Stanley Park Read Online Free PDF Page A

“The next step, really.”
    Jeremy chose his words carefully. “I thought you had given this up.”
    “I had,” the Professor said. “But I left something unfinished. Something I thought should be put to rest.”
    Jeremy wasn’t sure he understood.
    “My own celebration of ‘local bounty,’ ” the Professor said, nodding towards the duck and smiling.
    “Not funny,” Jeremy answered.
    “You don’t like that we might be working on parallel projects.”
    Jeremy sighed and lifted the silver cup in the orange light that flickered around them. “Santé,” he said. “To your health.”
    “A la vôtre,”
said the Professor, before drinking. “To yours too.”
    They charred the bird a bit on the back and the legs. It was tough to cook directly over such a low flame. Still, it wasn’t badly done. The breast was crispy, the meat the texture of medium steak. The Professor cut them off pieces in turn, which they ate with their hands, sitting cross-legged next to one another in the dry ferns near the fire.
    “It’s not really cooking, I realize,” said the Professor. “Perhaps with a salal-berry cream sauce we could tart it up to your customer’s level of sophistication.”
    “Sure.” Although: salal-berry cream sauce. Not bad.
    “Salt?” The Professor dangled the packet at eye level.
    Jeremy took the paper envelope of precious salt and sprinkled some across the piece of canvasback breast in his fingers. He chewed and swallowed. He took a breath.
    “I’m just a cook.”
    The Professor glanced up. “Oh yes?”
    “That’s all,” Jeremy said. “So I like local produce. So I like local rabbits. Whatever.”
    “Whatever? Meaning: no reason for this preference? No larger significance?”
    “Of course it has significance. There just isn’t any big—”
    “Any big reason for it?” the Professor said.
    Maybe not, Jeremy thought. He swallowed another mouthful of duck and held a greasy finger up in front of himself. “If somebody asked me, ‘What are you trying to accomplish?’ ” he started, “I would answer that I was trying to remind people of something. Of what the soil under their feet has to offer. Of a time when they would have known only the food that their own soil could offer.”
    “Sort of a nostalgia thing,” the Professor said.
    “Make fun,” Jeremy said, “but how would you answer the same question?”
    “I would say,” the Professor answered, “that I am here allowing the words of this wilderness to penetrate me, to understand what is being said by these people. Because I believe it is something that concerns us all, some more than most. You and I, for example. Or perhaps we are just ready to hear these words. You and I.”
    Jeremy looked away. Part of this answer was pleasing, the inclusion. The remainder was exasperating. “And what are those words exactly?”
    “In aggregate, something along these lines:
    With an hoste of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning speare, and a horse of air,
To the wildernesse I wander.”
    Jeremy shook his head and sat back. “And to think Sopwith Hill won’t commit to that.”
    “The stories don’t come all at once, shrink-wrapped with a complimentary bookmark.”
    “Give me one. Just one to get a sense.…”
    “Well, there is this Siwash character,” the Professor said. “He sits in the forest—a few hundred yards that way, near Siwash Rock—counting.” Counting people, the Professor went on to explain. Nobody knew why, and the Professor had only spoken with him twice since arriving. Siwash made him tea both times, their dialogue polite, cagey. He had arrived, he explained, like so many others had arrived. “I am blown here,” Siwash had said, running a hand over a waxy scalp, then pulling on an ear that appeared to have two lobes. “I was washed up on the beach like all the others. Crawled free from the wreckage of an imperfect landscape onto these perfect shores. I will never leave.”
    He liked maps. The