Falling From Grace (12 page)

“What do you mean?”

“There's nothing serious between us.”

“Why would I care?”

“I've been honest,” she said. “I don't do . . . domestic relationships.” She rested her cheek on her child's head. “I didn't have much of a role model.”

My heart softened. Grace always used to say one shouldn't underestimate the complexity of a human being. “Paul's a big boy,” I said.

Mary ducked her head and lifted Cedar back onto her shoulders. “Thanks.” Cedar waved his chubby fingers at me as they walked away, Mary's slender spine swaying like a sapling in a breeze.

I found Rainbow with Mr. Kimori. The two stood beside a young cedar, its branches curved gracefully downward close to the ground. Faces set in concentration, they dangled sheets of sketching paper in the air beside the tips of the branches.

“What are you two up to?” I said.

“Tree painting,” Rainbow answered, tongue between her teeth, head bent, intent on her work.

“You're painting the tree?”

“Nope.” Rainbow swung around and held out the sheet of paper. “The tree's painting.” Random swatches and spatters of blue and yellow like Japanese ink drawings decorated the page. “We put water colours on the needles and the wind blows them around and paints the paper.” Rainbow shoved her picture toward me. “Here. It's for you.”

Tenderness welled up in my chest at her gesture.

“Mr. Kimori showed me how.” She smiled over at him. He smiled back and bowed. Rainbow chattered on. “Did you know a tree can move seven times around the world in a year?”

“Oh?” I accepted the gift. “Trees can paint and walk too?”

“No, silly.” She giggled. “You add up how far all the branches swing in the wind,” she explained. “Right, Mr. Kimori?”

“Right, Rainbow.” Mr. Kimori held up his painting. Miniature black birds winging across a white sky.

I swallowed my breakfast speech. “Homemade granola?” I offered Rainbow a bowl. “I need a taster. It's got dried cranberries. Let's say it's a trade for the painting. Mr. Kimori?”

“Ah yes,” he said. “A full stomach makes a happy painter. I'll get my dishes.”

Rainbow scrutinized the gift with suspicion, but when Mr. Kimori returned and I divided the cereal three ways and added milk, she accepted. The three of us ate side by side on a log, the artwork spread to dry on a bed of moss at the base of the tree.

“What brought you here, Mr. Kimori?” I picked a cedar needle out of my cereal.

“I am a Buddhist,” he answered. “We revere all life.”

“That's it?”

“And, like you, I have a special affinity for trees,” he said.

“What does your family think about you blockading a logging road and risking arrest?”

“I live alone.” His placed his bowl and spoon on the log and folded his hands in his lap. “My wife died a decade ago and we had no children.” He touched Rainbow's arm and his face brightened. “It is nice to spend time with children.”

“Would your wife approve of what you are doing?”

“She would be right here beside me.” He raised a finger up beside his ear. “Listen.”

The song of a Swainson's thrush trilled like music from across the creek.

“Is it your wife, Mr. Kimori?” Rainbow asked excitedly. “Is she reincarl . . . re—”

“Reincarnated as a bird?” He tweaked her cheek affectionately. “She loved birds. It sings beautifully, doesn't it?”

The thrush sang three more times and was silent.

“What do you do when you're not blockading logging trucks or painting with trees?” I inverted my bowl to let the last of the milk drip into the duff at my feet, the white liquid seeping quickly into the spongy ground.

“I own a clothing store”—he patted his black fleece vest— “I cater to Asian men.” His eyes glittered. “I call it Mr. Small and Short.”

“You're teasing us,” I said.

“Yes,” he laughed. “I am.”

• • •

Paul and
I walked the aisles of the supermarket, cart loaded with bags of rice, instant oatmeal, dried juice packages, tinned food, and odds and ends requested by various people. I related to Paul the story of Rainbow's refusal to eat.

“She's spunky,” he said. “It wouldn't surprise me if she willed herself to stop growing. I love those kids.”

