Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(7)

The night seemed to last a long time.

He spent the time awake remembering the previous winter, spent camping alone in the Utah desert. But the arid emptiness had left him with a longing for tall trees, so he made his way through the beautiful emptiness of Nevada to California’s thirsty, fertile central valley and the overdeveloped mess of the northern Bay Area. It made him think, as he often did, that the world would be better off without so many people in it.

He’d parked his pickup in the driveway of a fellow Marine in Clearlake, California, and walked through housing tracts and mini-malls and vineyards and cow pastures to the southern end of the Mendocino National Forest, where he headed north. Sometimes he hiked on established routes, sometimes on game trails, sometimes wayfinding the forested ridges, trying to get above the rain and the fog and into the sun. He’d come too early in the year for summer’s blue skies, but he didn’t want the woods all cluttered up with people.

Instead he’d found a very large bear.

When it became light enough to see the ground, he looked down and considered his options. His gear was wrecked, his food supplies gone. Mr. Griz still down there, bigger than ever. Still snoring.

A cup of coffee would be nice, he thought. But not likely.

He was pretty sure his coffee supply was bear food, too.

He looked up. He was astride a sapling in a mature redwood forest. Although he couldn’t see far in the fog, he thought the sapling went up another forty or fifty feet. The mature trees probably went up two or three hundred feet after that.

The rain had stopped sometime in the night, and although the fog was still thick, some quality of the mist had changed. It glowed faintly, green with growth and heady with the oxygen exhaled by giants. He thought maybe the sun had come out, somewhere up there. It turned the forest into something like an ancient cathedral.

He looked down. Mr. Griz, still sleeping. The contents of Peter’s pack destroyed or eaten. The static fizzing and popping in his head. Peter himself cold and wet and tired.

He looked up again. The promise of sunlight, and warmth, and a view.

What, you want to live forever?

He smiled, and began to climb.





2





It was easy work at first, the sapling’s trunk slender enough to put his arms around, branches appearing at regular intervals. Like climbing any tree, only taller.

The grizzly’s bite out of his boot heel didn’t seem to make much difference. The exercise warmed him, and soon he found the trunk narrowing. After a few minutes, he could hold himself in place with one arm, then the crook of his elbow. When he reached the highest place he felt he could stand without damaging the tree, he could encircle the trunk with one hand. The wind blew more strongly at this height. He felt himself swinging slowly from side to side, as if at the top of an inverted pendulum.

His mother had encouraged Peter to memorize poems as a boy. She liked Robert Frost, and Peter learned “Birches” by heart when he was ten. Then he went out into the woods and taught himself to do what the poet had written about, climbing a birch sapling until he could throw his body into the air as the tree bent beneath his weight, swinging him gently to the ground.

A redwood wasn’t a birch. And he was a good sixty or seventy feet in the air. It wouldn’t swing him to the ground.

But there was a branch from another tree not far from this one. A small branch, but a big tree. The trunk was nine or ten feet in diameter, even at this height. And beyond it were other trunks, a cluster of them.

Maybe he could swing himself over. And keep climbing upward.

Out of the static.

Into the sun.

So he rode the inverted pendulum, throwing his weight out at the end of each swing, trying to improve the distance he moved through the sky. It was exhilarating, and he made progress. The arc of his travel got bigger with each swing of the pendulum.

Would the sapling flex enough to get him to a branch on the next tree? If it wouldn’t, was he crazy enough to jump?

He swung back and forth across that arc of sky, a trapeze in a cathedral, his heart outsized in his chest. If the whole thing wasn’t so gorgeous, it would be ridiculous.

He wanted to jump. He wanted to get up into the sunshine. He calculated the distances, how far he could leap, how much farther the momentum of his swing would carry him. How fast he might fall. What would happen if he missed.

But he never found out if he was crazy enough to jump.

Because as he got closer to the big tree, he saw something hanging down from it.

A rope.

A thick green rope, a rock-climber’s rope.

What the hell was that doing here? The bottom end hung down ten feet below him, with a big loop tied in the end. Its upper end vanished into the dim light of the high branches.

? ? ?

HE KEPT THROWING HIS BODY outward at the end of each arc of the reverse pendulum. The arc grew, but not quite enough for him to reach out and grab the green rope.

Now he didn’t want to jump. He didn’t know if the green rope was even attached to anything. It looked older, faded, with patches of lichen growing on it. It might have rotted up there in the sun and rain. Maybe nothing but inertia held it there.

What he wanted was another length of line, something weighted. Something he could throw out to capture the climber’s rope and pull it back to him. If Mr. Griz hadn’t chewed up Peter’s rope, it would have worked nicely. But without Mr. Griz, Peter would be miles farther down the trail.