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was the prematurely greying of her short and otherwise dark, curly hair.
        There had been only three serious, and sexual, relationships in Annie's life so far, two if the clumsy high school romance with a boy one year her junior and at least one foot smaller (the school geek, in fact) were to be discounted. That had lasted all of six months, and was a blessed relief to them both when it had ended (school was out and love with it). Louis followed three years later, a tall, serious man whose mission was to save the world, and the one she was to marry. They met in Saskatchewan's Kelsey Institute and were wed before the two-year Renewable Resources course was over; ten beautiful years had followed, a sharing of common interests and uncommon love-the latter was too intense, too fervid, to be termed common. Their mutual enthusiasm for the protection and preservation of the environment led not only to the professions they'd followed, but also to an indulgence in nature itself, with journeys to Canada's lonely outer regions in a constant study of fauna and wildlife and the private planting of seedlings whenever on fieldwork for the ministry. And as they shared their love of nature, they shared their own love with nature.
        When they could, when it was possible, when the mood was on them, they made love in the open air. By a lake, in a forest clearing such as the one in which she now lingered, in the tall grasses -even on the snowy slopes of the Northwest Territories where their vacation cabin was not too far away for a hurried retreat and when appropriate holes had been tom in their clothes beforehand to minimize frostbite. Louis, from Quebec but only gently Gallic, had been a large man, unlike her first lover, yet a graceful one, his big hands as sensitive as a surgeon's and as strong as a faller or chockerman's. Mercifully his death had been swift, the cancer taking him with no half-measures and no respites, only with startling and rapid selfishness.
        Three weeks and his diseased lung had persuaded its healthy brother-lung to join in the plunder. Another week and the ravagement was complete. Now, five years after his death, the big man's atrophy seemed like the blinking of an eye to Annie, but it was never the frail and wasted thing lying on that sweetly sour-smelling hospital bed that she remembered; it was always the big man with his black bushy beard and small brown smiling eyes that remained in her thoughts.
        So here was her third relationship, her third lover, spread all around her. The rocky hills, the timberlands, the streams and lakes, the snow-capped mountains beyond. And it was her lover in the true sense, for on more than one moonlit or moonless night, it made no difference, she had bathed in the chill waters, lain naked and damp on the forest's yielding carpet; she had taken a random tree as her mate, reaching her arms around the coarse trunk, raising her legs so that the roughness was against her thighs, the protrusions between her legs, holding herself there, thrusting against the hard, still tree, crying out to the night sky, both in ecstasy and in sorrow, finally sinking to the earth, to lie there and whimper for her lost lover.
        Now this lover, this once fertile land, was dying too, but slowly, the drama of its death more subtle, the pains more insidious, less evident-or merely less acceptable.
         It's too late, Louis. You always maintained there was a chance for revivification, but then you were always the optimistic one. Too few people spoke up, and too few listened. Even so, should we feel angry? Didn't we two doubt your own disease? In that first week, didn't we deny the diagnosis? In the second, didn't we think-hope, pray?-that the horror would take itself away, would leave you alone, go off and terrorize someone else, someone (a shameful prayer, this) more deserving? Lung cancer, sweet Louis, and you never once held a cigarette to your lips. Hard, so hard, to