When Is a Man by Aaron Shepard Page A

has someone with him—his wife, I guess.”
    â€œWell, I’m single. Thanks for pointing that out.”
    â€œWhat I mean is, don’t you need two people to keep up with the tagging and measuring?”
    Paul looked over, surprised. “You know a lot about this project.”
    â€œMy dad used to work for Monashee Power. Knows all the biologists around here.”
    â€œRetired?”
    â€œSorta.” Jory grimaced. “He’s into pottery now. Yeah, don’t ask.”
    â€œSo the spawning run—it’s pretty big?”
    â€œBig enough, especially when it’s midnight and raining and your hands are going numb from the cold. No way a guy can do that shit alone and not lose his mind.”
    â€œHuh.”
    â€œDidn’t know that?”
    â€œNot a clue.”
    â€œYour boss is a bit of a dick, yo.”
    Paul was starting to think the same thing.
    The road sloped upward and they climbed until on his right, across from the river, the mountains rose into view, craggy and snow-covered along their cathedral-like tops. For the first time he saw the magnitude of the range as it stretched to the north and south, the layers of peaks stacked westward, blue shapes blended into the sky. The river had disappeared behind a patchwork of clear-cuts, slash piles, and dense plantations of young spruce and larch.
    â€œBranch 65,” Paul said as they neared a fork in the road. The signpost, painted in white, hung from a broken-topped cedar.
    â€œWhat about it? Keep left.”
    â€œA work crew. I met the camp cook. I think she invited me for lunch.” Paul frowned, thinking he wouldn’t take her up on the offer, and maybe it was too late anyway. “Kind of a bumpy drive just to get a meal and some company.”
    â€œIt gets worse farther up,” Jory said. “The road turns to absolute shit. You need an ATV and a jockstrap. Take a left down there.”
    Tree branches scraped the window, and twigs snapped under the tires as he negotiated the narrow trail’s steep descent. A hairpin switchback spat them onto a clearing, a bench of land fifty metres above the river. On the far side of the bench, a forest of hemlock and fir dipped into a small, narrow ravine, where a fast-moving stream cascaded through the woods and met the river. He stepped out, stretched, and smelled rotten wood warming in the sun. Among the dried grasses, fireweed, and thistle, bits of rusted metal peeked out, the iron spokes and rim of a wagon wheel, a corroded chassis.
    â€œWhat’s all this?”
    Jory pulled the kayak from the back of Paul’s vehicle. He glanced around. “The junk? Part of an old sawmill, I think.”
    â€œHence the name? The Flumes?”
    â€œI guess.”
    Paul waded through the grass and inspected the metal scraps—an axle attached to a gear the size of a truck tire, the corroded skeletal hoops of an old waterline, the wooden slats long gone into the earth, corroded tin sheets from the remains of a sluice or drum. He tripped over the remnants of concrete foundations at his feet, the faint traces of vanished walls.
    â€œLittle help here?” said Jory behind him.
    Paul stood up. “Sorry.”
    â€œI’m joking.” He’d stripped down to his underwear. From a duffle bag, he pulled out a neoprene wetsuit and hood and tugged it over his muscular, mostly hairless frame and finally zipped up a sporty-looking yellow lifejacket. “I’m going to roast if I don’t get in the water. You know, if you like old stuff, you’re going to love living in the valley.”
    â€œDon’t plan on living here,” Paul said, but Jory had already slung the kayak under one arm and grasped his paddle and helmet in the other hand. As they walked through the field, the young man rattled off a list of local antiquities: trappers’ cabins in the woods, cemeteries in the middle of nowhere, mineshafts, abandoned logging equipment.