I paused, momentarily discomfited, remembering the light in Cameron’s eye as it slowly dawned on him that the body might be Diamond’s. It had been a very unpleasant moment to watch joy in another man’s eye at the mention of death. Here certainly was no friend. Leslie had been so cold, so matter-of-fact, and Don had simply been what? Upset? Horrified? No, that wasn’t it. What, then? Frightened? That was it, frightened, but for himself or someone else? Maybe he was just afraid of bears. Academic, really, but I hated it when things didn’t fit neatly. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that something weird was happening here.
“I gather Diamond won an injunction to stop the logging and it was overturned. They erected a barricade last month to stop the beginning of the logging. They set up a camp. Dozens of protesters, including children. There were a lot of arrests, and when the injunction was overturned, there was some sabotage of equipment so the loggers can’t start until next month and they are fuming mad. No one’s taking up his battle and the loggers are gearing up. They plan to start on the east side of Dumoine right away. The north side is slated for cutting next fall.”
“Not a few people would have welcomed Diamond’s death,” noted Martha, echoing exactly what I had been studiously avoiding thinking.
I looked up quickly. The words sent shivers down my spine. I shuddered, remembering our near miss. That flash of purple, was it just a figment of my imagination or had someone really tried to kill us? And if so, why? Had it had something to do with Diamond’s death?”
But Ryan and I were still alive, and no one had tried again. It made no sense. Thank God, I had kept my suspicions to myself. No use looking stupid if you don’t have to.
“Well, that’s all right then.” Martha’s voice brought me back with a jolt. If I keep daydreaming like this I’ll be jolted out of existence, I thought.
“What’s all right?”
“This bear business. All tidied up, neat as a pin; you’ve survived, case is closed, as they say, and we can move on to the important things in life such as your insects.”
God, if only it were that simple. Martha cleared her throat, an ominous rumble. She glanced over the mess in my office, her sharp, penetrating eyes searching among the bottles and vials on the desk.
“Surely, Cordi, this isn’t all you got then, is it?” She waved at the vials and bottles in disgust.
I shook my head. “Everything’s up in the lab, but it doesn’t amount to even this much.” I sighed. One day’s collection salvaged from two weeks of work. If I hadn’t known just how depressing it all was, I could have read it easily from Martha’s face.
“Lord love you, Cordi. That’s not enough for even one new lab, my dear, let alone any new experiments you might have cooking.” She studied my face closely. “What happened?” she asked softly.
I let my anger slide away from me, but I knew it wouldn’t evaporate. It would just go to ground until I hauled it out again, but at least it was being bumped by other thoughts.
“I did get some live larvae. Most of them are in the lab,” I said. “I’m hoping we can get them to pupate and then identify what they are, see how long it takes, show their habitat, and try to incorporate that into a lab. Maybe the students will take a proprietary interest in their charges and not get bored.”
“What happened to the rest?”
“Two wonderful weeks’ worth. We crashed the canoe in the last set of rapids. We hadn’t intended to run them, but we accidentally got caught in them.” Involuntarily I saw again the boulder, the blur of something purple, and Ryan crashing into the canoe. I brushed aside the images.
“Most of my collection was strapped under the stern and bow seats. We found only pieces of it below the falls. All I came out with was the stuff I collected that last day, and that’s only because I left the day’s collection at the end of the portage when we went back for the canoe. I don’t see how I’m going to get this course working for me. I’m hoping some great thought will jump out at me, rescue me from oblivion.” I didn’t put much faith in my thoughts, though.
Those insects had taken me the best part of my two-week vacation to collect. We’d crawled over cliffs, shimmied down into caves, swept fields and trees, and raided the maggots off dead animals in search of the unusual and the mundane. Dozens of little kill jars and live jars, each with a tiny card noting date, location, and habitat in which the critters had been found, had been squirrelled away in my storage case. All gone, shattered by the rocks, I thought angrily, all but the ones inadvertently taken from Diamond’s corpse.
Martha put on her holier-than-thou expression, nose in the air. “Well it serves you right, gallivanting down suicidal rivers miles from nowhere. Really, how do you accidentally get caught in a rapid anyway? I can’t think how you ever got it into that head of yours to go into wild country like that. Why, you’d think you had a death wish,” she said, as though her reputation had just been put on the line.
She had seldom ventured into the wilderness in her life. The closest thing to it she had ever seen was my farm and the parks in Ottawa. An earthen path was a monstrous thing; give her good old cement and asphalt and she was happy.
I smiled, remembering the near miss in the rapids. Martha, for once, wasn’t far off the mark, even though her sentiment was all ass-backwards, but if I told her the truth she would smother me in sympathy and dire warnings. I preferred being bawled out to suffocating.
“I know, I know, Martha,” I said lowering my voice in a conspiratorial whisper, “but some of the best insects are up there, miles from nowhere, in the deepest darkest corners of the Canadian wilderness where bears and wolves and bobcats and dead bodies lurk around every corner and you take your life in your hands just venturing into the woods.”
“Oooh, you see? I told you. Too effing dangerous. Sheer stupidity.”
Martha took everything at face value, believed everything. Watching her as I told her my story, I could relive it through Martha’s facial features. They rose and fell and plummeted and bucked with the rapids, grew round and menacing with the sweeper, grew blank and then widened in fear with the falling of the boulder (I omitted the possibility that someone had hurled it at us and longed to know what facial expression would have gone with that), and finally grew exhausted as she mentally hauled herself out alongside me and Ryan at the end of the rapids.
It was exhausting to watch, but at the end she collected her features, remoulded them into a business-like form, added a frown, and said, “Just what do you suppose we’re going to do about course material, with all your insects at the bottom of the river or wherever they go when they dump in a rapids. Classes start in less than two months and I have no specimens to set up your labs.”
“We’ll have to phone around, find out if some colleagues have some extra unsorted material, and I’ll have to scramble and do some more collecting. I’m sure someone would happily lend us some material, especially if we tell them we’ll sort the insects from the leaf litter and identify them. ”
Martha grimaced. Sorting was not pleasant work.
“Worst case scenario we can use some of Jefferson’s collection, but they’re not in very good shape.” I sighed. “I just don’t have time to go on another field trip, with all my experiments needing to be written up. The Dean is on my case pressing me for papers. Publish or perish, as they say.” I was eager to get at my research. Animal Behaviour wanted more analysis before they’d accept my paper on what male praying mantids might gain from their lopsided encounters with their cannibalistic mates.
“We’ll have to get the lab material somehow,” I said.
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Well, I don’t want to have to admit I have nothing new and use the old collections, do I? Not unless I want to get