The River Wife Read Online Free PDF

owned me. By day I could walk upon the land or swim as a fish, but when the day was gone and I stepped into the river I became a fish and could not be a woman again until the dawn returned.
    ‘It is a great riddle,’ Father said. ‘You are the riddle we might happily never solve.’

W ilson James was a flash of colour in the forest. He was the sound of twigs breaking, leaves crushed underfoot, damp earth imprinted with the mark of a shoe. The lingering scent of his clothes and skin settled in the air with the drift of smoke from his house, the banging of a door, dissonant in the hush of mist through the trees. He stepped about the forest like a large animal. He trod heavy upon the paths and watched with a face as keen and blind as wind. Often he did not wake until the sun was playing in the centre of the lake, and as night slipped through the forest the unclothed windows of his house emblazed the trees.
    Rain fell as it had not fallen for many seasons. Melt from the mountains found the river, and when the river could carry no more it overflowed into the fern-filled rock cascades beside the river’s course. Loud was the river and loud was the rain and with the fremitus of the river came stories, each one to be sifted, untangled and tended. Wilson James was the unfamiliar bird whose call I did not recognise. I did not know its food nor the purpose of its flight, but it settled into the forest and brought no more disturbance than its own discordant music.
    On the days when clouds walked down from the mountains but brought no rain, he came every day to the river. He wore a green jacket and a soft black hat and he had with him a notebook. After a while he seemed to find a thought to his liking. I crept a little closer. Wilson James’s pen caught the sunshine and sent it dancing on the tree trunks. He scratched lines black as wet sticks across the page. The pen flew and rested. He wrote words and made drawings of fern fronds and rock forms. His pace was unsteady, stopping and starting, his head cocked like a bird observing a certain call, a note upon the air which I could not hear.
    Spring captivated the forest with the invitation to grow and bear. Insects fled the constraints of their shells, flies awoke early from the dark places they had slumbered. In the afternoons Wilson James often fell asleep against a tree. Insects flew in his breath and the notebook stirred on his lap as a breeze played with the pages. At last I could bear it no longer. When I could have left him there to sleep undisturbed I did not. I had all those days avoided contact with him, preferring to observe the flow of his daily ritual, his lightening tread upon the paths, his increasing assurance as he stepped from rock to rock. I had stood close enough to touch him. I had sat in a tree above him. I had waited behind him on the riverbank in the gloom of green sunlight and he had not glimpsed me. What made me reach forward, disregarding entirely the words of my father?
    I thought I had taken the measure of him in small observations, as if in the accumulation of patterns and rhythms I had a picture of the whole. I did not know that in the span of a human life, shorter than the cycle of a tree but much longer than that of a bird, flows an undercurrent deeper than it is possible to understand unless we choose to swim in it.
    ‘What are you saying in your book?’ I asked.
    Wilson James jumped like an afternoon fish. He dropped his pen and book and picked them up and then dropped them again. He stood up and then sat down again. Small flies flew up from the rock where they had settled beside him.
    ‘You have returned,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think I’d imagined you.’
    I saw his eyes were not the same, that his face was two faces, one half each. Wilson James had a face that was as soft as a leaf and as hard-edged as a flint of stone. He had curves in his cheeks that ran down from his nose. His face had many journeys in it and I wondered if he would