I AM ARRANGING an exhibit for the small museum where I work. I’ve wanted for some time to look at a period in the history of a community through its textiles. Mostly this will show the history of the women, although I would be happy to be surprised. I put a notice in the local newspaper, asking people to bring in textiles that might be a part of the exhibit, and I have phoned those whom I know have collections of suitable objects. There have always been quilters, for instance, and I hoped to find generations of quilts showing common family themes. I know also of a few women who made samplers for grandchildren. One of them told me that her family had always done this and that she still had the sampler her grandmother had made for her as an infant. One elderly woman makes lace, something I remember my own grandmother doing, even when she was very old and blind. With fine cotton and a thin crochet hook, she made lengths of fragile webbing which fell from her hands to her lap and then to the floor.
I am thinking, too, that the exhibit must include objects from the various cultures that have called this place home. In the museum’s collection, there are pieces of clothing made by the aboriginal people — skirts of cedar bark, diapers of fine inner bark, hats and capes, blankets of yellow cedar bark. And there is also a small jacket, a child’s jacket, of indigo cotton, padded and quilted with tiny white stitches, that I’m sure must be Japanese sashiko, although its card reads, “Donated by the Williams family, provenance unknown.”
But pieces are slow to come in, and I’ve been looking into the box which I’ve come to think of as Margaret’s box, the name on the letters evoking a girl, perhaps the girl in one of the photographs, standing in a field with one hand shading her eyes. She is not smiling but looking towards the camera, her shadow falling to one side of her like a faint sister. And little by little I am trying to piece together a life from the small scraps of ephemera.
William Stuart: Astoria, 1883 — Nicola Valley, 1887
What William remembered most about his boyhood in Astoria: boats and horses. His father had been a bar pilot on the Columbia River and made sure that his son learned to manage a boat and navigate the dangerous sandbars at the entrance to the river. Standing in the pilot house, he pointed out the way the ocean currents moved against the steady surge of the river, how the sandbars endlessly changed so that a man had to keep his eyes open, to be constantly alert to weather and seasons. To know which birds were swimming in the grey water and which were perched on submerged hummocks of sand. Together, father and son went over and over the compass and the elder Stuart’s annotated charts, faded handwriting indicating rocks or testily questioning the fathoms. He was less than happy, however, when William secured summer employment with a school friend’s uncle, Jim MacKay, helping on a gill net boat.
“Remember, William, that we are descendants of the Stuart kings!” This was his refrain whenever his son threatened, by word or deed, to shame the family. Yet the elder Stuart’s beginnings had been humble enough. A descendant of Scottish royalty? Perhaps — a small pool of blue blood in a forgotten hollow, a crook of the elbow or deep in the ribcage, ignored by generations of red blood coursing by in the daily work of the living. But his own immediate family had been Highland crofters and had sent him to North America during the Clearances. He’d survived by his wits and natural intelligence, marrying a daughter of John Jacob Astor’s paymaster and with her building a comfortable life on the rim of America.
The Astoria they knew was a bustling seaport, with the first post office west of the Rockies, the first customs house west of the Mississippi, and a bevy of stately houses clinging to the steep slopes, one of which was their house, with its hipped roof, its balconies and verandas, its three-storey tower that looked right out to the estuary. On a good day, watchers could spot eagles and harrier hawks, black-shouldered kites, blue herons returning to their rookeries, plovers and murrelets, pelicans, and deer making their careful way across the sand. In immaculate copperplate, William’s mother kept a journal of her sightings. June 12, 1882: Using the telescope, I watched an eagle swoop down over the water and pluck a merganser chick from the clutch following the mother as she swam in the shallows by the entrance to Youngs Bay. Too far away to hear anything, I could only imagine the distress of the adult as she tried to protect the other five chicks from such predation. Also seen: three herons, bufflehead, a magnificent osprey and two sea lions pulling themselves up onto a islet. I think they must have been feeding on the candlefish that are making their way by the thousands up the river. Her son would come upon her at such times and watch her hand moving across the paper, followed by a script as lovely as the scribble of bird tracks in the sand. Leaning to read over her shoulder, he could smell lavender and violets and would remember her cutting tall stems of lavender in high summer to dry in airy baskets spread about the floor of the attic, stripping the dried flowers later to fill muslin bags to tuck into the linen. Her fingers would be fragrant with the oils for some days afterward.
