NIGHT MOVES: The Stroll Murders by Gar Mallinson

Author:Gar Mallinson [Mallinson, Gar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SKC Press
Published: 2021-05-05T22:00:00+00:00

XIV

In the early morning, with a cup of hot coffee in hand, the foreman opened the door of his trailer and looked up at a sky filled with scudding clouds driven by high winds. Patches of sunlight appeared and disappeared as the cloud cover broke up. At ground level, the wind was light out of the south-west but strong enough, he thought, to have started a drying trend. The track would be dangerously soft, but the salal would be dry enough to cut. He went back inside and called the driver.

His crew met him at the bottom of the lane into his trailer park. Maki Road ended down past the new Rona store at a gravel turnabout around which stood stone posts and a security gate. There was room to park a few cars near the gate, and they would wait there for the stake truck. The men sat around on the rail fence, some smoking, some talking quietly. The foreman stood apart a little, talking on his cell with the driver. It was eight in the morning now, later than usual for them, but early enough to allow a full day’s harvest. The truck finally appeared around the corner at the light, and the men grabbed their backpacks and waited.

Once in the rear of the truck, they pitched their bags up near the cab and held on. The truck ran down thirty kilometers of highway before it turned off south of Chemainus. After that, the asphalt quickly turned to gravel and ran inland. Two one-lane bridges later, the truck turned again onto a patchy, poorly maintained road full of potholes. That road turned west in a half kilometer toward an old wrecking yard. The truck kept straight ahead on what was little more than a single-lane dirt track. The driver avoided as many water-soaked sections as possible by riding on the edge of one side, but at times, he had no option but to simply plow through in low gear. The men held on to the sides with both hands to avoid being thrown about by the violent swaying.

The truck reached a stream before nine and the men disembarked. The depression was now slick with mud, the stream brown and running fast. The men waded across carefully and began the trek up the road. All of them had come prepared for work in rubberized pants and waterproof boots that would keep them reasonably dry in a forest still wet underfoot.

With this protection, they walked in the two parallel tracks of the road. The tread marks they had encountered a couple of days before were no longer visible. When they reached the area they had previously cut, the men waited for the foreman to lead them up the ridge to the new cutting area that lay on the other side. The salal was still wet, of course, but the upper branches were dry enough for the cutting could begin.

The clearing beyond the ridge was small and uneven, the footing a little treacherous, but the salal continued beyond it into the trees as far as the men could see.

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