Chapter 10
We walked into the woods behind the cabin. Within ten steps, I understood I was following someone who knew this land way better than I did.
Scout moved through the trees without hesitation. No checking bearings or pausing to orient herself. She simply walked, and the forest opened around her.
"The slope here is deceptive," she said without looking back. "It drops sharply about thirty yards ahead, then levels out along a bench before the final climb to the property line. You can't see it until you're on it."
She was right. The ground fell away exactly where she said it would, and we descended into a different climate. Cooler here. The canopy closed overhead, thick with Douglas fir and western red cedar.
"How do you know where my property line is back here?"
"I've walked these woods since I was six years old. Father taught me to read a survey map when I was seven. Most people around here know whose land is whose, even if there aren't fences. It matters."
She stepped over a fallen log without breaking stride.
"There used to be an old logging path through here. Nineteen fifties, maybe. You can still see where they cut. See that stump?"
She pointed to a massive old stump, maybe eight feet across, rotted soft and covered in moss.
"That was an old-growth cedar. Probably two hundred years old when they took it. The stumps tell you what was here before."
I looked around and saw more of them. Ghost markers of a forest that had been altered decades earlier.
"Do you think it will come back?"
"It already is. Look at the canopy. See how the firs are closing in? Give it another fifty years and this will be dense timber again. Not old growth, that takes centuries. But still real forest."
We kept walking. She showed me where the stream came down from the upper property, a thin silver thread that gathered volume as it descended.
"This feeds your pond," she said. "It originates just beyond your line on Bureau of Land Management territory. It runs year-round because the watershed on that slope is intact. As long as nothing disturbs the canopy up there, you'll have water."
"What would disturb it?"
"Logging. Fire. Both unlikely, but not impossible."
She kneeled beside the stream and put her hand in the water.
"Cold. That means it's coming from deep springs, not just surface runoff. Good water."
I kneeled beside her. The water was clear and quick over rounded stones.
"Could I drink this?"
"Yes, but you'd want to boil it first or filter it. Giardia is real."
She stood and wiped her hand on her jeans.
"How do you know all this, Scout? Did they teach it in school?"
She looked at me directly.
"I never went to school, Thomas. Father taught me at home. How to read, how to write, how to think. The rest I learned here, in these woods. And from books I borrowed from the Port Chasten library."
"You like the library?"
Her face changed, opened.
"It's my favorite place in the world outside of these woods.
Mrs. Kohler is the librarian. She lets me take books home for as long as I need them.
She orders books I ask for. She never asks questions about why I'm not in school or why I only come to town once a month.
She just hands me books and tells me what she thinks I'll like. She's never been wrong."
We kept walking. Scout pointed out timber I could harvest without harming the forest. A stand of alder that was crowding out the conifers. Some windfall cedar that would make good posts or boards if I wanted to mill it.
"You'd want to leave the big firs," she said. "They're the structure. Take them out and the whole canopy changes. But the alder? That's just colonization. It moves in after disturbances. You can take it all and the forest will thank you."
She showed me a place where a deer trail crossed the stream. Fresh tracks in the mud.
"Blacktail deer. Small herd. Maybe six or seven. They bed down on the slope above your cabin during the day and come down to the pond at dusk. You'll see them if you're quiet."
We climbed the final slope to the property line. She showed me the survey markers, old iron posts set in concrete and marked with faded orange paint.
"The BLM land starts here. You can walk it, but you can't cut anything. Not that you'd want to. Most of it is too steep to work anyway. Our land is just to the right. 40 acres of wooded slope, above your place and the James Farm. Also abutting... private lands. To the east."
She said the last part with contempt. Before I could ask about it, she turned and looked back down the slope.
"In winter these woods are brooding," she said quietly. "The fog comes in from the coast and settles in the canopy and everything goes quiet and gray. Much like the wild moors in Wuthering Heights."
I didn't know what she meant. The reference came without warning or preamble. Not a quotation or an explanation, just a statement of fact.
"Is that a novel?"
"My favorite novel. Written by Emily Bront?."
"I've never read that one," I said.
