The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland Page B

laid among the heathen.
    After the reciting and responding, after the sprinkling, the lowering, the covering, people murmured in flat voices, nodded good-bye, and went off to their houses. Sophie dropped back to walk with Emily, and Margaret Dan whirled around, leveling at Emily a look vibrating with resentment. What was she to do? Shrivel up and disappear?
    Their footsteps thudded dully on the wood. “I want lots more babies,” Sophie said. “Frank knows. He wants them too. Indian men drink medicine to stay strong until they old.”
    Ahead, under slumped shoulders, Jimmy Frank walked with a tired stride, his hands cracked and grimy.
    Sophie slowed, and Emily watched an idea take shape in her mind. Her eyes glistened and her voice took on a bright earnestness. “When I get more babies, I share one with you.”
    â€œSophie! What are you talking about? People don’t share babies.”
    Sophie’s face fell into a pout, and she marched ahead.
    Could she have been serious? Emily felt her breath knocked out of her. She had offended Sophie in the deepest way.
    â€œNo worry. It’s only for borrowing,” she said over her shoulder, her words clipped.
    In a few minutes Sophie waited to walk with her. “When I get a girl, her name will be Em’ly Maria.”
    Emily breathed more easily. “That would be very nice.”
    A short way off, Emily saw Sarah bareheaded in the rain, whisking Sophie’s house with a small cedar bough.
    Sophie lunged ahead, shrieking, “No! No, Auntie! This is a Christian house. We don’t need the old ways.”
    Sarah continued to brush. “Wash away death,” she murmured.
    Sophie snatched the branch from Sarah and threw it onto the mud. “No. I am a Christian woman. I have a Christian friend.”
    Emily flinched. Was this tirade for her benefit? She glanced at Mrs. Johnson, who raised her shoulders and tipped her head, as if to say, See?
    Emily handed Sarah the shawl and stepped back.
    The thin skin around Sarah’s wet eyes puckered as she glared at Sophie. “You don’t know what you are.”

10: Killer Whale
    Emily stood with Alice in their Skagway hotel room and watched ghostly figures passing through sheets of rain, the wettest summer she could remember. Fog obscuring the coastline on the way north and three days of downpour here had made any sketching impossible. The town was shut tight. The Klondike gold strike over a mountain pass in the Yukon seemed more than ten years ago. Assay offices and saloons were boarded up with weathered planks. All the hurly-burly was gone. Foghorns moaned a dirge.
    â€œSounds like cows with the collywobbles,” Emily said.
    â€œOur whole time here, wasted,” Alice said, her forehead against the window.
    It had seemed such a good idea—a trip to coastal Alaska to help Alice get over her gloom from losing half a finger slicing bread, the horrible result of her poor eyesight. Even Dede had agreed and loosened her hold on their trust fund. Best of all, it got her north, without needing Claude du Bois. But it would take dogged effort to jolly Alice out of the grumps.
    â€œYou know I’m not very good at concocting cheer, but at least I’m making an effort. Watch.”
    She drew a caricature of the two of them dripping wet, bedraggled, rain pouring off their umbrella, an enormous hump of a bandage on Alice’s left hand, a pick in the other, shovel propped over Emily’s shoulder, paintbrushes stuck above her ears, both of them in enormous overshoes leaping across a puddle. Underneath, she wrote: Gold Rush Gals on Liquid Holiday.
    Alice smiled in spite of herself.
    â€œI think I’ll send it to Dede,” Emily said.
    â€œShe should have come instead of me.”
    â€œOoh, poor-dear-little-me. Let’s cherish our misery a little longer.”
    â€œYou’d be miserable too if you’d lost a finger and couldn’t hold a brush.”
    The