River’s End

in it. Then there’s western hemlock. It’s not usually a canopy tree, and it’s shade-tolerant so it’s understory. It doesn’t grow as fast as the Douglas fir. You see the cones, all over the place?” Olivia stooped to pick one up. “This one’s a Doug-fir, see the three points? There’ll be lots of them inside the forest, but you won’t see saplings because they’re not shade-tolerant. The animals like them, and bears like to eat their bark.”
    “Bears! Eek!”
    “Oh, Aunt Jamie.”
    “Hey, I’m your city-slicker client, remember?”
    “Right. You don’t have to worry about bear if you take simple safety precautions,”
    Olivia parroted. “The black bear lives in this area. The biggest problem with them is they like to steal food, so you’ve got to use proper storage for food and garbage. You never, never leave food or dirty dishes unattended in your campsite.”
    “But you have food in your backpack. What if the bears smell it and come after us?”
    “I have the food wrapped in double plastic, so they won’t. But if a bear comes around, you should make lots of noise. You need to be calm, give them room so they can go away.”
    They stepped out of the clearing and into the trees. Almost immediately the light turned soft and green with only a few stray shimmers of sun sneaking through the canopy of trees. Those thin fingers were pale, watery and lovely. The ground was littered with cones, thick with moss and ferns. The green covered the world in subtly different shapes, wildly different textures.
    A thrush called out and darted by, barely ruffling the air.
    “It looks prehistoric.”
    “I guess it is. I think it’s the most beautiful place in the world.”
    Jamie laid her hand on Olivia’s shoulder. “I know.” And a safe place, Jamie thought. A wise place for a child to go. “Tell me what I’m seeing as we go, Livvy. Make it come alive for me.”
    They walked at an easy pace, with Olivia doing her best to use a tour guide’s voice and rhythm. But the forest always captured her. She wondered why it had to be explained at all when you could just see.
    The light was so soft it was as if she could feel it on her skin, the air so rich with scent it almost made her head reel. Pine and damp and the dying logs that were the life source for new trees.
    The deceptively fragile look of the moss that spilled and spread and climbed everywhere. The sounds—the crunch of boots over needles and cones, the stirring of small animals that darted here and there on the day’s business, the call of birds, the sudden surprising gurgle of water in a little stream. They all came together for her in their own special kind of silence.
    It was her cathedral, more magnificent and certainly more holy to her than any of the pictures she’d seen of the glorious buildings in Rome or Paris. This ground lived and died every day.
    She pointed out a ring of mushrooms that added splashes of white and yellow, the lichens that upholstered the great trunks of trees, the papery seeds spilled by the grand Sitka spruce, the complicated tangle of vine maples that insisted on growing close to the trail.
    They wound between nurse logs, shaggy with moss and sprouts, brushed through feathery crops of ferns and spotted, thanks to Olivia’s sharp eye, an eagle lording it over the branches high overhead.
    “Hardly anyone uses this trail,” Olivia said, “because the first part of it’s private. But the public trails start to loop there now, and you begin to see people.”
    “Don’t you like to see people, Livvy?”
    “Not so much in the forest.” She offered a sheepish smile. “I like to think it’s mine, and no one will ever change it. See? Listen.” She held up a hand, closed her eyes. Intrigued, Jamie did the same. She heard the faint tinkle of music, could just make out the slick twang of country and western.
    “People take away the magic,” Olivia said solemnly, then started up the upward slant of the trail.
    As they climbed, Jamie began to pick up more sounds. A voice, a child’s laugh. Where the trees thinned, sunlight sprinkled in until that soft green twilight was gone. The lakes spread out in the distance, sparkling with sun, dotted with boats. And the great mountains speared up against the sky while the dips and valleys and gorges cut through with curves and slashes.
    Warmer now, she sat and tugged off her overshirt to let the sun play on her arms. “
    There’s all kinds of magic.” She smiled when