Falling From Grace (5 page)

“Please, please, please,” Rainbow begged, palms pressed together, eyes pleading.

What a drama queen
. “Help?” I begged Paul. A jubilant smile spread across his face and I threw up my hands. “Okay, but I take no responsibility.”

“No problem,” Paul said. “I got her.” Rainbow squealed and hugged his leg.

“No asking a million questions,” I ordered.

She waggled her head back and forth.

“And no wandering off. Bears and cougars live here.”

Her expression widened. “I promise.”

“Your mother has to watch you.” I handed her a daypack full of carabiners and harnesses. “Paul and I have work to do. If you're any trouble, I'll send you back to camp.”

She beamed, slipped her skinny arms through the pack straps, and scampered off, the pack banging low on her hips, equipment jangling inside. She returned minutes later with Mary, Cedar tucked into a sling wrapped around his mother's torso. Paul handed Mary two water bottles. He himself wore a large pack weighing close to thirty kilos, the crossbow strapped to his back.

Rainbow examined the bow. “Are you one of Robin Hood's men?”

“My old job,” Paul joked.

“He was nice to poor people,” she answered brightly. She laced her fingers around her pack straps. “I'm ready.”

Paul led the group into the upper valley on the park trail, then turned northwest to cross the creek to the far bank, where the trail to our site was marked by a limp strip of orange flagging tape tied to a branch. Single file, we started up the steep slope where the trail quickly deteriorated. Paul helped Mary and the baby up the incline, but Rainbow refused any assistance, soldiering along behind me until we reached gentler ground. We stopped to catch our breath. The forest floor ahead was a labyrinth of felled limbs, debris, and downed trees. Paul and I had not yet had time to clear the route of winter fall. Guided by occasional strips of flagging, we made our way over, around, and under logs, our boots caked with mud from slogging through pockets of bog filled with yellow-leaved skunk cabbage.

An uprooted fir blocked our passage ahead. Paul climbed across with ease, then turned around to receive my gear. I heaved my pack across the thick-barked crevasse between us. The orangutan amulet dangled at the open neck of his muddy brown
T
-shirt. He'd shaved off his beard a few days earlier and appeared far younger than his thirty-two years, his newly exposed skin untanned and smooth, the line of his jaw more pronounced. His pupils were always a deeper shade of green in the forest. A wave of longing washed over me.

“Well?” Paul said, mouth upturned in an amused smile. “Are you coming or are you going to climb that sapling over there instead?”

“Sorry, daydreaming.” I ignored the offer of a hand and slithered across on my belly, thankful I didn't have to suffer the indignity of crawling beneath the log on my butt. Paul held out his hand to Rainbow.

“I don't need help,” Rainbow crowed, scrambling across on all fours like a bear cub. “I can do it like Faye.”

“Dr. Faye to you.” I readjusted the pack, already feeling the weight in the small of my back after a winter away from hiking.

“Wow,” Rainbow exclaimed and pointed ahead where an enormous trunk shot up out of the undergrowth, towering above us like a skyscraper. We stopped, sweaty and panting beside the colossal specimen. A second mammoth loomed out of a tangle of salal. Beyond it a third. Our study trees. We had twenty-two trees from the flood plain to ridge top marked on our site map, each tree numbered on a grid for easy reference.

“Which one?” Paul tilted his head back and peered into the canopy.

“SS-1-3,” I said. “I want to check the aerial traps.”

We continued on until we reached a Sitka spruce we had measured at sixty-seven metres in height. Paul estimated it to be five hundred years old or more, older than the printing press, older than the Renaissance, a seedling when Christopher Columbus made his voyage to the New World. The tree was already rigged and we hunted around in the undergrowth for the parachute cord.

“What's that?” Rainbow asked.

“Didn't I say no questions?” At her wounded expression I explained. “It's cord for pulling up our ropes. We never leave our expensive climbing ropes in the trees.”

