A Clearing in the forest Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ma’am. There are specifications now to protect you. Anyhow, this is just to test for oil. Chances are we won’t find a thing.”
    She absolutely had to get inside to wipe her nose. “I don’t want to have anything to do with your company, and that’s final.” The dog was lying on his back, ready to have the man scratch his belly. She gave the dog a kick and turned on her heel.
    Once inside the cabin, she considered calling one of the real estate people. Let them come in and divide the riverbank into fifty-foot lots—the heck with the whole thing. She saw that she still had the man’s card in her hand, and anxious to get rid of it, she opened a cupboard and was ready to toss in the card when five orange and black butterflies flew out, viceroys, Limenitis archippus . She remembered collecting the cocoons in the fall, cutting them off a willow. She had a tendency to act like a first-grader bringing things to school for the nature corner. After pitching the cocoons into the cupboard, she had forgotten all about them. Now the butterflies, newly hatched from the cocoons, dipped and fluttered around her like maddened maypole dancers.
    One settled on her shoulder. She took it as a good omen and was beginning to feel better under this new and fragile protection when the dog, who had been watching a butterfly hover over his nose, snapped it up and swallowed it, dusty wings and all.

5
    By early evening she was ending the day as she began it, picking berries. The Juneberry bushes by the edge of the river were heavy with a rich purple fruit that made a delicious preserve. It was her best seller. Flocks of black-masked cedar waxwings and female rose-breasted grosbeaks had been at the bushes, but they ate only the berries at the top, leaving the rest to her.
    When it became too dark to see the berries, she decided to do a little fly fishing. Since the dizzy spell she’d had the day she met Wilson, she had given up wading the stream and had cleared a spot along the bank of overhanging branches so she could cast without getting her line tangled in the trees. As people played a smaller part in her life, the stream became more important to her. The first thing she heard in the morning and the last at night was its unobtrusive ripple.
    She chose an artificial fly, as close in pattern as possible to the caddis flies twitching over the surface of the river. During the summer the larvae of the caddis lived on the bottom of the stream in cases fashioned out of tiny pebbles. You looked down in the water at what you thought was a pile of small stones, and it began to walk away.
    Except for a band of red at the horizon, darkness was flowing from the woods into the sky. The trout, rising for the flies, made little plopping noises like fat raindrops falling on the water. From somewhere downstream she heard the primitive bag-piping of a loon. Although it was only fifty feet behind her, the lighted cabin seemed to be in another country.
    She stood on the bank, soothed by the rhythm of casting her line and retrieving it. The ground fog rose over the banks and tumbled around her feet, soaking her shoes. The loon was silent. She was puzzling over the way the red glow was growing in the sky when she felt a sharp tug on her line. She was confused. The fly didn’t seem to be in the water; it was somewhere in the air. The tension eased and the line went slack, but the next second it was yanked in another direction. The tugging became frantic. She heard desperate squeaking noises, hoarse and sharp at the same time.
    Something flew at her. She had hooked a bat. It had mistaken her artificial fly for a real one. She wanted to drop the pole and run for the cabin, slamming the door behind her. She considered cutting the line, but she couldn’t let the bat fly off with a hook in its throat. She might remove the hook, but the thought of reaching into the small red mouth and past the nubbin tongue and the fine ridge of