“Rainbow won't talk to you,” I countered, peering ahead over the cart handle that came to the middle of my forehead.

“True.” He frowned. “But she let me take her hunting for clouded salamanders in woody debris yesterday.” He chuckled. “She used hand signals to ask questions.”

“Don't get too attached,” I cautioned.

“Why not?” he said. “They could use a bit of stability.”

“Mary's not the one.”

“What do you mean?”

“A hunch.” I'd said too much. He could cry on my shoulder when he needed to. “Let's hope this is our last supply run.” I checked toilet paper off the list. “My car is going to go on strike soon.”

“We should finish in another five days if the weather holds,” Paul said. “Where's that ecologist Roger promised?”

“I'll give him two more days,” I said, climbing up on the bottom rack of the cart to reach higher on the shelf.

“I'll bet he never comes,” he said. “What's with all the cookies?” Paul pointed at the boxes of chocolate chip cookies I was throwing one by one into the basket.

“The cookies are for Marcel,” I said. “Give me a hand, will you?”

“How many? Three? Four?” he joked as he tossed four more boxes into the cart. “I guess it's what keeps him svelte.”

The drive back traversed a decades-old clear-cut environmentalists claimed was visible from space. A brown stain on a blue-green sphere. It reminded me of a battlefield: kilometres and kilometres of rotting stumps and slash, slumps of debris, colourless but for faint verdant brushstrokes where Douglas-fir seedlings replanted years ago struggled to survive.

“We'll have to give them proof,” Paul said halfway through the desolation.

“I lost you. Proof of what?”

“The murrelets.”

“We have the shell fragments.”

“Not enough. I mean video footage of a murrelet in a nest,” he said. “The tree-sit gave me an idea. I think I know which tree has a nest. One of the Doug-firs near where I found the shell. I'll spend a night in the hemlock next door. A few nights if necessary. If a bird comes into the nest in the morning, I'll film it or at least pinpoint the nest branch.”

I considered the idea. “Murrelets are pretty skittish.”

“Better skittish than no nest tree.” He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and feigned slinking through tall grass. “I'll be stealthy as a ninja.”

I ignored his shenanigans. The clear-cutting of critical nesting habitat represented the murrelet's most formidable enemy, their numbers at sea plummeting over the past decades. “Okay. Let's do it. A nest should give ample evidence.”

I swerved the car around a deep pot-hole at the top of a hill. Another expanse of clear-cut spread out before us. “We better do the filming soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

We stopped at the blockade and handed out chocolate bars and pop.

“Any action today?” Paul asked.

“One crazy logger drove by yelling insults this morning.” Terry leaned in against the door, hands on the edge of the window. “Otherwise, it's dead around here.”

“Those poor big men are frightened of a grandmother,” Grace piped up. She wore a sandwich board that read,
Granny Against the Rape of Public Forests
.

“Do you think the company knows about the tree-sit yet?”

“I doubt it,” Terry said.

“Any news about the injunction?” I asked.

“Our contact expects a decision soon.”

Paul and I unloaded the groceries into backpacks in the empty parking area and lugged them down the trail. Halfway to camp, we found a jacket, ripped and muddy, in the middle of the path.

“I think it belongs to Chris,” Paul said. “He must have dropped it on his way to the blockade.” He picked it up and shook it out.

Around the next corner, we discovered a bag of oatmeal spilled across the ground, a few steps farther, a dirty sleeping bag and a headlamp with a smashed bulb. We ran the rest of the trail. Dropping the groceries on a stump, we stood, staggered by the state of the camp.

“Shit.” Paul sucked in his breath.

Speechless, I took in the carnage. Slashed tents, food bins cut from ropes and upended, the kitchen tarp collapsed and torn to shreds, clothes ground into the dirt. Socks and underwear littered the rocks in the middle of the stream like strange displaced flower petals and the current swirled around a camp stove.

“The bear?” But I knew an animal could not accomplish this level of damage.

