Brubaker was a little drunk and working from sore memory, but he had the sense of it well enough, as he told Nibbles about his latest peeve.
“A local man is hoping that Canadians will stand up for the environment,” he said loudly in a TV newscaster’s big brown voice. “This is in response to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement that Canada will be unable to meet the new environmental protocols.”
The trees swallowed up the noise, as they swung and swayed in their turn.
Nibbles looked on in a kind of moody contempt. Brubaker was obviously drunk, or affected by the sun and the wind. Maybe it was just all the fresh air.
“You’ve been spending too much time in the basement,” he observed.
“I know, I fuckin’ know,” said Brubaker. “This is real, really real. Do you know what I mean?”
Nibbles just sat there, drinking in the scene, laid out like a feast just for the two of them.
“If I had a website I’d really be kicking ass,” mused Bru. “God-damned girly-men.”
He stopped paddling and they drifted for a while.
Nibbles remained silent.
“Our city fathers are afraid to ask too many questions,” said Brubaker in a meditative tone, almost as if Nibbles wasn’t there. “They can’t make statements, because that costs votes. Look at this ban on pesticides. Every year it comes up, and every year they fuddle-duddle and piss-ant around the issue. It’s all because a few people are employed in lawn care. Yeah, the sort of people who run for city council are also the kind of people that employ a lawn service to come in and spray. One of the minor joys of being a fuckin’ aristocrat is a nice lawn.”
Nibbles had nothing to say to this observation.
“Look up ahead, on the left,” said Brubaker finally. “O’ow ate gidizhaamin. This is where we’re going.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” asked Nibbles.
“It means, in Attiouwandaron, ‘this the place we are going,’” said Brubaker. “It’s an Ojibwe dialect.”
“You’re quite mad, of course,” said Nibbles, quoting a popular line from a popular movie.
“Of course,” said Bru, giving the appropriate response. “Besides, fortune favours the diseased mind. So anyway, this Vaccares guy is in the paper, and he’s cutting my fuckin’ grass.”
“That’s not good,” agreed Nibbles, sparking up their seventh marijuana cigarette.
“This knucklehead has posted a big challenge on his fuckin’ website. He says, ‘the government should become pioneers in its energy and pollution choices.’” said Bru. “The government puts all kinds of obstacles in the way of wind developments, and shut down guys who tried to use methane from their farms to generate electricity. They couldn’t get a hookup, after paying for miles of poles and wires.”
Nibbles may not have been listening.
“The government wants to retain control of production, no matter what self-serving nonsense they put out in press releases, and the ‘objectivity’ of the press means they have no critical faculties. The press specializes in never drawing any conclusions. If the government said the moon was made of blue cheese, the media would quote them on the front page. Fuckin’ bastards,” he added. “I’m not even on the internet. You know?”
Nibbles gathered that not being on the internet pissed Bru off something fierce.
“Well, Big Frank is kind of old,” he agreed.
The cable service was in Frank Brubaker’s name.
“This fucking dingbat says, and I quote, ‘if people continue to consume energy at their current rate, the world’s oil supplies will run out in this century,’ he says…fuck! I’ve known that since 1973!”
Bru quieted down for a while. They eased the boat in, and carefully got out. Bru took a rope and pulled the boat up. He went up the bank and tied it. Bru wandered off into the bushes and Nibbles presumed he was taking a leak. All thoughts of big cats, or their supposed mission, were long since departed.
“You’re a half-wit, Brubaker,” Nibbles told the trees around him, snapping open another can of pop. “Dumb as a stick.”
Unspoken, the rebuttal revolved around in Chuck’s head.
“I don’t mind being called a half-wit. Coming from someone like you it’s really a kind of a compliment. And you’re as dumb as two sticks.”
The real problem, as Brubaker saw it; unzipping his fly to relieve himself a few yards away; was that CEO’s and the Boards of Directors of corporations and companies had one sole fiduciary responsibility. To increase shareholder value. Brubaker was watching TV the other night. He saw a documentary about a native reserve up around Fort Chipewyan. This was two hundred and fifty kilometres downstream from the tar sands development in Alberta. Royal Schnell Oil wanted to build a big new refinery, right here in Lennox; to process tar sands crude. The natives were suffering high rates of cancer. High levels of mercury were found in the fish. Those fish were unsafe for pregnant women to eat; fish with all kinds of lesions and tumors in their bodies. High levels of arsenic were being detected on the reserve—and the natives suffered from the types of cancers that exactly corresponded to the kinds of cancers caused by arsenic. Royal Schnell had fifty million dollars to spread around. Local leaders were asking for the government’s environmental assessment process to be ‘sped up as much as possible.’
