Forty Minutes Deep in Cedar

Every sound was a variable.

She had been doing this long enough — negotiating with uncertain situations, reading the room before the room knew it was being read — to know that you don't commit until you've assessed all the exits. The cedar grove had taken her forty minutes to reach. She had counted the trail markers. She knew exactly what forty minutes meant in both directions.

She stood with her back against the widest tree she had found, the bark rough through her base layer, the ferns at her ankles still wet from the morning. Filtered light came down through the canopy in long pale columns, moving when the wind moved. A woodpecker somewhere to the east. Wind in the upper branches — a slow, lateral sound, nothing that carried urgency. A branch settling fifty metres back the way she'd come, the ordinary weight-shift of wood.

She waited. Assessed. Continued.

The pack was already open at her feet, the bandana sitting on top of where she'd folded it. She didn't reach for it yet. That was part of the protocol she'd built for herself over two years of doing this: you don't reach until the environment is stable. You read the room first. The room, right now, was two hectares of second-growth cedar, a creek she could hear but not see, and the specific quality of midday silence that meant no other hikers had left the trailhead in the last hour.

The compression of the leggings had been present since the car. She was aware of it the way she was aware of a second variable in a negotiation — not the primary problem, but something that would matter later. The fabric pressed evenly across the front of both thighs, smooth and ungiving, and when she had been walking uphill for the last twenty minutes, that pressure had become something she was tracking alongside the trail markers and the sound map she was building of the grove.

She picked up the bandana. The weight of what was inside it was familiar in her right hand — she knew the heft of it, the specific give of silicone through cloth. Her left hand rested flat against the cedar bark behind her, the rough grain a temperature contrast against her palm, cooler than she expected.

A jay called, sharp and brief, from the north.

She stopped. Catalogued it. Jays called at movement — at intrusion. She waited through eight full seconds of subsequent silence. The woodpecker resumed. The creek continued. The canopy moved in a slow wave from west to east.

Clear.

She exhaled — and it came out longer than she had authorised it to, unfolding into the wet spring air before she'd decided to release that much of herself into the open. Her left hand pressed harder against the bark. The bandana was still in her right hand. The leggings held everything in place, patient, compressed, waiting for her to make the next decision.

Another sound from the canopy. Wind, only wind.

She assessed it.

And then, slowly, she began to slide her right hand down.