Coast Lumber tried to ignore her at first, but after El Niño failed to dislodge her, she became an embarrassment—and worse, a liability. Because the longer she held out, the more people began to take notice. No one had been up a tree more than 20 days before Sierra climbed up into Artemis, and as she reached the one-month mark the press started to converge on her dwindling grove in the Headwaters Forest. Andrea gave her a cell phone too, and by the end of the second month she was spending two or three hours a day on it, chatting with her father and stepmother sometimes, sure, but mainly giving interviews, educating the public, throwing down a gauntlet in the duff.

The other two tree-sitters—a skinny girl with a buzz cut and a sad-eyed, bearded 19-year-old known only as Leaf, each perched in a neighboring grove—had given up after the first week of unappeasable rain and 50-mile-per-hour gusts, and Coast Lumber, I'm sure, felt vindicated. Sit on your hands, that was their policy. Avoid force. Squelch bad press before it can poke its ugly head out of its hole and bite you in the foot. But my daughter was something they hadn't reckoned with. She wasn't your ordinary body-piercing neo-hippie college kid chanting slogans and chaining herself to the bumpers of corporate town cars on her summer vacation, she was immovable, unshakable, Joan of Arc leading her troops into battle, with nothing to lose but the bones of her flesh. They had to get rid of her. They had no choice.

Pick a morning, midway through the second month. Seven a.m.A light rain falling with the slow, shifting rhythm of the infinite, the serried trees, the sky so close it seems illuminated from within. Sierra is asleep. The forest breathes in and out. A marbled murrelet perches on a branch 50 feet below her. She's dreaming of flying. Not of falling—that's a dream she refuses to entertain up here in a bed this high above the earth, even in her unconscious—but of sprouting wings and diving off the platform to swoop low over the lumber mill and then rise up aloft until the forest falls away and then the hills and even the ocean, higher and higher until she's dodging satellites in the glittering metallic bands of their orbits and can gaze down on the earth unobstructed.

Suddenly, the platform shudders. She wakes. Looks through the aperture at the south end of her tent. And sees a hand, a human hand, tensed there on the corner of the platform like a bird-eating spider hatched in the forests of the Amazon. There's a grunt, and then another hand appears—and in the next instant a head pops into view, presumptive eyes, the sliver of a mouth, a face framed in a beard the color of used coffee grounds.

He's got a knee on the platform now, and his eyes have never left hers, no diffidence here, no higher feelings about slipping into a girl's bedroom while she sleeps. And the thing is, he's not bad-looking: every hair in place, the beard neatly clipped, the sliver of a mouth widening in a smile, the eyes friendly now and warm. "Good morning, Sierra," he says, and she likes his voice too, wondering if he isn't one of the new support people from EF! or maybe a truly intrepid journalist, but then, in the same moment, she's annoyed. They know she doesn't give interviews this early. Her hair is a disaster. She claps a knit cap over it, sits up, and kicks her legs out of the sleeping bag. And the climber? He's crouched at the end of her platform in his spiked shoes—six-by-eight, that's all she's got here, two sheets of plywood, and he's halving her space. "You know who I am?"

He's wearing a flannel shirt, wet with sweat or the rain or a combination of the two, jeans, a thermal T-shirt the color of dried blood visible at his open collar, some sort of elaborate tech-pro watch, and suspenders—red suspenders. "My name's Deke," he says, "Climber Deke is what they call me, actually," and his smile has become a grin, as if this were the world's richest joke. She knows who he is. Now she knows. The suspenders would have told her if he hadn't. "I'm here to bring you down. And we can do it the easy way—the civilized way—or we can get rough, if that's how you want it. But you're coming down out of this tree, little lady, and you're coming down now." He pauses to shift his weight to his knees and the platform trembles. "And I'm afraid I had to dismantle your lower platform, the one with all the food and your camp stove? Yeah, honey, you'd just starve up here anyways, so why don't you just dump what you want to take over the side here and we'll be on our way."

"OK," she says—that's what my daughter says, "OK"—and her voice is so soft he can barely hear her. But he nods—she really hasn't got any choice, she's breaking the law up here and he'd strap her to his back if it came to that, and handcuff her too—and settles down on his flanks to give her time to bring down the tent and roll up her sleeping bag and get rid of the damned New Age hippie mural of a butterfly she's painted on a piece of canvas as if this were a walkup on Ashbury or something. Sierra crawls out of the tent—six by eight—and rises to her feet so that she's standing over him and makes as if to loosen the cord at this end of the tent.

Makes as if. In a single motion, she grips the branch above her and flips herself up like an acrobat, and then, her feet gripping the slick, corrugated bark, she climbs high up into the crown of the tree, even as he struggles up after her, and there are no safety lines here, not for her or for him. "Come back here, you little bitch!" he shouts, digging his spikes in, thrusting upward. His reward is a faceful of redwood bark, threads and splinters kicked up by her feet and sifting down into his eyes, his nostrils, his mouth.

Climber Deke is a lumberman. A timber person. He's agile and muscular and cocksure. If she wants to play, he'll play. But he doesn't know my daughter. She finds a limb and she goes out on it. And when he gets to that limb and he's facing her over a gap of maybe ten feet or so, he stops. The limb Sierra is crouched on won't support two people—in fact, from Climber Deke's perspective, it doesn't look as if it'll support one much longer. Far below them a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) flits through layers of light, its wings extended and then drawn down and up again with an audible snap of its crisp black feathers. The rain has picked up now. The moisture flattens Climber Deke's hair, clings in droplets to the pelage of his face. He curses, his voice flat and hard.

"I'd rather die up here than have some pathetic gutless bastard like you even touch me," my daughter spits.

"Then die," he says. "Die. Because we're going to cut this tree whether you're in it or not."