Italy

The five of them sat in silence as the little car ascended up twisting roads. “What trail are we going on?” Linda said. A native of San Diego, it was her first time mountain hiking. “Actually not a trail,” said Elaine, who knew the Shasta slopes pretty well. “Or at least we’ll start on one of the higher trails, but it’ll be off-trail mostly. About 20 minutes from now.” Being off trail, outside the view of passing hikers, also had been carefully planned. Everyone in this part of the state knew about the Project, and the gentle Sire went around naked in public, but Elaine preferred to minimize contact with surprised strangers. That is why she picked a weekday for this outing and not a weekend, when the mountain was crawling with hikers, many from out of state.

It was on a Saturday, this past Saturday in fact, that Angela had been invited, by Kai-Kai. She was on the forest path in McIntyre Park, taking a shortcut back from lunch with friends. The glimpse of a sunlit, undulating bare butt with a woman’s boots and stockinged legs wrapped around it told her she was passing an outdoor impreg. The copulating couple was fairly deep in the woods, not exposed to public view unless one deliberately looked. Floating on the breeze were Italian-inflected sighs of a woman in orgasm then, barely audible, the boy’s polite low moan, mixing with the singing birds and the low bubbling of the adjacent creek. By the time she rounded the bend and looked from the other side they had finished. She decided to climb through the laurel bushes and say hi. Saturday impregs were lazy, indulgent affairs, with Kai-Kai having no classes to go to, often outside of town. It was more like “making love”, with time to sit and chat both before and after. As was common, this procreator had made a picnic out of it; when Angela approached she saw the naked young Sire and the I-4, Maria Poggio of Catanzaro, Italy, on a blanket lunching on sandwiches out of a basket, with a glass of red wine next to Mrs. Poggio, who was brushing her disheveled hair, her knees still widely spread under her long, pretty red, white and green (Italy) dress. Angela, not hungry at the moment, accepted the offer of a string of grapes and sat down with them. She had heard that sometimes two procreators would get together and make it a lunch for three, with the other woman watching as Kai-Kai ejaculated into one and, after they ate and chatted and enjoyed the day, turned around to shoot the warm jets of his DNA into the other. Ms. Poggio knew only a few words of English and so there was not much conversation. But in between sandwich bites Kai-Kai asked Angela if she wanted to go hiking with him and his sister and a couple of friends. She couldn’t imagine saying no, and on the way back to her dorm shopped around for hiking boots.

So here she was, sitting with the Sire and Elaine and Linda and Susie as the car ascended. Up and around, up and around they went, on a seemingly endless spiral. The road got narrower, they passed State Park hiking signs, underbrush gave way to bare red clay under the towering trees. Glimpses of mighty Mount Shasta getting closer and closer. Finally Elaine stopped at a turnoff that said “Avalanche Gulch”. A couple of bearded young men with walking sticks emerged and got into a pickup truck and drove away, leaving the Mini-Cooper to sit alone.

“‘Avalanche Gulch’!” Linda said. “Sounds dangerous!” “Don’t worry,” Elaine said, getting out and stretching, stamping her boots on the clay. “We’ll survive . . . Probably!”