressed in light nylon pants and a microfiber shirt, and held an iPad in a leather case in one hand. “You can tell there’s something interesting underground.”
“Mmm,” Jake said. “I thought iPads were a no-no.”
“It doesn’t have a 3G connection,” she said. “And the GPS has been disabled. Warren cleared me to use it.”
“Good for you,” Jake said.
They watched as Parkson and Greer drilled another anchoring hole into the rock. The Geocore rig’s diesel engine rpms climbed mildly as the bit chewed through the stone. A cloud of gray dust rose up from the ground, clinging to the mud on their hip boots.
“Good thing there’s some bigger rocks,” Rachel said, tapping her foot against the rock they were standing on. “Not the bedrock they’d like, but at least they can anchor to it. The rig can float on the ground if it has to, but it’s so wet down here that Warren thought they might bend a core tube or something.”
“He doesn’t take too many chances, does he?”
She huffed air out through her nose. It reminded Jake of the way a whitetail doe would puff when she was angry. Probably something he shouldn’t say to her, although the reason for that escaped him at the moment. He smiled, mildly amused at his attempt to identify his political incorrectness. Yup, it was certainly a two-pill day, and he was just floating along, talking with a pretty, spoiled girl about geotech exploration in a valley his father had once called the single most uninviting place he’d ever visited. Resurrection Valley, or simply the bad country.
“What?” she said, seeing his smile.
Jake shook his head.
“Are you ready to go, then?”
“Go where?”
“I have to gather some data,” she said. “Remember? Warren said you’d come with me.”
“What kind of data?”
“Well, I’m an ecologist, so . . . ?”
He looked at her blankly.
She sighed. “Plant and animal survey, see if there’s anything endangered or threatened. First level due diligence. For you, just a walk in the woods.”
“Warren didn’t say anything to me about this.”
She shrugged. “What else are you going to do? C’mon, Cameron and Jaimie are going to be collecting core samples, Dyson and Greer will be running the rig, Warren will be getting in everyone’s face about being more timely.” She poked him lightly in the arm, her eyes gleaming. “By comparison, I’m pretty good company.”
He rolled his shoulders, feeling for the pain he knew was lurking underneath the opioid cloud. He felt a twinge and he used it to focus, to clarify his thinking, to pull himself out of this damned false happy place. “Why’d you get into ecology?”
“For the stimulating company, obviously,” she said. “Come on, Grumpy, let’s go check out the neighborhood.”
“No,” he said, his voice stopping her as she started away. “I want to know. Why?” He waved a hand toward the drill rig, welcoming the pain that twisted through his knuckles and wrist. “Why ecology? So you can let some suits know how much damage they can do without getting sued?”
She gave him a patient smile. “It’s not like that.”
“If you’re in it for the money, I can understand. But you’re an afterthought, right? They can’t be paying you as much as those guys. So what, this is the only gig you could get, figuring out how much good ole Ma Nature can give up? Some sort of ecology pimp?”
Very slowly, the animation that had been in her face drained away. Her mouth pursed twice, but each time the words she was about to speak retreated back inside her. After a moment she turned away and started picking her way down the valley. Jake watched her as she moved from rock to rock, moving quickly at first, then slowing. She stopped near a small swamp (a pocket wetland, he thought) and took out her iPad, snapping pictures of the plants on the fringe of the marshy ground. Her face was red, her lips pursed.
Too much, he thought. Jesus. A little push would have done it.
And on the heels of that: Oh, Deserae. I’m sorry, babe. Sorry I even looked at that dipshit little girl, or at Jaimie.
Deserae, who he had first met in the city when they were in college. It was a mid-December night, and the snowflakes were cartwheeling through Rice Park in downtown St. Paul, catching the glow from the Christmas lights strung up in the trees. He had come to the coffee shop to get out of the wind, his mind too cluttered to study for his upcoming finals, and when he went up to order his coffee he couldn’t decide what to get and was too embarrassed to admit he didn’t know a cappuccino from a latte. As he stood there trying to look indecisive rather than clueless, she had moved alongside him and said it was a French press sort of night, didn’t he think? He ordered two, and although she insisted on paying for her own, she allowed him to sit at the small table with her. He had tried to talk. Hard to do without studying her face, the kind of sight he thought people should have to stand in line to see.
