The Forest Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

isn’t going anywhere.”
    â€œBut with your boats and camp and everything.”
    He laid an otter pelt on his arm and moved the animal’s little head as if it were speaking. “Moi aussi, s’il vous plaît,” he said in a squeaky voice and wagged his head.
    Emily and Jessica turned to each other, dumbfounded, and laughed at his peculiarity. “They’d like this,” Jessica said.
    â€œYou mean him,” Emily whispered. “In two weeks,” she said louder, “many ladies will come.”
    His hands flew up. “Ah, but none as beautiful as you, mesdemoiselles.”
    â€¢ • •
    She swung open the door to her rented flat on Granville Street. Joseph’s gray feathers and red tail ruffled in the breeze. “I’m no English crow,” he said, as well as he could.
    â€œRight you are. I like your sense of identity.” She shook out rain from her cape, put the ferns in water.
    â€œDon’t talk rot,” he muttered.
    She put her finger in his cage, and he let her stroke his breast. “You know how touching live things makes me crazy happy, don’t you, Joseph? How lonesome I get.”
    He belted out a long, old-fashioned “Awk!”
    Had someone knocked? She opened the door. A lean native woman, mid-twenties perhaps, stood on the stoop, her square shoulders wrapped in a shawl. She held a large lumpy something in a cloth which she carried by the four corners.
    â€œBaskets? You want a basket?”
    Half hidden behind the woman’s full brown skirt stood a girl and a boy, maybe four and five years old, each carrying a smaller bulging flour sack. Rain fell like it meant it now and the girl wiped her cheek. None of them wore shoes.
    â€œI’m sorry. I have no money for baskets.”
    â€œNo money? Maybe you got dress, shirt for a basket.”
    The boy sneezed and buried his nose in his mother’s skirt.
    â€œCome in.”
    The mother hesitated, then wiped the children’s feet, touched her hand to the girl’s back, and waited for the boy to follow his sister in. The woman wiped her own feet, stepped in, two steps, toes placed down first, and knelt, straight-backed, to lay the bundle on the floor. The part between her braids cut an unwavering line. From another bundle cradled in the shawl on her back, a small wet face peeked out.
    Emily took out a handkerchief, held her hand toward the baby, and looked at the woman. “May I?”
    The woman froze, surprise written on her face, and then nodded.
    Emily wrapped her index finger and dabbed at the sweet brown cheeks wrinkled as a walnut and the nose hardly a rise at all. Bow-shaped lips pulled inward at the touch. It was a moment of exquisite pleasure, passing too quickly.
    The woman spread the cloth to display the baskets. Round ones, squares, rectangles, flat trays, all coiled, with intricate diagonal and geometric patterns or with animal and fern shapes.
    â€œThese are fine baskets.”
    The woman emptied out the children’s sacks and smaller baskets tumbled out. One rolled against a table leg and the boy jumped to retrieve it.
    â€œWhat are they made of?”
    â€œCedar root.”
    â€œWhat about this?” She pointed to a contrasting pattern.
    â€œCherry bark.”
    â€œThese black ones too? That zigzag?”
    â€œNo. That one different. The bark of horsetail root. It means lightning and rainstorm. Use for holding water.”
    â€œAh.” The woman had made a connection between purpose and the source of her design. “And this?” Emily touched one with a cherry bark line undulating around the belly.
    The woman laughed in a soft, abashed way. “Snake.” She moved her hand to imitate a snake wriggling forward.
    The design was its track in the dirt. A keen imagination. She looked at the woman’s face—round nostrils, sharply edged mouth neither turned up nor turned down, dark eyes tucked under delicate eyebrows,