There it was again: that smell. It was stronger now, and fouler: rank and animal.
Once again he stopped and searched around with his flashlight, feeling a prickle of anxiety this time. Small saplings and a latticework of flattened, fallen tree limbs reflected the beam back at him. The bright circle of light made everything outside it pitch-black.
Palmer shook his head. He was letting the eerie desolation of this place get to him. He’d barely seen an animal all day, just a single raccoon and a couple of young foxes. And that had been back in the old-growth forest. No animal in its right mind larger than a mouse would live in this kind of shit. His frustrating slog had to end sooner or later. And once he had a bellyful of chili inside him and his favorite inflatable air mattress beneath his sleeping bag, he’d be—
Now the smell was back, worse than ever, and with it came a sound — a deep, guttural noise, half grunt, half snarl. It sounded angry — angry and hungry.
Without even pausing to think, Palmer began to run. He ran as fast as the heavy pack allowed, the flashlight beam striping crazily ahead of him, panting, gasping, bounding over fallen trees and kettle holes, as the grunting and snuffling grew increasingly loud behind him.
And then his foot snagged on a protruding root; he crashed heavily to the ground; a heavy weight that had nothing to do with his pack pressed suddenly against his back — a horrible, rending pain like nothing he’d experienced in his life clawed across his face and neck as the reek washed over him like a wave, then another explosion of pain, then still another… and then everything faded, first to red, and then to black.
2
From the suburbs of New Haven, the route led north to Waterbury, then west along the meandering line of I-84 until — after it crossed into New York State and passed over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge — it intersected with I-87, the New York Thruway. Here the route became much more direct, arrowing north until the low, furred peaks of the Catskills began to assert themselves to the left. Traffic on this Friday afternoon grew heavier as Albany approached. It thinned out somewhat at Glens Falls, where all the trailers and flatbeds carrying Formula One vehicles bound for Watkins Glen exited. It thinned even further at Lake George, which even this late in the year drew tourists and weekending families.
It was at the first rest stop after Lake George that Jeremy Logan pulled over his vintage Lotus Elan and — although the afternoon was lengthening and the temperature hovering just above sixty — stopped long enough to put the roadster’s top down before proceeding.
It had been fifteen years since he’d last made this journey, but this last part had always been his favorite leg and he was determined to enjoy it. With each passing town — Pottersville, Schroon Lake, North Hudson — the traffic lessened and the mountains around him swelled as if heaved up from the ground. The dark bulks of the High Peaks of the Adirondacks rose skyward, proud and inviolate, clad in their October hues of green and russet and gold, dwarfing the Catskills he’d traveled through not three hours before. The air that rushed past his windscreen became deliciously cool, freighted with the smell of pine. The setting sun gilded the bald tops of the taller mountains, while the valleys and cols between them — thick with spruce, beech, and birch — grew ever darker and more mysterious.
The Northway — as this section of I-87 was called — was as scarred and seamed with tar sealant as he’d always remembered, and with a little imagination he could relive the last time he’d made this drive, with John Coltrane and Bill Evans just barely audible on the half-muted stereo and Karen, his wife, sitting in the passenger seat. There was something about the ever-increasing height and bulk of the surrounding mountains, the afterglow and fast-onrushing night, that always seemed to coincide with the last leg of the six-hour drive from Connecticut, that quickened his pulse and whetted a taste for adventure.
Logan had never been much of an outdoors type — he’d been a passable fly fisherman as a youth, taught by a father with a mania for the sport, and he could usually manage to finish eighteen holes of golf with a score of less than three digits. But he had no patience for such things as jogging or running marathons — such activities seemed paralyzingly dull to him, a hamster running in its wheel. But one long weekend early into his marriage, another couple who were both assistant professors at Yale and card-carrying AMC members had convinced him and Kit to come along for a climb up Whiteface Mountain, just north of Lake Placid. Logan had accepted with reservations, only to find the mini-vacation a delight. There was something deeply satisfying about hiking up a mountain — selecting a route, navigating the trail blazes, enjoying the beauty of the changing microclimate as you ascended, pacing yourself for the truly steep stretches… and then at last breaking through the tree line and following the meandering rock cairns to the summit itself. Not only were the views remarkable, but there was something ineffably rewarding about conquering the peak itself. No, that wasn’t right, because these mountains could not be conquered, or even tamed — it was more like coming to an accommodation, an understanding, with them. It was something you could never get from a treadmill session. After Whiteface, he and his wife had returned again, several years in a row, becoming modest “peak baggers”: Algonquin, Cascade, Porter, Giant, and of course Mount Marcy — at 5,344 feet the tallest mountain in New York State.
But then their careers — his as a scholar-professor and hers as a professional cellist — had increasingly taken over their time. And what vacations they had were taken up with trips abroad to supplement his research, or to spend a week at Tanglewood when Karen was playing at the music festival there — and the three-day weekends in the High Peaks fell away behind them, just as the Northway was doing now in his rearview mirror.
At Underwood, he turned off the interstate onto NY 73 and followed the road as it wandered through thick forests and past fierce waterspouts rushing down stony gorges. He drove through Keene Valley and the town of Keene itself, then arrowed directly westward for Lake Placid and, beyond it, the village of Saranac Lake. The towns were a little larger than he remembered, and on their verges the footprint of man cut a little more heavily into the forest, but the changes were subtle and he remained irresistibly reminded of trips past.
“It’s almost the same, Kit,” he said as he drove. “It’s like our last trip up, when we climbed Skylight and almost got lost in the fog.”
He often found himself talking to Kit, dead of cancer now for more than five years. Naturally he did this only when he was by himself — save for Kit, of course — and yet it was less of a one-way conversation than one might have expected.
At Saranac Lake, he turned left onto Route 3, heading in the direction of Tupper Lake. Only the occasional car passed him now in the other direction, headlights winking in the humid forest air. He was not as familiar with this part of the park and — with an intense darkness closing in around him — he drove more slowly. About five miles farther on, his headlights illuminated a large, open gate cut into the thick spruce forest to his right. There was no signage on or beside the gate, merely a large metal symboclass="underline" a cumulus cloud hovering over a rippling watery surface.
He turned in, followed a bumpy, heavily rutted dirt road for perhaps two thousand feet — and then, suddenly, the forest parted to reveal a vast, weathered, three-storied structure of dark brown wood and rough-hewn stone. It sat beneath a massive, shingled A-frame roof in Swiss chalet style that went from the serried chimneys along its ridge vent almost all the way to the ground. Twig-work balconies ran along the entire second floor as well as the third, shorter floor, and from within the large, red-framed windows that stood in series, the welcome glow of countless lamps and fireplaces beckoned.