Falling From Grace (15 page)

“We did have sex. You were drunk, stoned. Or you had a waking erotic dream. Could make headlines, man fucks in sleep. I think there's a term for that . . . sexomnia? Drop it.”

“We . . . I didn't use a condom.”

“I guess we'll have to hope for the best. I assume Mary doesn't insist.”

He walked a circle in the gravel, waving his arms in frustrated gyrations through the air. “I don't want to talk about Mary.” He dropped to his knees on the ground in front of me. “I want to know about you.”

“This is a bit melodramatic.” I gestured for him to get up. “What? What do you want to know? How did it feel? Were you good?”

The skin around his eyes collapsed as if recoiling from a blow. “You said you weren't sorry.” He paused. “I want to know why.”

I gazed past him at the curling tip of a sword fern, the uniform rows of spores on the underside of the fronds.

“I want to know, Faye. Why aren't you sorry?”

If I'd answered him things might have turned out differently. We might have spent the day in the tent, making love, this time with a condom, or more likely, he would have bolted, left for town, quit the project. Instead we finished breakfast in silence, cleaned up, and spent the afternoon rigging the hemlock for his night in the tree. Paul begged me to talk, but I couldn't, wouldn't, feigning concentration on my work. Rigging the tree took longer without the crossbow; we used weighted lead bean bags on parachute cord instead, tossing them over branches, missing often, the bags less accurate and underpowered by my inadequate muscles, Paul's hung-over ones. He drank bottle after bottle of water and ate nothing but a handful of nuts. Late in the afternoon he clipped his Jumars on the rope to ascend for the night.

“Please speak to me,” he tried one last time.

“Let it go.” I ran through the check of his climbing gear, avoiding his eyes. “I'll see you in the morning after sunrise.”

“We'll talk then?”

I turned away. He sighed, reached out and squeezed my arm, then slid his left ascender up the rope and headed into the canopy. Once he secured himself in the crook of a thick branch where he could hang his hammock, I sent up his gear. He hauled in the climbing rope for the night. “All set,” he called. I couldn't make out his next words and didn't bother to clarify. I took one last look up at his nest in the trees and headed back to camp.

I made my way through the buffer zone and into the park, the low afternoon light melting into dusk. I was acting like a scorned teenager, my thoughts too muddled for intelligent conversation. We'd behaved badly. Both of us. I passed a high buttressed hemlock, young, a few decades old, its exposed roots wrapped like human limbs around the crumbling snag that gave it life. Their repose reminded me of a pair of lovers entwined, and the sight of it made me stop. Two as one. The natural pull of life. To merge with another. I wiped a tear from my cheek and vowed never to allow regret to taint the memory of my imperfect body entwined with Paul's perfect one, his breath on my skin. I stepped around a bend in the path and glanced back the way I'd come. The angle had shifted, the two trees no longer lovers, but mother and child.

The camp was bustling with activity, the protesters full of the events of the day. Two buses of supporters had arrived at sunrise minutes before the police, who trailed an empty yellow school bus of their own and a handful of company reps, followed by a parade of pick-ups and logging trucks. Terry instructed the core group to observe from the side. “We're needed for coordination and insurance.” “He was scared,” Sue confided later to me. Billy and four members of his family had drummed as police led, carried, and dragged eighty-six protesters off the road and transported them to the detachment in Duncan. Over a hundred activists were camped in the clear-cut prepared for more of the same tomorrow. Excited talk, descriptions of the arrests, and speculation about the next few days brewed in the background, but my mind was fixed on Paul rocking in his hammock high up in the canopy.

13

In the
smoky light of the predawn hours of a June morning, a flock of brown and white mottled seabirds smaller than robins bobbed in the waves at the mouth of Otter Creek. The birds gathered at the edge of a raft of kelp. They faced the ancient rainforest and awaited the appearance of the sun above the trees. At their backs rolled thousands of miles of open water to Japan. The birds jockeyed, skittish in the open, watchful for falcons and owls. A bird on the outer fringe tilted its beak into the air, stretched its neck, and dove. An alcid, wing diver, it flew down through the green tinted water, webbed feet trailing, then circled up through a coil of Pacific sandlance. When it surfaced, a single silver fish glistened in its beak.

Sixteen kilometres inland, an archer stole through the thick underbrush of the forest floor. He travelled light, a crossbow slung over his shoulder, a handful of bolts stowed in a hippack. Alert, his ears picked out the slightest of sounds, feet and hands sensing direction under the faltering cover of night. The only sound, the shush of his pant legs past sword ferns, the rasp of boots on bark. He stepped into a small clearing. His nostrils twitched for scent. A barred owl swivelled its head and watched from its perch in a cedar. Patches of sky visible through the canopy above began their morning transformation from black to grey to pink to blue.

High up in a hemlock tree, Paul, cradled like a caterpillar in a nylon hammock suspended between two stout branches, retrieved a jacket from the bottom of his sleeping bag and slipped it over his head with care. He eased himself out of the sling and shifted his weight onto a branch, climbing rope trailing behind like a prehensile tail. He trained a pair of binoculars on the neighbouring Douglas-fir and scanned the largest branches in vain for signs of a tiny head, a fluffy ball of spotted feathers, a shallow depression of nest. A video camera dangled from his harness by a length of nylon webbing and he picked it up, flicked it on, and sited through the lens. A point of light on the housing flashed red. He covered it quickly with his hand, switched off the camera, and settled against the tree to wait.

