LITMIR.BIZ

      Emily Carr’s painting of D’Sonoqua, wild woman of the

       woods. It was the first time Carr met this supernatural

       figure, towering above stinging nettles in the abandoned

       village of Gwa’yasdams in northern British Columbia.

      And so she waited, in the mission or perhaps in some native cabin, while the Indian agent went about his business, took his time, almost forgetting about the lone white woman whose luggage consisted mostly of a sketch sack, a blanket roll, and a dog for company.

      Finally, he was ready. The woman lifted her few belongings to her shoulders, called in a soft English accent to the young native girl who would accompany her on the site, and the three of them climbed into his open boat. When they arrived at the deserted village of Gwa’yasdams, it was dusk. The woman and child stood on shore and stared up at the frightening tall figures of totem poles, which leaned forward as if to touch the visitors.

      “There is not a soul here. I will come back for you in two days,” the Indian agent said, and left them alone. As his boat rounded the shoulder of the bay and disappeared, the little girl burst into tears. “I’m ’fraid,” she said.

      The woman led the way up a narrow path overgrown with stinging nettles. It was dark when they reached the empty mission house. As the door creaked open, they heard the scamper of rats. The woman tried to make them comfortable by building a fire, perhaps to cook some food, but the firewood was wet and she couldn’t make the stove work. She had no candles, so they ate her canned food in darkness, then laid their blankets on the floor and slept.

      The next morning the air was a curtain of dampness. When the woman followed the plank walk, she had to cut through stinging nettles that reached over her head. Her thick clothes and long skirt and stockings protected her a little, but nettles bit at her face and hands. Slime from thick yellow slugs coated the wet wood under her feet. Suddenly, with a cry, she fell. When Emily Carr looked up, an immense wooden figure loomed over her.

      The creature had been carved from a huge red cedar tree. She was so tall, the nettles barely reached her knees. Her long arms stretched wide as if about to grab someone. But it was her face that seized Emily’s attention.

      Her eyes were two dark sockets outlined in dazzling white under fierce, black eyebrows. Emily felt as if at any minute the cry of the tree’s heart might fly out from the protruding lips that framed her open mouth. At the ends of two black hands, the figure’s fingertips were painted ghostly white. Round ears jutted from her head as if to miss nothing, and rain and mist put a slick gloss on the red of her body, arms, and thighs.

      Emily pushed through to the bluff so she could look back and see all of the creature. She sketched, and watched, for a long, long time – until a thick mist moved in off the sea and the figure disappeared.

      “Who is that image?” she asked the little native girl. She could see the child knew what she was speaking of, but the girl said, “Which image?”

      “The terrible one, out there on the bluff.”

      “I dunno,” the girl lied.

      All that night, as the child slept, Emily sat at the open window of the mission house and listened to the foreign sounds outside their thin shelter: the cries of an abandoned dog, the crash of breakers, and the groaning, living sounds of huge trees around her. She was ¹