“Would the squirrels eat them?”

I shushed her and sent her over to her mother, who had settled onto a log where she was already nursing Cedar, white breast showing at a gap at the edge of her sweater.

“Listen.” Rainbow jumped up and down, pack thwacking on her back.

“I don't hear anything but you, Peanut,” Mary answered dreamily.

“Why is the ground bouncy?” The girl sank to her knees and dug her fingers into the spongy layer of moss.

Paul scanned the path of the cord up into the canopy. “Because”—he tugged on the lightweight black line—“this forest is thousands of years old and under us are layers of rotted dead trees, roots, and needles grown over with moss and lichens and ferns and other plants and baby trees and nosy children.” He gave a sharp yank and the cord ran free.

“Centuries?” Rainbow sat back on her heels. “Older than my grandpa? What's a lichen? What's that thing?” She pointed at a marker embedded in the base of the tree.

“SS-1-3.” Paul opened the top of the pack and pulled out the end of the climbing rope. “It's the name of this tree. Sitka spruce, Site 1, Tree 3. See . . . markers all the way up.”

“SS-1-3?” She craned her head back to view the row of aluminum discs the size of dollar coins nailed into the thick bark at regular intervals up the trunk. “What a funny name. I like Bruce the Spruce better.”

“No talking,” I scolded. “Hand me that pack and sit.” To my surprise, Rainbow sat, laced her hands over the folds of her skirt, and watched Paul knot the ends of the parachute cord and the climbing rope together with a half-dozen clove hitches. Together Paul and I hauled the rope up through the pulley at the top of the tree and down the other side; the rope coiled out of the top of the pack like a charmed snake. While Paul anchored the leading end of the rope around another tree with a bowline, I donned my climbing gear.

“Ready.” I clipped the ascender to the rope. “Stay back from the bottom of the tree,” I warned Rainbow and Mary. “Watch for falling branches.”

“If you hear us yell ‘headache,'” Paul added. “Dive for the bushes.”

He double-checked my harness and I started up. Paul continued along the trail to the next rigged tree, the goal for the afternoon to check a dozen suspended Malaise traps for captured arthropods I would identify in the lab back at the university during the winter.

I climbed steadily, pausing once to catch my breath. I reached branches at twenty-five metres and hooked my leg over a limb. Below, Mary and Rainbow, faces upturned, appeared as diminutive as Rainbow's two dolls. From the top of the tree they'd shrink to specks of colour through the foliage below, if visible at all. Rainbow stood and waved.

I reeled in the aerial flight-interception trap suspended on a pulley midway between two trees. The fine gossamer net— designed to intercept flying beetles and ants—was empty. The second trap five metres higher the same. The third trap yielded a handful of rove beetles and three types of spiders; one I suspected was a new species of dwarf weaver, awash and dead in the pool of alcohol. I was surprised to find a live green darner dragonfly clinging to the mesh high up in the trap. “What are you doing here?” I said. “You belong below near water.” I reached in and pressed its silvery iridescent wings together with care, struck by the solid texture of the lacy fabric, and drew it out of the trap. Its emerald green thorax shimmered in the sunlight and I turned it over to examine the garnet stripe running along the turquoise abdomen. I wondered how I appeared to the darner through its bulbous compound eyes. A grainy pattern of light and dark dots? As fascinating to the darner as the darner to me? A giant? I should have collected it, returned it to the lab, and mounted it on a board with a pin for future reference. I didn't have the heart. I opened my fingers and the darner zipped out of my hand and headed off, darting back and forth, in the erratic way dragonflies do. I fished my field journal out of my pocket and made an entry.
Unusual occurrence of
Anax junius
at thirty-five metres, Site 1, Tree 3, Malaise trap #3. Specimen released.

My radio crackled and Paul's voice cut in and out.

I stopped climbing, retrieved the hand-held from my pocket, and depressed the transmitter button. “What?”

