A Friend of the Earth

Santa Ynez, November 2025

I can't sleep. Christ knows I'm tired enough, my knee throbbing, my back gone into permanent retirement, every muscle in my body, stretched to the tearing point and both my shoulders hanging on threads like a puppet's. I'm beat, whipped, done in and played out. It's been a day. I'm in bed, in Mac's place, in a room bigger than a bus station, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. Andrea is here beside me, curled up like a question mark and snoring so softly I can barely hear her, and Mac's pink satin sheets are flowing like bathwater over and under my grateful old man's feet. Do you want to define cozy? This is it.

Outside, it's different. Outside is the wind, the horizontal rain, the rending and the howling, outside is the wreckage of the place I've called home for the past ten years and all the pens and cages we contrived to design and build for the greater welfare and happiness of the animals. Gone. Just like that. Where the guesthouse used to be there's a river now, all roiling muscle and deep-brown ribs, no more Rancho Seco, no more Lupine Hill condos, nothing but sirens and searchlights and people clinging to one piece of wreckage or another.

But that's not what's keeping me awake. I've been through the list of the animals twice already, and I'm satisfied on that score, and Andrea managed to salvage most of my personal belongings (yellowing boxer shorts, the food compressor, the toaster, my beat-up copies of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and The Dharma Bums, the odd bottle of sake and assorted foodstuffs). Things are nothing to me anyway. I could rebuild, pack up and move on, live in a ditch or a teepee — or a six-by-eight platform in a redwood tree, for that matter. No, the problem here seems to be my brain-it just won't shut down. For a while I tried to trace the whole convoluted chain of my thoughts back to the first image-that works most of the time, because sooner or later I forget what the point of the exercise is and then it's six o 'clock in the morning — but perversely, and maybe because there's been such radical change in my staid and limited sphere here in the past few days, new thoughts kept spinning out of the recovered ones, so that, in going back from the idiosyncrasies of Andrea's snoring to my mother's when she fell asleep on the couch with a quilt pulled up to her chin and her drink gone to water in her hand to the way the light came through the kitchen window in'the house in Peterskill to Anthony's Nose and Dunderberg and all the hikers coming down with Lyme disease on the Appalachian Trail, I found myself wondering about the new breed of nature-lovers who take their TV attachments every place they go because the real thing has nothing to offer anymore. Then I got stuck on TV, my boyhood in front of the tube, and before I knew it I was reprising the entire CBS, NBC and ABC schedules for a given week in 1959 or so. That's how I got to Ronald Reagan. I went through each of the weekdays like beads on a string, got to Saturday night and Have Gun, Will Travel, then Sunday, Ed Sullivan, eight to nine, followed by The General Electric Theater, hosted by the future governor of California and fortieth president of the United States.

I'd stretch out on the rug that smelled of carpet cleaner with my school books scattered round me, and watch the jugglers, comedians and dancing horses that made up Sullivan's pretty dull affair, and then, if I wheedled and pled, I'd get to stay up half an hour more to watch the drama that followed, because anything was better than bed. And there he was, Ronald Reagan. I was nine years old and I had no idea who he was-I'd never heard of Bedtime for Bonzo or Hellcats or the Gipper or any of the rest of it. I just saw him there, bland and anonymous but for the amazing glistening meatloaf of hair glued to his head and the motto of the company he shilled for: Progress is our most important product. Sure. Of course it is. That makes sense, doesn't it? We move forward, conquer and foster and discover-plug it in, tune it up — and life just gets better. And what about that house they built for him and his wife in the Pacific Palisades? An intercom in every room, electric switches to close the drapes, electric barbecue and hedge clippers, three TVs, two ranges, two ovens, three refrigerators, two freezers, heat lamps, electic eyes, washers, dryers, a retractable canopy roof for alfresco dining. That's progress. And so is naming James Watt your secretary of the interior.

My guts are rumbling: gas, that's what it is. If I lie absolutely still, it'll work through all the anfractuous turns and twists down there and find its inevitable way to the point of release. And what am I thinking? That's methane gas, a natural pollutant, same as you get from landfills, feedlots and termite mounds, and it persists in the atmosphere for ten years, one more fart's worth of global warming. I'm a mess and I know it. Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, enviro-ecocapitalistico guilt: I can't even expel gas in peace. Of course, guilt itself is a luxury In prison we didn't concern ourselves overmuch about environmental degradation or the rights of nature or anything else, for that matter. They penned us up like animals, and we shat and pissed and jerked off and blew hurricanes out our rectums, and if the world collapsed as a result, all the better: at least we'd be out.

In between gusts the volume comes up on the rain and I can hear it patiently eroding the lashed-down tiles of the roof (two years ago Mac had steel mesh welded over the entire thing and so far it's held up-no splootching buckets here). Ssssssss, the rain sizzles, fat in a fryer. Andrea snorts, mutters a few incomprehensible syllables and rolls over. More rain. An unidentified flying object hits the side of the house with a thud, a dull booming reverberation that sets tinkling the flesh-toned figurines in the display case (each of the guest bedrooms is decorated after an era in rock — and — roll history-we're in the Grunge Room, replete with replicas of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam in action, as well as a framed lock of Kurt Cobain's hair over the legend "A Lock of Kurt Cobain's Hair"). This is crazy. How can I sleep through this? How can anybody sleep through it? How can Andrea, April Wind, Mac, Chuy, Al and Al?

More to the point: how can the animals? And yes, I admit it, I am concerned about them, or concerned all over again, because that's the way it is with insomnia — the brain, diligent organ that it is, will always manage to come up with something to forestall the inevitable shutdown. Very still now, Andrea between breaths, the wind making a snatch at the rain, and I swear I can hear one of the lions coughing two floors beneath me_ I'm not imagining this — there it is again. Sounds like Amaryllis. I can picture them down there, exploring their new quarters, scent-marking the walls, gutting the furniture, ripping up carpets, settling in.

The amazing thing is, no one got hurt.

All those claws, all those teeth, all those hundreds of pounds of irascibility and recalcitrance, the wind blowing up a tornado, the water waist-deep and running slick and fast, and me at seventy-five with my bad knee, savaged back and chewed-up arm and nobody to help but Chuy and five conscripts: this is a recipe for disaster. I didn't need April Wind, I needed the Marine Corps. But Chuy, never to be mistaken for a genius, especially since the pesticide seemed to have annulled most of the cognitive functions of his brain, really came to the rescue. He did. He saved the day and no doubt about it. Because his idea of roping the cats (and, ultimately, Lily and Petunia) and forcing them to swim for it, as ridiculous as it might sound, was the one thing that ultimately worked. While Mac and the women went off to hood the Egyptian vultures and prod the honey badgers into their carrying cages, I unlocked the gate on the chain-link fence and stepped into the lion compound, Chuy right beside me with a coiled-up rope. Al and Al sat in the Olfputt, flexing their muscles and looking very small in the face: they wanted no part of this, and who could blame them?

I never liked darting the animals. Too risky. We were using a mixture of Telezol and Xylazine, and it worked like a charm — if you got the dosage right. Too much, and you had a dead animal on your hands; too little, and you ran the risk of becoming a dead animal yourself. I'd worked out the dosage as best I could under the conditions (duress, flooding, excitable women and a hysterical Mac, inundated kitchen, floating table, that sort of thing), and I figured I'd try half a dose for starters-enough to make them groggy, but not so much that they couldn't swim behind the Olfputt and find their way through the open basement door to where dry accommodations, some hastily scattered straw and the freshly drowned carcass of an emu awaited them.

The water was waist-deep did I mention that? — and slipping by at a pretty good clip. Plus there were the damned catfish crawling up on every horizontal surface in their little gift-wrapped packets of slime. And how did the lions feel about it? Pissed off. Definitely pissed off. They were hungry and tired and sick to death of being wet and cold and clambered over by fish that had no right to exist in this environment at all. Dandelion fixed his tan eyes on us and let out a belly-shaking roar of complaint from his perch atop the lion house.

"All right, Chuy," I said, "I'm going to dart Dandy first, and when you see him go down on his haunches, fling that rope around him. That lasso, I mean. You can use it, right?"" Si, Mr. Ty, I can use, no hay problema. " (Among his many former occupations, Chuy listed" bronco-buster "and" vaquero. "When he was in his twenties, before he came north, he'd worked in a Mexican rodeo, roping dogies, whatever they were-calves, I take it.)" No worries, "he said now, grinning out of the wet mask of his face. The wind screamed, flapping the hood of the slicker against my elongated old man's ears, and I could hear Lily harmonizing in the distance: 0000-whup, 0000-whup!

"And if the other two come for us, I'm not going to dart them, so we're just going to have to back out of the cage and lock the door, okay? They're not all that fond of the water, so they'll probably stay put-"

"That is what I am thinking tambien, Mr. Ty," Chuy said, wading forward with deep thrusts of his legs till he was twenty feet from the gate and maybe thirty from the lions. And they were roaring now, all three of them, ears flattened, lips pulled back, tails twitching, their eyes locked on Chuy as he whirled the lasso over his head in the wind and driving rain. "Yippee!" He shouted. "Yippee-yi-ki-yay!"

I was worried, I admit it. I'm a worrier and cynic at heart, always have been-at least since Earth Forever! Came into my life. Or before that even, when a stinking little half-inch wasp that couldn't have weighed more than a quarter of an ounce took Jane away from me for good. I expect the worst, and I'll have to say that my expectations have been abundantly fulfilled through the seventy-five years of shitstorms and bad luck that constitute my life to this point. At best I expected three drowned lions; at worst, I pictured Chuy with his limbs separated from his body and me with my intestines rearranged in a way that would have caused real consternation down at the emergency room. That's why I had Philip Ratchiss' Nitro Express slung over my shoulder in addition to the Palmer dart gun.

My hands were trembling as I sighted down the barrel of the dart gun (old age, palsy, the sake shakes, undiluted terror — you name it), and the first dart took off like a guided missile, streaking high over the lions, out of the pen and into the dense fabric of the wind-whipped sky. The lions roared, Chuy yippeed and yahooed and twirled the rope over his head. I took my bifocals off and wiped them on the handkerchief in my breast pocket, the only reasonably dry thing on me, and then I lined up a second shot with the tip of my nose spewing water like a fountain and my fingers befuddled and the catfish crawling up my pantlegs, and let it go out of desperation, frustration and something very much like hate-hate for the animals, for Mac, for the U. S. Weather Service and all the polluters and ravagers and industrialists who had brought me and Chuy and the lions to this absurd and humiliating moment in the history of interspecies relations.

There was a sound like the final blow in a pillow fight — a soft w hump l — and there it was, the dart, dangling from Dandelion's flank like a-well, like a big yellow jacket. He turned and snapped at it, whirling round two or three times with a snarl more bewildered than fierce, and in the process inadvertently knocked Amaryllis off the roof and into the cold swirl of the muddy water. She didn't like that. Didn't like it at all. Thankfully, though, she didn't take her displeasure out on Chuy — or me — but instead scrabbled back up on the roof of the enclosure and gave Dandy a swat that would have crushed the spine of a zebra or wildebeest (if such things existed), but only managed to operate in concert with the drug and knock him off his feet. That was when Chuy's rope work came into play. He was a master, no doubt about it, the lasso snaking out, catching the wind and riding it in an elliptical trajectory right over Dandy's head, where it came down soft as a snowflake.

The rest was easy. (I'm speaking relatively here, of course-relative to a week ago, when all I had to worry about was what I was going to read on the toilet and which can of soup to open for supper, it was the seventh circle of hell.) Chuy cinched the rope, waded back to me and stood at the open door of the enclosure to watch the result — and slam shut the door if anything went wrong. I backed up, the current snatching at my old man's feet, the wind slamming at me in gust after gust, and slowly made my way back to the Olfputt, where I climbed into the back seat and fought the door closed. The two Als were up front, giving me the sort of look they reserved for anybody who got within five feet of Mac. They looked fierce and suspicious, puffed up like bullfrogs, the slabs of their shoulders rising titanically out of the black slickers Mac had provided them with. They also looked scared. "What now?" The one at the wheel said.

I glanced over my shoulder to where Chuy, partially obscured by a scrim of wind-driven rain, was giving me the thumbs-up sign. A gust rocked the truck. "Put it in four-low," I said, still watching Chuy, "and start up the hill, nice and easy."

The truck moved forward and the line fastened to the trailer hitch went taut, and in the next moment I saw the distant form of Dandelion pitch forward off the roof and plunge awkwardly into the water, all four paws spread like landing gear. For an instant, he was gone from sight, but then his head bobbed up and I could see his front paws churning-he was swimming! But the miracle didn't end there. In the next moment, both the other lions followed suit, flopping into the water with looks of weary resignation and paddling right along with him, through the open gate and on up the hill behind the Olfputt. "Right up to the door!" I shouted at AL "Right on up to the door!"

Now, there are many forms of disaster that could have spun out of this-three full-grown, ill-tempered and half-starved African lions loose among the condos, and how big a check would Mac have to write then? — but the newborn river that had taken possession of Rancho Seco had split round Mac's hill. His place was an island now, and though the cats could have swum off to wreak havoc of the worst and bloodiest sort, I really did think they would have the sense to come in out of the rain and settle down to the breast of feral emu we'd so thoughtfully provided for them. And that's exactly what they did. I leaned out the back window and cut the rope, and Dandy, wobbly from the drug, had to sit down twice in the mud before he could follow his nose — and his two unencumbered companions-through the open door and into the vast recesses of Maclovio Pulchris' paneled and carpeted basement. All that was left was to close and secure the door, and I had Al the First nose the Olfputt in over the flowerbeds and right up to the door, and then Al the Second jumped out and put his shoulder to it in a very definitive way. Then it was the planks and six-inch nails, and all three of us put our energy into that, even as Chuy, triumphant, staggered up to us with a four-foot grin. "Now we go for Lily, verdad, Mr. Ty?"

So this is why I can't sleep — the animals. It was the animals all along. Lions in the basement, vultures round the indoor pool, the hyena in the gift-wrapping room on the second floor. It's crazy, that's what it is. And all the while the water rising.

What are we going to feed them? How are we going to clean up after them? And when the waters recede — if they ever do-will Mac have the energy to start all over again?

I don't know. But Andrea rolls over suddenly, her face right beside mine on the pillow, and in the watery light of dawn I watch her eyes flash open, dreaming eyes, the eyes that me down and into her inescapable arms. "Sleep well?" She whispers.

I try to avoid perspective as much as possible. Perspective hurts. Live in the present, that's what I say, one step at a time, and forget nostalgia, forget history, forget the sketchy chain of loss, attrition and disappointment that got you into bed last night and out of it this morning. It's hard, though, when you've got Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater sitting at your elbow and sectioning your grapefruit for you because you can barely lift your arms your back hurts so much, and April Wind the toad worshipper mooning at you from across the table. And Mac. I've known him for ten years, ever since I got out of prison for the last and final time, and here he is skating through the door in a gauze mask that scares the living hell out of me. "Morning, morning, morning!" He chimes, whirling round on the balls of his feet as if he's onstage, the two bodyguards shadowing him with their big heads and sleepy eyes. One more shock: they're wearing masks too.

I gape. I blink. I fish my glasses out of my shirt pocket. "All right," I say finally, "come on, Mac-what's with the mask? And don't tell me it's the mucosa again, because I don't want to hear it, not with the weather and the animals and all the rest of it, uh-uh, no way."

Andrea's out of her chair already, and screw the grapefruit, screw her ex-husband, nobody exists in the world but Mac. "It is, isn't it? April and I were trying to tell Ty, but he wouldn't listen. Go ahead, tell him, Mac-"

But let me back up a minute to give you a view of the scene unfolding here. Here's Mac, worth I don't know how many millions, fiftyish and lean to the point of being skinny, bandy-legged in a pair of black jeans, some sort of drum major's jacket with gold piping over a black Barbecue You! Tour T-shirt clinging to his emaciated torso, his face swallowed up in fedora, shades and mask; and here's Andrea, worth nothing, a hot old lady in a print hippie dress that drops to the toes of her boots, striated bosom exposed, golden eyes agog, taking hold of Mac's forearms in real earnest while the bodyguards shift uneasily from one cloddish foot to the other. And where are we? We're in one of the three dining rooms in the mansion, this one called the Motown Room, perched high over the north wing, looking out the reinforced picture window to the roiling mess of the flatlands beneath us. It's still raining. And the wind is still cutting up.

"I've got masks for everybody," Mac pipes, shrugging out of Andrea's grip and waving a sheaf of them over his head, "so there's no reason to get excited. Just a precaution, that's all. Everybody's my guest for as long as this keeps up, and don't you worry, Mac'll take care of you. We've got plenty of food and Al's had the generator going ever since the power went out day before yesterday-"

I'm on my feet and I'm angry and I don't know why. "So what is this, 'The Masque of the Red Death' or something? We all wore masks and kept strictly to ourselves the last time, remember, Mac? And it didn't do Lori a whole lot of good, did it?"

"That was then. We didn't take it seriously at first. We fraternized. Let the maids go home every afternoon. The parties, remember the parties, Ty? But I got out of the Carolinas the minute I heard this time. Siege mentality, folks. And, really, I'm going to have to insist that everybody wear a mask till we hear different — if you want to stay here, you play by my rules. And Dr. Deepit says to stay inside because of the mosquitoes, the ones that carry the-what do they call it, Ty?"

"Dengue fever. They call it dengue fever, and the mosquito that carries it is the Aedes aegypti, formerly known to occur only in the tropics. They call it bonebreak fever too, because your bones feel like they're snapping in half when you've got it. But we can stay inside all we want-shit, we could go around day and night in beekeeper's outfits — but what are we going to feed the animals, that's what I want to know. Everything got washed away yesterday, and all of them except for the lions have had to go without."

Andrea's face is-joyful. Or nearly joyful. And April Wind, dressed in some sort of serape with a clay likeness of Chaac, the Aztec rain god, dangling on a suede cord from her throat, looks ecstatic too. It takes a minute, and then understand — the storm is raging, the plague afoot, and they're locked in with Maclovio Pulchris: mission accomplished.

I don't like it. I don't like it at all. The mucosa is a nasty business all the way round, a sort of super-flu, spread by casual contact, that inflames the mucous membranes of the sex organs, the respiratory canal and the eye until they begin to hyperfunction and you literally drown in your own secretions. It's painful. It's lingering. And ifs not pretty.

"It might surprise you to know, Ty Tierwater, that there's meat in this house," Mac is saying, and he skates playfully across the room to pose beneath a rippling electronic portrait of Gladys Knight and the Pips, performing for the little audience gathered in the dining room. I'd describe his look as sly, but for the fact that he has no look at all-hat, shades and mask, that's all I see.

"Meat?" April Wind is offended. "But you're a vegetarian, aren't you? You of all people — I mean, I've read all the bios and the magazines too, everything…" She's gaping up at him from a plate of chapatis, lime pickle and eggs-over-easy prepared by Mac's invisible cook and served up silently by a masked Pakistani woman who disappeared the minute the plate hit the table. "You're a vegetarian. I know you are."

Andrea's left in the middle of the enormous room, looking as if she's been deserted on the dance floor between tunes. "He probably just keeps it for his guests, for the parties-Barbecue You? Right? Isn't that it, Mac?"

Mac. She met him two days ago-through me, because of me — and already it's Mac this and Mac that and could I get you another soda, Mac, or peel you some grapes, and what do you think, Mac?

He's smiling — I can tell because the corners of the gauze mask lift just under the plastic rims of the sunglasses, where the muscles of his fleshless cheeks would be. He's looking at me — or at least his head is turned my way. "Come on, Ty, don't be such a crank-come on, I'll show you," and there's movement now, Maclovio Pulchris, the ex — pop star who hasn't had a hit in sixteen years sliding across the room on spring-loaded joints to take hold of my aching and angry arm, the two Als stirring and exchanging nervous glances over the dangerous proximity of their employer to another human being, Andrea closing fast and even April starting up from her congealed eggs. "Down in the basement, Ty — the east basement, locked off from those sweet tawny lions, and you know I love them, man, so don't give me that look. Shit, I've got a whole meat locker full of staff-steaks, rump roasts, strings of pork sausage, lamb chops, corn dogs, filet mignon, you name it. We could feed fifty lions!"

I've never believed in vegetarianism myself, except as an ecological principle-obviously, you can feed a whole lot more people on rice or grain than you can on a feed-intensive animal like a steer, and, further, as everyone alive today knows, it was McDonald's and Burger King and their ilk that denuded the rain forests to provide range for yet more cows, but, still, I don't make a religion of it. Meat isn't the problem, people are. In prison, they gave us spaghetti with meat sauce, chili con came, sloppy joes, that sort of thing, and I forked it up gladly and didn't think twice about it. It's a Darwinian world-kill or be killed, eat or be eaten — and I see no problem with certain highly evolved apes cramming a little singed flesh between their jaws every now and again (if only there weren't so many of us, but that's another story). Besides, I didn't really come to the environmental movement till Andrea got hold of me, and I'd gone through thirty-eight years as a carnivore to that point. Top of the food chain, oh, yes, indeed.

My daughter saw things differently.

It started when she was eleven. She came back from an outing in New York with Jane's sister, Phyll, which I'd assumed would be a Radio City Music Hall/Museum of Natural History sort of thing, and announced to me that meat was murder. They hadn't gone to the Hall of Mammals after all. No, Phyll had taken her to the Earth Day rally in Washington Square, where she'd been converted by a dreadlocked ascetic and a slide show depicting doe-eyed veal calves succumbing to the hammer and headless chickens having their guts mechanically extracted on a disassembly line. Pa had a catastrophic day at the office, my biggest tenant — a national drugstore chain, the anchor for the whole shopping center — threatening to relocate in the mall down the street, and I was sipping scotch to anaesthetize my nerves and defrosting a fat, dripping pair of porterhouse steaks for dinner. Sierra stood there in the kitchen, five feet nothing and eighty-eight pounds, lecturing me about the evils of meat, the potatoes dutifully baking, the frozen string beans in the pot and the steaks oozing blood on the drainboard. "That's disgusting, Dad-it is. Look at that meat, all slimy and bloody. Some innocent cow had to die just so we could eat like pigs, don't you realize that?"

I wasn't humorless — or not entirely. But I'd had a rough day, I was a single parent and a cook of very limited resources. Meat was what we had, and meat was what we were going to eat. "What about last week?" I said. "What about the Chicken McNuggets I get you every Saturday for lunch? What about Happy Meals?"

The kitchen we were standing in was a fifties kitchen, designed and built by my father after he'd finished the first seventy-five houses in the development. Things were breaking for him, and he spared no expense on the place, situating it on three acres at the very end of the road, with a big sloping lawn out front and an in-ground pool in back, then buffering the property with another hundred acres or so of swamps and briars and second-growth forest — the haunt of deer and opossum, toads, frogs, blacksnakes and the amateur biologist and budding woodsman who was his son. The kitchen, with its built-in oven and electric range, Formica counters and knotty-pine cabinets my mother insisted on painting white, had been the scene of any number of food rebellions in the past (macaroni and cheese particularly got to me, and wax beans — I couldn't even chew, let alone digest them), but this was unique. This wasn't simply a matter of taste-it was a philosophical challenge, and it struck at the heart of the regimen I'd been raised on.

Her gaze was unwavering. She was wearing shorts, high-tops and an oversized T-shirt Phyll had bought her (Lamb to the Slaughter? It asked, over the forlorn mug of a sheep). "I'll never go to McDonald's again," she said. "And I'm not eating school lunch either."

I took a pull at my drink, the scotch swirling like smoke in a liquid sky. "What am I supposed to give you, then-lettuce sandwiches? Mustard greens? Celery sticks? Bamboo shoots? You don't even like vegetables. How can you be a vegetarian if you don't like vegetables?"

She had nothing to say to this.

