The Fisher Queen by Sylvia Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

tuning fork. Some pre-paleolithic part of us heard and knew we were going home and prepared to slide back to meet it.
    We stepped through the dark velvet curtain and onto a dazzling stage where another kind of Passion play unfolded: the marriage of sea and sky. It swallowed our jokes and glibness and all our silly little human concerns. We were blown out fresh and flat and simple as white sheets in the wind.
    The waves rumbled us quiet, as we lay side by side on this beach at the edge of nowhere. The waves whispered us to sleep after we made love and nestled deep into our warm, pebbly mattress like salmon and dreamed our fishy dreams.
    We awoke suddenly to the bellowing waves as we stirred and blinked in our chilly hard beds. The sun was racing for the horizon, kicking up spumes of smoky dust and setting the clouds smouldering. If we didn’t hurry, it would get home before we did. A moonlit trail may be romantic in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, but it was deadly out here.
    Scrambling up the gravelly slope, we ran back and forth looking for the trailhead, like terriers looking for a rabbit hole. After a few false starts we found something familiar enough to call a trail and convinced ourselves it was the right one. It was not. We knew it but wouldn’t admit it. Where it had been spongy, it was now boggy. Where it had been lush, it was now forbidding with dark looming trees, massive ferns and dense tangled underbrush. The cool dappled light now blurred and ran together.
    The more we needed to hurry, the slower we had to go—like trying to run in a dream. Like running underwater. I thought of those experiments I’d read about where people could actually breathe oxygen-suffused water without drowning. Maybe this was one of nature’s experiments, an attempt at creating another element. Everything seemed so saturated that one more drop and this whole place would burst into water. Soon we couldn’t step over or around the dark water. The pools ate up every inch of ground and the humus became porridge.
    Even if we had been able to pick our way around the water and bog, it was blanketed by an endless morass of fallen trees, helter-skelter like a giant game of pick-up sticks. Most of them had been here long enough to grow thick shaggy coats of slippery moss, playing host to the next generation of flora. I looked down at my flimsy tennis shoes and prayed they would magically grow golfing spikes. There was no way around, just through.
    We tried to keep moving in some general direction while zigzagging from one slightly more stable surface to another with the concentration of tightrope walkers. Though the moss underfoot was an enemy, the stuff hanging on live trees was a friend, showing us where north was in this surrealistic world. Or so we hoped.
    Lost in some Alice In Wonderland fantasy, it seemed that the trees and ferns and moss had not gotten bigger but we had become smaller—I was certain of it. We had become four-footed, big-eyed, furry little mammals scurrying from one fallen tree to the next, criss-crossing this forbidding primeval swamp to find their burrow trail. Ears pricked for the sound of crashing reptiles, we wordlessly pushed on, saving our energy and breath, with only an occasional grunt to indicate a safer or shakier footing.
    I wondered if we were really just wandering aimlessly and for how long our exhausted legs could hold out. How ironic, I thought, after everything we’ve been through, to die in a rainforest swamp less than two miles from our skiff and the lights of the fish camp. If we didn’t succumb to exposure—May up here was like March in Vancouver—we could slip off any one of these fallen logs and break a leg or rip our guts open on a spike or be swallowed up by bog mud.
    But that was just bogeyman talk. I didn’t know about Mr. Ace Explorer, but I was going to make it back okay; I always would. I could feel Paul glancing at me to gauge my fear or resentment.