After less than half an hour, they stood on a wide limb looking out at the wrinkled tree-covered mountains spread out ahead of them. Thick nylon webbing around the limb held a beefy locking carabiner attached to a gleaming cable, impossibly thin, stretched high above their little pocket valley, barely clearing an impossibly steep rocky ridge and slanting down to the next drainage, where it disappeared into the canopy of another redwood.
Climbing around inside this enormous tree, it was hard to judge or even imagine the whole architecture of it. But from a distance, Peter could see clearly the shape of the next tree, a gnarled asymmetrical giant that certainly looked as if it had lasted two thousand years, and might last a thousand more. He could see other ancient behemoths, standing like sentinels in the rugged rain-collecting pocket valleys and drainages inaccessible to the first loggers who had cut down almost all the old growth on the West Coast. Around these sentinel trees grew their much-younger cousins, the smaller second-and third-growth trees sprouting up since the days of clear-cutting, hundred-foot trees considered tall by any measure but their ancestors.
It was a long way across a very thin cable.
Peter peered into the depths of the valley below. It was a long way down, too.
He kept his voice quiet, thinking about the men below. “How far is it?”
“About nine hundred feet,” she said. “That’s aircraft cable, stainless steel. It would hold ten of us.”
He thought about the logistics of getting the cable in place. The bow and arrow to get the high-test fishing line across. Then the feeder rope, and after that the cable. Hours of dangerous work, high in these giant trees.
“This is your idea of fun?”
She shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I like to keep busy.”
“I bet you’re a hell of a journalist,” he said. “So what happens next? We clip on our harnesses and pull ourselves across?”
“You can do it that way if you want,” Riot Grrrl said, rooting through her pack. She extracted a small metal contraption and held it up for Peter to see. Her eyes gleamed with fun, the hunters below forgotten for a moment. “But it’s a lot faster to ride.”
Peter saw the harness clip, and the handles, and the wheels.
It was a trolley for a zip line. He raised his eyebrows.
“I liked you better when I thought you were worried about aliens.”
“Oh, the aliens are real, too,” she said, putting the trolley in his hand and taking another from her pack and mounting it to the line. “Their mind-control beams are totally gnarly. If we ever get out of this, I’ll make you a tinfoil hat.” Her smile was brilliant. “You want to go first, or me?”
“What’s the landing like?”
“You can see from here that the cable isn’t strung tight. If it was, the movement of the trees in big storms would snap it like twine. So there’s a dip on the far end, and the rise should slow you some. The attachment point on the far end is twenty or thirty feet inside the outermost branches. When you get close you’ll see a small landing stage like our work platform, with rope railings to keep you from overshooting. But be ready, ’cause you’ll be moving fast.”
He was heavier than she was, thought Peter. If the cable attachment broke under his weight, better that she was already on the other side of that ridge, away from the men below.
“You go,” said Peter. “Show me how it’s done.”
She clipped her harness into the trolley and checked the locks. “Usually I scream my head off when I do this,” she said, then pointed toward the men on the ground. “But I’ll try to stay quiet so they don’t hear.”
Flashing him a last toothy grin, she gripped the trolley handle with both hands and took a running jump off the limb of the tree. The harness caught her hips, and she leaned back and stretched her legs out in front of her like a human projectile. Gravity pulled her faster and faster, down, down and away with a high bubbling laugh that echoed over the trees and rocks and ridges like the call of a wild animal.
Peter saw her disappear into the outer fringe of the next tree. Then he saw the rope go slightly slack, which would be the Riot Grrrl setting her feet on the platform and unclipping her harness from the trolley. Then the cable rose in a series of small waves that traveled up toward him. She’d bumped the cable to signal that she was clear. It was Peter’s turn.
He set the trolley on the rope and locked the wheels into place. He clipped the carabiner on his harness to the eye on the trolley body and checked that lock. Nine hundred feet across. Three hundred feet up. He tasted copper in his mouth and felt the smile spreading across his face as the wild exhilaration rose within him.
Alive, alive, I am alive.