Hannah and the Wild Woods

by Carol Anne Shaw

  He loses interest and wanders back to the house, where a woman appears on the front steps. She must be Ruth. She looks to be in her sixties, with round, red cheeks and a twist of grey hair pinned on top of her head.

  “Oh good!” she says, holding up the side of her long blue skirt as she clomps down the stairs. “You’re here!” She’s wearing hiking boots, a heavy fisherman-knit cable sweater and a worn leather pouch at her hip.

  “Hey, Ruthie,” Peter says, greeting her with outstretched arms. “Good to see you!” He wraps his arms around her and gives her a bear hug.

  “Well, come on in, everyone.” Ruth beams, and ushers us up the stairs. “I made a big pot of corn chowder, and I just popped some cheese biscuits in the oven. They’ll be ready just in time for lunch.”

  Cheese biscuits? My mouth begins to water. I realize I’m starving, but in the midst of all the excitement, I’d forgotten just how much. At the mention of food, Sabrina gets out of the truck, and I whisper to Jack about the seafood smorgasbord that must be waiting for him down on the beach. Flying almost 300 kilometres must have left him famished.

  Ruth leads the way up the wide flight of red stairs and past a fat white cat sleeping on a couch in the sun porch. It doesn’t even open an eye as we march by.

  “That’s Pearl,” Peter says. “She’s unconscious most of the time, but Ruth says she’s an awfully good foot warmer at night.”

  I smile, and wonder whether Poos and Chuck will miss curling up by my feet at night. Chuck snores, and Poos licks his paws a lot, but I’m used to them.

  The inside of the Artful Elephant is as funky as the outside. The walls above the dark wood wainscoting in the central hallway are covered with old-fashioned wallpaper. It’s pretty faded, with raised velvety red roses all over it. The entire hallway is plastered with old framed black-and-white photographs. Some look as though they are taken here on Vancouver Island, but others show scenes of a bustling city full of traffic and tall buildings, along with huge crowds.

  “The Big Apple,” Ruth says as I lean in closer to inspect a photo of a street corner lit up with neon signs. “That’s Times Square. I have a time-share condo in Manhattan, not too far from there, near Central Park.”

  “You do?” I say, and then wonder if I sound too surprised. It’s just that Ruth doesn’t look like the sort of person who has ever stepped away from the West Coast. She looks like part of the landscape.

  “Pfffft!” Peter snorts. “That city is highly overrated.”

  “You’ve been there, too?” I ask.

  “Only once. Went with Ruth two winters ago. Nothing but sirens and people and taxi cabs. I’ll take the Driftwood Diner in Tofino any day. Best salmon cakes in all of B.C.”

  “Oh, please!” Ruth laughs. “You have no sense of adventure.”

  “How can you say that?” Peter grins. “I have plenty of adventurous spirit.” His teeth are white and straight and when he smiles, his eyes crinkle up at the edges. “I just prefer my adventures here in B.C., that’s all.”

  “What kind of adventures?” Sabrina looks suddenly hopeful. She hasn’t taken off her fancy pink jacket yet and is standing near the old radiator where the hallway meets the kitchen.

  “Oh,” Peter says, “adventures in the woods mostly.”

  “He goes on these crazy solitary walkabouts,” Ruth explains.

  “What are walkabouts?” Sabrina asks.

  “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” Peter says. “I just go off on my own in the woods from time to time. You know, give myself a break from conversation. Open my ears a little more. Stuff like that.”

  “Yeah, but what do you do for fun?” Sabrina asks. She stares blankly at a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling. “Hide out in the woods and eat wild mushrooms?”

  “Well, in my case I guess that’s pretty accurate,” Peter says.

  “Sounds totally boring.”

  “You may be right.” Peter laughs.

  But I disagree. I don’t think Peter is boring at all.

  Chapter Four

  Our bedroom is at the top of a dark mahogany staircase that has a deep burgundy carpet running up the middle. I twist the antique glass doorknob and the heavy wooden door swings open. The room is big, and the walls are painted a light yellow. There is a distinctive smell in here: that old-fashioned oil soap you use to wash hardwood floors. I stand under the sloping ceiling on one side of the room then look out the dormer window on the wall that faces the beach.

