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When Marian climbed out of Tate’s truck at the Pétron Oil compound, she immediately heard the humming of electricity, like a dull ringing in her ears, from all the buildings and lights and generators and diesel trucks whose engines were plugged into outlets when not in use.
“Welcome home,” Tate said.
Marian squinted against the snow and the bright afternoon sun. And when a woman with long brown hair approached them amid the sunlight and the glare from the snow, she almost appeared like an apparition. Tate introduced the woman as Jenness, the other team leader, who then extended her hand toward Marian. The cuff of the woman’s down coat pulled up the slightest bit so that when Marian shook Jenness’s gloved hand, she noticed the tattoo, a small hawk feather, etched in black, on the underside of the woman’s exposed wrist. The woman was no taller than Marian, around five feet four inches, and appeared lean despite her thick snow layers. She said she had Marian’s key and room assignment and would show her to the orienteer housing.
“We only beat you here by a few hours,” Jenness told Tate. Then she pointed out two trailers at the other end of the parking lot where she and Tate and the six handlers would be staying with the dogs.
Tate and Jenness exchanged banter about logistics and business and the names of people Marian didn’t know, and because of Jenness and Tate’s easy way with each other, Marian wondered if they might be a couple.
Marian and Jenness each picked up one of the duffel bags. They carried the bags to one of three large modular buildings. There were a couple hundred rooms in the building, Jenness said, and several communal bathrooms. “You’ll have your own space, but I have to warn you, it’s really small.”
The room was about the size of a walk-in closet, with barely enough space for a twin-size bed, a small desk, and a bureau. Marian tried to turn around and bumped the duffel bag into the desk chair and stumbled a bit, and when she did, she grabbed onto Jenness’s shoulder. Then Jenness laughed. “Like I warned you. The rooms are small.”
“I don’t mind,” Marian said.
“Trust me. We’ve stayed in a lot worse.”
Because the two women with the large duffel bags were still standing in the small space, the room suddenly felt like the kind of tight quarters where one can hardly breathe, and perhaps Jenness sensed the same thing because she set the bag down and said she’d let Marian get settled in. There was a folder on the desk with maps and instructions and helpful tips about the compound, and another folder with a schedule and information to bring Marian up to speed. “It’s a lot to take in,” Jenness said. She was now standing in the doorway with one hand on the doorjamb. “Don’t worry. I’ll walk you through everything. And don’t be afraid to ask questions.”
Beyond the three long modular barracks that housed seven-hundred-plus oil workers and the conservation group’s six orienteers was a building with a TV commons area and an exercise room. Beyond that building was the cafeteria. After Marian organized her small space, she joined the others in the cafeteria for a group meeting with Jenness and Tate.
Six dog handlers had been hired as seasonal employees for the oil sands study. This was their first project. Their employment would end once the study was over. The six orienteers were here as volunteers. Each team would consist of a handler, a dog, and an orienteer. Marian had taken on other jobs as a volunteer, as long as housing was provided, for the experience alone, and this was one of those.
The purpose of the study was to assess the impacts the oil exploration was having on the caribou, moose, and wolf populations living in the oil sands. This would be done by using the dogs to locate scat from these different species. The scat would then be packed in dry ice and shipped back to the lab at the University of Washington, where it would be analyzed for DNA, hormone levels, and diet. Of special concern on this study were the caribou, which would be each team’s priority. Wildlife investigators had predicted that the caribou would become extinct in the oil sands within the next two decades.
The handlers were responsible at all times for the dogs. The orienteers were to navigate each team’s course of travel, collect the scat, and record the waypoints. This meant that the dogs were off-limits to the orienteers. Jenness and Tate said that now that the dogs were on site, it was important to limit their distractions, and interaction with too many people wasn’t a good thing.
Jenness and Tate went on to explain that orienteers were rarely assigned to a study. “When there are two people, usually one of them will be talking, which interrupts the focus of both the handler and the dog,” Tate said. But this particular contract had required that each team consist of two people for safety measures, primarily because of the cold.
