The Forest Lover

  “Mademoiselle Courageuse!” she heard behind her, and turned to see Claude with his arms raised, wagging his head.

  “I’m no more courageous than a bowl of jelly. I’ve just been jostled to kingdom come.”

  “But you’ve been to Kitwancool and back.”

  “Did you turn to stone right here in the road? This is exactly where I left you.”

  “I went to Hazelton.” He rested his hand on the laces of her men’s hunting boot. “If you hadn’t come back today, I would have set out to find you.”

  “If I hadn’t come back today, you wouldn’t have recognized me. I’ve been attacked by an army of carnivores. Every mosquito in Kitwancool cut its teeth on my flesh.”

  “Your face is pocked like a giant strawberry.” He reached up with both hands and helped her down. Her legs buckled under her, but he kept her from falling.

  She thanked Luther, who nodded an acknowledgment while Claude unloaded her gear.

  “What you need is a hot bath and a steaming fish dinner, but La Renarde Rouge only has enough fuel right now to take care of one thing. Which will it be?”

  Bath? Her hair was matted and dirty, but on the deck? The mere thought—

  “Supper. I’m already a blazing furnace.”

  “Ah, you’re hot, mademoiselle?” His eyebrows popped up.

  “I mean, from the sun, the mosquitoes.” She fanned her face. “Supper.”

  “Then you’re hungry, oui?”

  His grin told her he knew he’d trapped her again.

  She grinned back. “Painting hard requires food. I worked hard. The carvings were marvelous.”

  “It’s you who is marvelous.”

  They carried her gear to his boat. She landed on the deck with an “Oof,” off balance, arms flailing, dropping her gear. Far from a marvelous maneuver. Billy whined on the riverbank.

  “Convince yourself, Billy. I can’t carry you across.”

  “Does he like mush?”

  “After a week of doggie hardtack, mush would be caviar. To both of us.”

  Claude produced a pot of leftover mush from the top of the boiler, waved it in front of Billy’s nose, grasped his collar and urged him across. “See? Monsieur Bill likes La Renarde Rouge.” He poured water from a skin bag, set the pot down for Billy, and arranged some pelts for her on deck.

  “Tonight we put them below deck for you, with mink too, yes? For me, the skiff. A promise. But now, take a little nap. I’ll be right back.” He kissed her on both cheeks, his beard smelling of tobacco, his brown eyes bright with anticipation.

  She lay down with a groan, positioning her face in the shade cast by the tin hat on the stovepipe. Every joint creaked. Now if she could only stop scratching. She closed her eyes and let the boat’s motion lull her. Did she really know what sort of a man Claude was? What he had in mind ought to make her nervous, but it didn’t. She had no energy for nerves. If he mentioned her running out of his tent in Vancouver, should she tell him that she’d come back that next morning after he’d left?

  No.

  He’d called her marvelous. How could this man be attracted to her? She was graceless, fat around the middle, not dainty like Alice, or statuesque like Clara. Apparently there weren’t many beauties of the two-legged variety in the wilderness. Was what she’d eliminated from her life, with acceptance, suddenly plopping into her lap?

  His heavy foot jostled the boat and she jerked upright. One by one, he lifted his purchases out of a gunny sack—two fish, a cauliflower, potatoes, bannock bread, an Indian squash, and two large, dark, unlabled bottles. “Indian brown ale. The finest in the wilderness. Don’t move. I cook for you.”

  She leaned back against the furs with a sigh. She must have been holding her back and shoulders tense for five days. Having someone—him—cook for her, take care of her, melted her stiffness. The trip was harder than she had anticipated.

  “Thank you.” The words came out in a mere squeak.

  He lit the boiler, picked up the pot Billy had been drinking from, poured in more water, and dumped in the vegetables in big chunks. He gutted the fish and lay them in a pan, poured some ale for her into a tin cup, and drank from the bottle.

  She choked on it. “Tastes wheaty. Kind of bitter, but good. Anything’s good.” She drank in large gulps, feeling relief as the river of liquid coated her dry throat. She rolled a cigarette and offered it to him. He took it, and she rolled another for herself. After the first drag, she relaxed in the pile of furs and gazed at the trees along the bank.

