Some sign-maker for the Park Service had screwed up here at Heart of the Hills National Forest, or maybe just enjoyed the occasional cruel prank.

The only water Martin Rogers had seen, on the trail which had promised "water available along the way," was a trickle running along the ground.

A long-time hiking veteran, Martin had brought along his own supply. Depending on signs, he knew, could sometimes leave a person lost -- or at the least, with a throat as raw and dry as the eroded pathway he was cruising along now.

He had just come upon a pine-girt plateau and was about to break out his last Therma-pack chilled bottle when he saw something.

A woman.

She sat alone on a fallen log, staring at the trail ahead.

A stick cracked under Martin's foot and she turned and saw him. But apparently, being a lone woman out here in these hills, with a strange man approaching, didn't scare her.

"Hello," she said. "Welcome to hell."

Martin was not easily startled. This startled him.

If she was to be the demon welcoming him to Satan's realm, he was sorry he hadn't done more sinning sooner. She was a golden-haired beauty tucked fetchingly into a halter top and jeans-shorts.

"You couldn't hurt me any worse than I'm already suffering," she said, apparently reading his mind.

In this beautiful place? In this paradise for which she had such an unhappy title? Okay, he was curious.

"My boyfriend gave up on me. Went on ahead. Said I wasn't keeping up and I could wait here until he got back. I need a cigarette something awful but I can't stand to smoke one if I don't get a drink first. And the chump took the rest of our water with him, just so Mr. Macho Man could get to the peak of this damn hill by two-o-clock," she said.

Martin felt the weight of his still-unopened water bottle in his hand. He lifted it and shook it a little.

"I just happen to have a little H2O, chilled by the latest technology, Ma'am. And fear not, I'm a simple school-teacher, not a backwoods stalker. Thought I might make that peak myself today, but I'm beginning to doubt it now," he said.

He held out the bottle and she closed her fingers around it, murmuring a thanks. She popped off the top and took a deep drink.

Did she have to keep mentioning that mountaineering moron? A guy like that would probably try to sock him one for sharing a water bottle with his woman.

She took another deep gulp.

"Drink all you want. I've got another one in my pack somewhere," Martin said.

"You're lying," she said. "But I'm flattered that you'd care about a perfect stranger, even as your own throat dries up and blows away. Have a sip."

She handed back the bottle, not bothering to wipe the lip of it where her own lips had made their moist mark. He sipped gently from that very spot, tasting a slight bit of fruit-flavored lip balm she had left behind.

"How do you know I don't have another bottle in there," he asked, intrigued by this brassy beauty.

"Well, I base my verdict on the distance you've traveled, the likelihood that you would already have finished one bottle; and the fact that you are a guy and would have felt wimpy if you had packed more than two water bottles for your hike," she said.

"You must be a lawyer," he said.

"Might be," she said. "Mind if I have another sip?"

"It has boy germs on it now," he said.

"I'll live," she said, taking another deep swallow and handing it back.

He stood there, awkwardly now. Should he just keep on hiking and leave her here all alone? Next guy along might not be a mild-mannered school-teacher with ice-water to share. On the other hand, if he stuck around, he'd probably get beat up by her bad-tempered boyfriend, if the clot ever came back.

She solved the problem: "Got a light?"

A beautiful blonde goddess, an angel who had stepped out of heaven in denim shorts. And in these dismal days of political correctness, she dared to be a smoker?

Maybe he had died and gone somewhere. But he was sure it wasn't hell.

He sat down an appropriate distance from her on the log and found the emergency matches he had tucked into his pack. For lighting fires. This seemed a good one. She was rooting about in her own little backpack for her cigarettes; now she sat up abruptly with a rainbow box of Misty Lights in her hand.

The little breeze she stirred up, brought the scent of her to him -- sun-warmed hair, a faint tang of sweat, a little bit of perfume.

She held her cigarette pack to her lips and opened them around one long, white cigarette. In the still air, he could smell the sweetness of the raw tobacco peeking out of the crisp paper tube. He could imagine how long she had craved that scent, the taste of that tobacco, waiting for her stupid boyfriend to come back with water and matches.

What a brain-dead clod that guy was. Maybe he would fall off the trail somewhere and bash in his thick skull. One could only hope.

She was waiting, with the cigarette perched in her lips. He struck a match, but his hand was trembling violently, belying the cool image he wished he could project. Well, he'd already messed that up, letting on that he was just a school-teacher.

She smiled behind the cigarette and grasped his shaking hand with her own, to steady it. The flame bit against the end of her cigarette and she closed her eyes and drew in deeply, causing the cigarette to dance and then stiffen in her lips, and its ash to glow a fierce orange.

She let go of his hand, to whisk the cigarette from her lips and swallow the smoke, a little cottony ball that lingered on her tongue just a moment before vanishing down her throat.

She turned her head and exhaled with a deeply satisfied sigh, blowing a long stream of smoke into the piney-shade beyond their clearing.

Martin found his voice, although it trembled almost as badly as his hands had.

"I don't mind if you smoke," he said.

He had given her the light. So now he sounded about as dumb as he probably looked. And she was looking at him a little puzzled.

