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home to dine on blueberry cobbler and salmon pie. Better that than a quick clobber and the hot fang of death.
    Is a bear in the bed better than two lovers separated by death? I don’t know, but I would not mind finding out. The next time I find myself seated at the library computer terminals beside the man in Red Suspenders, I will ask him out for coffee. And I will smile a lot, for despite the glitter of platinum in my back teeth, the smile on the outside is still good. And no matter what Red Suspenders does, no matter if he tells me about online tax calculations or compares long distance phone plans, Baba Yaga will say, why yes, do tell me more.
    A deer has just come out of the woods. Dainty best describes the pattern of spots on her sides, like icing sugar on a coffee cake, and the tender white flame of a tail. Let nature lead you, Freya. My father used to say that. He was a wise man, a woodsman, and well read. He kept a notebook filled with his favourite Norse sayings, like the forest is the best teacher for a boy. So, following Papa’s advice, and ignoring Otto’s, I will follow the deer’s tracks. She has been running high on the
banks beside the road where the purple brusilla grows in the summertime, and I have been struggling along in the ruts. But now I know where I am. I have arrived at the artists’ colony.
    They were quite the pair, those artists. They used to drive across from Toronto for the summer, arriving in Quebec with all the excitement and release of being in a different country. He built sculptures throughout the woods at all hours of day and night, and she was a photographer, drooping about with her hair in her eyes. He was stocky and she was willowy. Otto called them the Rock and the Reed. We used to take visitors to the outskirts of the artists’ terrain to see the Rock’s work. It was worth the walk to see the faces carved into the clay banks of the stream, or the huge mobiles made of leaves and horsehair. Some visitors murmured about scribbles on water when they saw the sculptor’s work, others said he must be a maniac. Once, when Otto and I took my father on this walk, the Rock saw us photographing a pile of leaves arranged in a spiral. He rushed towards us, shouting, not unlike a short polar bear with his shaggy chest and bristling white head.
    â€œThe Rock is drunk,” Otto said, turning away. My father, on the other hand, tapped his pipe out on a tree and refilled it, saying, “Speak of trolls and they rustle in the hallway.”
    Sheltered by the low eaves, there is less snow up here on the boardwalk that joins the assorted cabins and studios together. There’s a banging sound coming from the summer kitchen. Perhaps it’s squatters. The artists won’t mind squatters. They share everything. I can see from here that the storm door has been wedged open by a drift. I might be offered a hot drink.
We might have a talk about my Baba Yaga problems. Squatters know a lot about society, being in it and out of it at the same time. This is snooping, Freya, it will gain you nothing, peering in at the empty easel, the jar of cobwebbed brushes: At every doorway, ere one enters, one should spy round.
    I’ll just trot along and have a look.
    Many summers ago a new dog took off on us, spooked by the unfamiliar give and snap of the forest floor. Otto and I wandered the woods all afternoon whistling and calling. Eventually we arrived here at the colony. We heard raised voices inside the summer kitchen, and the heavy groan of female exasperation. And then the avocado shot out the door, powering into the sunlit grove.
    How richly endowed with feeling, how proper it seemed to me at that moment, to hurl avocados in times of passion and of rage. The sunlight descended through the canopy of trees in blue yellow shafts, illuminating the bright thistledown of the Rock’s hair where he stood blocking the doorway. She meant to get him, the throw was hard, but