I worked my way along a ninety-foot branch that served as a bridge between two ground-rooted redwoods. It looked like lightning had split the bark down the middle. The exposed center brimmed with turquoise-green moss as soft as goose down. Entering the next canopy, I was greeted by a rotted stump from a reiterated redwood that had fallen long ago. The crater-size remains had filled with rainwater to become a wading pool six feet deep and forty feet across. To my surprise, the redwood pond was filled with islands of pads and toads the size of a catcher’s mitt whose heads turned crimson whenever their throats expanded. Incredibly, there were also fish in the stump—at least I thought they were fish until they suddenly flew out of the redwood pond and flitted about like birds, shaking water from their rigid tropically colored pectoral wings, their barracudalike mouths coveting tadpoles the size of my foot. After a few passes overhead, the creatures perched on their tail fins on the rim of the hollowed out stump like crows on a fence.

The caves began on a different level of the redwood crown, six stories higher than my entry point onto the second tree. They had no doubt been created by lightning strikes, the fires burning for weeks, perhaps months. A redwood is too big and too wet to burn down. It simply isolates the fire by rerouting its internal water supply through a network of microscopic vessels known as the xylem. If a Northern California redwood could generate two million pascals of negative pressure to suck water from its roots up its trunk over tens of miles of branches, I could not imagine the forces necessary to redirect water throughout these behemoth tree forests.

There were three caves. Two were located in the roots of a harvest of reiterated redwoods that had sprouted from a massive U-shaped branch as wide as a highway off-ramp; the third had been burnt into the side of a three-story buttress.

Moving to the edge of the limb, I looked down upon the clearing where I had stood nearly an hour ago. I quickly approximated the drop to be in excess of three hundred feet and, feeling dizzy, backed away.

I had found my way to the source of the distress call, now I needed to find the distressed.

The opening to the first fire cave resembled a ten-foot-high birth canal. Slipping inside, I was greeted by an off-putting blue-cheese smell. The interior walls were spongy and scorched black from the fire, the chamber as large as my family’s old living room. Brown salamanders tinged with golden specks scampered by my feet, the amphibians feeding off blind pink earthworms they had exposed in the cave soil.

No cephaloped.

Nor was there one in the second cave.