Wolf at the Door Read online

  The road, still broad and well gravelled, travelled the ridges where it could, but it dropped down to cross over first Pinto Creek and then Nose Creek before lifting again into what Kelly realised were the first real foothills. Off to her right she could see the beginnings of the proper mountains, and between herself and the rising peaks was the broad expanse of a substantial river valley.

  They crested Chinook Ridge, following the ridge for miles with extensive views on both sides of them, views of rugged, timber-covered hills that stretched away into the distance. It was, she thought, like some areas of Scotland and Wales, although different in its total isolation. How easy to imagine that only a few miles from this road there might be trails where no man had ever been before.

  When the road slid down the mountain again to the jewelled beauty of two tiny little mountain lakes, Kelly was overjoyed to find that Marcel had halted his truck at a campsite on the shore of the second one.

  ‘The road gets a bit rougher after this,’ he said when she had alighted to join him. ‘I thought it would be easier on you if we took a break.’ He reached into the cab of his truck to emerge with the Thermos bottles of coffee she had prepared before leaving home, and they walked down to sit on a log beside the water.

  A pair of red squirrels chattered angrily in the tall pine trees, and no sooner had they got settled than a swift, raucous bird that looked like a grey-coloured blue jay swooped down to perch on a stump and stare at them suspiciously. When Kelly tossed down some pieces of the cookie she was eating, the bird was on them like a shot, crying his pleasure in shrill screams.

  ‘Whisky-jack,’ Marcel informed without her asking. ‘Actually it’s a Canada jay, but you’ll never hear them called that out here. Every camp has at least one; we’ve got a whole flock of them up at Kakwa, and every one of them’s an accomplished thief.’

  ‘I think he’s delightful,’ Kelly replied, ‘but why are they called whisky-jacks?’

  ‘No idea,’ he shrugged. ‘Some of the real old-timers call them camp robbers, and that is accurate enough. They can be a real pest at times.’ He snorted angrily. ‘If it was left to me I’d shoot a few of them just to get some peace, but Scofield would have my head on a platter if I did.’

  ‘I’m certainly pleased Mr Scofield and I will have one point of agreement from the start,’ Kelly said dryly. ‘I’ve been worrying just a bit about my reception. My father hasn’t actually come out and said so, but I got the distinct feeling he doesn’t expect I’ll be welcomed with open arms. Why would that be? I wonder. Just because I’m female?’

  Marcel’s reply was a bark of laughter not unlike that of the cheeky whisky-jack.

  ‘I don’t think that would bother him at all,’ he laughed. ‘The old grey wolf eats little girls like you for breakfast, or at least that’s what some of his men would have you believe. Scofield has a fair reputation as a womaniser, although usually he doesn’t attempt to mix business and pleasure. But then I doubt if he’s ever had a woman as pretty as you right there in camp with him. From what I understand Scofield doesn’t think much of having women in his camps ... too much of a distraction for the men, if nothing else.’

  ‘But there’s already a woman at die camp,’ Kelly replied with a troubled glance. ‘Mrs ...

  ‘Cardinal,’ Marcel reminded her. ‘And she hardly counts, when you consider she’s a wrinkled old half-breed woman who’s fifty if she’s a day, looks seventy-five, and has a dozen grown-up kids — not to mention a husband who’s there at the camp with her. Marie is your bull-cook and her husband Etienne is sort of general handyman.’

  Kelly could tell by the expression on Marcel’s face that he expected her to query him about the unfamiliar terminology, and resolved to disappoint him.

  She had spent every spare minute during every one of her father’s yearly visits to England in questioning him about his work, and she knew very well that a bull-cook, in Canadian terms, was a cook’s helper, a sort of kitchen slave who peeled the potatoes, washed the dishes and did most of the heavy labour in camp kitchens.