Locally, people were kissing Royal Schnell’s ass all over the place, yet one lady raised objections to six wind turbines; citing, ‘noise concerns!’
The turbine project was shelved.
The people of Lennox would pay a very high price for what was essentially a hundred permanent, high-paying jobs, and a couple of thousand construction jobs, all temporary. Bru would see no benefit at all. Just a shortened lifespan, so some creep in a suit could get rich.
Fuck them.
Essentially, there were no moral considerations. No ethical considerations came into play. Assuming you could avoid running afoul of the law, or assuming at least that the fines didn’t cut too deeply into profits; you could do anything. If you drove share prices up, pushed out a good dividend once in a while; if people thought it was a good risk, and recommended it to their friends as an investment; you were doing well.
Leverage the fuck out of your assets and take it out in cash bonuses. Every CEO had a poison-pill buyout clause in their contracts. Everyone knew that.
God; how the other half lives! For some reason, the government had just slapped ‘eco-charges,’ on green products. But no charges on luxury, big-ticket items like yachts! Or ‘personal watercraft.’ Or anything that made any sense at all.
It wasn’t easy to prove criminal conduct in a white collar crime. The cops and the courts needed somebody to rat somebody off. Otherwise, if the government and the criminals stuck together, and contradicted each other, if they ‘couldn’t remember,’ how could you draw any conclusions? Every witness has equal weight. But when one guy admitted guilt and knowledge, and was willing to testify against another; then a case could be made in court.
‘We can change the penalties with a stroke of the legislative pen,’ as the words of a recent editorial went. ‘Changing attitudes is the hardest thing in the world.’
As far as stuff going up a smokestack, as long as the government knew about it; as long as you followed guidelines, you could get away with it forever.
He was struck by a sudden thought. He was pissing once, and his foot was six inches from quite a large snapping turtle, just laying in the long grass. Then came the thud-thud of his heart as he remembered the cougar. The wind whipped up through the clearing under the cedars; and a few leaves blew off to another destiny. There were tracks there, in a sandy patch. Without any talking, all the sounds were there for him: sparrows, crows, a blue jay a hundred metres away.
“Poo-pip…poo-pip!”
/> He didn’t know the name of it, but it was either a woodpecker or some other bird, circling head-down and going around and around the branches of a small conifer. The thing regarded Bru with disinterest. Figured he was too small to be eaten, or something.
“Hey, little buddy,” he said in drunken reverence.
It just kept pecking at the bark, and going around in circles.
He hadn’t affected the outcome. And that’s good, right?
Something slithered a few inches and stopped again. Slightly nervy, slightly drunk; he uttered a startled, “Whoa!”
What the heck was that? Zipping up, he looked around and found a long twig. He used it to poke and push aside a few leaves.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
It was a salamander. He had only seen two in his entire life. He vaguely remembered seeing one at the Scout Camp when he was about twelve. One of the scouts caught one on a line hung off a wooden footbridge that used to be there. More recently, last summer in fact; there was a dead one at the Lennox Bay Marina.
Chuck assumed a similar scenario. The thing died, or was killed, because it got hooked on someone’s line.
This one just crouched there, looking at him, with its eye turned back in its head. He gave it a gentle poke in the flank, and it moved exactly one inch and stopped.
“All right, little fella,” he said, standing.
He was about to go back to the riverbank when he spotted more movement. There were two more salamanders. No, three more!
“Holy frijoles!” he said, astounded by the size of the last one. “I’ve never seen nothing like that around here.”
They were native to the area, he knew that much. It’s just that they’re quiet.
One salamander, perched on a flat hunk of rock overhung by branches but exposed to the sun, must have been a good three-footer. Considering all the time he had spent in the woods around here, it was a kind of a shock. That’s when he saw the other tracks, big ones. Just then, the big salamander buggered off down the far side of his rock. Bru turned to examine the tracks. A dozen metres away, he could hear Nibbles muttering to himself about a ‘half-wit.’
Bru grinned. He and the little salamanders listened in amusement for a while.
