A/N: Here's the next chapter! Thanks to all who reviewed the last one :). Love the lovely reviews!
Disclaimer: Daine & Numair: Tamora Pierce's. Laurel, Sandy & Jim: mine (again, loosely composed from bits of real people). Plot: a bizarre admixture of TP's and mine ... getting tough to tell at this point. Basically, if you recognize it from elsewhere, it obviously isn't my invention!
Chapter 6: Calgary, Banff, Rockies, 17–20 July
Early on Tuesday morning, having sent Numair off with Sandy to collect the camping gear from the Outdoor Program Centre on campus, Daine gathered all their belongings and began dividing them into two heaps—Things We Need on top of the bed, and Things We Don't Need on the floor—preparatory to stowing the latter in the now-empty suitcase and packing the former ready to go, with the aforementioned equipment and the food supplies in paper sacks on the dressing-table, into the rucksacks.
She worked cheerfully and methodically, humming to herself. She was tired, but she smiled often as, moving about the room, she noticed something that reminded her of the previous night.
It had seemed silly, when they had only one more night to spend in possession of such a lovely, soft bed, to waste all of it sleeping.
Daine had been at her task for three-quarters of an hour, and had just zipped up the suitcase and moved on to rolling articles of clothing into tight, space-saving cylinders, when someone knocked on the door.
"Come in!" she called, assuming it was Numair and Sandy back again.
"No key," someone called back.
Daine put down the enormous World Wildlife Fund t-shirt she was rolling up and went to open the door.
"I came by to say goodbye," said Laurel. "I have to leave for the airport in a couple of hours, and I didn't want to miss you. It's been such a pleasure working with you—I hope we'll get to do it again someday."
"I—me, too," Daine said. "You're going back straight away?" she asked, and then felt stupid.
"Well, you know." Laurel shrugged. "I've been here for two weeks. The hubby and kids miss me." A wink told Daine the feeling was mutual. "And I've got this elephant at home—at the Zoo, I mean—coming up on her twenty-second month. She hasn't had any problems so far, touch wood, but it's her first pregnancy as far as we know, and the father's enormous and Khaja's pretty small, so we're a bit worried about CPD—"
She stopped talking to stare at Daine, whose jaw had dropped in astonishment.
"Khaja, did you say?" Daine repeated. "Indian elephant, youngish, came to you two years ago or so from a private zoo in a small Middle Eastern country you'd never heard of?"
Laurel nodded. "How the heck did you know that?" she asked. "The acquisition wasn't publicized much—I didn't think anybody knew where she came from."
"I didn't," said Daine. "I know her. Khaja. Your elephant."
"You do?" Laurel stared harder. "How? From where?"
"It's a long story. The short version is, she saved my life once, and Numair's."
"Really."
"Yes, really. And I know someone you work with—Jack Taves?—from the feline VIN. His must've been one of the names I gave Kaddar." Laurel looked less than enlightened by this attempt at clarification; but Daine was too busy searching the room for her mobile to notice. At last she found it (under a large pair of woolly socks) and scrolled through the numbers to Numair's. "How much will it cost to change our tickets?" she demanded, breathless, almost before he had picked up. "I want to stop in Toronto on the way home. You'll never guess who's living in Laurel's zoo!"
There were more farewells in the hotel's small lobby as the out-of-town committee members, and assorted companions thereof, prepared to go their separate ways.
"Don't let him make any hotel reservations," Laurel admonished, eyeing Numair, who was half-hidden behind a potted palm, talking rapidly into his mobile. "If you're coming at all, you're staying with me. Us. Ben and Emma would never forgive me if I deprived them of such exciting houseguests."
"They're in for a disappointment when they meet us, I'm afraid," Daine replied. "But we are coming, even if it means selling the car on eBay when we get home."
"I don't think there'll be any need for that, love." Numair's voice was tinged with laughter as he came up behind her. "I've just rung the airline to change the tickets, and they've only charged us fifty dollars per, which I think works out to fifty pounds all in."
"My bike, then."
"Silly goose."