"What about candy? You can eat candy, can't you? I mean, candy's a vegetable, isn't it? Maybe we could base your whole diet around candy, you know, like eggs with fried Butterfingers for breakfast, peanut brickle and baked Mars Bars on rye for lunch with melted chocolate syrup and whipped cream on top? Or ice cream-what about ice cream?"

"You're making fun of me. I don't like it when you make fun of me. I'm serious, Dad, you know, really serious. I'll never eat one bite of meat again." She pointed a condemnatory finger at the steaks. "And I'm not eating that either."

I could have handled it differently, could have humored her, could have applied the wisdom I'd gained from all the little alimentary confrontations I'd had with my mother when I was Sierra's age, not to mention my father and his special brand of militant obtuseness. But I was in no mood. "You'll eat it," I said, looming over her with my scotch and the beginnings of a headache, "or you'll sit at that table over there till you die. Because I don't care."

The steaks were in the pan, inch-thick slabs of flesh, and I looked at them there and for the first time in my life thought about where they'd come from and what the process was that had made them available to me and my daughter and anybody else who had the $6. 99 A pound to lay down at the A&P Meat Depai. Talent. Cattle suffered, cattle died. And I ate burgers and steaks and roasts and never had to contemplate the face of the creature who gave it all up for me. That was the way of the world, that was progress. I shrugged, and shoved the pan under the broiler.

Sierra had retreated to her room at the end of the hall, the room that had been mine when I was a boy, and she wasn't listening to her tapes or doodling in her notebook or whispering dire secrets into the phone-she was just lying there facedown on the bed, and her shoulders were quivering because she was crying softly into the pillow. I'd seen those quivering shoulders before, and I was powerless before them. But not this night. I had my own problems, and I didn't take her in my arms and tell her it was all right, she could eat anything she wanted, Fruit Loops in the morning, cupcakes for lunch and Boston cream pie for dinner-no, I took her by the arm and marched her into the kitchen, where a baked potato sat slit open on the plate beside a snarl of green beans in melted butter and a slab of medium-rare steak the size of Connecticut.

I poured her a glass of milk, set my drink down and settled into my chair across the table from her. I plied knife and fork. I lifted one chunk of meat after another to my mouth, patted my lips with my napkin, vigorously tapped the inverted pepper shaker over my plate, chewed green beans, slathered my potato with sour cream and butter. There was no conversation. Nothing. I might have said, "Good meat," or something along those lines, some little dig at her, but that was about it. She never moved. She just bowed her head and stared down at her plate, the potato and beans no doubt contaminated by the juices from the steak, and the milk, which she'd never much liked but only tolerated in any case, entirely ignored. Even when I got up from the table to rinse my plate and dump the rest of my drink down the drain, she never so much as glanced up. And later, when the phone rang and rang again, her friends on the other end of the line anxious to communicate their own dire secrets, she never flinched. She sat there rigid at the table as the daylight faded from the windows, and when I found her sitting there in the dark an hour later, I flicked on the counter lights.

I couldn't look at her face or focus too long on the back of her bowed head and the sliver of white that was the perfect parting of her hair, because I was determined not to waver. Let her get away with this and she'll rule me, that's the way I felt, and then it'll be junk food and candy, then it'll be stunted growth and rotten teeth and ruined skin, delinquency, early pregnancy, bad debts, drugs, booze, the whole downward spiral. At eleven, I crept into the kitchen and saw that she was asleep, head cradled in the nest of her hands, the plate pushed to one side, untouched, preserved like a plate under glass in some museum of Americana: Typical American meal, circa 1987. I lifted her in my arms, no weight to her at all, as if the forfeit of one night's meal had wasted her, and laid her gently into bed, covers to the chin, a kiss to the cheek, good night.

Pork chops the- next night, breaded, with German potato salad, sauerkraut, hot apple sauce and reheated green beans. She wouldn't even look at it. What did I say? Nothing. She sat there at the table doing her homework till she fell asleep, and this time I left her there. On the third night it was pizza, with anchovies and mushrooms, her favorite, but she wouldn't touch that either. I gave vent to my feelings then. I roared and I threatened, slammed things, stretched her over the rack of guilt and stretched her again-did she think it was easy for me, with no wife, to come home from a numbing day of work and put on an apron, just for her? Huh? Did she?

On the morning of the fourth day of her hunger strike, I got a call from the school nurse: she'd fainted during gym class, halfway through the rope climb, and had fallen twelve feet to the gym floor. Nothing broken, but they were taking her to the hospital for precautionary X-rays, and by the way, had she been eating right? The windows were beaded with rain. Sevry Peterson, owner of the failing stationery store in the shopping center, was sitting across the desk from me in the hopeless clutter of my office, explaining how she'd come to be six months behind in her rent. I waved her off, grabbed my jacket and made the Mustang scream all the way to the hospital.

Sierra was sitting in the waiting room when I got there, looking glum in her leggings, big socks and Reeboks and the oversized fluorescent pink T-shirt she insisted on wearing every third day. Mrs. Martini, the school nurse, was sitting on one side of her, a hugely fat man in sandals and a dirty white sweatshirt on the other. The fat man periodically dabbed his forehead with a bloody rag and moaned under his breath, and Mrs. Martini sat stiff as a cadaver over a copy of People magazine. Sierra's eyes leapt up when she saw me come through the door, but then they went cold with the recollection that meat was murder and that I, her father, was chief among the murderers. And then what?

Then we went home and she never touched another scrap of meat in her life.

Mac's house-his Versailles, his pleasure dome, his city under a roof-was built during the nineties, the last age of excess in a long line of them. It has three dining rooms, eighteen bedrooms, twenty-two baths, the aforementioned giftwrapping room, a theater, spa, swimming pool, gymnasium and bowling alley, not to mention the twenty-ear garage and a scattering of guesthouses set amongst the remains of what were once formal gardens. There's plenty of room for everybody Andrea, April Wind, the ghost of Sierra, Dandelion, Amaryllis and Buttercup, refugees from the condos (though none have showed up yet and the winds are still raging), the two Als, Mac and his collection of gauze masks, even Chuy, who insists on sleeping beneath the vintage Dodge Viper in the garage. And, as I'm about to discover, there's food too. Mac pulled me out of the dining room by the arm, and now I'm following his sloping shoulders down a long corridor to an elevator with hammered brass doors. "It's down two," he says, pulling a gauze mask from his pocket and holding it out for me.

What can I say? I take the mask and loop it over my head without — a word. My role here is to play the angry old man, and I let my eyes, fully stoked, do the talking for me. Down we go, and then the doors part on another hallway, magenta carpets, recessed lighting, some of the last mahogany paneling ever installed anywhere on this earth. In the confusion of yesterday we herded the warthogs and peccaries into the bowling alley, and that's down along here somewhere, I think, and though I can't hear them, I can smell the lions. No doubt they're asleep-even in nature, when there used to be nature, that is, adult lions would sleep something like twenty hours a day. I can picture them laid out like corpses amongst the rags and tatters of the dismantled furniture, only the slow rise and fall of their rib cages giving them away. (It's a crazy picture, I know it, this whole thing is crazy, but welcome to life in the twenty-first century. And who am Ito complain-I'm surviving, aren't I? If that's what you want to call it.) Mac's shoulders work, the fedora rides. We follow a corridor to the right, make a left up another corridor, then pass through the swinging doors of the lower kitchen. Mac fumbles for the light switch and a world of kitchen implements bursts into gleaming view: saucepans, colanders, whisks and graters depending from the ceiling above stainless-steel worktables, a big industrial-sized dishwasher, the polished doors of a walk-in freezer. "Check this out," Mac says, his voice muffled by the gauze, and then he pulls back the door on the right and we're engulfed by a creeping cloud of super-refrigerated air. Another light switch illuminates the interior and we can see the carcasses arrayed on their hooks and casting their frozen shadows.

"To be a host-to be the host of the baddest, hippest and grooviest parties-you just have got to have meat, you know what I mean?" Mae is saying. "Plus, these poor things were already dead and slaughtered, and its like, if you're going to have a wine cellar, why not a meat cellar too? I mean, it's an investment. I've got the last Argentine beef in here, you know that? Buffalo tongue, elk, mutton, spicy salsiccia from Palermo — I don't know what all. And fish. Two whole bluefin tuna, maybe the last ones on earth, and you know what the Japanese would pay for them? For just a slice as long as your little finger?" A wave of his hand. "They're back in there somewhere. Or at least they used to be." His breath is steaming through the mask in a weird billow of light, shadows everywhere, the naked beasts on the naked hooks, meat with a vengeance. "Some of this stuff is twenty years old."

We've both edged into the locker. Here's something right next to me, frozen like granite, and with a hoofless leg at the end of it. "So you're saying we can maybe feed some of the older stuff to maybe the fox, the hyena, the lions-in a pinch, that is? You don't mind?"

Mac gives me an eloquent shrug. His shades are frosting over. I can feel the ice crystallizing round the white hairs in my old man's nostrils. "We've got to save the animals," he says finally. "You know that, Ty."

The Sierra Nevada, August 1989

Tierwater sat perched on the edge of an Adirondack chair, a sketchpad in his lap and a tall vodka and tonic within easy reach, watching his wife and daughter shake dice in their fists and move tiny silver markers around a Monopoly board. The temperature was in the low seventies, the sky a clear omniscient blue, the aspens unruffled, the pines, cedars and redwoods silently climbing one atop another to the distant horizon Andrea was seated in the lotus position on the weathered planks of the veranda, her breasts swinging free behind the thin cotton screen of her T-shirt, her own drink cradled between her thighs. Just below her, on the steps down to the pale needle-strewn duff, Sierra knelt barefooted in a wide stripe of sunlight, contemplating the construction of a hotel on one of her more favorably located properties. There was no sound but for the reiterative knock of a woodpecker from deep in the forest and, closer at hand, the high-pitched complaint of a chickaree from the canopy of a huge ponderosa pine that rose up like a wall outside the bedroom window. There were no bugs. There was no wind. And the smell-it was the smell of a sauna, clean and astringent, the sun slowly baking the scent out of the pines.

Tierwater wasn't much of an artist anymore (though he'd once had vague ambitions along those lines), and he would have been the first to admit it. Still, he liked the feel of the stick of charcoal between his fingers, the easy, faintly rasping strokes, the suggestion of the real in an abstraction- vertical strokes became trees; horizontal, branches; and then there was the quick scrawl to represent the shadows on the tumbled granite that erupted from the earth at the foot of the big pine. The exercise was calming. Deeply calming. And it was more than that too-it was an expression of the love affair he was having with these mountains. Never mind the panic, the police, the warrants, the assumed name (they knew him here as Tom Drinkwater, his wife as Dee Dee, and his daughter as Sarah) — he was in love. Turn by turn, minute by minute, as they'd come up out of the San Joaquin Valley and the staggering heat of late July, he'd felt it growing in him. Each switchback brought him closer to it, a landscape of liberation, light like a bombardment, a forest of trees ten times bigger around than anything he'd known in all his years of hiking the hills of the scaled-down East. And more: this was wild country, haunt of puma, black bear, coyote, ouzel, golden trout and golden eagle. Yes, he'd seen trees in Oregon, magnificent trees, but they were the palisades of his nightmares now, they were the cut and sharpened and fire-hardened pikes of Sheriff Bob Hicks and Judge Duermer as they poked and prodded and held him at bay. This was different. This was landscape as embrace. This was peace.

Sierra let out a squeal. "Ha!" She said. "That'll be, let's see-one thousand one hundred and fifty dollars:'" Killing her, huh, honey? Show her no mercy, that's what I say."

"Come on, Ty," Andrea said, raising the glass to her lips and rattling the ice cubes, "you don't have to be so bloodthirsty, or mercenary, or whatever. What about the spirit of friendly competition, mother and daughter, all the rest of it?"

She was joking, of course, because she was as much in love with these mountains and this moment as he was. "Call me Tom," he said.

"All right, Tom, after I obliterate Sarah here and make her mortgage all her properties and squeeze her till she bleeds, how about a little hike out to Kramer Meadow be: fore dinner?"

"You wish," Sierra said, cupping the dice in her palm. "Watch out, because here I come!"

Sure, he would say, sure, they'd take a little stroll through the trees and out to the meadow, which was in reality a sort of alpine bog nurturing arrowhead and sedges and tiny tree frogs, good for the appetite, he'd say, and then they'd come home to the eggplant casserole in the oven and have another drink and play Scrabble and maybe even put a log on the fire if the night turned cold. And the nights did turn cold here, perfect sleeping weather, September in the air and then October and November and snow enough to bury every fugitive in the country. To say sure to all that was to say that life was a good and great thing, that life was normal, and a man could love his family and nature too and love them in peace. But that wasn't the way it was, not for Tierwater, not then. And if he needed a reminder, it appeared at that moment at the far end of the dirt drive that wound through the naked legs of the trees and on up to the dead spot-no needles, no pine cones, just dirt-to the left of the graying wooden steps on which his daughter was perched.

Philip Ratchiss' silver Toyota Land Cruiser caught the light and threw it back at them, there was the sound of the big all-terrain tires eating up the ruts, then the glittering boxy machine was settling into its springs over the dead spot and a fine brown dust, the dust of mountains gone down, hung like a trembling nimbus in the air. "What ho!" Ratchiss said, stepping out of the car and flicking a finger to the brim of his safari hat. He was an American, born and raised in Massapequa, Long Island, but he'd lived twenty years in East Africa, and he had one of those accents that drop somewhere in the no-man's-land between Nassau County plumber and member of the House of Lords — and he loved to quote Shakespeare, not in any apposite or meaningful way, but in the little phrases, the "What ho! 'S" and "Zounds!" S and "Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" S. How old was he? Tier-water wasn't sure, but he looked to be in his mid-fifties, a strangely muscled man-muscled in all the wrong places, that is, ankles, wrists, the back of his head-with a bush-ravaged face and a stingy hook of a red and peeling nose stuck in the middle of it as if noses were purely accidental. He'd killed whole herds of animals. He drank too much (gin and bitters). In his blood, he harbored the plasmodium parasites that gave rise to malaria. He was loud, boastful, vain, domineering. He was their host. And this was his cabin.

Tierwater was never quite certain just how to respond to "What ho!" So he lifted a lazy palm in greeting as Ratchiss took the three steps to the front deck in a single bound, both his arms laden with groceries, the hat shoved back to expose his retreating hairline and dead-white scalp. "Hot as a bitch down below," Ratchiss said, easing open the door to the house with a tentative finger, the paper sacks shifting in his arms with a crunch of glass on glass. "More things in the car," he grunted, and then the screen door slapped shut behind him.

Andrea gave him a look, and Tierwater drained his glass and ambled down the steps to the car. He reached into the back seat and extracted three bags more-pickles, relish, buns, condiments to go with the meat Ratchiss was forever grilling on a rack out back of the house. That was all right. There were fresh greens too, and Sierra had enough soy burgers in the freezer to last till Christmas. He hefted the groceries, pinned the bags to his chest and went up the steps and into the house.

Inside, it was dark and cool, with a lingering smell of woodsrnoke, burnt bread and mouse urine wedded to the sweet chemical scent of the kerosene lanterns lined up on the mantel above the blackened stone fireplace. The cabin itself had begun as an A-frame, with a grand room just off the veranda and a sleeping loft with two bedrooms and a kitchen tucked under it, but Ratchiss had cobbled an addition onto the back of the place to give it two more rooms, a second bath, and a hot tub cut into the redwood deck and open to the sun and stars. Tierwater wouldn't want to call it a conventional mountain cabin, because at this point he'd had precious little experience of cabins, mountain or otherwise, but it was pretty much standard issue. Except for the views, of course — and for Ratchiss' interior — decorating scheme. There were no deer's heads over the mantel or lacquered trout affixed to the walls on wooden plaques, no sentimental acrylic renderings of alpine grandeur or stark black — and — white photos of El Capitan or the Half Dome-no, inside Ratchiss' cabin, it was Africa.

The furniture-couch, loveseat and two matching chairs-was made of rock-hard mopane wood and upholstered in zebra hide. There was a lion rug on the floor instead of the orthodox bear, and the walls bristled with spears, shields, tribal masks and the mounted heads of kongoni, sable, oryx, leopard and bushpig — and one monumental rhino that looked as if it had burst through the paneling directly over the fireplace. But the piece de resistance was the rearing lion-eight feet tall at least, with drawn claws and a stupefied snarl-that stood guard over the entrance to the kitchen. Ratchiss identified it fondly as the Maneater of the Luangwa, killer and devourer of seventeen hapless men, women and children.

And here was the very man who'd put an end to the lion's existence, the odd band of muscle flashing under his shirt as he alternately tossed cans of beans and piccalilli relish onto the shelf and poured himself a drink from the half-gallon jug of Beefeater's on the counter. "Heard from Teo," he said. "Saw him, in fact, down at my place."

Ratchiss was referring to his primary residence, a house in Malibu with unobstructed ocean views, two swimming pools and a gallery of African art and trophies that would have put the Smithsonian to shame. He'd left Mag (or Mug) in charge of the place for a few days so he could do a little grocery shopping for his guests and see how they were adapting to their new surroundings. Tierwater merely grunted, but the grunt had a faint interrogative lift to it: Ratchiss had heard from Teo, and he had something to communicate.

"Yeah, we had a couple drinks together and then went out to this place I know in. Santa Monica. He's looking good, doing well-E. F.I Took in nearly eighty thousand dollars in contributions and new memberships last month alone. Oh, and before I forget, he gave me this, uh, for you-"

Tierwater set down the groceries and took the thick white envelope Ratchiss held out to him. He stuffed it in his pocket without looking at it, but he knew what it contained: hundred-dollar bills, a hundred and fifty of them, paid out of his business account by his secretary and channeled to him through a post-office box in Calabasas; the box was rented by an E. F.I Volunteer who gave over the envelope to Teo, who in turn transferred it to Ratchiss. Byzantine precautions, but necessary. The FBI was almost certainly in on this now: Tierwater had jumped bail, violated a court order, committed assault and battery, abduction, child abuse and God knew what else — and he'd fled across state lines to avoid prosecution. He was a criminal, a desperado, a fugitive from justice facing actual prison time, years maybe, years behind bars, and what had he done? He'd stuck his feet in some wet cement. Pissed off a few people. Tried to save the planet. Christ, they should be giving him awards- But there was no going back now. Sierra was already registered for the eighth grade in the Springville public schools — a mere twenty-eight miles away, down a twisting mountain road — and he and Andrea were in permanent hiding, ready to strike back when the opportunity presented itself. Nobody knew them now, and nobody cared. But they were going to become a cause celebre, that's how Tierwater saw it, heroes of the environmental movement. Like the Arizona Phantom. Or the Fox. People who'd struck back, done something, mattered. People who didn't just take up space and draw breath and consume so many pounds of food and pints of liquid a day and produce nothing in their whole oblivious, cramped and contaminated lives but waste and more waste.

The Phantom was a case in point. He'd appeared along the Arizona/New Mexico border in the early seventies, an anonymous avenger who took on Peabody Coal and its federal allies in the fight over the Four Corners power stations and the mine planned for Black Mesa. Eight-hundred-foot smokestacks. Air like soot. Burn coal and light up L. A. So the megalopolis can creep even farther into the desert-that was the idea. Peaceful protests had no effect. Lobbying failed. The Black Mesa Defense Fund ran out of money. But stealthily, methodically, without ever revealing his identity or coming close to apprehension despite an army of guards and watchmen lying in wait for him, the Phantom went to work on the tracks of the Black Mesa Railroad and every piece of heavy equipment he could find. Ultimately, the mines were gouged out of the ground and the smokestacks went up, but the Phantom-one man, acting alone-showed the world what commitment was. Or could be.

To Tierwater's mind, the Fox was even better, because he was visible — or at least he made himself visible at certain crucial and dramatic moments, like a kind of Zorro of the ecodefense movement. Legend had it that he was just a concerned citizen — a weekend fisherman, a biology teacher, a jogger-who took matters into his own hands after watching local industries pollute the Fox River in northern Illinois. He plugged illegal drains, capped smokestacks, left taunting notes at the scenes of his crimes and once was even interviewed (albeit in a mask) by a local television crew. But most dramatically — and this was what really fired Tier-water's imagination-he appeared one afternoon in the offices of a U. S. Steel executive and proceeded to pour a fifty-gallon barrel of sludge on the carpet. You people keep telling us you're not polluting our water, he said. So, if that's the case, this shouldn't hurt the carpet one bit And then he disappeared.

"Said he's coming up next week-wants to talk to you."

Tierwater had the refrigerator door open. He was extracting heads of lettuce, carrots, broccoli from the paper bags and dropping them into the vegetable crisper. "Who?"

"What do you mean, 'who'? Teo. Who're we talking about?" Ratchiss was giving him a look, lips pursed over the bite of his drink, eyes narrowed to slits.

All right, look at me, Tierwater was thinking, belligerent suddenly. If Teo came up, somebody might follow him And if somebody followed him, it wasn't Ratchiss who was going to jail, it was Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater. And his wife. And his daughter. "Isn't that dangerous?" Tierwater said, backing away from the refrigerator, all the peace gone out of the day like air from a hissing balloon.

"Bloody hell, you don't think he's going to drive, do you?"

"How else is he going to get here-by parachute?"

There was a moment of silence, Ratchiss studying him, the squirrels chittering in the trees outside the window, a soft exclamation of despair or joy-he couldn't tell which — drifting in from the grudge match on the porch. "He's no fool-he's hiking in. Having some friend drive him to the trailhead at Camp Orson, and you know Teo-I'd bloody well like to see some lawman try to keep up with him on the trail. No, not to worry, Ty: these people are professionals. We're professionals, I should say." He took a step forward, set his drink down on the counter and held out his hand — a callused, hard, sinewy hand, chilled by cold gin — which Tierwater duly took in his own. "Nobody's going to give you up, don't you worry?'

Andrea was committed to the cause-one of the charter members of Earth Forever! A paid, full-time proselytizer and rabble rouser — but Tierwater could see she hadn't counted on this. Living underground, living anonymously, living as Dee Dee Drinkwater in a place as remote from the bright lights as you could get, beautiful scenery, sure, but where was the action? Her forte was traveling the enviro circuit, making contacts over the cocktails and hors d 'oeuvres, showing the slides, giving the peroration and passing the hat. She looked good up there onstage, tall and commanding, with her low-cut blouse and scorching eyes, very persuasive, very seductive-as Tierwater could testify. She hadn't said anything yet, but he sensed she was looking for a way out, a deal maybe, a way to cut their losses and generate some publicity. Teo was coming. He wanted to talk. And what did that mean? More lawyers? More Freds? Tier-water didn't want any part of it-he was Tom Drinkwater now, faceless and hidden, and if he was going to go down he was going to go down in flames.

He was in the kitchen, half an hour after his chat with Ratchiss, helping Andrea dice vegetables for the salad that would complement the casserole and the mighty slabs of meat Ratchiss was incinerating on the grill out back, when he broached the subject of Teo's visit. "Teo's coming up next week, you know"

He turned his head to study her in profile, the hard bump of her nose, the slash of her cheek, hair falling to her shoulders in laminated coils. "Philip told me."

Outside, in the gathering shadows, Ratchiss hunched over the fire, drink in one hand, tongs in the other. He was whistling something, faint and atonal, something maddeningly familiar- "Seventy-six Trombones"? The theme from The Magnificent Seven?

"He did?" Tierwater was surprised. And somehow-he couldn't help himself-annoyed.

She was watching her hands, the knife that deftly julienned the carrots on the chopping block. "He gave me a letter from him too, E. F.I Business mostly." She shot him a sidelong glance. "Robin Goldman? Remember her? The one that loaned us the car? Well, she quit. Didn't say a word to anybody, just quit."

