The Gist Hunter (38 page)

"Stop running. After all, anything or anybody you meet in a dream is only another part of you, so what's to be afraid of?" She peered up at him through filmed lenses. "Is there something you want to talk about?"

He had a feeling that if he started talking about the bear with Mrs. Skinner, he'd find himself wandering into parts of the forest he wasn't ready to deal with yet. Things would come up. Things like having to move
here
from Ottawa, like leaving all his friends behind, like being lonely, like not fitting in. Like being scared but not knowing why.

Here
was the small town of Comox, at the end of a little stub of land that hung off the east coast of Vancouver Island into Georgia Strait. It was home to a few thousand people, many of them attached to the air force base at the landward end of the peninsula.

Three squadrons operated out of CFB Comox. One flew the big, gray submarine-hunting Auroras that wheeled over town on four throbbing turboprops, their fuselages so jam-packed with electronic detection gear that the crew could spot a Coke can half-submerged in the Pacific from a mile high. Or so he'd heard kids at school saying.

Another squadron flew forty-year-old T-33 jet trainers, the same machines that every serving pilot in the Canadian Forces learned to fly in, the fast-movers that zoomed up from the base and out over the harbor, with torpedo-shaped pods at the tips of their stubby wings that made each one look like a flying
X
.

Whatever he might be doing, Mike stopped and looked up when the planes flew over. Especially when the air force aerobatics team appeared over Comox one bright, spring morning, for two weeks of practice. He couldn't believe how the local folks just kept puttering around in their gardens, not looking up as ten red and white Snowbirds hurtled over their roofs, practising how to spiral up and loop down in tight turns, wing-tip to wing-tip, so fast and so just right.

Mike's father was neither a jet-jockey nor a sub-hunter. He had been posted in March to the third group operating out of CFB Comox, the historic 442 Search and Rescue Squadron. He was an air force SARtech—a specialist, he liked to say, "in getting people out of situations where if they had any sense they wouldn't have got themselves into them in the first place."

SARtechs went out in the slow-flying de Havilland Buffalo—big brother to the tough little Twin Otters that the bush pilots used to open the Canadian north—or in the lumbering, two-rotor Labrador helicopters. If a fisherman abandoned a burning boat, the Lab would hover in the air so that Dad could jump into the cold sea, put a harness around the man before hypothermia killed him, and wait in the water while the victim was winched to safety, and they lowered the cable again to retrieve the SARtech.

It was dangerous work. Once, a Lab was picking stranded rock-climbers off a mountain. The shivering civilians had been lifted aboard, and the last rescuer was coming up the cable, when an engine suddenly shuddered and died. With the Labrador at maximum payload, one rotor couldn't hold the helicopter in the air. It fell, crushing the life from the SARtech dangling beneath it.

Mike's father said there was no point thinking about it. Somebody had to go when people needed help; if it was risky, then it was risky, but somebody still had to go.

"It's not being a hero," Dad said. "It's just a job that's got to be done. It's
my
job."

"You didn't have to be a SARtech, though," Mike said. "You volunteered. You used to be a cook."

Dad shrugged. "Don't worry about it. Nothing's going to happen."

"But don't you get scared sometimes?"

"You don't let that get in the way." His father hunted around in his mind for a moment; he wasn't good with words. "You have to walk through the being scared part. 'Cause on the other side of scared is this other place where everything opens up, you feel really great, and . . . and you're just
there
."

Mike didn't tell his father about the bear. He told Jonah Hennenfent, the only kid he'd gotten to know at Highland, Comox's senior high school. Jonah was smallish and rounded, with hair that stood up straight and a tendency to practise new facial expressions even if other people could see them. His parents were ground crew at the base; they'd transferred in from the fighter base at Cold Lake at about the same time Mike's family had arrived from the east.

The two newcomers had met in the principal's office in mid-March when they'd both arrived to start school. They'd hung out together from time to time over the summer, and were still an exclusive group of two now that September was almost over.

Mike told Jonah about the bear over sandwiches and drink boxes in the lunch room—no details, just the core of the dream.

