The Last Woman in the Forest Read online

  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 fe
el 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.

  3

  January 2017

  MARIAN

  Oil sands, Alberta, Canada

  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 minist
er 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.