The Precipice Read Online Free PDF Page A

previous two weeks. It was protocol to call all the local fishing guides, logging companies, and sporting camps—anyone with a business inside the search radius.
    I showed the Chalmerses the logbook inside the shelter and asked if they knew any of the thru-hikers who had signed their trail names. Daddy Shortlegs and Swedish Meatball were a friendly older couple from the Midwest, they said. The others they knew only from their logbook entries.
    “We’re not the fastest ones out here.” The man smiled at his wife.
    “My trail name is Turtle,” she said. “He’s the Hare.”
    Rain fell in sheets off the lean-to roof. It felt like we were inside a cave behind a waterfall, looking through a diaphanous curtain of water. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nissen squatting on his heels at the edge of the platform. He had his scarred back to us and was staring out at the tempest, as motionless as a gargoyle. Every now and then, a blue flash of lightning would light up the forest like a strobe, and the sky would crack open overhead. I tried to forget the fact that we were two thousand feet up and miles from the nearest road.
    I left the Chalmerses a poster to show other hikers and told them to call the number listed if they encountered anyone who had seen Samantha and Missy. I was about to step down off the log at the edge of the shelter when Connie said to Nissen, “Have we met before?”
    “No,” he said, then leaped out into the pouring rain.
    Connie turned to her husband. “Doesn’t he look familiar?”
    “I don’t remember faces,” Rick said.
    I said good-bye to the Chalmerses and jumped down into the mud. I expected that I might have to whistle for Nissen again, but I found him standing to one side of the lean-to, out of the wind.
    “You ready to head back to Monson?” he asked.
    “Not yet,” I said. “I want you to show me this bunkhouse.”
    “What for? The lieutenant would have called Hudson’s Lodge already. The girls won’t be there.”
    I started off into the cold drizzle without answering him.

 
    4
    The storm chased us down the mountain. Every few minutes, another blue flare went off, and a deafening shock wave rolled across the landscape. I could feel the reverberations in the walls of my heart.
    The dusk had come early with the clouds, and the downpour had turned the path into a rushing streambed. It was like running blindfolded down a sluiceway. The beam of my headlamp bobbed along in front of me as I tried to keep my balance. I wasn’t always successful. My pants were smeared with mud.
    Half a mile down, we came upon a sugar maple that had been cleaved in two by a thunderbolt. The exposed heartwood looked like a black slash. Charred and broken branches lay scattered among the exposed roots and smoking leaves. When lightning strikes a tree, the electricity travels through the sap, and the superheated liquid explodes the living plant from within. If the previous weeks had been any drier, we might have found ourselves cut off from my truck by a newborn forest fire.
    Nissen didn’t bother with a flashlight. Those lantern eyes of his seemed to function perfectly well in the shadows. He moved by grabbing a sapling and then swinging his body forward until he could grasp another with his free hand. It felt like I was trying to keep pace with Tarzan of the Apes. Once again, I found myself outdistanced. I didn’t know what he planned on doing when he reached the bottom, since I had the only set of keys.
    I stopped in a sheltered crevice between two boulders and took a swig from my water bottle. I’d nearly drained both of the quart containers on my climb up Chairback. It felt strange to be soaked to the skin and yet so dehydrated at the same time. An hour earlier, I’d been on the verge of heat stroke; now I was goose-pimpled from the cold. Every warden has seen fatal cases of hypothermia in the middle of summer: swimmers who overestimate the warmth of a spring-fed pond, mountain climbers who wander