下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
When Marian met Tate, she didn’t know that the story of her life was about to change. She didn’t know of northern Rocky Mountain skies and moons that could cut her heart open to the bone or that his cool hands would burn rivers beneath her skin, and that when he’d tell her in so many ways that she’d been everything he’d been looking for, his voice would sound unmistakable and true and she would believe him. She had just flown into Edmonton two days after New Year’s and would be joining a group of field technicians for the next three months on a conservation study. The study would be conducted in the Athabasca oil sands in northeastern Alberta, between Lac La Biche and Fort McMurray.
Marian passed through customs and stood with one of her duffel bags strapped vertically to her back and the other slung over her neck and hanging crossways in front of her. A messy braid fell over her right shoulder, and wisps of brown hair trailed from beneath her knit cap. She’d told Lyle, the program coordinator, what she looked like and had sent him a picture. He’d told her not to worry; someone would be holding a sign. But she didn’t see anyone holding a sign, so she proceeded to follow the foot traffic that led outside the airport and onto the curb. She held her cell phone in her left hand and was about to check it for a text message or a missed call when she heard a male voice say her name.
That was the first time she saw him. He was standing against a white pickup truck with a black soft topper. And though he would later want her to recall the moment, to set it apart from all the other moments that had existed for her up until then, no matter how many times she revisited the memory, she would not be able to recall the same kind of specific details as he. It was morning in Edmonton. She had taken a red-eye flight and had slept on the plane. She had not had time to brush her teeth, and the coffee that she had been served before the plane landed was weak and had left her with a terrible headache, and she worried that she had packed too many clothes because the duffel bags felt heavier than she would have liked.
But she did remember how as soon as she raised her chin and smiled, relieved that she had arrived and that there was a person on the other end to get her where she was supposed to be, she’d heard the barking of a large dog from the back of the truck, and that the man had hurried toward her and had taken the duffel bags off her shoulders. Tate introduced himself and put her bags in the back of the truck with boxes of food and a crate that held an eager Labrador mix who barked and wagged her tail against the plastic housing of her kennel.
Marian lowered her face to the kennel. “Hi, there,” she said, her voice a fairly high note, as if she were talking to a very young child, as if she were talking to her dog, Deacon, who would be staying with Marian’s parents while she was away.
“Her name’s Arkansas,” Tate said. “She’s a rescue dog from the Ozarks.”
“How old is she?”
“We’re not sure. Maybe five or six.”
Marian had first learned about K9s for Conservation and that it was seeking applicants for an upcoming study in Alberta that past summer when, as a seasonal employee, she was living with Deacon and a group of other technicians in a small trailer on the north beach of South Padre Island, Texas. Her job had involved rescuing stranded sea turtles, rehabilitating them, and releasing them into safer areas. Marian had been reading through job listings for her next position, preferably one that would allow dogs, when she’d seen the posting for six detection dog handlers and six orienteers with no prior experience required. The job would involve hiking in Alberta in three feet of snow and taking helicopters into remote locations for the purpose of finding wolf, caribou, and moose scat during the winter’s oil explorations.
The program, a part of the University of Washington, was operated out of a camp facility just west of Whitefish, Montana, and relied on high-energy rescue dogs who would work for the sole pleasure and reward of playing with a ball. The candidates who were accepted for the positions would be expected to arrive in Whitefish in October for two months of training.
Marian filled out the online application. She mentioned her studies in biology at the University of Michigan, where she had graduated four years before. She listed all of the seasonal jobs she’d held since then, including tagging and tracking brown-headed cowbirds in Illinois, spraying for noxious weeds in Oklahoma, and banding ducks and mourning doves in eastern Wyoming. She wrote about her bulldog, Genius, whom she’d grown up with. And she wrote about Deacon, a forty-pound cattle dog with too much energy whom she’d adopted from a shelter shortly after arriving in Texas.
But seasonal jobs for field technicians were competitive. Marian was not selected for an interview for the study in Alberta. When her summer employment with Turtle, Inc., ended, she’d been allowed to stay in the trailer through December in exchange for working in the nonprofit’s gift shop. The other technicians moved on to other jobs or went back to school. Marian strung Christmas lights outside the trailer and drank spiked cider on the beach with the local employees. She’d found a job with a fish hatchery program in Clinton, Missouri, that would begin in the spring, and had decided to move home to Michigan in the meantime, to spend time with her parents and her brother’s family.
Then she received the call from Lyle. She’d just come in from a run with Deacon and was standing in the doorway of her trailer, the sweat of Texas moving down her body, the lights on her trailer blinking red and green. Did Marian have a DUI, Lyle wanted to know. How soon could she get to Edmonton?