They met in the city, but neither one was made for it. He could still see her on a crisp September evening three years after they met, standing at the edge of the marsh with the sun setting and the massive full harvest moon rising in the east, Deserae swinging her little twenty-gauge in a smooth arc and tumbling a canvasback, almost squealing in pleasure at the thought of the roast duck dinner it would provide, then turning to him and telling him someday he might grow up and learn how to shoot, too. She was as lovely then, her cheeks smeared with mud to hide her face from incoming ducks, as she had been in the coffee shop in her merino sweater and silk scarf, in the dim light of their apartment with clothes melting away, in the bright spring days when they walked everywhere, broke and happy and the world there just for them. Perhaps more lovely then than anywhere or anytime.
And what would she think of him now? Creeping through his thirties, trying to cobble something together for a life, alone and growing more and more ornery with every passing day. He knew. He knew what she would think: his fate was far worse than hers.
He heard the diesel engine rev again and turned. They were still anchoring the legs, but later that day they would begin to drill down into the ground, probing into the area where Warren had shown him those strange geomagnetic swirls. In a day, maybe two, it would all be over. He would have his money and he would go on to the rest of his non-life.
One of these days, he thought, I promise, honey, I’ll start working on being who I was again.
He started after Rachel, trying out different apologies in his mind as he walked.
* * *
It was late afternoon and she had still not spoken to him. The different things he might have said had remained inside him, curdling in the back of his mouth after her first withering glare. He stayed back, shadowing her as she moved through the marshy ground, then up through the sides of the valley, snapping pictures, occasionally plucking a leaf to study against the key on her tablet. She took nothing with her, no samples, just cataloging what she saw and marking down her observations. They were almost two miles from the drill site.
“We need to start heading back,” he said.
She kept walking, moving even farther away. Jake sighed and followed her in silence. It was very quiet; he couldn’t hear the drill rig from here, or much of anything else. There were few birds and no animals in the valley, and the plant life was mundane. He supposed that was a good thing for Warren, because bringing along an ecologist on an exploratory mission obviously meant there was the potential to develop this site. The idea of development seemed farfetched to him—the site was far from anything and everything—but perhaps it would not be so hard to carve a road through the swamps and brush. From a pure civil engineering perspective, he supposed it was actually quite simple—the hard part would be convincing the locals that it was a good idea. And convincing the banks it was worth the investment.
The bottom of the sun was almost touching the horizon when Rachel finally tucked her tablet into her backpack and headed back to camp. Jake followed her, as he had most of the day, his hips aching and the beginnings of a headache forming at the base of his neck. He didn’t feel as bad as he’d thought he might. There were some days when he would be relegated to his bed by the dinner hour, pills or no pills, a cobweb of pain spreading over his body joint by joint.
It took far less time to make it back to camp when they didn’t have to stop at every patch of vegetation. Warren was talking with Cameron some distance from the drill rig and the rock dust it was generating. He waved them over.
“Well?” Warren asked. “Any indications?”
Rachel shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s pretty sterile around here, biologically speaking. I need to find somewhere with some active life.”
“Okay,” Warren said. “We’re about ready to start drilling, so go get some rest. It took a while to get everything aligned, but we should be able to collect our first sample before it gets dark.” He turned to Jake. “Everyone is pretty hungry.”
“It’ll have to be freeze-dried stuff,” Jake said. “No game around that I can see.” He turned to Rachel and tried a smile. “It’s pretty sterile around here, is what I’m saying.”
She ignored him, moving up the slope to the campsite and slipping into her tent.
“Christ, you’re a charmer,” Warren said. “And no shooting—I told you that. I don’t care if a goddamn bear wanders into camp. The drill rig makes more than enough noise.”
“Why the big hang-up on a little bit of noise?” Cameron asked. His beard was covered with flecks of mud, as were his clothes, except where he had pulled off his hip waders to reveal clean blue jeans. Cameron’s eyes were the same shade of blue as his jeans, bright and inquisitive within that shaggy face. “They’re not actually monitoring us, are they?”
“I don’t know,” Warren said. “But we keep it under eighty decibels, no matter what. And if someone complains that we’re spooking game, we need to pack up and leave. Right away.”
Cameron reached up and scratched at his beard, looking around him at the barren valley, then up to the pines at the top of the ridge. “Who’s going to complain out here?” he asked. “Environment Canada? One of the First Nations?”
