Creature Discomforts

as in “Everest.” For a hill, Dorr is steep, but the point of Acadia isn’t difficulty; it’s beauty. Kurt Diederich’s Climb has that in abundance. It wound upward, flattened into sections of stone-lined trail, passed beneath cliffs, and, after a half mile that felt like more, ended at the T-intersection and cedar post where the dogs had paused yesterday. Consulting the hiking guide I’d stowed in Kimi’s pack, I figured out that the trail marked in the book as the Emery Path was the one the wooden arrow called the Dorr Mountain East Face Trail. After watering the dogs and then myself, I set off to the left, toward the scenes of my fall and Axelrod’s death.
    The route took us up yet more flights of cleverly constructed steps that seemed designed and built by supernatural beings with the aid of natural forces: elves, perhaps, assisted by glaciers, or magically animate granite working with gravity to split itself into slabs and fall into artful patterns of wondrous convenience. A typical section of the narrow, stone-paved trail ran below a ten-foot wall of rock on the uphill side and, on the downhill, a long row of boulders arranged in curbstone fashion to protect against falls while providing seats for hikers to use while catching their breath, retying their boots, picnicking, or admiring the view. The postcard vista of the valley below and the rocky hills beyond it was, I regret to mention, hideously scarred by the evil-looking sprawl of what I assumed was a medium-size factory. Even in a mill town or industrial park, these graceless buildings would have stood out as architectural blights. Here, the ruinous ugliness felt obscene. On one of the maps in my hiking guide, this pockmark on the face of the island was labeled Jackson Lab.
    I diverted my eyes from it by scanning in search of Rowdy’s lost saddlebags, which had to be the bright red of the part of his pack that remained and the same bright red of Kimi’s pack. As we continued upward, the oaks, pines, huckleberry bushes, and other vegetation gradually took on the dry, stunted look of plants adapted to life on exposed rock. Now and then, lone hikers and vigorous couples passed us heading swiftly to and from the summit of Dorr or the Ladder Trail. We came upon families resting by the side of the trail or progressing along it while pep-talking lagging children. Despite the wholesome friendliness of everyone we encountered (What beautiful dogs! Oh, look! That one’s wearing a backpack! Isn’t that cute! Are they brother and sister? Aaron and Alison, look! Huskies!), my sense of fear rose with the altitude. In the increasingly barren, earth-toned landscape, the bright primary red of Rowdy’s discarded saddlebags should have leaped out and shrieked at me. The only reds, however, were the soft, natural hues of leaves. Worse, the closer we drew to the scene of my fall, the more sharply I remembered the pain of regaining consciousness. Nothing triggered the slightest memory of the events preceding my injury.
    Feeling weak, I not only let the dogs charge ahead of me, but felt grateful to hang on to their leashes and let their power haul me along. At the well-marked fork where the right-hand trail led upward to the top of Dorr, the left-hand path downward to the Ladder Trail, Rowdy and Kimi unhesitatingly moved left. Given a choice, a malamute will almost invariably take the familiar route. I was mystified. Still, it was now bafflingly clear that Rowdy and Kimi had at least started down toward the Ladder Trail. Furthermore, from everything I could piece together from the guidebook, its maps, and my pitifully defective memory, the Rock of Ages where I’d landed was somewhere below the path toward the Ladder Trail. What in God’s name had I been thinking? What in God’s name had happened here?
     

Chapter Seventeen
     
    EAGER TO EXAMINE THE AREA where Norman Axelrod had met his death, and where I’d perhaps come close to meeting mine, I started along the gentle beginning of the upper portion of the Ladder Trail. To my annoyance, the dogs and I had covered only a short distance when we came upon a lone hiker taking a break just off the stretch of trail that, according to my estimate, ran directly above my Rock of Ages. The hiker, a man I guessed to be in his late twenties, had the admirable combination of dark skin, dark hair, and vivid blue eyes. It’s a combination admired by me, anyway, especially, as in the case of the hiker, when the guy has