Haphazard wind lurches through old-growth forest. Green canopy churns. Broadside trunks groan. Duff flies upriver like weightless condor feathers.
Soggy soil slips grasp of tendril fingers underground. Twisted roots, black as grizzly claws, rend and rupture, disconnecting life force from its center.
Totem topples, limbs crack rapid-fire, crescendo in a landslide roar that reverberates through the watershed.
Spine recoils off understory of huckleberries, redwood bark explodes in a rain of spongy fiber, backstrap shreds into spikes, as sharp as any porcupine’s.
Thousand-ton trunk gains speed downhill, slams through a dam of debris in the stream, spraying a nimbus high as humpback spume.
Salmon-flesh heartwood lies exposed, tattooed with faint, charcoal chin stripes, as delicate as capillaries.
Mary Lentz
This article appears in ‘A Big Family’.