Read Online The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland - Free Book Online Page B

I’d come back?”
    â€œYou didn’t finish painting.” His mouth formed a teasing grin.
    She grinned back and held out her empty hands.
    â€œOh-ho!” He wagged his head.
    She tied Billy to a tree again and sat on the pelts. “I came to ask about totem poles.”
    His bottom lip protruded in a pout.
    â€œI have a Squamish friend in North Vancouver,” Emily said. “She took me to the cemetery there and showed me a carved figure of a man. I want to know. Are the totem poles like that?”
    â€œHow tall is it?”
    â€œI’d say ten or twelve feet.”
    He laughed. “See those cedars? Imagine them stripped of branches and carved all the way to the top. Creatures with eyes and beaks andteeth and wings stacked on top of each other staring at you out of the forest.” He spread his arms like wings and bent over her. “Comme ça.”
    â€œAren’t they in villages?”
    â€œMost of them. Some villages have been abandoned, but the poles are still there. You can come upon one suddenly, or you can hear wind moaning—whooh, whooh—like a ghost, and then you know there’s one nearby, and so you creep around like a fox.” He hiked up his shoulders and stepped his hands forward, placing one on her knee. “But even if you know it’s there somewhere, it hits you when you see one. Right there.” His fingers tapped her chest under her collarbone, dangerously close. A vibration shot through her.
    â€œI want to see them.”
    â€œThey might frighten you.”
    â€œI want to be frightened.”
    â€œOh?” He leaned toward her.
    â€œI mean I want to see the whole coast, and go up the rivers too. To paint.”
    â€œNot possible. Not for a woman alone.”
    Yes, but here he was, wind-burned and capable, a man of earthly resources who faced raw wind with a laugh, who lived free, answering only to the pull of the tides. And there was his funny little boat. And what tied her here? Certainly not any heaps of money she’d earn from teaching children. She imagined embarking north with him. Just for the summer. A practical arrangement.
    â€œNot even possible for”—she worked to remember his words— “une dame courageuse?”
    He laughed at her pronunciation. His amusement made her feel pretty.
    â€œA fair-weather adventurer. Wait till you learn what rain really is. And mosquitoes with jaws as big as a crocodile’s.”
    He made quick little pinching motions up her arm and neck to her earlobe. Goose bumps rose on her skin.
    â€œI went to Hitats’uu alone.”
    â€œAlone you went?”
    â€œFor a whole week. I loved it.”
    â€œWhat’s to love in a mean little row of bighouses?”
    â€œThe whole place. And the people. They are what they are. Nopretending. I loved how they all live together. How they make what they need. Fine things. Cedar mats, baskets, hammocks.” She thought of the platform in the menstrual hut, so carefully crafted it had made her ache with envy for such love. “Everything so full of feeling.”
    â€œMaybe it’s you who is full of feeling.” His eyes gleamed. “More than you know.”
    â€œThey live by tradition and in harmony with nature too.”
    â€œPuh! You see with storybook eyes. You think they laugh at storms? Frostbite? Cougars? You think they smile at the place where they die?”
    He opened a potato for her and laid it on a tin plate. “ Attention. Hot.”
    â€œI mean, like you do. Cooking and sleeping outdoors.”
    His bottom lip protruded in a droll way. “I have no choice.”
    â€œWhatever the reason, they have something we don’t.”
    â€œWe?” He took a bite of potato.
    â€œThe we that live in cities.”
    â€œAnd what might that be, ma philosophe? ” He grinned, half indulgence, half mockery.
    â€œThey know things about the workings of nature.”
    He pushed