Falling From Grace (3 page)

Did it live in a rainforest?

“What species of bat do you think it is?” Paul shaded his face from the glare of the setting sun.

“Hard to tell from here.” I lifted my binoculars and watched the animal fly figure-eights through the air. “A long-eared?”

“You have a boyfriend?” he asked without warning as he crushed a mosquito against his cheek, a smear of blood left behind when he lifted his hand away.

“Me?” I lowered the binoculars, surprised by the question. “No. Too busy. You? A girlfriend . . . or boyfriend?”

He laughed. “I'm a ladies' man,” he said. “A lonely one. I travel too much.” He paused. “Know any nice women?”

I studied his profile, more comfortable than handsome. His attention was on the bat. All I knew about him were small details from his resumé and the fragments of his personal life I'd gleaned on our long drives together. His older sister married and moved to the States when he was a kid. His parents both dead, a fact he shared while deciphering another sketchy map to another study site drawn on the front of an envelope.

“I'm sorry.” I regretted the foolish personal question.

“No worries,” he'd answered. “I think we turn here.”

I could slip what I knew about him in one pocket of my jeans. “Personal policy. I never make matches for my employees,” I quipped.
Or date them.

I'd heard sex described as the bite in the forbidden fruit responsible for the expulsion of humans from paradise. Before sex, each living thing was a clone, its genes identical to its parent.

Without sex, there'd be no dwarfs.

I changed the subject. “Tell me about the amulet around your neck.”

He fingered the object at the hollow of his throat. “This? It's an orangutan tooth from Borneo.”

“Good luck charm?”

He untied the leather thong and handed me the tooth. “They spend almost all their time in trees. Orangutan means ‘person of the forest.'”

“I suppose you know they're endangered.” I examined the yellowed piece of bone, the grinding surface worn flat, then handed it back.

“Yeah, going the way of the Dodo.” He retied the amulet around his neck and zipped up his jacket. “What do people say when you tell them you climb trees for a living?”

“Leaves most of them speechless.” I laughed. “My mother thinks I climb trees to make myself taller.”

“And is she right?”

I admired his candour. “No. I just love trees. The search for knowledge. Defying gravity.”

“For me it's the adventure, the body rush.” He cocked his head to one side and listened. “Murrelets,” he whispered.

A pair of small mottled birds the size of robins appeared over the tops of the trees to the west. The birds shot over our heads, the whirr of wings audible, calling a high-pitched
keer, keer
, and disappeared into the canopy on the other side of the river.

“Amazing they fly this far to feed their chicks.” I searched the visible branches with the binoculars to see if I could detect the nest, the secretive seabirds choosing mossy limbs high up in old-growth trees, commuting at dawn and dusk with food for their babies. “We must be twelve, fifteen kilometres from the coast.”

“In Oregon we found marbled murrelet nests seventy-five kilometres from the sea,” he said. “No wonder it took decades to find out where they nest.”

Within an hour we detected more than thirty murrelets flying upriver.

“I bet hundreds nest in this forest,” Paul said, jumping from rock to rock to reach shore. I followed him, the sky growing too dark to see bats or birds.

3

I knocked
the last tent peg into the root-riddled ground, the nylon shelters wedged between huckleberry bushes laden with flowers. I stood and breathed in air pungent and fresh with spring growth. It was early June, the start of our third field season in Otter Valley. We had given up fording the river long ago in favour of a natural log bridge upstream of the waterfall and moved our base camp to the clearing near the road for ease of access. Three large hemlocks guarded the camp. An enormous fallen spruce thick with moss and bristling with seedlings provided protection for our make-shift kitchen—a portable propane stove balanced on a plank supported by two stumps—where Paul was fixing dinner. Muted evening light angled through the canopy, the air cool. Steps away the river current sang its journey west to the ocean, the stream bank thick with red columbine and false bugbane in bloom, the delicate white and yellow flowers of the bugbane showy against the dark green fans of leaves that left painful red blisters on the skin. Few people came to the valley, the odd hiker or bevy of teenagers out for a drinking spree. Paul and I considered Otter Creek our own.

We were tired. We'd left town at six
AM
to ensure we'd reach the site by nine, then spent the day in our trees, setting aerial traps, collecting moss samples. Otter Creek had fulfilled its promise. We had negotiated a buffer zone outside the park boundary and adjacent to our study site with the company that held the timber rights. Pacific Coast Forestry had agreed to forgo logging there for the years it would take us to complete our work. A significant tract of undisturbed true, old growth forest was essential to our research, and we had it, a biological paradise where diverse tree species grew together, upstart saplings and hoary veterans centuries old supporting lichens and mosses in the high canopy, shrubs and herbs flourishing at ground level, the forest floor a nursery of decaying logs and debris. A complex and multilayered collaboration between the living and the dead. An ideal wilderness laboratory.

We planned to stay two weeks.

I settled on a log with my laptop to enter the afternoon's data. As the machine chugged through its startup, I watched a common merganser fly downstream above the large flat rocks at the river's edge, wingtips skimming the water's surface. Intent on its passage, I was unprepared for the female voice behind me. “Hello?” I turned. A woman materialized like a sylph from between the trees at dusk. She reminded me of a waif out of
Les Misérables
, her face frightened, dark eyes huge and innocent, dreadlocked hair as wispy and wild as the arboreal lichen, Methuselah's beard, that hung from the branches above her head. I would have taken her for a child but for the baby in her arms—cheeks stained with tears, hair white and loopy with curls—and the girl at her side, about six or seven, who clung to the woman's long worn skirt. The girl wore pants under an ankle-length skirt of her own, an old Cowichan sweater two sizes too big, and mud-caked boots. Her straight dark hair stuck out in impulsive tufts from under a pilled handmade toque.

