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hit a pothole that jarred his teeth. “Look at that cloud. These bastards are going to be brushing grit out of their teeth for weeks.”
    “I hope it’s the right group.”
    After they passed the cyclists, Scooter added, “It was them. I saw him. Jesus, I think Fred and those guys are going to run them over. It’s dustier than hell back there. I don’t know how they can miss. I think we cut it a little
too
close.”
    “Did he see you? That’s what matters.”
    “He was too busy spitting dust.”
    A few moments later the walkie-talkie squawked.
“Jesus. Can you guys slow down? We can’t see a thing back here. We’re going to go off a cliff or something.”
    It was Roger Bloomquist in the Land Rover. “Just don’t hit any cyclists,” Scooter said. “I don’t want to have to crawl under somebody’s truck to pick a bunch of Lycra out of the undercarriage.” He laughed at his joke.

5

    “ W hat was wrong with those assholes?” Muldaur asked.
    “I don’t know,” said Stephens. “Maybe they didn’t see us.”
    “They could hardly have missed us,” said Muldaur. “I can’t believe how close they came to killing us. It was like they didn’t care if they did or not.”
    “My guess is they’ve already started drinking,” said Giancarlo.
    “Let’s not get too excited about something that, uh, ended up being rather inconsequential,” said Stephens. Zak had to admire that quality of reasonableness, even though he was as pissed off as Muldaur. Clearly, the yahoos in the trucks had been out to do damage; had the cyclists not ducked off the main road when they did, he was reasonably certain one or more of them would be on their way to the emergency room right now.
    Stephens led them down to the rugged North Fork of the Snoqualmie, which now in late August was just a shadow of its normal self, and then along some overgrown logging roads Weyerhaeuser workmen had once used to haul logs out of the area. Somewhere on the county road to the west they could hear the caravan of vehicles racing back down the road. “Who the hell let them past the gate?” Muldaur asked.
    “I wonder if they even knew we were there,” said Zak.
    “The first car did.” Muldaur turned to him. “I saw the passenger laughing.”
    “They were laughing at us?”
    “One of them was.”
    Eventually they made their way down a slight incline to where the road crossed the Snoqualmie River on a concrete bridge. Because they’d detoured into the woods, they’d bypassed a good part of the county road, as well as what Stephens called the Spur Ten gate, which he assured them would be locked and would effectively bar the Jeeps from following them.
    Once they attained the bridge, they stopped to take in the panorama. Zak could see a quarter mile to the north and a bit more to the south. The water was slow and swirling with eddies and currents and moss-covered rocks exposed by the summer waterline. He could have watched the river all afternoon. The bridge had no railings, and Zak couldn’t help thinking how easy it would be for a car to drive off it. They stared at the hypnotic currents, at the silvers, greens, and lazy blue colors farther downstream. A kingfisher sat on a branch thirty yards away, and Zak spotted a deer standing in the water downriver. The air was cooler here and refreshing.
    “Is there snowmelt at this time of year?” Zak asked.
    “Oh, no, well, you know…that all ended months ago,” said Stephens. “Most of this water’s coming from up in the high lakes. When there’s snowmelt, it’s all sea green and milky from…well, not clear like this.”
    Zak looked up at the close mountains above them in wonderment that they would conquer these slopes in ways that hadn’t been possible when their pioneer ancestors traversed them. Stephens pointed deep into the woods where there were occasional cedar stumps eight or twelve feet across, remnants of the titans that had been logged eighty years back and that dwarfed anything