out.'
'I'm not scared,' Benny said.
'No arguments.'
With a sigh, Benny opened his door. When he, Julie, and Karen were outside the car, Scott unbuckled his seat belt. The trio walked ahead of him, Karen nodding and speaking to the man behind the wheel. At the rear of the camper, they stopped and turned around to watch. Karen straddled the road's edge, her eyes fixed on his right front tire. Her lips were drawn back in a grimace. She wiped her hands on the sides of her corduroy shorts.
This must be really bad for her, Scott thought as he inched forward. Karen knows no one's immune to an accident. She'd barely escaped death in a car crash three years before, and her fiance had been killed.
With the fingers of his left hand curled around the door lever, he steered alongside the camper. He watched its gleaming side as he slid past it, no more than an inch away. If the car should start to tip, he realized, he wouldn't be able to get his door open.
Not at first anyway. He might find an instant, though, just before the car slipped over the edge.
He glanced at Karen. Her hand was covering her mouth. Benny looked relaxed. Julie was squatting down, hands on knees, staring at the tire.
Ice fishing when he was a kid, Scott drove out on the frozen Saint Lawrence River with his father. Sometimes, the ice creaked and groaned under the weight of the pickup truck. They always kept their doors open for quick escapes. Everyone did, driving on the river. Everyone but fools.
He wished he had his door open now. A little precaution like that could save a man's life.
The front of his car was even with the rear of the camper. He fought an urge to speed up, and kept to a steady crawl until he cleared the vehicle. Then he swung to the left and stopped in the road's center.
Benny climbed in first. 'Boy, Dad, that was really close.'
'A piece of cake,' he said, and backhanded the sweat off his upper lip.
'Hope we don't have to go through
Karen slumped in the passenger seat with her knees against the dash. She stared straight ahead. Her lips were a tight line.
Reaching out, Scott rubbed the side of her neck. 'You okay?'
'I guess,' she muttered.
After another traverse, the road curved around the mountainside to a high, wooded valley. A weathered sign, caught in a patch of sunlight, read BLACK BUTTE RANGER STATION, 6 MI.
The forest, pressing in close on both sides of the unpaved road, opened up. Karen saw two cars ahead, parked under trees. One, a dusty Mazda resting at a rakish angle, had a rock at the base of each rear tire to keep it from rolling.
'Guess we beat them to it,' Scott said. 'What do they drive?' Karen asked. 'Probably the Plymouth station wagon.' Karen imagined a station wagon trying to squeeze past the RV on the thin strand of road along the mountain slope, and her stomach tightened.
Scott swung off to the left. He pulled forward slowly, the tires crunching over fallen limbs and pinecones. He parked with the bumper close to an aspen, and shut off the engine. 'Let's leave everything here for now, and check out the ranger station. We can pick up our fire permit while we're waiting.'
They climbed out of the car. After the air conditioning, the heat outside felt stifling to Karen. But the air smelled sweet, and a soft breeze stirred the trees. She took a deep breath. She stretched, arching her stiff back, sighing with pleasure as her muscles strained. Then she followed Benny around the rear of the car, the thick mat of leaves and pine needles springy under her boots. 'This is really wonderful,' she said, joining Scott and Julie.
'Warm,' Scott said. He took off his flannel shirt, rolled it up, and tossed it into the trunk. His T-shirt was tight across his chest, with a slight rip at the shoulder seam. 'Well, let's see if we can scout up a ranger.'
They walked alongside the tire tracks toward a small log cabin in the clearing ahead. A Jeep was parked close to the cabin's side. The snort of a horse drew Karen's eyes to a corral at the left, where a man in a uniform was currying a brown stallion. 'That's probably the ranger,' she said.
They walked toward the corral. The man saw them and waved. He slapped the horse's haunch, tossed aside the curry brush, and climbed over the fence. 'Hello there,' he called in an eager voice. 'Hope I didn't keep you waiting. I was out on the trails, just got back.'
'No,' Scott said, 'we just arrived ourselves.'
'Well, that's good.' He smiled at Karen and Julie, winked at Benny. He looked to be barely twenty, with short blond hair and cheerful eyes. Though he wore a badge on his uniform shirt, he was unarmed and had a casual manner that put Karen at ease. 'Come on over to the office,' he said. 'We'll take care of your wilderness permit and get you on your way.'
They followed him toward the cabin.
'Where you folks from?' he asked.
'Los Angeles,' Scott told him.
'Dad's a pilot,' Benny said, looking proud.
'Oh? What do you fly?'
'L1011s, mostly.'
'No fooling? The big birds. My old man's a crop duster. He flies a replica of an old Fokker DR-1. The triplane?'
'Sure. Richthofen. The Flying Circus.'
'Yeah. My old man calls himself the Green Baron. He works out of Bakersfield.'
'Sometimes I wish I had three wings,' Scott said, stepping onto the porch after him.
'All that airfoil, he can glide for miles. Sometimes has to.'
They entered the dim, shadowy cabin. The young man stepped behind a counter near the door. On the wall was a huge topographical map of the area. A poster of Smokey the Bear hung over a two-way radio. Benny nudged Karen's arm, and pointed to a rifle rack on the wall across from them.
'Whereabouts are you heading?' the ranger asked.
'We're hoping to make it over to the Triangle Lakes area.'
'Some good fishing up there. Here's an
'We'll be meeting some friends. They've got topogs of the area.'
'Fine. This one'll give you a nice overview, but it's weak on detail. You've got a nasty ridge here, for instance.' He tapped his ballpoint against a bare spot on the map. 'Looks like an easy jaunt from Wilson to Round, but don't you believe it. It'd take an hour of hard climbing. The topogs'll take care of that for you.'
He tapped the counter three inches from the bottom edge of the map. 'Okay. You're about here. You'll want to take the Juniper Lake trail. It's two miles to Juniper.' As he scribbled directions on an edge of the map, he said, 'That'd be a fine place to spend the night. Some nice campsites all around it. When you head out of there, you just follow the trail you came in on. It branches out at the head of the lake, and there's a marker there for Triangle Lakes. You just stay on it, all the way. Here's where it comes onto the map.' He drew a line along the trail. He circled a lake. 'This is Tully. It's beautiful, has a real nice waterfall at the western end. Just a couple of miles farther, you've got Lake Parker. They're a good day's hike from Juniper. I'd stick to one or the other if I were you. Once you leave Parker behind, you've got Carver Pass to look forward to. You'll want to be fresh when you tackle that. It's a good three- or four-hour climb, takes you up to eleven thousand feet.'
'Yuck,' said Julie.
The ranger grinned at her. 'About halfway up, if you're like most folks, you'll start wishing you were back home watching a ball game.' He marked zigzags on the map. 'You've got switchbacks you think'll never quit.'
'I'm already exhausted,' Karen said, 'just hearing about it.'
'A great view from the top,' he told her. 'And a good, cool wind.' He lowered his eyes to the map. 'Right here, on the down side, you'll run into the Mesquite Lakes. I don't recommend you bother with those. You'll know
