by David Boyle
The forest had a similar mix of colors, smells, and openness as the woods he’d hunted over the years, but look beyond the familiarity and the true distinctiveness of the place became apparent. With few exceptions, every tree, bush, and fern was different from the ones he knew, or thought he knew. There were short, stocky ferns growing close to the ground, and great flowing ones with fronds the size of palm leaves. And while the trees comprising the forest filled the same ecological niches as they did at home, the individuals were often far different. Thin, scrawny trees probed into the heftier branches of the older, taller ones, and scattered about were small pines and evergreens, many types of oaks, a few smooth-barked ginkgoes, and bushes he recognized as near copies of sassafras. At that, the majority of what he was seeing were simply trees, some perhaps never recorded in the fossil record. Strangely, there were no palms anywhere in sight on the hillside.
In places the canopy was so thickly intertwined that the interior had the appearance of twilight. Then too, the forest contained an unusual number of trees that held but a fraction the proportion of the leaves as others, the dead and dying scattered across the hillside amongst their more vigorous neighbors. Something else too: few of the trees had low growing branches. At least live ones. And a look into the distance found that the trees throughout had a distinct lower level that followed the dips and undulations of the hillside.
Mark pulled up. “Holy shit….”
On a scale never before seen by human eyes, Mark realized he was staring at a browse line. The forest preserves in and around Chicago oftentimes had ridiculously high deer populations, the trees there nibbled clean to a height of six to seven feet. Here the browse line reached an astounding fifteen!
Unnerved by the number of animals required to so completely alter the landscape, Mark hurried along what was quickly becoming an overgrown gully. The trickle played out within a hundred yards, the rocks themselves vanishing into the mulch soon thereafter. The creek bed was gone, and now so was his compass. Even so, the trees were nowhere near as dense as near the island. Get above the cover and the forest allowed almost unrestricted views in most every direction. His chances of seeing dinosaurs were now excellent… and their chances of seeing him even better.
Mark searched the forest when a call echoed far off, the river a shiny slash glinting through the trees, the yellow-heads all but invisible. More importantly, he couldn’t see any others. The creek bed’s uphill journey was a slow meander just barely north of due east, his new course at a slight angle to ensure that come morning he would intercept it. He kept moving, watching for movement and studying the trees, how high the branches were above the browse line now part of his selection criteria.
The deadfall blocking the way ahead had taken down a good number of its neighbors, and the whole conglomeration was now swarming with vines. The biggest of the deadfalls he’d encountered so far, the thing provided ample warning to begin his detour early. Mark waded toward the upended rootstock, Charlie’s snag-prone compound held overhead, the cover tugging at his legs seemingly absent on the far side of the deadfall.
Mark discovered why when he rounded the old giant, and the reason stopped him cold.
Running beside the deadfall and extending in both directions was a twenty-foot wide highway, the soil trampled to near rock hardness. There were stones here and there, along with a myriad of three- and four-toed impressions, a recently laid set of the latter looking as if they’d been made by Gargantua himself. Mark stared along the concourse. “Now this is cool,” he whispered, visions of hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, perhaps entire herds of them, marching majestically through the forest. That’s gotta be something to see.
He noticed a little hole in the soil. Small, if not quite round, it resembled the work of a bird searching for grubs. Nearby was another. And a third. And a chill skittered down his spine when he recognized the triangular pattern for what it was. He swallowed the lump in his throat, his eyes already scanning. The next threesome was a good ten feet away. And off to the side, yet another set of slightly out-of-round-holes. Claw marks, sure as hell.
The combination of trail and deadfall was an unambiguous landmark, and with the lingering fear of getting lost finally eliminated, Mark trotted along the highway knowing where he was and exactly what he wanted to do. He hurried along the trail, checking the trees for the features he needed. One especially caught his attention.
He turned uphill, and while skirting a deadfall glimpsed daylight through the trees in the distance. The top of the hill?
