Free The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland

out his lips and scowled.
    â€œAnd how places can feed us back again.”
    â€œYou’re sure of that now? After one week in a southern village, you know what they’re like in the north?”
    â€œI know what I saw.” She stroked the pelts in nervousness—the otter so sleek, the mink making her palm tingle.
    â€œHaida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl. You think those tribes are all alike? Gitksan, Nisga’a, Mamalili ka la. All the same?”
    Those names, so full of mystery, vibrating in his accent. Maybe each one was different. All the more intriguing. “I want to find out. Everything.”
    â€œEverything?”
    â€œ La Renarde Rouge. Is she big enough for two?”
    â€œAnd a four-legged rug?”
    â€œI could paint the villages where you trade.”
    â€œYou can sleep in a tent?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œCook over a fire? Live in the rain?”
    â€œYes. Yes!” Her splayed fingers moved through the muskrat.
    He scratched behind his ear as if considering.
    â€œSleep in furs smelling of north woods and musk,” she said.
    He took a mink and stroked her cheek and throat with it. “It’s warmer when you’re bare against the fur.” His breath came close in quick bursts.
    â€œYes,” she whispered.
    His lips grazed her skin, kissing. Murmurs of pleasure in exotic words. A brief flutter of tongue-touchings. A tightness and a trembling, a light-headedness too.
    Her imagination sped ahead in confusion. She had to make him stop. Soon. In a minute. He pressed her shoulders, leaning her back, kissing, licking her neck. He shoves it, and you have to take it. The first time rips you open. Stop. Stop now. She pushed his chest a little, firm beneath the soft buckskin.
    â€œVixen, you tease me.”
    He opened his arms, and she scrambled to her feet.
    â€œYou go too soon.”
    She untied Billy’s leash and began to climb the slope.
    â€œYou come tomorrow?” he called. “We talk about the north.”
    She had no breath to answer him.
    She dragged herself home in delirious misery. She was not herself. Going up the stoop, she held on to the railing, her legs rubbery.
    That night in her room she stared through the window at a moon like a shaving off a pearl, and buried her fingers in Billy’s shaggy coat. What did she really know about love? Not much. Rushing back to her out of the past, the only other man in her life was Mayo Paddon, the ship’s purser she’d met coming home from her first trip to Hitats’uu, acceptable to Dede and Lizzie because of his fine record of church attendance. Puh! He’d followed her to London, fawning, proposing six times, annoying her, interrupting her painting study. She hadn’t felt a thimbleful of desire, not like she had with her childhood dream boy who knew how to whistle like a killdeer. He had smelled like acorns and sweet hay when she’d nestled in his arms on a white horse as they galloped in the sky to rest in the cup of a crescent moon.
    Maybe Claude was right. Maybe she did see with storybook eyes. Dede told her more times than she could count how immature she was. Still, what if real love was even half as wonderful as thatchildhood fantasy? How could loving a place even come close? She felt wrapped tight as a bud. What if Father had exaggerated in that brutal telling? What if she’d confused his warning about sex with real love, and she would miss out for life and die a lonely old maid? She’d be a damned fool to let Father still have such power over her.
    Besides love, there was the northland. She had to find out—would he or wouldn’t he take her with him? In the joy of kissing, she’d felt momentarily free, but nothing was really free. She was prepared for that now, a give and take.
    â€¢ • •
    This time, she left Billy at home. She walked quickly and stopped at the top of the incline, stunned. The boats were gone. The tent intact, but