Jonah waived his arms and experimented with a mouth-open, full gawp. "That's your totem, G!" he said, having dipped deeply into aboriginal culture over the summer, starting when his parents took him to a performance by the Komoux Band's storytellers and dancers at the native Big House down by the shores of the estuary.

"As if," said Mike.

"For sure, G," said Jonah. "This is your spirit guide trying to get in touch with you. It goes, 'Hey, man, let me get a little closer.' And you're all, 'No way, bear, I'm outta here!' But it's gotta keep coming back 'cause it's gotta make contact. You should, like, do a vision quest. Go off in the bush and don't eat."

Mike moved Jonah off the subject and into more comfortable areas. He told him about the time he'd been carsick, and had thrown up out of the window before Dad could find a place to pull over.

"I splattered these people waiting for a bus. It was just their shoes, but it totally grossed them out."

"Yow!" said Jonah. "A drive-by hurling! Awesome!"—and forgot about the bear.

At dinner, Mom said, "You don't seem to be making a lot of friends since we moved here. Just Jonah."

"I'm okay," Mike said.

Dad said, "There's a good Air Cadets squadron at the base. You guys could join. You already put in two years with the Ottawa group."

Mike concentrated on his mixed vegetables, separating the peas from the carrots.

"They'd teach you how to fly," Dad said. "That's what you always wanted to do when you were a little guy. Get up there and slip around."

"Guess I'm not a little guy anymore."

Mike's chore was the after-dinner dishes. He was methodically scrubbing fried rice off a teflon-coated skillet whose powers of non-stickiness had long since been scratched away, and not thinking about anything much when he said, "Mom, do you worry when Dad goes out on a mission?"

His mother put three plates on the counter by the sink and looked through the archway into the living room, where Dad was watching the sports report on tv.

"I used to," she admitted. "But your father's very good at what he does." Then she sighed. "Besides, there's no point worrying. He loves it. He's not going to stop doing it. It's a big part of who he is."

"Pretty dangerous, though."

"Doesn't matter. It's what he does. What you and I have to do is live with it." She put a hand on Mike's arm. "Are you afraid he might get hurt . . . or something?"

"Nah," Mike said. "I was just wondering how you felt."

On an afternoon late in September, a wind blew up—not a big wind, but big enough to whittle white points onto the gray-green chop of Georgia Strait. And that was too big for the comfort of four couples who had crowded into an undersized skiff to go hand-trolling for coho salmon three miles out from the boat launch at Point Holmes.

The boat owner, a welder who worked at Field's sawmill, decided it would be wise to head for shore. But when he pulled the lanyard on the outboard, it started, sputtered and died. He did all the things he knew to do: checked the spark plug, checked the fuel line, checked the gas tank—and found it empty. He'd forgotten to fill up before launching.

By the time the skipper had identified the problem, the wind was brisking up, causing the overloaded skiff to wallow in steepening waves, shipping water over the gunwales.

He looked at the white faces of the three men and four women who had come out with him, without life jackets or even warm clothing, and said, "We're gonna row in. Break out the oars."

The oars were pulled from beneath the thwarts and run through the oarlocks, and the two strongest men tried to haul the boat shoreward. But the wind was offshore, and growing stronger as each long minute passed. Even with two men to an oar, the overloaded skiff barely made headway.

"We're in trouble," said the welder, watching the light fade behind thickening clouds, and reached for the emergency radio in the locker below his seat. Fortunately, he was more conscientious about the strength of the radio's batteries than the contents of his gas tank. When he tuned to the emergency channel, depressed the talk switch and said, "Mayday, mayday," CFB Comox came right back.

"I won't be home for supper," Dad said over the telephone. "There's some boaters in trouble." Five minutes later, they heard the Labrador racketing up from the base and heading out to sea.

An hour crawled by. Mike and his mother sat in the darkening kitchen, drinking coffee and trying not to look out the window. The clouds were low, eight shades of gray raggedly streaming on the wind that bent the tops of the fir trees out back. Cold rain tittered on the glass.

They turned on the lights and drank more coffee, talking about nothing. Mom started dinner, and Mike set the table, then they realized that neither of them was hungry, so they brewed more coffee.

