Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  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, 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 would 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 thought 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 forty 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 the hell he was.

  • • •

  HE CAME TO A PLACE where the thick main trunk ended in a wide blackened stub. It looked like the tree had been struck by lightning, probably many years ago. Around the splintered stub, a half-dozen mini-trunks had sprouted and grown upward seeking the sun, the largest of them two feet in diameter and rising another forty or fifty feet. Each mini-trunk would be a giant in the third-growth Wisconsin forest where Peter grew up. He was having trouble wrapping his mind around the scale of the redwoods.

  Another red rope marker, and another. Green travel ropes hung in the difficult places. Sunlight now came through in larger patches, but it was hard to find a logic to the trunks and limbs. There were entire suburbs in this giant tree, each a different tangle, bower, or thicket. It would be easy to get lost. Then he realized that he was seeing more than one tree, that he was in a ring of trees whose main trunks were no more than ten or twelve feet apart.

  Peter climbed toward the sun.

  It occurred to him to announce himself. “Hello,” he called out. “Is anyone here?” If the tree explorer was any kind of a nutcase, Peter didn’t want to surprise him. “Hello? Anyone?”

  There was no answer but the wind in the branches.

  The red rope markers led him in a circuitous path. Around another blackened area, through several dense tangles where branches grew in every direction, but always upward, toward the sun.

  The tree canopy opened as he climbed. He could smell the heat of the sun on the redwood bark. The sky was a high brilliant blue, and the peaks and valleys of the Coast Ranges stretched out around him, wearing their undulating pelt of trees.

  Finally he saw above him a slender triangular platform. As he got closer he saw it was some kind of netting stretched between the tops of several trees, maybe twenty feet on a side. Irregular shapes showed through the netting at one end, maybe tools or supplies left behind. Above the netting hung a triangular sun cover, larger than the platform, turning the sun strange dappled shades. It would keep the rain off, too. Redwoods grew in rain forest, after all.

  This was not just some tree hugger’s weekend nest.

  It was too well-designed, too organized.

  “Ahoy the platform,” he called out. “Anyone up there?”

  He counted to twenty. No response. The platform cover rattled softly in the breeze. The sun was warm on his back. Through the branches he could see trees without end, or so it seemed.

  “Okay,” he called out. “I’m coming up.”

  A broad horizontal branch stretched toward the platform, with safety ropes strung at waist height, making an easy path. He noted where the platform was tied off, checking each rope and knot before he trusted the netting with his weight.

  When he stepped onto it, the netting gave slightly beneath his weight, like a trampoline. He heard a faint twanging sound behind him. Then a voice.

  A female voice.

  “Hands up, asshole. That’s far enough.”

  3

  Peter turned and saw a woman with a bow and arrow standing on the broad horizontal branch, ten feet away. The bow was stretched taut, the arrow set to the string and pointed at his chest.

  She wore a faded pink Riot Grrrl T-shirt, patched hiking pants, and a daypack on her back. Behind the bow, he saw red hair cut short over a freckled face, intense eyes, and a long narrow nose that came to a point like a rapier. She had serious climber’s arms, and held the bow steady. The branch she stood on might have been a city sidewalk for all the attention she paid to it. She was entirely focused on Peter. It was not a comfortable feeling. He was an ant under a magnifying glass, and her gaze was the sun.

  Peter put his hands up. The movement made him bounce slightly on the netting, which was probably why she’d waited until he made it to the platform. He’d have trouble moving quickly on the spongy surface. She had good tactics, whoever she was. Better than some infantrymen Peter had known.

  “Hi,” he s
aid, trying for cheerful and harmless. “Nice place you got here. I’m Peter. What’s your name?”

  Riot Grrrl looked at him with those blazing eyes, but didn’t answer. She had the edge of her lower lip between her teeth, thinking. Her arms did not shake with the tension of the bow. She projected utter confidence and capability, but Peter thought he saw a muscle twitch at the edge of her eye.

  It was a compound bow, the kind with pulleys to maximize the force of the projectile and minimize the arm strength required. The business end of the arrow had a broad head, designed to cut its way in and do some damage. Although Peter had given up killing animals for food or sport after the war, he’d been a bow-hunter in high school, and knew that the arrow, at this range, would probably go all the way through his body and a fair distance into the tree limb behind him. Unless it hit bone, in which case it might well become a permanent part of his anatomy, for whatever short time remained to him as he bled to death on a trampoline at the top of a giant redwood.

  The bow had a quiver holding three more arrows, so she had several opportunities to put a hole in him.

  Peter had led a Marine infantry platoon for eight years in two war zones. Many professional soldiers had pointed their weapons at him, and it was never something he’d enjoyed. But it was the amateurs who really made him nervous. Again he saw the flutter at the edge of her eye. A stress reaction.

  “I’m going to sit,” he said calmly. “Maybe you’d like to tell me what’s on your mind.”

  With his fingers laced on the back of his head, Peter crossed his ankles and lowered himself to a sitting position as the netting gave gently beneath him. It felt like he was floating. It would have been pretty cool if it weren’t for Riot Grrrl pointing a medieval weapon at his center of mass.

  She didn’t say anything. She was still thinking. The branch she was standing on creaked and swayed in the breeze, but it had no effect on her.

  “You could rest your arms,” he said. “You look pretty strong, but I’d rather not get shot by accident.”