The Forest Lover (24 page)

“You ever been here before?”

“Maybe, when I was little. To a potlatch.”

“You aren't so big now.” Emily looked at the speck of the boat in the V of its widening wake, the shrouded expanse of gray trees and grayer water. “Neither of us is.”

A shivering double cry cut through the silver-gray vapor, stretching in a long, penetrating arc, and descending to a mournful yodel. A loon. She didn't move. It came again, those two short notes releasing that unearthly call and then the half-laughing, half-crazed finish, chilling in its beauty.

She hoisted her bedroll, food basket, and easel. Log steps smeared with velvety green algae led from the clamshell beach to a raised plank walkway overgrown by bushes so tall she couldn't see above them. The damp planks had been overtaken by an army of reddish-brown slugs trailing thick slime. Two steps onto the planks sent her slipping sideways. She dropped her bedroll and her arm shot out to steady herself against the bushes. Their sting attacked her hand and
wrist. “Don't touch, Tillie. They're nettles. Billy, stay.” She lunged to grab him and her hand brushed against them again. The itching began immediately.

Holding his collar, she followed the wooden walkway down a row of bighouses. Not houses. Creatures. Enormous, blocky fantasy creatures as big as houses. One house front was painted with gigantic eyes and a leering grin. The whitewashed double doors were two front teeth. A beaver. A diving whale was attached vertically to the next house. The whale's open upper jaw jutted forward ten feet as a porch roof, and the door was a tongue inside the red mouth—as inventive a design as Chief Wakias's Raven's beak. On the whale's back rode a sprightly little man with curling frog-like legs, and Raven was caught between the tail flukes. On the roofline next to it stretched a sleepy, gray, two-headed sea serpent. She stepped backward to take it all in, slid on a slug, tumbled into the nettles, and let out a yelp that made Billy bark.

She beat back the nettles with her easel and caught a glimpse of the far end of the village. What was
that?
She scrambled to her feet and thrashed through undergrowth toward a towering colossus, a single elongated figure, not a stack of totem animals, not carved onto the front of a pole, but a statue by itself, probably twenty feet tall. The red torso and round cedar belly were clearly human. Clearly a woman! An ogress. Block-like wooden breasts hung downward, with nipples that had been carved into, what? Eagles' heads? With eyes and beaks? Arms fashioned from added wood extended forward at the shoulder, reaching. A terrifying sight. High nettles prevented her from seeing the woman's face.

“What
is
she? A witch?” Emily murmured.

No answer. Tillie had gone back to the shore for a second load. Wind whistled, and it started to rain.

Separate from the bighouses, across an open space, stood a small white clapboard house with windows and a peaked roof, the mission house. “Come on, Billy. This way.”

In a minute, he said with his nose in a puddle scummed over with algae.

“Billy! Now!”

When Tillie turned Halliday's key in the lock, something scuttled inside. In the damp, dim interior smelling of mildew, Emily
dug into her food box for a candle and matches. Tillie found some wood and built a fire.

“Won't the missionaries expect that wood to be here when they come back?”

“We only use a little. I'll get some new tomorrow. It will dry by and by they come back.”

They baked potatoes at the fire's edge which they ate with smoked salmon and apples. Tillie handed her a shiny brown something spread with what looked like congealed tapioca pudding. “Herring eggs on kelp,” Tillie said. “It's good.”

Emily bit down on the cool, rubbery surface which squeaked in her mouth but was relatively tasteless. She scratched her face. It was impossible to ignore the tingling, and rubbing her cheek on her sleeve had only made the irritation worse.

“I saw you fall into the
jumjumclum,
” Tillie said. “Alder bark's the Kwakwaka'wakw way to get rid of the sting, but I didn't see any. Use, you know, from your nose. Not as good, but always with you.”

“Kwakwak . . . ?”

“Our tribe. We say Kwakwaka'wakw. You say Kwakiutl. More easy for you.”

Tillie pantomimed blowing her nose into her hands and spreading it on her face. Emily followed her instruction. It helped a little.

