They head off in different directions. No point in trying to spot each other. He inches along one barrel-sized limb, cabled in, scooting on his pants seat. The scraped branch smells of lemons. A twig growing out of it holds a shock of cones, each one smaller than a marble. He takes one and taps it on his open palm. Seeds fall out like coarsely ground pepper. One sticks in the crease of his lifeline. From such a speck came a tree that holds him two hundred feet in the air without flexing. This fortress tower that could sleep a village and still have room to let.
From high above, she calls, “Huckleberries! A whole patch up here.”
Bugs swarm, iridescent, parti-colored, minuscule horror-film monsters. He works his way to a strange junction, careful never to look down. Two large beams, over the course of centuries, have flowed together like modeling clay. He grapples to the top of the hillock and finds it hollow. Inside is a small lake. Plants grow along a pond flecked with tiny crustaceans. Something moves in the shallows, speckled all over in chestnut, bronze, black, and yellow. Seconds pass before Nick coughs up a name: salamander. How did a damp-seeking creature with inch-long limbs climb two-thirds of the length of a football field, up the side of dry, fibrous bark? Maybe a bird dropped it here, fumbling a meal into the canopy. Unlikely. The chest of the slick creature rises and falls. The only plausible explanation is that his ancestors got on board a thousand years ago and rode the elevator up, for five hundred generations.
Nick edges himself back the way he came. He’s propped up in the corner of the Grand Ballroom when Maidenhair returns. She’s ditched the safety umbilical. “You’ll never believe what I found. A six-foot hemlock, growing in a mat of soil this deep!”
“Jesus Christ. Olivia. Were you free-climbing?”
“Don’t worry. I climbed a lot of trees when I was little.” She kisses him, a quick, preemptive strike. “And, you know. Mimas says he won’t let us fall.”
HE SKETCHES HER as she copies her morning discoveries into a spiral notebook. The drill of solitude comes so much easier to him than to her. After years of camping in an Iowa farmhouse, a day at the top of this leviathan flagpole is like stepping out. She, though, in her core chemistry, is still a college girl, addicted to a rate of stimulations per second that she hasn’t entirely kicked. The fog burns off. Deep in the expanse of midday, she asks, “What time would you say it is?” Her question is more mystified than agitated. The sun hasn’t passed overhead, and yet the two of them are so much older than they were this time yesterday. He looks up from sketching the local labyrinth of Mimas’s limbs and shakes his head. She giggles. “Okay. What day?”
Yet, soon enough, an afternoon, half an hour, a minute, half a sentence, or half a word all feel the same size. They disappear into the rhythm of no rhythm at all. Just crossing the nine-foot platform is a national epic. More time passes. A tenth of an eternity. Two-tenths. When she speaks again, the softness shatters him. “I never knew how strong a drug other people are.”
“The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused.”
“How long does it take to . . . detox?”
He considers. “Nobody’s ever clean.”
. . .
HE SKETCHES HER as she makes lunch. As she naps. Coaxing birds or playing with a mouse at two hundred feet. Her struggle to slow down looks to him like the human saga in a nutshell, in a redwood seed. He sketches the ravine full of redwoods, and the scattered giants that tower over their lesser brothers. Then he puts the drawing pad aside, the better to see the changing light.
“YOU HEAR THEM?” he asks. A distant buzzing, systematic and competent. Saws and engines.
“Yes. They’re everywhere.” Every falling giant brings the crews closer. Trees ten feet thick and nine hundred years old go down in twenty minutes and are bucked within another hour. When a large one falls, even from a distance, it’s like an artillery shell hitting a cathedral. The ground liquefies. Their platform two hundred feet up in Mimas shivers. The largest trees the world has ever made, saved for this final roundup.
IN THE HAMMOCK LIBRARY, she finds a book. The Secret Forest. The front cover shows a prehistoric yew, aboveground and below. The back