The Mountain Can Wait Read Online Free PDF

rolled down the window to let in the brisk spring air and the sweet-sour wood-chip smell of the lumberyards. He’d left two hours later than he’d told Carolina he would, had wasted the morning trying to speak to the right Nielson Logging guy on the phone. They’d made last-minute changes to some of the cutblocks he’d been contracted to plant, and he had to wait for them to fax him the new block maps before he could leave. He was heading up a day early, so he and Carolina could camp one night together.
    After three hours of driving, he stopped in Hook Lake for a coffee, a sandwich, and a piss at the gas station—the last place that he could fill up with diesel for a hundred kilometers. He checked the connection of his trailer hitch and then carried on north. Gold flashes of the McLeod River ribboned through the pine trees to the west, and after another hour he came to his turn on the left, a winding dirt road to the campground. He parked next to Carolina’s Honda in the small lot by the ranger’s office and collected a lightweight backpack, his sleeping bag, and a wool coat from his truck. Three separate trails branched off the parking lot and he started on the one that led to Crossbow Creek, a three-kilometer hike to Carolina’s favorite site. A cloud bank settled in front of the sun just as the trail took him into the trees and the temperature dropped. For the next few weeks up at the Takla camp, where he’d be heading the next day, the milk would be frozen in the mornings and the planters would have to hack through a layer of ice just to wet their cereal. The morning dew would be frosted until at least June. He went back to his truck to retrieve his quilted blanket and draped it over his shoulders. Carolina would laugh at him when she saw him coming and call him an old man.
    Her light-blue, two-man tent stood alone at the campsite, pitched on a flat patch of rough grass close to the tumbling creek. A hearty fire burned a few meters away from the tent in a blackened, stone-lined pit. Tom dropped his stuff by the tent but kept the blanket and stood by the side of the creek. The water roiled deeply with spring runoff and there was the tumble of smooth stones passing over each other, like whispers.
    A tussling, crackling racket echoed in the woods. Carolina came into the clearing dragging half of a dead tree and dropped it by the fire. Tom pulled his blanket tightly around his shoulders and watched her. Her round cheeks were flushed; a green wool toque covered most of her shaggy hair.
    “Sounds like there’s an elephant tramping around in them woods,” he said, winking.
    “Be a man and put the ax to that log.”
    “I’m sorry I’m so late.”
    She shrugged, made a noncommittal noise from the back of her throat. “I like it here, just me and this here creek and my book.” When she got close he could smell the woodsmoke in her hat, her hair. Wrapping his blanket around them both, he put his face to her neck and smelled her.
    She had brought two rump steaks, a bag of chips, chocolate, apples. Instant coffee and beers, which were cooling against a rock in the creek, and a twenty-six-ounce bottle of rum.
    “What about breakfast?” he joked.
    “I thought you were leaving at the crack of.”
    “But I’ll still be hungry, woman. I expect you to be up and frying the bacon.”
    She elbowed him in the gut. “Then I hope you enjoy sleeping alone in your little blanket tonight.”
    He dug his hands under her layers of fleece and wool and warmed them against her skin.
    At ten o’clock, the dusty purple of the northern sunset still hung low in the sky. She grilled the steaks over the fire and they ate them with chips and beer. She had cooked them perfectly, holding the meat over the flames just long enough to blacken the surface, leaving the bulk of it pretty much raw. He eyed her piece as she neatly tucked into it with a camping knife, hoping she’d leave some for him, but she ate it all. When they were finished,