“You remember me from a time ago? You made pictures on the beach.”

“Did I draw you too?”

Tillie nodded. “I kept it for long time. My little brother Toby ripped it. It made him sad.”

“I'll do another now.” She took out a small sketch pad, and penciled in the shape of Tillie's face, as round and brown as an earthenware plate. A braid hung forward over her shoulder.

“What's that woman? That big carving?” Emily asked.

“Dzunukwa.”

“What's Dzunukwa?” Her tongue struggled with the deep buzz that launched the name.

“She lives in the forest.” Tillie's voice became husky. “When mothers hear her call,
huu, huu,
they so afraid they act like trees. Arms out but they can't move.”

Emily remembered Sophie telling Tommy about a Wild Woman of the Woods, but Sophie had used another name, Kak-something.

“What does she do?”

“She carries off children in her basket and smokes them to eat them.”

“Why does she have eagles' beaks on her nipples?”

Tillie was silent in her pose.

“If she's bad, why do people put her in their village?”

“Not always bad. Sometimes she gives good things.” Her voice was soft with awe. “If you chase her she turn to smoke.”

Emily sketched Tillie's hair. Where it was pulled tight from a center part, she rubbed in highlights with her India rubber.

The fire crackled, her pencil scratched, Billy snored, and the wind moaned, but still she heard another sound, like an owl hooting only lasting longer. “What's that?”

“Dzunukwa,” Tillie said.

“Is she crying?”

“No. She doesn't cry. Mothers with dead babies cry. She of the Woods, she just calls,
huu, huu,
and takes the babies.”

A harpy! She thought of Annie Marie, Tommy, and the unnamed one, a mere fluttering, short-lived as a moth. “Do many babies die in Alert Bay?”

“Some. My brother did. Not Toby. And two cousins too.”

“Were you afraid of Dzunukwa when you were little?”

Tillie nodded minutely. “When I went too far away, Mama told me Dzunukwa will get me.”

Emily shaded under Tillie's brows to get that intensity and fear into her eyes so pinched together.

“Is Dzunukwa still alive?”

“Yes. She dead hundreds of times, but she can put herself together again. She always comes back and sings, ‘I have the spirit power.' ”

“What's her spirit power?”

Tillie lifted her shoulders. “Many stories.” She ate a strip of kelp with tiny, thoughtful chews. “Only some people can tell them. Not me.”

Emily put down her pencil and gave the drawing to Tillie. Her eyes glowed and her wide smile expressed her thanks.

They let the fire die down. Cold night crept in through the
window that had become a square black hole. Tillie pulled her blanket over her. Billy was restless. Emily sympathized, but the sound of his nails tappety-tapping on the wooden floor was annoying. “Billy. Lie down.” She pointed to the floor by her bed. Tillie's breathing took on a gentle rhythm. Maybe that would give Billy the idea.

The call of a loon pierced the light thrum of rain, asking and asking, urgent in the darkness, otherworldly, the loneliest sound she'd ever heard.

Emily felt the ogress with her fierce beak breasts staring in at them with whatever eyes she had. Tomorrow, she'd stand before that Wild Crone until her every feature was seared into her memory, and she'd make of her a thing of terrible beauty.

• • •

By morning the rain had stopped. She walked around the nettles to the rocky bluff above the sea which gave her a fine view of Dzunukwa, as if this Forest Fury had just stepped out from the trees behind her. Wisps of vapor floated above her head. Tense stillness engulfed Emily and the figure. Emily stared. Dzunukwa stared back. This hideous, mighty Queen of Dark Places stared back. She had to wrench her eyes away from the clutch of Dzunukwa's empty sockets in order to study the other features of her face. Wide whitish circles around her eye holes. Thick black brows over them. Round ears sticking out. Gruesome cheek cavities in scooped-out red ovals. The mouth—that garish, ghoulish mouth with red bulging lips pushed out in an O as if she were howling that low
huu,
like the sound made by blowing across a bottle, a chill, keening hoot.

