The Dark Place (21 page)

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 begun. It had taken him an hour and a half.

Humbled and much more observant now, he began walking again, carefully following the trail. After an hour it began to climb again. He was beginning to recover some of his confidence when he was stopped short by the opening up of a long view over the valley toward Mount O’Neil and Colonel Bob—the same view he’d seen before. Exactly. At first nothing registered but puzzlement. Could it be possible that he was on a loop trail? That he had been walking in a circle? It must be; there was the rocky overhang under which he’d had the sardines.

When the truth hit him he came near to sitting down in the rain and crying. He had, of course, been simply and stupidly walking in the wrong direction since he’d rediscovered the trail. He’d gone back the way he’d come and never even suspected it! On second thought he did sit down, his back against the rock wall. He sat there awhile, slumped over, wet, and miserable. The wind had sharpened so that the overhang was little protection. The temperature was dropping, too. His hands were red and raw, and from the feel of it, so was his face.

There was now no chance that he’d reach Finley Creek in time to find and talk with the Yahi today. He’d have to camp out in this cold and funereal jungle—and he wasn’t going to get much coziness from his five-dollar plastic tent or much warmth from his butane lighter. Certainly, he wasn’t going to be able to ignite any of the ubiquitous but waterlogged deadwood of the forest floor. It might make more sense to walk back to his car right now—it was less than two hours away, notwithstanding the five hours he’d been bumbling through the rain forest—and drive off to have a decent dinner somewhere, then find a warm bed someplace, and return in the morning, fresh and —

He cut off the thought with a shake of his head and hauled himself to his feet. He knew very well where his mind was leading him: A good dinner somewhere meant the Lake Quinault Lodge, and a warm bed someplace was Julie’s. No, he was more resolute than that, or more stubborn. He wasn’t going to melt in the rain, goddamn it, and there was plenty of daylight left in which to make more progress. He adjusted the uncomfortable pack and strode firmly back down the hill. He wasn’t ready to admit he was done in yet, not by a long shot.

Three hours later, dispirited and weary, he was ready to admit it. A choppy, erratic wind drove the rain needlelike into his face, stinging his cheeks and eyes, and sometimes even streaming upward into his nostrils to make him cough and sputter. His trousers, poorly protected by the flapping poncho, were soaked, and the waterproofing seemed to be wearing off his shoes. The rough up-and-down trail had long ago slowed his stride to a foot-dragging, mindless trudge.

When he found himself under a little open sky, he stopped and looked gratefully at it. It was malevolent and yellowish-gray, but anything was better than that tossing, dipping roof of solid green. Even the rain didn’t seem so bad here, falling more gently, in fat, soft blobs. He was somewhere along Big Creek, still probably a good four miles from Finley Creek, and, he thought dully, it seemed a good place to stop for the day. He found a flat, open space ten or fifteen feet off the path, still with a view of the sky, but surrounded by thick brush and trees that blocked the wind and offered a little protection, more psychological than real, against the rain.

For a few minutes he simply stood there with his eyes closed, catching his breath, thoroughly sick of the rain forest and the endless rain; sick even of the Yahi, though he had yet to meet them. He had, for that matter, yet to confirm their existence. How, he wondered muzzily, had he come to be here? What impossible chain of events had brought a quiet, comfort-loving professor to stand alone in gray-green mist, drenched and shivering, deep in the only damn jungle in the Northern Hemisphere?

Swaying slightly, with the rain pelting his eyelids and thrumming on his poncho, Gideon waited for sensible answers which didn’t come. The hell with it, he thought stolidly, I’m here and I’ll see it through. Not that he had a choice; he didn’t have the energy to make the long walk back to the car.

By shrugging and twisting, he moved the pack around to his chest, keeping the pack under the poncho to protect it from the rain, and managed to dig out the ridiculously unsubstantial-looking tube tent, packed flat in a square not much bigger than a handkerchief. The principle was simple, the salesman had told him: Lay the blue plastic cylinder on the ground, tie ropes to the grommets at each end, tie the other ends of the ropes to supports, and presto, instant tent.

He had neglected to bring a ground cloth, but the spongy forest duff drained well and kept the ground from being muddy. Thank God for small favors. He laid out the tent, ran ropes through the grommets, and found a low, stubby tree limb to serve as one of the anchors. It was massive and sturdy-looking, but when he pulled tentatively on it, it squashed like papier-mache, oozing water between his fingers and dropping in pulpy fragments to the dark forest floor.