But William convinced his father that he was old enough to know his own mind, and the way he wanted to spend his summer was on Jim’s boat. And anyway, from what he’d learned of the Stuart kings — Charles I, James who was sent to France, the Old Pretender, the Bonny Prince who’d come back to the island he’d heard about since his infancy in Rome (“A salvo of guns sounded from the Castle of St. Angelo”) to claim his true crown — William felt they would approve of the decision he had made.
He didn’t talk about the work much at home. How to explain the feeling as the tow-boats pulled the fleet out past the mouth of the river and then released them one by one to the wind and tide, how he’d row and steady the boat as the nets went down, the mesh shoaling into the grey water? He would imagine the curtain of net across the current, the fish entangling themselves silently in the barrier. He loved pulling them in, splitting the lines, cork to one side, lead to the other, while Jim removed each fish, hitting it once firmly on the head and then putting it to rest in a box he would cover with damp burlap. Every muscle in William’s body ached as he held the boat steady in the waves, even after he was accustomed to the work, and for the first few weeks, the palms of his hands were raw with rope burns. Until they callused, he’d wince every time he gripped the ropes, the salt water stinging. Putting the wound to his mouth, he tasted salt and blood, a tang of seaweed, thinking how remarkably close to fish was this blending of elements.
It wasn’t so much for the money that he stayed on the job, though when the price for sockeye went to three cents a pound and the run was good, he would come home with more money than he’d imagined possible. At night he and Jim slept in turns in the doghouse, fragments of dream interrupted by wind and the push of the tide against the keel. When Jim was sleeping, William would sit out watching the lantern bobbing on the far end of the net, lulled by water. He thought of the song his mother had crooned him to sleep with, always saying, “And this was your ancestor, my son. His blood runs in your American veins.”
Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward, the sailors cry.
Carry the lad that’s born to be king
Over the sea to Skye.
He’d imagined the child lying in the bottom of a small skiff ascending skyward, a look of astonishment on his face. At dawn, they’d pick up the net and find another drift where they could set it again, they’d make tea on the Primus and some sort of a meal. But it was for the run back to the cannery that he wanted this, when they’d raise the spritsail, sometimes even a second spritsail or a jib if they were running before the wind, and it was like flying low over the water, the sails flaring. Sometimes two or three of the gillnetters would go in together, racing in the wind like giant butterflies. William’s heart was in his throat as he tacked and turned, gulls in their wake, the treacherous sandbars hidden in the white-capped water. Each safe return seemed a miracle. William had never known such freedom.
Passing Sand Island, they’d see the beach seiners taking out their nets in small flat-bottomed skiffs, then leading huge horses into the tide to pull the nets in. The horses waded belly-deep in icy water, received the lines, then turned, straining as they hauled the fish-laden nets to the shore. Jim MacKay told William that they’d take in thirty tons of salmon on a good day. The cries of the seiners, urging the horses to pull, pull ye lazy bastards, and the snorting of the teams, their sides sleek with water, their shoulders lathered in sweat. Passing near them, William could smell their sweat, cut with the iodine tang of the water, the cold odour of the salmon teeming in the nets. The horses were like unknown creatures, rich and strange, dressed with seaweed, more at home with gods than men, calm as mountains. After them, the Stuart horses seemed so sedate. A matched pair of Morgans to pull the carriage, a saddlehorse or two, they lived in a tidy stable behind the house, snorting primly from the small cinder paddock where they were turned out while the stalls were cleaned. A man cared for them, harnessed them when the carriage was required, and he was not too pleased to have a small boy — later, a young man — hanging about. The bridles were more like ladies’ gloves than like the tack worn by the river horses, thin strips of fine leather, the brass polished to dull gold. The Stuart horses had delicate buckles at their throats, jointed snaffles between their jaws; the river horses wore their harnesses like armour, girdled in straps, mighty curb bits clanking in their mouths.