And those eagle breasts. Those beady black eagle eyes. That sharp hook of a beak on each nipple ready to snatch and tear. What did it mean? In spite of what Tillie had said, this Hellhag was pure savage.

She could see this Wild Cedar Woman wasn't afraid of anything—suffocating forest, lightning, torrential rain, cougars, isolation, vastness. She was of it. She could see in the dark, stride through bogs, race wolves, fight bears, penetrate the impenetrable, be alone. The only one of her kind, having no mate, she could look upon raw life or death and not shrink from either one. She could even rise from the dead and put herself back together again. If only an ounce of that raw power could become hers. She felt the pull of Dzunukwa's
extended arms. Were they itching to steal a child, or were they reaching for her, taking her to her bosom?

Dzunukwa's mystery deepened along with the darkening sky. Rain threatened. She'd have to work fast. That meant watercolor, not oil. She pulled out two large sheets and placed them vertically to accommodate the tall figure. Before such a ferocious creature, she had to talk herself through the process. Simplify the shapes. Use Fanny's long, loose strokes in burnt sienna for the torso. Exaggerate to express. Build up a chromium oxide shadow on her arms to take on the forest colors behind her. Highlight her breasts with a smear of cadmium red medium for expression, like Gibb would do. Make it lurid, like his nudes. Lay another smear on her cheek. Surround the black hole of a mouth with a thick, pale Indian yellow ring for lips. Outline the ring in cadmium red deep. Outline the eyes, the ears, the arms in black.

What about the nipples? A momentary pause. A catch in her rhythm. Later. Keep the rhythm going. Do the surroundings now. Make the nettles lick Dzunukwa's legs like green flames. Use Fanny's long strokes in Prussian green and viridian. Highlight with shorter, narrower strokes of yellow ochre. Do shadows in ultramarine. Outline in indigo and black. Simplify the trees in the background into overlapping triangles.

The beak nipples. She stopped to think it out. How could she paint what she couldn't understand? But if she didn't paint them, no one would know that they were there. And if she did, Fanny's prediction would be right—her own expression would vanish in her awe of the totem, and the eagle faces would be wrong, too tight considering the broad, sweeping lines of the rest of the painting.

Dzunukwa's lowing came again.
Huu, ah, huu. Who are you?
she seemed to be hooting.
Recorder, or artist?

It had been easier to simplify in France because she didn't care about preserving the details there. They didn't mean anything to her. But here, whatever they meant to the Kwakiutl, to her those beak breasts suggested a Beldame Nature not benign. The nipple that fed could also scratch and tear. She slashed a thick dark line, curved outward and downward toward the nipple, like a scythe. She painted the reverse shape on the other side of the nipple to make a point at the bottom. She did the same for the other breast
and added two black dabs on each pointed nipple. Let them suggest what they may.

The haunting call of the loon resounded, as though it were the lowing Dark Forest Goddess herself. Emily unleashed her own unearthly call, yodeling and hooting, back to the wilderness.

“A secret,” Tillie's mother, Beatrice James, said softly on the beach at Alert Bay where Emily was painting. A full-bosomed woman wearing large abalone-shell earrings, Beatrice carried herself with authority. “Chief Wakias got an invitation for you to Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi's potlatch.”

“A potlatch! Me?”

“Sh!” Tillie scowled in exaggerated seriousness. “You can't tell them at the mission house.” Then she grinned.

“Tell Mrs. Hall that my husband, Mac James, is taking you to paint at Quatsino. Then they go wrong way to find us.”

What would Claude think of this? Would he be there? He'd be surprised to see her. His eyebrows would pop up.

Lizzie would be starched silly if she knew, but Victoria was more than two hundred miles south. Emily imagined a missionary society meeting in the family parlor and Lizzie announcing crisply, As long as those Indians still do their cannibal dances at pagan revels and then go to church afterwards, there's plenty of the Lord's work left to do. We're not finished until we've rooted out all heathen practices and backsliding.