Print Edition. Electronic edition published by RainWood Press 2015. The Adventures of Dorea Tress Copyright © 2015 by Rhea Rose.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction.
Cover:
Illustration, ‘Sinister’ © Chris Harvey at Shutterstock
Excerpt Illustration for The Wall, ‘Woods’ © Ann Mei at iStock
Cover designs by RainWood Press
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Table of Contents
Beginning
Middle
End
Excerpt of The Wall
The Adventures of Dorea Tress
by
Rhea Rose
I was only a child when baby bear bit me. That’s the part of the story they never tell. He bit me right on the knuckle, tore my delicate flesh clean away as if it were pale tissue, exposing the white pearly bone beneath. That bite hurt like a hundred hell fires, and I bled for days from that wound. Back then I was a star, a golden child on a movie set, I ran from the film shoot into the dark, green woods and got lost.
It took the searchers three days to find me curled up in the roots of a large tree. They had to enlist an old Salish chief to track me. Ricky Joe was an elder, a chief and a shaman, a rare combination and he’d grown up in this area where the woods and river banks were riddled with trails. He’d told the reporters that he could find a yellow haired fish in a dark, green sea, but he would have to use magic.
And he did.
Legend has it that an ancient Salish family had once lived in these woods, a mother and father, two daughters and a small son. The youngest daughter often misbehaved and played bad tricks on her sister and brother. Over time her misbehaviour escalated. Her parents tried to punish her misdeeds in the hope that she would learn to respect her family, instead she ate her little brother. She tried to eat her sister but only managed to bite her. She ate her mother and then began to eat the animals in the woods. Her father took her sister away and abandoned Little-Daughter to the forest.
I remember the day Ricky Joe found me. His face appeared from the tangle of sticks and leaves in front of me, floated in toward me like a large, papery leaf, fallen from a tree. His silver white hair hung from his shoulders like strands of white shoelaces, shining in the little spots of sunlight between the trees. His teeth where perfect, a mouth full of little white beach shells, and he smiled down at me and said, “Come out little yellow hair. These woods aren’t friendly. This tree has been kind, but soon its roots won’t let you go.” He gave me his hand, and it was leathery, big and warm. “Take my paw,” he said, laughing, “And don’t bite me.” He pulled me gently from the roots. He told me he was over a hundred years old as he carried me down the trail. He called me Little-Daughter.
****
After awhile I was sent to see Dr. Bruno. My therapist.
Dr. Bruno says that Ricky Joe never really existed, that I’d made it all up, and that I hadn’t run very far that fateful day before one of the movie people found me and took me to the hospital. Dr. Bruno says the reason I continue to run the same trail so many years later is because I was forever-after traumatized.
Against the advice of my therapist I was going for a little run in the woods to alleviate my anxiety. Having run this route often, I knew all the twists and turns on the path, all the rocks and roots to avoid. I could have run that path through the woods with my eyes closed. The scents on the air, the twilight, the dry sandy earth beneath my feet, and the smell of a long dead rabbit, rank and bloated, filled my nostrils. I love to run barefoot with my yellow hair streaming behind me.
And come to think of it maybe my eyes were closed when I ran into Christopher.
I’m sure Dr. Bruno would nod wisely and agree when I say I fell over this guy and not for this guy. I literally ran him down and injured his ankle. When we crashed, we rolled all tangled together down the path.
“I’m so sorry,” I apologized over and over. I was on top of him and staring down into his blue but terrified eyes.”
“I’ve been lost for hours out here,” he said, clearly shaken.
I tried my cell phone.
“There’s no signal up here,” I told him. I examined his ankle. I noticed several sharp gashes. They looked like bites. He grabbed my arm for support and pulled himself up to sit.
He whispered. “I don’t wish to alarm you,” he said, glancing nervously past me and over my shoulder. “These woods are strange. I heard something. I mean – I heard – some thing.”
“A bear?” I asked.
He nodded. “Y-y-yes. I mean, I think it was – a bear. I hope it was and not something else. I mean. I think it was. There. Right there in that bush.”
I twisted my head awkwardly around, then back the other way. “I don’t hear it. Did you smell him? They smell like unwashed laundry, but worse. They just want the berries.” I rattled on and on about all the bear facts I knew, until finally, to shut myself up, I picked a nearby huckleberry and ate it. I picked one for the injured man and offered it to him. He refused. Looking closely at him I saw he was very young, maybe twenty, maybe still a teen. His fair-haired looks gave him a boyish appearance, like my younger brother if I’d had one.
“Were you bitten by anything?” I asked.
“No. No.”
I tried again to see the marks on his leg, but he wouldn’t let me look. “What’s your name?”
“Christopher.” He held out his hand. I shook it, sweaty palm and all.
“My name is --” I hesitated then. In my head I heard Dr. Bruno’s voice, “You are Dorea. Dorea Tress.”
“I’m Dorea.”
“You don’t seem very sure about that,” Christopher said.
“My parents never called me by that name.”
“Oh?”
“They called me – Little-Daughter.”
He laughed. “Oh, well, nice to meet you Dorea. Do you come here often – Dorea?”
I nodded. “Yup. This is my running trail.”
“A bit secluded isn’t it? I mean for a girl, alone in a hundred acres of woods.”
“That’s the way I like it.” I smelled the blood on his leg. I reached for my water bottle. I wanted to wash the wound and get a better look at the injury. I pulled out the rag I carried in my running pouch, squirted the cloth with water and gently began to wipe away the blood. I saw a protrusion pushing his skin out.
“Ooouch!”
“I hate to say it but I think it’s broken, Christopher.”