"No lawyers," Tierwater said, "and no deals. They pushed me, and I'm going to push back. You want to see sabotage, you want to see destruction like nobody's ever seen, well, that's what I'm devoting the rest of my flicking life to, and I don't care-"

"You want to see the letter? It's up on the night table, right by the bed." The heel of the knife hit the board, slivers of carrot flew, chop, chop, chop. "Go ahead, read it yourself."

"I don't want to read it. Just tell me what the deal is, because I'm getting pretty stressed out here — I mean, every step I've taken since we, since I met you, has been a flicking disaster, one Ricking disaster after another, and I want to know what's going on."

Down went the knife. She turned to face him, wiping her hands on the flanks of her shorts. "Nothing," she said. "Nothing's going on. And it was you who couldn't control yourself, slamming into that goon out in the Siskiyou, breaking out of the hospital, going up there to Sierra when I told you-"

"Yeah, you told me, all right." He pinched his voice in a mocking falsetto: 'You think I'd take Sierra along if I wasn't a hundred percent sure it was safe?' If Sierra doesn't go that night, then we're not here now, then my life isn't flicked, ever think of that? "He was shouting, he couldn't help himself, though he knew Ratchiss was listening, and, somewhere, Sierra too.

"All right. I made a mistake. What do you want me to do, bleed for it?"

"I just want to know one thing," he said, and he got his voice under control, or tried to. "Did you ever have anything going with him?"

"What are you talking about? With who?"

He dropped his voice, way down low, so low he could barely hear it himself: "Teo."

Later, at dinner, after Sierra had expressed her disgust over the bleeding mound of sliced tri-tip Ratchiss had set down in the middle of the table ("What do you call thatcarpaccio?"), And Ratchiss had told a pungent, sweltering anecdote about tracking down a wounded leopard in thick bush and removing its head with a double blast of his shotgun as it hung in the air two feet from his face, Tierwater began to feel better. It wasn't so much Teo that was bothering him as what Teo represented. Intrusion. The outside world. Business as usual. These past three weeks had been an idyll, and Tierwater knew it, but he wanted the idyll to go on forever. He looked at Andrea, at her hands and arms and the way she cocked her head first with amusement and then intrigue and finally something like fear as Ratchiss spun out his story, and wished he could freeze the moment.

"You know, really," Ratchiss was saying, "my life's come a full three hundred sixty degrees."

"One eighty," Andrea said automatically. "From one pole to the other. If you'd gone three sixty, you'd be back where you started."

"That's just what I mean: I'm back where I started." Red-faced, his skin baked to the texture of jerky, Ratchiss took a gulp of Pinot Noir and looked round the table. "You see, I started out loving animals — and, by extension, nature — then, suddenly, I hated them and wanted to kill everything with claws and hoofs that moved across the horizon, and now I'm as committed a friend of the earth and the animals as you'd want to find."

Sierra had been toying with her utensils, filling up on Diet Coke and chips. She didn't really care for eggplant, and salad was salad. "How could anybody hate animals?" She said.

"Oh, it's easier than you might imagine. Ever think of what our ancestors must have felt when Mummy was snapped up by a big croc while washing out her loincloth in the river? Or when they glanced up from the fire to see Grandpa dangling from the jaws of some cave bear the size of that tree out front? Or, more to the point, the thousands of poor Africans taken by leopards every year? You think they love leopards? Or do you think they want to exterminate them ASAP?" He leaned back to light a cigarette, and Sierra made a face. "Let me tell you a story, a true story, about why I came to hate wild animals-why I gave up my desk job to go to Africa. It was because of something that happened to me when I was little, or not so little-how old are you now?"

"Thirteen."

"Thirteen. Well. Maybe I was a year or two younger, I don't know. But, anyway, my father took the family on a vacation, to see the country, he said, all the way from Long Island, where I grew up, to Pikes Peak, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Park-not far from where we sit right here tonight, in fact. I had a sister then, Daphne, and she must have been about four at the time, a little girl with bangs and dimples and a barrette in her hair, and for the last two hundred miles all we talked about was the bears. Would there really be bears in Yosemite? Wild bears? And could we see them? Would we? My father was a solid man in his fifties-he married late and my mother was twenty years younger — and he'd got rich during the war in the canning business. He had one of those little masking-tape mustaches then, I remember, the kind you see on the dashing types in the old movies. Anyway, he just turned around in his seat and said, Sure, of course we'll see them. That's what the park's famous for. Bears.

"This was in the forties, by the way, just after the war. We had a Packard then, big as a hearse, in some deep shade of blue or maroon, I can't remember… And the bloody bears were there all right, a hundred of them, lined up along the road into the park like peanut vendors at Yankee Stadium, bears of all colors, from midnight black to dogshit brown and peach, vanilla and strawberry blond. You see, those were the days when the Park Service was actively trying to encourage tourism, and so they encouraged the bears too, by dumping garbage instead of hauling it out, because people wanted to see Bridalveil Falls and all that, sure, but if they were going to experience nature, they figured, really experience it, well, bears were the ticket.

"Every car was stopped, and every car had a bear at the window, and people were photographing them up close-from inches away — and feeding marshmallows and bologna sandwiches, candy bars, whatever they had, right into their mouths, as if they were just big shaggy dogs. Some people had their windows rolled down, leaning halfway out of the car to offer up a morsel of this or that, and the bears played it up, sitting on their rumps, doing tricks, woofing in that nasal, back-of — the-throat way that always makes me think of a trombone played in a closet. This was the thrill of my life. I was so excited I was practically bouncing off the ceiling of the car, and my sister too, but for some reason all the bears were occupied and none of them came up to us, or not right away. What's the matter, Dad? I whined. Why won't they come to us? And my father rolled- down the window-we all rolled down our windows, even my mother — and he leaned way out and tossed a packet of American-cheese slices out onto the blacktop about ten feet from the nearest bear, all the while making these mooching noises to attract it. I remember the bear. It was medium-sized, black as the car tires, with too-small eyes that seemed to melt into its head.

"Well, it must have heard my father — or the soft wet thwap of the cheese hitting the pavement — and it turned, sniffed and vacuumed up the cheese, wax paper and all, and then it ambled up to the car, swinging its head to catch the scent, and it was like two huge dogs wrapped in an old rug. I remember the smell of it-still, and after all these years and all the animals I've tracked and shot and skinned. It was rank and wild and it engulfed U. S as if the car had suddenly rolled down a hill and into a swamp or a cesspool, and it made me afraid, but only momentarily, and not so afraid I didn't hang out the window and feed it a whole bag of popcorn, kernel by kernel, and the marshmallows we were going to roast over the fire that night.

"By this time, people were getting out of their cars all up and down the line, so many people you could hardly see the bears for them. They all had cameras, and some of them were offering the bears more elaborate things, like hot dogs on a stick and jars of peanut butter-one guy even held out a pineapple to a bear, and though I'm sure the bear had no idea what it was, it ate it, prickly skin and all. That was when my father closed in on our bear — the black one with the melted eyes, a thing that barely came up to his waist — and decided he wanted a picture with one of us kids mounted on the thing's back."

"You've got to be kidding," Tierwater said. Sierra darted a glance out the window. She was hunched over her plate, rhythmically knocking her knees. She didn't say a word.

Ratchiss just shook his head. "I was too big, obviously, so he got my mother to hold the camera and he lifted my sister up into the air, thinking to swing her over the bear's shoulders for just an instant as it nosed at the popcorn on the pavement. My sister was wearing a white dress, with pink roses on it, that's what the pictures show, and a ribbon, I remember a ribbon." He pushed back from the table, drew on his cigarette and let out a long slow exhalation. "And that was it. My father was six months in the hospital. My sister, what was left of her, we had to bury."

Andrea leaned forward, both hands cupped over the rim of her wineglass. "You must have been devastated-"

"I saw the whole thing, my mother screaming, my father wrestling with this snarling bolt of stinking primitive energy, my sister, and I didn't do a thing, nothing, just stood there… It took me half my life, looking at my father's disfigured face and the looping white scars down his back every time we went to the beach or the pool, to understand that it wasn't the bear's fault."

"She died?" Sierra said, but nobody answered her.

After a suitable pause, during which Ratchiss stared down at the juices congealing on his plate and they all took a moment to listen to the silence of the woods brooding over the house, the conversation moved on to other things. There was coffee, and hot chocolate for Sierra, and then they retired to the big room to throw a log on the fire and sit watching the flames chew away at it. At some point, Andrea and Ratchiss talking in low tones about gut-shot buffalo and wild dogs, Tierwater poking through Emerson and Sierra hunched in the corner over a magazine, the telephone rang — but it didn't just ring; dropped into that well of silence, it was like an explosion. On the first ring, Tierwater felt as if he'd been hit in the back of the head with a hammer; on the second, he wanted to leap up and tear the cord from the wall. He was jumpy, and who wouldn't be? They could come for him at any moment.

Ratchiss answered it. "Yeah," he said. "Oh, hi. Just talking about you. Uh-huh, uh-huh." He cupped a hand over the mouthpiece. "It's Teo, calling from a phone booth. Change of plans-he'll be up tomorrow. He wants to know if you want anything-"

Tierwater just shook his head, but Sierra rose out of her seat and threw down the magazine. "Tell him I want magazines, books, video games, anything," she said, advancing on Ratchiss as if to snatch the phone away from him. "Tell him I want friends. Tell him I'm bored, bored, bored-"

"Yeah," Ratchiss whispered into the phone. "Uh-huh, yeah." Then he put his hand over the receiver again and gently replaced it in its cradle.

Sierra was left standing in the middle of the room, her hands spread in extenuation. She was grimacing, and Tier-water could see the light glint off her braces — and that was another thing, an orthodontist, and how was he going to explain the fact that somebody had twisted those wires over her teeth and kept meticulous records of it but that that somebody's name and records were unavailable? "I mean it," she said, and he thought she was going to start stamping her foot the way she did when she was three. "I don't want to be trapped up here with a bunch of old people and hicks, and I don't want to be Sarah Drinkwater either — I want to be me, Sierra, and I want" — her voice cracked- "I want to go home."

"You see this?" Teo was standing at the edge of a dirt road deep in the woods, hands on his hips. He gestured with a jerk of his chin "This is a culvert, twelve-inch pipe, nice and neat, keeps the creek from flooding out the road at snowmelt. If they don't have a culvert they don't have a road, and if they don't have a road they can't get the logs out."

It was a day of high cloud and benevolent sun, a Saturday, and the trees stood silent around them. They weren't real trees, though-not to Tierwater's mind, anyway. They weren't the yellow pines, the Jeffreys, ponderosas, cedars and sequoias that should have been here, but artificial trees, hybrids engineered for rapid and unbending growth and a moderate branching pattern. Neat rows of them fanned out along both sides of the road, as rectilinear as rows of corn in the Midwest, interrupted only by the naked rotting stumps of the giants that had been sacrificed for them. Tree fanning, that's what it was, tree farming in the national forest, monoculture, and to hell with diversity. Tierwater didn't see the long green needles catching the sun, didn't smell the pine sap or think of carbon-dioxide conversion or the Steller's jay squawking in the distance-he just gazed with disgust on the heaps of frayed yellow underbranches the timber company had pruned to make the job of harvesting all the easier. There was even a sign down the road — a sign in the middle of the forest, no less-that read Penny Pines Plantation. It was no better than graffiti.

One night, against his better judgment, he'd gotten into a debate with a logger at the local bar, an old man so wizened and bent over you wouldn't have thought he'd be able to lift a saw, let alone handle it, but as it turned out, he was a trimmer, part of the crew that shears the branches off the trees once they've been felled. Tierwater had said something about clear-cutting, and the old man, who was sitting at the bar with two cronies in plaid shirts and workboots, took exception to it. "Let me ask you this," he said, leaning into the bar and fixing Tierwater with a stone-cold crazy look, "you live in a house or a cave? Uh-huh. And what's it made out of? That's right. You use paper too, don't you, you got some kind of job where you don't get your hands dirty, am I right? Well, I'm the one that give you the paper in your nice clean office, and I'm the one that cut the boards for your house — and if I didn't you'd be living in a teepee someplace and wiping your ass with redwood bark and aspen leaves, now, wouldn't you?"

Tierwater had felt something rise up in him, something born of impatience, truculence, violence, but he suppressed it-he was trying to keep a low profile here, after all. There weren't more than fifty cabins out there in the woods, with a couple of blacktop roads connecting them to the combination lodge, gift shop, bar and restaurant he was now sitting in, and everybody knew everybody in Big Timber. So he just turned his back, picked up his beer and went off to sit at a table in the corner. He'd felt bad about that, about letting the running dogs of progress have the last say, but now, out here under the sky, in the midst of their plantation, he saw a way to answer them all.

"And this" — Teo was grinning, squatting over his big calves to rummage through his backpack and produce a scuffed rag of leather that looked like a deflated volleyball- "is a deflated volleyball. All you have to do is stuff it in the pipe, inflate the piss out of it and toss some debris up against it for camouflage. Soon as the water starts to flow-goodbye, road."

"Perfect for ten- or twelve-inch pipe," Andrea added. She was in a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt, her legs and arms tanned the color of iced tea, plastic wraparounds for sunglasses, Angels cap askew, halo and all. This was her hiker's disguise-that and the map in her hand — and she stood at the edge of the road shuffling her feet and grinning as Teo produced a bicycle pump and bent to his work. "Of course," she continued, "for bigger pipe we use a drill and those little eye screws? You know what I mean, Ty — the kind of thing you use for hanging plants? You just screw four of them in, or maybe six, depending, and then stretch some chicken wire across the gap:'" Right, and for really big pipe, pipe you can walk through" — Teo was off the road now, down in the gully, wedging the ball deep into the culvert- "you use a pickax, just punch holes in the bottom of the thing, I mean really tear it up, because eventually the water 'Il seep in underneath and undermine the whole business."

"It's really pretty easy," Andrea said. She was enjoying this, a little field trip, she the professor and Tierwater the student. Call it Ecodefense 101, or Monkeywrenching for the Beginner.

Teo's face, peering up from the culvert, a grin to match hers, the sun glancing off the shaven dome of his head: "Not to mention fun. You're having fun, aren't you, Ty?"

"I don't know-am I? What if somebody comes, what then?"

"We're hikers, Ty, that's all," Andrea said. "Here, look at my map. Besides which, there's nobody within ten miles of us, and all the loggers are hunkered around watching the game-"

"What game?" Tierwater said. "Is there a game on today?"

"There's always a game, football, basketball, hockey, championship bowling, whatever — and they're all watching it and getting liquored up so they can go out on the town and get into a brawl someplace. We don't even exist. And nobody 'Il know about this till spring runoff."

Fine. But would it save the forest? And beyond that, would it save the world? Or would it only serve to provoke the timber company all the more, like the Oregon fiasco? Where had that gotten them? What had that saved? Even the press was bad, portraying Tierwater as a subspecies of violent lunatic (two of the flattopped kid's teeth had been knocked loose, and the building inspector claimed he'd suffered a bruised windpipe), and Earth Forever! As a collection of unhinged radicals dedicated to killing jobs and destroying the economy. Still, as he shouldered his pack and moved on up the road, Tierwater understood that he didn't care, not about the press or the organization or the trees or anything else: all he cared about now was destruction.

"You see, Ty, what I wanted to tell you is you're in a unique position." Teo shifted his own pack with a twist of his shoulders and took two quick steps to catch up. "My hands are tied — I mean, they're watching me day and night, phones tapped, the works — but you're Tom Drinkwater now, you're nobody, and you can have all the fun you want. Right here, for instance, where the road narrows by that bend up there? See it? Perfect place for a spikeboard."

"What's a spikeboard?"

"Maybe a four-foot length of two-by-four, studded with sawed-off pieces of rebar, set at a forty-five degree angle. You anchor the thing in the road with two L-shaped strips of the same rebar-invaluable stuff, really, you'd be surprised-maybe a foot and a half, two feet long, so the board doesn't shift when they run over it. Then you just kick some dirt on top of it and it's practically invisible?'

Andrea, loping along, all stride and motion, hands swinging, eyes electric with excitement: "That slows them down all right." She let out a barely contained whinny of a laugh that rode up into the trees and startled the whole world into silence. And then Teo laughed along with her — a soft nasal snicker that sounded as if someone were drowning a cat — and Tierwater joined in too.

An hour later they arrived at their destination, a bald spot carved out of the mountain at the end of the road. On one side was the unbroken line of shadow that was the forest; on the other there was nothing but a dome of rock and debris that fell away into the valley below. There were machines everywhere, naked steel and scuffed paint glinting in the sun. It was dry underfoot, the duff scattered and pulverized, crushed twigs poking out of the soil like bones, dust like a second skin. In the center of the bald spot, a thin coil of smoke twisted up into the air where a heap of charred branches, crushed pine cones and other debris had been swept up by the Cats and left to smolder over the weekend.

They scouted the place as thoroughly as they could from the cover of the trees, then stepped out into the open. "Don't worry, Ty, we're only hikers, remember?" Andrea said. "And it's not like we're trespassing. This is still the Sequoia National Forest, and whether the Freddies would admit it or not, we have as much right to be here as the-what does that say on the loader over there? Can you read that?"

"Cross Creek Timber Co.," Teo read.

"Right-as the Cross Creek Timber Company."

They walked right up to the machines, Teo and Andrea alternately lecturing about the most effective way to disable them, pointing out the salient features of a Clark scraper, a shovel loader and a pair of Kenmore log trucks parked nose to tail at the mouth of the road. Tierwater didn't like being out in the open in broad daylight, even if there was no one around. He kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to catch the quick glint of the sun flashing off a pair of binoculars from the cover of a blind, or worse — a couple of forest rangers, with sidearms, ambling across the burned-over field. Or cops. Or FBI agents. And this was yet another movie, and he the reluctant star of it. What did FBI agents look like? Robert Stack? Tommy Lee Jones?

"See, they burn it over to put something back in the soil," Teo was saying, squatting to sift the blackened dirt through his fingers. "Gets rid of the debris too. Then they come in and plant in their neat rows and twenty more acres of old growth become a plantation."

They were in the shadow of the shovel loader, a big crane-like thing that heaved the logs up onto the trucks once the Cats had knocked them down and the trimmers had removed the branches. Andrea slipped on a pair of cheap cotton gloves and unscrewed the filler cap on the crankcase. "Right here, Ty-this is where you pour the sand, tonight, when it's dark. Medium-grit silicon carbide is even better, but obviously we're not going to haul anything extra all the way out here. And don't forget your boots."

All three of them, at Teo's insistence, had slipped sweat-socks over their hiking boots before they emerged from the woods-to cover up the waffle pattern on the soles. It was daylight, and they were hikers-only hikers, nothing but hikers — but they were taking no chances. "I won't," Tier-water promised. "But I tell you, I don't know if I can wait till dark. I'm here, the machines are here, the fucking artificial pines are down the road — I wouldn't mind torching the whole business, plantation, Cats, the whole flicking thing."

"I know, Ty," Andrea said, and her hand was on his arm, a gentle hand, a persuasive hand, a wifely hand that spoke volumes with a squeeze, "but you won't."

When the lesson was over for the day, the three of them retired to a creek bed half a mile away and Andrea spread out a picnic lunch-smoked-duck sausage, Asiago cheese, artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes and baguettes, replete with a stream-chilled bottle of Orvieto. They drank a toast to Tier-water's first covert action-coming action, that is — and then Andrea and Teo shouldered their packs and headed up the streambed to the trail that would, in three hours' time, take them back to Ratchiss' cabin. And Tierwater? He settled in to feel the sun on his face, read a book, watch the sky and wait till the day closed down and the moon rose up over the bald spot on the mountain.

It was past nine when he woke. Something had crossed the stream not fifty feet from where he lay, something big, and it startled him out of a dreamless sleep. The first thing he thought of, even before he fully recalled where he was or why, was Sierra. He checked his watch, listened again for the splashing-it was a deer, had to be; either that or an FBI agent — and pictured her dangling her big feet over the arm of the mopane easy chair, reading The Catcher in the Rye under the dull, staring gaze of the kongoni head in Ratchiss' living room. She wasn't here tonight, and she wasn't going to be present-ever again-for any nighttime activities of any kind. He was determined that she was going to have a normal life — or as normal a life as you can have living under an assumed name in a museum of African memorabilia in an A-frame in the hind end of nowhere. She was going to go to school, learn about the Visigoths and prime numbers, go to dances, acquire a new squadron of evil friends, experiment with pot and booze, become passionate about affectless bands, debate meat-eaters, rebel and recant, have her nose ring reinserted and drive a convertible at a hundred and ten. In five years-four and a half, actually-she could even have her identity back.

As for Teo, there was never any question of his participating in anything like this, not for real, not anymore-he was Earth Forever rs poster boy now, the big fund-raiser, and he couldn't afford to get caught in a covert action. He could chain himself to nuclear reactors and tree-sit and preach and publish all he wanted to, but his tire-slashing days were over. "Really, Ty," he said, working the corkscrew with the sun flattening his face and the butt of the wine bottle clenched between his thighs, "you understand why I can't risk any extracurricular activities anymore, don't you?" The cork slid from the bottle with a wet oozing pop of release. "But I envy you, I do."

And Andrea. She'd paid her fine, like Teo, and gotten off with probation for the Siskiyou incident-she hadn't assaulted anybody. And who knew it was her in that turd-brown car? Or at least that's what Teo was thinking. Maybe they'd let her back in, maybe Fred could do something… "About the kidnapping. Or abduction, or whatever. The Sierra thing."

Tierwater watched her. She'd tugged the brim of the baseball cap down to keep the sun out of her face and it immobilized her hair as she sliced cheese and portioned out the wine. She didn't say anything, but Tierwater could read the look on her face. Second thoughts. She was having second thoughts.

"Look," he said, "there's no reason I can't do this myself. How hard can it be? In fact, I insist. I know the drill. I know the trail out of here better than either of you." Andrea looked up. The brim of the cap threw a shadow over her face. "Right, lion?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't feel right about it." That was what she said, and she might even have meant it, or thought she meant it, but she was already looking for a way out of the whole mess, whether she realized it or not. "You sure you want to do this by yourself, Ty?"

She'd asked him twice. Once over the wine and duck sausage, and then when she bent to kiss him just before she and Teo packed up and left.

"It's all right," he told her. "Hey, the Fox always worked by himself, didn't he?"

But now it was dark, and he was alone, and something was splashing in the creek. When he'd fallen asleep, it was on a scoured pan of granite just above the high-water mark, in a place where the spring floods had scooped out a hollow in the rock, and he lay there as if in the palm of a sculpted hand, the water continuously butting up against it and rushing by with the white noise of infinity. A minute passed, and then another. Whatever it was that had wakened him was gone now. He listened for a minute more to be sure, then pushed himself up and flung the pack over his shoulder. Before he knew it, he was weaving through the debris of the clear-cut, his footsteps muffled by the sweatsocks stretched over his boots, a gibbous moon showing him the way with a light as pale and cold as the ambient light of a dream.

(And what was I carrying in that pack? The tools of my new trade. Pipe wrench, socket wrenches, gloves, wire cutters, hacksaw, flashlight, plastic tubing and plastic funnel, a couple of granola bars, bota bag, sheath knife, matches. I was equipped to wreak havoc, no excuses, no regrets. The least of those machines was worth fifty thousand dollars, and I was prepared to destroy every working part I could locate — but subtly, subtly, so they'd see nothing amiss and run their stinking diesel engines till they choked and seized. I only wished I could be there to see it happen, see the looks on their faces, see the trees I d saved standing tall while the big yellow machines spat and belched and ground to an ignominious and oh-so-expensive halt.) Tierwater scouted the 'place twice-no one and nothing moved; the silence was absolute — and then he slipped on the black cotton gloves and began servicing the machinery. He hit the shovel loader first, unscrewing the filler cap on the manifold as Andrea had showed him, neatly inserting the plastic tubing and then pouring cup after cup of sand (or decomposed granite, actually) into the funnel. It sifted down and into the innards of the engine with a soft gratifying swish, and it was that sound, the sound of sand in a plastic tube, that he would forever identify with nightwork — and revenge.