"So you are coming, then? Terrific!" Laurel grinned and dug her BlackBerry out of her bag. "When?"
"The second of August," said Numair, "at seven forty-five in the evening."
An hour later, thoroughly hugged and with hands thoroughly shaken, Daine and Numair, with Sandy and her colleague, Jim, piled into Sandy's Parks Canada truck and set off.
"Don't let me forget to stop for gas on the way out of town," Sandy said.
But Numair and Jim (who had not had any coffee that morning) were too sleepy to pay much attention, and Daine, her head half out of the rear passenger-side window, didn't hear her at all.
As they approached the city limits, Sandy shifted smoothly from yet another lecture on back-country safety and protocol into tour-guide mode, pointing out the ski-jump venue from the 1988 Winter Olympics on the left and bemoaning the increasing spread of new "subdivisions" (which seemed to mean housing estates) on the right. "Ten years ago this was all still farms and pastureland," she commented mournfully.
Daine, who had tuned out the park-safety lecture, was paying more attention now. Not quite half an hour into their journey, the crowded, treeless housing estates at last began to give way to farms and pastures, and she caught her breath at the sight—green and gold and brown and brilliant yellow, trees and fields and gentle hills, seemed to stretch for leagues in either direction. Sandy, spotting her passenger's expression in the rear-view mirror, grinned. "It's quite something, isn't it?" she said happily. "Look up ahead, though—if you can see around that oversized husband of yours, that is."
Numair mumbled a sleepy protest, then woke more fully when Daine, leaning forward slightly, gave his shoulder a little shake. "You ought to see this, 'Mair," she said.
Then, head craned on one side to give her a view around his seat and the window-frame, she gave herself up to admiration of the westward view.
Half an hour later, the highway was winding between stands of mixed trees, the mountains looming around them to the north, west, and south. Numair, who had made a study of the province's flora and fauna, was amusing himself (and beginning to irritate everyone else) by identifying plant and tree species as they passed: "Poplar … trembling aspen," he muttered. "Blue spruce—no—black spruce. Lodgepole pine. Henbane … horsetail fern … oh, look, vetkin!" he exclaimed. "Fireweed! See?"
She looked, as best she could from the window of a moving vehicle, and frowned at the stands of tall green topped by conical spikes of pink flowers. "Rosebay willowherb, you mean," she said.
"Epilobium angustifolium, yes," he said. "It's called 'fireweed,' here, because it's the pioneer growth after a wildfire. And it's also the … em … I was going to say the provincial flower of the Yukon Territory, but that can't be right, as it isn't a province …"
"Territorial flower," Sandy said, taking pity on him. In the mirror, her eyes met Daine's with a rather you than me! expression.
They had just passed a turn-off labelled "Exshaw" when Sandy glanced down at the dashboard and made a sort of strangled noise.
"What's the matter?" Numair asked, frowning in concern.
"No one reminded me about filling the gas tank on the way out of town," she accused. It sounded to Daine as though she were not sure whether to laugh or weep.
"It's okay," Jim reassured her. "I'm sure we can make it to Dead Man's Flats …"
"Is that meant to be a good thing?" Daine inquired. "Only it sounds rather dire."
"It's the first gas station on the TransCanada between Calgary and Canmore," Jim explained.
"And it's about … twelve more kilometres from here," Sandy added. "And the gas gauge is already on Empty. So everybody better cross their fingers that we don't end up having to push this thing the rest of the way there."
They all did so—not (Daine told herself privately) that one was superstitious, but, after all, one never knew.
Whether through judicious finger-crossing or some other means, they did at last turn, with considerable relief all round, into the motorway services at the unfortunately named Dead Man's Flats, and thence into a petrol station, Husky by name. Sandy got out to fill the gas tank, and everyone else to stretch their legs.
When she put the nozzle back into the petrol pump, Sandy looked rather pale. "I just put in eighty-five litres," she said.
"Wow," said Jim, looking awed. He gave the truck a little pat.
Daine and Numair, assuming they were meant to be impressed by its capacity, echoed him.