  “Look at all the different kinds of trees here. Will there ever come a day when I’ll know everything there is to know about green?”

  Claude seemed amused and poured her more ale.

  “If God is good, no,” she said, rubbing Billy behind his ears as he lay next to her. “If I had the energy, I’d sing a hymn to green.”

  “Green, all the time green. Enough to make a person scream. If God is good, He’d make some trees purple or blue. Or even gray.”

  “He does. At least that’s the way they see them in France.”

  “Who?”

  “Les Fauves.”

  “Ah, tu parles français maintenant, oui?”

  “Non.” She tried to say it in the French way, through her nose. “See that spruce? It’s blue-green.”

  Claude thrust out his bottom lip. “Green.”

  “See there, along the shore, those firs streaked with purple shadows. That aspen flecked with yellow light. See in the distance, those mountains. They’re milky gray-blue.”

  “That’s mist.”

  “Mist veiling a forest. There are shy greens that retreat behind mist. Dull greens that lie down and sleep. Young greens that are frisky as a puppy. Spring greens that dazzle the eye.”

  “Solid green that drives a man mad.” He looked at her and laughed softly. “Take off those gum boots and wiggle your toes. It will make you feel better. No mosquitoes here.”

  “Some Gitksan carver must have been bitten to smithereens once. He put a giant mosquito on top of a pole, with a prong long enough to bite through boards. A man told me it was a woodpecker, but I swear it was a mosquito.”

  She pulled off her boots, keeping her brown wool stockings on, and told him about the Mother-and-Child pole, the Frog Woman pole, and Mrs. Douse wanting to keep a painting. “That meant heaps more than a passel of Vancouver society matrons buying the whole lot.”

  He turned the fish in the pan. “Where do you go now? Up the Nass? Alaska?”

  She gazed at the sun’s glow behind the highest firs, the golden ribbon of river gleaming in the west, going out to sea, mixing with the waters of Haida Gwaii. The poles are different there, Henry had said. What would she be missing if she didn’t go?

  But she was an artist, not a researcher. What did it matter if she brought back an incomplete impression of native art?

  To Henry Albert Douse, it mattered, even though he wasn’t Haida. There had been that sad, soft tone in his voice when he’d said, Nobody to watch the poles. They had named her something. Hailat. Person with spirit power in her hands. Maybe that wasn’t just a compliment about her paintings. Maybe it acknowledged her power to do something. She had imposed herself on them, and now, with as much gentleness as the Kitwancool totems, he was asking for something back.

  Claude put his hands on his knees and his face inches from hers. “I said, where do you go now? Up the Nass? Alaska?” His eyebrows lifted hopefully. “I can take you.”

  To go with him? Now? Her old dream—painting and Claude together. She looked at his funny, dirty face, his cheeks puffed in a smile above his beard all crinked and cranked every which way, his eyes glistening, pulling her into them, waiting for an answer. The possibility that they might yet become lovers pulsed in her like a drumbeat.

  Wherever you’re going, she almost said.

  “A man in Kitwancool said I should go to Haida Gwaii.”

  Claude straightened up and let out a wolf growl that made Billy perk up. “Haida G
waii. The Queen Charlottes, eighty miles out to sea.” He scowled at the fish.

  “Some of the poles there are in empty villages, unprotected from thieves. They’re not going to last, and I don’t know when I can come north again.”

  “Hecate Strait is a hell hole of treacherous water for small boats. Fog thick as thunderclouds. Fog that sneaks up and suffocates you, turns you crazy in circles. I have no instruments to navigate in fog.”

  “I didn’t mean you should take me.”

  He turned the fish, all buoyancy gone from his features. In a few wordless minutes that seemed like an hour, he put a tin plate of food and a fork before her. “Voilà.”

  She ate. “As fine as any restaurant I went to in Paris.”

  He smiled, a wan, disappointed sort of smile, held his fish by the head and tail, and tore into it with his teeth.

  “Do you think it’s right, what I’m doing?”

  He pulled two fish bones from his mouth. “It brought you north, so it’s right.”

  “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. It’s right, and it’s important.”

