"Pendant? Pendant? What do you mean, pendant?"
"Don’t get angry. I’m trying to say something nice."
"I hope I never hear you say something rotten. Pendant!" She jabbed him in the ribs with a knuckle. The spat, if that’s what it had been, was over, and he grabbed for her, getting his arms around her back and bringing her breasts down to his face. She pummeled him a little more and then stopped, stroking his hair and watching him with avid eyes while he slowly moved his head back and forth, brushing her breasts over his forehead and cheeks and against his eyelids. He kissed each nipple gently, feeling her tremble, and looked up at her face with a smile and a sigh.
"When I said pendant," he said, "I didn’t mean it in the sense of ‘droop,’ I meant it in the sense of ‘depend from.’"
"That’s better," she said. "I like it when you talk like a dictionary."
They both laughed, and she slid into the bag alongside him. Gideon moved his hands down her sides and cupped a round buttock in each palm, pressing her close to him. She kissed his throat and rubbed her cheek against the hair on his chest.
"Julie, Julie…" he murmured.
"Oh-oh, I think I hear a lyrical flight coming."
"You’re right. Let me rephrase it." He pretended to think. "Okay. You have a big, beautiful ass that I love to squeeze. And I really like it when your breast droops over my arm like that. How’s that?"
He had said it to make her laugh, but she lay on her side and looked at him with liquid, ink-black eyes. "I love you so very much," she said tightly, and pressed her head to his chest again. To his surprise, and to hers, too, he was sure, they fell asleep like that.
In the morning they made love the moment they awakened, or perhaps even before. When they were dozing afterward and Gideon lay sprawled on his back with Julie’s head on his shoulder, he jerked suddenly.
"What’s that?" he said.
Her lashes brushed his shoulder as she opened her eyes. "I don’t hear anything."
"No…maybe I was dreaming…" He realized abruptly what it was. "It’s not raining anymore."
The only sound was the soughing of a gentle breeze in the high branches. They dressed in the chilly, gray light inside the tent, unzipped the flap, and stepped out. With his first breath Gideon’s antipathy to the Olympic rain forest vanished. The air smelled of moist green leaves and pine bark, and the light breeze had a touch of faraway ocean in it. What they could see of the sky was a brilliant robin’s-egg blue, but it was early, not yet seven, and a morning mist clung to the forest in vertical, pearly sheets, one behind another, with clear spaces between them.
It was so beautiful it seemed contrived, a sfumato masterpiece from the Renaissance, with everything diffuse and muted yet marvelously crisp. Every surface was fresh and clean and covered with droplets of dew like clear glass beads. Nothing seemed sodden. The draperies of club moss and vine maple were translucent and ferny again, and the leaves and pine needles glowed with a thousand different greens-emerald, turquoise, Irish, olive, aquamarine.
"Don’t I hear water running?" Gideon asked.
She nodded. "Big Creek. I think it’s just a few hundred feet away, beyond that rise."
Her hand reached out to his and he took it, and they both stood basking in the freshness. After a while some birds began to sing. The sound was so perfect they looked at each other and laughed. "Winter wren," Julie said.
Ten or twelve feet away a tiny squirrel with its cheeks packed appeared on a log and sat up on its haunches, looking surprised to see them. At Gideon’s burst of laughter it scampered off into the brush toward the creek.
"I couldn’t help it," he said to Julie, still laughing, "I feel like I’m in the middle of a Walt Disney cartoon, with the sun coming up and all the forest creatures beginning to stir. Honestly, I thought that squirrel was about to rub its eyes and yawn and maybe start singing."
He turned to her, smiling and serious both. "Julie, you’re not going any farther. I’m going alone."
"No," she said firmly. "If it’s not dangerous, then I want to go. If it’s dangerous, then I don’t want to go, and I don’t want you to go either."
"It is not dangerous, and I am going by myself." He spoke at his deepest, most resonant pitch, and he backed it up with a no-nonsense scowl. "And it is not open for discussion."
"Baloney," she said brightly. "We’ll talk about it over breakfast." She picked up a pot and thrust it at him. "Go and get some water for coffee. I’ll scramble the eggs."
"Now, listen to me, Julie-"
She stood up tall and tucked in her chin. "It is not," she growled, "open for discussion. Now, git!"
The squirrel, cheek pouches bulging with tiny spruce cones, skittered over the rough ground, its gray tail floating behind it in a graceful, serpentine curve. Almost home, just a hundred feet from its nest in the old cedar, it halted abruptly, startled, and raised itself on its hindquarters. It stood trembling, nervously jerking its head from side to side. Then, reassured, it dropped to all fours and sprinted for the tree again, only to stop once more after a few feet. Again it stood erect and quivering, its forelegs hugged to its pale, furry chest, its nose twitching.
The shining, buttonlike eyes focused on the still, brown heap before it, nearly invisible among the huckleberry and ferns, and the squirrel’s body froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. So it remained for a long time in the quiet, sunshot undergrowth, staring at the unfamiliar, motionless pile. Finally the nose twitched, the whiskers waggled once, twice, and the squirrel, choosing the better part of valor, gave the strange heap a wide berth and scampered for home on a roundabout route.
When it had gone, the heap gathered itself together, got to its knees, and became a man. The man crouched behind the thick brush, brown and rough-skinned, like a part of the ancient forest itself, with damp fragments of bark and dead leaves clinging to the grease that coated him.
Through a screen of matted hair, deep-set eyes watched the saltu clamber down the slope to the gravel bar, then walk to the water. The nearly naked brown man swayed slowly back and forth with a high-pitched, singsong muttering. His shoulder muscles jumped and twitched, and on the hand that held the stone ax the tendons stood out like ropes.
Big Creek was not very big, but it flowed fast and satisfyingly noisily. Schools of small, brown fish, invisible against the brown pebbles on the bottom, briefly twinkled silver when they veered sharply in unison, then vanished again. On the surface, brown leaves billowed and spun slowly on the tiny swells and were borne away toward Lake Quinault.
At the stream’s edge, Gideon immersed the pot. He remained on one knee for a few moments, lulled by the splashing, purling water, and by the warm morning sunlight on the back of his neck. As he rose he was conscious of a small movement behind him. Julie, probably, come to -
A tremendous concussion jarred his skull, and his head was filled with a great white light that quickly broke into tiny, yellow pinpoints on an endless field of velvet black. He was floating, tumbling slowly in the dark, and there was an odd, faraway noise, an inexplicable scraping sound. He was losing touch with his mind and fought to hold on against the overpowering fascination of the pinpoints, which had become smoothly revolving spoked wheels. The noise, he realized cunningly, was the pot clattering on the gravel. How absurd, how tasteless, he thought, that it should make so mundane and ordinary a racket at a time like this, at so presageful a moment, so augural a juncture, so, so…
He began to spin faster, in the opposite direction from the wheels, too fast to continue his interesting reflections. The wheels gradually contracted again to pinpoints, and slowly, one at a time, blinked out.
Chapter 16
He was lying on his side, his left shoulder under his head. There was a soft breeze, and the air was sweet and fresh. The sharp gravel pressed uncomfortably against his side. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. His head hurt.