The Peacock 295

 Kenny used to say that the forest is one single, entire and incredibly complex organism.  And that most people treat it like wallpaper.  I see his point.  This place is alive, and every tree has for me presence.  I feel like a visitor in someone else's house, and this is very humbling to me.   The salmonberries won't be ready for a couple of weeks yet, but I can see some are already beginning to turn colour.  Kenny and I used to wander an entire June or July day in the Endowment Lands near where we lived, stuffing our gullets with berries.  The forest always seemed to transform him.  I think it has also been transforming me.  I often feel, while I'm in there, like I shouldn't leave, that I have found my true home, where I have really lived since time immemorial. And also here, in this forest, but it still feels tainted, as though there is a thin slightly acrid film adhering to the leaves and branches and tree trunks.  I really want to know what it is about this place, but now I am almost at the clearing.  I wonder what Kenny would make of this place, or of my intuition.  He would probably tell me it's all in my head.  He had both a mystical and an incredibly scientific view of nature.  He would just say that simply by being the forest that that makes it sacred, that makes it pure and clean, that makes it holy.  So, maybe I am in a holy place here but a holy place that has still been defiled by something evil and sinister.  

I am going to ask Carl about this place, when I get back, and I really shouldn't stay out here for very long.  I think I might be already off the property, but I don't think I'm going to get lost, since there is only this one trail so far, but here is this clearing, like a field, or a meadow rather, and this place is full of flowers, blue violet lupin and big white and yellow daisies especially, and what is that in the middle?  A cabin?  Out here?  But where else?  But I don't want to go there yet. not alone, and now this is getting extremely creepy, and how quickly I reverse my direction and now I am almost running back to the property, and back to the house, and back to the safety of this strange and half crazy family I have stumbled into....