  But she wasn’t quite so confident in her ability to deal with the obvious problem of this Scofield man and his attitude that women in a camp led to trouble. Nor did Kelly really know how to combat such an attitude, except by the example of simply not causing problems. Certainly, she thought, she was old enough to handle the attentions of a group of hard-working prospectors and surveyors, who should normally be working too hard to have time for amorous intentions.

  Someone like Marcel, she realised instinctively, could be less easy to deal with, and she was suddenly very glad indeed that he wasn’t going to be on hand at Kakwa camp every day of the week. Quite an abrupt shift from her initial impression, she knew, but undoubtedly a safer one, at least until she came to know him better. The way he kept looking at her was distinctly unnerving, and she decided it was high time they started driving again.

  As they walked back towards the trucks, Kelly couldn’t help turning back for another look at the placid blue waters of the small lake. What a pity Kakwa camp couldn’t be in a setting like this, she thought, then spoke without conscious awareness.

  ‘Is it anything like this—at the camp, I mean?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Marcel replied with a vioy grin. ‘No lake, for starters, and it’s about a thousand feet higher. We’re just on the edge of the real mountains here; at Kakwa you’d be up over the five-thousand-foot line, I think.’

  He grinned at her expression of dismay. ‘You wouldn’t want the camp anywhere near here if it was the weekend,’ he said. ‘You can’t move for the crowds and you can’t hear for the racket. It’s the farthest thing imaginable from what you’d consider unspoiled wilderness. Up on the Kakwa it’s at least quiet some of the time, although even there you’ve got the generators and trucks coming and going at all hours of the day and night.’

  Kelly could well believe it. There had hardly been a mile on the journey south in which they hadn’t met or been passed by some form of vehicle, most of them going exceptionally fast for the rough, dusty road. But it was certainly in keeping with her father’s comments that Grande Prairie was a boom town, and that it would get even worse as exploration and development of the wilderness to the south intensified.

  ‘I hate to see it in a lot of ways,’ he had said on the morning after Kelly’s disturbing encounter at the school. ‘But we need the resources; progress can’t be halted that easily. And actually there’s no reason why development can’t be combined with good conservation practices and resource management. It only needs the right kind of leadership and regulations. That’s one of the things I really like about Scofield, his attitude towards conservation.’

  Kelly had told her father only enough about the disruptions at the meeting so that he knew there had been a violent protest. Of her own involvement, and her subsequent encounter with the police and the tall grey-eyed stranger, she’d said nothing at all. And when he began to expound about the conservation practices of the Scofield business empire, she thought it just as well to remain silent, since it would only upset Geoff Barnes to hear about the incident. Clearly he thought very highly of this man Scofield, and as he detailed the man’s ideas on conservation as he himself knew them, Kelly .found herself increasingly impressed.

  Her own attitudes towards resource development were firmly entrenched by the ruined countryside left by gravel- stripping and surface mining operations in Britain and by her own studies. She firmly believed in progress, but was becoming increasingly convinced that reclamation costs and planning must be included in any development scheme right from ,the start. It was heartening to hear her father describe the approach taken by Scofield, who insisted on reclaiming his camps and development sites even though he was under no obligation to do the job as thoroughly as he always did.

  ‘I know of one camp he used for five years straight,’ her father had said, ‘and if you went back there now you’d never believe there’d ever been a camp on the site. Not like some of these ol
d drilling sites that will be junk heaps for another fifty years.’

  Marcel reached into his truck cab to replace the Thermos flasks, and when he emerged he had a rolled-up chart in his hands which he spread out across the bonnet of the truck.

  ‘Have a look,’ he suggested, and Kelly leaned over to watch as his finger traced their route on the forestry map.

  ‘Here’s Grande Prairie, and the road we’ve driven on. And here we are now — Two Lakes. Very original, whoever named them,’ he added with a laugh.

  Then he showed her the route they must take to reach the camp, his finger following a track pencilled in amongst the dotted lines of seismograph lines and trails. According to the map, the actual road ended at the forestry airstrip at Sherman Meadows, but Marcel’s route continued south over Stinking Creek, Mouse Cache Creek, into Dead Horse Meadows and then up the Kakwa River almost to the B.C. border.