“…a fucking half-wit, Brubaker…”
Bru could literally hear him smoking. A real greenhorn, but what the heck. He pulled the camera out of his belt pouch, and snapped a few shots. He put his lighter down beside the most distinct footprint to give some idea of scale. The last rain was two days ago. The sand was moist and wet. The top layer of sand had been dried by the breeze, but the sides were still kind of crumbly, or crumbling…
“Uh, huh,” he muttered.
He stood up to survey the surrounding brush, especially the low underbrush, and looking for anything high, like a big tree branch.
The place seemed empty of cougars.
Now that he knew what he was looking at, his heart subsided, but not entirely. It kept up a dull thud, thud, thud. The adrenal juices were at a pleasurable level. It was nothing out of hand that he couldn’t deal with. He studied the tracks some more, admitting to himself that it was very difficult to tell the difference between a large dog, a wolf, or other big predators. There were no boot tracks around anywhere. Most dogs were with someone, after all.
Just then Nibbles was at his shoulder and he almost jumped right out of his skin.
“Look what I found,” said Nibbles, holding up a scrap of cloth.
“Oh, fuck, what did I tell you?” said Bru. “Where did you get it?”
He asked Nibbles not to pick stuff up; not without showing him the lie, the location, the circumstances.
“Who’s a half-wit now?” he said.
“Right over here,” said Nibbles, but Bru just grabbed at the scrap of cloth and shoved it into his bush jacket pocket.
“Oh; yeah? Look what I found,” he told his buddy.
“By thunder and Jesus,” gasped Nibbles. “Is that what I think it is?”
“I don’t know, my erstwhile friend.”
(What does that mean? thought Nibbles.)
“Keep your voice down. We’re tracking into the wind, and these seem fairly fresh.”
Nibbles was impressed.
“Um, what does that mean?” he asked.
“It means we go back to the boat, get a canteen, the cameras, my bow, a couple of granola bars. Don’t light up a smoke on me just now, okay? Or you can wait here.”
“I ain’t waiting here!” he hissed in angry response to Bru’s little dig.
He shoved the smokes back into his pocket.
“Then don’t smoke. Stay thirty metres back. Don’t talk. Watch where you’re putting your feet. We’ll be diddy-bopping pretty slow, and when I hold up, just stop, okay? Don’t come rushing up on me.”
Bru told him, ‘thirty metres,’ knowing full well that it would be more like ten, or just about right.
Tenderfeet were all the same.
“Um, um; okay,” agreed Nibbles as they gingerly traipsed back to the waterline and then stood by the canoe.
Chuck pulled it up higher and double-checked the safety rope.
Brubaker quickly pulled out the little twenty-five-pound bow his old man had made him for Christmas when he was about six years old. He put his leg through the string, bent the bow against the back of his calf, and had it strung in a few seconds. He pulled three arrows out of the rotten old leather quiver. His old man hand-made the thing; stained black with shoe-polish thinned down with mineral spirits. Notching one to the bowstring, he put the bow aside; and then carefully shoved two arrows down the back of his coat-collar, inside of his coat, and into his left back pocket. Nibbles raised an eyebrow but said little.
“That’s not so bad,” Bru said, as he tucked the plastic tongue of the canteen’s belt-hook under his broad leather belt.
“Anything else?” asked Nibbles.
Brubaker sucked back the remains of the tall beer he was working on, and chucked the empty into the boat. Lifting the lid of the cooler, he pulled out another.
“No telling how long we’ll be gone,” he said, with a quick glance at the sky. “We’d better make sure we’re back here by about one-thirty.”
He shoved the beer into his hooded sweatshirt pocket and zippered it up. He did up his coat halfway.
“Neither one of us has a watch,” protested Nibbles.
What was he getting himself into?
“Yeah, mine’s broken. But don’t worry. We won’t go too crazy, okay?” Chuck assured him.
Then he led off, back up the slope and into the woods, proceeding very slowly. Chuck listened carefully, watching and looking at everything. Nibbles figured it was about noon or twelve-thirty by now. At this rate they couldn’t be going too far. He hoped. Nibbles needed a smoke, but there was no way in hell he was going to wait by the boat all alone, wondering where old Brubaker was. No way!
Bru told him earlier that a big cat would sleep much of the time, hunting mostly at dusk and dawn.
“How the hell would he know?” he muttered.
“Psst.” Brubaker pointed down. “Get a few shots of this while I look ahead.”
Nibbles took a picture of the tracks, and a small creature he took to be a lizard? A gecko? Like in the car insurance commercials; only different. But exactly how, he really couldn’t say. He had no idea; as Bru beckoned him on.