  There are four twin beds, all of them wrought iron and painted bright white. They remind me of the beds you see in old movies from the 1930s, with deep, squishy mattresses and those vintage white pilly bedspreads that grandmothers seem to like so much. At least mine does.

  Sabrina claims the bed under the sloping ceiling. She collapses into the middle of it with exaggerated fatigue and covers her eyes with both palms. Such drama.

  I take the bed between the window and a narrow door that opens onto a little balcony with an ornate iron railing. A wicker basket full of shells and polished pieces of beach glass sits on the night table next to my bed.

  I hear a clacking sound on the stairs, and a moment later Norman walks into the room. He collapses on the rug as though he owns the place. A second later he farts. Sabrina looks horror stricken.

  “Hey, Norman.” I walk over to give him a scratch. He’s really a cool looking dog, and it’s only then that I notice he has one brown eye and one blue one. Maybe there’s some husky in him somewhere. He flops over on his side and yawns, hoping for a belly rub.

  “Ew,” Sabrina says. “How can you even touch him? I can smell him from here.”

  “I thought you liked dogs,” I say. “What about Tiffany?”

  “Tiffany is sweet and tiny and smells nice. That dog farts and smells heinous.”

  Jack, who appears on the railing of the little balcony, does not seem to share my enthusiasm for Norman either. His feathers are all ruffled up, and he fixes Norman with a beady-eyed stare through the window. Norman, however, is unfazed, and I laugh, because really, he looks anything but threatening, lying on his back with his belly exposed.

  “I still love you best, Jack,” I say, even though he can’t hear me through the glass.

  “Pathetic,” Sabrina says. She stands in front of the wall mirror and smoothes out an expertly shaped eyebrow with her forefinger.

  I continue to scratch Norman and smile as his eyes begin to close.

  “Heard from Max lately?” Sabrina asks innocently. She applies some red gloss to her lips as she stares at me in the mirror’s reflection.

  “He’s on his way to Mexico,” I say.

  “That’s nice.”

  “I guess.”

  “Although I’ve been there, like, fifty times. It’s okay, but the guys down there just won’t leave me alone. You know, because of my hair. They have this thing for blondes, I guess.”

  “Of course,” I say. “It must be so annoying.” My sarcasm is lost on Sabrina, but I do start thinking about Max, and how he still hasn’t replied to my text. I know he’s on holiday and everything, but this whole moving-to-Victoria thing is pretty major for me, and I wish I could talk to him about it.

  The dining-room table downstairs is huge; there’s at least seating for twelve. The accompanying chairs are heavy wooden ones, each with a neatly stitched needlepoint cushion on its seat. My cushion is blue and green and shows a pair of otters floating on their backs in a tangle of kelp. It reminds me of the otter that’s carved into the lintel over our door at home.

  When we sit down to lunch, Peter tells us that the two kids from Port Alberni who were supposed to participate in the program, cancelled at the last minute. I feel deflated, and look at Sabrina, but she doesn’t even appear to be listening. This is going to seriously suck. Sabrina and I working alone together for ten long, lonely days? I console myself by taking two hot cheese biscuits from the basket on the table, and smother them with butter.

  Peter’s girlfriend, Jade, breezes in
partway through lunch, and takes the chair next to him. She’s friendly looking, with straight brown hair, pink cheeks and clear, blue eyes. One of the first things I notice about her is the small tattoo of a raven on the inside of her wrist. Of course, it’s a conversation starter—one that quickly leads to a discussion about Jack.

  I don’t tell her everything, meaning, I don’t tell her the details of how I met him when I was twelve; she probably wouldn’t believe me, anyway. I almost tell her about last summer, though, about how Jack helped to uncover a poaching operation in Cowichan Bay, but I catch myself in time. I mean, Sabrina is here, and her uncle is currently serving time as a result of that bust. So instead I tell Jade about how Jack helped us find some semi-orphaned eaglets, the other big event of last summer.

  “What a great story,” Jade says. “But I’m not surprised. Ravens are super smart, and they communicate with other animals, too. Even wolves. Some people even call them wolf birds.”

  “They do?” I ask. “Why?”

