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Lee nudged Alex. “Look,” she whispered. “The slide.”
Alex gasped. “This is our spot.” He looked around. “The trees are bigger over there. The beach is kind of different too. But the climbing rocks are exactly the same. Man….”
He held the tarp flap aside and asked the woman, “Do you know another beach around here with a sliding rock like that one?”
“No. Take this.” The woman handed him a can of paint and a stick. “Stir,” she commanded. “We will paint today, or my name isn’t Emily Carr. Enough of your distractions.”
“You’re Emily Carr?” Lee looked into the tent.
The woman poured paint into another can and gave it to Lee. “Stir,” she said, turning away and walking to a large stack of manila paper. Attaching a sheet to a board, she carried it out into the sunshine. Again she disappeared into the tent.
Lee moved over to Alex and set her paint can down beside his on the sand. “Emily Carr!” she whispered. “She’s a famous painter. My new teacher was just talking about her. But she didn’t tell me Emily Carr lived around here, or that she was so strange.”
For a moment Lee wished she could stay and paint. She loved the reds and browns, was tempted to put her fingers into them.
A thunderous crash broke the silence. Lee breathed in sharply and swung around, almost overturning the can of paint. “What was…?”
“Something fell,” Alex said, his eyes bulging. “Something huge! Up there.” He pointed to the hill behind them.
After a few more crackling sounds the air became very still. No dogs barked. No birds sang. Even the wind hushed.
Emily Carr came out of the tent and looked up at the hill, where the homestead was hidden behind the trees.
“Goodness, another one dead,” she muttered. “Too many. Your folks are getting greedy.” She shook her head. “Every day this goes on. I’ll have to move the elephant.”
“The elephant?” Lee and Alex asked at the same time. First a monkey, now an elephant. Was Emily Carr part of a circus? Did she do disappearing acts?
“The trailer,” she said, waving her hand in its direction. “My summer home. I call her the elephant.” She walked back into the tent. While they stirred, Lee and Alex whispered about what to do. This had to be the right beach, but their parents were gone. The fire pit was in a different place. The canoe, the clothes line, even the tubes had disappeared. In its place were Emily Carr and an old trailer she called the elephant. She thought they were twins who lived up on the hill. A loud crashing sound meant another one was dead.
“Another what?” Lee wanted to know. “A fallen tree maybe?”
Alex shrugged, a worried look on his face. He wanted to go up the hill to investigate.
Leaving the paints on the sand, they ran along the beach and started up the trail, but it was different too. The ground had been leveled and some roots that grew across the path had been flattened in places. Stumps were sprinkled with bits of sawdust. This wasn’t the old trail; this was a new road.
The trees alongside the path showed big gashes in the trunks, as if something heavy had bumped into them. Pieces of bark were missing. The dirt showed marks as if something had been dragged uphill.
“Let’s hurry.” Lee was ahead of Alex this time and she had forgotten all about the lump on her head.
After rushing up the trail, Lee slowed down and caught her breath. She recognized the road as the trail they had climbed dozens of times. It had the same curves, the same lookouts, the same views of the Strait of Georgia waters and the Gulf islands. But the trees were enormous. Lee shivered in the silence. On the forest floor grew bushes and brambles so dense Lee was sure she couldn’t make her way through it if she wanted to.
“This morning I waited here for you.” Alex pointed to a boulder at Lookout Point. “I sat on this rock.” He sat down. “These trees were smaller. I’m sure!” He slapped his arm, then his calf. “There are more mosquitoes and they’re biting.”
Lee glanced around and moved over to Alex. “Something weird is going on,” she whispered. “I don’t like it.”
Alex nodded, making room for Lee on the boulder.
They sat side by side, whispering. Lee said there were no tire tracks here, so she’d like to go back to ask Emily Carr more questions. Alex wanted to hike to the homestead and The Bluff, where they could see the whole beach below. He had to find out what a “dead one” was, he said. They both jumped as another crash broke the silence. The noise was closer this time, much closer, coming from just up ahead on the road.
“That wasn’t a falling tree. Something bumped into something,” Lee whispered, her heart pounding against her ribcage.
Quietly, they walked up the road side by side, moving slowly, peering ahead through the trees, looking over their shoulders and to the sides, ready to duck.
Alex held out his hand. “Listen,” he whispered.
Lee had heard it too- a crash, then the sound of something big rubbing against a tree. A man’s voice yelled, “Left, left!”
“Someone’s coming down the road,” Lee whispered. “Hide.”
Alex crouched behind an enormous root.
Lee jumped off the road after him. A man leading two large, brown horses came around the bend. The animals, in harnesses, strained and pulled, their hooves kicking dirt into the air.
“Sharper turn,” came the low voice of another man still hidden by the curve in the road.
The lead man shouted at the horses, moving the team sideways, then forward a step. The chains behind them became taut. Lee stood up in her hiding place to see what would come next, but then ducked down quickly to avoid being seen.
“A log,” Alex whispered. He had a peephole between two roots so he could see the road.
Lee nudged him to move over so she could see. The chains were attached to a section of log. The front end of the log had been cut into a curve, to look like the front part of a ski. It glided around the corner and down the road like a huge single runner on a sleigh.
The log smashed into a tree as it rounded the bend, bark scraping off with a screech. The horses kept pulling. The log righted itself so that it pointed straight down the road.
The second man came into view. He walked beside a wooden sled that was tied to the end of the log and bumped along in the dust. As the log started to slide faster down the hill, the man pushed an old anchor from the sled onto the road. This slowed the log, so it couldn’t pick up speed and slide into the horses’ hind legs.
“Whoa,” the front man yelled, holding the reins. Everyone stopped. The men pried the anchor loose with metal bars and pushed it back onto the sled. The horses continued.
As the horses came closer, Lee caught their smell and saw their powerful muscles straining, their bodies sweating,
