David Dun - Unacceptable Risk

She walked to the forest's edge and looked, straining to see like a child peeking in a stranger's house. She stepped in among the trees. There was brush, but not much. The forest actually looked fairly open. Back nearer the coast, she recalled, it was more dense. Here the lower trunks were clear of branches and grayish green brush had grown up. Moments ago she had been in a rush, intent on being with Michael Bowden, but in this place of quiet and wild, where things were more timeless, it seemed a few minutes wouldn't matter. For a while she wandered down a gentle hill, enjoy ing the unfamiliar mystique of the forest. When next she stopped, she heard a stream and walked on to investigate. What she found was a series of beautiful pools a few feet across and vigorous cascades running between them.

The moss was almost effervescent and the grasses lush. The rocks were white and speckled and, even in the deep of the pools, the water was translucent and small green trout were vividly outlined, the black speckles of their backs plain. Something about the place made her shiver, but it wasn't the cold. Nor was it fear.

A very large tree attracted her attention and she walked to its base. She wondered if it might be a Douglas fir. Sam had told her long ago how the species was named after a Scotsman, a Mr. David Douglas, who was the first white man to publicize its existence. Instead of asking the Indians the tree's name, it was named after Douglas. The forest floor all around looked soft and thick with old needles.

She sat and watched the pools, and in a few moments there was a whirr sound and she realized that a large bird had landed in a nearby tree and she could just see the branches bobbing. On the tree that might be a Douglas fir, there was a giant fungus that looked mushroomlike. She wondered at its age. Something made her suspect that such a fungus would grow very slowly. She wondered how big the tree was on the date of her birth and realized that it had probably changed very little in the last twenty years. She couldn't imagine how old it might be. She imagined bringing Michael to this place and having him explain about the tree, the fungus, and the creatures. Surely, if he had been in these woods only a few days, he would know more than she might ever learn. She knew he was like that.

Near her shoe she spied a small salamander and farther away a chipmunk running over the litter on the ground like a picky shopper at a fruit stand.

Things were so different in the world of men than in the world of giant trees and quiet streams. A couple of weeks earlier, she thought, she might at least consider spending the rest of her life with a working stiff making babies. Then something strange had happened: Michael Bowden had come along.

The tree was not like her life. It never moved.

For a moment she thought she might be nuts sitting here in a forest several hundred miles from her home. This trip could leave her feeling very foolish. She was in love with a man who lived in her mind and now she was on a mission to discover if something in this world, one Michael Bowden in the flesh, might roughly match the man in her head. Of course she realized there was another possibility and that was that maybe he was different from her fantasies but nevertheless destiny's truly intended. Where love was concerned even the most cynical corners of her mind had to yield to a little magic. Looking at the fungus and the tree and the enchantment of the stream, the barely visible sky above, she felt truly insignificant. Still, somehow, people and their thoughts of her and her thoughts of them made her life im portant because most of mankind seemed bound by some metaphysical strangeness sometimes called consciousness or love, and if there was anything else out there in the great beyond, it might also be subject to this same love and this same self-awareness.

When she turned around, she had to think a moment where the road was and then realized she could just listen for the next car. She stood and waited. Nothing came, or at least she heard nothing, until she heard a snapping of branches off behind a thicket of trees.

This was a lonely winter road.

Listening again for cars, she still heard nothing. It could be anything in the forest, she told herself. She reached in her purse and removed the Desert Eagle. 357 magnum semiau tomatic that Sam had given her to supplement the less po tent, but much more compact, SIG Sauer P232 that she still had in the car. Pointing the big gun in the direction of the sounds, she began backing toward the highway. Maybe the stream drowned out the road noise. Then she considered. On one side of her, she had a stream, on the other a road. It should ensure that she wouldn't get lost. Or would it? The road had been making a giant U of sorts and wasn't running straight; so if she missed the U, she would actually be walking parallel to the earlier stretch.

Looking back toward what she supposed was the location of the road, she didn't see any parting of the bushes to indicate where she might have come. Unfortunately, she had walked through something of an open forest and paid little attention to landmarks. Again there was movement in among a thicket of trees. Fear surged through her and she turned and began to trot. She thought of Gaudet and imagined his cold eyes as he watched his men torture the Matses girls and realized she could have been followed from as far back as Los Angeles.

She began to run even as she told herself that if Gaudet was here and armed, he would have confronted her. After maybe a hundred feet she heard the whisper of a car, breathed a quiet sigh of relief, and vowed to tell no one. There didn't seem to be anyone following. Perhaps her fear had been silly.

She emerged on the road, jogged to her car, and drove on, the mountains becoming progressively steeper and the deep canyons deeper. Rocks left scars down the hillside where they flowed like rivers and abutments had been constructed to keep them off the road. Often they failed and she had to be careful, lest she high center the rental car on a boulder. Again Grady felt small in this mammoth-size wilderness.

She used her odometer to find the wide spot in the road where, according to the realtor, the trail to Michael's house began. Jill had been smart about discerning how to find the place. Since it had just sold, Jill knew that the real estate community would have some vague idea or description of how it might be found. And they did. They said if you kept going two hundred yards past a mile marker on the highway paralleling the Salmon, you could look down the cliffs and see the cabin. At the trailhead there was nothing but a forest and a slight incline that obviously led to much steeper terrain. Slowly she drove up the deserted two-lane road and was struck with the grandeur of the walls of rock and the velvet of great forests that rose into the clouds and looked as if conjured by one of the turn-of-the-century landscape artists she had studied in art history class.

When she came to the next wide spot in the road, she got out into the chill of the mountain air and looked over the side. Almost straight down a thousand feet she saw a large, cascading river intersected by a smaller one known as the Wintoon River. Where the Wintoon River emptied into the larger Salmon, a series of magnificent cascades churned white. In the whole of the giant canyon there seemed one level spot and that was on the far side of the Salmon, at the confluence with the Wintoon. It was a plateau a slight dis tance above both rivers, tiny, mostly wooded, and utterly isolated. On the large bench of land stood two cabins, one fairly large with a gray plume of smoke and a light in the window that created a sense of humanity in the valley.

Looking through her binoculars, she saw various works of stone about the place. They resembled walls and wall seg ments and cone-shaped structures that she couldn't quite fig ure out. Who would have built these rock creations? Why would they bother? Grady could make out two rock piles that appeared to be small fortifications of a sort and it seemed as though she could make out a man inside one of them, for there was the barrel of what looked to be a large gun, judging from its location and the posture of it.