The Drifter

by Nick Petrie

  It took Peter a few more steps to figure out that he was seeing a bear.

  The trail ran through a deep pocket of old-growth trees in an area too steep for commercial logging. It was mid-March, and Peter assumed the bear was looking for food. There would be grubs under the log, which would provide much-needed protein in that still-lean time of the year. The bear grumbled to itself as it dug into the dirt, sounding a little like Peter’s dad when he cleaned out the back of his truck. The bear was focused on its task, and hadn’t yet noticed the human.

  Peter stopped walking.

  Black bears were plentiful in the wilder pockets of the West, but they were smaller, usually three or four hundred pounds when fully grown. Black bears could do a lot of damage if they felt threatened, but they usually avoided confrontation with humans. Peter had chased black bears out of his campsite by clapping his hands and shouting.

  This was not a black bear.

  This bear was a rich reddish-brown, with a pronounced hump, and very big. A grizzly. At the top of the food chain, grizzlies could be very aggressive, and were known to kill hikers. Clapping his hands wouldn’t discourage the bear. It would be more like a dinner bell, alerting the bear to the possibility of a good meal.

  The most dangerous time to meet a grizzly was in the fall, when they were desperately packing on fat to make it through the winter.

  The second-most dangerous time was spring, with the bear right out of hibernation and extremely hungry. Like now.

  Peter was lean and strong from weeks of backcountry hiking. His clothes were worn thin by rock and brush, the pack cinched tight on his back to make it easier to scramble through the heavy undergrowth. His leather boots had been resoled twice, the padded leather collars patched where mice had nibbled them for the salt while he slept wrapped in his groundcloth.

  He’d walked a lot of miles in those mountains.

  Now he wondered how fast he could run.

  He took a slow step back, trying to be as quiet as possible, then another. Maybe he could disappear in the fog.

  Peter had once met an old-timer who’d called the bears Mr. Griz, as a term of respect. The old man had recited the facts like a litany. Mr. Griz can grow to a thousand pounds or more. Mr. Griz can run forty miles an hour in short bursts. His jaws are strong enough to crush a bowling ball. Mr. Griz eats everything. He will attack a human being if he feels threatened or hungry. Mr. Griz has no natural enemies.

  The bear was still focused on the rotting log. Peter took a third step back, then a fourth. A little faster now.

  Call it a retreat in the face of overwhelming force. No dishonor in that, right? Even for a United States Marine.

  The California grizzly was supposed to be extinct. But this bear looked big, and big males were known to travel long distances in search of mates. He was only sixty miles south of the Oregon border, and in this dark primeval forest, anything seemed possible.

  Five steps, now six. Peter didn’t care how much this particular grizzly weighed, or what he felt like eating. He didn’t want to find out. He was almost back to the bend in the trail. This would be a good story to tell someday.

  Then he felt a slight breeze move the hairs on the back of his neck. The wind, which had been in his face, had shifted.

  He was in trouble.

  Grizzlies have fair eyesight and good hearing, but their sense of smell is superb. And the mountain breeze carried Peter’s weeks-long hiking stink, along with the smell of his supplies, directly to the bear’s brain. The supplies included a delicious trail mix made of cashews and almonds and peanuts and raisins and chocolate chips.

  Much better than grubs under a log.

  The bear’s head popped up with a snort.

  Peter stepped backward a bit faster, feeling the adrenaline sing in his blood, reminding himself of the old-timer’s advice on meeting Mr. Griz.

  You don’t want to appear to be a threat, or to look like food. Running away is a bad idea, because bears can run faster than people. And running away is prey behavior.

  What you were supposed to do, said the old-timer, was drop your pack to give the bear something to investigate, then retreat backward. If the bear charged, curl up into a ball, protecting your head, neck, and face with your arms. You might get mauled, but you’d be less likely to be killed.

  Peter was not exactly the curl-into-a-ball type.

  The bear stood upright on its hind legs, now a good eight or nine feet tall, and sniffed the air like a Silicon Valley sommelier.

  Mmmm. Trail mix.

  Peter took another step back. Then another.

  The bear dropped to all fours and charged.

  Peter shucked his pack and ran like hell.

  —

  He’d grown up with animals. Dogs in the yard, horses in the barn, chickens and cats wherever they felt like going. He’d kind of inherited a big dog the year before, or maybe the dog had inherited him, it wasn’t entirely clear. In the end the dog had found a better home than Peter could provide.

  But he liked animals. Hell, he liked grizzly bears, at least in theory. He certainly liked how it felt to know a big predator was out there. It made him feel more alive.

  The backpack distracted the bear for only a few seconds, barely long enough for Peter to round the corner, find a climbable sapling, and jump up. The bear was right at his heels at the end. Mr. Griz chomped a chunk of rubber from the sole of Peter’s boot. Peter was glad he got to keep the foot.

  He scrambled higher, finding handholds in the cervices of the soft, deep bark. This was a redwood sapling, tall and straight as a flagpole. He hugged the trunk with his arms and legs while the bear roared and thumped the sapling with his forepaws, apparently uninterested in climbing up after him. The young tree rocked back and forth and Peter’s heart thumped in his chest.

  Alive, alive, I am alive.

  Would you rather be here, or stuck behind a desk somewhere?

  “Bad bear,” he called down. “You are a very bad bear.”

  After a few minutes, Mr. Griz gave up and wandered back toward the smell of trail mix. Peter had to climb another ten feet before he found a branch that would hold his weight. He was wondering how long to wait when the bear returned, dragging Peter’s backpack. It settled itself at the base of the tree and began to enthusiastically disembowel the pack.

  After an hour, Peter’s two-week food supply was working its way through the entrepreneurial bear’s digestive system, along with his emergency phone, long underwear, and fifty feet of climbing rope.

  “Mr. Griz, you give the word ‘omnivore’ a whole new meaning,” Peter said from the safety of his high perch.

  The bear then proceeded to entertain itself by shredding Peter’s sleeping bag, rain gear, and spare clothing. Peter said a few bad words about the bear’s mother.

  Mr. Griz was tearing up Peter’s new featherweight tent when it began to rain again. Big, pelting drops.

  Peter sighed. He’d really liked that tent.

  For one thing, it kept the rain off.

  —

  He’d slept in many strange places in his thirty-some years. His first six months, he was told that he slept in a dresser drawer. As a teenager in fairly constant and general disagreement with his father, he often preferred to sleep in the barn with the horses, even during the severe winter weather common in northern Wisconsin. He’d slept in tents, on boats, under the stars, and in the cab of his 1968 Chevy pickup. In Iraq and Afghanistan, he’d slept in a bombed-out cigarette factory, in a looted palace, in combat outposts and Humvees and MRAPs and anyplace else he could manage to catch a few Z’s.

  He’d never slept in a tree before.

  It wasn’t easy. The rain fell steadily, and soaked through his clothes. As the adrenaline faded, the static returned to fizz and spark at the back of his brain, which added to the challenge of sleep. His eyes wou
ld flutter shut and he would drift off, arms wrapped around the trunk of the sapling, serenaded by the snores of Mr. Griz below. Then he’d abruptly jerk awake to the sensation of falling and find himself scrabbling for a handhold, shivering in the cold and wet.

  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 was pretty sure 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.

  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 f
orty 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 he was.