The tree was very nice. Tall, lots of branches, and positioned so he’d be able to see every dinosaur that happened along the highway. And that he definitely didn’t want to miss. But daylight? Mark had seldom been able to refuse his curiosity, and he knew right off he was about to give in again. He wiped his brow and did a quick run through—up and back, an hour max—and checked his watch. Tight, but still time.
It’s not like you’re coming back. “Absolutely…. Why not?” he said, and promptly continued on up. There were two deadfalls in the first hundred yards, and nine in the hundred thereafter, Mark soon watching for alternatives back while imagining what was over the ridge. A valley of course. One with a river?
The cover changed dramatically as the slope eased toward the top, the bushes and shrubs joined by an understory of ferns, cycads, and rustic looking fern trees. Duckbills called in the distance, only two of which he recognized, a cloudy sky showing beyond the forest where an army of gigantic broadleaf trees stood guard along the ridgeline. He wound through the cycads and other wondrous vegetation, and once clear of the blooms forgot all about the lack of ground cover.
His arms went limp. It was a valley… sort of. Only this one had water in it!
It was nearly a mile to the far shore, and while not a big lake, to find anything more substantial than a pond after climbing for the better part of an hour was stunning. Mark had thought he was past the point of needing to recalibrate his head, and realized now that his notion of normalcy was based on a Midwestern mind-set where the world was flat and lakes couldn’t exist on the top of a hill. He wanted to run down and touch it, but he’d already done his experimenting for the day, and with so many dinosaurs in so many directions, he decided he’d better not. Still, it was tempting. He scanned the lake, and the more he saw, the more he loved it.
The grove of big trees was fabulous all by itself, the nearest of the duckbills congregated less than a quarter mile away beneath the limbs of trees whose branches seemed fully capable of buttressing the sky, with more beyond them in what looked like a meadow, though he knew the greenery wasn’t grass. Two groups of animals he didn’t recognize browsed along the bend; a small herd of what were likely triceratops moving off to the southeast; with three additional groups of at least a dozen animals each spread along the far shoreline and north. He couldn’t see the end of the lake, but judged the farthest shoreline to be about three miles away. “Definitely a pain to get to… but it sure is pretty.”
The Kings of the Ridge mushroomed into the sky, the biggest fifteen feet in diameter and fastened to the ridge with huge sprawling rootstocks, their massive limbs spreading and dividing into intricately foliated sheet-like outer branches. Strolling beneath the giants, entranced, Mark stared through the branches to the summits where brilliant green swayed easily a hundred and fifty feet or more above the landscape. Magnificent, if impossible to climb, the picturesque monsters probed skyward for hundreds of yards into the distance.
Cycads with long upright cones blossomed at the edge of the forest, their lacy fronds rustling quietly in the steadily increasing breeze. In shape at least, one type reminded him of saguaro cactus, its shaggy arms garnished not with needles, but long palmate leaves….
A muffled crack sounded from the forest.
Mark transferred the arrow from his bow hand to the string, watching for a second, listening, then hurried along the ridge and away from whatever was in the woods. The forest was darker than just minutes before
, and with access to the tree he’d located earlier now suspect, he was back to searching for a place to roost. “Nice job, dumbass. Now what the hell are you going to do?” He was running out of daylight, his pulse quickening as he rejected one tree after another. A growl echoed across the lake.
“Think of something will ya!”
Dismissed initially as inaccessible, the gray giants offered all the protection he could ask for. But how to get up when even the lowest branches were well out of reach? He tried climbing the nearest of the Kings, but the flaky bark wouldn’t support his weight.
He ran along the ridge, his fanny pack flapping, an arm clutched to keep the broranges bottled in his shirt. A hundred yards and still nothing he could climb. He stopped, hands on his knees, panting, and searched for better prospects ahead. Honks echoed across the lake, its far shore a graying line in the distance. There just weren’t any others. The tree he’d passed five back would simply have to do.