“Okay. The wind is in our faces,” Bru explained. “I’m just going to follow these as far as the place we’re going.”
Then he was off again, a real man-tracker.
Nibbles carefully picked his way, occasionally catching a vague glimmer of the game trail they were on. Again Bru paused and pointed down at the path. When he got
there, Chuck had moved on and it took a minute to pick it out. Then Nibbles saw a footprint, smaller than his own, deeply treaded. Bru had discovered a mud hole, and simply pushed back the overlying leaf litter.
Nibbles saw that a dead leaf was stuck under the tread, squashed down by the weight of the person. Even to Nibbles, it looked like it had been there forever, cast in mud that was now hardened to a rock-like consistency.
“How did you know that would be there?” he muttered, then turning to the slope of a hill on his right, he saw a mucky seep coming down the hillside, all black and stinky.
“Huh!” he said.
Bru was disappearing up ahead, and so Nibbles went on again.
Water seeped out of the hill and across the trail. As the season advanced, the muddy spot dried up some. It was simple, really. Once you knew the facts behind the magic. Nibbles wondered just how long a track could stay in the woods. Even to his untrained, and admittedly inexperienced eye, it was clear that if nothing else came along and obliterated it, the footprint could be pretty old news. This was a dry summer so far. Last winter, there was very little snow.
So far, no big cats had attacked them. Brubaker stopped again, and turning, waved him on up, with a finger across the lips to signal silence.
“Check this out,” he whispered in Nibbles’ ear.
Nibbles couldn’t see a blasted thing.
“Where?” he asked.
Then he saw a fire pit.
At first glance, it was nothing more than a ring of stones, but it looked very old. It was filled in with ashes and dirt, with a small, dark and wet-looking pile of kindling beside it.
That was about it. There was a thin grass, about twenty to thirty centimetres tall, all over the place. He noted what looked like a small clump of birch-bark held down under a rock, and a blackened coffee pot.
“Okay,” he began, but Chuck pointed here, and there, and there, and kept a hand on his arm to stop him from going anywhere.
“What do you see there?” Chuck murmured, pointing.
“Holy shit!” he said out loud. “That’s awesome.”
Nibbles was amazed. He hadn’t even seen the lean-to at first.
This was made out of poles and brush, roofed with boughs of pine. He didn’t know his trees, but they were all laid on there just so.
“What’s that?” he gasped, and Chuck grimaced.
“Under that plastic is probably Hilier’s equipment,” he said, all somber and serious.
“Fuck!”
“Yeah. He’s dead all right,” muttered Brubaker.
“And over there?” wondered Nibbles, who couldn’t make it out because of the shade under the trees and bushes, which still had some leaves to block the wan, slanting light.
“Stay right there and shoot everything,” said Bru, as he carefully moved through some tall weeds, trying to walk where Hilier hadn’t, or so Nibbles surmised.
“It looks like a stove. Some boards between the two trees,” called Bru. “Two boards, four nails kind of thing. And the plywood.”
Nibbles noted a shiny spoon or something on the platform as well.
“This camp hasn’t been used in some time,” Bru observed. “Hear that noise? That’s the waterfalls.”
“How far are they?” asked Nibbles.
“Probably a couple of hundred metres,” he was told.
Inside the lean-to was a sleeping bag, mouldering on the groundsheet. Bru used his telephoto lens to look into the shelter’s interior, popping off a few shots with his flash.
“It’s hard to say how long that’s been there. But he obviously expected to return and sleep in it that night,” Bru reasoned. “Normally, I would have camped up above the falls.”
Eyeballing everything, he mentally reviewed the situation of the camp. Hilier couldn’t have known the area too well. But that notion wasn’t justified conclusively. Two Falls was on private property. Without the permission of the landowner, you had to camp somewhere off the beaten path. Plastic had been put over the poles, then more poles, then the boughs laid on to hold it down, and possibly obscure it from view? All of this was way more work than pitching a simple tent, waterproof and bug-free.
“I wish I knew more about this fuckin’ Hilier. Was he a secretive guy? Paranoid someone would scoop his next project?” but there was nothing Nibbles could say to that one.
“Everybody and his brother thinks they should have a fishing show, or an outdoors show,” reckoned Brubaker.
“You should have a show, Bru,” quipped Nibbles.
Brubaker just grinned in silence, then he snapped a series of photos, thoroughly documenting the state of the campsite, the layout, and the surroundings of the little clearing under the cedars.