He went to each of the vehicles in succession, working not only on the engines but on all the lubrication fittings he could find, and when he was done with the heavy machinery, he turned his hand to the two trucks. Tinkering, tapping, murmuring directions to himself under his breath, he lost all sense of time. When finally he thought to check his watch, he was amazed to see it was past three in the morning. He had to get going, bad to get out of there and head down the moonlit trail that would take him back home to the safety and anonymity of his bed, and already he could see ahead to the next day, a late-afternoon drink at the bar, his ears attuned to the buzz of drunken conversation ebbing and flowing around him. Sabotage? What do you mean, sabotage? Where? When? You're kidding. Now, who would do a thing like that?

The night breathed in, breathed out. He stood there looking up into the nullity of the sky, and for a long moment he didn't move at all. What was he feeling? Satisfaction, yes, the special charge that comes of knowing you've done your best, the true sweet exhaustion of a job well done, but something more-anger. He was angry still. This was nothing, the smallest pinprick in the web of progress, the death of a few machines-maybe, if he was lucky, of a logging company. But what about the trees? What about all those artificial pulpwood trees in the Penny Pines Plantation an hour down the road? They were there still, weren't they, and until they were gone, eliminated, erased from the face of the mountain, there was no forest here. No forest at all.

He found himself walking. Not down the path, not toward the cabin and Andrea and his bed, but toward the place where the planted pines ran on as far as the eye could see. The air was cool-temperature in the low sixties, or fifties even — but he was sweating as he walked, and even as he sweated he stepped up the pace. Fifty minutes later he was in the middle of the plantation, down on his knees in the dry, yielding, friable dirt, and in his hands, the matches. There was the sudden sizzle of the struck match, the bloom of light as he touched it to one of the random heaps of shorn branches, and then the quick fingers of flame racing through the desiccated needles. He watched it take, watched the first tree explode in violent color against the black of the night, and even as he ran, even as he fought down the pain in his knee and the screaming of his lungs, the world at his back was transfigured, lit so spontaneously and so brightly it was as if the sun had come up early.

Andrea murmured something, a snippet of dream dialogue, and rolled over. The windows were infused with the green light of seven-thirty in the morning, and when Tierwater lifted the covers and slid in beside her, the tranquil hot familiar odor of the nesting animal rose to envelop him, the smell of his wife's body, her beautiful naked slumbering body, rich in all its properties and functions. He nuzzled at her ear and worked an arm underneath her so he could cup her breasts in both hands. He was excited. Burning up with it. She murmured again, moved her buttocks against him in a sleepy, precoital wriggle. "You're back," she said. "I am," he whispered, and felt her nipples harden. He was thinking of Jane and Sherry and half a dozen other girls and women he'd known, and then she turned to face him, to kiss him, and he was thinking of her, nobody but her.

Afterward, they lay side by side and stared up into the rafters as the house began to stir beneath them. There was the sound of a flushing toilet, then the wheeze of the refrigerator door and the low hum of Sierra's tape deck as the muted throb of gloom and doom filtered up through the floorboards. Voices. Sierra's, Teo's. The swat of the screen door, and then Ratchiss' "What ho!" And Teo's whispered response.

"You smell like smoke," Andrea said.

"Me?" Tierwater knew he'd gone too far, knew they'd suspect arson once the machines went down, and he'd heard the first of the planes rumbling in to attack the fire even as he legged it on up the trail home. The lookout at Saddle Peak or the Needles must have been up early, because the helicopters were in the sky before he'd had a chance to catch his breath, and within the hour the drone of the bombers saturated the air and he looked up to see three of them scraping overhead with their wings aglow and their bellies full of fire retardant.

She was up on one elbow now, watching him. "You didn't start a campfire out there last night, did you? Because that would be stupid, really stupid-"

"Are you kidding? It went great, every minute of it. I was like the Phantom and the Fox rolled into one, so efficient it was scary. It was a rush, it was."

He could feel her eyes on the side of his face, the eyes that brooked no bullshit and reduced every complexity to the basics. She was sniffing-first the air, and now him-hovering over him, her breasts soft on his chest, ruffling his hair, sniffing. "I don't know," she said, "but you smell like you spent the night in the chimney."

"Maybe that's it," he lied- "I started a fire when I came in, just to take the chill off the morning."

That seemed to satisfy her, at least for the moment-until she heard the bombers for herself, that is, and walked down to the mailbox and smelled the smoke on the air and saw the Forest Service buses rolling down the highway crammed to the windows with the impassive dark-faced immigrants they hired at minimum wage to beat back the flames bush by bush and yard by yard. Then she'd know. And Teo would know, and Ratchiss. He could hear them already-Are you crazy? Right in our own backyard? You think these people are stupid? You want to jeopardize everybody and everything — the whole organization, for Christ's sake-just because you're out of control? Huh? What's your problem?

Suddenly he was exhausted. He'd been up all night, hiked nine miles each way, destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of heavy equipment. His knee ached, and his upper back, which he must have strained somehow-probably fighting one fitting or another. He was no mechanic.

"You want to get some rest?" Andrea said, and already she was in motion, the bed pitching like a rubber raft in deep water, a lingering glimpse of her nude body, and then she was shrugging into T-shirt, panties and shorts.

"Yeah, that would be nice," he said, "but you never answered my question."

"What question?"

"About you and Teo. All those nights on the road, Connecticut, New Jersey, wherever. You slept with him, didn't you?"

"What does it matter? It was before I even met you."" You did, didn't you?"

Somewhere, far overhead, there was the thin drone of an airplane. The wind must have shifted, at least temporarily, because he could smell the smoke now too, as if the air had been perfumed with it. "I'm not going to lie to you, Ty-we're both grownups, aren't we? You want to know the answer? Did I sleep with him?" He closed his eyes. He'd never been so tired in his life. "No," he said. "No, forget it."

Santa Ynez, December 2025

Mac has always made a big deal of the holidays-glitter, he just loves it, cookies in the oven, blinking lights, fa- la-la-la-la, that sort of thing — and this year is no exception. So what if conditions are a little extreme? So what if we live on what amounts to an island and can't get out to the supermarket, hospital, sushi bar or feedlot? So what if the basement is full of shifting, snarling, pissed-off and dislocated animals? Let's decorate, that's his thinking. Two years ago he brought in a crew of fifty to string lights in parallel strips up and down the walls of the house so the whole place looked like a gift box on a hill (or, more accurately, a huge electric toaster as seen from the inside out), something like twenty thousand bulbs burning up electricity nobody has and nobody can afford, and he wasn't even here. Last year a crew nearly as big showed up on the first of December, but the winds were so intense the workers kept getting blown off their ladders and out of their cherry pickers, while the lights they did manage to string just slapped against the side of the house till there was nothing left but a long chain of empty sockets chattering in the breeze. Mac wasn't here then either. He's here now, though, here with a vengeance, and if we can't have Christmas outside because of the unremitting meteorological cataclysm that seems to be lashing away day and night at everything that isn't buried ten feet underground, then we're going to have it inside.

Which to my mind is purely asinine. What's to celebrate? That's what I want to know. That we had a forty-eight-hour respite from the rain last week? That April Wind has started her Sierra — the-martyr book with me as the chief and captive source? That Lily seems to have adjusted to her new surroundings as if she'd been born between paneled walls and that the rock-hard pendulous corpses of cattle, pigs and turkeys look to tide us over right on through the next millennium? Piss poor, that's what I say. The end is nigh. What fools these mortals be.

We're wearing masks still, all of us, though we might as well be on a coral atoll for all the contact we've had with the outside world, and when I'm not disinterring the past with April Wind or watching Andrea cozy up to Mac, I try to stay busy with the animals. Chuy and I are doing a creditable job of feeding them, I think, but feeding isn't the problem. Captive breeding, and that's been our biggest goal here, right from the start, is nothing less than impossible under conditions like these. We have no real access to the animals-it's just too risky to try to tiptoe up to a reinforced wooden door and surprise any creature that isn't deaf, blind and comatose. And forget the cleaning, it's just too dangerous, particularly with Lily, Petunia and the lions — and you'd be surprised how cantankerous and subversive even a warthog can be. Open the door of the bowling alley, and you hear nothing, not so much as a snort or whimper; half a heartbeat later you've got two angry pairs of tusks swiping at your gonads. Someday, in the dry season, if it ever comes, Mac will have to rip up the carpets, tear out the pissed-over paneling and burn it, that's all. And then we can start again, with new pens and new animals — or some new breeding stock, at least.

But back to Christmas, because Christmas is what's happening here, floods, mucosa and irate quadrupeds notwithstanding. The two Als, left with no discernible use or employment since there's no one within half a mile to protect Mac from, have been co-opted by the interior — decorating department (Mac and Andrea, working in concert) to string lights and pin tinfoil angels to the walls. It all feels — I don't know-vestigial somehow. And sad. The empty ceremony of a forgotten tribe. Christmas means nothing to me, except maybe as a negative, the festival of things, of gluttony, light the candles and rape the planet all over again. Even the Japanese got in on the act at the end of the last century, but they saw the Yule season for what it was-wall-to-wall shopping and nothing more.

I know, I know. We had Christmas when I was a boy, because of my mother, and there was magic in the world then — there was redemption. Hope. And more than that: there was a reason, for us and the beasts and the plants and everything else. That's all gone now Long gone. And though I'm utterly practical and unsentimental, as stripped of illusion as any captive of the Mohawk, the first time I come down the hall and spot those silverfoil angels crowding the ceiling on their crimped and glittering wings, it's all I can do to keep from blubbering into my gauze mask. And how do you like that for a confession?

In fact, I'm standing there in the downstairs hallway, overcome with emotion, ten o 'clock in the morning and eight more shopping days to Christmas, when Chuy materializes from behind a lifesize marble statue of Elvis, chopping along the Persian runner in his quick purposive way. I can see from his body language-head down, shoulders bunched up around his ears, feet snipping at the carpet like lawn shears-that he's looking for me, and that he's looking for me because something has gone suddenly and irremediably wrong. "Mr. Ty," he calls, his eyes already running away from him, "I don't want to tell you, but la puerta del cuarto de regalos? — The gift room? — This is open. Open wide!'

What am I thinking? Lily, that's what. She's over six feet long from snout to tail, weighs a hundred and sixty pounds, with a big gray head shaped like an anvil and black stripes on her legs. The bulk, the fur, the collapsible rear and ungainly legs-don't let appearances fool you. This is an animal that can run better than thirty miles an hour in a burst, and run all night long, designed by evolution as an eating machine, pure and simple. No codes, no ethics. See it, kill it, eat it the motto of the family Hyaenidae. And now the door's open, open wide, and the hoped-for, prayed.. For, one-in-a-thousand — chance miracle-that's she's snoring and sated in a midden of gnawed bones and foil gift wrap-is not a thing I'm counting on. She's too smart for that. Too devious. Too wild.

My first impulse is to fly up the stairs on my seventy-fiveyear-old feet and see for myself, maybe even slam the big mahogany door and turn the key in the lock, but I suppress it. That's what an impetuous forty-year-old would do — or even a headstrong fifty- or sixty-year-old. Sure. And have his head crushed and his bowels ripped out in the process. No, the wisdom of age speaks in my ear (life might be shit, but why curtail it here, before the end of the story?), And my aching feet take me down the corridor in the direction of the back stairway, Chuy hurrying along beside me with an inscrutable look. Is he concerned, frightened, excited? With Chuy, it's hard to say. His eyes are like trick mirrors and he never loses that loopy, gold-inlaid smile, no matter what happens. We're being stealthy, though, both of us-we're in lock-step on that score — and we slip down the hall to the Grunge Room as quietly as possible.

Ten feet from the door, both of us stop dead: something isn't right. Something, in fact, is very wrong: the door is ajar. What I'm feeling all of a sudden is nothing less than panic. My heart is pounding, my eyes are burning-vinegar, somebody's poured vinegar in my eyes — and I can't seem to swallow. It's me. My fault. I'm old, forgetful, a fool and worse, because I'm the one who must have left that door open when I slipped into my jeans and boots and staggered down the corridor to breakfast. Andrea, I'm thinking, Andrea, even as I lean into the howling depths of that still and silent room and fumble for the light switch on the wall inside the door. I can't find it, at least not right away, because I'm just a guest here, because my fingers are trembling and I'm old and I want to be back in my own house, amid my own things, and away from all this.

The room is deep, high-ceilinged, cavernous. I can't see a thing. The weather has been so bad it's hard to tell morning from night anyway, but Andrea keeps the big brocade curtains drawn to squelch any hint of daylight till she drags herself out of bed, usually about noon. She's there now, a hyena-sized mound in the center of the bed, all the stories of African witches shape-shifting and taking on the form of the sneaking graveyard robber come back to haunt me ("And what big teeth you have, Grandma") till she rips off a sudden burst of crackling old-lady snores and I can breathe again.

Then the light, and I see that the room is empty, but for Kurt Cobain's hair and the heap of molding artifacts that represent my worldly wealth, the salvage of the guesthouse rudely dumped in the far corner. In amongst the junk, though, duly cleaned and lubricated with a rag soaked in 3in-1 Oil, is the. 470 Nitro Express rifle that once belonged to Philip Ratchiss. I've never hunted a thing in my life, not to kill it-I'm with Thoreau: No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does — but I go straight to the gun, force the cartridges in the chamber and sight experimentally down the length of the barrel.

Andrea (half awake): "Ty?"

Me: "Yeah?"

Andrea: "You're not-? What are you doing? Is that a gun?"

Me (hard, cold, tough as the callus on the heel of a fakir's foot): "I'm going hunting."

It's all a pose. Because I'm not that tough. Nobody is. Except maybe Ratchiss. Or Teo — the late Teo, and why does it give me such satisfaction to turn that phrase over on my tongue? I have no illusions here: Lily is going to have to die, the soft-point bullets tearing a hole in her you could stuff an encyclopedia into, and Lily is one of-what, two, three hundred? — Of her kind left on earth. She's been with me since the beginning, a scruffy yearling we got from the L. A. Zoo before it went under, and she was here for me when Andrea wasn't. How many morsels have I tossed her in the space of ten years, how much roadkill, how many chicken backs? And if you've never tossed a chicken back to a hyena, how can I begin to describe the satisfaction of hearing the snap of those iron jaws, the gorge descending, the efficiency of the animal, my animal, as it consumes and thrives and grows into the very image of the shaggy wild-eyed thing that trotted across Olduvai Gorge when we were still toolless apes bolting our own meat raw?) This is Lily we're talking about here, Lily — I'd as soon have to shoot Old Yeller.

Out in the hallway, stalking now, Chuy at my back: "Mr. Ty," he whispers, "you quiere for me maybe to get the wire net, I think maybe?" And then, when I don't answer: "No le vas a disparar-you no shoot Lily, Mr. Ty?"

I just grit my teeth — or what's left of them, anyway. "The dart gun, par que no we just dart her?"

I'm busy stalking. Crouched over my screaming septuagenarian lower back muscles, the gun as heavy as a hod of bricks in my weak wet hands, eyes watering, hearing shot, I haven't got the energy to respond. You don't dart an animal like this, not at close quarters-even if you did manage to hit her, she'd have removed your face before the drug began to take the spring out of her legs, and she'd have her head deep in your intestines by the time she felt a yawn coming on. This is no Patagonian fox. This is no stitch job at the local hospital. This is finality. Good night, all she wrote, sheetover — the-face time.

Upstairs, there's nothing. The bedroom doors are all firmly shut, the fluorescent energy-savers glow in their sconces, silence reigns. I say nothing to Chuy, and he says nothing to me. It's all we can do to breathe, the air thick in our nostrils, almost solid with the stench of hyena, urine, excrement, rotting meat. The gift-wrapping room is up ahead on our left, three doors down. What I want more than anything in the world is for that door to be closed, for Chuy to have mistaken it for another one, for all this to be nothing more than a false alarm, a joke on me, the smallest little inconsequential miscue to laugh about over coffee and crullers. But it's not, and that's an affirmative, Captain, because we're close enough now to see that the door is indeed open, open wide, flung all the way back on its hinges like a big toothless mouth.

That freezes me up, all right. My legs feel as if they've been sawed off and put on backward, my fingers are rigid, I think I'm having a heart attack. And the gun-suddenly the gun weighs as much as a howitzer. "The chair," I whisper, jerking my chin first at Chuy and then at some priceless antique from the nineties, all molded black plastic and chrome, until Chuy catches my meaning and inches the chair away from the wall and into my purview. Now I'm resting the gun on the back of the chair, finger on the trigger, the barrel trained on the open door at optimal hyena height, and now Chuy — the most tentative man in the world, an acrobat on a wire stretched high over a pit of snakes-is inching toward the door.

I've had a lot of bad moments in my life, bad moments like little missives from the Fates, whole truckloads of them, but this is one of the worst. I am ready for anything — or as ready as a mostly broken-down young-old man with deteriorating reflexes and a serious loss of faith can expect to be — but it's not Lily that comes sailing through the door, it's Mac. Mac. He's wearing the usual getup, half drum major, half hood from a forties B-movie, his legs gliding on silk strings, a stack of gift-wrapped boxes in his arms, and he's whistling-actually whistling-some Motown tune of the sixties. It takes me a minute, and then I've got it-The Supremes, "Stop in the Name of Love."

I can't seem to find my voice. But Chuy, who doesn't seem capable of construing things with the same degree of complexity as I do, has no trouble finding his. "Mr. Mac; 'he says, waving his rope-walker's arms for balance," I think you better maybe look out. Cuidado, you know?"

As I've said, my hearing could be better, the vestigial buzz of Hendrix's "Voodoo Child" forever vibrating in the cochlea of my left ear, and I can't make out Mac's gauze-muffled response. "Muffins on marmalade," he seems to be saying, or maybe it's the other way around. He's arrested there in the doorway, not ten feet from the barrel of the gun, and I can see that his lips are moving behind the gauze film of the mask. Meanwhile, my hands are trembling so hard I'm afraid I'm going to squeeze the trigger in some sort of involuntary reflex, so I let go of it, rise up to my full height (which is two full inches less than it was when I was middle-aged, another of the humiliations of longevity), and tear my own mask off. "Mac, for Christ's sake, will you get out of the way!"

No response.

"It's Lily!" I shout. "Lily!"

In pantomime now, the spilling legs, floating packages, eyes bugging behind the silver lenses of his shades: a glance over his shoulder, a glance for me, and then the packages are left to the mercy of gravity and Mac is at the door, flinging it shut like the lone defender at the gates. He's so stunned, so consternated, so much at a loss, he forgets all about cool and contagion and strips off both his shades and the gauze mask in one frantic motion. "Holy-," he says, searching for the expression, because Mac doesn't curse, "I mean holy crap! What was I thinking? I wasn't, Ty, that's just it, I wasn't thinking. It's just like I mean it was Christmas and I — she didn't get out, did she? Is she loose?"

I shrug. "How would I know? But my guess is yeah, sure, she's loose. Long gone, in fact."

The three of us take a minute to look both ways up and down the long corridor, as if we expect to see her scrag of a tail poking out from beneath one of the memorabilia cases that line the walls on either side. (No suits of armor or crossed halberds here-this is nothing less than a shrine to the genius of Maclovio Pulchris, and I don't mean that sarcastically. He is a genius. Or was. Maybe he's gone a little bit overboard with the self-deifying aspect of it, I won't deny that. It's a question of proportion, I suppose, because it's all here, Pulchrisized for the ages. Not only has he got photos and oil portraits of himself staring out from the walls wherever you look, but every record and CD he's ever recorded is on permanent display, not to mention tour souvenirs, ticket stubs, T-shirts, yellowing press releases and fanzine articles, even the outfits he's worn onstage, all of it meticulously arranged according to release dates, artistic period and hairstyle.) "I don't know," Mac says, "it was only a minute. Maybe she was asleep or something."

I'm shaken. I'm angry. And though he's my employer, though he's my lifeline in the dark churning Social Security — less waters of the perilous young-old life, I let him know it. "What do you think, you can just leave the door wide open and she's going to curl up like some fat lapdog?"

Mac wants to answer — I can see a response gathering itself in his naked, faintly yellowish eyes — but the opportunity dissolves into the sudden ringing of the doorbell. Or it doesn't ring exactly, but chimes the opening bars of Mac's biggest hit, "Chariots of Love," from the Chariots of Love album. It's a curious thing, the ringing of that bell-because no one rings the bell, ever. No one, even in normal (or less abnormal) times, can get through the big gates out front and past the surveillance cameras and Al and Al and even me and Chuy and the day-workers and gardeners and all the rest to arrive at the door and find the button to depress in the first place. And as if that isn't enough of a feat under ordinary conditions, now we're even further isolated by the flooding. So who's ringing the bell? Lily? God? The Ghost of Christmas Past?

Down the stairs we go, judiciously of course, the Nitro Express and I shielding Mac from the front, Chuy and his Dursban-saturated hide screening him from the rear, and then we creep cautiously down the first-floor hallway and out into the vestibule even as the bell chimes again and the two Als materialize grimly from the surveillance-control room to the left of the main entrance. The taller Al, after giving his employer a warning glance, pulls open the door.

There, in the strange subaqueous glow of the storm, stands Delbert Sakapathian, the cat-lover, he of the cueball head and overinflated gut. He's lost his slicker and his rain hat, his clothes cling wetly and what hair he has left is painted to his skull. But that's not all: beside him, wrapped so tightly in a black slicker he looks as if he's been extruded from a tube, is an old man — or maybe an old woman. It's hard to tell, because this person is one of the old-old, the ancient old, the antediluvian, artifactual, older-than-knowledge old, so old that he/she has been rendered utterly sexless. We see the tube of the slicker, the monkey hands, the face like a peeled grape, toothless, chinless, cheekless, a scraped and blasted black hole of humanity. Neither of them is wearing a gauze mask.

"Mr. Pulchris," Delbert Sakapathian says, addressing Mac with all the awe and humility of a communicant in the church of celebrity, "we need help. I — this is Old Man Foley, from the Lupine Hill Retirement Home? — and there's nothing left over there but wreckage, and he needs shelter, I mean, if you can spare it, just till they can get the emergency crews in there to rebuild or take people to a gymnasium somewhere or something. He's been wet through to the skin for days now."

The rain keeps up its steady sizzling. And the smell is there, so sharp it makes me wince — the smell of the underside of things, of decay, of death.

"Look, I'm not asking for myself-Lurleen and me are okay, I've got my canoe out there tied to the railing and they can condemn the condos all they want but they're going to have to shoot me to get me out of there, at least till the rain stops…" He looks at me now, at the two Als and Chuy, making a mute appeal.

Finally, Mac, in his sweetest voice, says no. Shakes his head wearily, the eel whips slipping across the slick surface of his restored shades. "I'd like to help," he says, "I really would, but I just can't-we can't-risk it. It's the 'mucosa. You understand, don't you? I want to help. I do. Money's no problem. You want money?"

I'm watching Delbert Sakapathian's face. His expression says, Shit and die, all of you, you fools on a hill, you animal lovers and epicene rock stars; it says, I'm worth ten of you because I'm a human being still and you're just things in a cage. Chuy gives me a look. The two Als brace themselves. And that is the precise moment when Lily appears.

The noise she emits — a low chuff of warning or surprise-is so faint as to be barely audible over the sibilance of the rain, and anybody who hasn't watched her eat, sleep and scratch round her pen for ten years probably wouldn't have recognized it as an animal vocalization at all. I turn my head. That's all-just turn it, a simple flexion and release of the appropriate muscles — and Lily is gone, a brownish streak, black stripes, gray head, dodging past Delbert Sakapathian and the extruded old man to vanish into the storm.

