Falling From Grace Read Online Free

mossy limbs high up in old-growth trees, commuting at dawn and dusk with food for their babies. “We must be twelve, fifteen kilometres from the coast.”
    â€œIn Oregon we found marbled murrelet nests seventy-five kilometres from the sea,” he said. “No wonder it took decades to find out where they nest.”
    Within an hour we detected more than thirty murrelets flying upriver.
    â€œI bet hundreds nest in this forest,” Paul said, jumping from rock to rock to reach shore. I followed him, the sky growing too dark to see bats or birds.

3
    I knocked the last tent peg into the root-riddled ground, the nylon shelters wedged between huckleberry bushes laden with flowers. I stood and breathed in air pungent and fresh with spring growth. It was early June, the start of our third field season in Otter Valley. We had given up fording the river long ago in favour of a natural log bridge upstream of the waterfall and moved our base camp to the clearing near the road for ease of access. Three large hemlocks guarded the camp. An enormous fallen spruce thick with moss and bristling with seedlings provided protection for our make-shift kitchen—a portable propane stove balanced on a plank supported by two stumps—where Paul was fixing dinner. Muted evening light angled through the canopy, the air cool. Steps away the river current sang its journey west to the ocean, the stream bank thick with red columbine and false bugbane in bloom, the delicate white and yellow flowers of the bugbane showy against the dark green fans of leaves that left painful red blisters on the skin. Few people came to the valley, the odd hiker or bevy of teenagers out for a drinking spree. Paul and I considered Otter Creek our own.
    We were tired. We’d left town at six AM to ensure we’d reach the site by nine, then spent the day in our trees, setting aerial traps, collecting moss samples. Otter Creek had fulfilled its promise. We had negotiated a buffer zone outside the park boundary and adjacent to our study site with the company that held the timber rights. Pacific Coast Forestry had agreed to forgo logging there for the years it would take us to complete our work. A significant tract of undisturbed true, old growth forest was essential to our research, and we had it, a biological paradise where diverse tree species grew together, upstart saplings and hoary veterans centuries old supporting lichens and mosses in the high canopy, shrubs and herbs flourishing at ground level, the forest floor a nursery of decaying logs and debris. A complex and multilayered collaboration between the living and the dead. An ideal wilderness laboratory.
    We planned to stay two weeks.
    I settled on a log with my laptop to enter the afternoon’s data. As the machine chugged through its startup, I watched a common merganser fly downstream above the large flat rocks at the river’s edge, wingtips skimming the water’s surface. Intent on its passage, I was unprepared for the female voice behind me. “Hello?” I turned. A woman materialized like a sylph from between the trees at dusk. She reminded me of a waif out of Les Misérables , her face frightened, dark eyes huge and innocent, dreadlocked hair as wispy and wild as the arboreal lichen, Methuselah’s beard, that hung from the branches above her head. I would have taken her for a child but for the baby in her arms—cheeks stained with tears, hair white and loopy with curls—and the girl at her side, about six or seven, who clung to the woman’s long worn skirt. The girl wore pants under an ankle-length skirt of her own, an old Cowichan sweater two sizes too big, and mud-caked boots. Her straight dark hair stuck out in impulsive tufts from under a pilled handmade toque.
    â€œWe’ve come to save the trees,” the mother said.
    Paul and I exchanged glances. Save the trees? Paul stood from his crouching position beside the camp stove, a ladle in his