• • •
Tate told Marian that he was one of the team leaders and that he had worked as a handler for the past ten years. Jenness, the other team leader, who managed the program’s communications, had been with the program six years. “Jenness and I will be running the operations,” Tate said. Marian already knew that Lyle would be staying in Montana at the program’s base camp, or The Den, as it was called, to coordinate and prepare for other studies.
The crew had arrived in Edmonton three days prior, with ten dogs, four snowmobiles and two trailers, six trucks, and supplies and gear. They’d used the first day to inventory supplies, restock food, and give the dogs some exercise, and had spent all of the next day in a snowmobile operations class taught by a Polaris dealer. They’d checked out of the hotel that morning and were on their way to an oil company compound in the oil sands. The compound, a five-hour drive from the airport, was owned and operated by Pétron Oil, a co-funder and supporter of the upcoming wildlife study. Tate estimated that he and Marian were only a couple of hours behind the others.
After Tate stopped to get Marian a coffee and the two of them were back on the road, Marian asked Tate about the two months of training that she’d missed. He told her about the fitness exercises, which included Indian trail runs up mountain roads, sometimes twice a day. The runs involved a single-file line, where the last person sprinted to the front, and so on. Tate told her the group would cover three to six miles at a time. Other days the runs were off-trail through dense forests, so that each member was bushwhacking. He told her not to worry. “You look like you’re in pretty good shape,” he said.
Then Tate asked Marian how much Lyle had told her, and she admitted that he had told her very little. “He just wanted to know if I’d ever had a DUI,” she said.
Tate talked about the orienteer who had been turned away at the border because of a prior DUI. “There aren’t always clean lines to human behaviors,” Tate said. “But, hey, if it hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be here, and that’s a good thing, right?”
“I’m so happy to be here,” Marian said.
Marian also learned that the teams had participated in a ten-day emergency responder course during those two previous months. Her résumé had included her first responder training, a certificate she had kept current, which had no doubt given her an edge in Lyle’s last-minute decision to offer her a position.
As Marian finished her coffee and stared out at the polished white landscape and the endless highway around them, Tate talked about the multiple projects going on at any one time. One job was wrapping up in New Mexico, where a border collie mix was looking for Jemez Mountains salamanders, a candidate for the endangered species list. Tate talked about the incredible ball drive of the dogs. “It’s an obsession,” he said. “Given the choice between playing with a ball or eating a rib eye steak, they’ll choose the ball.”
Marian couldn’t help but think of Deacon and his poor attempts at searching for Rodney, the stuffed sea turtle. After she’d submitted her application for the job, she’d been determined to turn Deacon into a detection dog so that should she be called for an interview, he would give Marian an advantage. After work each day, Marian would hide the stuffed turtle from the gift shop and praise Deacon enthusiastically and feed him treats when he found the turtle. During her lunch breaks she would throw a tennis ball for Deacon on the beach and reward him with beef jerky when he ran after the ball and brought it back to her, which he seldom did without her chasing him into the water. She’d envisioned the snow-covered trails she and Deacon would hike, the solitude.
In her caffeinated state and excitement and lack of sleep, as she listened to Tate talk, everything looked beautiful to her: the cold, stark landscape; the long highway; the images of Tate’s words; his light brown eyes that shot quick, animated glances toward her as he spoke; the color of his pupils in the sun’s reflection like tree sap, amber and transparent.
Marian asked Tate if he had a favorite project, and he told her about the Yellowhead ecosystem along the eastern Canadian Rockies. “Fifty-two hundred square kilometers of pure God’s country,” he said. The study examined the impacts that recreation, forestry, and oil and gas exploration were having on the grizzly and black bear populations by analyzing scat samples for hormone levels, diet, and DNA.
Before the use of detection dogs, researchers had relied heavily on hair snares, typically consisting of barbed wire around an attractant for the purpose of snagging a tuft of the bear’s fur, and radio collars, Tate said. Because the hair snares relied on the use of an attractant, the data could be considered biased. And though radio telemetry data was helpful, it came with risks, as demonstrated by the death of a park employee that previous spring when a bear was released from a culvert. The bear had attacked a young intern before a high-caliber rifle could put the bear down.
• • •
Two hours into the drive, Tate pulled off at a truck stop in Boyle to refuel and to get lunch. He and Marian sat across from each other at a booth, and as they ate cheeseburgers and shared a plate of French fries, she told Tate about Deacon and how much she missed him.