The seabird lifted off the water, fish curved cross-wise in its bill, and flew east over land. The bird shot over the treetops at speeds up to a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour, covering the distance from sea to nest in a fraction of the time it would take a man to walk. It circled over clearings, calling out a high
keer keer keer
, the fish still clutched in its beak. Both archer and climber heard the call of the bird.
Keer keer
. The archer lifted his face to the sky at the sound of the call and the whirr of wings in time to witness the stunted silhouette hurtle like a bullet across the fragment of pale sky above him. As he scanned the canopy for another glimpse of the bird, he spied his prey. He slipped the bow from his shoulder and loaded a bolt.

Paul aimed the camera lens at the fir.

The bird dove through a narrow gap in the canopy and hurtled toward the ground, then curved up into a steep climb, the sound of air in its wings like the muffled roar of a jet plane. It stalled above a wide mossy limb and flopped onto the branch. A chick, half the size of the adult, stirred in a shallow depression in deep moss, called a quiet
psh, psh
, and rose to its feet, beak open, greedy for the fish.

Out of sight of the bird, Paul scaled the backside of the tree, moving with ease from branch to branch. When high enough to see into the nest, he inched his way around the trunk and wrapped his legs over a limb, raised the camera once more to his eye, and pressed a button. The red light flashed. The adult bird froze in place two steps from the chick.

Below, the archer focused through the cross-hairs of the bow, breath slow and measured, and followed the progress of his target up the ladder of branches. He steadied the bow against his shoulder and tightened his gloved finger on the trigger.

The trio waited in a silent triangle.

The bird broke the stalemate. It sidestepped the final distance to the chick, who snatched the sandlance from the mother's beak and swallowed it whole, tail last. Task accomplished, the adult bird waddled to the edge of the branch and dropped like a stone. It snapped open its wings in midair.

The bolt shot from the bow, whistling from understorey to canopy at a hundred metres per second.

Paul lifted his head at the odd sound. The bolt pierced his chest below the clavicle on his right side and with a grunt, he tumbled from the branch like a wounded waterfowl from the sky, the murrelet already high above the trees and heading for the sea.

14

I slipped
into a restless sleep, worn out from the previous night and the strains of the day, my dreams filled with wind, and the beat of bird wings, a vortex of restless sound; the suffocating tips of feathers swirled around my face. I would remember the dream for the rest of my life and imagine the drama unfolding in the woods while I slept. I woke gasping in the dark and lay staring at the curve of the tent above me thinking about Paul and what to tell him when he descended from the tree. I knew he wouldn't let the issue drop. The incident held the potential to forever alter our work, our friendship. I needed to lie. We would walk along the river after he showed me the murrelet footage. I'd ask him about his night in the tree. And explain what I had meant when I said, “I'm not sorry.” I meant . . . What?
I haven't slept with anyone for years.
A half-lie. It might ring true to him. He knew all about my pathetic and absent love life. I could expect benevolence, but would he believe me? After my tears, my admonitions.
You thought I was Mary? Couldn't you tell the difference?
No expectations.
We're friends right? The work's too important.
End of discussion. We'd submit the video, our study area would be secured, and we could get back to work.

I dressed and crawled from the tent at first light, the sky through the canopy a thin charcoal grey. By the time I washed my face and brushed my teeth I was anxious to find Paul, sort things out. I fixed sandwiches and a Thermos of tea by headlamp, packed a small rucksack, and headed up the trail to the study site. By my calculation, I should arrive well after the murrelet's dawn feeding, the departure of the adults. I'd not gone far when footsteps pattered behind me and Rainbow appeared, pyjamas under her Cowichan sweater, hair uncombed, her boot laces loose and trailing behind in the dirt. “Can I come?” she panted, out of breath.

“You're not dressed.”

“Please.”

“Aren't you going to the blockade with Mary?”

“Cedar threw up. She says we'll go later. They went back to sleep.”

She appeared more relieved at missing a day at the blockade than disappointed. Was Rainbow's big adventure wearing thin? The arrests more than she could take? People dragged across the ground by police officers, her friends hauled off in handcuffs.

“Okay,” I said, taking pity on her; she was just a child. “I'm going to meet Paul.” Our talk could wait an hour or two. I dug in my pack and handed her an orange. “Hungry?”

She bit into the peel, wincing at a spray of juice up her nose. “Where is he?”

“Sleeping in a tree.” I explained our plan as we walked, suddenly happy for her company, her curiosity a welcome distraction.

“Can I sleep in a tree one day?” she asked. “How do the murrelet babies get down?”

By the time we reached the study site, shafts of light from the rising sun angled in through the trees, illuminating tiny airborne insects and dust motes in the air.

“Shhh,” I cautioned Rainbow, “we don't want to scare any murrelets away.”

But we neither saw nor heard a single bird of any species, the forest eerily quiet.

“Paul?” We called from the base of the tree, expecting the end of the rope to come tumbling from above like Rapunzel's hair. When he didn't answer we tilted back our heads and searched for his hammock in the foliage.