For the first ten days, the handlers would be running training exercises for the dogs to get them acclimated to the area and to further enhance the scat-ball concept. The orienteers would be working in pairs to assess the roads. The oil company’s ice road network varied from year to year. The orienteers would be exploring that network, while making a tracklog with their GPS devices. They would also be determining which roads could handle the weight of the trucks. At the end of each day the orienteers would be downloading their tracklogs onto the program’s geological information system, where the data would become road layers that could be added to maps.
Determining which roads were stable proved to be challenging, as the roads were built on top of peat bogs, called muskeg, which was why the terrain was only accessible when the ground was frozen. The general rule was that if there were young trees or shrubs in the nearby landscape, the road most likely was one to be avoided, as the road would be too soft. But the absence of low-growing vegetation wasn’t always an indicator, and there would be a loud thunk and the truck’s tires would fall through the muskeg, which was what happened to Marian on her third day. Jeb, an orienteer from Oregon, was riding with Marian, who was behind the wheel. They’d just turned onto a road that led through dense woods of Canadian spruce and canoe birch, when the truck thunked and came to an abrupt halt.
They had brought a shovel for just this reason, and while Jeb dug around the truck’s wheels, Marian took a handsaw into the woods to cut branches. They layered the branches around the wheels. Marian again climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and slightly accelerated, while Jeb pushed from behind, but the wheels only spun, and so she and Jeb continued their efforts again and again, but to no avail, until finally the two of them decided they’d better call over the radio for help.
While they waited for assistance, Marian learned that Jeb was twenty-five, just a year younger than she, and after college had held a number of different jobs including working as a deckhand on a fishing boat in the Bering Strait and driving a bulldozer for an excavation crew at construction sites. He said he wanted to go back to school one day and study writing. Marian liked his long blond hair, which he wore in a ponytail. She told him he reminded her of her younger brother who was working as a youth minister at a church in Grand Rapids, where the two of them had grown up in Michigan.
At some point the conversation turned toward the dogs, and Jeb said that most of the program’s dogs had been one step away from being euthanized. “Just look at them now.”
Marian and Jeb were sitting on the tailgate and were eating from a bag of trail mix when they heard a truck approaching. They retraced their path along the road to the turnoff, where the ground was more solid. Tate pulled up beside them and rolled down his window.
“I got a couple of chains in the back. Each of you grab one. I’m going to back in and get a little closer.”
And so Marian and Jeb did as Tate instructed, and Tate parked and got out. He connected the two chains and hooked the ends on the closest axle. Within minutes Marian and Jeb’s truck was out of the bog and they were loading the chains back into the bed of Tate’s vehicle.
Then Tate asked Marian to ride with him. “You can brief me on the road conditions.” And so Marian climbed into the passenger seat next to Tate, and Jeb walked around to the driver’s side of the other truck and hoisted himself behind the wheel.
After they got going, Marian told Tate about the grid units to the northwest having the best network, and that there were only a few working roads to the northeast. She gave Tate specifics about the muskeg and the terrain.
Marian had removed her gloves and while she was talking, Tate reached for her hand. “You’re cold,” he said. “You were out there a long time.” Marian said she was fine. Other than that, there was now nothing obvious to say, and her hand remained beneath his until he asked her what she hoped to get out of her time there, and his right hand grabbed hold of the steering wheel again.
Marian hesitated before answering because she did not want to sound presumptuous, and Tate said, “It isn’t a difficult question,” and Marian told him what she really wanted was to be working with the dogs.
“You want to be a handler,” Tate said.
“I wish I’d had the chance to try out.”
“We’ve had a lot of folks over the years who started out as orienteers, Jenness included. What you want isn’t out of reach.”