After Lyle had offered Marian the job, she’d called her parents to see if they would take Deacon while she was away. “It would just be temporary,” Marian told them. And he was very well trained.
And so her parents had agreed. Marian had found a flight on Alaska Airlines that allowed larger dogs to fly as cargo if the dog and kennel didn’t weigh more than one hundred and fifty pounds. She slipped a note with instructions for her parents into a plastic sleeve and taped it to the top of Deacon’s crate. And after she checked Deacon in, she checked his small bag of toys, as well. Two hours later, she’d boarded the flight on Air Canada.
Maybe it was because of her lack of sleep, but her eyes became teary as she told Tate about Deacon, and she wiped away the wetness and apologized.
And did Tate’s eyes become teary also? He didn’t want her to apologize. He said he felt terrible for her. He told her about a dog he’d had when he was a boy growing up in Glendive, Montana. Said he’d found the dog after baseball practice one day and the dog had followed him home. “I’d read to him. Honest to God, don’t laugh. He’d sit up in bed with me and I’d read him these books I’d get from the library. At first I just called him Dog, but then I named him Arthur because we were reading a story about King Arthur and Guinevere, and I thought my dog was like a king.”
“That’s so sweet,” Marian said.
“Yeah.” Tate was smiling and looking away. “He drowned,” Tate said.
“What? Oh my God. I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“We had a river behind our house. We got a lot of rain that year. There were these kids who lived down the street. And Arthur, he had Labrador in him. He liked to fetch things, kind of like these dogs we’ve got with us up here. So these kids came over and threw a stick in the river, and Arthur went in after it. He got the stick, but the river was too powerful for him to turn back.”
“Were you there? What did you do?”
“I was running alongside the river and crying and trying to get to him. I’d get close, and he’d try to scramble onto the bank. He’d be looking at me with these big brown eyes, all pleading and frightened, wanting me to save him. But then he’d get washed away again.”
“Tate, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
Tate leaned back in the booth and placed both hands flat on the table. “Well, what are you going to do.” He ate another French fry, then took a swallow from his glass of root beer. “I wrote an epitaph for him,” he said. “I still have it. Except I wrote it in pencil. It’s kind of hard to make out now.” Tate finished his drink. “I got this,” he said. He picked up the bill from the table and walked up to the cash register.
He was taller than Marian had realized, close to six feet. About an inch of wavy brown hair showed beneath his knit cap and fell over his ears. Marian tried to guess his age. Probably midthirties.
After Tate paid and left a tip on the table, he told Marian he had something for her, and so she followed him out to the truck, where he opened up the back, and Arkansas was again wagging her tail and whining with delight.
“Hey there, girl,” Tate said. He let Arkansas out of her crate. She leapt down and pranced beside him, her eyes bright and fixed on his every move. Marian knelt beside the dog and stroked her coat.
“She’s beautiful,” Marian said.
“I thought maybe you could use some dog medicine,” Tate said. “I know how hard that must have been putting Deacon on that plane.”
Marian wrapped her arms around the dog and cooed in her ears. Then the dog swiveled around quickly, and Marian noticed that Tate had something in his hand. Next to the parking lot was an open field with windblown eddies of snow. Tate pulled his arm back and threw a blue rubber ball, and Arkansas tore off across the empty parking spaces and into the eighteen inches or more of snow before the ball landed maybe sixty yards from where they stood. The dog’s back legs kicked up flakes of the white powder, creating a wraithlike image in her wake.
“She’s fast,” Marian said. And no sooner had Marian said those words than Arkansas came tearing back to Tate, the ball already covered in frothy saliva. She dropped the ball at Tate’s feet, her body tense with anticipation, as if Marian could hear the dog saying, Again! This time Tate handed the ball to Marian, who drew her arm back and threw the ball as far as she could, maybe forty yards. And even after Arkansas had sprung after the ball, Marian could feel Tate watching her, and her cheeks burned red from the wind and the cold and her awareness of Tate, who now was saying very little.
She and Tate continued to throw the ball for Arkansas, and Marian continued to love on the dog each time the big, sloppy, beautiful Lab brought the ball back, until Tate said they should get going.
They didn’t talk as much on the rest of the drive. Marian felt herself dozing a little and feeling grateful to be where she was. She had loved playing with Arkansas. She couldn’t wait to meet the other dogs in the program. And three months would fly by, and she and Deacon would be running on the beaches in Michigan and then driving across the Midwest to Missouri for her next seasonal job. And maybe she smiled as she dozed because she didn’t know then that it would be weeks before she would be able to throw her arms around a dog once more, or that in less than a month, she would never see Deacon again.