  “Do you know a man named Alfred Poole?”

  “Gitksan?”

  “White.”

  “No.”

  “I think he’s some kind of scout or dealer in poles to museums or collectors. He’s one notch lower than a mosquito, sucking the lifeblood out of villages. He’s speeding up what nature will do in her own good time.”

  “You need to go.” He tipped his head back to finish the ale. “A steamer leaves Prince Rupert every Monday at noon and puts in at Skidegate on Graham Island of the Charlottes.” He slapped the gunwale. “Renarde can take you to Rupert. It’s a hundred eighty miles to the coast, but the river’s with us. From there Rupert is only a short way up the sound.” He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “What day is it?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Friday?”

  “I thought it was Wednesday.” They laughed until Billy barked. “Monsieur Bill, do you know?”

  “No. He never knows.”

  “I’ll find out.” Claude heaved four black oil drums onto the dock. They sounded empty when he set them down. He rolled one of them toward the landing house.

  “I’ll pay you, of course,” she shouted to him, ahead of her.

  He turned back and grinned. “Maybe yes. Maybe no.”

  A tingle traveled through her. She couldn’t be so naïve to think he was doing this just for friendship. For whatever reason—Haida Gwaii or Claude du Bois—she felt excruciatingly alive. She put her boots back on, leashed Billy to the boat’s wheel, and stumbled after Claude, rolling another oil drum. Out of breath, the buzz of the ale in her head, she caught up with him as he was coming out of the landing house.

  “It’s Sunday!” he shouted. “We leave at dawn. Four-thirty.”

  She worked alongside him, loading supplies, his and hers, from the Hudson’s Bay post. By the time they finished, she could hardly stand. He lit a small lantern and hung it over the hatch, tossed a blanket into the skiff, and came back to arrange a bed of furs below deck. He invited her in. It wasn’t much to speak of, just a crawl space really. Billy settled right in the middle, sniffing the furs.

  “Non! Not for you!” Claude pushed and slapped but Billy didn’t move.

  “Billy, here!” Emily snapped her fingers and pointed to a place in the bow. Begrudgingly, Billy obeyed, but not without a whimper. Emily stretched out on the furs, exhausted and weak.

  On his knees beside her, Claude whistled a descending note and his eyes shone in the lamplight. “Here, at last, you sleep in mink, oui?”

  “Oui, in the queen’s pajamas.”

  He scrunched up his face. “Non. Rien. Sleep in nothing.”

  She fanned her hand over the fur and chuckled. “One day an MP’s wife in Ottawa or London will wear this fur to the theater, never knowing.”

  To pick up where they left off, nothing in the world prevented her, now. Right here, tonight, it might happen—to love without hesitation or fear. At Rupert they would part. No claims. Just two people coming together on a river.

  “The virgin in a man’s boots.” He unlaced them and took them off, then reached for her wool stockings.

  She tensed and tucked her toeless foot behind the other knee.

  “Now don’t be coy with me.” He held her other ankle, waiting.

  She closed her eyes and saw Fanny bending over her foot, knowing all. She stretched out her leg, an offering of trust. He began to peel off her stocking. She felt it go, inch by inch, down to her ankles, over her heel.

  “Ach!”

  She froze.

  “Les petits démons! A million of bites! Poor girl.”

  “Yes, but I painted the Mother-and-Child pole.” She smiled. “It was in a swarming bog.”

  He crawled toward her face, and she opened her arms to him. “You don’t tease me this time,” he said. Smelling of fuel oil, he kissed the mosquito bites on her neck, her ears, her eyelids. He lay next to her and kissed her mouth, opening it with his tongue, his hard desire surprising against her thigh, making her squeeze inside in small involuntary waves. Heat surged through her. Her whole body felt feverish, nauseous. His beard chafed her cheek and she winced.

  “You hear the potlatch drums?” He covered his heart with his open hand. “The beat of passion, oui?” One eyebrow arched and his mouth formed an uneven, amorous smile.

  She tried to muster the sound of drums within her, that pulsing she’d felt before supper, but only the sadness of the ruined potlatch at Mimkwamlis came to mind. She felt an almost imperceptible slackening, any drums too faint to be felt. She couldn’t answer him.