“The side-creeks don’t flood the same way as the river,” he told Nibbles. “The whole valley this one runs in can’t be more than two kilometres long. This is where I found my first beaver dam in Lennox County. I mean, other than the ones up at The Pines.”
“When was that?” asked Nibbles curiously.
Clearly, there were a lot of things he didn’t know about Bru, yet they grew up on the same street.
“I don’t know…maybe about 1987?” muttered Bru. “Something like that. I don’t know how long they’ve been up there.”
“Where?” asked Nibbles in some confusion.
“The beaver lodges up at The Pines,” explained Chuck patiently.
Finally Bru led them off up the trail, which was slightly more distinct now. Nibbles wondered why the trail followed the hilltops, but then the creek was steeply banked. The banks were too choked with bushes. Even with minimal water in it, the creek bed was all rocks and boulders. Deer would take the easiest way, right? The noise of falling water became louder and more insistent in the consciousness, quickly becoming a dull roar. He huffed and puffed his way up another steep incline, maybe twenty metres up.
They weren’t exactly hills. The terrain was the result of the gullying effect of spring runoff, each little side valley taking hundreds of years to erode. When Nibbles caught sight of the falls, he was thrilled in the sense that they had found it, but it was also somewhat smaller than what the noise implied.
The creek, crystal clear, unlike the river a few hundred metres away, came out of a little hole in the bushes, across a sloping rock of which no more than a metre could be seen. Shooting down, riffling across a wider shelf, then it pooled up, seventy-five or a hundred millimetres deep. It went out again through another slot, down another racing rivulet; and into another pool, where the speed slowed and the depth increased. Finally, the water curved to the right, and after one waterfall perhaps a third of a metre high, there was a ledge about seven metres wide, and then a drop of four or five metres.
Nibbles could see a massive chunk of rock ledge broken off and situated on a pile of boulders under the lip of the falls. For fifty metres at least, the creek ran on solid rock, with the occasional loose stone sticking up. There were small pools, and sandy riffles with a miniature watery weed growing in it.
“How did you find this place?” asked Nibbles, enjoying the scene despite the terrible knowledge of the campsite roiling around in his head.
“I figured if there was one waterfall, there had to be others,” explained Bru. “There’s Three Falls further downstream. There’s Rocky Glen Falls, on Rocky Glen Creek, which also drains into the Shashawanaga.”
He pondered whether to burden Nibbles with the concept of ‘fall lines,’ and other details.
“Only Rocky Glen Falls is actually public property. But on some days this valley is crawling with rock hounds. I followed the creek in from the road, which is about twelve hundred metres over that way,” he said, pointing to the south, or at least in the general direction of the sun.
“Thi
s slab here is full of what they call pteropoda, that’s the Aronka shale deposit. And these little cone-shaped hash pipes are zaphrentis prolifica. I got a real nice one at home, at least I used to,” said Bru. “I had one that was worn smooth and looked like a vulva.”
Nibbles seemed oblivious to such nice technical details. Maybe it was just the bizarre and unfamiliar terminology.
“On top we have the Widder Beds, named after some little old lady; then the Hungry Holler formation; which used to be called the Encrinal Lime and the Coral Zone…these are corals here…see? The Aronka shale is what weathers to that soft, blue mud. That’s where, if you’re lucky, you might find a gastropod; the platycares aronkanensis…” but Nibbles must have gotten lost somewhere.
“Brubaker! What’s that?” he asked in dismay.
Bru just grinned, totally in his element, temporarily unflappable.
Something gleamed white and bony from beneath a shrub covered in flowers. These floral anomalies were a holdover from some abandoned homestead of a previous century.
Bru had seen everything from wild onions, tiger lilies, feral periwinkle, and other stuff. Sometimes the government bought land that was once settled, to return it to floodplain protection or natural regeneration. Sometimes private citizens held it as a ‘managed forest,’ or leased it for commercial tree plantations.
Carefully examining the ground, Bru was on hands and knees.
“Fifty years ago, there were a lot less trees in Ontario,” Bru told Nibbles. “And they were a lot smaller. The first time I ever saw this place was about thirty years ago.”
Bru was silent for a moment.
“And it has changed, that’s for sure.”
It would be hard to put your finger on any one specific thing.
How could you say, ‘That tree used to be four inches in diameter?’
Of course that must be true, and that said nothing to the observer. You couldn’t say, ‘all these trees are bigger than I expected.’ Although it was true enough.’
