The Forest Lover Read Free Page B

gray-brown trunks of Douglas-fir soared two hundred and fifty feet and crowded against white pines sending out their aroma on the breeze. Her favorite, sturdy western red cedar, sheltered the droopy-topped western hemlock whose feathery tips of branches hung like graceful dancers’ fingers. She inhaled deeply, hugging herself, wanting to fill her lungs with forest scents.
    A crow cawed and landed on a large, square wooden box wedged between the boughs and trunk of a cedar. What was that doing there? Something man-made that high in a tree? She sidestepped through a salmonberry thicket to get a better look, and came into a soggy clearing smelling of algae and humus. Seven cedars without lower branches had boxes high against their trunks. Some had disintegrated and only a few planks remained in place.
    Beneath one of them, a carved animal mask and paddle lay in the moss, neatly placed. Bones lay scattered on the ground—human bones grown green with algae. They must have fallen out of the boxes. Shock lashed through her. Slugs crawled over a green skull. She shuddered. How could they just leave it there? Seedlings had split the boxes, nourished by what remained in them. This must be a sacred place too, and here she was, her feet sinking into spongy moss right in the midst of ribs and thigh bones. How could something so repellent be sacred?
    Wind whistled, or was it spirits? She thought of the handwritten paper she’d found in the mission house, Sermon for March 17, 1906. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The Nootka were not poor in spirit. Lulu running off the dogs was full of spirit. This place vibrated with spirits. She felt surrounded by them peering at her through the foliage, breathing down her neck.
    Maybe she should leave and not tell anyone she’d seen this. Slowly, she backed away, but a powerful urge to paint here stopped her. Slowly, she sat on a moss-covered log. Other than dampness seeping through her skirt, nothing happened. Slowly, she opened her watercolor box. It creaked, too loud against the hush.
    She reached into her sketch sack for her watercolor book. Rena’s bannock bread spilled out. Instantly four huge crows cawed and swooped down to fight over it. Others dove at her, flapping their wings against her face. She didn’t belong here. Crows must be protectors of this secret place.
    They devoured the bread, belted out curses that she had no more, and disappeared back into the forest. Fine thanks she got.
    They were only birds.
    She opened her watercolor book and saw on the first page a woodland study she’d done months earlier in England. Her breath drained out in a thin stream. There was no backbone to that yew on the page. It was poor in spirit, without any earthly mystery, a ho-hum composition meaning nothing. Technique—interpretation—subject matter—all three had eluded her. She had fished five years and caught nothing.
    She tore out the page. Strip by strip, she shredded the yew.
    She stared at the shorn, tapering trunks before her, the grim boxes, the bones. She couldn’t paint them as she had painted trees in England, meek little puffs of greenery without connection to thepeople who lived among them. The algae-covered skull sucked in her stare. Did she dare use a lime green that bright? An unreal color, yet those bones were real. They’d belonged to a man or woman loved by people who had let her stay and paint, by people who went about their lives today not knowing what she was about to do. Her hand squeezed the brush.
    The terrible sacred privacy of the place repelled her intent. Without painting a stroke, she retreated.
    â€¢ • •
    After a short walk she saw the roof of the hut above some high-bush cranberry. She listened for any noise, but heard only the croaking of frogs, so she crept around the bushes to study the symbol painted on the wall. Not quite oval. More pear-shaped, upside down, outlined in black with concentric bands in red