"You don't understand," Sandy told them. "It's an eighty-litre tank. I don't know how long we've been running on fumes."
They rattled over an arrangement of horizontal bars in the road that Jim explained was called a Texas Gate and was intended to keep cattle from roaming, and after a brief excursion through tall trees and other, more unexpected scenery ("Was that a skateboard park?" Daine whispered to Jim. "I'm afraid so," he said dejectedly. "Tourists, you know.") they found themselves in the town of Banff. To Daine's delight, all the streets were named for native animals: Gopher, Lynx, Squirrel, Rabbit, Fox …
"Jim and I have to check in," Sandy said, parking the truck on Marmot Street and indicating the Park Warden office on the other side of the railroad track. "Jim can show you around a bit, and when I'm done we'll drop you at your campsite—where are you tonight, again?"
"Two Jack Lakeside," Numair said. "Then Johnston Canyon tomorrow night, and Lake Louise the night after, and then Mosquito Creek, and …"
"That's a lot of hiking before you even get into the back country," Jim pointed out. "Are you sure—"
"Don't bother." Sandy gave him a rueful grimace. "I've tried to talk them out of it, but apparently this is their hearts' desire." Then she grinned at Numair and Daine: "Just remember, cell phones don't work in the back country, so if you change your mind and need a lift back to town, call me before you leave Mosquito Creek."
The hired gear was unfamiliar, and there were a few missteps and false starts before they regained their usual smooth camp-pitching rhythm. Numair could not at first work out how to connect the miniature campstove ("Perfect for backpacking!") to its fuel source; Daine shut her hand in the door of the bear-proof locker in which she was storing the food they didn't need for their supper. By the time they had pitched the tent, rigged a tarp over the picnic table, and put a pot of water up to boil, however, the murmur of water and the scent of spruce and pine had begun to work their magic, and everything seemed, somehow, destined to work out well.
Numair backed out of the tent, where he had been laying out the bedrolls, and straightened up, looking about for Daine. He spotted her standing at the edge of their campsite, her face to the woods and her hands clasped loosely behind her back. Stepping softly, in case she was conversing with some wild creature who might be spooked by his approach, he came up behind her and laid gentle hands on her shoulders.
"I've missed this," he said.
"Missed what?" Daine sounded confused, but not in the least startled. "You've never been here before, you said."
"Not that." He gestured at the surrounding landscape, then closed his arms around her: "This. Us. Outdoors, peace and quiet, no agenda."
"Oh," she said, and leaned back against his chest with a contented sigh. "Yes, so have I."
They awoke next morning (as predicted by Parks Canada's web site) to the sound of flowing water and chirping birds—some of which sounded very close indeed. "Whiskeyjack," Numair murmured sleepily. "Tree swallow." Daine smiled against her folded arms, wondering when on earth he had had time to learn a whole new set of birdcalls.
Then, trying to shift a little, she realized that she was no longer alone in her bedroll.
"Well," she said after a moment. "This hasn't happened for quite a long time."
Numair sat up, hunching over so as not to distort the shape of the tent. "What hasn't?" he asked.
Daine held up a hand in their old signal for quiet and, very cautiously, lifted the top edge of her bag and peered in. Most of her new bedmates were certainly ground squirrels; there also seemed to be a chipmunk or two. The rest, in such poor light and at such an awkward angle, she couldn't quite identify.
Very slowly and carefully she extricated herself from the sleeping bag and its other occupants and crawled out of the tent into the chilly early-morning sunshine. Numair followed after a moment, pointing out to her, with one eyebrow raised, that she hadn't had to unzip the tent flap on her way out.
"Don't look at me," she retorted. "You were last in yesterday." This was, strictly speaking, true; Daine was sure it had been well after midnight when she had left the tent for a middle-of-the-night wee and, in all probability, forgotten to close the door behind her on returning.
"You said 'this hasn't happened for quite a long time,'" Numair remarked later, as they sat spooning porridge into themselves and enjoying the music supplied by the several dozen wild birds perched on tree limbs around their campsite. While preparing their breakfast they had watched four ground squirrels, two chipmunks, a hoary marmot, and several deer mice emerge from their tent and wander away. "When did it happen before?"
