And either he didn't carfe about being followed, or else he wanted us to find these tracks. I looked around at the forest and suddenly it all looked dangerous. The undergrowth wasn't that thick. If you squatted down and hid yourself, you could see of a hundred yards, but you'd be invisible to within ten. It was no fair.

"Change of plans," I said. "What if Dolmacher's waiting for us?"

"You know the guy, I don't."

"He's just the type who would do it. It wouldn't be complicated enough to just run through the woods and bore a few holes in Fleshy. He'd have to turn it into a war game."

"So? I thought you said you were smarter than this guy."

"Yowza, Jim! My eyes are watering."

Jim just shrugged.

I said, "Let's just go to the festival site. Let's take kind of an indirect route. We've still got an hour. We don't have to track the guy, we already know where he's going, so the only thing we can do by following his tracks is fall into a trap."

"We can swing way around and avoid the ridge," Jim said.

"Which would put us on the highway."

He sighed. "Or go over the ridge up there."

"Are you up to it?"

"We'll have to hurry."

"You have a watch, Jim?"

"Do you?"

"Shit no."

"Wonderful. We just have to go as fast as we can."

Time stretches out when you're in the woods and in a hurry. What seems like two hours is actually one. So if you have a deadline, you're always anxious about it. Usually you get there way ahead of time.

That's what I kept telling myself, anyway. It didn't make me feel any better. Actually I just felt like an asshole. We'd gone in all hot to track Dolmacher down and then realized we were in mortal danger. Meanwhile, Boone was out on his own. He was easily a match for two dozen SS men, but I at least wanted to see it.

When we got to the place where the ground went from flat to approximately vertical, we were already hurting. I was sick and starting to get cramps in the gut, and Jim had stepped in a hole and twisted his ankle.

I was opening my mouth to suggest that we run back and hitchhike to the festival when I heard a crinkling noise. Jim was unfolding a tinfoil packet that he'd taken from his pocket.

"Lunch already?" I said.

"Most people associate hallucinogenic mushrooms with the Southwest," he said, "but the Northwest tribes are familiar with fourteen varieties. I was there last summer."

"Studying their culture."

"That's for whiteys. I was taking my family to Expo in Vancouver. But I did stop in for a while, and look what I brought home." He popped something dry and brown into his mouth. "Legal for me, but not for you."

"What the hell, I can't get much more illegal than I already am."

The shrooms didn't help much on the first part of the climb but on the last part they did wonderful things. We still felt awful, but we were thinking about other things. Everything got very bright-of course, we were gaining altitude- and we believed that our senses were sharper. We lost track of time. But as I already said, this happens anyway when you're in the woods, in a hurry. Especially when you have to keep doubling back and going around obstacles. But eventually we made it to the top, and then we simply didn't give a flying fuck anymore. Without the drug, I would have been paralyzed by fear of Dolmacher. With it, we just started to run. When it got too steep, we put our feet down and skidded through old, wet leaves. There were a few short earthen cliffs and we slid down those on our asses.

Finally the ground leveled out, the woods got thick again and we realized that we were totally lost. Jim stayed cooler than I did and made us stand there for a while, getting our hearts and lungs under control. Eventually we were able to hear highway noises, in roughly one direction. Comparing that with a map and the location of the sun, we drew an approximate bead on the site of the ax-throwing competition. We spread out, about a hundred feet apart, and tried to move forward quietly.

Which is a joke when you're knee-deep in last year's leaves. The wind was blowing in the treetops, covering our noise a little, but I still felt kind of conspicuous, as though I was. driving a tank through the woods. But down here the trees were skinny and widely spaced and I was pretty confident that Dolmacher wasn't lurking anywhere, ready to spin out from camouflage, both hands wrapped around his pistol, drawing down on me. I didn't want that to be the last thing / I ever saw.

It got worse and worse. We saw brighter light up ahead and we knew there had to be a clearing. We heard a crowd, heard the cash register ringing at the concession stand. Dolmacher had to be between us and that. The undergrowth got a lot thicker and I came across a gully. Had to slide down one side and clamber up the other, helpless, white and stupid. I was thinking of those old World War II pictures of captives standing in the trenches, about to be gunned.

My first handhold ripped loose and I did a semi-controlled plunge back to the floor of the gully. Now I was ankle-deep in mud, covered with dirt and leaves, and wet. I moved downstream a few yards, toward where Jim was supposed to be. But I hadn't heard or seen him in ten minutes. Finally the walls of the gully opened out a little bit and I found an obvious way to get out of it.

And Dolmacher had preceded me. I stood there in stoned amazement and traced his tracks right up to the top. And at the top there was a wild-raspberry cane sticking out across his path; it was still vibrating.

Someone was moving around up there. I could hear him underneath the murmur of the crowd, the drone of the announcer. It was either Jim or Dolmacher or both. Then the sounds were all drowned out by the applause of the crowd.

I took that as a free ticket, out of the gully. I clambered most of the way up, making plenty of noise, and flopped onto my stomach on the top. No reason to expose myself; if Dolmacher knew I was right behind him, he'd be waiting.

But he didn't know. I saw the bastard, walking slowly, carefully, toward the clearing, not more than fifty feet away from me. Through gaps in the trees I made out an awning over a raised log bandstand and a waving American flag, and when I climbed up to my feet I could see the parking lot. That's what I remember, because when you've been thrashing through mud and leaves for a while, nothing looks stranger than a bunch of cars glinting in the sunlight.

I couldn't see Jim anywhere. Had Dolmacher already taken him out? I turned around and checked the length of the gully, but no sign of Jim. He'd already made it across. He was somewhere out there, off to Dolmacher's right.

The Groveler was droning on about something through the P.A. system, but then there was a commotion. Dolmacher turned around and squatted behind a tree. Out at the edge of the clearing I could see a man in a trench coat appear from nowhere and run away from us.

Dolmacher saw it too, jumped to his feet, and headed for the clearing at a dead run. He knew he had his opening. He knew he could make noise, at least for a minute, covered by the shouting match that was now going on over the P.A. system, i

"Let the man talk! Wait a minute, let's'hear what the man has to say," Fleshy was shouting. "I have no qualms about my environmental record."

It was Boone. He'd done it. He was engaging Fleshy in mouth-to-mouth combat. And Fleshy was stupid enough to

bite. Everyone remembered Reagan's performance in New Hampshire years ago: "I paid for this microphone!" It had won him the election. Anyone with Pleshy's instincts, and his reputation for being a wuss, would view Boone's challenge as an opportunity to pull a Reagan on national TV.

I got up and ran like hell. It looked like Dolmacher was making his move, but he slowed down when he was almost in the open, dropped back toward his crouch. If he turned around now I was screwed, because I'd dropped all caution and was just chugging along in the open, thirty feet behind him.