For a moment, nobody moves. Then a breeze comes up, and that smell with it, and one of the tinfoil angels scratches its wings against the ceiling. That's when I step forward, not a word for Mac or Chuy or the two men standing on the doorstep. The doorknob is in my hand, the rain hissing like static, the smell of it, and then the door somehow swings closed till it hits the frame with a shivering thud.

And then? Then I bolt it.

A week later, I find myself sitting in front of a faux fire, rain spitting at the windows, April Wind crouched on a footstool at my feet with a tape recorder the size of a matchbox. She's wearing a denim dress with thin two-inch strips of material sewn randomly to it, fringed suede boots and a belt of what looks to be at least two boxes of Kleenex knotted together. The overall effect is of a big unfledged bird with buck teeth and a head too small for its body. Have I mentioned that I have no use for this whittled-down little stick of a woman? That I hate the past, have limited tolerance for the present and resent this or any other form of interrogation? That I'm sitting still for it for one reason only and that that reason is spelled A-n-d-r-e-a?

"So," April Wind breathes, setting the tape in motion with a practiced flick of her index finger, "tell me about the whole tree-sit thing, from the beginning, because I didn't join E. F.I Till after Sierra-well, till after she was already up there in the arms of Artemis. What I wanted to know is, whose idea was it-was she pushed into it by Teo? Or Rolfe? Or what's-his-name, Ratchiss?"

We're in the James Brown Room, surrounded by images of the Godfather of Soul, his sunken eyes, glistening pompadour and thrusting chin replicated over and over till the walls seem to shift like the walls of a planetarium and his multiplied eyes become the stars in the sky. It's quite a trope, I know, but then I'm suffering from indigestion, the gauze mask is like a smotherer's hand clamped over my mouth and my mind is already playing tricks on me. Papa's got a brand new bag, oh, yes, indeed.

"Or was this her own thing, something spontaneous, something she just had to do? For love of the earth, I mean?"

I'm fumbling around for an answer, suddenly ambushed by an image of my daughter that's as palpable as the portrait of the Famous Flames leering at me from the place of honor over the fireplace. She's twenty-one, long-limbed and lean, with the cleft chin she inherited from her mother and her mother's heat-seeking eyes, wearing running shoes, cut-off jeans and a thermal T-shirt. Her hair is in a braid as thick as a hawser, and there's no trace of the makeup she used to baste herself with when she was fourteen and terminally angry. I see a whole tribe of tree-huggers and vegans and post-hip hippies gathered round her, pounding on bongos and congas, somebody playing a nose flute, the spice of marijuana in the air and the big ancient trees rising up out of the duff like the pillars that keep the sky from crashing down. It's the first day, the day of the ascension, and her feet are on the ground still. And me? I'm in the picture too. I'm there to see her off.

"Well?" April Wind wants to know.

I try to shrug, but the catch in my shoulders makes me wince. It's the weather. It makes me feel twenty years older than I already am. "For love, I guess."

"Nobody put any pressure on her? You didn't, did you?"

I shake my head, and even that hurts. Pressure her? I tried to talk her out of it, tried to remind her what peaceful protest had got us in the Siskiyou and the whole sorry downward spiral that had spun out of that, but of course she wouldn't listen. She was fresh from Teo's Action Camp, in love with the idea of heroic sacrifice and so imbued with the principles of Deep Ecology she insisted on the ethical treatment not only of plants and animals, but even rocks and dirt. "Rocky?" I said. "Dirt?" She just nodded. She was lit up in the glow of all that attention, the cynosure of the Movement, the sacrificial virgin who was going to dwell in a tree while the rest of them went home to their TVs and microwaves, and I looked into her eyes and barely recognized her.

"Everything in the ecosystem has its integrity," she assured me, leaning back against her tree and sipping a concoction of papaya, wheatgrass and yogurt from a glossy red plastic mug with the Earth Forever! Logo stamped on it (another of Teo's ideas, and he was a marketing genius, all right, never doubt that. If there was an angle, Teo would exploit it). "Really," she said, glancing up as the drummers shifted into another gear and the dancers swayed round the trees with their goat bells and tambourines ajingle, "it's not just about wolves and caribou and whooping cranes-it's about the whole earth. I mean, you have to think about what right do we have to dig up the ancient soil and disturb the fungus and microbes, the springtails and pill bugs and all the rest, because without them there'd be no soil, and we have even less right to manufacture and mutate things into new forms-"

"Like that mug in your hand," I said. "Or that shirt that's going to keep you warm tonight?'

"Compromises," she said, "everything's a compromise."

This was in December of 1997, just outside of Scotia, in Humboldt County, California. I was an ex-con at the time, a jailbird, an absentee father, a name on a card in the mail, and I hadn't seen much of her over the course of the past four years. I didn't want her up in that tree-Teo wanted her there, Andrea did, all the northern-California Earth Forever! Tribe and their ragtag constituency were clamoring for Abut I was there to give her my love, unconditionally, and to worry over her and maybe tug on the long cord that had bound us together through all the years of her life and convince her to let somebody else-some other virgin princess or square-jawed dragon-slayer-deliver themselves up to the enemy. I knew this: once she set foot in that tree, she was theirs.

Deep Ecology-Adat-says that all elements of a given environment are equal and that morally speaking no one of them has the right to dominate. We don't preserve the environment for the benefit of man, for progress, but for its own sake, because the whole world is a living organism and we are but a humble part of it. Try telling that to the Axxam Corporation when they're clear-cutting thousands of acres of old growth to pay down the junk-bond debt accrued in their hostile takeover of Coast Lumber, and you find yourself in a philosophical bind. They're going to cut, and Earth Forever! Is going to stop them, any way they can. Hence Sierra, up in the tree.

I hugged her to me, held her for as long as she could stand it. Then I pressed a knapsack full of granola bars, dried fruit, books and toilet paper on her, and walked away from her, through the crowd and into the trees. I couldn't afford to stick around for the denouement-all this noise was designed to bring on the goons, and all these people were going to jail — but I waited long enough, on the fringes, to watch them haul her up the tree to the platform that already awaited her, one hundred eighty feet above the ground.

It was cold. There was a smell of rain on the air. A thickening mist clung like gauze to the high branches and a pair of birds fled through it as if they'd been shot out of a gun. How can I say what I felt? The pulleys creaked, the drummers drummed and my daughter rode up into the mist, higher and higher, till the pale-white bulb of her face was screened from view, and the last things visible — the dark, gently swaying soles of her running shoes-finally disappeared aloft.

That night it rained. But this was no ordinary shower or even a downpour, this was an El Nino event, evil harbinger of the apocalyptic weather to come, and it was accompanied by high winds and a drop of twenty degrees inside of an hour. I was in a motel room in Eureka at the time, working my way through a bag of Doritos and a six-pack of Black Cat malt liquor (choice of environmentalists everywhere), while watching Humphrey Bogart grimace in black and olive on a pale-green motel TV screen and waiting for Andrea and Teo to be set free on bail. The wind came up out of nowhere, flinging a hail of rubbish against the door and rattling the windows in their cheap aluminum frames. A framed list of motel do's and don'ts fell from the wall and landed face-up on the bed, right about where the back of my head would have been if I'd been asleep. I went to the door first, then thought better of it and brushed aside the curtains to peer out the window just as the rain exploded across the parking lot.

The fall of water was so violent it dimmed the lights across the street, and within seconds it was leaping up from the pavement in a thousand dark brushstrokes, as if gravity had been reversed. I had three beers in me and three to go, and when the next gust bowed the window, I backed away and sat on the bed, thinking of Sierra in her tree. What if a branch tore loose? What if the tree fell — or was struck by lightning? And what of her fear and desolation? There were no painted renegades out there now, no nose-fluters or drummers, nobody making lentil stew or chanting slogans-no one at all, not even the enemy. Who would haul away her bucket of waste, already overflowing with all this, excess water, who would talk to her, comfort her, keep her dry and warm?

She was twenty miles away, on property owned and jealously guarded by Coast Lumber — a hypervigilant and enraged Coast Lumber, awakened now to the undeniable fact that my daughter was occupying their turf, high up in one of the grandest and most valuable of their trees, thumbing her nose at them, making a statement, saving the world all on her own — and even WI could get that far in the storm and locate the place to park the car off the public highway and find my way through the big trees to her, what then? She wasn't just rocking in a hammock-she was a hundred and eighty feet up, and there was no way for me to reach her. On a clear, calm day, sure, maybe-bring on the harness and jumars, and I'll do my best, though I have to admit I've never been one for heights (roller coasters leave me cold and ski lifts scare the living bejesus out of me). And with the wind and the crash of the rain, she probably wouldn't even be able to hear me shouting from down below. But I would be there. At least I would be there.

I left a note for Andrea, fired up the black BMW she'd bought while I was putting in my time at Vacaville and Sierra was doing the same at another state institution (not to worry: it was UC Santa Cruz), and headed off into the storm with my three remaining cans of Black Cat. It wasn't a night to be out. Trees were down, and they'd taken power lines with them, and though this was the first heavy rain of the season, the roads were already running black with water and debris. I dodged logs, fenceposts, bicycles, boogie boards, cooking grills and a ghostly dark herd of cattle with tags in their ears. And I fought it, fought through everything, forty-seven years old, nearsighted and achy and already hard of hearing, the radio cranked up full, a sweating can of malt liquor clenched between my thighs, the headlights illuminating a long dark tunnel of nothing.

Three times I went by the road I wanted and three times had to cut U-turns in a soup of mud, rock and streaming water, until finally I found the turnout where we'd parked that afternoon. It had been compacted dirt then, dusty even, but now it was like an automotive tar pit, a glowing head-lighted arena in which to race the engine and spin the tires till they stuck fast. I didn't care. Sierra was up there on top of the ridge before me, up there in the thrashing wind, scared and lonely and for all I knew dangling from some limb a hundred and eighty feet in the air and fighting for her life. I had five beers in me. I was her father. I was going to save her.

What was I wearing? Jeans, a sweater, an old pair of hiking boots, some kind of rain gear — I don't remember. What I do remember is the sound of the wind in the trees, a screech of rending wood, the long crashing fall of shattered branches, the deep-throated roar of the rain as it combed the ridge and made the whole natural world bow down before it. I was ankle-deep in mud, fumbling with the switch of an uncooperative flashlight, inhaling rain and coughing it back up again, thinking of John Muir, the holy fool who was the proximate cause of all this. One foot followed the other and I climbed, not even sure if this was the right turnout or the right ridge-path? What path? — and I remembered Muir riding out a storm one night in the Sierras, thrashing to and fro in the highest branches of a tossing pine, just to see what it was like. He wasn't trying to save anything or anybody-he just wanted to seize the moment, to experience what no one had experienced, to shout his hosannas to the god of the wind and the rain and the mad whirling rush of the spinning earth. He had joy, he bad connection, he had vision and mystical reach. What he didn't have was Black Cat malt liquor.

I spat to clear my throat, hunched my shoulders and hovered over the last can. I was halfway up the ridge at that point, sure that at any moment a dislodged branch would come crashing out of the sky and pin me to the ground like a toad, and when I threw back my head to drink, the rain beat at my clenched eyelids with a steady unceasing pressure. Three long swallows and my last comfort was gone. I crushed the can and stuffed it into the pocket of the rain slicker and went on, feeling my way, the feeble beam of the flashlight all but useless in the hovering black immensity of the night. I must have been out there for hours, reading the bark like Braille, and the sad thing is I never did find Sierra's tree. Or not that I know Of. Three times that night I found myself at the foot of a redwood that might have been hers, the bark red — orange and friable in the glow of the flashlight, a slash of charred cambium that looked vaguely familiar, the base of the thing alone as wide around as the municipal wading pool in Peterskill where Sierra used to frolic with all the other four-year-olds while I sat in a row of benches with a squad of vigilant mothers and tried to read the paper with one eye. This was her tree, I told myself. It had to be.

"Sierra!" I shouted, and the rain gave it back to me. "Sierra! Are you up there?"

I don't really remember what the past few Christmases were like. One year-it might have been last year or five years ago, for all I know-Chuy and I went up to Swenson's and had the catfish boat with gravy and stuffing on the side, and another time we sat in my living room and watched the buckets splootch while sharing one of the last twelve-ounce cans of solid white albacore on earth. We ignored the expiration date and ate it with capers and pita bread and a bowl of fresh salsa Chuy whipped up, and I remember we washed it down with sake heated in a pan over the stove. And what was on the radio? Ranchera music and a trip-hop version of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." This year is different. This year it's Andrea and April Wind, and Yuletide cheer chez Pulchris.

Christmas morning I'm awake and waiting for the dawn as usual, Andrea snoring lightly beside me, the concept of a good night's sleep as foreign to me now as jogging or biting into an apple sans forethought or even bending to tie my shoelaces without a whole string section of pain playing up and down my spine in a mad pizzicato. Sleep at my age comes like a blow to the back of the head, any time of day or night, and you'd better have a couch or an easy chair handy when you go down for the count (and don't even ask about the old-old — they're nothing more than zombies, staggering around on bird's bones with twenty or thirty years' accumulation of sleep deprivation bleeding out of their eye sockets). Anyway, the first thing I notice is that the rain has stopped. No rattling, no whooshing, no white noise like a lint screen inside your head, nothing but a profound early-Christmas silence, not a creature stirring, not even a Patagonian fox.

Up out of bed and into the clamminess, a pair of powder-blue boxer shorts climbing up my glabrous old man's legs and cradling the brindled spectacle of my old man's sexual equipment. Then the jeans, the plaid shirt and the rinsed-out jeans jacket, Grunge all the way, yes indeed. I'm thinking of Andrea's present — and I know she's expecting one, though every other breath out of her body for the past week has been a pro-forma denial ("Oh, no, no, Ty, you don't have to bother, really") —-wondering what totemic object to dig out of the water-logged mound of my possessions or to beg or borrow from Mac that would express what I'm feeling for her. Because what I'm feeling is gratitude, what I'm feeling is an affection so deep for this big-shouldered oblivious old lady in the bed at my feet that its verging dangerously close to love, and beyond love, to forgiveness and even-dare I say it? — Bliss. I'm in love all over again. I am. Standing there in the dark, the silence so profound it's beating in my veins with an unconquerable force, the force of life undenied and lived right on down to the last tooth in the last head, I'm almost sure of it. On the other hand, it could just be indigestion.

There's no newspaper, of course, what with the flooding, and since magazines are scarce because of the lack of stock-paper, that is — I retreat to the lavatory with a mold-splotched copy of Muir's The Mountains of California. This is a big room, by the way, a room the size of the average condo, with a six-person Jacuzzi and a tiled shower stall with dual heads, recessed lighting and a built-in bench for comfort, and it smells of Andrea, of her perfume and powders and skin rejuvenator. The walls are painted to resemble the aluminum garage doors of old, in honor of garage bands everywhere, the detail true right on down to three-dimensional handles and glittering rust spots (the portrait of Eddie Vedder, all eyes and teeth, I've long since turned to the wall, so as to be able to conduct my business in peace). In any case, I stoop to the faucet for a drink, just to rinse the night-taste out of my mouth, and then settle in for a long pre-Christmasdinner bout with my comatose digestive tract. Relaxing, or trying to, I flip back the page and read of fantastical forests: The trees of the species stand more or less apart in groves, or in small, irregular groups, enabling one to find a way nearly everywhere, along sunny colonnades and through openings that have a smooth, park-like surface, strewn with brown needles and burs. Now you cross a wild garden, now a ferny, willowy stream…

I don't know how long I'm lost in those memorial forests — the better part of an hour, at least-moving on from the unconquered trees to the adventures of the water ouzel and the Douglas squirrel, not even the faintest stirring of a movement down below, when Andrea raps at the door. "Ty?" She calls. "You in there? I have to pee."

"Just a minute." I lurch up off the seat with a jolt of pain in both hips and my left knee, hoist my pants, flush, and close the book on my index finger to mark the place.

Ty?"

"Yeah?"

"Merry Christmas."

The phrase takes me by surprise, the novelty of it, and beyond that, the novelty of the situation. We didn't wish one another a merry Christmas in prison, and, as I say, Chuy and I have been on our own the last few years. Nobody has wished me anything in a long time, not even hate, despair or a lingering death. I'm moved. Moved almost to tears, as I'd been with the tinfoil angel in the hall. I'm halfway to the door, but then I remember to go back and wash up at the nearest of the four sinks, so I have to raise my voice to be heard through the solid plank of the door. "You too," I call, my voice echoing in the tomblike vastness of the place. "Merry Christmas."

The Sierra Nevada, May — August 1990

Tierwater was feeling his age. He'd turned forty at the beginning of the month, an occasion memorialized by a discreet party out on the redwood deck. It was a small gathering, as it would necessarily have to be if FBI agents were to be excluded, consisting of his wife and daughter, Teo, Ratchiss and Mag (or Mug). Everyone, even Andrea, seemed to be in good spirits. They drank a California Viognier without worrying about the oak trees and other native species the vineyards had displaced, and as the evening turned chill, they disported themselves in the redwood hot tub without a murmur about the ancient giants felled for their momentary pleasure. Sierra-Sarah Drinkwater, that is, the cynosure of the junior high in Springville-went in to write an essay on ancient Mesopotamia after the birthday cake had been set ablaze, wished over, sliced up and divided, while the rest of the party lingered in the hot tub, global warming be damned, at least for the duration of the night. Mag, in a high energetic voice, volunteered the story of how he'd lost his face, with Ratchiss filling in the supporting details (He creep on me, because I am profound inebriate with the strong savor of palm wine on my lips, and I am dreaming of the long rains and millet when he come and snap him jaw), Teo and Andrea hatched plans for her covert participation in a coordinated series of protests along the northern-California coast and Tierwater got so drunk he'd had to go off in the woods and commune with nature a while-it was either that or vomit in the recirculating waters of the hot tub.

Tonight, though, he was only mildly drunk-just drunk enough to take the sting off. He'd twisted his bad knee and nearly fractured an ankle stumbling into a hole while trying to outrun the beam of a watchman's flashlight up in Del Norte County two nights ago, and he was sitting in front of the fireplace, his leg propped up, judiciously anaesthetizing himself. The house was quiet. It had been quiet since the fire last summer, which had sent a ripple-no, a tidal wave-through all the West Coast chapters of Earth Forever! Thirty-five thousand acres had burned, and spokespersons up and down the coast fell all over themselves denying any involvement-E. F.I Ers might have marched in the street and shouted slogans like "Back to the Pleistocene!" But they strictly eschewed any illegal activity; it was only the disaffected fringe that sometimes, out of frustration and an overriding love of the earth, spiked a grove of ancient redwoods or blocked a culvert, but certainly the organization was there to protect the forests, not bum them down. And where did that leave Tierwater? Right where he wanted to be, on the unraveling edge of the disaffected fringe.

Teo, back safe in Tarzana, was especially vocal, deploring everybody and everything, even while the Tulare County Sheriff's Department expanded its investigation and Coast Lumber hired a pair of shuffling retirees from the local community to stand watch over the gleaming new Cats, wood-chippers, loaders and log trucks the insurance money had provided. (In their generosity, the insurers also provided a private investigator by the name of Declan Quinn, a shoulderless relic who sat permanently hunched over a pack of Camels at the Big Timber Bar and Mountain Top Lodge, chain-drinking Dewar's and water and asking endlessly in a cancerous rasp if anyone had seen "anything suspicious.") At the first whiff of smoke, Ratchiss had lit out for Malibu, and Andrea, though she stayed put and went through the motions of mothering and housewifery, devoted her every waking minute to roasting Tierwater for his lack of judgment, juvenility and criminal stupidity. Even Sierra weighed in, "It was really like mega-dumb, Dad," she said one night over home-made manicotti and the steamed vegetables she kept pushing from one corner of the plate to another. "What if they catch you? What if you go to jail? What am I supposed to do then-change my name to Sarah Dorkwater or something?" The idyll was over. Definitely over.

And then it was his birthday, and both Teo and Ratchiss showed up. It was dusk, and they were out on the back deck, charring meat, when Teo ambled out of the woods in a pair of shorts and hiking boots. Ratchiss had arrived an hour earlier, the silver Land Cruiser packed to the ceiling with gifts and goodies, and he looked up from the grill and raised his gin and bitters in salute. "All hail," he said. And then: "Methinks yond Teo has a lean and thirsty look. How about a drink, my friend?"

Teo dropped his backpack on the planks and accepted a glass of iced gin with a splash of vermouth. He was shirtless, though the evening had begun to take on a chill (there was still snow out there in the woods, especially on the north-facing slopes), but then that was his pose: the insensible, the indefatigable, the iron man of the Movement. "It's been a while," he said, ducking his head and taking Tierwater's hand, "but hey, happy birthday, man." He nodded democratically at Mag, who stood behind the grill in a torpedoed freighter of smoke, basting the meat with his secret sauce, and then he was embracing Sierra and digging into his pack for the plain-wrapped gift he'd brought her. There were the usual exclamations- "You're as tall as me now" and "Let's get this girl a basketball scholarship!" — and then Andrea, who'd gone into the house for a sweater, stepped out onto the deck.

It was just a moment in a history of moments, but it bore watching. She was buttoning the sweater up the front, her hair swept forward, barefoot in a pair of jeans. "Teo," she exclaimed, and Tierwater saw the anticipatory smile, the quickened stride, watched them embrace, the tall woman and the short man, and he knew the answer to his question as surely as he knew it would be dark in half an hour and the sky would spill over with stars: of course she'd had sex with him. Fucked him, that is. Of course she had. Any fool could see that from the way they moved around each other, the familiarity of one organism with the other, all those dark and secret places, the commingled breath and shared fluids and supercharged emotions. But so what? So what? That was before he'd even met her-so what if she'd fucked whole armies? Tierwater was no puritan. And he wasn't jealous. Not a bit.

After the meat and before the cake, there was a lot of discussion of strategy-of the upcoming "Redwood Summer" campaign, of Andrea's dyeing her hair or wearing a wig and coming down off the mountain to work behind the scenes and, eventually, of her coming in out of the cold altogether. Fred was working on it. A plea bargain, no time, just maybe community service, something like that. "And what about me?" Tierwater had said. "Am I just supposed to stay here forever? And won't it look a little fishy here — I mean, if my wife suddenly ups and deserts me?"

Teo just gave him a blank stare. Ratchiss looked away. And Sierra, who'd adjusted to her rural surroundings by ritualistically re-embracing the Gothic look (graveyard black, midnight pallor, ebony lipstick, the reinserted nose ring that drained all the remaining light from the sky), set down her soy burger and pitched her voice to the key of complaint: "And me?"

"You're out of the loop, Ty, at least for now," Teo said, flashing Sierra a quick smile of acknowledgment, and then coming back to him. "You've got to be patient. And nobody's deserting anybody. I just think Andrea can be more effective if she-"

"And what does she think?" Tierwater said, cutting him off and turning to his wife. "Isn't that what matters here? Isn't that what we're talking about?"

Andrea wouldn't look him in the eye — or she did look him in the eye, but it was the sort of look that flickered and waned and said, I want no part of this. She'd been unusually restrained all night, except when she was buzzing with Teo over tactics and the campaign to mobilize college kids for the protests, and now she just said, "It's complicated, Ty. Beyond complicated. Can't we talk about it later?"

And Ratchiss said, "Yeah, isn't this supposed to be a celebration?"

It was. And Tierwater, itching with his insecurities and angers, drank himself into celebratory oblivion.

Now, two weeks later, he'd almost forgotten about it. Teo was gone, as were Ratchiss and Mag, and Andrea was still here, still playing Dee Dee Drinkwater to his Tom. It was night. All was calm. Tierwater had his leg propped up, a drink in his hand, four good chunks of wind-toppled pine on the fire, no sound but for the snap of the flames and the doomed doleful wail of Sierra's Goth-rock leaking out of her speakers and through the locked door of her room like some new and invasive force of nature. He was just about to lift the drink to his lips when there was the dull thump of footsteps on the front deck, followed by a light rap at the door.