"You should," she said excitedly. "It's about a place that shapes the people who live there.
The moors are as much a character as Heathcliff or Catherine.
The landscape is emotional. It reflects what the people feel and makes them feel what it does.
Father says that's pathetic fallacy, but I think Bront? knew exactly what she was doing.
I think she understood that some places get inside you and change what you are. "
She spoke with the intensity of someone who had encountered the book young and been permanently altered by it.
"What happens in the book?"
"A lot of people suffer because they can't be what they are. Heathcliff loves Catherine and she loves him, but the world won't let them be together because he's poor and rough and the world tried to make him small. So they destroy each other instead. It's violent and sad and true."
She looked at me.
"I've read it five times. I'll probably read it five more. Some books are like that."
"Sounds heavy."
"It is. But it's also beautiful. Bront? doesn't apologize for how wild it is. She doesn't try to make it polite or easy. That's what I love about it."
We walked back down the slope in companionable quiet. The light had changed, the sun was lower and the shadows longer.
When we reached the cabin, I stopped.
"Do you want to see the film?"
She looked at me blankly.
"The film. Wuthering Heights. There's an old black-and-white version, I think. The name rings a bell after you talked about it. Everyone says it's a classic. I have a satellite internet connection. I could stream it for you."
"I haven't seen many films," she said slowly. "Father thinks they are deceptive, like the shadows on Plato's Cave. No chains but the one we put on ourselves."
"Oh, okay," I said, with no clue about what she was talking about.
"But... I saw cartoons when I was very small. When we lived on an Army base. I remember my mother laughing at them. That's one of the only memories I have of her."
She said it simply, without emotion or elaboration.
"Where is your mother now?"
"I don't know. She left when I was young. Father doesn't know where she is."
I sensed the complicated weight beneath the simple words and didn't push.
"Well, you can watch Wuthering Heights anytime you want. Just let me know when you want to come by."
She looked at me. Her eyes were bright and intense in a way that made me feel as if I'd offered something larger than a movie.
"I'd like that," she said.
Then she looked away abruptly.
"I have to go home. I need to tend my goats."
"You have goats?"
"We have four goats. Four working goats."
"Four?"
She nodded.
"Cincinnatus is the oldest goat. Cincinnatus was a Roman farmer who put down his plow to save Rome and then went straight back to his farm when it was done.
Father named him that because he thinks that's the highest thing a man can be, someone who does what needs doing and then goes back to his work. Cincinnatus the goat is the same."
She paused.
"Thoreau thinks fences are an illusion. Father named him for Walden, 'to live deliberately, front only the essential facts of life.' Thoreau the goat has decided that the essential facts of his life are browsing nutritious vegetation. I find it hard to argue with his reasoning."
Another pause, Scout's voice lowering as if she were sharing a secret.
"Aristotle is the difficult one. Father says he named him for reasoned thought, but I think he named him because Aristotle the philosopher was also difficult and contrary and usually right, which is an irritating combination in a goat or a philosopher."
She looked at me seriously.
"Beowulf, you don't push."
I felt a smile forming despite myself.
"I'd like to meet them."
"They could clear the blackberries that are creeping in on the far side of the pond. We'd only need two. Cinncinatus and Thoreau. Not Beowulf."
"No, certainly not Beowulf," I nodded seriously. "That sounds like a good idea."
She returned my nod, something shy in the gesture that made me smile.
"Goodbye, Thomas."
She turned and walked toward the trees. I watched her go. The blonde ponytail swaying, the holster at her hip. The easy stride of someone who belonged exactly where she was.
Then she was gone. Disappeared into the woods like some forest nymph. Like something I'd imagined.
No, not a forest nymph. More like one of those Viking Shield-maidens. Liberty Scout Flint is as fierce as she is beautiful.
I stood there for a long time, looking at where she'd vanished, wondering what her life was like back at Abner Flint's homestead.
I sat on the porch in the evening, an LED lantern from the trailer on the railing drawing circling moths. My laptop was balanced on my knees, the coffee mug from Irma's bakery steaming on the rail beside the lantern.