She found herself feeling self-conscious, with the bow and arrow. Maybe even a little silly.
She snapped the arrow back into its quiver and jumped from her branch to the platform netting. Her landing made him bounce on the trampoline material. She liked that he didn’t look startled.
He seemed like the steady type.
She went directly to the dry bags she’d insisted Bryce buy and dug through them for the gear she needed. Everything was still clean and dry. Rotten rope was a bad thing if you were three hundred feet up a tree.
She found Bryce’s old narrow climber’s pack, four coils of 9-mil rope, and the heavy clanking bags from Mountain Rescue. “Hey,” she said to make sure she had Peter’s attention, and tossed him a knot of webbing. “That’s a climbing harness. You ever wear one before?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Put it on,” she said. “I’ll check you. How about Jumars, figure eights? Ascenders and descenders?”
“Most of my rope work involved jumping out of helicopters,” he said. “But I know the gear.”
She dumped out her own pack and sorted her belongings. She laid out rope and gear, divided it up, and made a pile for him with Bryce’s old bombproof pack. “Here, take this. You’re going to need it.”
She collected her gear, made sure the compound bow was tightly lashed to the back of her pack, and pointed him back the way he’d come. The bow would make it more difficult for her to travel through the tree, but she wasn’t going to leave it behind.
She liked that he was packed and ready when she was.
They followed the path of red marking ropes past the burnt stub of the original lightning-struck spire, and down through the lower crown. He moved lightly in the tree, found branches that would support his weight without cracking or breaking, and didn’t use his boots to kick footholds into the bark. He moved, in other words, like a real climber, even on this easy path.
The next routes wouldn’t be so easy.
But if he’d really free-climbed a 9-mil rope twenty stories after climbing sixty feet up a redwood sapling, he was plenty capable.
Now they could hear fragments of voices from below, although the wind in the branches drowned out the words. How many men were there?
She wondered if they were the same men from the SUV, and how badly she’d hurt them. Part of her felt remorse about hitting them with the stun gun. A small part, but still. She didn’t want them dead, just unable to ever threaten her again. She hoped these were different men.
Conscious of sound now, she used simple hand gestures to direct him to the Perch. It was a massive limb, six feet in diameter, and horizontal for ten feet before it angled upward toward the sun.
This was the lowest point of decent lateral structure in the tree. She’d run strong webbing from the main trunk to the vertical leg of the Perch, so they had a drop point well above their footing. On their research trips, she’d clipped ropes and pulleys on the webbing for hauling gear up and down in a system she’d privately called the freight elevator. When you had four academic biologists three hundred plus feet up in a tree for two weeks at a time, you hauled a lot of freight. Not just camping gear and sample cases, but all supplies in and all garbage out, including their poop in plastic bags, triple-wrapped.
June wasn’t a biologist, wasn’t part of that team, but it had been a way to spend time with Bryce. She’d started free-climbing boulders and trees during her lonely tomboy childhood in rural Washington. When she moved to California to live with her mom, she’d joined a climbing club and turned into a serious rock monkey. Ascending tall trees with Bryce was just another way to feed the rat.
As it turned out, she’d also written some of her best articles up there in the high canopy. Surprisingly, her laptop’s cell modem caught a signal just fine up there. The trick was getting enough sunlight in the temperate rain forest for the solar chargers to keep her gear powered up.
The green rope hung down into the mist, and voices filtered up, louder now but still indecipherable. Three of them? Four? The wind had dropped. It smelled like rain.
He spoke in a soft voice. “We need to get closer.”
June shook her head. She wasn’t going down there. She could still see the date rapist’s leer, his piggy little eyes. And now there were more of them.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll go.” He seemed so calm. How could he be calm?
“They have guns,” she hissed.
“And I don’t,” he said. “So I’ll be very quiet.”
Her mouth opened, but she didn’t know what to say. Why was he doing this for her?
So she said it. “Why are you doing this?”
He gave her a toothy grin. “Why not?” he said softly. “Maybe we’ll learn something.”
“I don’t know if I trust you yet.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “If you decide you don’t trust me, you can always cut the rope.”