“Could be either one,” Warren said. “I signed on the dotted line that we wouldn’t disturb their hunting land to the west on our way in, and that we would be under eighty decibels the entire time. I also confirmed drill holes would be sealed and covered, and any spills would be reported immediately through this.” He patted his vest pocket containing one of their satellite phones. “We’re going to respect each and every one of those requirements.”
“Well, that Geocore is a pretty tight little unit,” Cameron said. “No spills unless we tip it over. And she’s anchored down real nice.”
“You ready to pull a sample?”
Cameron grinned. “Absolutely.” He twirled his finger in the air for Greer, who gave him a thumbs-up and depressed one of the levers. The drill bit ground through the overlying rock, moving slowly, almost imperceptibly. The hollow core inside the wider drill bit spun slowly, reflecting the setting sun.
“What’s that?” Warren said. “Three inches a minute? We’ll be down into the good stuff in less than an hour.”
“If it’s there,” Cameron said.
“It’ll be there,” Warren said.
They watched the drill rig slowly bore into the ground. It was like a giant straw, Jake thought. Plunge it into the ground, but instead of holding your thumb over the top the way you kept liquid in a straw, the hole-sawing bit was retracted, allowing small drilling teeth on the inside of the bit to unfold. When the drill rig began rotating again, the teeth cut sideways into the bottom of the core, severing it for extraction.
From thirty yards away, Greer held up one hand, indicating five feet of progress. As the sun slid completely below the horizon, he held up two hands, fingers splayed.
“Almost into it,” Warren said. It was as talkative as Jake had seen the man, almost giddy, and Jake had to admit to a certain level of excitement himself. Dinner had been forgotten. It didn’t matter to him that whatever they pulled from the ground would likely be unremarkable, at least visually. There was, perhaps, something extremely valuable right under their feet. The fact it would come from Resurrection Valley, from the bad country, only added to its allure. It would be like finding a diamond in the trash.
We’re not after diamonds, though, Jake thought. Not copper or silver or gold, either, I think. Something different, something that causes a reaction.
He had no idea what that meant, and he didn’t really care. He was so captivated by watching the core rig that his pain was forgotten, and he shrugged off the first trembling as the shaking of his exhausted leg muscles. Then he noticed the leaves on the poplar trees near the top of the slope, already yellowing, had begun to shower down, the thin trunks shaking back and forth as though under a high wind. “What’s going on?” Rachel called out from above them, emerging from her tent. Cameron raced up the slope to her and put an arm around her shoulders, which she shrugged off.
“Warren?”
He held up a hand, his eyes never leaving the drill rig. The tremor grew, rippling under them, and Jake had to take a step to steady himself and keep from falling. The ground was trembling, the leaves and grasses shuddering. One of the rocks in the soft ground slowly slid out of the earth, like a tooth popping loose from a gum. The trembling intensified, and Jake was about to retreat back up the valley slope, away from what he guessed was one of the first recorded earthquakes in this area of the world. Back into the woods, which to him always meant safety, his natural refuge in this world, more so than the city or the hot desert sands where he had spent three years of his life being someone else entirely. The only other place he had ever felt as safe was with Deserae, and that was a safety that had turned out to be fragile, as delicate and beautiful as the tiny iridescent scales on the back of a butterfly’s wings.
Then the shaking stopped.
Warren glanced at Jake, who shook his head. “No idea,” he said.
Greer had already shut the rig off. Warren and Parkson walked over to him, Cameron still at the top with Rachel. Jake stayed back, watching as the three men inspected the drill rig, which seemed undamaged as far as he could tell. Jake scanned the valley, now darkening, as still and silent as it had been all day. The only indication of the temblor was the mud-streaked boulder that had popped out of the ground and the fresh carpet of yellow poplar leaves farther up the slope. After a bit, Greer and Warren produced small LED flashlights to continue their inspection, and Jake made his way back up to the campsite.
“What happened?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you? Is this the reaction you were talking about?”
“No,” Rachel said. “I . . . I don’t know what that was.”