William liked to take his father’s mare up to Coxcomb Hill, where he’d let her graze on the young grass while he followed the routes of the rivers with his eyes — the Lewis and Clark coming in from the southwest, Youngs River immediately south, the mist-covered Columbia surging from the east. His tutor once showed him reproductions of quattrocento paintings, and the rivers looked here and there to be painted by the same hands. They made him restless and homesick at the same time, the clear green of the surrounding trees, the contour of the rivers disappearing into fog. He wanted to venture up each to its end, and yet he was afraid of what he might discover hidden beyond that soft curtain. There were stories told in Astoria of men going into the wilderness and never coming out, their footprints vanishing into thin air. The woods teemed with stories of huge hairy creatures, half-human, watching from a ridge, valleys of trees too large to get the mind around. Jim MacKay had worked in the woods, and he told William about cutting down cedars near Mist, then inviting others to join him for a dance on the stumps. “I’ve seen four couples,” he said, “aye, four couples waltzing on the dance floor created by a stump, while two fellas sawed away at fiddles and another lad played a mandolin alongside, balancing on the springboards.” Below, in the town, William could hear saws whining at the mills, the commotion at the docks as crates of canned salmon were loaded onto waiting vessels. From this hill he’d once seen whales, a stately procession passing the estuary. The natives hunted them, he knew, using the bladders of seals as floats for their harpoons, and whaling ships came into port for provisions, their decks bloody, the piles of whale flesh stacked carefully to balance the load. But the day he saw the whales, they moved north, their progress unimpeded by anything more than curious seals.
Two summers of working with Jim MacKay convinced William that he ought to buy his own boat. He didn’t tell his father but chose one himself, a twenty-six-and-a-half-foot Columbia River salmon boat. It was white with blue gunwales and beamy enough that he felt safe handling it himself. He bought it in February, 1883, and spent a few months down at the docks, scraping the bottom, tarring the inside planks, repairing the nets, patching a hole in the jib using stitches taught to him by his sister Elizabeth. He enjoyed being around the other fishermen, listening to them tell stories of good years and bad. Most of them fished for the cannery and used the cannery boats; they worked on these during the off-season for an hourly wage, labouring over them as carefully as if the boats were their own. William tried not to ask too many questions but watched and learned with his eyes and hands. Sometimes another fisherman would take William’s hands in his own and draw the scraper over the curving wood of the hull, helping the young man to feel the pressure needed to pare off paint and barnacles, though barnacles were few here where the boats were moored in fresh water or lifted to the quays for the off-season. He’d smell the bitter edge of the pipe tobacco the Norwegians smoked, the unwashed sweaters of homespun wool, the thin, vinegary whiff of pickled salmon, pungent with mustard seeds.
That was a good season for him. The runs were enormous, the nets teemed with fish, and the canneries worked around the clock to keep up with the supply. Sometimes when he delivered the fish, he would look inside the cannery; he saw the native women expertly cleaning and slicing the salmon, the Chinese men making cans from tin plate, soldering them together, the steam swirling from the processing baths, the smell of fish and blood entering his nostrils in nauseating gusts. Everywhere the gulls wheeled and cried in the wind. A good season, yes, but when the sockeye finished that year, he decided to sell his boat and try something else.
Some enterprising men recognized the need for beef in the gold fields of Williams Creek and Antler, and a few decades earlier, they’d begun driving herds of cattle there from Oregon and Washington, taking them over to the Boundary country, across brigade trails, and up the wagon road running north from Yale. The uncles of William’s friend Tom Alexander had participated in the drives, and their stories fuelled Tom’s adventurous spirit. After a summer with his uncles, he had come back to Astoria with shining eyes, telling of huge ranges of grass, there for the asking. Some of the drovers had settled to raise cattle on the rich bunchgrass, and although there were no longer the big drives of the fifties and sixties, it was possible to find work on a smaller, more specialized trip north, one bringing solid breeding stock, mostly bulls, to established ranchers trying to improve the quality of their beef. A herd of Clydesdales was making the journey, too, for the ranchers wanted good teams to pull the haying equipment. William slipped away from his sleeping house one morning, leaving a note.
The trip north had been glorious, riding through the coulees and grasslands of eastern Washington territory, swimming the animals across rivers, up through the Boundary and over to the Thompson Valley. William remembered campfires under stars, the unearthly howling of coyotes, and an unsettling moment when one of the drovers found a rattlesnake curled up under his bedroll. He’d cut off the head without a moment’s delay, and then expertly removed the skin for his hat band. Waking at night, William heard the Clydesdales snorting and shifting in the darkness, and he remembered the powerful shoulders of the horses pulling in the seine nets, water bedraggling their fetlocks.
When the group arrived at their destination, a ranch in the Hat Creek Valley, they’d all been paid, and then William travelled to Kamloops to gather his thoughts. He paid for a room in the Cosmopolitan Hotel and got to know the owner, a man called Edwards, who told him it was a country ripe for young men. Ranches, paddlewheelers, contractors blasting away mountains for railways — there was work any place you cared to look. Edwards lent him a horse, one of the muscular wide-chested mounts favoured in this area, and William rode in every direction, trying to get a sense of place.