Near eight o'clock, they heard the helicopter coming back, and started dinner again. But a few minutes later, the Labrador passed overhead again, heading back out.

By nine, with the sky black and the wind stage-whispering around the eaves, the Lab was still up. Mom called the dispatcher at the base. Mike saw her knuckles whiten on the handset, heard her brief question, watched her face go quiet. She hung up.

"There were eight of them in a little boat, out of gas," she said. "The Lab couldn't carry all of them and the crew too. Your father volunteered to stay in the boat until they came back for him. When they got there, no boat. Probably swamped by a wave and sunk. They're looking."

At eleven o'clock, Comox's missing SARtech was the second story on the CBC late news. The tv showed file footage of Labradors taking off, and a colored map of where the search was concentrating.

Mike watched the images and heard the reporter's accompanying voice-over: "Georgia Strait fills a deep and narrow trench between Vancouver Island and the rest of North America. Strong tidal currents sweep the bone-chilling water southeast, down past the Gulf Islands and on into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, then around the southern tip of the big island.

"Anything floating on the surface gets flushed out into the north Pacific and lost forever. Unprotected from the cold, in seas tossed high by stiff winds, a human being in the water can die in a few hours. Add a survival suit and expert knowledge, and life expectancy—and hope—increase. The search continues."

The camera cut back to the news reader, who began talking about a freeway pile-up in Coquitlam. Mike switched off the set.

"They'll find him, and he'll be all right," Mom said. Some of her friends had come over to help them wait. They talked cheerfully, in low voices. Mike nodded and said, "Yeah, sure," a lot, but he didn't hear most of it.

By midnight the sky was clearing, stars making holes in the clouds and poking through in twos and threes. CFB Comox had everything up—Labs, a Buffalo, an Aurora—and a Coast Guard ship was quartering the strait below where Dad had last been seen.

Mike couldn't stay inside anymore. He put on his jacket and slipped out the back door.

They lived on two cleared acres that backed up against a stand of second-growth timber in Comox's northeast corner. The valley's big spruce and cedar were long gone, cleared to make farmland and lumber back before the twentieth century was a toddler. The yard was unfenced, the lawn ending in a thicket of blackberry bushes that grew over a ditch between their property and the woods.

Mike sat on the back steps for a minute, but he could still hear the encouraging voices from the living room. The wind was dying, making a stillness under the trees, and he got up and crossed the lawn to where he could cut through a gap in the blackberry bushes. A few meters into the woods lay a waist-high, half-buried boulder forgotten by some careless glacier. It was a good, solid place to be.

Mike walked around the rock then leaned his forearms on the old granite so that he was looking back toward the house. The stone was cold and the wetness left by the rain seeped into his jacket sleeves. He listened: far to the east, a search plane's engines murmured at the edge of his hearing.

The last clouds tattered and moved off, letting the full moon silver the floor of the woods. The kitchen light shone yellow between the stark bars of the trunks. Then the plane's engines faded into the distance, and the only sound was a drop of rainwater working its way down through the branches.

In the perfect quiet, Mike caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye. He turned to look, but the best night vision is peripheral vision, and all he could see straight on was a darkness in the gap between the berry bushes.

And then the darkness shifted. He froze. He heard a heavy body rustling among the thorny blackberry runners, wet smacking noises, and a whuffling exhalation of breath.

People had told him about bears coming into town to gorge on blackberries. Naturally, he'd imagined meeting one. But somehow, his imagination had always supplied daylight.

Back slowly away
, they'd said. But the moment he moved to ease his weight off the boulder, the berry-eating noises stopped. He distinctly heard the animal
sniff
twice, followed by a deep-throated
huff!
Then it came toward him.

Now it was just like the dream, a black mass growing steadily larger, looming between Mike and the lights of the house. And, as in the dream, he couldn't move.

The bear eased forward, slowly but without hesitation, until only the width of the boulder separated them. It rose up and leaned its forelegs against the stone; Mike heard the scrape of claws on granite. Then the animal stopped still, as if posing for a picture of two friends leaning toward each other over a small table.