• • •
The living area of one of the two handler trailers had been converted into the group’s workstation. It was late when Marian had finished downloading her GPS tracklog and entering her notes regarding the roads, sometime close to midnight. A dusting of snow blew over her boots as she walked back to the orienteer housing, and snowflakes collected on her lips and lashes, though the sky was clear. She thought of Deacon and loneliness and other matters that collected in her mind at a day’s end when sleep was close. Only three weeks before, Marian had been running down a sand-packed trail with Deacon bounding alongside her. Her life had felt snagged in a trailer and a place too hot to call home. She was fair-skinned with sun-enhanced freckles and too much Irish and Scandinavian blood to be living in Texas.
For the past four years, Marian had gone from job to job. Her family worried that she was chasing happiness and might be better off with a man, even though they typically weren’t conventional thinkers. After Marian had started college and still did not have a boyfriend, her father asked her if she was gay. But Marian did not think she was gay. She met a boy her junior year. He had brown hair, and when the sun shone on it, the ends looked like copper. He was friends with Marian’s roommate, a tall, strong woman with Chippewa blood. The boy’s name was Hawkon, and he told Marian he had Chippewa blood, too, like her roommate. He was an English major who enjoyed writing poetry. Marian liked his name and the poems he wrote, though she did not understand them, and she liked the copper tips of his hair. They talked and read poetry for a month before he kissed her one night underneath a streetlamp in downtown Ann Arbor. They had just left a bar and three empty beer bottles each. And when he kissed her, he slid his right hand beneath the fall of her hair, lifting it slightly from the nape of her neck, and her spine chilled from the warmth of it all. After he walked her back to her dorm, she tried to write a poem for him, but her words felt futile.
Hawkon did not stop by the next day or the next, and a month later when she had not heard from him, she cried. She thought her roommate was asleep, until the covers on her roommate’s bed stirred, the mattress springs creaked, and bare feet padded across the vinyl floor. Linda lifted the polyfill comforter and crawled in beside Marian. She smoothed Marian’s hair and breathed warmth against her skin. The next night, Linda slipped beneath the covers with Marian again, and the night after that. Her fingers stroked Marian’s arms. She tugged at the neckline of Marian’s T-shirt and kissed her freckled shoulders. They became lovers, but Marian never wondered if this was love, and only once after their lovemaking did Linda speak those words, shortly before falling asleep.
Marian had actually only been with one man, when she was twenty-three, a kind man with fleece sheets who would bring her coffee in the morning. But he’d eventually moved on, as had Marian, when their seasonal job together ended.
• • •
Marian visited the women’s communal bathroom. She was thinking about emailing one of her co-workers from Turtle, Inc. But when she walked out of the bathroom, she was startled by Tate, who was standing just outside the doorway.
“I understand you want to take the sleds out tomorrow,” he said.
Marian told Tate about seeing only one road on the grid unit that she and Jeb had been assigned to check and that she wasn’t sure what kind of shape the road was in. “After today, I’d feel better taking the snowmobiles.”
“Do you know how to handle these machines?” he asked.
And Marian told him she did, that she’d grown up riding snowmobiles in Michigan.
“Do you want me to give you some pointers?”
“I’ll be okay,” she told him.
• • •
Marian moved down the hall and was surprised to find she’d left her room unlocked. She didn’t think much of it until she opened the door and removed her boots and began to peel off the layers of her clothes. In that moment she felt certain that a man had been inside her room. There were footprints on the floor that were too large to be hers. She thought of the oil workers. She checked her belongings. Everything was in its place. But when she turned in she knew someone had lain on her bed, because her pillow had the unfamiliar scent of a man that she would later come to recognize, of spruce and sweat and diesel oil and outdoor air.
And when she eventually came to know Tate’s body and the comfort of his breathing and the way his skin and clothes smelled, she asked him about the night when she had turned her pillow over and had lain awake for too many hours and had promised herself never to leave her door unlocked again.
“You were in my room,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Why were you on my bed?”
He told her that her door wasn’t locked, that he’d come looking for her to ask her about the sleds. He knew the orienteers had been complaining about their rooms. He’d wanted to get a sense of just how small the rooms were. He was being a responsible team leader.
It all made sense to Marian. It always did.