Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(8)

His pockets were empty. He thought about his shirt, but it was short-sleeved, probably not long enough. He could take off his boots and use the laces. That seemed like a bad idea.

He swung back and forth, finding the end of the arc, thinking. Searching for an idea better than the one that had come to mind. But he never found one.

It was hard to take off his pants while swinging atop a redwood sapling.

But not impossible.

And as it turned out, they were just long enough.

They were still wet from the rain, which made them heavier.

His pantleg wrapped around the rope on the third try.

He reeled them back in, towing the rope as the reverse pendulum yanked him in the opposite direction. The rope was just long enough that it traversed the arc without shortening enough to steal his pants.

Peter was glad of that.

He didn’t want to climb back down the tree in his underwear.

Once he had the rope in his hand, he gave it a tug. It felt solid. Close up, it didn’t look more than a few years old. The lichen would grow fast in this cloud forest.

He put some weight on it. He felt no real give, just the normal spring of a fixed rope. From the thickness of it, Peter guessed it was designed to hold considerably more than he weighed. Which meant Peter had some margin of error.

The rope was so long that he couldn’t see where it ended. Once he had it in his hand, it was hard to resist. The push of the static, the pull of the sun. Just one thing to do first.

He tied the loop loosely over a branch and put his pants back on.

? ? ?

UP HE WENT, hand over hand, swinging at the bottom of a new pendulum, wrapping his legs to help his stability. His arms were strong from bouldering. The good news was that he was warm, his clothes were drying in the mountain breeze, and the endorphins from the exercise damped down the static.

The bad news was that the rope went up for a very long way. He couldn’t see the end. Its green color combined with the dim filtered light to make the rope seem to hover in space above him, then disappear.

After thirty or forty feet of climbing, the rope rose past a small branch, just big enough to support his weight, and he could rest. If he’d had a harness and ascenders, this would have been easier. But he didn’t, so he just shook out his arms and flexed his hands and looked around in silent awe at the sheer abundance of life. He could see other trees around him, rising close enough that their branches caught all available light, only glimmers of sun peeking through. Their bark was rust-red, thick and striated, sometimes spiraled, with crevices deep enough to use as climbing holds if needed.

The rope kept threading higher.

Then up again, hand over hand through the mist to the next limb, and the next. It was hard work. His arms ached. Without the rest stops, he almost certainly would have fallen.

As he climbed, he thought about who might have put this rope here, and why. The rope would be nearly invisible from the ground, even if you knew to look for it.

At two hundred feet up, the ground had vanished in the fog. The wind whispered through the soft needles, the evergreen smell grew stronger, and the light grew brighter. The sense of something opening above him was powerful. His arms complained loudly, and his hands were sore. But the branches were more numerous now. He could make his way without the rope if he had to. Still he kept following the slim green line, up and up. He wanted to know why someone had been in this tree. Research? Some tree hugger’s dream house? If so, it was a lot of work to get the groceries home.

He was expecting the end of the rope before he came to it, tied off above a stout branch in a beautiful bowline, the first knot Peter had learned as a boy. The branches were closer together now. Peter could monkey up easily from here. Up to the sunlight.

He looked to plan his route and saw a short piece of red rope tied loosely around a limb a dozen yards away. Beyond that, another. Someone had already marked the path. Peter followed. Where the next branch was too far for an easy reach, the tree explorer had thoughtfully provided a green rope to ease the way.

Peter was starting to like this guy.

Whoever the hell he was.

? ? ?

HE CAME TO A PLACE where the thick main trunk ended in a wide blackened stub. It looked like the tree had been struck by lightning, probably many years ago. Around the splintered stub, a half-dozen mini-trunks had sprouted and grown upward seeking the sun, the largest of them two feet in diameter and rising another forty or fifty feet. Each mini-trunk would be a giant in the third-growth Wisconsin forest where Peter grew up. He was having trouble wrapping his mind around the scale of the redwoods.

Another red rope marker, and another. Green travel ropes hung in the difficult places. Sunlight now came through in larger patches, but it was hard to find a logic to the trunks and limbs. There were entire suburbs in this giant tree, each a different tangle, bower, or thicket. It would be easy to get lost. Then he realized that he was seeing more than one tree, that he was in a ring of trees whose main trunks were no more than ten or twelve feet apart.

Peter climbed toward the sun.

It occurred to him to announce himself. “Hello,” he called out. “Is anyone here?” If the tree explorer was any kind of a nutcase, Peter didn’t want to surprise him. “Hello? Anyone?”

There was no answer but the wind in the branches.

The red rope markers led him in a circuitous path. Around another blackened area, through several dense tangles where branches grew in every direction, but always upward, toward the sun.