The Almost Widow

DedicationFor the writers I mentor.You teach me every day. EpigraphNo one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.—C.S. LEWIS, A GRIEF OBSERVED ContentsCoverTitle PageDedicationEpigraphFridayChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5SaturdayChapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9SundayChapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14MondayChapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17TuesdayChapter 18Chapter 19WednesdayChapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23ThursdayChapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29FridayChapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36Chapter 37Chapter 38Chapter 39SpringChapter 40ThanksAbout the AuthorAlso by Gail Anderson-DargatzCopyrightAbout the Publisher Friday 1Someone was watching me. I could feel it. That tingle you get at the back of your neck, between the shoulder blades. I scanned the dim, misty forest behind me: the skunk cabbage along Hunter’s Creek; the western hemlock strewn with witch’s hair; the moss-covered and impossibly large trunks of the towering red cedars; the ferns sheltering the mossy forest floor at their roots. I saw no one, though the unsettling feeling persisted. Someone was watching me.But then, there was always someone watching within this temperate rainforest, a chickadee, a crow, a cougar, a black bear—or a grizzly. I put a hand to the bear spray in the belt holster at my hip. A huge cinnamon-coloured grizzly, a sow, had stalked my husband, Ben, through this forest earlier in the fall, though on the far shore of the lake, likely the same bear that had mauled a young woman to death there the previous summer. Ben and Jackson had never been able to catch the animal. The cinnamon grizzly, with a taste for hunting humans, was still out there. I shook off the thought as I turned back to the giant stump I’d just discovered and snapped a few photos of it with my phone, to share on social media when I caught some bars. There was no cell reception out here.This stump of an old-growth red cedar was inflicted with heart rot as so many of the elderly trees were. Aside from the mound of waste branches left behind, most of the wood of the felled tree had been bucked into rounds and split into blocks small enough to be hauled away. The tree had survived hundreds of years, storms and fires, and then a century more of logging within this rare inland rainforest. It had been a giant, an ancient, an old soul, alive in a way my puny human mind would never fully comprehend. And now, senselessly, it was dead, only so some homeowner could slap cedar shakes on their house or keep the weeds at bay in their garden with cedar mulch.Shit.I knelt in front of the stump and wrapped my arms 2There was a crack, like a twig broken underfoot, and I turned to squint down the overgrown tree poacher’s trail that I had followed to find this stump. Overhead, clouds skittered too fast, nervously jittering around the mountain peaks that loomed over the valley. Someone, or something, was out there, blocking the way to the logging road, even as a man lurked in the forest behind me. I looked back and forth in each direction of the trail as I pulled the bear spray from my holster, removed the safety clip and took a step toward the road, my truck, safety, holding the canister in front of me, my gloved hand out to guard my face against the broad-leafed, spiny and aptly named devil’s club that stood on guard throughout the forest. Another, louder crack, and I stopped, held my breath.And then Ben appeared, striding around the corner of the roughed-in trail. I let out my breath as I slid the safety clip back on the bear spray and tucked the canister back in the holster. My husband wore his uniform, black pants and jacket, projecting an official persona so different from the easy, relaxed man he was at home. Even so, his bearded face was, as always, kind and welcoming, an advantage in his role as public educator, as he informed the people he met in the bush about the many laws and regulations governing the wilderness and its resources. But that friendly face was also a disadvantage, I imagined, when trying to enforce the same laws on those determined to break them.“Oh my god, Ben,” I said as he reached me. “You scared me. How long have you been here?” Did he see me hugging the stump?“I only just arrived.” Seeing the fear on my face, I imagine, he squeezed my hand. “Hey, what’s going on?”I lifted my chin in the opposite direction, to where I had seen the figure in the mist. “The Green Man was here.”The Green Man. The bushman who had haunted this forest over the past year, stealing from summer cabins and homes around the lake. Ben’s buddy Jackson, who