Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 02 - The Dark Place

by The Dark Place

  By late afternoon, his head was so full of the strange morphemes he was afraid that if he tried to cram in one more syllable there would be an explosion, and hoori’ma’a’nigi’s and zicin’mauyaa’s would go ricocheting off the walls. He closed the book wearily, stretched, and made himself a ham and cheese sandwich, which he ate standing at the sink, washing it down with a glassful of milk, blessedly vacant of mind.

  Then he slipped his poncho over his head, dashed through the rain to his Rabbit, and drove down the wet and blackly shining road toward Sequim, ten miles away. He needed to do some shopping for his expedition.

  The rain shadow gods were at work. Directly over Sequim there was a big, bright blue, raggedly circular hole in the thick clouds, through which sunlight streamed in visible rays, suffusing the streets with tawny light. The effect was that of a Tiepolo fresco. All it needed was a rosy-nippled shepherdess peeking through the hole, and a couple of buttery cherubs on top of the lamppost at East Washington and Sequim Avenue.

  He stopped first at Southwood’s Department Store to buy a five-dollar lightweight plastic tube tent, which someone had told him was a useful thing to have in the rain, a bottle of liquid purporting to waterproof shoes, and a day pack. Package in hand, he was making for the exit when a discounted box of necklaces made, apparently, from ball bearings caught his eye. Trinkets. How could you go looking for a lost tribe without trinkets? He bought four of them for a dollar apiece, then went back to the cosmetics section. Mirrors also were de rigueur, and he bought two purse-sized ones.

  A few yards of cloth would round out the obligatory items, but Southwood’s didn’t stock it, so he got a packaged set of kitchen curtains, yellow with red fleur-de-lis, instead. On the spur of the moment he went to the toy section and bought a $1.09 rubber turtle named Squeekie who, predictably enough, squeaked cheerfully when squeezed. A fair sampling of the wonders of civilization for $10.88.

  "This it?" the grandmotherly clerk said, punching at the cash register. "A few goodies for Daddy’s little darlings?"

  "Yes," Gideon said, smiling. "And I’ll have one of these, too." He picked up a throwaway plastic cigarette lighter for $0.69. If that didn’t convince them that civilization had something going for it, he didn’t know what would.

  He put his purchases in the car and walked a block to the Mark & Pak supermarket. The blue hole still was directly overhead, and he enjoyed the sunshine. He bought a small loaf of wheat bread, a pound or so of grapes, and ten cans of sardines (in tomato sauce, mustard sauce, and olive oil for variety). Not the most appealing menu imaginable, but nutritious and protein-rich. He didn’t have a camp stove, didn’t want to buy one, and didn’t want to carry one on his back for ten miles each way. Or carry pots and utensils. It wouldn’t kill him to eat cold food for a couple of days.

  In the evening he was in a lighthearted mood. He had just finished a note to John describing what he was planning to do. He’d drop it off at John’s Quinault office tomorrow morning, and if all went well, he’d be back before John saw it. And if not, the prospect of John thundering after him was reassuring. He put the note in a manila envelope, enclosed a Forest Service map with his route marked in fluorescent ink, and sealed it. Then he loaded his pack, applied the liquid to his shoes (it seemed to work), puttered happily until 9:00 p.m., and went to bed.

  When the alarm rang it was a different story. No one is a hero at 4:00 a.m., a wise man has said, and Gideon found it true. He had lain under the covers for fifteen minutes, reluctant to leave his warm bed, and then, more reluctant still to face the black, slanting rain, he had managed to use nearly an hour making and consuming a pot of coffee with toast.

  Now, three hours later, having swung by Quinault to tack the note to John’s door, he slowed to a stop in the deserted North Fork campground. If he was not precisely reluctant, then he was not exactly anxious, either, to walk 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 National Geographic article perhaps titled, "Four Months on the Matto Grosso."

  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 did peter out, or at least become so overrun with huckleberry, horsetail, ferns, and even some fledgling trees that it required m
ore concentrated attention than he gave it, engaged as he was in reciting Yahi vocabulary.

  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 f
avors. 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.