She shook her head.
"I have seen most of the interior of the house. I have sat on the porch and drank tea and stared at these wonderful mountains that stick up everywhere, I have walked about on this lovely turf, in these grounds that are like an English park—and marveled how it had been made so beautiful. But I haven't seen the family boneyard. Is that literal?"
The boy nodded.
"There have been quite a few of us born here at one time and another," he said in his pleasant low-toned voice, "and buried here finally. Come and I'll show you, Miss Wall."
"My name's Laska," she smiled at him.
"All right then, Laska," he agreed. "Odd name. I like the sound."
"R.S.N. Eighteen hundred and nine. Hoc saxum posuit. I've forgotten all my Latin, Rod."
"He placed this stone," Rod translated. "Come on. I'll show you where the old chap's buried and tell you something about him."
Big Dent passes on map and chart for an island, by a geographical laxity. But it is an island only for brief moments at an extremely high tide. Otherwise it is a peninsular out-thrust, that helps to choke the Euclataw Passage.
Big Dent was a mile wide and twice as long. From side to side and from end to end it stood clothed in its ancient garment, the forest. Everywhere lifted enormous firs in whose plumy crests had sighed the winds that blew the first Norquay's trading vessel down Cardero Channel, cedars that were lusty when Columbus crossed the Western Ocean. For profit there had never been ax laid to tree on that twelve hundred acres. On its northern extremity Big Dent remained the natural forest of the region, a hushed jungle of devil's club, salal brush, ferns that grew man-high, salmonberry, branchy dogwood, vine maple. Out of this lesser growth the great trees rose in their majesty, silent, immobile, brooding. The sun blazed on their lofty heads. About their boles were silence and shade, a coolness at midday heat, the commingled smells of moist, fecund earth and rotting wood.