That altered things, all right.

He was transformed in that instant from the bruised ecowarrior taking his ease to the hunted fugitive living under a false name and called suddenly to task for his multifarious crimes. He froze, his eyes as glassy and dead as the eyes of the butchered animals staring down at him from the walls. The knock came again. And then a voice, gruff and hearty at the same time: "Tom? Tom Drinkwater? You in there?"

Where was Andrea? 'Andrea! "He shouted." Can you get that? Andrea! There's someone at the door. "But Andrea couldn't get it, because she wasn't in the house, a small but significant piece of information that rose hopelessly to the surface of his' consciousness even as he called out her name. She'd gone out half an hour ago with the flashlight and a sweater. Where? To walk the mile and a half to the bar and sit outside in the phone booth and await a call from Teo, very secretive, hush-hush, E. F. I business, Ty, so don't give me that look-" Tom?"

"Just a minute, I — " Tierwater's gaze fell on the rack of big-bore rifles Ratchiss kept mounted on the wall just inside the door, and then he was up out of the chair and limping across the room. "Hold on, hold on, I'm coming!"

At first he didn't recognize the figure standing there at the door. The weak yellow lamplight barely clung to him, 'and there was the whole brooding owl-haunted Sierra night out there behind him, a darkness and fastness that was like a drawn shade and this man on the doorstep a part of its fabric. "Tom-Jesus, I didn't mean to scare you… Don't you recognize me?"

The man was in the room now, uninvited, and it was the nagging raspy wheeze of the voice that gave him away, even more than the boneless face and dishwater eyes. It was Declan Quinn, the insurance investigator, all hundred and ten bleached alcoholic pounds of him, and Tierwater saw why he hadn't recognized him right away: he was wearing some sort of camouflage outfit, buff, khaki and two shades of green, and his face was smeared with a dully gleaming oleaginous paint in matching colors. Greasepaint, that's what it was, the very thing Tierwater himself employed on his midnight missions.

"Jesus, Tom," he repeated, and the very way he said it Jaysus-marked him for an immigrant, if not a recent one, and why hadn't Tierwater noticed that before? "You look as if the devil himself had come for you." And then he let out a laugh, a quick sharp bark that trailed off into a dry cough. "It's the getup, isn't it? I completely forgot myself — but I'm not intruding, am IT'" Oh, no, no, I was just- "Tierwater caught a glimpse of himself in the darkened window and saw a towering monument to guilt, staved-in eyes, slumped shoulders, slack jaw and all. He'd been caught in a weak moment, taken by surprise, and though he was as articulate as anybody and fully prepared to act out his role onstage before a live audience, if that's what it took, he couldn't help wishing Andrea were here. For support. And distraction. This man was an investigator, a detective, and what was he doing in Tierwater's living room, if Tierwater himself wasn't a suspect?

Quinn laughed again. "Completely forgot myself. You see, I've been out back of your place the last three days, not four hundred yards from where we now stand, tracking a sow with two cubs. Out of her den now, but its right there, right out back, so close you wouldn't believe it — but, Lord Jesus, you've got some heads here, haven't you?" He was pointing to the kongoni. "What is that, African? Or maybe something out of the subcontinent? It's no pronghorn, I know that much."

"Well, it'd have to be African," Tierwater was saying, though the phrase out back of your place was stuck in his head like plaque on an artery, "because as far as I know that's the only place Ratchiss really hunted-"

"Ah, yes, yes, Philip. Prince of a man, really. The Great White Hunter. Not many of them left in the world, are there? But a prince, a real prince. And look at this lion, will you? Now, that's impressive. That's the real thing, eh?"

"The Maneater of the Luangwa," Tierwater said, shifting the weight off his bad leg.

"Yes, sir, mighty impressive." Quinn had his back to Tier-water now, gazing up at the lion. "Had a bear once," he said, "nothing as impressive as this, of course, but I'd put the arrow in her myself, if you see what I mean, and I was attached to it. The taxidermist represented her couchantlying there like a big spaniel, that is — which was all right, I suppose, though I would have preferred her rampant myself.

Mavis, my first wife, hated the sight of her, and that was a sad thing, because she wound up taking her to the dump when I was off in Tulare on an arson investigation. "He sighed, swung round on the rotating pole of one fleshless leg." But I see you're having yourself a drink there, and I was just wondering-? Because I'd love one myself. Scotch with a splash of water, if its not too much trouble. And if you've got Dewar's, that'd be brilliant."

Tierwater had seen this movie too, a hundred times — the self-righteous criminal and the unassuming detective — and yet he was playing right along, as locked into this role, this new role, the one he'd never auditioned for, as if it had been scripted. So he poured the man a drink, not so much nervous now as on his guard, and curious, definitely curious. Was this a friendly visit, one yokel neighbor rubbing up against another? Or was it about the gutted Cats and all the rest, was it about the fire? Because, if it was about the fire, he'd already said all he had to say on that subject-months ago, on a barstool — which is to say, no, he hadn't seen anything suspicious.

"No, sir," Quinn wheezed, poking round the room like a tourist in a museum while Tierwater stood at the counter, pouring scotch, "I'm up here enjoying myself now," and he might have been talking to himself — or answering Tier-water's unasked question. "My family's had a cabin here for twenty-some-odd years, did you know that? Up in back of the Reichert place? We got in when they first passed the bill allowing them to develop this little tract-lucky, I guess." A pause. He looked Tierwater dead in the eye. "To get in before the environmentalists started raising holy hell about it, I mean."

"Ice?" Tierwater asked.

"Just a splash of water, thanks."

Tierwater saw that he had a magazine in his hand now-The New Yorker — and he seemed to be examining the address label, but Tierwater (or Andrea, actually) had thought of everything, and that label read Tom Drinkwater, Star Route #2, Big Timber, CA 93265. "But, no, I'm not up on business this time-though the fire and all that vandalism still dogs me, it does, because I don't feel I've done my job till those skulking cowards and arsonists are behind bars, where they belong; no, I'm just tracking a little bear. For when the bow season opens up-in August, that is. I just like to pick out a sow and follow her around till I know her habits as well as I know my own. Then I know I can get her whenever I want her."

So he was a hunter-what else would you expect? A killer of animals, a despoiler of the wild, a shit like all the rest of them. Insurance investigator. Yes. And what did they insure? The means of destruction, that's what.

Tierwater handed him his drink and gave him the steadiest look he was capable of under the circumstances. And how had he felt about the fire? In reality? Good, he'd felt good. And more: he'd felt like an avenger, like a god, sweeping away the refuse of the corrupted world to watch a new and purer one arise from the ashes.

Thirty-five thousand acres, Ty, Andrea had cried, had shouted, so close to his face he could feel the aspirated force of each syllable like a gentle bombardment, thirty-five thousand acres of habitat, gone just like that. What about the deer, the squirrels, the trees and ferns and all the rest? He'd turned away, shrugged. Fire's natural up here, you know that — the sequoia cones can't even germinate without it. If you did a little research or even picked up a nature book once in a while instead of plotting demonstrations all the time, you'd know it the most natural thing in the world. Coming right back at him, she said, Sure, sure, but not if you start it with a match.

"Cheers," Quinn said, as Tierwater handed him the drink. "But what happened to your leg — or is it your ankle?"

Tierwater picked up his own drink-careful now, careful — and settled into the mopane armchair before he answered. "Just one of those things. We were out for a walk the other day, Dee Dee and me, right on the road here, and I wasn't looking and stepped off the shoulder. Twisted my ankle. No big deal."

"Hah!" Quinn cried, and he was as wizened as a monkey, all spidery limbs and one big bloated liver. "Getting old, is what it is. Reflexes shot, muscles all knotted up. And your knees — they're the first thing to go. Then this." He pointed to his crotch and arched an eyebrow. "Oh, I could tell you, believe me." Sinking into the chair across from Tierwater, he paused to gulp at his drink — a double, in a glass the size of a goblet, because Tierwater was taking no chances: get him drunk and see if he tips his hand. And then, into the silence that followed on the heels of this last revelation, Quinn dropped his bomb: "So how's the book coming?"

(I was within an ace of saying, What book? Half cockeyed myself at that point, but panic does wonders for the mind, better than neuroboosters any day, and I barely fumbled over the reply. Which was, "Fine." This was our cover, of course — I was an aspiring novelist, working on my first book, and we'd come up to the mountain, my wife, Dee Dee, and my daughter, Sarah, and me, to rent our old friend Ratchiss' place so I could have some peace and quiet to work in.) "Well, I'm glad to hear it," Quinn said, setting the glass down on the coffee table. "I don't know how you people do it-writing, I mean-it's just beyond me. People ask me, do I write, and I say yes; sure: checks." He had a laugh over that one, wheezed and coughed something up, then took a restorative gulp of Tierwater's scotch. Or Ratchiss', actually. "A novel, right?" He said, cocking his head and pointing a single precautionary finger. "Would that be fiction or nonfiction?"

"I, uh, well, I'm just in the beginning stages-" Tierwater lifted his own glass to his lips and drank deeply.

Quinn leaned forward, all eagerness. "So tell me, if it's not a secret-what's it about?" There was a pause. Tierwater went for his drink again. A hundred plots, subjects, scenarios crowded his brain. He could hear each individual flame licking away at each molecule of the split and seasoned wood, breaking it down, converting matter to energy, murdering the world. "Eskimos," he said finally.

"Eskimos?"

Tierwater studied the bloodless face. He nodded.

Quinn sat stock-still a minute. All this time he'd been in motion, pressing, probing, snooping, rocking back and forth in his chair as if he were hooked up to a transformer, and now, suddenly, he was still. "Well, now, that's a charge," he said finally, and gave a low whistle. "Now, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it's your lucky day, Tom. You're staring at a man who spent two years in Tingmiarmiut among the Inuit-back in the days when I was working for British Petroleum, that is. You spend much time up there?" Suddenly he slapped his knee and gave out a strangled cry. "By Jesus God, I'll bet you we know some of the same people-"

Salvation comes in many forms. This time it came in the form of Sierra. The door of her room flew open and the whole house was suddenly engulfed in a world-weary thump of drums and bass and the scream of a single suicidal guitar rattling round an echo chamber. She was dressed in black jeans with distressed knees, high-heeled boots and a blouse so small and shiny and black it could have been torn out of a baby's casket. But for the black lipstick, she might have been a young Victorian widow, in mourning for her husband, the late industrialist. "Dad," she said, "have you seen my gum-you know, that bag of Plenti-Paks we bought down the mountain the other day?"

The room reverberated. It shook. Sierra was already halfway to the fire when she noticed Quinn huddled there in the chair in his face paint and his fatigues. "Oh, wow," she said, caught in mid-step, "I didn't know we had company."

She gave the insurance investigator a look and a tentative smile. "Are you guys going to a costume party or something?"

Andrea passed out red berets all that summer, sold T-shirts imprinted with the raised red fist of the- E. F.I Logo and, in a wig that made her look like Barbara Bush's love child, advised accounting majors, aspiring poets and premed students how best to bicycle-lock their heads to bulldozers, log trucks and the front doors of the Axxam Corporation's headquarters in Severed Root, Kentucky. Teo started up an action camp for neophyte protestors and led marches on half a dozen lumber mills on the North Coast, and Ratchiss stayed at home in Malibu, watching the Discovery Channel and marveling at the way the sun glittered off the water at cocktail hour each day. Tierwater brooded. He dug up everything he could find on Eskimos, lest he should run into Declan Quinn over a plate of runny eggs and home fries at the lodge, played endless games of pitch and Monopoly with his daughter and went vengefully out into the night at least twice a week to beat back the tireless advance of progress.

In mid-July, almost a year to the day after the Siskiyou fiasco, Tierwater was taking his ease on the rear deck one afternoon, studying the configurations of the clouds from the nest of his hammock and feeling as Thoreauvian as he was likely to. He and Sierra had got up early, driven down the highway and hiked out into the burn, and he'd been gratified to see how many of the big pines and redwoods had resisted the fire. They were scarred, certainly, raked from the ground up as if mauled by a set of huge black claws, but the winter's snows had already worked the ash into the soil and seedlings were sprouting up everywhere. Better yet: the Penny Pines Plantation was no more, and there were no carved wooden signs announcing the largesse of Coast Lumber — or anything else, for that matter. And where the sawmill trees had stood in all their bio-engineered uniformity, there were now fields of wildflowers, rose everlasting, arnica, fireweed, mountain aster and a dozen others their field guide had no illustrations for. He picked a bouquet for Andrea, and felt he'd sown and nurtured each flower himself. This was nature as it was meant to be.

Andrea was still in bed, snoring lightly, her hair spilled across the pillow, her mouth sagging open to reveal the glint of a gold-capped molar on the upper left side. Tierwater had stolen into the room an hour earlier and set the vase of flowers on the night table, then retired to the deck. His wife was worn out. She'd been away for the better part of a week, stirring up demonstrators and clandestinely visiting her former dentist, and had gotten in late. Tierwater had waited up for her, and they'd traded gossip and made love in the silent, still shell of the house that floated like a ship in the dark sea of the night. Now he was waiting up for her again. Sky-watching.

It was no ordinary sky-rags and tatters of cloud unraveled across it like a scroll you could read if only you knew the language — but it put him to sleep nonetheless. When he opened his eyes, Andrea was there, sitting in the chair beside him, cradling a cup of coffee. The shadows had leapt over him. It must have been three in the afternoon.

She said, "You're awake."

"Yeah," he said. "I think so."

Her hair was wet from the shower, ropy and robbed of its sheen, and she bowed her head to work a comb through it. "You see anything of that little snoop while I was gone?" He watched her fingers, her hands, the snarl of hair. "You know, what's-his-name — the drunk."

"Quinn? She threw her head back and ran both hands through the wet hair, shaking out the excess moisture; it was so still he could hear the whisper of the odd droplet hitting the deck." I can't believe you let him in that night. He's not as stupid as he looks. Or as drunk either."

"What was I supposed to do?"

"Tell him you had a headache. Heartburn. The flu. Tell him your wife was in a mood and your father just died. Tell him anything. You think if I was home he would have got two feet inside that door?"

Tierwater offered her a grin, but she wasn't receiving it. She'd dipped her head again and the comb was working furiously at a dark knotted tangle. "You're tougher than I am. Everybody knows that."

She threw her head back and the hair with it. Now she was glaring. "It's no joke, Ty. He's on to us — if you can't see that you're nuts. And I tell you, we're not moving again, not with Sierra in school and — "

"Who said anything about moving?"

"I did. It's that or go to jail, isn't it? It's that or the FBfucking — I kicking down the door at four in the morning."

Tierwater felt a chill go through him. Did she really think that? How would anybody know anything? There was no evidence, not a scrap of it. And any sort of background check would just turn up the clean, sweet, uncomplicated and lovingly fabricated record of Tom Drinkwater, ex-schoolteacher, budding novelist, family man. "You've got to be kidding."

She wasn't kidding. "I warned you," she said, and then she launched into a neat little prepackaged speech, one she must have been rehearsing all the way up the coast. She'd been back to Oregon. She'd seen Fred. "He's put in something like two hundred hours on this, Ty-he's practically bent over and kissed the DA's ass, not to mention the feds — and he's got us a deal. No more false names, no more worrying about every knock at the door."

Tierwater looked beyond her to where the aspens caught the first hint of a breeze coming in out of the west. It was warm in the sun and the woods were silent but for the drone of the meat bees — the yellow jackets-that nested in the ground every ten feet in every direction for as far as you could see. "I'm going to jail," he said, "right?" He swung his legs out of the hammock, set his feet down on the deck. "But you're not."

"That's right, Ty: I'm not. But I didn't assault anybody or break out of jail either. Hey, but let's not argue, because this is right, you know it is, and it's going to be the best thing for Sierra."

He wanted to tell her about the Eskimos, how they had no jails or laws and lived within the bounds of nature — they didn't even cook their meat, because they had no wood or coal or oil, which is why they'd been called Eskimos in the first place: Eaters of Raw Flesh. And when they had a dispute, they didn't need lawyers to settle it for them — the injured parties would sing insults at each other till one of them lost his composure. The one who broke down first was the loser, simple as that. Of course, by the same token, Tierwater understood that he wouldn't fare any better under their system than under Fred and Judge Duermer's-not with his temper.

"It's all set," Andrea said. "The DA-he's new to the job, a man by the name of Horner, a younger guy? — He understands that all this arose out of a peaceable demonstration and that you were just trying to protect your daughter-"

"How long?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean-how much time do I have to do?"

She looked away, fussed with her hair. "Six months," she said. "To a year. But, listen, I get off with probation only — and we get Sierra back. That's the important thing. I mean, isn't it?"

At first he wouldn't listen. Wouldn't even consider it. Give himself up? Go to jail? For what? This wasn't Nazi Germany, was it? This wasn't Pol Pot's Cambodia. Jail? He was outraged. So outraged he'd punted a chair into the hot tub, hopped the railing and stalked off across the yard and into the trees. He sat out there in the woods all afternoon with the meat bees, each a perfect replica of the one that had done Jane in, turning it over in his mind. He had a yellow pine for a back rest, and he crossed his outstretched legs at the ankles, brought back down to earth-no more cloud-gazing today. He studied his clasped hands, the scatter of pine cones, the carpenter ants scaling his boots. Every few minutes, as the sun fell through the trees and the ravens called and the chipmunks flew across the duff like skaters on a pond, a yellow jacket would land on his exposed forearms or the numb monument of his face-not to sting, but to taste, to see if he was indeed made of meat, rent meat, meat sweet with the taste of fresh blood. Finally, at cocktail hour, when all the trees were striped with pale bands of sunlight and the birds began to hurtle through the branches in their prenocturnal frenzy, he got up, brushed himself off and ambled back to the house.

Andrea was sitting at the kitchen table with Sierra, both of them intent on the fashion magazines she'd brought back with her from the world below. There was something in the microwave, revolving endlessly-macaroni and cheese, from the smell of it. Three places were set at the table, and a bowl of salad, garnished with slices of tomato and avocado, stood on the counter. Tierwater said nothing, aside from a grunt of acknowledgment in response to Andrea's muted greeting, but went straight to the liquor cabinet and poured two tall vodka-tonics with a squeeze of lime. He took a long swallow from the nearest one, then crossed the room and handed the other to his wife. "Okay," he said. "Okay, you're right."

Sierra was absorbed in the page in front of her, gloss and color, some band, some actress, some model. Without looking up, she said, "About what?"

Andrea signaled him with her eyes. "Nothing, honey," he said automatically, and then he wandered out onto the deck, leaving the sliding door ajar behind him. A moment later, Andrea joined him, drink in hand. He turned to watch her as she slid the door closed.

"Good, Ty," she said, "it's for the best. We can get out from under all this."

He dropped his eyelids, shrugged, felt the sting of the ice as he lifted the drink to his lips.

She was in his arms, hugging him, her face pressed to his. "But you haven't heard the best part yet, and this is great, you're going to love this-"

"Sure," he said, pushing away from her and stepping back to the edge of the deck, "I'll bet. But don't tell me: you're going to bake me cookies every week while I'm in jail, right? You're going to knit me a sweater for those frosty nights on the cellblock when the sons of bitches won't turn the heat on-"

Her face was cold. "It isn't fumy, Ty. This is the best we can do, and we're going to make the most of it. When we give ourselves up its going to make the news coast to coast."

He said nothing. He didn't know where this was leading, but he didn't like it.

"Get ready," she said, and now she was animated, all right, effervescent, lit up like a self-contained power source, the three-hundred-watt smile and radar eyes. "You remember my great-grandfather?"

"Never met him."

"I mean, his story?"

He remembered. She was the great-granddaughter of Joseph Knowles, one of the archetypal eco-nuts. On a gray spring day in 1913, in the Maine woods, he did a striptease for a gaggle of reporters, emptying his pockets, setting aside his watch and wallet and penknife, neatly folding his jacket, vest, trousers and shirt, until finally he was down to his long underwear. Ultimately, he shed that too, to stand pale and naked before them. He then reiterated the credo that had drawn the journalists in the first place-that nature was to be preserved for its own sake as the nurturer of mankind — and plunged into the woods to live off the land. Two months later, hard and brown and considerably thinner, not to mention chewed, sucked and drained by every biting insect in the county, he emerged at the same spot to an even larger crowd and proclaimed that his God was the wilderness and his church the church of the forest. "No," Tierwater said. "You've got to be kidding. Tell me you're kidding."

There was the world, there were the trees, there was his wife. The light was perfect, held in that fragile moment between light and dark, the highest crowns of the trees on the ridge behind them on fire with it. She came to him again, and all he could see were her eyes and her lips, her glowing lips, her red, rich, persuasive lips. They kissed. He held her. The sun faded from the trees. "Think of it, Ty," she whispered, "think of the statement we'll make."

Tierwater had never been good with crowds. Crowds made him nervous; crowds made him think of the degradation of the planet; crowds showed him what humanity was, and he didn't like what he saw. This crowd, the one he, Andrea and Teo were the current focus of, must have consisted of a hundred or more. There was a good contingent of E. F.I ers out there, conspicuous in their red berets and the power-red T-shirts of the clan, thirty or forty of them, dispersed through the crowd like poppies in a field. You couldn't miss them. They were there to provide moral support — and to mob Tier-water and Andrea if any law-enforcement types showed up, in uniform or otherwise. The general public was in attendance too, at Andrea's express invitation-journalists, mostly, turned out in two-hundred-dollar hiking boots, pressed jeans and disc sunglasses in sixteen different earth-annihilating colors, as well as a scattering of the curious, the nearsighted and the bored. The day was golden. The mountains lay all around them, folded into one another like ripples in meringue. Teo had given his speech, and Andrea had given hers. There was nothing left now but to get to it.

Tierwater eased himself down on a section of wind-smoothed rock and began unlacing his boots; Andrea, barelegged in an airy dress the color of salt-water taffy, shucked off a pair of beaded moccasins. There was no wind, and the sun stood directly overhead, hot on his shoulders and the back of his neck. He gazed out over the mountains, his heart pounding, embarrassed already — and how had he ever let her talk him into this, one? — and then he glanced up at Andrea. She was staring placidly at the onlookers, making eye contact with one after another of them, milking the moment for all it was worth. Tierwater stood abruptly. The quicker they got this over with, the better, that was his thinking, and he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and stepped out of them, one leg at a time.

No one said a word, the whole crowd holding its breath. Tierwater was in good shape from all that hiking and his nighttime activities, six one, a hundred eighty pounds, too skinny in the legs, maybe — and he hated showing off his legs in public, and his feet too — but all in all, a fair match to play Adam to Andrea's Eve. He folded up his pants and handed them to Teo (who, incidentally, was dressed all in white, in a muscle shirt, shorts and sandals, like some sort of priest of the Movement). Everyone was staring at him, and he did his best to stare back, but then Andrea reached behind her for the zipper to her dress, and a hundred pairs of eyes went to her. He watched her arms bow out as she worked the zipper down to the base of her spine, and then the big hands come up and pull the dress over her head with a quick shake of her perfect hair, which fell perfectly into place. She was wearing crimson underwear — the subject of intense discussion that morning at breakfast, Tierwater fiercely opposed to it, Teo all for it — and the cups of her brassiere, right over the nipples, were imprinted with the raised black fist of the Movement. A smile for the crowd, and then she handed the dress to Teo. Defeated, feeling more foolish and more enraged by the moment, Tierwater tore off his shirt, dropped his briefs-his plain white briefs, $3. 99 A pair at J. C. Penney — and stood there naked for all the world to see.

