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 more 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.