she in another, underneath creatures of mildness, bulk, and repose. “Aren’t you freezing?” he asked.
She answered no. And he believed her.
“Sore?”
“Not really.”
“Scared?”
Her eyes said, Why? Her mouth said, “Should we be?”
“They’re so big. Humboldt Timber employs hundreds of people. Thousands of machines. It’s owned by a multibillion-dollar multinational. All the laws are on their side, backed by the will of the American people. We’re a bunch of unemployed vandals, camping out in the woods.”
She smiled, as at a little kid who just asked whether the Chinese could reach them through a tunnel in the earth. Her hand snaked out of her bag and into his. “Believe me. I have it on the highest authority. Great things are under way.”
Her hand stayed between them like a traverse line as she fell asleep.
THEY FOLLOW A SWITCHBACK down into a distant drainage until the path turns into a rivulet of mud. Two miles in, the trail vanishes and the two of them must bushwhack. Light sifts through the canopy. He watches her cross a carpet of starflower massed with sorrel. Mere months ago, by her own account, she was a nasty, jaded, narcissistic bitch with a substance abuse problem, flunking out of college. Now she’s—what? Something at peace with being human, in league with something very much not.
The redwoods do strange things. They hum. They radiate arcs of force. Their burls spill out in enchanted shapes. She grabs his shoulder. “Look at that!” Twelve apostle trees stand in a fairy ring as perfect as the circles little Nicky once drew with a protractor on rainy Sundays decades ago. Centuries after their ancestor’s death, a dozen basal clones surround the empty center, all around the compass rose. A chemical semaphore passes through Nick’s brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.
Alongside the pebbly creek they come to a downed giant that, even sideways, is taller than Olivia. “We’re here. Just to the right, Mother N said. This way.”
He sees it first: a grove of trunks six hundred years old, running upward out of sight. The pillars of a russet cathedral nave. Trees older than movable type. But their furrows are spray-painted with white numbers, like someone tattooed a living cow with a butcher diagram showing the various cuts of meat hiding underneath. Orders for a massacre.
Olivia lifts the Handycam to her face and films. Nick slips off his backpack, floats weightless for a few steps. A rainbow of spray cans comes from his pack. He lays them in a patch of young horsetails: half a dozen colors from across the spectrum. Cherry in one hand, lemon in the other, he wanders toward a marked tree. He studies the white strokes already there. Then he lifts the can and sprays.
Later, her video will be edited, fitted out with voice-over, and sent to every sympathetic journalist in the Life Defense Force address book. For now, the sound track is the hundred cries of the forest punctuated by awe—How do you do that?—up close to the microphone. Nick returns to his palette on the forest floor and picks two more hues. He paints, then steps back to appraise his handiwork. The species are as wild as any that inhabit a museum’s collection cabinet. He goes on to the next numeral-defaced tree and starts again. Soon enough, the numbers disappear, past recognition, into butterflies.
He graduates to those trunks marked by a simple blue tick. They’re everywhere, these death sentences made with a simple stroke. Then he proceeds to paint those trees with no markings at all, until it’s impossible to say which trunks have been slated for cutting and which are mere bystanders. The afternoon vanishes; they’ve both been on forest-time too long to count in mere hours anymore. The work is over in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.
Olivia pans the camera around the transformed grove. Where there had been measurements and prospects, a project of hard numbers, there are now only skippers and swallowtails, morphos, hairstreaks, and heaths. It could be a grove of sacred firs in the Mexican mountains, where Tiffany insects stage their many-generation migration. Thus two people, in an afternoon, undo a week’s work of appraisers and surveyors.
The voice on the unedited video says, “They’ll be back.” He means the numbers men, to mark their culls again in a more foolproof way.