“I think you better come down.”

“I've hardly started.”

“Come down,” he answered and the radio cut out.

I looped a bite of rope through my descending equipment—a loop of metal called a whale's tail—tested my weight on the line, then unclipped the ascenders so I hung freely from the descender. The procedure took concentration and care, the transfer from ascenders to descender a vulnerable time for a climber, the danger of tying in to the wrong side of the rope an easy but potentially fatal mistake. I let the rope run slowly through my gloved fingers and the whale's tail, and dropped from my perch, the sensation the closest to what I imagined flying might be like, except I was on my way down to earth rather than up to sky. I had the ability to stop myself at will with a simple twist of the rope against the descender, but I loved the freedom of the long, smooth glide and rappelled to the base of the tree in one continuous slide. Mary and Cedar were asleep on Mary's sweater. Rainbow stood next to Paul, our spare climbing harness dangling from her slender hips.

“Can I try?” she asked the moment my feet touched the ground.

“No way.” I unbuckled my own harness. “Too dangerous. And you should have a helmet on.”

“I like climbing trees. Kids like climbing trees. You do.”

“This is not the same. This is work, not playing, and it's climbing a rope. Not for kids.”

“But you're a—”

“No, I'm not.” I unclipped from the rope and shrugged my gear off in a heap. “What's up?” I said to Paul, who was watching me with an expression I couldn't read, hands slack at his sides as if he didn't know what to do with them. “Paul?”

He tilted his head in the direction of the trail and said, “Rainbow, stay with your mom.”

I followed behind, alarmed at his uncharacteristic gravity. A dead body? One of our trees fallen in a storm? He led me upslope past four of our study trees and stopped at the base of Tree 7, our oldest, a redcedar, five metres in diameter, the crown split into three leaders that reached for the sky like a candelabra.

I sucked in my breath. “What the hell,” I said, astonished to see a violent blue cross of spray paint marking the trunk. A blue timber tag on a tree meant cut me down . . . and soon. “We're still within park boundaries, aren't we?”

Paul spread his hand over the centre of the mark; the tails of the X extended beyond his fingers like arrows of blue light. “Yes. And besides, there's the buffer. They shouldn't be logging anywhere near here.”

I sat on a nearby log. I couldn't tear my eyes away from Paul's hand and the threatening slash of paint beneath.

5

I steered
my car along the rough gravel road in a light drizzle, avoiding potholes and on the watch for deer. On either side of the road, tall trees towered overhead.

A loaded logging truck careened out of a side road and I slammed on the brakes. The truck roared on ahead, mud and rock chips from the sodden roadbed spitting up behind its wheels onto the windshield, adding another pockmark to my already pitted view of the world. My anxiety rose again at the size of the giants piled on the truck bed—three enormous logs filled the truck to capacity—as they hurtled down the road from the upper valley, an area not slated for logging for years, an area planned for possible expansion of the park. An area where the sound of chain saws should be as rare as a marbled murrelet on the ground.

The car left old forest and entered clear-cut. I winced at the flat glare of light under overcast skies and the kilometres of stumps and splintered wood, streambeds clogged with debris, the ground ripped and heaved from the weight and churn of heavy machinery and the impact of hundred-tonne giants crashing to the ground. They couldn't do this to Otter Creek. Parks were sacrosanct. Moonscape, bomb site, ground zero, every cliché of devastation travelled through my mind. I understood the need for logging on the island; after all, as an academic I used more than my share of paper. I knew the industry supplied jobs for small rural communities. I accepted the concept of sharing the forest land among loggers, scientists, and hikers. But leave the big trees alone. Especially my big trees.

Ironically,
PCF
's regional field office had been built in the heart of a mature forest. The yard, an expanse of cracked pavement, was empty, loggers no longer housed in the drab green and white trailers that lined the edge of the clearing, but driven into the cut blocks each day from town in a company crummy. A pick-up sat outside the management office.