Jaimie had joined Hans, the diesel engine mechanic, at the small campfire. She looked up from the aluminum pot in which she was boiling water for their freeze-dried meals. She seemed to be the least concerned of all of them regarding the event—Jake wasn’t sure what else to call it; earthquake seemed a bit dramatic—and again he was impressed by her calmness. “Maybe Mother Nature doesn’t like to be poked and prodded,” she said.
“Maybe not,” Jake said. “But something tells me we’re not done with her yet.”
Hans, a short, prematurely balding man who carried a laminated service manual and a pocket-size Bible with him, had been sleeping in his tent and was awakened by the shaking ground. He was anxious to know if the temblor had damaged the drill rig’s engine.
“Ask them,” Jake said, motioning toward the men laboring up the slope into camp. He could smell the rehydrated food, and his mouth was salivating. Sometimes the pills drove away his appetite as well as his pain, but tonight that wouldn’t be the case.
“Is the engine okay?” Hans asked. He patted the small rectangle the Bible made in his front pocket, something he did constantly.
“It seems to be,” Warren said, closing his eyes and rubbing his forehead. “But the core tube is bent, and the drill bit is trapped underground.” He glanced at Greer. “I doubt we can salvage either one.”
“Anchors are bent, too,” Greer said. “Let’s cut them all off and start over.”
“What if it happens again?” Hans asked. “You get too much vibration coming up the core tube, that little engine is going to rattle apart.”
“I was thinking about that,” Greer said. “This time we’ll let the legs float on top of the ground. That way, if we get another shaker, we’ll move with it.” He held a hand out, shaking it and moving it along an imaginary plane. “Sometimes you gotta roll with the flow, man. Right?”
“Sure,” Hans said, patting his Bible again. “Thank goodness everyone’s okay. I think I heard a tree fall back in the woods a bit when the shaking was at its worst.” They all looked around them, as though the ancient white pines around their campsite might suddenly topple over.
“Did we cause this?” Rachel asked quietly.
They all looked to Greer, who shook his head. “Highly doubtful,” Greer said. “Only time a drill rig is going to cause movement is if you’re near some sort of geothermal activity, drill into some felsite, and release pent-up steam. We’re way too shallow for that—up here, the real pressures are way down in the guts of the earth. We’re barely punching through the skin.”
“So it’s what?” Jaimie asked. “Coincidence?”
“Who knows?” Greer said. “We probably drilled into a minor pressure plate, jump-started a process that would have happened in the next few hundred years anyway. It’s a unique place, geologically speaking. Lots going on, even as shallow as we’re operating.”
“But nothing to worry about,” Warren said.
Greer glanced at Warren, then turned to the rest of the group. “No, nothing to worry about at all,” he said. “Just a little shake and bake. Tomorrow morning we’ll reset and give her a good poke.”
“Good,” Warren said. “Get something to eat, all of you.”
They ate their meals straight out of the packets, tossing the containers and plastic forks into the small fire. There was little talk, and after a few minutes they began to straggle into the one-man tents. Jake waited until all had left and then pushed the coals into a small, concentrated pile with one of the half-burnt sticks. In the morning, he would spread the coals out again and supply some twigs and fresh air. It was something he always liked to do when he was out in the brush, coaxing life out of what appeared to be dead gray ashes. He sort of hoped that Jaimie, or even Rachel, might be awake to see him perform the old trick. The thought simultaneously amused him and disgusted him. Well. It had been a long time since he had been around women, and longer yet since he had been around women quite like Rachel and Jaimie, intelligent and strong and a bit exotic, in different ways.
Easy, he thought. They’re not exactly looking for a northwoods love affair, and you need to keep your mind focused on the job.
Later, as Jake tried to position his body on the hard ground so he could sleep, his mind kept returning not to the women but to the trees, the way they had twisted and shuddered, how the leaves had come down from the poplars like . . . well, shit. Deserae had always said the way the leaves would fall on a windless day made her imagine the trees weeping, crying at the approach of winter, at the departure of warmth and rain. Her analogy had disturbed him, for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, and it bothered him more now, thinking about this early leaf fall. His thoughts followed him into his dreams, where aspens and balsam firs and white pines twisted and swayed all night long. He woke once and understood, in a moment of clarity that sometimes comes after a dream, why their movements had bothered him so much. For it was not as though the earth had been moving the trees, or that the trees were crying. It was as though the trees themselves, long anchored in this remote valley, had been trying to claw themselves out of the ground so that they might escape.