Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [100]
Beneath the transparent rain slicker the young man’s waterlogged jeans were now stained brown from the waist down. Shreds of bark and leaves and other unidentifiable macrobiotic matter in various stages of decomposition clung to his legs and shoes.
An unsympathetic Fanole offered one of his typically terse observations. “Warned you. In here if you don’t get soaked from the top down, sooner or later you get soaked from the bottom up.” With that he turned and started back up a trail that had already diminished to little more than a narrow tunnel between the trees. “Might as well get used to it!” he yelled back.
The now saturated graduate student looked unhappy. “Sorry. I thought I could keep dry for one day, at least.”
Loftgren tugged the brim of his slicker down over his forehead. His face was wet, but the rest of him still held back the best efforts of the swamp to drench him. On the other hand, he was already soaked with sweat.
The Alakai was where dryness went to die.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Julio. Both Fanole and I have a lot more experience in this kind of country than you do.”
Twenty minutes later Loftgren stepped over a log and onto a seemingly solid patch of ground that turned out to consist of cloying thigh-deep sludge. Fanole and Sanchez stood off to one side, looking on as he slowly pulled himself out and worked his way through the trough. No one said a word.
By nightfall they’d reached the junction of the Pihea and Alakai trails. Here the Forest Service had helicoptered in thick beams and wood planks. Securely strapped together, these formed a level, solid, platform at the trail juncture.
Fanole set up the tent, somehow managing to keep the interior halfway clear of rain. Beneath the extended, oversized storm flap they stripped nude and deposited their equipment outside on the redwood six-by-sixes.
“Any other wood’d rot out inside a month,” their guide pointed out unnecessarily. “Except cypress and mahogany. But we can’t get cypress here, and mahogany’s too expensive. So we have to import the redwood.”
Using clean towels they dried themselves, then crawled into the tent to settle down around the camp stove Fanole ignited. By the time dinner was ready it was darker outside than the inside of a cave. A drenching, dripping, soaking dark. Steady rain pattered like dancing mice on the top of the tent, falling harder at night than it had during the day. Except for the monotonous thrumming of the continuous downpour—the heartbeat of the Alakai—it was dead silent outside the shelter.
Fanole poked leisurely at his reconstituted freeze-dried supper, looking on as Sanchez ravenously devoured his and Loftgren made a more considered go of his own. The guide was nearly fifty, with a receding forehead of thinning brown hair and dark eyes the color of aged bourbon that seemed to pierce whatever crossed their path, be it human or rock or tree. His sun-seared appearance left his ancestry open to some question, but he was certainly at least part Hawaiian. He had a slight bulge around his middle: spare tire for a bicycle rather than a sedan. Otherwise he was surprisingly muscular.
“You don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re both crazy.”
Loftgren grinned. It wasn’t the first time that opinion had been expressed in regard to the expedition. “You’re entitled to your opinion. If you feel that way, why did you agree to guide us?”
Fanole finished the last of his dinner and set the plate carefully to one side. “Because no one else would. I know you academic types. If you couldn’t get any help, you’d eventually have tried it on your own.” He glanced up at the roof, listening to the rain tap-dancing relentlessly outside. “You’d never have gotten out of this place alive.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Loftgren told him. “I’ve been in rougher places than the Alakai. There are no snakes here, no hostile natives. Not even any dangerous bugs, and the mosquitoes quit climbing at the thirty-five-hundred-foot level.”
Fanole nodded. “That’s right. Nothing dangerous here but the place itself. Don’t