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jolted through him. “Sure,” he said. Anyone, really, could do this job as long as they didn’t mind being alone or working outside at night. If a person actually understood fish, or even liked them, that would be better, but anyway, here he was.
    Tanner crouched, swished his plate in the creek, and then dipped his mug into the river. He rose and drank deeply, eyes closed. “Okay.” He grinned and tugged at an imaginary cap on his head. “Time to put on the film critic hat. Try not to screw anything up.” They walked back to camp, where Tanner packed up and drove away.
    For a while, Paul wandered in circles around the camp, unsure what to do with himself. Before he could properly register his being alone, vehicles rumbled up the road. Their approach was slow, and the violent shake of equipment and the laboured mutter of truck engines in low gear echoed through the valley. He could see the road through the trees, a hundred metres or so uphill from where he stood beside the camper. Two large crew cabs hauled long white trailers, followed by some smaller trucks, their cargo boxes loaded with chainsaws, shovels, jerry cans, and other gear. Clouds of dust drifted through the trees, and by the time the air settled, the last rattles and engine noise had faded.
    First task: clean the fence. He grabbed his waders from where they hung drying beneath the camper’s awning and went to the measuring station. Except for the weirs near the shore, the fence ran across fast-moving, choppy water and sizable rocks where the female trout wouldn’t lay their eggs, so there would be no redds to disturb as he followed the length of the fence.
    He picked at the twigs and bark bits piled against the mesh, grabbed handfuls of alder and aspen leaves and tossed them downstream. Then he scrubbed the mesh with a wire brush until the matted leaves had flaked away. There were branches stripped of bark and nibbled to sharp points by what he guessed were beavers. Tanner had warned him that after several days of bad weather there’d be so much debris piled up that either the fence would be blown out or the creek would flood. A chainsaw was stored in one of the camper’s bins in case a tree swept against the fence. He’d never used a chainsaw and thought that standing knee-deep in storm-tossed currents wouldn’t be the best place to learn.
    Midstream, a small fish, a rainbow or cutthroat, had wedged its sloped head in the fencing wire and snapped its spine, the body rubbery and clammy. A sad waste, but learning to gut and cook a fish was beyond him today—another foreign, unfamiliar task. He threw the trout downstream, and it floated on the surface for a moment, pale underside flashing in the sun, then disappeared.
    Ten o’clock. Waders off, and his work done until nightfall. Now what the hell was he supposed to do? He returned to where they’d eaten breakfast at the confluence and crouched on the shore to absently scoop warm pebbles and sift them through his fingers.
    On the other side of the Immitoin, a broad, flat forest stretched along the shore before it ran into the hills and mountains beyond, a range of conical and boxy peaks with snow-covered ridges and cols, suspended in hazy air. The woods across the river were dense and marshy, a place where a hundred elk could disappear.
    His thoughts were erratic, flighty. Whatever he wanted from his mind, it was impossible to access. He became drawn in—downward, it felt like—by the sound of the river, the rhythms and counter-rhythms, the layers of melodic and discordant voices created by unexplainable surges and shifts among different currents. The noise pulled his mind along, stripped it of language, and left him with a tattered patchwork of disturbing and fleeting images. White, claustrophobic images: hospital rooms and hospital sheets, a toilet bowl with a trace of blood spiralling in the water, snow falling in late May outside a bar in