“Bears can't spell.” Paul pointed to a placard painted over with the words:
Tree-Huggers Are Welfare Bums Crawl Your Butt Back to the City
.

“Our gear,” I exclaimed. I carried my computer and cell phone at all times to protect our data, but we stowed the climbing equipment in packs under the tarp. We hauled aside the tangled strips of blue polyethylene and found the packs empty, ropes, lanyards, carabiners, strewn in the dirt, our best rope knifed in half.

I slumped onto a log while Paul continued to rummage through the mess. He strode around the clearing, muttering to himself, hunting under tarps, clothing, and sleeping bags. He lifted his head and faced me, a soggy pair of jeans in hand, cheeks drained of colour. “The crossbow's gone.”

We drove to the blockade and gave Terry the news. He used his radiophone to call the
RCMP
.

The
RCMP
didn't show up until late the next afternoon, a single officer in uniform, his cap tucked into his belt, too late to witness the bulk of the damage, much of the mess already cleared away; a dozen digital photographs and a pile of equipment beyond repair the remaining evidence.

The officer introduced himself. “Sergeant Lange,” he said. “You shouldn't have disturbed the scene.” He lifted his hat and passed his hand over a balding pate fringed by grey.

“We had to eat and sleep,” I pointed out. “We expected you sooner.”

He shrugged with disinterest. “Anything missing?”

“One item of significance.”

“Which is?”

“A high-powered crossbow.”

The man raised an eyebrow. “A crossbow? What would a protest camp need with a crossbow?”

“It's mine,” I said. “Paul and I aren't with the protesters. We're scientists. We just happen to be camped in the same place.”

“Okay,” he drawled. “I still don't see the connection. What do a couple of scientists need with a crossbow?”

I sighed. “We use it to set climbing ropes in trees.”

“For?”

“Collecting samples from the canopy.”

“Of?”

“Arthropods.”

“Which are?”

“Bugs.”

“I'll take your word for it. Anyone you know might have a vendetta against you?”

“Not us. You better talk to Terry Seybold. He's the guy over there with the phone glued to his ear.”

Not an hour after Sergeant Lange left, Roger Payne walked into camp.

“We heard about your problems here,” he said, scanning the clearing. “Is there anything I can do?”

“You heard where?” I asked.

“I golf with the police chief,” he explained. “He called me this morning.”

“For starters,” Terry said. “You can tell us who did this.”

“Hold on,” Roger held up his hands in defence. “Our guys have strict orders not to interfere with your protest.”

“Then who would?” Terry said.

“No idea. But your blockade has attracted a number of odd characters.”

Terry scowled and stalked off, knocking the radiophone against his thigh as if to stun it into operation.

“Let's talk about those timber markings,” Paul said.

“I thought it was only one,” Roger answered. He picked a broken tent pole from off the pile and examined the scratch marks on it.

“Lots of timber markings,” Paul corrected.

“I told you,” I said. “In the park and the buffer.”

“Definitely mistakes,” he said. “I'll tell the fallers to stay out of there.”

“That's welcome news—” I said, relieved, but Paul interrupted.

“Are you planning to log close to our site?”

Roger cleared his throat. “That's not what I meant,” he said. “Everything's up in the air”—he gestured with one hand at the camp—“with this madness going on.”

“Can we see your logging plans when they're ready?” Paul said.

Roger put his hands on his hips and scuffed the dirt with a boot.

“And what about the murrelets?” Paul pressed him. “I believe they nest all through there. Why don't you come with us now and take a look?”

“How long would that take?”

“An hour?”

He checked his watch. “I promised Pam I'd be home by five,” he said, then flashed us a disarming smile. “But don't worry. Cal should be here tomorrow. Let me know how it goes.”

He tossed the tent pole back on the pile and, with an apprehensive wave, strode back up the trail to the road.

“Why would he drive all the way out here for that?” I said. “To tell us not to worry?”

“Why indeed,” Paul replied. “Why indeed.”