The Precipice Read Online Free PDF Page B

“They’ve got a chef there and bathrooms in most of the cabins. You can go stand-up paddleboarding and everything. It’s real nice.”
    “So you don’t like it because you’re a purist?”
    “Nothing is pure on the trail anymore,” he said, “least of all the fabled Hundred Mile Wilderness. You’re lucky you don’t get hit by a logging truck crossing the KI Road these days. And Gulf Hagas has basically become just another tourist attraction. Someone should sell T-shirts.”
    Gulf Hagas (rhymes with Vegas) was a spectacular ravine nearby with hundred-foot slate cliffs and a series of stomach-dropping waterfalls carved by the West Branch of the Pleasant River. It was commonly, but inappropriately, nicknamed “the Grand Canyon of the East.” I’d hiked the Rim Trail when I was a student at Colby College and had nearly slipped over the edge trying to impress my girlfriend with my foolhardy fearlessness.
    “We’re not going to find those girls holed up in the bunkhouse,” Nissen said, “so why are we going over there? Who exactly are you looking for?”
    “Any of the other names I found in the Chairback trail register.”
    The air inside the cab of the truck smelled worse than a locker room now, but the blowers had cleared a sliver at the base of the windshield. I shifted the transmission into reverse and backed carefully out of the bushes. My pickup was a brand-new black GMC Sierra, which I washed and waxed every weekend. It was inevitably going to get scratched and battered, but this was the first nice vehicle I had ever been assigned, and I intended to baby it as long as I could.
    “So what’s your story, Nissen?” I asked.
    He cocked his head as if to shake water out of his ear. “What do you mean?”
    “What do you do for work when you’re not out searching for lost hikers?”
    He paused, as if the answer was a state secret he was forbidden to disclose. “I’m an apiarist.”
    “You mean a beekeeper?”
    “That’s what the word means. I have a few bee yards with three hundred hives. I sell honey and beeswax, but the big money is in pollination services.”
    “And you make decent money doing that?” I asked.
    “Probably more than you make.”
    “That wouldn’t take much,” I remarked, as if he hadn’t intended the insult. Maybe the poor guy’s autistic, I thought. I could never tell the difference between someone with Asperger’s syndrome and a garden-variety misanthrope. I tried to be charitable.
    “I have a booth at the Big E in Springfield, Massachusetts, next week. I usually clear ten grand there.”
    This was the nickname of the month-long Eastern States Exposition, the largest agricultural fair in New England. The Warden Service had a traveling display it set up there, featuring taxidermy mounts—deer heads, moose antlers, stuffed fish—confiscated from poachers; it was called the “Wall of Shame.” Something like half a million people attended the Big E, I’d heard.
    We rumbled down the narrow tote road in the dark. The truck shook back and forth as it traversed a path of stones bulging up from the weeds. I heard branches scraping the sides of my vehicle and rocks bouncing against the undercarriage. So much for babying my new truck.
    “What did you do before you started keeping bees?” I asked.
    “This and that,” he said.
    “Do you live in Monson?”
    “No, Blanchard.”
    It was the next town to the south—even deeper in the boondocks. “Any family?” I asked.
    “It’s just me and my shadow. Hey, I like to keep my privacy, you know?”
    I’m a curious person by nature, and sometimes I go too far asking questions. Normally, I would have apologized for the intrusion, but with Nissen, there seemed to be no point in making the gesture.
    After a while, the logging trail dropped us onto the gravel thoroughfare Nissen had mentioned. The KI Road sliced across the Hundred Mile Wilderness from one side to the other. From the village of Brownville, it traveled west past the