This bothered Gideon more than it should have. The entire rain forest seemed suddenly more deceitful, more untrustworthy. He looked around him, noticing for the first time that he had chosen to spend the night in an area in which most of the trees had long ago sprung from what Julie had called nurse logs. These were great, fallen trunks on which seedlings had taken purchase, gradually straddling them with roots that ran down to the ground. Eventually the original trunks had rotted away, leaving the roots straddling nothing but air. The effect was grotesque. Gideon felt as if he were surrounded by the mighty hands of giants, their splayed, gnarled fingers gripping the ground, their powerful forearm-trunks rising to the forest roof.

Now he was getting silly, and he certainly wasn’t going to allow himself to be spooked by trees. He tied the two rope ends around a couple of young maple trunks, testing them first to see if they were solid. The tent now looked something like a tent, even if it smelled like a brand-new beach ball. The plastic stench would be overpowering once he tied the ends against the rain.

Which he couldn’t do, he realized with a heart that sank a little more with each passing, rain-soaked minute. He hadn’t brought any extra rope. Uncharitably, he cursed the salesman for not reminding him. He laid his sleeping bag, which even under the poncho had somehow gotten damp, inside the tent and used twigs to hold together the three grommets at each end, but he could see it wasn’t going to work. The sleeping bag would be drenched. Already little puddles were forming on the plastic floor of the tent.

What a night this was going to be, but he was too tired and hungry to think much about it; he would eat something and then try to sleep, even if he had to do it sitting up in his poncho against a tree.

When he got out his plastic bag of food, he found that the bread was thoroughly soaked, more like a wet mush than bread at all, and that the grapes weren’t there; he had apparently left them when he’d stopped to eat that morning.

That did not leave much of a dinner menu:
M’sieu
would like the
sardines a la sauce moutarde? Non?
Perhaps then the
sardines a la sauce de tomates?
He opened a can with the mustard and glowered unenthusiastically at the contents. They were very large sardines, only three to a tin, and they looked more like cold, dead fish than sardines had a right to do.

Huddled over the can in the rainy, deepening darkness, Gideon couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt so extravagantly glum. He smiled unconvincingly; this would no doubt be most amusing told over a steak dinner in a warm, dry restaurant. But it didn’t seem funny now, he thought, looking at the spreading water in his sleeping bag and at his raw, wet hands. And those oily fish.

He couldn’t locate the plastic fork he’d brought, but he managed to find a pointed, fairly solid sliver of wood to serve as a knife. He steeled himself to impale one of the soft, grublike bodies in the can. Ah, well…

He stiffened, suddenly alert, the back of his neck tingling. There had been a sound, audible over the unvarying, sharp rattling of the rain. A rotten branch breaking under the weight of accumulated water? A large bird startled into flight…but by what?

It came again; a scuffling sound, and then again; someone or something moving, brushing against the foliage. He jumped to his feet and jerked down the hood of his poncho to listen. The sound had come from the direction of the path; he was fairly certain of that. He stood staring, blinded by thick, gray cords of rain. He could hear his heart pounding crazily.
"Ya’a hushol!"
he shouted.
"Ai’niza
ma’a wagai!"

The sounds stopped abruptly, then continued more firmly, someone moving toward him. He could hear the squelch of footsteps now. His breath came fast and hard.

Between the huge fronds of a head-high brake fern he caught a brief, startling glimpse of a dark, bundled figure moving purposefully through the underbrush—toward him, he was sure. The figure vanished behind foliage, and Gideon stood staring at the spot where it had been, trying to see through the sheet of water that ran down his face. He stopped his breath, got his feet more firmly under him, tensed the powerful muscles of his arms and shoulders.

A moment later the fronds of a lady fern were abruptly thrust aside. With a violent jerk, Gideon spun toward the motion, crouched and straining, the pointed wood sliver clenched in his hand.

Enveloped in a bulky parka and loaded with a huge pack, Julie walked into the clearing.

"Dr. Oliver, I presume," she said, smiling.

   It took her five minutes to set up the amazingly roomy A-frame tent she’d had in her pack, and another five to rig a rain fly over it. Fifteen minutes after that, a pot of beef stew was bubbling on the tiny Optimus stove. Gideon sat in a warm comer of the tent near the stove, grinning foolishly, content to be out of the rain, and out of his musty poncho, and to watch Julie bustle competently about.

"What was that you were squeaking when I came up?" she said over her shoulder, stirring the stew.

"I wasn’t squeaking, I was speaking Yahi."

"Yahi? Why Yahi? How do you know Yahi?"

He explained while she stirred thoughtfully. "Well, you scared me," she said. "I thought maybe it wasn’t you. I didn’t know you squeaked."

Gideon laughed. "I guess I might have been a little jumpy."

"Yes, maybe just a little. I didn’t know whether you were going to stab me with that twig or hit me with that horrible fish."

Gideon laughed again, beginning to thaw out. "I thought you weren’t supposed to light a stove in a tent."