  ‘It’s a rough old road once we get past Sherman Meadows, so take it easy,’ he warned her. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll be keeping an eye out for you if you run into problems.’

  He was keeping an eye on her for more reasons than that, Kelly suspected, but she accepted his caution without comment and a few minutes later she was back in the big pick-up truck and following his vehicle down a road that grew increasingly rougher.

  Her wrists were aching from the unaccustomed effort of driving such a large vehicle by the time they rounded the final turn in the track to see the buildings of Kakwa camp.

  The camp was more or less what Kelly had expected. Three sides of a huge square were taken up with large house-trailers while the gravelled area between them served as a communal parking lot. The left-hand row was the bunk-house accommodation for the men; the centre section housed the kitchen, dining hall, wash-house and laundry facilities, and the right-hand leg held the trailers used for offices and what her father had jokingly called executive accommodation. It was there that the combined office and sleeping quarters that Kelly would use was located.

  Obviously the lunch-hour had ended, and there was only a single pick-up truck and a battered old Chevrolet car in the parking lot, but when the two newcomers had parked their vehicles close to the cookhouse, they were immediately greeted by a short, stout and very wrinkled dark woman who Kelly presumed must be Marie Cardinal. To Kelly’s surprise the woman literally ignored her, shouting at Marcel in a vivid mixture of French patois and what Kelly thought must be some local Indian language. In any event, she couldn’t understand more than a few words of the diatribe, and it became immediately obvious that Marcel couldn’t get much out of it either.

  Finally, however, he managed to calm the woman down enough so that her rapid speech shifted entirely into French, and it soon became evident what the problem was. The second cook had received a visitor from town soon after Marcel had left that morning, and the visitor had brought whisky, or at least alcohol of some sort.

  ‘So both your cooks are drunk as the proverbial skunk,’ he explained eventually, ‘and also out of a job, although somehow I doubt if they care much right now. They’re both in the cooks’ bunkhouse, dead to the world. Frankly, I’m just as glad for the excuse to fire them both, but I can’t help wishing they’d picked a better time. I absolutely must go back to Grande Prairie tonight; I have to be in Peace River before noon tomorrow.’

  Angrily, Marcel ran his long fingers through the mop of his shaggy hair, sighing with obvious exasperation.

  ‘God, but I hate to leave you with a situation like this,’ he sighed. ‘In fact, I can’t. There’s simply no way you can cope with cooking for eighteen men, even with Marie’s help. And certainly not when you’ve only got four hours to get dinner ready for them.’

  ‘I can, and I will,’ Kelly replied with a determined gleam in her eye. She had avoided letting Marcel understand that she spoke and understood French almost as well as he, but she wasn’t going to allow him to get her started in her work on the wrong foot. ‘You just arrange to have your truck unloaded; there’s fresh meat and other things that must be put away immediately,’ she said. ‘And since you’re taking my father’s truck back, all I ask is that you take your two drinkers back with you, I don’t even want to see them, and you can sort out their wages back in town.’

  ‘It’s simply too much for you,’ he protested. ‘I’ll get on the blower and arrange something, but I’m going to stay and see things under control.’

  He looked around him wildly, and Kelly suddenly realised that he was closer to panic about the situation than she was herself. And obviously the reason was his inability to accept that she could, and would, cope. A meal for eighteen men in four hours wasn’t impossible; it simply meant they would have to be less choosy than usual. But what she did want, and must have, was the opportunity to sort out the problem in her own way. She knew only too well that she couldn’t afford to have her authority in question so early in the piece. It would be next to impossible for her later on,

  ‘No, you will not stay,’ she said imperiously. ‘You will get those two drunken sots into the back of that truck and you will get them out of here. If you hurry, you might even get back into town early enough to start looking for a couple of new cooks, which would be very nice indeed as I don’t fancy running the camp and cooking three meals a day forever. Now please, Marcel, will you just get on with it?’