  Sweat trickled down her temple. She raised her hand to wipe it off. Her fingers and wrists were swollen. He seemed alarmed at the sight of them. Her head, neck, everything felt swollen and hot. She couldn’t lie still. The tingle from within merged with the tingle on her skin, making it almost unbearable. She wished she had chosen the bath. A cool one. The supper and the beer hadn’t settled well.

  “Too hot, oui?” He unfastened the top two buttons on her blouse. His fumbling concentration was amusing. Letting him was easy now, because of Fanny.

  “Mon Dieu!” he cried, and backed away. “Your skin!”

  She opened her blouse to her waistband and looked down at the red and bumpy flesh of her breasts and midriff, inflamed and raw from scratching, dotted with bloodied specks and tiny scabs.

  He blew on her skin to cool it. “Émilie. Émilie,” he murmured, pain in his voice. He said her name as naturally as though he’d been saying it to himself for years.

  “What to do? What to do?” he murmured, shaking his hands, and scrambled up onto the deck. She heard him rummaging in the cabin. “Où est-il? Où est-il? Ah!” He scrambled back down with a tin.

  She raised up on her elbows. “What’s that?”

  “Ointment.”

  “What kind?”

  “Sh. Lie down.” He took off his buckskin shirt.

  She watched his muscles moving under his skin. Even in the dimness she saw the line on his neck between bronzed and lighter skin. She lay back and threaded her fingers through the hair on his chest.

  He smiled wryly at the attention. “Your blouse,” he whispered, waving his hand for her to take it off. She did, and spread it under her and on both sides to protect the mink.

  He dug his fingers into the tin and placed dots of salve on her cheeks and throat and smoothed it on gently. It was cool and soothing, but smelled oily, maybe slightly fishy.

  “Is my face puffy?”

  He nodded. “Poor Émilie. Émilie.” It was as though once he’d finally said her name, he must say it again and again. He worked the ointment down her neck, over her shoulders, down her arms, over the backs of her hands. She felt herself relax into his sliding caresses, acquiescing to whatever ministrations he would do. He smoothed the salve onto her right breast, onto the side, lifting it, under it, and around again, cupping it in
his palm while he massaged. In a hazy thrill of not knowing where his hands were going, a long sigh escaped her, but the thrill receded, as though belonging to another person.

  “Alors, comme ça. Doucement, oui?” His voice soft.

  He moved to the other breast, and down to her waist, his thoroughness telling her that his tending to her gave him pleasure.

  “You have spirit power in your hands,” she murmured, amazed at such tenderness in a man so rugged, a man for whom it was important that she paint the Haida totems. If she had an ounce of inclination . . . But somehow, in spite of what she’d once hoped for, it had all drained out of her.

  His eyes looked deep, as though seeing beyond her skin, into her soul. “I thought I knew. I thought I understood. That you are passionné. That you could be passionné for me. Mais, non. Only for art. Only for art. Mon Dieu, to stay in that mosquito pit—to paint!” Slowly, he raised his eyes to hers, dark with anguish and moist with a new recognition. His fingers curled into fists pushing against his chest. “I cannot. I see you are too sick.”

  Her eyes welled up with the truth of all he said. Only for art. For this moment, probably forever, it had to be enough to know that she had been desirable, and perhaps even loved, in his way, smeared with fish grease.

  “One more thing.” He clambered up on deck and down again and laid the little French flag, wet and cool, across her breasts.

  She laughed softly. “Does this make me French?”

  “Oui, mademoiselle. Une dame héroïque.” He raised his fist and it hit the roof of the cabin. “Pour l’art!”

  He kissed the palms of her hands and drew back, looking pitiful. The corners of his lips turned down. “Bonne nuit, Émilie.”

  “Bonne nuit, Claude.” She smiled. “Monsieur Galant.”

  He took the lantern, climbed up and was gone.

  26: Moss

  At noon William and Clara Russ, the Haida guides whom the minister on the Queen Charlotte Islands had recommended, arrived at the Skidegate dock in a gas boat towing a small dugout canoe. “Ready?” William asked.