He’d never seen anything like it, this country of golden grass. He couldn’t remember when he decided for certain that this was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life: he stayed one winter, then two, working for Bill Roper at Cherry Creek after a tip from Edwards, who knew all the ranchers. He lived in bunk-house, learning from the other men, acquiring a saddle which he couldn’t then remember living without, though it was certainly different from the saddles he’d learned to ride with in Astoria in what seemed like the life of another young man. He discovered that the winters were bitterly cold and the summers hot, nothing like the moderate seasons of his boyhood, tempered by the Pacific. People spoke of chinooks, warm winds that could come during the coldest months, they spoke of the spring flowers; even the spiny cactus would produce enormous deep yellow blooms, some tinged with apricot, some fading to soft red. In the fall of 1886, on a selling trip to Joseph Greaves at Douglas Lake, William had looked at the vista from the Douglas Plateau, the sky that billowed and rolled forever, dark with thunderheads, the oceans of rippling bunchgrass, and he asked a few questions about ranches.
It turned out the Cottonwood place was available. As a ranch it wasn’t much yet, but the title included six thousand acres of grass, both deeded and commonage, and he wasn’t afraid to work hard to build it up. He bought eighty head of two-year-old Shorthorn steers and moved them to his ranch, fencing one big meadow with the help of a young Indian man from nearby Spahomin to keep them in that winter. There was a cabin, nothing fancy, two windows with glass intact, a roof of split cedar shakes, only a few missing, and, once he’d cleaned out the stovepipe of mice straw, a useable stove which almost warmed the room he lived in. At night he’d hear mice in the other room, and he knew a packrat was nesting underneath the floor boards because of the sharp stink. As soon as he could, he would get a dog to deal with the packrat. He re-chinked the biggest gaps between the logs with clay and moss and built a log frame for his bedroll, but he did little else to the house. It was more important to get the cattle through the winter. At night he’d sit as close to the fire as he dared, the smell of his wet woollen stockings draped over the fender filling the small room, and he’d remember the old song, humming it to himself or singing a phrase here and there, never able to summon up the entire thing: Onward, the sailors cry or though the waves leap, soft shall he sleep or dead on Culloden’s field. He could see the Highlanders fighting bravely but then slain in their thousands on the bleak moors of Culloden and Glencoe, which he imagined looked a lot like his own home meadow in winter. Some nights he didn’t make it to his bedroll at all but slumped in the wooden chair, dozing while his stockings steamed. The ghost of his bonny ancestor stole from the field, dressed as a maidservant, secreted away to Skye, and returning finally to France, then Italy, no longer the gallant youth who had captured the hearts of the Scottish chieftains. The part his father had not cared to tell him, the tutor had revealed: Charlie ended his days a drunk and a cuckold and couldn’t have done much for Scotland even if the Highlanders wanted him.
That winter was one of the coldest on record. William had been able to purchase a little hay, a few tons, and he’d scythed as much grass as he could, drying it quickly, then dragging it with a rope behind his horse to a central location, but his eighty head mostly had to feed themselves on what they could find. Unlike horses, who could paw away snow from a covered field and get at the wintering grass underneath, cattle were at the mercy of the elements. William had counted on them surviving on their stored fat and what fodder he could get to them. Another winter they might have been fine, but from mid-January on, blizzards brought snow to cover the grass and other forage, and in the spring of 1887, Cottonwood’s winter pasture was dotted with carcasses; less than half his herd had made it through. William called the field Culloden after that and thanked heaven he hadn’t been counting on cows to drop healthy calves after such a fierce winter.
When a letter came from Astoria, the first since he left though he’d written home many times — to tell them he had arrived, where he picked up his mail, about the ranch, how he hoped they were well and weren’t bitter about his leaving — he knew what it would say before he opened it. He’d dreamed of his father’s death a week earlier and had woken to find his bedroll soaked with tears. So the envelope edged with a thin black line came as no surprise. What he didn’t expect to find out was that a large amount of money had been included in his father’s estate for him. The money could be wired to him as soon he provided the name of a bank. Such a loss and unexpected gain filled William with turmoil. He supposed this was his father’s way to demonstrate forgiveness and approval: to have remembered the defector in his will. Yet how welcome a letter would have been in William’s first lonely months. He went to Kamloops and arranged to have the money sent to the Bank of British Columbia there. It would be useful, no denying. He’d pay off what he owed on the ranch and buy some more cattle, maybe even invest in one of the Hereford bulls just coming into the country, thanks to Greaves of Douglas Lake, and a good string of horses. He’d need haymaking equipment, too, if he was going to increase his herd and keep more horses. And he ought to make some improvements to his cabin, which looked more like a home now that he had received a parcel from Astoria containing a mariner’s compass quilt made for him by his mother and sister and a sampler cross-stitched by Elizabeth, soft flowers and a verse from the Old Testament: Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwelling. The range of the mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after every green thing.