The tree was Lilliputian in comparison with its siblings, the lowest of its limbs still an outlandish eighteen feet over his head. If… no when he reached it, he’d be able to stair step as high as he felt like on the branches that followed. He unbuckled the fanny pack, untangled the painters, and with a loop tied on one end, clipped on the carabineer of the other to create a single rope nearly forty feet long. A broken branch became a weight.
Timing. That’s all it was.
He swung the rope… tossed… and pinched down when he saw it would miss. The far shore darker still, he coiled the rope while picturing how best to get weight A over limb B. He tried twirling, but his timing was off. He tried throwing the branch like a baseball. Then like a grenade. Simple in theory, frustrating in practice, Mark knew there couldn’t be a last time and simply kept trying until he finally got it—the rope trailing the stub up and over, then swinging dangerously close to looping back on itself before he gave the line slack.
Snapping his end and reaching for the other, Mark took hold when the branch slipped within reach. He buckled his fanny pack to the lower limb of Charlie's compound, got rid of the branch, and, after tying the ends of the painters together, clipped what was now his climbing aid to the bow's opposite limb. So much for the easy part, Mark thought, taking hold of the ropes and gazing jadedly into the tree.
Two sore palms and long minutes later, Mark snagged the branch with his shoe, then carefully worked his leg over until he was able to hang from a knee. He cautiously let go of the ropes. “This is ridiculous,” he said, breathing hard and massaging his hands. “What will the neighbors think?” He chuckled at his upside down world and, taking the utmost care, worked himself up and onto the branch. He slumped wearily against the trunk, able finally to relax.
He was hungry, thirsty, and exhausted. And not quite done. A forked limb ten feet higher had the earmarks of a bed, and he’d see how that worked as soon as he caught his breath. The view was spectacular in the fading light; birds settling across the lake on what had to be an island, the duckbills south dabbling in the shallows. He needed to haul the bow up, but his arms were just too tired, and instead unbuttoned his shirt and got one of the broranges. They tasted good, for one thing, and eating some now eliminated the possibility of dropping them later.
A breeze carried from the forest, his eyes closing as he savored its caress, a swirl of flavors yet lingering. His head sagged… and he snapped upright, the sleepies fast gathering to take him away. Not yet fellas, he thought, blinking. I got a couple more things to do. After that… I’m yours. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, thinking wistfully about how nice it was to be able to see. By no means the first time that a Croakie had saved his glasses, today’s he’d remember as the most crucial ever.
He got to his feet and studied the route up, and after licking the blade clean sank his knife hard into the trunk. The bow and fanny pack came up next, the compound hanging from the knife as soon as the fanny pack was back around his waist. Rope coiled and stuffed in his shirt, Mark climbed up to the branch with the fork.
Trying hard to ignore how high he was, Mark took a deep breath and scooted out along the limb, and where it forked wormed himself along the bigger of the two legs. He pulled the rope out, and using the carabineer for a bob flipped it across the opposite limb and caught it with his foot. Wrapped once around and secured with the carabineer, the lose end was then whipped around the opposite branch and back again, the several ropes providing the leverage he needed to draw the limbs together. Again and again, the lose end was strung over and around the paired branches until he’d created a net wide enough to lay on. What branches he could reach were next threaded between the ropes, and chalk line from his pack looped around the crossovers to prevent the ropes from spreading.
He crawled out gingerly and laid down. Better than trying to curl himself on a branch, there was just no good place for his head. He bit his lip, frowning, and stared at his fanny pack. Damp yes, but softer than either the ropes or the limb, his faithful companion was soon buckled to the ropes near the junction. Mark settled on his back and worked his head between the broranges. Better sure, except for whatever was poking his head. “Now what?”