"I mean, I don't mind if, don't mind when a little of your smoke blows this way," he said. Hardest words in the world for a lonely, smoke-loving man to say -- that odd, misunderstood, often non-smoking captive of someone else's habit. Words that would empty a bar stool or a bus bench, words brought out before, only to meet confusion, rejection. 'I don't mind your smoke. Please share. Please, oh please.'

"You don't have to be so polite," she said, "...if my smoking bothers you. It's a bad habit. I should quit."

Something seemed to break loose inside of Martin, breaking through the years of trying to frame the right word, years of tiptoeing around taboos. If he didn't just come forward now, when the hell would he ever?

"Ma'am, I've never smoked a cigarette in my life. But I love the sight and smell of it second-hand, I just do. I can't explain it. Do you ladies even know how beautiful you look with cigarette in hand, blowing out billowy, beautiful clouds of smoke? Do you know how many guys out there pay lip service to the opinions of our stupid, health-freak friends, when they wrinkle their noses walking through the smoking section, when they yak on about how unattractive a smoking woman looks -- while all the time we're dying inside to tell you just how cool and wonderful you really are?"

He fell silent, embarrassed, the blood pounding in his ears. A freak, she would be thinking, a wacko freak. In company with cross-dressers and pedophiles and other weirdos.

She took another puff and blew it away on the breeze and he died inside. He had failed. He was doomed to continue living in a world of blow-awayers and car window roll-downers and secretaries who hid behind the office instead of sharing clouds out front.

"I'm not getting it," she said. "There are people out there who like other people's smoke? Who actually want to have it blown at them like some kind of Aztec incense?"

Martin was calm now, figuring he had lost the battle anyway.

"Yeah," he said. "But nobody ever understands. I can walk into my friend Joyce's kitchen and tell her how wonderful the soup smells that she's got cooking. I can sniff the new perfume she's got on and like it and tell her so. But when she sits down to enjoy a fine, feminine cigarette and dedicate a few minutes to the pure pleasure of nicotine worship, lady-style, I'm supposed to be disgusted. I'm supposed to not want a single whiff of the delicious smoke she's fired up and sucked into her lungs and tasted on her adorable little tongue and launched from between her lovely lips.

"I can enjoy her pretty looks, I can in public say what a gorgeous voice she has, I can even go out to lunch with her and take a playful bite of her sandwich already marked by her pearly whites or a sip of her soda with her lipstick on the straw or kiss her tears away. But something as intimate as the very smoke she's inhaled and gotten pleasure from and yet casual enough to be blown away on the breeze, that I can't share in. That she won't share."

He had said too much. But she still seemed puzzled.

"So you like it when a woman smokes around you? I guess there are weirder things out there," she said.

"Try me!" he said. Was it a challenge, a taunt, or just a desperate plea?

She flicked ash from her half-burned cigarette and watched the smoke swirls spilling from its burning end.

"Whatever," she said. "You gave me the water I wanted."

She leaned close to him, so close that he could see the tiny droplets of sweat on her brow and smell again that sweet scent of her perfume, mingled with smoke. She lifted her cigarette into the air, wicked wonderful things. Its wispy trails tickled his nose as she held it just a millimeter or so from his face, so close he could feel the heat of the ash

. Now she leaned in and closed her lips tightly around the cigarette and drew in hard. The end burned fiercely and he heard the crackle of the tobacco as her lungs pulled the smoke through the length of the cigarette. Her fingers came up in a "v" and tugged the cigarette away with a sop "pop" of her lips, breaking the seal.

She leaned in -- and then turned away, blowing the smoke into the trees again.

"I can't do it. You don't really want me to blow old cigarette smoke into your face. That's like me spitting into your glass or belching into your ear or something," she said

. Martin thought about all the health nuts he knew, the vocal "antis." He contemplated the painful death he would devise for them all when he got off this hill. He contemplated the sad, dreary existence that lay ahead of him, a woeful world of womanly wastage, smoke forever scattered from sea to shining sea.

"Guess I'd better go," he said, for lack of something better to say. He started to rise and felt her hand touch his. He sat back down. She leaned in close again; the smoke from her burning cigarette rose like the ghosts of tiny serpents, wriggling in the air. She inhaled, deep and hard, pursing her lips as if she were sipping the last drops of a milkshake through a straw.

Then she opened them, just a dot of an "O" not big enough to squeeze a Cheerio through. Like a tiny ghost slipping out of a tiny door, a cottony-white trickle of smoke pushed through her lips, the herald of a long, tightly-blown stream that she aimed directly into his eyes, making them water and sting.

Again, she drew on the cigarette, holding the smoke in her lungs for at least three seconds, swallowing it deep down inside of her. She bent in so close that he could feel the warmth of her lips just a paper's width away from his. She opened her mouth wide this time and suddenly the smoke spilled forth, filling her mouth and pealing around her lips and pouring in a warm, sweet, spicy cloud over his face and he inhaled as hard as he could, floating somewhere himself in a paradise world where all women were sweet and friendly and didn't breathe, they smoked, and ten-year-olds asked for cigarettes, not candy.