off into the dark and dripping forest.
The campground was closed for the winter, and the campsites were all empty. Small wonder. Who'd be out in weather like this? It was barely light. The only sounds were the pattering of the rain on the hood of his poncho, and the dripping of rain from the limbs of the trees, and the trickling of rain down the runnels at the edges of the gravel paths. For a man who had always liked rain, Gideon found the scene dispiritingly gloomy and forlorn. Already he regretted his decision not to bring a stove. A hot cup of coffee would have gone a long way to brighten things.
Finding the trailhead took more time than he expected. Only after an hour's prowling of the barren campground, when he was beginning to fear he wouldn't find it—or to hope he wouldn't; he wasn't so sure which—did he come upon it, not in the campground itself, but a hundred feet back down the road. It was an unmarked, decayed trail, corroded and rutted by six seasons of hundred-forty-five-inch rains, obliterated in places by robust intrusions of ferns, bead-ruby, and cloverlike oxalis. Still, it looked passable and easy enough to follow. The towering green walls of moss-draped cedar and spruce that hemmed it in would make it difficult to lose, even where it was overrun with smaller plants.
He struck out determined to walk off the slightly down-at-the-mouth feelings he'd awakened with, and, with his usual resilience, soon did so. Potholes and obstructive vegetation notwithstanding, he quickly settled into an easy stride and found himself humming and thinking with pleasure about meeting the Indians, talking with them, befriending them. The walking warmed him, and the cool rain sliding down his face was fresh, and sweet-tasting when it ran into his mouth. Except for his face and hands, he was as dry as toast.
After a couple of miles the trail began to climb gently. Must be skirting the southern flank of Finley Peak, Gideon thought sagely, trailwise and proficient in the ways of contour maps and rain forests. Eyes to the uneven path, he noticed that the air had lost its green, underwater cast, and he looked up to see that the trees had thinned. He was indeed on the flank of a mountain, with a clear, stupendous view to his left.
He found a relatively dry spot under a mossy rock overhang and sat down to look at the scene before him. It was like a photograph taken from a small airplane, the opening picture of a jungly
Below him lay the Quinault Valley, an endless, wet, billowing blue-green carpet, humped and bulging in places, like a stupendous, lumpy mattress tossed carelessly down between the mountain ranges. Here and there the Quinault River glinted dully through the green. Off to the west a flat, crescent-shaped segment of Lake Quinault could be seen, mirroring the sky's gray, but pinkly tinged and luminous, like a disc of abalone shell.
Gideon suddenly realized he was hungry; all he'd eaten was the slice of toast before dawn. He opened a can of sardines in olive oil, found them delicious, and had another with a few slices of bread and some water from a stream that gushed down the rock a few feet away.
When he was done he got out the map and compared it to the terrain, nodding complacently to himself. The trail wasn't on the map, of course, but he knew approximately where it should be, and he thought he knew just where he was. The mountains directly across the valley had to be Colonel Bob and Mount O'Neil. Off ahead five or six miles the southeast shoulder of Finley Peak edged gracefully into the rain forest, just as the contour lines said it did. On the other side of that, according to the map, in the little canyon between it and Matheny Ridge, ran Finley Creek, and there the Yahi would be. It didn't look difficult to get to. With mountains as reference points on either side, he'd be able to find it easily, even if the trail petered out, which it gave no sign of doing.
Revivified, content, and feeling very much the outdoorsman—city person, indeed!—he started confidently out once more.
Twenty minutes later he was as lost as he'd ever been in his life. The trouble was that the trail descended at once, back into the rain forest, and there it
When he finally realized that he was no longer on the trail, he looked up to find his mountain reference points. All he could see were trees: massive trunks of Sitka spruce, like monstrous elephant legs; slim, soaring hemlock; rough-barked fir. No mountains, no reference points, not even any sky.
Gideon's first reaction was mild amusement, removed and tolerant, a sort of “Oho, it looks as if the Great White Hunter isn't the woodsman he thought he was.” Then he turned very slowly in a complete circle, searching for anything that might help him find the trail. There was nothing. More unsettling, he wasn't certain exactly when he'd turned all the way around; he was no longer sure which way he'd been heading, and he didn't know which way he'd come.
That shook him a little, and he felt a prickle of uneasiness. The rain was falling more heavily now, and the enormous folds of club moss hanging from the branches were not translucent archways but thick, sodden draperies, slimy and spinachlike. A green, swampy mist, thickening perceptibly, swirled over the ground, theatrical and sinister. That was a good description of the whole damn rain forest, he thought: ominous and unreal. No, he said to himself, that was no frame of mind to get into. Positive thinking was in order.
All right. Think positively. He couldn't have been off the trail more than a few minutes, so it was nearby. He would walk in an expanding spiral, keeping the big cedar with the droopy branch as the central point.
To his astonishment, as soon as he took his eyes off the cedar he lost it. It vanished, became exactly like a hundred others. And when he instinctively spun around to look for it, he once more lost his sense of direction; he couldn't tell which way it lay.
The uneasy prickle became a stabbing worry. This was not his element; he was an intruder, a foreigner who didn't know the rules. He wiped the rain from his streaming face. “The air is made of water,” the little boy Denga had said. It seemed like it, all right. Hard to see through, difficult to breathe, confining, constraining, restricting...
Positive thinking. If the spirals wouldn't work, he would try another tack. He would once again take a big tree as a point of reference—and learn what it looked like this time. He chose a spruce, fixing in his mind's eye the configuration of a convoluted set of limbs high up on the trunk and the big, ragged tear in the club moss that hung from them. Good. Now he would choose as a landmark another large tree a hundred and fifty feet away, the absolute limit of his vision about seventy-five feet above the ground. (At ground level, the undergrowth made it much less.) He would walk toward the tree in as straight a line as he could, continually checking back over his shoulder for his home spruce. If he did not find the trail by the time he reached the tree, he would go back to the spruce, choose another landmark tree down a line at right angles to the first one, and so on. With four such explorations he would be bound to cross the trail if it was within a ninety-thousand-square-foot area...unless, of course, the trail curved, which he wouldn't think about just yet. If all of this didn't work, he could expand the area, using the landmark trees as new focal points.
What he didn't anticipate was the number of trails—elk trails perhaps, or deer, or maybe Yahi, for all he knew. Some seemed to be natural, meandering channels through the undergrowth. He followed five false leads, one of them for a quarter of a mile, before he stumbled onto the one he was looking for, only fifteen feet from where he'd