“We've come to save the trees,” the mother said.

Paul and I exchanged glances. Save the trees? Paul stood from his crouching position beside the camp stove, a ladle in his hand. “What do you mean?”

“They told me if we came here we could help.” She gazed at her feet and then behind her as if she'd be grateful to fade back down the trail to the road.

“They?”

“The people in Victoria. From the coalition.”

“Coalition?”

“I'm in the wrong place.” She blushed. “I saw your car and the trail . . .” Her voice faded to nothing.

“How did you get here?” Paul asked. We heard all the infrequent traffic on the road—forest company trucks, the odd hiker's four-by-four. “We didn't hear your car.”

The woman's face flamed crimson. Her daughter glared at us, hands on her narrow hips, and said, “We walked.”

Walked? Eleven kilometres of logging road from the closest secondary highway? Forty more kilometres from the closest town? Three hours drive from Victoria?

“You're kidding,” I stammered.

“We hitchhiked to the lake,” the woman blurted out. “Then we walked.” She shifted the baby on her hip. “You're not the protest camp, are you? It must be farther. We should go.” She took her daughter's hand and backed up a step.

I hesitated, but Paul spoke up. “No, wait. Don't go.”

He walked over and sat on his heels in front of me. I could see the beginnings of wrinkles at the sun-weathered corners of his mouth, the new growth of moustache on his upper lip. “We can't let them leave, Faye. It's dark in an hour.”

“Not our problem.” The thought of playing hostess to a trio of children made me weary.

“Where will they go?”

I scanned the three huddled together on the trail, their ragged clothes, the inadequate bag the woman carried over her shoulder. I couldn't ask them to bed down with the bears and cougars. “Just tonight.” I didn't bother to hide my annoyance.

Paul jumped up. “I'll cook more rice.”

He urged the three into the clearing, moved a jumble of gear off a log, and gestured for them to sit. The woman smiled shyly and her weary face transformed with a fragile beauty. She stuck out her hand. “I'm Mary.”

“Paul.” He grasped her fingers. “And Faye.” He tilted his head in my direction, and then squatted in the duff in front of the little girl. “And you, madam?”

“My name's Rainbow.” She inspected his face with her chocolate eyes as if to judge his merit. “Because one was over our house the day I was born. I was born at home, you know, in the bathtub.”

“I didn't know,” he answered, unfazed by the information. “Sounds like fun. Pleased to meet you, Rainbow. And what's your sister's name?”

“Brother,” she growled. “He doesn't have a name yet. We're waiting. Until he can tell us.” She paused. “We call him Cedar.”

“Was there one in the yard the day he was born?”

She pushed out her lower lip and wrinkled her brow. “Hmmph.”

Cedar, whose blond hair curled below his chin, hid his face in his mother's neck when Paul held out his finger and said, “You're in fine company. Lots of big cedars around here.” The baby, about a year old and beautiful as a Raphaelite cherub, pawed at his mother's shirt. She eased off her pack and settled onto the log, then lifted and peeled back layers of clothing to expose a bare breast. The baby grasped the white flesh with chubby fingers and latched on to the swollen pink nipple. “Thanks for letting us stay,” Mary said.

“No problem,” Paul answered. “We'll figure it out in the morning. I'll help you put up your tent after we eat.”

Mary bit her lip. “We don't have one.”

“No tent!” I blurted out. We were on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island.

“I'm sorry.” Her lower lip trembled. “They said they'd have lots of room for us.” She pointed at her pack. “I have sleeping bags.”

“It's okay,” Paul said quickly. “We'll manage.”

I raised my eyebrows and cleared my throat. Paul ignored me.

“How?” I demanded. Paul and I slept in two lightweight backpacking tents. “If you think I'm shar—”

“We'll figure it out,” he interrupted.

“Did you bring food?” I shifted my laptop to a stump and stepped out from behind the log to face them. Rainbow's eyes widened, her mouth opened in a perfect O, and she gawked at me until her mother noticed and tugged on her sweater.

Mary shook her head, cheeks growing redder with each question. “They . . .”

“. . . said they'd provide food too?” I finished her sentence. “They told you lots of things. What did they tell you about this protest?”

Mary smoothed the baby's fine hair with the tip of a finger. I strained to hear the woman's soft voice. “A man handed us a leaflet outside the library. It said the logging company is cutting the last big trees.” She turned to Rainbow. “Do you still have it, honey? This was Rainbow's idea. To come and help.”

The child reached into the pocket of her jacket, pulled out a crumpled pamphlet, and held it out to Paul with a grubby hand. The photograph on the front page of the cheap photocopied brochure showed the massive trunk of a Douglas-fir encircled by a ring of people. The caption read: “Save Big Mama and the Ancient Giants.” The inside text described the imminent clear-cutting of the upper valley, a surprise move by the forest company, licensed by the government without public notice. The group called itself the Ancient Forest Coalition.

Paul and I exchanged a troubled look.

“You must be mistaken”—I pushed away a mounting uncertainty—“We haven't seen any group.”

Paul handed the pamphlet back to the little girl. “We'll help you find them tomorrow.”

Dinner with Mary and her children tried my patience. When Paul handed Rainbow her bowl of canned tuna, rice, and cheese, she crossed her arms, pointed her nose in the air, and announced, “We don't eat other animals. We're vegetarian.” Paul cooked a new pot of our precious rice and served it with cheese and rehydrated vegetables. My shoulders ached with irritation, our meals planned down to the number of slices of cheese allowed per person per meal. The leftover tuna casserole would moulder in a garbage bag suspended in a tree or in the back of the car away from prowling animals until we managed to drive to town for supplies. I needn't have worried though, Paul wolfed it down, apologizing to Mary and Rainbow for his barbarous ways as he licked the last of the sticky tuna off the spoon.