The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [177]
We were sitting now on the log of a fallen tree, while Rosabone with her reins loose wandered around the pool and Rouser went off out of sight to pursue the trail of one of the animals. “It’s so peaceful here,” Viridis observed, smiling and taking a deep breath as if the air were peaceful too.
“This would be a perfect place for Nail to hide if he—” Her voice caught, she choked, then sobbed once, loudly, and I thought sure she was going to cry, but she stopped herself and sniffled, using her wrist to rub away whatever had been ready to run from her eyes or nose. Then sadly she said, “Maybe he’ll never see it.”
“He’s already seen it,” I said. “He knows every inch of this mountain.” I thought of what I’d said to him in my letter: “I didn’t stay up there very long, but while I was there I thought of you, a lot, and I had a strange vision as if I could see you just living and dwelling in that hidden glade.” I told Viridis, “If he’s alive, and if he goes anywhere, he’ll come here. He might even be on his way here right this minute.”
We waited. It was almost as if we’d been told he’d come at high noon and we had just a few minutes to wait for him. Meanwhile Viridis asked me to identify everything that I could see from where I was sitting: she wanted to learn the names of everything visible that could be named. There were some ferns growing around the pool that were so uncommon I didn’t know their name, and there was even a flower, some kind of twayblade, that I couldn’t identify, but I told her everything I knew in that green glen.
And she knew things I didn’t, that every shade of that green had a name, some shades of green I’d never heard of before, that she pointed out to me: cinnabar, Aubusson, smaragd, cobalt, Hooker’s, palmetto, Véronèse, teal, gamboge, shades of green that only an artist would know but that would come in handy if you wanted to remember the difference between a frond of fern and a bough of cedar. Cinnabar is a very reddish green, and I didn’t even know that green could be red, its complement, until Viridis pointed it out to me.
We were learning things from each other. But it was past noon now, and we were both hungry for dinner, and I hadn’t brought my .22 with me to shoot something to eat, and even if Rouser had trotted back with a possum in his mouth I wouldn’t have known how to cook it. It would be way past dinnertime before we got back home, and we’d be starved.
A blue lizard frightened Viridis into leaving the place. It was just a harmless little skink that crawled out from under a rock and flicked its tongue at her, but maybe she had never seen a lizard before: she jumped up with a squeal of terror and ran several feet before stopping. Of course by then she’d scared the daylights out of the poor skink, who’d slunk back to his hidey hole. “It was just a lizard,” I said. “They won’t bite.”
“Up close he looked like a small dragon,” she said, recovering herself, and then, apologetically, “Well, we’d better go, don’t you think?”
I nodded and called for Rouser. He came back from wherever he’d been tracking whatever, and Viridis took Rosabone’s reins and said, “I wish there were some way I could let him know that I was here, in case he comes.”
“Well,” I said. I began picking up small rocks, and I arranged them beside the pool of the falls into a large letter V. “If he sees that, he’ll know it stands for you.”
Viridis studied my handiwork, and then she bent to gather some other stones and make beside the V another letter, a large L.
I was flattered, but I protested, “He won’t know what that stands for.”
“If he doesn’t,” she said, “let him think it stands for love.”
I blushed red.
Each morning thereafter Viridis went to that remote glen of the waterfall, but without me. I understood. Sometimes I guess I overstood: I let my imagination run away with me in picturing the first meeting between Viridis and Nail,