  “Well, ravens will often warn wolves when there’s a threat nearby, so it helps them hunt better. And as a thank you, the wolves will let them feast on their kills when they’re done with them.”

  I ladle some chowder into my bowl. “And they can also mimic human speech,” I say, “although Jack hasn’t mastered that yet.” Sabrina rolls her eyes, and I wonder if I’ve come off sounding like a know-it-all. I hope not. I just know a little about ravens, because of Jack.

  “Did you know that this guy right here is a Raven?” Jade gives Peter’s arm a squeeze.

  “Excuse me?” Sabrina says in her customary monotone.

  “Haida governance,” Jade says. “If you are of the Haida First Nation, you belong to either the Raven clan or the Eagle clan. Peter is a Raven. Because his father is an Eagle, and his mother is a Raven.”

  I think about Izzy, whose mother is Cowichan, of the Coast Salish First Nation. When I first met Izzy, she wasn’t interested in her mother’s stories at all. Now she tells them herself. “Sounds complicated,” I say to Peter.

  “It is a little,” he laughs. “It’s a matriarchal thing. We follow our mother’s lineage. Back in the day, an Eagle could marry only a Raven, and vice versa. You couldn’t have two of the same.”

  “Oh,” I nod. “Now I get it.”

  “God, Hannah. It’s not rocket science,” Sabrina says, frowning at her soup bowl.

  I decide to take the high road, resisting the urge to snark back at her, but Peter comes to my defence anyway.

  “No,” he says, “it actually is pretty complex. It’s hard to keep some families straight. Don’t sweat it, Hannah.” He winks at me.

  We spend the rest of the day exploring the beaches we’ll be working on, as well as learning a little about the native plants that grow in the area. Plants are totally Jade’s passion—she’s studying ethnobotany—that’s the relationship between people and plants through time. Just before we head back to the lodge, she points to a black cottonwood tree growing at the edge of the forest, explaining that its sticky buds will soon appear.

  “There are tons of those trees near the Cowichan River,” I say. “That white seed fluff floats over the silver bridge in Duncan every April.”

  “That’s the seeds,” Jade says. “But it’s the buds that smell so good. You can make a nice skin salve from them. People have been doing it for centuries.”

  “Can you believe that?” Sabrina mutters as we trudge up the beach. “No way would I ever put tree bud goo on my skin.”

  In the evening, Jade and Peter take us into the Big Kahuna, a room filled with tons of books, some overstuffed couches and giant comfy armchairs that look as though they could swallow you up whole. There is a big stone fireplace at the end of the room with a hearth so wide you could easily sleep on it if you wanted to. Honestly, I’ve never been in a more comfortable house in all my life. The walls of this room are plastered with more photographs and big abstract paintings hanging above the fireplace, all blues and purples and teals. They remind me of the ocean.

  Norman lies down in front of the fire and starts to lick his feet, and Ruth comes in with a cloth bag of knitting, to join the group. I should have known—a kindred spirit. She pulls out a skein of russet-coloured wool and starts adding stitches onto a circular needle. Must be a sweater. My fingers begin to tingle the way they always do when I’m around wool. She hands me the skein to unravel and I take the wool and get to work.

  Peter dims the lights and shows us a PowerPoint presentation about Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. Then he shows us another one about the Japanese tsunami, along with actual live video footage of the day all that water rolled in. Seeing it again is no less terrifying. And now, four years later, a lot of debris has travelled across an entire ocean to our coastline. Some people say that the worst is still to come. Others say there is no way to know for sure.

  When our long day draws to a close, Ruth lights a fire in the fireplace, and Peter and Jade begin a game of snooker in the corner of the room. Sabrina sits in her chair and fiddles around with her brand new iPhone. “It’s dead,” she says after a few frustrating moments. “Can I borrow someone’s iPhone charger? I forgot to pack mine.”

  “Sorry, don’t look at me,” I say. “My phone is a hundred years old.”

  “There’s a land line in the kitchen if you need to make a call.” Jade says.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Sabrina flings her phone to the end of the couch. It bounces off the cushion, and lands on the rug next to Norman. “This is just great.”

  But I’m not listening to Sabrina. I’m listening to something outside the window, something far in the distance. Peter and Jade set down their pool cues and turn to the sound.