“That’s the biggest fossil I ever saw,” muttered Brubaker, still on hands and knees. “Technically speaking, it’s not a fossil at all but a concretion…hello!”
Brubaker regretted an eight-inch crystiphyllum superbum; which he used to have in his garden on Sigourney St. Gone now, probably. The new owners would have cleared it out with the trash. They would have pitched it with all of his other belongings; stuff that was just too much for his mom and Diane to haul out.
“What do you have there?” asked Nibbles, catching the whiff of excitement in the air. “Do you even know what you’re talking about?”
“Looks like a dental pick,” said Brubaker.
“A what?” said Nibbles.
“A dental pick. It’s a tool used by dentists, to pick around in your mouth,” he added.
He thought for a moment.
“This pretty much ID’s the campsite. It has to be Hilier. He was known for lying on the ground, picking apart moss in front of a macro lens, looking for nematodes and shit.”
“What kind of toad?” asked Nibbles. “Toad shit?”
He was impressed in spite of himself.
“Nematodes,” Chuck laughed. “They got warts and they go, ‘ribbet…’”
He carefully lifted the morphous, pale accretion of half-billion year-old critters.
“This is Devonian. It’s about five hundred and forty million years old. It’s all corals, trilobites, brachiopods. There’s like fifty different types of fossil around here. It’s a chunk of a larger bed, just like the shelf of the falls.”
Taking it, Nibbles eyes widened.
“That’s not as heavy as I thought,” he told Chuck.
Something fell off, and Bru took a glance at the long grass where it went.
“Probably just gravel,” he said, and then Chuck gently placed the fossil into the doubled up plastic shopping bags which he habitually carried on expeditions.
You never knew what kind of garbage you might find in the woods, and he liked to haul it out when he could.
“That don’t smell too good,” Nibbles told him, but Bru was oblivious.
“We scooped the bastards,” was all he said. “We scooped the bastards but good, this time! Hee-hee.”
“What’s that smell?” insisted Nibbles.
“Panther piss, cougar crap, tiger turds. Jaguar jizzum. How the fuck would I know?”
came the retort.
“I think it’s time to go,” said Nibbles. “Anyhow, I don’t want to be in the same vehicle as that puma poop.”
“Ah. We’ll figure a way to put it in the boat, on the roof,” said Bru as he looked up at the sky. “Grab any more shots you want and we’ll go.”
He put the bag down, and picked up the bow. Nibbles tied the loose plastic in two tight knots, wishing he had more bags. The smell made him retch slightly. Bru cracked a beer, and had a long drink. Then another.
Nibbles realized he would have to carry the thing.
He set it down for a moment.
“I’m going to have one last quick look around, and take a piss,” and then Bru stepped away.
He went stalking farther up the trail by the babbling brook.
Nibbles began clambering down the steps formed by rocks and roots and branches, trying to get down a very steep bank to shoot the falls from below. When he got to the bottom, he carefully stepped from wet rock to wet rock, careful not to slip and bust an ankle.
“Hey! Brubaker! You didn’t tell me about the cave!” he bellowed up to the circle of sky visible through the tree-tops.
No answer.
Quickly losing all sense of time even as the shadows lengthened, Nibbles began to shoot, some with flash, some without, some zoomed in, and some at a wider angle. He stopped to re-load the old-fashioned, film-type camera, then went on.
The ledge of the falls hung over a good two metres. Under that was an empty space about three metres high. It was two to two and a half metres deep, back up high under the roof. The floor wasn’t too level. It sloped up at the rear, in a bank of gritty-looking bluish clay. Bits of shattered limestone scattered underfoot were a telling reminder that this ledge was only temporary. As if the huge chunks scattered all down the streambed weren’t enough to say it. Whether it was water erosion, eating away at the clay; thus causing the ledge to cave in, or frost, splitting the rocks apart, he didn’t know.
It was beautiful, and wild as all hell, and he was damned glad to be here. Looking out from under the falling spray, thin, yet sparkling against the blue sky, he could see lonely, dark-looking jack pines on a nearby hilltop.
The air was as clean and envigourating as he had ever known it. And Brubaker knew these places like the back of his hand? Where had he been? Probably sitting in a jail cell.
He thought of his son. He thought of taking his son fishing and golfing and hiking.
Nibbles tried to think of the future, and to let go of the past.
Now Brubaker—Brubaker could use some letting go.
That’s for damn sure.