A minute’s fumbling located a pokey length of plastic. He blinked. Could it be? He zipped the pack closed, his prize better than any Cracker Jack. “I’ll be damn,” he said, pulling out a lighter and an old cigar from an even older zip-lock. How long ago he’d packed them he couldn’t remember, and with all the banging around his pack had been through, it was a miracle that any of them was intact. “Better a third than none, yes?” He peeled away the cardboard wrapper, then licked the seams of his seriously shortened Hav-A-Tampa. Dry as the tobacco had to be, the cigar wouldn’t last long. Not that the length of time mattered. Not here… not now.
Mark clicked the lighter, puffing repeatedly, then blew out a thin stream of wonderfully delicious smoke. “Not too shabby. Not too shabby at all.” He puffed again, and stuffed the lighter in his pocket. Serenaded by the hoots, honks, and occasional growls spilling across the lake, Mark couldn’t care less about the oncoming storm. A cigar could be so inflating.
Ghosts flickered about the distant clouds, the rain still hours from reaching the lake. Mark had hopes of being asleep by then, and would spend the interim luxuriating in the moment, babying his cigar and enjoying the evening’s concert while cradled in the arms of a King.
*****
Tony listened when a gust rattled the trees. The vultures were gone, having either finished with the carcass or run out of daylight, the result in either case being that the forest was returning to normal. He sucked his cigarette down to the filter and flicked it away, a glance about the forest showing how gratuitous a term that was. There was an implicit civility to ‘normal’, not a smidgeon of which existed here.
A mist was rising throughout the forest, every tree and leaf now a colorless gray where monsters of the imagination roamed free. He could barely see across the campsite, much less for any distance into the woods. He checked his watch, edging toward the fire in order to read the hands. Thirteen minutes since the last time…
Tony reached to his pocket. How long could it take? Certainly not more than two hours. Next time he wouldn’t give in so easy. “Ron, I really think we—”
“I already told you I’m not going anywhere. Relax already. We’re on an island, remember? And Hayden knows what he’s doing.
“Trust me. He can find his way home no matter how dark it gets.” Ron noticed the flare when Tony lit up. “Got one you can spare?”
“I thought you quit.”
Ron prodded the fire with a stick. “Yeah, so did I.”
Tony flipped him the pack. Ron had one part right: Hayden was the explorer, not him. Without sidewalks, Tony was certain that fifty yards into the woods would be plenty far enough for him to get lost. Like it or not, he’d just have to wait.
Two cans of stew stood waiting by the stove, a preparation Tony had hoped would get his mind off Mark and Charlie. It hadn’t of course, but Ron was
seldom inclined to fix anything food-wise, and he was sure the others would be hungry when they returned.
The only saving grace was that Wheajo was still bottled up in Mark’s tent. Having inexplicably passed on the chance to kill the predator, just the sight of him was enough to set Ron off. Why Wheajo was in there was a bit of a mystery, and while he had brought back a fistful of plants to test—proof in Ron’s view that he really didn’t give a shit—there hadn’t been near enough that testing them could take this long. So what else was Wheajo up to?
The thought slipped away when Tony heard the whispered swish. Firelight flickered across the trees, a faint glimmer fading in and out behind the leaves before Hayden trudged into the clearing.
Ron stood and flicked an ash into the fire. “Told you, didn’t I?”
Tony sighed. “Any luck?” Charlie stepped from the forest a second later, his expression all the answer he needed. His friend drifted past like a broken stallion, the long blond strands of his hair flecked with bits of leaves as he slumped with his back along the hanger tree.
Hayden pulled Mark’s chair near the fire, Ron strolling from the tarps with a beer a minute later. “Here, you look like you can use this.” Hayden nodded, then popped the can, staring at the flames.
Minutes passed, the fire’s cheery crackles sending sparks sailing into the trees.
Ron tipped his head at Charlie. “You tell him about Bennett?”
“Thought about it,” Hayden said, at last taking a sip. “Figured it was a bad idea.” He closed his eyes and slumped forward, absently grinding the can in the mud.
Tony looked away when he saw the pain on Hayden’s face, then glared at Ron, who whether brain dead or callous, seemed totally oblivious of the impact of his question. Mark was his partner for God’s sake!