  Norman stands up and pricks up both of his ears, and his blue and green eyes are wide and alert. Within seconds, the night air is filled with a beautiful, yet eerie sound—mournful cries that make my skin tingle as though an electric shock has run right through my whole body. It goes on for what seems like forever, and mixed in with the solemn song, is a familiar raven’s cry. Right away I know that it’s Jack.

  “What is that?” Sabrina reaches for the crocheted afghan beside her and pulls it tight around her shoulders.

  The air grows silent, and Jade walks over to the window to peer into the dark. “Wow,” she says. “That was some beautiful song.”

  “Sure was,” says Ruth.

  Peter nods, and our eyes meet. “Ever heard wolves before?”

  I shake my head. I can’t even talk, but it isn’t because I don’t have anything to say. It’s because I can’t find the right words to describe what I’ve just heard: a beautiful sound that feels older than the forest itself.

  Chapter Five

  The next morning, the beach is practically empty. The first thing I do is look for wolf tracks in the sand, but if there were any there last night, they’re long gone now.

  Huge chunks of weathered driftwood sink into the sand up near the treeline, relics left over from recent winter storms. They look like big sleeping beasts whose pale, smooth bodies have been partially swallowed up by the tall dune grass. But in amongst the driftwood, is a lot of garbage. Tiny chunks of Styrofoam mostly, along with lots of plastic fragments. It all looks so out of place on this wild stretch of beach.

  I push my hair under my hat and face the sea, leaning into the wind at a forty-five degree angle. It’s as though the wind up here is on steroids! I hang for a couple of moments, feeling weightless before allowing myself to be blown back upright. I feel a little bit like the shrubs and western hemlock out on the point, all of them growing in the same direction, shaped by years of being hammered by the relentless winds.

  It would be cool to experience a good spring storm while we’re up here, and judging by the number of surfboards we saw strapped to cars in Tofino, it would seem a lot of other people are hoping for the same thing. Even so, thinking about storms gets me thinking about tsunamis and the reason I joined up with the Coast-is-Clear program
in the first place. And when you factor in that the whole coast of B.C. is a seismic hot spot known as the Ring of Fire, I start feeling a little nervous. Everyone knows we’re overdue for a big earthquake: a giant mega-thruster, as big as, or even bigger than the one that hit Honshu in Japan in 2011. If and when that happens, there’s going to be a tsunami all right, and this part of Vancouver Island would take a direct hit for sure. What if it happens while we’re here? It’s totally possible. There have been lots of “burpers” in the past few months: four-or five-pointers on the Richter scale, and the 7.7 one up in Haida Gwaii a few years ago, like the sticker on Peter’s truck says. Are those quakes relieving the pressure for this part of the coast or are they just a drum roll for the “big one?”

  I venture down toward the water, even though we’ve been fully lectured on the danger of the surge channels that can occur between narrow openings in the rocky portions of the beach, and how rogue waves can appear out of nowhere to sweep you into the deep. But I have to say, I’m pretty confident around the ocean.

  A heavy mist hangs over the sea, and through it I hear the familiar bark of sea lions, animals we are lucky enough to see for a couple of weeks every winter in Cowichan Bay. I spot them a few moments later, basking on a small haul-out on a rocky islet a little ways out. There must be at least one hundred of them, all barking at once like a bunch of old dogs with a bad case of croup.

  I reach for my phone in my pocket to take a photo. When I look at the screen, I’m thrilled to discover a text from Max. Finally!

  Hi Han. Got your msg. Sorry 2 take so long

  2 answer. Sucks about Victoria stuff.

  But close 2 your fave resto — Figaro’s. LOL!

  Hot here. Stoked 2 surf. Later. X

  I read the text again, and fight back the sting I feel in my eyes. Really? Sucks about Victoria stuff? That’s it? I shove my phone angrily in my pocket and mash my hat down on my head. Whatever.

  I work quickly and efficiently, chucking scrap after scrap of garbage into my bags while Sabrina, Peter and Jade work the other end of the beach. I decide that I like being on my own for now, surrounded by the sound of wind and gulls and those comical croaky sea lions.