All. Right. And they were quiet now, E. E! Ers, newspaper hacks, birdwatchers and Winnebago pilots alike. This was a spectacle. This was nudity. And Andrea — andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, the Earth Forever! Firebrand and environmental fugitive-was next. Again the bowed arms, as she worked at the catch of the brassiere, again the hundred pairs of eyes deserting Tierwater to embrace. His wife. (Come on, Ty, she'd said, it the human body, that's all, nothing to be ashamed of You're beautiful. I'm beautiful. This is the way we were born.) Then her breasts fell free and she stepped out of her panties — and handed them, silken and still warm, to Teo, Teo who'd seen all this before, up close and personal. And the rest of them? They saw that she was a natural blonde, for what it was worth.

There was a spatter of applause, and then Tierwater had her by the arm-grabbed hold of her before she could take a bow, because he was sure it was coming, and Why not, she'd insist, why not? — and they turned their backs and hobbled awkwardly over a spew of distressed granite on feet that weren't nearly hardened enough. He couldn't see the picture this made, because he was at the center of it, but Tierwater was reminded of nothing so much as Raphael's depiction of the expulsion from paradise. But that wasn't right. It was paradise they were entering, wasn't it?

For the next three hours, Tierwater focused his attention on his wife's buttocks, though the glutei were only the most prominent of the muscles in operation here. He studied her thighs, calves and ankles too, and the dimple at the base of her spine. Her shoulders dipped and arms swung free with the easy rhythm of her stride, and her hair-newly washed, brushed and conditioned-lifted and fell with a golden shimmering life of its own. He admired the sweet triangulation of her scapulae, the exquisite grip and release of the muscles of her upper back, and her heels, he loved her heels. This was all new to him, a revelation, bone and muscle working beneath the silk of the skin in a way that was nothing less than a miracle. He'd seen plenty of women with bare shoulders in his time, women playing tennis and wearing evening gowns, women in swimsuits and tank tops, women in the raw, active women, ballerinas and gymnasts, porn queens on the receiving end of a zoom lens and Jane giving birth to his daughter in the flesh, but he'd never followed a naked woman through the woods before. It was something. It really was. And it moved him somehow, the grace and good sense of it, even more than it excited him — and it did excite him, so much so that he was hard-pressed to keep from planting her in the ferns at the side of the trail and expressing his wonder in the most immediate and natural way.

Of course, he couldn't do that. Not with Chris Mattingly moving along lightly behind him. And "lightly" was the word — the man kept a discreet distance, the only indication of his presence the occasional scrape of boot on rock or the rustle of cooking equipment packed loosely in the outer flaps of his backpack. This-Chris Mattingly, that is, and picture an Eagle Scout all grown up and rejected by the Marines, twenty-eight years old, regular haircut clipped to fishbelly-white arcs around the ears-was another of Andrea's inspirations. We've got to bring a journalist along, she insisted. Somebody impartial — or at least impartial enough to see that we don't cheat. How else would anybody know we don't have a cache of jerky or candy bars or even filet mignon out there in the woods — or a cabin with a satellite dish? Or how would they know we didn't just slip away to Maui for a couple of weeks? We need to record this, Ty, if it's going to do any good.

So Chris Mattingly was going to shadow them for a month (thirty days, yes, because there was no sense in challenging Great-grandfather Knowles' record, and, besides which, by September first it could get pretty frigid in these mountains). He would be sleeping in a tent, on an inflatable mat, and feasting on freeze-dried lobster thermidor, scallop enchiladas and power bars, while they made do with bark and pine boughs for bedding, and scraped watercress out of the muck and toasted grasshoppers and freshwater mussels on a stick — if they could manage to start a fire, that is. Think of it as an adventure, Andrea said, and it was an adventure, Tierwater saw that immediately, the sort of thing that would make the two of them more notorious than all the Foxes and Phantoms combined. Of course, when Andrea first mentioned it, he bitched and moaned, argued, pleaded, employed all the specious reasoning of the Sophist and the third-year law student, but it was for form's sake only-secretly, he was pleased. To go out into the wilderness with nothing, to hunt and gather and survive like the first hominids scouring the African plains, that was something, a fantasy that burned in the atavistic heart of every environmentalist worthy of the name. And he was one of them, as far now from the shopping center and the life of the living dead he'd been enduring all these years as it was possible to be. And though his feet hurt and he ached with lust for his wife and he was already feeling the first stirrings of hunger despite the staggering mounds of ham, bacon, flapjacks and eggs he'd forced down for breakfast, he was feeling at peace with himself, feeling fulfilled, feeling lucky even.

They hiked all that afternoon, following a trail that led them out of the national forest proper and into a remote wilderness area (entry by permit only, no hunting, no logging, no motorized vehicles, no traps, snares, seines or gigs, all fishing on a strict catch — and — release basis, beer cans, chain saws and boom boxes strenuously discouraged). This was old-growth forest, the redwoods gathered in groves along steep stream courses, the pines rising up out of the hills like bristles on a brush, the silence absolute but for the screech of a jay or the breeze that would announce itself with a long echoing sigh in the treetops. It was dry. And warm. Very warm. Tierwater had begun to feel the sting of the sun on the back of his upper thighs and his own lean buttocks, and he watched his wife's shoulders and backside turn first pink and then a freshly spanked red as the day wore on (and this despite the fact that they'd put in at least an hour of nude sunbathing each day over the course of the past two weeks as a precautionary measure). But you couldn't guard against the sun, not if you were going to live in nature, or any of the other vicissitudes of natural life either-insects, snakebite, the elements — and both of them were prepared to make the sacrifice. Still, what he wouldn't give for a tube of sunscreen or even a palm-full of Hawaiian Dream tanning butter.

But they didn't have sunscreen. They didn't have toothpaste or dental floss, aspirin, Desenex, matches, knives, crockery or silverware, they didn't have down pillows or blankets or cell phones or even so much as a ring or bracelet to decorate their bodies with. All those things he'd accumulated in his life, all that detritus from his parents and his house and office and even the little he could call his own at Ratchiss'-it was gone now, irrelevant, and he was like one of the roving Bushmen of the Kalahari, blackened and bearded little men who accounted themselves prosperous if they had an empty ostrich shell to haul water in. Sure. And what else were he and Andrea going to have to do without? Coffee, English muffins, canned tuna, chocolate, vodka. Books, music, TV. Band — Aids. Mercurochrome. A snakebite kit.

And this last was important. Vitally important. Indispensable, even. Because their destination was a stretch of the upper Kern River, deep in the gorge it had carved out over the eons, and there were whole tribes of snakes there — or so Tierwater had been informed by three-quarters of the residents of Big Timber, none of whom had ever actually set foot in the place. And it wasn't as if they had hiking boots and sweatsocks and stiff thick denim jeans to protect against the savage thrust of the naked fangs. Or scorpions-what about scorpions? Ticks? Mites? Cougars, bears, rabid skunks? What about them?

(Ultimately? The way I felt that day? I welcomed them, welcomed them all: Here's my flesh, I murmured-said it aloud-here's my flesh. Come and get it.) They didn't have a permit either.

We don't want to look hypocritical, Andrea had argued, because what are people going to think if we go out there and violate the rules like the Freemen and the Phineas Priests and all the rest of the self-righteous back-to — the-earth yahoos? But Tierwater knew they would have to violate the rules systematically if they were going to get through this-let alone make a statement. What kind of statement would they make if they gave up? Or, worse, died? This was an experiment, and the wilderness was the laboratory. They would do what they had to do to survive-that was the point, wasn't it? Catch and release. Did the Bushmen practice catch and release? And what about Great-grandfather Knowles-had he lived on air while wandering the Maine woods?

It was past six and getting cool in the gorge by the time they found a likely-looking place to make camp, a tongue of sand thrown up against a wall of rock on the far side of the river. They waded across, the river no more than thirty feet wide and two or three feet deep at this juncture, and the frigid racing water felt good on their battered feet and sunburned legs. They'd agreed that their main priority the first night would be constructing a shelter-food they'd worry about in the morning. And so, dutifully, Tierwater and his wife had begun gathering brush and leaves to construct a debris shelter according to the instructions in one of the wilderness-survival manuals they'd found on Ratchiss' shelf. It was a pretty rudimentary affair: just prop a pole up on a stump or rock three feet off the ground, lay sticks against either side of it and cover the whole business with leaves and brush. Then line the interior with four or five armloads of spare leaves for bedding, and presto, you've got an insulated shelter for the night.

Dusk fell. A wall of cold air worked its way down the canyon foot by foot, settling into the low places, probing corners, retarding the metabolism of all those hidden snakes and scorpions and prickling the skin of Tierwater's chest with goosebumps. He was bent over a fireboard — a fragment of sun-bleached driftwood, that is-vigorously spinning a long, thin, very nearly straight drill of the same material. Andrea knelt beside him, fragments of brush in her hair, her breasts nicked and blemished from cradling armfuls of river-run debris, her big hands working in her lap. "Harder, Ty," she urged, "it's starting to smoke." And it was, it was, the spindle working in the groove as be furiously kneaded it between his palms, the faintest glimmer of a coal reddening the tip of the thing, friction, more friction, and Andrea blowing now, puffing for all she was worth. There it was — a coal! And the coal fired the kindling for the briefest, most desperate moment, before it died out in a faint little ribbon of smoke. By Tierwater's count, this was the twenty-seventh time the same scenario had played itself out in the course of the past hour. He was exhausted. His palms were raw. He sat heavily and let the cold air settle over his shoulders like the mantle of defeat.

It was then that the smell of a clean-burning campfire came to them, sharp and somehow delicious on the chill air. And the scent of food-some sort of sauce, tomato sauce, and the unmistakable aroma of fresh coffee. Tierwater drew his wife to him and held her in his arms, and it was the saddest moment of the whole adventure. They turned their heads in unison to gaze through the snarl of scrub willow in the riverbed to a point a hundred yards upstream. Through the screen of the bushes, they could just make out the figure of Chris Mattingly, crouched lovingly over his fire. And then, as faint as the first tentative murmur of the birds on a cold spring morning, a sound came to them, pitched low and melodic. He was singing. Cheered by the blaze and the wildness of the place and the intoxicating smell of the freeze-dried entrée he raised to his lips, bite by savory bite, Chris Mattingly was singing at the fall of day.

It got better, and then it got worse. In the morning, with a pain in his gut that twisted like the blunted stone head of a Bushman's arrow, Tierwater managed to get a fire going. He squatted beside it, his testicles dangling in the cool sand, and nurtured the weak dancing flame till it danced higher, into the nest of twigs and bark he'd prepared, and there it was: fire. It was a hungry little fire, and it chewed contentedly at everything he fed it, till finally he was dragging branches the size of coat racks out of the piles of river-run debris scattered along the spit and slamming them hard against the standing trees till they yielded the fuel he wanted, in convenient three-foot sections. He didn't know what time it was-only that it was light and that the chill had begun to lift — and he did a naked capering dance of triumph round the fire, kicking up his heels in the sand. They had fire. Fire!

While Andrea slept on, oblivious, her slack limbs encrusted with leaf mold and all the small but ferocious things that lived within it, Tierwater gathered firewood. He combed both sides of the river, keeping an eye out for fish or bird's nests or even snakes — and, yes, he'd be pleased and honored to indulge in a little roast rattlesnake for breakfast — and by the time the sun had climbed up over the eastern ridge of the gorge, he had enough fuel for a hundred fires stacked up round the shelter. But he wasn't done yet-no, this shelter would never do; it wasn't much more imposing than a suburban mulch pile, and all night, as insects crawled over him and fragments of leaves worked their way into his private parts and maddened him with itching, he envisioned a larger, airier shelter, a model of cleanliness and efficiency.

Something you could stand in, with pine boughs spread inside over the soft, clean sand. The thought of it made his spirits lift and soar, as if a fierce-eyed bird of prey had emerged from his body-climbed right up out of his throat — and shot into the sky. He'd never felt anything like it. Never. And then he was crouching in the hut, leaning over his wife to kiss her awake, the smell of her like some fermenting thing, like vinegar or curdled milk spilled on a patch of damp ground, bits of leaf mold stuck to her lips and forced up her nostrils, a scurry of insects frantically hopping and burrowing out of his calamitous way. "Wake up, baby," he said, pressing his lips to hers, the leaves rustling and fragmenting beneath them, and she woke to the smell of him, to the smell of smoke on him, and they made love in the twisted thrashing way of animals in the bush-for the third time since the but had gone up the night before. "I made fire," he told her, over and over, and she clutched at him with her big hands and powerful arms, pulling him into her with a furious urgency the but couldn't withstand. It rattled, it swayed, it fell, and they hardly noticed.

It was erotic, the primitive life, Tierwater was thinking-all those naked pot-bellied tribes in the jungles of South America and New Guinea, bare breasts, loincloths, penis sheaths, doing it in the hut, on a log, in the stream as the water sizzled round you — but it only took a day or two to disabuse him of that notion. The fact was that lust consumed calories, and in the final analysis calories were the only thing that mattered. Once their cells had been burned clean of fats, nitrates and cholesterol, once they understood that the odd fish, indifferently charred on a green stick, or a fistful of manzanita berries au naturel was it for the day-hold the butter, please, and no, I think I'll pass on the napoleons this evening — their erotic life came to a screeching halt. He saw his wife crouched there by the new and improved hut, weaving sticks into a primitive weir, her breasts pendulous, her skin so burned, abraded and chewed over it was like a scrub pad, and he barely glanced up. There's a naked woman, he thought, in the same way he might have thought, There's a tree or a rock.

In the beginning, it had all seemed possible. They were enthusiasts, pumped up with confidence and what they'd distilled from the pages of a book, so simple really, the diagrams still resonating in their heads (attach x to y to z and voila, there's meat in the pot). Tierwater spent hours constructing deadfalls to lure the unsuspecting skunk or raccoon, but it proved to be a fruitless endeavor, because nothing, as far as he could see, ever went near the baits he left out-except flies. Andrea sat cross-legged in the sand and fashioned snares from the thin whiplike branches of the willows, yet they snared nothing but air, and both of them spent the better part of a long morning digging mouse bottle pits (two and a half feet deep, with a wide bottom and narrow neck, hidden beneath a flat rock propped up on both ends to provide access), only to discover that no mouse, if mice even existed this far afield, had been generous enough to tumble into one of them. After inspecting the empty traps three days running, they looked each other in the eye beneath the tan trees, amidst the glorious but inedible scenery, searching for signs of the inevitable breakdown. There was frustration in the air. There was anger. And more than that, there was hunger-desperate, gnawing, murderous.

"A mouse," Andrea spat, arms akimbo, her skin burned to the color of boiled wiener, "we can't even catch a mouse. And how many calories you think we wasted digging these pits, Ty? Huh? And even if we did catch one, or even ten of them, what good would it do? What are they, the size of a marshmallow, once you skin and gut them?"

But Tierwater was in the grip of something — a delusion, that's what it was — and out here, where there were no microphones or high heels or E. F.I Contributors to woo, he was in charge. "Bears eat them," he said lamely, staring down into the dark, mocking aperture of the empty hole at his feet.

"Yeah," she said, "and people eat bears. Why don't we catch a bear, Ty? You know any good bear recipes?"

They spent the rest of the day haunting the streambed, darting after the elusive shadows that were the fish, but it was an unlucky day, and finally they were reduced to turning over stones to pluck beetles, salamanders, earthworms and scorpions from their couchettes, the whole mess, two handfuls of pulped and writhing things, singed in the cup of a rock Tierwater set in the middle of the fire. "I don't care, Ty," Andrea sang, huddled over her naked knees as the sun clipped off the rock wall above them and the ambrosial smell of whatever it was Chris Mattingly was cooking drifted down the gorge, "I'm not eating anything with the legs still attached. I'm not" So Tierwater mashed the whole business together with the blunt end of a stick, pounded it and pounded it again, till they had a dark paste sizzling there in the scoop of rock. They ate it before it had cooled- "It has a kind of nutty flavor, don't you think?" Tierwater said, trying to make the best of it — but fifteen minutes later they were both secreted in the bushes, heaving it back up.

The next morning, Andrea was up at first light, a cud of twig and leaf working in her mouth. He was tending the fire when she rose up suddenly out of the dirt and took hold of his arm. "I want meat," she said. "Meat. Do you hear me?" Her eyes were swollen. Her nails dug into his flesh. "Can't we at least hunt? Isn't that what people do when they're starving? Isn't that standard operating procedure?"

Tierwater didn't bother to answer, because if he'd answered he would have asked a question of his own, a question that was sure to bring some real rancor to the surface-Whose idea was this, anyway? Instead, he said nothing.

"What about marmots? Aren't there marmots out here?"

The fire was snapping. It was early yet, the sun buttering the ridge before them, the canyon still sunk in shadow. Tier-water had always been one to eat breakfast — and a substantial breakfast, at that-as soon as he arose in the morning. It the most important meal of the day, his mother used to say, and she was right. He wanted coffee, with heavy cream and lots of sugar, he wanted eggs and thick slices of Canadian bacon, buttered sourdough toasted till it was crisp, but he heaved himself up with the picture of a marmot — a fat yellow-throated thing like a giant squirrel and so stupid it wasn't much smarter than the rocks it lived among-planted firmly in his head. "I used to collect marmot shit," he said, the smoke stabbing at his eyes. "I guess I ought to know where to find them-up there, I would think," he said, gesturing at the ridge behind them.

They looked at one another a long moment, their bodies smudged and battered and all but sexless, and then they turned as one and started to climb. It was no easy task. Already, after a mere five days, they could feel the effects of starvation, a weakness in the limbs, a gracelessness that took the spring out of their step and made their brains feel as if they were packed with cellulose. They gulped air like pearl divers, left traces of themselves on the rough hide of the rocks. Every bush poked at them. They tasted their own sweat, their own blood. And when they got to the top of the canyon, they discovered more scenery, a whole panorama of scenery, but nothing to eat. "We've got to look for their burrows," Tierwater said, snatching the words between deep ratcheting breaths.

Andrea just stared at him, her chest heaving, the whole world spread out behind her. Burrows, they were looking for burrows.

They spread out and combed the ridge, chasing incidentally after lizards that were so quick they couldn't be sure they'd seen them, chewing bits of twig and the odd unidentifiable berry that might or might not have been poisonous, but they found no scat, no burrows, no sign that marmots or anything else lived there. Tierwater, the tender skin of his back and shoulders baked to indelibility, was making some sort of excuse, flapping his hands, dredging up marmot lore, when the two of them suddenly froze. There was a sound on the air, a high chittering whistle that seemed to be emanating from the next ridge over. "You hear that?" Tierwater said, and his face must have been something to see-give him a loopy grin, the look of the mad scientist, the cannibal turning a corner and bumping into a sumo wrestler. "That's a marmot. That's a marmot for sure."

Guided by the sound, they moved through the brush and 'into the cover of the tall pines till they came to a clearing dominated by a tumble of rock; in the center of the tumble, its broad flat rodent's head jerking spasmodically as it sang or screeched or whatever it was doing, was a marmot. A yellow-bellied marmot, fat and delicious. Tierwater glanced at Andrea. Andrea glanced at Tierwater. He put a finger to his lips and bent for a stout branch.

For an hour, crouching, creeping through a bristle of yellowed grass and pine cones on their stomachs, Tierwater and Andrea converged on the animal from opposite directions. It was hot. Tierwater was white with dust and itching in every fiber of his torn and abraded flesh. He watched Andrea's head bob up from behind a fallen log ten feet in back of the marmot, then he swallowed his breath and charged the thing, stick flailing in the air — and she, taking his signal, rose up with a whoop, her own stick clutched tight. It was a careful stalk, a brilliant stalk from a tactical standpoint, but, unfortunately, the marmot was unimpressed. With a single squeak that was like the first faint exhalation of a teapot set on to boil, he-it-disappeared down its hole.

"All right," Tierwater said, "all right, we'll dig him out, then."

And so they dug, with brittle pine sticks instead of a pick and shovel, in dry, rocky soil, their stomachs creaking and crepitating and closing on nothing. They dug wordlessly, dug mindlessly, earth and stones flying, sticks shattering, the vision of that stupid, dull-eyed, buck-toothed animal constall* before them-meat, meat spitted on the grill-until they gradually became aware of a noise behind them, a high chittering whistle. They turned as one to see the marmot watching them from the neck of a burrow twenty feet away, its head bobbing in complaint. Tierwater picked up a stone; the marmot disappeared. "No problem," Tierwater said, turning to his wife, and she was a mess, she was, her hands blackened, a fine grit glued to her with her own sweat, "you just stay here, at this burrow, and I'll dig him out over there."

And so they dug again, with renewed vigor, watching the distance between them shrink as Tierwater traced the burrow back along a meandering line to where Andrea dug forward to meet him. Half an hour passed. An hour. And then, finally, though they were exhausted-tense, exhausted and angry — the end was in sight: there were no more than five feet separating them. "I'll force him out," Andrea whispered, her voice gone husky, "and you club him, club the living shit out of him, Ty." Yes. And then they heard the whistle behind them, and there was the marmot, the fat, stupid thing, on the lip of yet another burrow.

Thirty days is a long time to play at nature. An infinity, really. But they learned from their mistakes, until finally, with coordination and the fiercest concentration, they began to eke out a starvation diet, all the while marveling at Great-grandfather Knowles and the sheer grit he must have had. Eventually, they caught things and ate them. They herded fish into shallow pools and scooped them out with a sort of lacrosse stick Tierwater fashioned one afternoon (the protected golden trout, Saltno aguabonita, mostly, but chub and roach too); they gathered crickets, grasshoppers and berries; they extinguished a whole colony of freshwater mussels that tasted of mud and undigested algae. They foraged for bird's eggs, chewed twigs to fight down the hunger that tormented them day and night, lingered round Chris Mattingly's camp like refugees choking on their own saliva. At night, wrapped in their leaves and detritus, when the stillness descended and there was no sound but for the trill and gurgle of the river digging itself deeper, they dreamed of food. "Reese's Pieces," Andrea would murmur in her sleep. "Cheeseburger. Doritos. Make mine medium rare."

The days stretched on, each one an eternity unto. Itself, animal days, days without consciousness or conscious thought. No books. No TV. No sex. Every waking moment consumed with a sort of ceaseless shifting and wandering in search of food, and no set time for meals either, not dawn or high noon or dusk. No, they just fell on whatever they managed to catch or forage-berries, forbs, a brace of lizard smashed to pulp by a perfect strike right down the middle of the plate — and ate greedily, no time for manners or self-abnegation or even civility, no time but primitive time. Andrea had grown up in the outdoors. She'd hiked, fished, camped, ridden horseback for as long as she could remember, and she had the blood of the mad anchorite Joseph Knowles in her veins, but, still, this was too much for her, Tierwater could see that before the first week was out. And it was too much for him too, too much suffering to prove a point, though there were moments when he stared down into the rolling liquefaction of the waters or up into the starving sky and felt washed clean, no thought of Sierra ensconced on Lake Witcheegono, New York, with her Aunt Phyll, no thought of Sheriff Bob Hicks or the awesome weight of the prison door as it slammed shut behind you or the busy wars of accumulation and want that raged through the world with the regularity of the seasons.

Tierwater lost twenty-five pounds, Andrea nineteen. They were stick people, both of them, as hard and burnished as new leather, and they barely had the strength to drag themselves up and out of the canyon on the last day of their exile. Chris Mattingly led the way with his loping vigorous strides, a man who dwelt deep inside himself, and nobody said a word the whole way back, The path rose gradually out of the gorge and into the higher elevations, and Tierwater had to stop every ten minutes to refocus his energy, Andrea tottering along on the poles of her legs like a furtive drunk, the sky overhead expanding and contracting at will until both of them had headaches so insistent they could barely see. But it was worth it, it was, because when they got there-to the big exfoliated dome of granite where it all began — there was a crowd of five hundred gathered to greet them and they roared like a crowd twice the size.

