In the bedroom, Doc had succeeded in swaddling John Sewall in about eight inches of goose down, wool, and linen. We needed to keep the blood moving through his arteries until the EMTs arrived, and then hope he would hang on long enough to reach the hospital in Machias. Every few minutes, Sewall’s eyelids would begin to flutter, and Doc would give his shoulder a gentle shake and whisper to him in the same tone I bet he used with skittish horses.
“So I’m thinking I should go out there,” I said.
Doc gave me a frown. “The man’s delirious, Mike. There’s no reason to believe anything he says.”
“All the more reason to find Ben Sprague, then.”
“Can’t Doris just call him?”
“She says there’s a dead zone in the Heath.”
Doc pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his shirt pocket and blew his nose forcibly into the cloth. “Well, it’s up to you. There’s not much you can do here except spell me on bathroom breaks. And I guess you’re right to worry about Ben. But I seem to remember that your Jeep’s stuck in a snowbank about a hundred yards up the road.”
“I was thinking of borrowing one of the Spragues’ sleds.”
Doc called my bluff. “So who’s going to rescue the rescuer?”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I’m sure that’s what Ben told Doris.”
“Didn’t you say that Kendrick was headed over this way with his dog team?” I said. “Your house is just up the hill and across Bog Pond.” He should have beaten us here by nearly half an hour, and Doris hasn’t mentioned seeing him.”
“Maybe he ran into Sprague out there,” said Doc. “I wouldn’t worry about Kendrick. This kind of weather is his natural element.”
“It’s my job to worry, Doc.”
I stepped into the TV room to call the state police. “The EMTs are never going to make it down this hill unless they’re driving a military half-track,” I told the dispatcher in Augusta. “Can you arrange for DOT to send a plow over this way to help out the ambulance?”
“Anything else?”
“Contact Sergeant Rivard and tell him I need assistance searching for a lost person.”
Call me chicken, but rousing my surly new sergeant in the middle of this snowstorm wasn’t a task I cared to do myself.
The Spragues’ sleds were Yamaha RS Ventures in the same colors: blue and white. They were touring machines, built for long-distance rides along well-manicured trails. Their meticulous Japanese engineers had never intended them to be ridden into the teeth of a full-on blizzard.
At first the snowmobile floated atop the powder. I gave the engine a half handful of throttle and felt myself pulled along as if by actual horses given their head. The tracks bit into the snow and pushed the runners through the scattering spray.
The conditions didn’t seem so bad until, going around a curve, I turned the handlebars and everything went wobbly. The sled rolled to the outside and dug into a drift, throwing cold mist up into the visor of my helmet. I stood up, leaned hard against the inside, and pulled the machine level for all of ten seconds before it pitched away from me again. I needed to find my balance quickly or I’d be wallowing in a snowbank with a quarter ton of steel on top of me. The last time something like that had happened, I snapped two bones in my hand. I planted both feet on the outside running board and let my body weight pull against the roll. Soon I was swaying back and forth down the trail.
Doris Sprague had called the frozen swamp behind her house the Heath. There were about a hundred places with that name in my district. Most were raised peat bogs from which, every now and then, someone dug up a tea-stained mammoth tusk. The word heathen is derived from these prehistoric wetlands because heaths were home to criminals, outcasts, and lepers. Bogeymen dwelled in bogs. In northern Europe, they were the sites of ritual human sacrifices.
This one was pretty much just a trackless wasteland. No virgins had ever been sacrificed here except by accident. Beneath the blowing snowdrifts, the sphagnum moss was hardened into permafrost. Stunted pines and swamp maples clustered together on islands of rock. Along the edges of the Heath, loggers had carved a rat’s maze through the laden evergreens. Every way you turned, there was another trail that dead-ended against a white wall of trees.
Why had John Sewall been lurking in this swamp on a subzero day? And how had he found his way out?
A lost person usually behaves in certain specific ways. Deprived of his bearings, he travels downhill or downstream under the mistaken impression that water always leads to a road (often it only leads to more water). Once he finds a trail, he will typically keep walking in one direction. A lost person moves with conviction and rarely reverses course, which is why wardens find so many of them headed 180 degrees from their intended destinations. The worst ones start bushwhacking and get themselves thoroughly turned around. Without clear visual clues, humans really do wander in circles.
To make matters worse, John Sewall was hypothermic. In addition to the normal panic one experiences upon being lost, he was freezing to death, and his behavior had likely been irrational. The worst-case scenario was that he’d never been in the Heath to begin with; perhaps his car had slid off Route 277, and maybe Kate was the name of his girlfriend back home. But my gut told me the young man really had come from the bog and that someone else was lost out here.
Snow sparkled in my headlights. It was often easier to see the outline of the road overhead than the road itself; the jagged treetops showed dark gray against the lighter gray of the sky.
Where the hell was Kendrick-or Ben Sprague, for that matter? I saw no evidence in the shapes of the drifts of a plow truck having come this way. The wind was blowing so hard that the snowbanks were moving around me like slow-motion waves. I realized Sprague might have pushed his way down this very road fifteen minutes earlier and I’d never know it.
I decided to mark a waypoint. I fumbled in my coat pocket and removed my DeLorme GPS unit. The satellite showed my location as a green arrow near the intersection of two branching tote roads. There were low hills on either side of me, steep enough to have presented a barrier to anyone traveling through deep snow on foot. Farther to the west was Bog Pond. I toggled north and south. If Sewall had come from this direction, the hills would have funneled him to this same spot. The road divided south of me. I needed to pick a direction.
East, I decided.
Out of the brute force of the blizzard, the wind wasn’t quite as loud, and I became aware of a distant sound. It was the barking of dogs.
Kendrick.
I twisted the throttle, and a noxious cloud of gasoline fumes rose up beneath my visor. Very quickly, the sound of the engine drowned out the yapping of the malamutes. I prayed my sense of direction wouldn’t fail me, or I would shoot right past them.
In a few minutes, as I moved east along the trail, my headlights found the phosphorescent eyes of a dog. It stood, legs planted far apart, barking at me with a curled lip. Behind it were others. Kendrick had lashed his team to a tree.
I cut the engine but left the lights shining, and tilted up the visor on my helmet. Moving at forty-five miles per hour, the windblown snow felt like shards of glass being driven into my face.
“Kendrick!” I shouted.
A shadow staggered out of the darkness.
Because he hadn’t bothered to put on the snowshoes he kept strapped to his dogsled, he was floundering, knee-deep, in the drifts.
“Have you seen Sprague?” I asked.
His fur-lined hood and the shoulders of his buckskin parka were crusted with snow. “I met him on the road outside his house. He said there was a car lost out here with a girl in it. I sent him north across Route Two seventy-seven to search.”
“Did you find anything?”
He smiled, cracking the ice on his mustache. “Yep.”
I jumped off the snowmobile into a deep drift. It was like trying to walk in wet cement.