The day William first saw Jenny was in the autumn of 1887. He’d gone to Father Lemieux’s house by the church just a mile or two from the Cottonwood Ranch to pick up some books. Not a Catholic, he had been gifted with a classical education nonetheless (for this was how the Jesuit put it to him) and had taken to dropping in to drink port on occasion and take home volumes selected for his edification by the good Father. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the confessions of St. Augustine, and even texts by earlier intelligent pagans, Pliny and Cicero — these had been taken to the windy cabin and read with great interest and a fair amount of skepticism on long evenings. And sometimes there was delight of recognition, as when Pliny described the mares of the Portuguese. William pondered over the Latin, Constat in Lusitania circa Olisiponem oppidum et Tagum amnem equas favonio flante obversas animalem concipere spiritum, idque partum fieri et gigni pernicissimum ita, wondering if the mares would gather themselves into a circle and hold their tails up to facilitate copulation with the wind. It was not difficult to picture them lifting their tails, he’d seen it so many times. But to the wind? Well, perhaps. After all, he had seen the gusts of ripe grass seed moving in currents of warm air, seen the golden pollen of cottonwoods falling from the sky. And maybe Pliny offered as complete an explanation as any for the occurrence of certain swift horses when the bloodlines did not lead you to expect such speed. And he laughed aloud in his cabin as he read the section of the Natural History concerning superstitions. Rumpi eqos, qui vestigia luporum sub equite sequantur — horses would burst if they were ridden in the footsteps of wolves, as near as he could tell. He hadn’t yet heard of wolves in this territory, although there were coyotes, cousins no doubt, and this theory might explain the way horses spooked when they heard coyotes nearby at night.
He found pondering these things exhilarating. He had no time to read in spring and summer, and only now that he had his herd down in Culloden for the cold months ahead did he find himself with a few hours to drop in on the priest. They chuckled over Pliny but agreed that he got so much right about weather and the behaviour of bees that one could forgive his lapses. It was Aquinas the priest loved. With winter coming, William would take advantage of his leisure to exercise his rusty powers of logic in debate with that austere mind. He kept a rough journal in which he noted ideas of particular interest or phrases that rang in the wind.
We next consider how one creature moves another. This consideration will be threefold: (1) How the angels move, who are purely spiritual creatures; (2) how bodies move; (3) how man moves, who is composed of a spiritual and a corporeal nature.
He would have liked to have asked Saint Thomas about cattle, which he, William, believed had something of the angels in their being. Or the huge fish he caught in the Thompson River once, its body muscular and shimmering with the colour of the sky. Looking into its eyes, he knew God. He wondered what Father Lemieux would have to say about that, or any of the saints, for that matter. Or what they would say about horses carrying the offspring of the west wind in their wombs, air turned to muscle and bone. Surely there was enough superstition in their own theology that they could hardly censure Pliny and his mercurial horses.
“Ah, William, come in. I’ll have Jenny bring us some refreshment. Go in and sit by the fire.”
The priest waved William into the cosy room at the front of the house and went off, his boots clattering on the board floor of the hall. Jenny? William wondered who Father Lemieux was talking about. His housekeeper, Mrs. Garcia’s cousin, was called something, he forgot what — “the good woman” or “the woman who does for me” — but not Jenny. The priest returned, rubbed his hands in front of the fire, and then went to the shelves for a book he was hoping William would enjoy. A few minutes later, there was a soft knock at the door and a young woman entered with a tray of glasses and something warm wrapped in a tea towel. She was the loveliest woman William had ever seen. Indian, obviously, with her lustrous black hair pulled back in a knot and a dress of indigo stuff. Her features were fine and regular, and when she looked at him, shyly, she smiled with such radiance, her teeth even and milky, her cheekbones tawny and high. Leaving the men, she closed the door and went quietly back to the kitchen.