Teo was there, newspeople with minicams and flashing cameras, children, dogs, E. F.I Ers, potters, crystal and totem vendors, and every last resident of Big Timber, turned out in flannel shirts and jeans. Declan Quinn was at the front of the press, nodding the parched bulb of his head like a toy on a string, and two cops in uniform flanked him. "That's the man," he rasped, "that's him," and the cop to his left — the one with a face like the bottom of a boot-stepped forward.

It was funny. Though he was making a spectacle of himself in a penis sheath he'd constructed of willow bark and rattlesnake skin, a man of sticks barely able to stand up straight while his wife, the thousand — year-old woman, limped along gamely at his side in a crude skirt and top made of woven grass, though it was over now and they were going to shut him up in a cage, Tierwater felt nothing but relief. He was as calm as Jesus striding out of the Sinai after his forty days and forty nights of temptation, and when he felt the cold steel grip of the handcuffs close over his wrists, he could have wept for joy.

Santa Ynez, April 2026 A ad then, one day, the rain stops for good. There it is, the filsun, angry and blistered in a sky the color of a bleached robin's egg, steam rising, catfish wriggling, eighty-seven degrees already and it's only eight in the morning. I'm outside, squinting in the unaccustomed light, my feet held fast in the muck of the yard, a flotilla of crippled-looking geese sailing by in the current of what we've dubbed the Pulchris River. What am I feeling? The faintest, tiniest, incipient stirring of hope. That's right. Hope for the animals — and they've suffered, believe me, cooped up in the house like that, no breath of fresh air or touch of the earth under their hoofs and paws, filthy conditions, irregular diet, lack of exercise — and hope for myself and Andrea too. Mac's promised to rebuild on higher ground, state-of — the-art pens and cages for the animals, a bunker for me and Andrea, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. Of course — and this is the sad part-for a good third of our specimens, it's already too late. The warthogs, all fourteen of them, have slipped into oblivion (a swine flu, we think, passed by the peccaries or maybe Chuy, but then I'm no veterinarian), Lily's vanished, the spectacled bear poisoned herself after she broke through the wall into the garage and lapped up a gallon of antifreeze, and there's been a whole host of other calamities I don't even want to get into.

Anyway, I was up at six, the astonishing wallop of the meteorological change registering insistently in my back and hip joints, the pillow gummy with sweat, my glasses misted over the minute I clapped them on the bridge of my nose. Global warming. I remember the time when people debated not only the fact of it but the consequence. It didn't sound so bad, on the face of it, to someone from Winnipeg, Grand Forks or Sakhalin Island. The greenhouse effect, they called it. And what are greenhouses but pleasant, warm, nurturing places, where you can grow sago palms and hydroponic tomatoes during the deep-freeze of the winter? But that's not how it is at all. No, it's like leaving your car in the parking lot in the sun all day with the windows rolled up and then climbing in and discovering they've been sealed shut — and the doors too. The hotter it is, the more evaporation; the more evaporation, the hotter it gets, because the biggest greenhouse gas, by far and away, is water vapor. That's how it is, and that's why for the next six months it's going to get so hot the Pulchris River will evaporate and rise back up into the sky like a ghost in a long trailing shroud and all this muck will be baked to the texture of concrete. Global warming. It's a fact.

But right now my spirit leaps up: I'm here, I'm alive and the sun is shining. Spring has sprung, and my brain is teeming with plans. I haven't even had breakfast yet or labored over the toilet and already I'm pacing off the rough outline of the new lion pen on a prime piece of high ground, a good half-acre of ochre muck and devilweed wedged between the garage and the gazebo. It's the lions that are suffering most — their hair is falling out, they're too depressed even to cough, let alone roar, and Buttercup seems to have lost most of her carnassial teeth, which makes chewing through all that partially defrosted prime rib a real chore — and I'm determined to get them fixed up first. Besides, they're the most dangerous things in the house (except maybe for Andrea, but who's complaining?), And though we've barricaded the doors and taken every precaution, I shudder to think what would happen if one of them got loose.

So this is how it is, the sun up there in the sky, me down here thinking lions, the wind out of the southeast ripe with a smell if not of redemption then at least of renewal — and isn't it supposed to be Easter soon? — When I hear Andrea calling my name. And this is remarkable in itself, because we're shy of noon by nearly four hours and she hasn't been up this early since she reinserted herself into my crabbed life back in November. She's wearing a white flowing dress, low-cut, and half a dozen strings of multicolored beads that bring to mind hippie times, and she's lifting the hem of the dress to keep it out of the muck and moving in her gum boots with the kind of lightness and grace you wouldn't expect from an old lady. I watch her pick her way to me, and I know I must have an awestruck look on my face (for a minute there I'm not even sure who I am or what lifetime this is), and then I watch her lips moving and notice her lipstick and hear her say, "So there you are."

I lift one of my boots from the grip of the muck and point to it: "I'm pacing off the new lion compound."

She's got a hand to her forehead, screening her eyes from the sun. "Did you remember your sunblock?" And before I can answer: "You should be wearing a hat too. How many carcinomas have you had removed now-what was it, twenty-two, twenty-five?"

Andrea isn't wearing a gauze mask, by the way, and neither am I. Nor is Mac or Only or April Wind or anybody else in the house. We gave up on all that nonsense back in January, when the screen informed us that the mucosa scare was just that — a scare. It seems there was a localized outbreak of a new and especially virulent strain of the common cold on the East Coast (people died from it, mostly the old-old, but still, it was only a cold), and a certain degree of hysteria was inevitable. Mac insisted on the charade for a week or two after the news became definite, but we were all relieved when finally, one afternoon, he appeared at lunch with the bridge of his nose and thin, pale, salmon-colored lips revealed for all to see. I remember the sense of liberation I felt when I tore off my own reeking mask and buried my dental enhancements in a thick, chewy chili-cheese burrito without having to worry about getting a mouthful of gauze with every other bite.

"Is that what you came out here to tell me?" I say, and I'm irritated, just a little, because I know she's right.

"No," and her voice is soft as she moves into me with a slosh of her boots and wraps her big arms around me, "I just wanted to tell you we've got eggs for breakfast this morning."

"Eggs?" We haven't seen anything even vaguely resembling an egg since the storms started in, and forget the cholesterol, I can already picture a crisp golden three-egg omelet laid out on the plate — or, no, I'm going to have mine poached and runny, so I can really taste them. "Where'd you get them?"

She pulls back to give me a sly smile, then lifts her chin toward the wreckage of the condos across the way. The two buildings that collapsed back in November have gradually subsided into the muck, a spill of ruined sofas, exercise equipment and video attachments littering the far shore under the glare of the sun. "The good old barter system," she says. "There's a kid over there — a kid, listen to me; I mean, he's got to be forty-five or so-who says he's a big Pulchris freak, went to all the shows, lifted all the performance tracks off the Net, that sort of thing-"

I smile. "And he's got chickens."

"He wouldn't take money, but April gave him a couple of old tour T-shirts-with Mac's permission, of course."

"Nothing like living off the past," I say, and then I loop my arm through Andrea's and we slog off across the yard to the house, awash in sunshine.

Storm chasing another down the coast, the rivers flooding and the roads washed out, mudslides, rogue waves, windshield-wiper fatigue, drip, drip, drip, everybody as depressed as Swedes. Nobody liked it-except maybe the surfers. And Coast Lumber. Coast Lumber loved it. Coast Lumber couldn't have been more pleased if they'd ordered up the weather themselves. A tree-hugger by the name of Sierra Tierwater, twenty-one years old and a complete unknown--nobody's daughter, certainly-was trespassing in one of their grand old cathedral redwoods and the press was waiting for them to send a couple of their goons up to haul her down, as brutally as possible. But they weren't about to do that. Why bother? Why give her anything? All they had to do was sit back in their paneled offices and let the weather take care of her. And then, quietly, while the eco-freaks and fossil-lovers were hunkered in their apartments watching the rain drool across the windows, they could take that tree down, and all the rest like it, and put an end to the protests once and for all.

The first night, the night I drove up there to rescue her from the storm, I was so disoriented I couldn't have found her if she were standing behind the cash register of a 7-Eleven lit up under the trees. All I managed to do was add to my quotient of suffering, inhabiting yet another dark night of the soul, face to face with my own dread and loss of faith. Drunk, I stumbled around through the graveyard of the trees while the wind screamed and the branches fell. I don't know how long I was out there, but it was a relief when I finally found my way back to the car, though the car was stuck to the frame in mud and there was no hope there either. My head was throbbing, my throat so dry it was as if somebody had been working on it all night with a belt sander, and my clothes were wet through to the skin. I felt dizzy. Nauseous. I was racked with chills. I stripped off my clothes, socks as wet as fishes, underwear like something that had been used to swab out toilets, and then, thinking Sierra, Sierra, I wrapped myself up in Andrea's mummy bag, and in the next moment I was asleep.

The morning wasn't much different from the night that had preceded it. Rain fell without reason or rancor, an invisible creek blustered somewhere nearby, the car settled into the mud. There may have been a quantitative difference in the light, a gradual seep of visibility working its way into the gloom, but it wasn't much. I pulled on cold wet socks, wet jeans, wet boots and a wet T-shirt, sweater and windbreaker, and went off to find my daughter. This time I walked straight to her tree.

There were eight redwoods in her grove, two conjoined at the base and blackened by the ancient fire that had scarred the trunk of her tree, and the forest of cedar, fir, ponderosa and other pines was a maze of trunks radiating out across the hillsides from there. Except to the west, where the skin of the earth showed through and there was nothing but debris and stumps as far as you could see. This grove was scheduled next, and my daughter — if she was alive still and not a bag of lacerated skin and fragmented bone flung out of the treetops like a water balloon-was determined to stop the desecration. I was proud of her for that, but wary too. And afraid. I leaned into the wet, dark trunk and peered up into the sky-her platform, the shadowy slab of plywood lashed across two massive branches with nylon cord, was still there. I pushed back from the tree to get a better angle, blinking my eyes against the fall of the rain, and saw the bright aniline — orange flash of her tent trembling in the wind like a wave riding an angry sea. She was there. She was alive. "Sierra!" I shouted, cupping my hands.

A gust shook the treetops, and Sierra's tree quaked till I could feel the recoil of it in my feet. I looked up and there she was, her face a distant, drawn-down splash of white in a welter of rocketing green needles. And then her voice, buffeted by the winds and assaulted by the rain, came drifting down like a leaf: "Dad!" She called. "Dad!"

My heart was breaking, but she was smiling, actually smiling, if I was seeing right — and even in those days, my eyes were nothing to brag about. "Sierra!" I called, feeling as if Pd been turned inside out. I didn't want her up there. I wanted to be up there with her. I wanted to bomb Coast Lumber, neutralize their heavy machinery, throttle their stockholders. "Honey," I shouted, and my voice broke, "do you want to come down?"

It seemed as if it took an hour for her answer to drift all the way back to me, the tree quaking, the rain thrashing, my heart like a steel disc in the back of my throat, but her answer was no. "No!" She cried, cupping her thin white hands round her mouth to make it emphatic. "No!" And the message fell with the rain.

I was her father. I knew what she was like, heard the determination in her voice, the fanaticism: she wasn't coming down, not today, and there was no use arguing. "Tomorrow maybe?" I shouted, my neck already strained from flinging my head back to gape up at her "Till the storm stops, anyway? You can always go back up- when the weather clears!"

Again the answer drifted down, this time in a long-drawn-out bleat of protest: "N00000!"

All right. But did she need anything? "Do you need anything?" I shouted.

Rain trailed down my back. I was shivering spasmodically. My throat was sore. My head ached. In time, she would need all sorts of things: a chemical toilet, books, magazines, art supplies, a cell phone, fuel for her camp stove, a special harness so she could descend to thirty feet like a big pale spider and conduct the endless press interviews her crusade would generate. But now, on the first morning of her life as an arboreal creature, an evolutionary oddity, a female Homo sapiens of breeding age whose feet never touched the ground and whose biological imperative would have to wait, she needed nothing. Except a favor. "Can you do me a favor?" She called out of the drifting white flag of her face.

"Yeah," I shouted, digging at the back of my neck and pushing away from the tree for a less inflammatory angle. "Sure. Anything!"

"Take these," she called, and suddenly two objects, oblong, pale gray and streaking white, came sailing down out of the tree. It took me a minute to identify them, even after they landed separately in the duff not more than two feet from me. Thump, came the first of them, and then the second, slapping down beside me with the sound of finality. They were her shoes. Her shoes. Her running shoes, walking shoes, walking, breathing and living shoes, the very things that connected her to the earth. But she flung them down to me on that first morning, because she wouldn't be needing them, not anymore.

Eggs. Such a simple food, the sort of thing we used to take for granted, the mainstay of every greasy spoon in every town in America, scrambled, soft-boiled, over easy with home fries on the side. I grew up on eggs, in the time before we realized what they did to the arteries, and my daughter grew up on them too, simply because she had to get her protein somewhere. But as I say, eggs have been scarce at Chez Pulchris during the siege. The cook-her name is Fatima, by the way, and her husband is Zulfikar-served up omelets and fresh-baked bread for a week or so after we all moved in, but then the eggs were gone and it's been meat, rice and canned vegetables since. Oh, the tall Al managed to make it across the Pulchris River once or twice in the beginning, but the supermarkets had been stripped down to the bare shelves-nothing left but cornstarch and pickled beets — and after that even the Olfputt couldn't breach the floods and we all just stayed put and made do with what we had. So I'm looking forward to a plate of eggs, even if I do have to sop them up with chapatis instead of toast, and I kick off my boots on the doorstep and go in to wash up, change my shirt and slip into the black — and — gold satin tour jacket Mac gave me when I ran out of clothes a month back. Sun floods the windows, and I'm actually whistling-Ride your pony, Ride your pony-as I gaze into the mirror and slap on some of Mac's three-hundred-dollar-an-ounce aftershave.

We're gathering on the third floor, in the Gangsta Rap Room, as it turns out, for a formal brunch-Mac has an announcement to make. As Andrea and I step into the elevator, her arm tucked neatly into the crook of my elbow, I can already guess what he's going to say: he's leaving. Going north for the summer-Fairbanks, Winnipeg, maybe one of the big Hokkaido resorts. He'll climb into a helicopter, and he'll take the Ms with him (and none too soon for the shorter one, who must have put on a good thirty pounds of flab since the rains started). That's all right. I don't mind. As long as I have his commitment to rebuild, he can be on the far side of the moon for all it matters to me, not that I don't enjoy his company, don't get me wrong, but Mac is going to be Mac, and that means globe-trotting. That means excess. That means Mac in Edinburgh or Reykjavik, bent over the gaming tables or squiring some starlet round the tony eateries where they serve tuna garni or twenty-year-old monkfish at three thousand dollars a plate. I'm used to it.

At any rate, I'm feeling good as we glide through the door and into the dining room, the sun shining, eggs on the menu, the future looking bright. The table has been set for six (Chuy never joins us for meals, though Mac, I'm sure, would have no objection, being the democrat and humanitarian he is) and we're the first to arrive, followed shortly by April Wind. "Hell000, Ty!" She chirps, as if she hasn't seen me in months, and she bends to peck a kiss on Andrea's cheek before seating herself at the far end of the table, next to Mac's place. She's had an exciting winter, the dwarf woo-woo woman in the size 2 dress, rattling away at her Sierra book (tentatively titled For Love of the Trees) and romancing Mac. That's right. They found common ground in the Zodiac, Pantheism, holistic medicine, yin yang and the androgynous universe, and crystals, and since she was the only woman under sixty-seven washed up on Pulchris Isle, I guess it was inevitable that she caught Mac's eye. Not that he isn't discriminating, just practical.

Orange juice is on the table (fresh-squeezed, in a stone pitcher), a plate of chapatis and dishes of lime pickle and mango chutney, two bottles of champagne in iced buckets, kiwi fruit, bananas and kumquats from our own inundated orchards. I pour myself a glass of orange juice, twist off the wire and pop the cork on a bottle of Mumm's Cordon Rouge, 1999, from the Pulchris cellars. "So how's the book going?" I say, giving April Wind a look.

"Let me have a little of that, Ty." This is Andrea speaking. She wants champagne, and who can blame her after all that rotgut sake, but she also wants to deflect my question. She leans forward, tipping her wineglass under the lip of the bottle while I pour. It's hard to say what she's thinking, but my guess is that, if she had to choose between me and April, I'd be out the door. And that hurts. It does.

"April?" I ask, lifting my eyebrows and proffering the bottle.

"No, thanks." She has the look of a decrepit child, the limp black hair, the vaguely Asian eyes, the lipstickless mouth. She seems to be hugging her shoulders, which makes them appear even narrower, her miniature hands clasped before her, the totem dangling from her throat in its pathetic little sack. What could Mac possibly see in her?

I smack my lips over the champagne, dilute it with a splash of orange juice. "So the book?" I repeat, and I hear my father's voice, the half-mocking tone he'd use when he came into the kitchen at night to refill his drink and saw me sitting there at the table with my homework spread out before me like so much refuse. "So nu?" He'd say.

April Wind ducks her head. She shrugs. Holds out her glass for orange juice. "As well as can be expected."

"No big publishers beating down the door?"

"Come on, Ty," Andrea says, exchanging a look with April Wind. The look says, Forgive him, he's being a jerk, and I am being a jerk, of course I am-that's my blood on those pages, and my daughter's.

"What's the celebration?" April Wind wants to know in her tiny piping kindergartner's voice, and I can't resist saying, "Mac's going away," just to watch her face fall.

"You don't know that, Ty-" There's an edge to Andrea's voice, and whose side do you think she's on here?

"Want to bet? You might think you know him, after, what-four, five months? — but I've been with him ten years, and I know he's getting squirrelly, has to be. If it wasn't for the weather and the mucosa business, he'd have been out of here months ago, believe me."

And then the door swings open, right on cue, and there he is, Mac, in hat, shades and eel whips, flanked by the two Als. "What's happening, people?" He sings, spreading his arms wide. "Don't you just love this groovy sunshine? Isn't this just a day? Do we deserve it or what?"

The Als have seen better days. Their eyes are haunted by visions of blackjack tables, cocktail waitresses, the track, and their skin is the color of the growth medium in a petri dish. The taller one was a professional wrestler back in the time when people cared about such things, and the shorter one, as I say, has put on so much weight he doesn't even look human. They take their places heavily, and without joy.

Mac is grinning. Mac is overflowing with all the emotions his bodyguards lack, and for a minute there I think he's going to snatch the bust of Chuck D off its pedestal and waltz round the room with it, but he slips into his chair at the head of the table and unfurls his napkin with a practiced snap of the wrist. "Eggs today, that's what I hear," he crows, treating us to his famous smile, "just like Mama used to whip up when there was eight of us growing up in Detroit, yes, absolutely, eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner — and now they're a treat, how do you like that?"

Before anybody can respond, April Wind draws in an audible breath — a stabbing, shrieking, stifled-in — the-cradle sort of breath — and asks, "Is it true, Mac?"

Mac turns his head to me, the shades flinging off the light of the chandelier in a poisonous silver flash, then comes back to April Wind, and I can't help thinking of the tight little smile of satisfaction on her face the first morning I saw her slipping out of Mac's room or the time he held her in his lap like a ventriloquist's dummy all through a showing of Soylent Green in the screening room. Good, I think, let her get her comeuppance. Who is she anyway, and how did she weasel her way in here?

Mac's response is so soft, so sweet and lispingly breathy, my old man's ears can barely pick it up. "If you mean what I think you mean, baby, then, yes, it's true, we're out of here-Al and Al and me-this afternoon. Business, that is. Up north. You all can stay on, and everything's going to be built back again, so don't you worry, Ty-you know I wouldn't sacrifice those precious sweet creatures down there for anything in the world."

April Wind wants to say a whole lot more, I can see that, she wants to call on the spirits of the trees and the other animist gods, wants to talk crystals and auras, wants to marshal all the forces of woo-woo to bind Mac to her, to us, but she just gives him a plaintive look and stockpiles her words for later, when she can get him alone. I'm not a betting man, but I give her less than a ten-percent chance of finding a seat on that helicopter when it rises up out of the muck with our resident god aboard. Goodbye, Mac, I'm thinking, and let's get on with it.

Events to this point are still pretty clear in my mind, the champagne, the promise of eggs fried in butter, Mac, April Wind, Andrea, the two Als-all that's been preserved in the hard-drive of my old man's memory. But the rest of it, I'm afraid, suffers from gaps and deletions. It's the shock factor, I suppose, selective memory, repressed material, events so naked and grisly you can't admit them. For better or worse, here's what I can bring up: Fatima, all in black, shoving through the swinging doors to the upper kitchen, which is really just a warming room, connected by dumbwaiter to the main kitchen on the first floor and the incinerator in the basement, and Zulfikar right behind her in his white toque and spattered apron. Both of them carrying big silver chafing dishes and a familiar ambrosial aroma that takes me back to my mother, my grandmother, the kitchens of old, but I can't taste those eggs now, so I don't think we got that far. I see the big silver dishes in the center of the table, Fatima's pitted black eyes peering out of the gap in her yashmak, and then I'm seeing Dandelion, incongruous as that may seem, scraping his way up the dumbwaiter from the basement with a kind of grit and leonine initiative I'd have had to admire under other circumstances. And that's a picture, four hundred — and — some-odd pounds of determined cat, the yellow fire of his eyes, the mane swinging from the back of his head like an ill-fitting wig, the spidering limbs and grasping claws. He defies gravity. He is silent, absolutely, no sound but for the rasp of those hooked claws digging for purchase. Dandelion. Climbing.

The door swings open again, right on Fatima's heels, as if there's another server back there, more to the feast than just eggs-curries and lamb tikka, defrosted halibut in a cardamom sauce, unexpected delicacies and further delights — but no human agency has pushed open that door. I don't know who becomes aware of it first. I remember looking up, heads turning, the motion of the door, and then seeing Dandelion there. And smelling him. A lion in the doorway might have been a trick of the light, slip off your glasses and polish them on your sleeve, get a new prescription ASAP, but there was no arguing with that smell. That smell was immemorial. That smell was the smell of death.

In the wild, when there was a wild, lions would kill their prey through suffocation. They would bring down a zebra or a wildebeest or even a cape buffalo, and then clamp their jaws on the throat or, more typically, over the mouth and nose, until the animal lay still. And when they took humans, they would most often attack at night, biting through the walls of a tent or but and seizing the victim by the skull, crushing it instantly. If the victim awoke or the lion missed its stroke, things would get nasty. Then the claws would come into play, and the victim would be dragged off screaming into the night. Of course, in a chance encounter in the bush, all bets Were off. The lion would do what lions do.

Is there a snarl? Or a woof? I don't know, but I have a hand on Andrea's arm and I'm dragging her awkwardly down into the vacancy beneath the table, chairs scraping, somebody shouting, God Himself invoked by one of the Als, the one who's about to be sliced open like a watermelon and flung across the room even as Dandelion, spitting and roaring, homes in on Mac. Why Mac? I'm thinking, as I scramble for the door with Andrea in tow and April shrieks and the surviving Al tries to draw a ridiculous little pistol from the leather holster under his arm, but thinking isn't something you do a lot of under circumstances like these. The roaring alone is enough to seize your heart — and I've never seen Dandelion like this, so wrought up and nasty, whirling, biting, slashing — and then there's the sight of the blood. And worse, the sight of Mac-our benefactor, Dandelion's benefactor, the provider of meat, money, health care, companionship, a true and caring friend of the animals-lying there so still in the cradle of his overturned chair. His hat is gone, the shades are crushed, the eel whips drawing the blood out of his scalp like the bright-red tips of a painter's brushes. Andrea is screaming something in my ear and the door to the hallway is closing on the scene, closing firmly, Ratchiss' big gun all the way down on the first floor and no hope for anybody or anything left in all this world.