Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

“ Jason, are you all right?!”

In full scuba gear, their leader had just flung himself from the water, gasping for air.

Jason was too winded to answer her, but Monique saw from the boat that he was OK. He just needed to catch his breath. She eyed the dark water nervously. But where were Darryl and Craig? Armed with harpoon guns, they’d joined Jason to check the waters near Redwood Inlet for any sign of the rays.

Lisa sprinted up from below deck, her eyes wide. “My God, is he OK?”

“He just needs to catch his breath; he’s fine.”

Phil trotted out, visibly confused. “What the hell happened?”

Monique shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Darryl and Craig popped up, ripped off their masks, and swam toward Jason. Before they could even ask, he said through gasps that he was fine.

Craig gently put a hand on his shoulder. “What happened?”

He finally caught his breath. “I don’t know. You saw me; I was a hundred and eighty feet down, and somehow I had an empty tank.”

Craig looked up at the boat, eyeing Monique, Lisa, and Phil. “I checked that tank myself.”

Jason shook his head. “I’m fine; forget it. You guys see anything down there?”

Neither said anything. They wanted to be sure he was really all right.

“Guys, I’m fine. Did you see any sign of the rays?”

They shook their heads.

“I wonder where they went.”

Craig looked around. “Maybe inland. Maybe further north. Who knows?”

Jason certainly didn’t. The blinking black dot had only appeared on the interactive map for seconds and disappeared. “What do you think, Darryl?”

Darryl slowly turned to the inlet then stared at it. “I think this inlet’s a perfect conduit, we just got a reading here, and we shouldn’t overcomplicate this.”

“Meaning…” Jason eyed the flat water mass himself. “You want to check it out?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

Minutes later, the Expedition motored into Redwood Inlet.

As Lisa looked up at the looming trees, she couldn’t believe it. They were actually looking for the new species inland. She turned when Darryl came up from below deck—carrying something she hadn’t seen in some time. A rifle. Lisa’s stomach turned. She didn’t think Darryl had taken the weapon out to shoot at skeet.

REDWOOD INLET went on and on. After forty minutes, they still couldn’t see the end of it.

For reasons they couldn’t articulate, everyone was amazed by their new surroundings. It was just so quiet here, just table-flat water, towering redwoods, and silence. No one spoke. Even Phil wasn’t typing. They all just studied the strange landscape.

Looking up, Darryl Hollis couldn’t get over the trees. Darryl had spent a great deal of his life in the woods and he’d never seen anything like them. Where Darryl was from, most trees were fifty, maybe eighty feet tall. Redwoods were absolutely massive by comparison, the height of thirty-five-story office buildings and as wide around as small water towers. He eyed a huge specimen growing right on the side of the bank. Moving his eyes up along the great shaft, he saw it was a perfectly clean piece of timber, literally not a single branch until twenty-five stories, where the crown began to grow.

Sequoia sempervirens. That was the official term for coastal redwoods. Darryl had read it in a book once and for some reason the name had stayed with him. But books didn’t begin to do these natural skyscrapers justice. Many were more than two thousand years old, he knew, literally old enough to have seen Jesus. Alive now, yet alive when Jesus had been.

Call your congressman, Darryl thought morosely, keep the damn logging companies away from these things. Only two hundred years ago, more than two million acres of the great old-growth trees had grown in this part of the country. Now 95 percent of them were gone. What had literally taken two thousand years to grow, an electric chain saw had cut down in twenty minutes.

“Look at that.” Craig pointed as an elk calf trotted from the forest’s shadows and began drinking from the creek. They all just watched it. With dark hair on its front half, lighter hair in back, the calf was three feet tall and thirty-five pounds.

Monique smiled cutely. “Isn’t he adorable, Darryl?”

Darryl rolled his eyes. He was a trained hunter and had never seen any animal as “adorable.” But Monique loved little furry things. They seemed to go well with babies.

Jason eyed the drinking calf with surprising dispassion. Nature was a dangerous place, and he tried to picture what one of the rays would see looking up at the animal from the water. There was only one possibility. Food.

In a sparkling new white undershirt, Craig read his mind. “You think one of those rays would try to eat it?”

Jason started to answer when he noticed Lisa, standing by herself at the front of the boat. He joined her. “Hey.”

“Hi.” Hair in a ponytail, she looked unsettled, even nervous.

“You OK?”

She didn’t answer.

He put a hand on her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

She eyed the calf, almost angrily. “What’s wrong is I saw Darryl take out his rifle before. What’s wrong is this is getting frightening.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“You don’t know we’ll be fine at all. If we actually find one of these things…” She just shook her head.

“Can we stay rational about this and see what we find, not decide it beforehand.”

She said nothing.

“Lisa, we will be fine. You and I will be fine.”

“You and I?”

He leaned into her, looked her right in the eye. “I’m not gonna let a goddam thing happen to you, all right? I swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

She saw the fire in his eyes, the fire normally reserved for his work alone. Now it was focused on her. She kissed him on the cheek.

“You feel better?”

“Did you just promise to be my guardian angel, Jason?”

“I guess I did.”

“Then I feel better. For a few minutes anyway.”

He smiled, and they joined the others. “What do you want to do now, Jason?” Craig said immediately.

Jason studied the landscape. “Look around. The water, the riverbank, everything.”

They searched as much as they could right up until it got dark. They found nothing. Rather than navigate the creek at night, they tied the Expedition to the inlet’s only dock and slept on flat water for a change.

The next morning they returned to the ocean. A few hundred yards north of the inlet, everyone studied the rocky shore’s sloshing white water with binoculars.

Jason shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”

“Me neither.” Craig pivoted. “How ‘bout you, Phil?”

“No, nothing.”

Jason gave Phil a dirty look. Phil had become increasingly short with him as of late, and Jason knew why. Clearly, Phil felt he deserved to be an official researcher after all. Jason no longer had the time or patience to deal with this issue. He’d treated Phil fairly, honestly, and as a responsible adult. Phil was still his friend, but if he wanted to act like a petulant child, so be it. No one else even noticed the subtle change in behavior. The bottom line was that Phil continued to work hard documenting the group’s findings and that was what mattered most.

Jason turned. “You see anything, Lisa?”

“I’m not sure, but”—she paused, readjusting the focus knob—“I think I do….”

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t make it out exactly.” She paused. This was a classic moment for Jason’s second-guessing. “You want to take a look?”

“No, that’s all right.”