  Then she turned to the startled Marie Cardinal and ordered her to fetch her husband immediately and make a start at getting the supplies unloaded, as well as showing her to the company trailer so that she could get changed and start work.

  Both the Metis woman and Marcel stood in awe at the crackling Parisian French that Kelly used, but the shock lasted only a moment before Marie Cardinal was scurrying to obey.

  Within half an hour, the worst was over. Marcel had chivvied the two drunken cooks into Geoff Barnes’ pick-up truck and headed back to town, Marie had bullied her tiny, silent husband into unloading the supply truck, and Kelly had thrown her suitcases into the trailer where she would be living and changed into one of the dozen light cotton jump-suits she had brought for working in.

  It was in the act of changing that the riskiness of her decision finally struck Kelly, and she shuddered at the potential for disaster she had created. But it was too late for recrimination, she could only go forward and pray for the best. Squaring her shoulders beneath the jump-suit, she trotted across to the cook-shack and cajoled the other woman into showing her where things were and how the equipment worked.

  It took a fair bit of negotiation; Marie’s French was substantially different from what Kelly had learned and even her English was often open to misinterpretation, while Kelly, of course, understood none of the stout woman’s rapid Cree. But they took an immediate liking to each other once Marcel was off the site, and when the first of the men arrived just before six o’clock, they had managed to put together a quite acceptable meai.

  That it wasn’t exactly what the men were used to, Kelly guessed by the expressions on the first faces at the servery. And she took their expressions of delight as being caused by the food, rather than her own somewhat dishevelled appearance.

  A look at the larder and the chef’s menus had told her already the awful news that the men of the Scofield operation had been surviving on steak and potatoes and steak and potatoes and steak and potatoes. Certainly a boring diet, she thought, and quite an illogical one considering the quantities of frozen chickens and fish and various vegetables she found in one of the two huge camp freezers. And she was thankful for the fresh produce and meats that had come with herself and Marcel that morning.

  It meant she had been able to provide a choice of two salads, fresh fried chicken and/or tiny lamb chops, mashed potatoes and a mixture of turnip and carrot for vegetables. Dessert hadn’t been quite so easy, but she had found enough frozen cream cakes in the freezer to get through a few days, until she either got new cooks or time to get some baking done.

  Her biggest problem had been judging quantity, and she had chosen
to simply double what she thought reasonable by generous restaurant standards and add ten per cent for good measure. It might mean some waste, but better that than to have too little.

  The entire operation was a rush to deadline, so she hardly noticed when the first arrivals only glanced through the servery and turned to leave the dining room. Obviously, she thought, they had only come to check if there was time to wash up properly before eating, although she was vaguely surprised nobody spoke to her.

  It wasn’t until Kelly had finished loading the steam trays and making her final checks that all was ready that Marie drew her attention to the gathering crowd outside. The woman’s patois made it difficult for Kelly to get her message at first, but her own observation through the window made it clear enough.

  These men hadn’t merely gone to clean up for dinner; most of them looked as if they were geared up for a night on the town. And when the first of them entered the dining room, shyly at first but with growing bravado and sheer noise as the numbers provided security, Kelly suddenly realised that she herself was at least as much of an attraction as the food.

  Her first reaction was to flee back to her trailer and get cleaned up herself. With a smudge of something on her forehead and her fresh jump-suit quite messed up after an afternoon of slaving in the kitchen, she didn’t feel at all up to meeting the stares and curiosity of this rather startling group of men. Her second reaction was to laugh at their often juvenile escapades; they looked for all the world like a flock of bantam roosters on parade for a single hen. Herself, which was a frighteningly sober thought.

  But her third reaction was the best, at least from her own viewpoint. Clearly she must establish some form of control, and as the cacophony of hoots and laughter subsided for a moment she stuck her head through the servery and spoke in her most polished B.B.C. accent.