Daine looked down, swirling the dregs of her tea around in her mug. "Well, always," she said at last. "When we were out in the field, that is. Until …"
"Until?"
"Well … until the summer I was twenty." She looked up at him and discovered, to her amusement, that he was blushing. "Canadian animals are obviously … bolder."
"You mustn't generalize from one experience, you know, vetkin."
"Well, in the service of science, I'm quite happy to sleep with the tent-flap open for the next fortnight, but—"
Moving more quickly than she would have thought possible so early in the morning, Numair levered himself out of his seat, rounded the end of the table and slid in beside her, one arm round her shoulders and the other behind her head, turning Daine's startled face to his. "In that case," he growled softly, "we shall have to make good use of the daylight hours."
Shortly after noon on Friday, Daine called a halt for lunch. Since leaving the Lake Louise campground, they had now been walking along the shoulder of the Icefields Parkway for some hours, sometimes talking of inconsequential things but more often simply enjoying everything around them—except, of course, the passing cars. Still, there were fewer of these than they had expected.
Although in the past they had always taken it in turns to set the pace when walking or cycling long distances, on this journey Numair was leaving all the pace-setting to Daine; he had noticed two days ago, the first and only time he had taken the lead, that she was finding it difficult to keep up with him, though he was quite certain his pace was no faster than usual—he had, in fact, consciously taken it easy, aware that both of them were unused to such extreme elevations and that the going would only get harder as they progressed. Daine gave no sign that she had noticed his solicitude, instead choosing to behave as though they had always done things this way.
Their wildlife sightings thus far had been spectacular. There was this to be said for travelling with Daine—and Numair was amused, now, by the length of time it had taken him to realize it, in the early days of their acquaintance—that where other animal-spotters saw one animal, you would see ten or fifteen. The variety of small members of the rodent and weasel families that had visited their campsites was quite astonishing—everything from shrews, mice and voles to badgers and martens had found its way into their tent over the past three nights, not to mention the mercifully brief visits of a fully grown porcupine and a family of skunks. On the trails and along the highways they had met bighorn sheep, mountain goats, mule deer and even one or two elk. They had not, however—to Daine's disappointment—met with any large carnivores.
Not yet.
They had got out their canteens, and Daine had produced from her pack two apples and a bag of mixed nuts and dried fruit contributed by Sandy, who called it "gorp," and they had settled down amongst the tall grass and wildflowers to eat, when they were interrupted by an ear-shattering roar. They leapt to their feet, staring wildly around them.
A gold-brown shape streaked out of the woods—reminding Numair, disorientingly, of Griffin—and skidded to a halt directly in front of Daine, thus revealing itself to be a huge golden-brown cat with black-tufted ears, white throat and vivid golden eyes. "Felis concolor," Numair breathed, awed. He wondered if he could get out his camera without frightening it away.
"Run," said Daine, stuffing food into the top of her pack and scrambling to re-shoulder it.
"What?"
"Something's coming, something—bad," she said urgently. "She says we need to get away from here—" a jerk of her head toward the cougar— "and I'd rather not hang about to find out why."
Numair hoisted his own gear, and their canteens, and grabbed her hand. "Where?" he demanded, towing his wife toward the shoulder of the highway. "Where does she say we should go?"
The cougar had already fled—in which direction, he had no idea.
Daine shook her head. "She didn't. Just … away," she panted. "Over the road's a good start, I should think."
They dashed across, blessing the sparse traffic. On the other side they stumbled down the slope and collapsed, breathing hard, into the wide, grassy ditch.
Again they heard that deep, shattering roar—nearer this time, and louder. Numair, cautiously raising his head to road level, was just in time to see the huge, staggering grizzly break through the trees.
A/N: CPD cephalo-pelvic disproportion (baby's head is too big for mum's pelvis). I have no idea if this is something elephants actually suffer from -- it was just a convenient thing for Laurel to be worried about :). VIN Veterinary Information Network (like the Dancing Dove for vets ;).