“Jenny is on loan from LeJeune,” said Father Lemieux. “He’s gone off to help with a church at Kamloops and to see to that newspaper he’s become so involved with, and my housekeeper had to return home because of illness in the family. Jenny is a very able girl. LeJeune convinced her to work for him when he was building the church at Douglas Lake last year. One of the Jacksons. A good family, the mother one of the basket makers. Do you know them?”
William realized that one of her brothers, it must have been, had helped him with some fencing when he’d bought more cattle and needed corrals at the home site. August Jackson. William had found him companionable, easy to sit with around the fire at night, watching for shooting stars and listening to loons. The rest of the visit with Father Lemieux passed in pleasant confusion. William could think only of the woman in the kitchen at the back of the house, her supple brown hands as she arranged the glasses and other things on the low table, her smile. He couldn’t speak of Aquinas or original sin or the merits of the port in his glass. When he left, carrying two books which would remain in his saddlebag for days and would be returned unread, he saw her face at the window, smiling at him in lamplight. How the angels move. He came back twice, once to ask her to attend an afternoon concert at Nicola Lake, and once more to fix a time for him to collect her so that they could be married by the Justice of the Peace, John Clapperton, at the courthouse in Nicola Lake. The priest had not been entirely happy with William “absconding” with his housekeeper, and he had not been pleased at all that Jenny was marrying outside the church. But he had come to visit them in the cabin at Cottonwood and had been reassured by the sampler, which showed evidence of biblical knowledge and suggested that the house would not be entirely godless; he gave them a Bible with gilded pages as a wedding gift. He had also left a bottle of his excellent port and told William he’d be by from time to time to hear Jenny’s prayers and to drink his share.
Wanting to take a break from the textiles, I suggest a brief camping trip to the Nicola Valley. I have a report to read, preparatory to my exhibition, and will take some time to clarify the details of Mylar, adhesives, insurance against humidity and insect damage. Away from the objects, I can make a plan for their display. And I am hoping to figure out the geography of Margaret’s box, the placement of trails and the locations of photographs.
When I wake the second morning after a deep sleep, I take a minute to remember where I am. Tent, blur of mosquito netting, Clark’s nutcracker scolding in a tree just at the back of us. I have dreamed of a girl, waiting on horseback. It might have been myself half a lifetime ago, the same dark hair and straight back. Someone is humming outside, and the sun is already up; I feel heat through the nylon wall. I go down to the outhouse to pee and find moths all over the inside of the cubicle — noctuids, geometers, pyralids and tiger moths, wings spread for balance and camouflage, stippled with colour. I am accustomed to thinking of moths as the enemy, and I have seen the damage caused to fine woollens and silks by the larvae of brown house moths and common clothes moths. But the wings of these are like samite or the couched gold grounds on pieces I have seen in ecclesiastic collections. I forget where I am, lingering in an unseemly fashion among the toilets as I examine each moth, their eyespots, their antennae fringed with sense organs. A few in a heap into a corner of the cubicle look for all the world like dead leaves or the crumpled, foxed pages of an old book. Not wanting to disturb them, I resist the urge to poke at the little pile with a twist of toilet paper to see if they’re alive.
Nicola Lake is lovely in the clear morning, ruffled a little by a light breeze, faint voices calling from the shore. I take back a kettle of water to make coffee and find our blue enamel pot covered with a fine yellow dust. Anywhere else, our stuff would be damp, condensation glazing the walls of the tent, the sides of the cooler, even our sleeping bags, but here we wake to pollen, falling from the pines like golden rain. I pick a small bouquet for the table, fleabane, asters, a sprig of southernwood. When the children come back from walking the dog, we eat pancakes with maple syrup, watched by a chipmunk on the nearest tree.
On a horse, dark hair, her back straight, her eyes shy.
Once, in this very campsite, I looked idly to the rocks behind us to see my image reflected in the eyes of a coyote. How long it had been there I had no way of knowing, but my children had been playing among the rocks earlier, and I wondered if it was attracted to their scent. It didn’t stay after I looked into its eyes but slunk away up the slope, its tail low, looking back from a respectable distance to make sure I was watching.
Hum of bees in the tall grass, quarrel of crows, ache of the distant hills dappled with sunlight. Each morning could begin this way, each evening end with the loons. To have grown up in this air, taking in the dust of this earth with each breath, dust of dried grass, animal skin, the bodies of collapsing stars. I have dreamed of a girl. Pollen falls into my coffee as I walk among the trees, wildflowers brushing my legs. A startled ground squirrel skitters away.